Inside the room, the mattress is wheezing like a child on the verge of an asthma attack. They’ll have to take it to hospital, I think. They’ll have to give it an intravenous shot of Salbutamol. But the mattress suddenly becomes silent and then starts again, breathing slowly and monotonously now, like a swimmer doing the crawl. Every fourth stroke, the twisted mouth surfaces on the right-hand side, just under the armpit, and the swimmer inhales. Then the face goes under again. The hand cuts into the water like a knife and then turns to push the liquid down toward the feet. And then another inhalation. When the face comes out of the water, or rather when one side of the face comes out, the swimmer hears, for a moment, the surrounding hullabaloo: people cheering him, on-your-marks whistles, the splashing of his own legs, and the noise of his body in friction with the water and, above all, the noise of his own respiration, of his mouthful of air, which, when he puts his head down again, is immediately silenced. That’s more or less what a swimmer doing the crawl sounds like. And that is also how the inside of my mother’s room sounds, though perhaps with fewer competitive elements (there are no whistles, or people cheering Marcelo as he mounts her). I think they could go on like that all night. All week. Cecilia will wake up; she’ll say she dreamed she was flying, and my mom and Marcelo will still be swimming.
I feel a strange pain in the pit of my stomach. I stop myself from hearing all this by going into the bathroom, which is right between the two bedrooms (between hers — my mother’s — where they’re swimming, and mine, which isn’t mine, or only in a provisional sense until we — Cecilia and I — return to our apartment by the vacant lot). I turn on the light and sit on the toilet seat with my head between my knees and my arms pressed tightly into my abdomen. The pain is still there, and now it’s throbbing. It throbs, and I feel as if my esophagus is filling with blood, feel the taste of metal rising up my gullet. I kneel down by the toilet, hug it like a pre-Columbian idol, and vomit into the bowl. After the couple of rather loud bouts of retching have worn off, I let a thread of spittle that seems endless fall from my mouth. I think I have an enormous coil of spittle in my belly that is unwinding very, very slowly. It’s the milk from the glass bottle, the thick milk. It was the milk that caused me to vomit, and it’s still there in my body in the form of an endless thread of spittle. Now I’ll have to stay here the whole night, like a beast bleeding to death, facedown.
But no, someone is knocking on the bathroom door, and I have to cut the thread of spittle with my own fingers, leaving everything that has still to come out in my stomach. “Just a moment,” I say. From outside, Marcelo’s voice asks if I need any help. As if.
I open the door and sit on the toilet seat, doubled over, hands pressed to my belly. He says the noise woke him. I know that’s not true, that he was swimming with my mother or rocking the child on the verge of an asthma attack — the aged mattress. I know he was coming in her, spilling his endless thread of thick, milky spunk while I was vomiting something similar. Anyway, I apologize for having woken him. “No problem,” he says, “I was worried.” Why was he worried? Has my mom told him I’m a worrier? That I’m weak and have a natural tendency to feel fucked up? That she worries about me? That everyone around me ends up entering into a relationship based on worry, their worries about me but also, to a lesser degree, the worry other people make me feel about myself?
“Nothing serious. I’m not used to farm milk. It’s coming up.” Marcelo’s facial muscles tense almost imperceptibly at the sound of the word coming, which I pronounce with a particular emphasis. Now he knows I know he was swimming with her. He knows I heard him, or thinks I saw him, rocking the child on the verge of an asthma attack and then starting his race, which — from the sound — seemed less a speed race than a test of stamina, like swimming the English Channel, or with a rope tied around your waist so you have no possibility of advancing; the thing is that I heard him swimming — and he knows it — on Adela, she underneath him, raising his head to breathe on one side of my mother, of Adela.
From now on, he’ll have to look at me the way you look at someone you’ve seen defecating — that obvious mixture of intimacy and denial.
10
Cecilia did indeed dream that she was flying, or that’s what she says. So I say that I dreamed I was swimming in a pool filled with milk; the image inspires me, and I amuse myself by telling her the particulars of my fictional dream. Around the pool, I say, there was a forest littered with trash, and while I was swimming — with my eyes closed — I knew a lot of people were watching me from the side. Eventually, I got out of the pool, shivering, and saw Isabel Watkins, Marcelo, my mom, and her, Cecilia, standing there. Endless threads of milk were streaming from my torso and head, and everyone else was smiling, as if approving my performance. Then I looked behind me, and on the other side of the pool of milk, an asthmatic child was wheezing, making a horrible noise. The child was very dark-skinned, in strong contrast to the pool, which looked more like it was filled with almond milk than the bovine variety, now that I come to think of it. No one seemed to notice the dark, disturbing presence of the asthmatic child, and they continued to applaud my prowess as a milk swimmer. Angst was taking hold of me, and I dived into the pool, swam across it, and got out on the other side, ready to assist the asthmatic child. But the child wasn’t there, and there was no one back on the other side either: not Cecilia, my mom, Marcelo, or anyone else. I was alone, without a towel, next to the milk pool. I got back into the white liquid. Then the milk began to thicken, and it was increasingly difficult to do the arm and leg strokes. The milk got thicker, and the pool was somehow involving me in an abduction phenomenon — I put it that way, “abduction phenomenon,” because Cecilia knows the term and always uses it when she wants to express actions that are beyond human understanding, though it’s not particularly appropriate — until I gave up swimming and let myself be pulled to the bottom.
Cecilia is powerfully impressed by my fictional dream. She anxiously tells me I have to concentrate every night and think of positive things (“Like your pets when you were small,” she explains), and that once inside the dream, I have to try to look at my hands. She also says she’ll get a book on oneiromancy — she doesn’t use that word — to see what the swimming pool filled with milk means.
There’s something satisfying about lying to Cecilia, even when it’s just innocuous lies like that. She never doubts what anyone says or compares the information she receives with the facts. I could swear to her that I’d walked on water and she would end up accepting it. I believe that, in part, I like lying to her because I envy that capacity of hers for taking things on board as if they were true. I, in contrast, harbor an innate distrust of almost everything, and although until lately I thought that made me a more intelligent person, I’m beginning to suspect it only makes me a more nervous one.
Anyway, I have to take full advantage of this ordinary pleasure, I tell myself, the pleasure of lying to Cecilia. There are few things that make my day: devising arbitrary collections, righting wrongs related to turds on bedspreads, pampering hens. The few ritornellos in my character that make me different from other men while simultaneously destroying me, in the way a drop of water repeatedly hitting a stone gives it a unique shape, while also producing or accelerating its ultimate eradication.