Bambina’s face looked like Carla’s, aside from her eyes, which were dull and gray like concrete. But the evil on the flesh of the first here grew a blister as thin as a fish bladder, glimmering, and evenly enveloping her entire face. Bambina was not impulsive like her friend, but she was perverse and calculating. Her limbs and her trunk were filiform, brown as a gypsy’s. She never looked you in the eye, and when the nurse came she would transform into the most well-behaved girl. Wherever she was, when she heard the easily recognizable steps of the nurse’s high heels, she would go sit at the table and begin to play with a doll, quietly, her feet together and her elbows by her body, and for this she was always praised. The nurse called her nothing but “little angel,” but I knew from the beginning whom I was dealing with, thanks to my toothbrush, which I picked up, washed, and put for the moment on the stiff sheet of my bed. Going into the hall a bit to see the other kids, I swung the door a while and then re-entered the great white cave. I caught Bambina wetting my toothbrush in the pot full of pee. I was so shocked by the girls’ behavior that I didn’t think to complain to the nurse who took care of us.
Both girls had hair that stuck out like Furies’, and they spent the day banging their slippers against the wall that separated us from the next room, yanking the hard fabric band that came from a hole in the wall, to raise and lower the window blinds, and especially playing with hideous rag dolls with plaster heads, like they were back then, dolls they bashed together until the faces shattered, saying they were soldiers or boxers. In the evening they would scare themselves, telling each other that the dolls would come for revenge during the night, so before bed, they tied them in cords and laces, making grotesquely large knots. I spent most of my time in the hallway or by the window. By the last day, I didn’t have my toys, and the two would shout if I even looked at their dirty dolls. I also liked to lift and lower the metal panel on my bed, to wander the hall and look at kids in the other rooms (even though I wasn’t supposed to go in the hall) or to gaze minute after minute at the marine-blue flowers on the tiles below the faucet, until I started to see double and the flowers — they were irises — merged into each other and took on a strange multidimensionality. It gave me the feeling that I had slipped out of reality and penetrated that unspeakably deep field of irises. I wandered through them without a body, without movement, I was that world where there was nothing but intensely blue flowers, floating in the air at equal distances, above and below, before and behind, to infinity. I would forget myself completely, until a slipper got thrown at my head or my waist, knocked my cheek against the faucet, and brought me back into the room.
I was totally isolated from the girls in faded pajamas, as though we were from different worlds, a feeling heightened by my inability to understand them. Most of the time, they spoke an unknown language, made not only of sounds but also of gestures and touches and even of smells (when one of them — in moments of discussion I became able to anticipate — broke wind), and which they performed with unbelievable speed and precision. Much later, reading about Vollapük and Esperanto, I remembered how Carla and Bambina talked, and the idea of naming their language passed through my mind, a language where ordinary sounds were mixed with bizarre glottals, with deaf-mute signs and facial expressions like catatonic schizophrenics. I thought of it as “mineymoezish,” because their most common invented word was “minemoe” or “mynimoe,” accompanied by rolling eyes and the motion of pulling something from their chests with imaginary claws.
Evening meals were almost magical. The nurse sat with us, on a folding chair, and our table was lit by a very weak shaded lamp, which only drew the plates and our nearby faces from the dark. Even the figure of the nurse, whose white and massive chest rose like an iceberg in the light, remained in a penumbra. The plates had the same unique food each night: it looked like a trembling jellyfish, almost completely translucid, with its internal organs (darker, amber-colored) showing through its skin. When you stuck your spoon in it, the jellyfish throbbed and tensed with pain. We had to eat all of it, despite the insipid taste, like flan without enough sugar. If the trembling aspic was not a kind of medicine, then I don’t know what medicine is. But it is possible that it was, because only during this time did the nurse sit with us to the end, to the last swallow. Many times one of the girls, most often Bambina, would lie down and vomit, covering the carpet with cheesy pasta, but without a word of reprimand, the nurse immediately called the housekeeper, who cleaned the floor and brought another plate of jellyfish. Like later, in the Voila sanatorium, whose madness seems to have been prefigured by that of Emilia Irma’s, the child would not escape until his plate was clean, even if it meant he had to stay at the table all night.
When she got them to talk, without their catching on, about their strange speech, the nurse got a story, more mimed than spoken in words. Carla, from time to time, had the same dream, in which, naked and with curly hair past her buttocks (“and I had boobs like a big woman,” she showed, cupping her fingers in front of her chest), she wandered through a vast palace of white marble, with a portico, galleries, and statues, and a shining mosaic spread on the floors, tracing out an incomprehensible design. Suddenly the palace was full of endless vistas, without any furniture or paintings, translucent like it was carved from salt, and filled with torpid, multicolored, butterflies. Surprised, Carla wandered through the halls until, in the center of one, she discovered a crystal mausoleum, sparkling in all the colors of the rainbow. Inside was a soft being, with a complex and delicate anatomy, wet orifices on the edge of an ashen stomach, and a vaguely sketched-out face, from the middle of which protruded a short proboscis, with a large bead of milk inflating and shrinking at its tip. Crinkled skin, like a scrotum, rose slowly, and the being opened a human eye (here, Carla closed her eyelids and then opened them with an unnatural slowness, until her eyes became two staring globes, as though paralyzed with fear; at the same time she made the gesture of pulling her heart, veins and all, out of her chest with the claws of her left hand). Then the statues came to life, climbed from their plinths, gathered around the tomb, and began to speak in this unusual language to each other, which Carla learned after many identical dreams and which she transmitted to Bambina, so she would have someone to practice with in the daytime. Despite all the nurse’s ploys, Carla never breathed a word regarding what, precisely, the statues had said.