As she put some of Patri’s clothes into the wash, Elisa’s thoughts turned to her daughter: now she was a more serious worry. Elisa had never known such a mixed-up girl. No one could say how she would turn out, least of all her mother. It was partly her age of course, but even so, she was a particularly worrying case. She never stuck at anything; she had no perseverance, as if she didn’t really know what she liked. If only she would fall in love! Proceeding mechanically through the washing, Elisa set out the problem point by point. Like many Chileans, she had the secret and inoffensive habit of addressing long, casuistic explanations to an imaginary interlocutor, or rather a real but physically absent person. In her case it was a friend she hadn’t seen for years, not since she had come to Buenos Aires, even longer, in fact. Nevertheless, it was to this friend that she explained the case of her eldest daughter. Look, she didn’t even stick with the karate; that was my husband’s bright idea, typical! But at least it was something. And those mother-of-pearl buttons she used to polish so nicely, she gave that up too, even sooner. I can’t really blame her for that, though, because we moved here. OK. But what about school? Same again: she refused to sit the equivalence tests. She wanted to be an electrician. Crazy! I’d have as much hope of doing that. As Elisa explained to her absent friend, the fundamental problem and the source of all the others, was Patri’s frivolity. Was there ever a more frivolous girl in the world? It was hard to imagine. She didn’t take serious things seriously because she was always serious about something else. She was a little dreamer, living in a looking-glass world. Not that she wasn’t intelligent; but her frivolity made her come across as silly. She had talent, and plenty of it. She was a talented seamstress, for a start. She could have been earning a living already from her sewing, if she’d wanted to. There was some hope, then, for the future, faint though it was, because sewing was a frivolous occupation. All that mattered was the result, not the intentions, which could be supremely whimsical. And Patri’s whims were limitless. For example, six years ago, when Blanca Isabel was born, she had prevailed against Elisa and insisted on choosing the baby’s name. It was the name of a famous fashion designer: an Argentinean woman, but the daughter of a Chilean, who in turn was the daughter of a woman who had been the godmother of Raúl Viñas’s grandfather. Elisa’s heart had been set on baptizing the child Maruxa Jacqueline, a desire she had partially satisfied later on, with her youngest girl.
Her soliloquy was interrupted by a feeling she often had, the semi-epileptic impression that someone was passing behind her. There was no one behind her in the kitchen, and no room anyway, but through the open door she could see a band of ten ghosts watching her from the terrace, between the apartment and the stairs. What were those floury clowns doing there, she wondered crossly. She didn’t like it when they interrupted her conversations with an intimate friend, all the more intimate for being in her mind and nowhere else. (Elisa didn’t know it, but a few months earlier, a horrific derailment in Concepción had claimed her friend’s life.) Anyway, it wasn’t their normal time. Were they going to start showing up around the clock? Or was there something special happening because it was the last day of the year? That could have explained why they were staring at her with their round eyes open wide in their stupid faces. As if they had something to propose to her. It was odd, because they were meant to be seen rather than to see. And since she was in the relatively dark interior of the kitchen, she may not have been visible from outside. But she couldn’t be sure about that, because even if the shadows hid everything else, her thick, twelve-diopter spectacles could reflect or condense enough light to make them visible (she had been caught out like that before): two shining circles, like the eyes of an owl suspended in the night. In any case, she could see them, and that must have been their way of watching. But was she really seeing them, or was it a waking dream? Ah, that was another question. Seeing ten naked men with their dicks dangling while washing clothes in the kitchen wasn’t exactly the most realistic experience. Although for a married woman like her, the scene had a special significance, not a promise but a confirmation: men were all the same in the end. They had nothing to hide. It wasn’t just that all men had the same bits; they also had the same value. Which was, admittedly, considerable, but it was shared out among a multitude that was almost beyond the grasp of the imagination, like the idea of “everyone.” The only thing that bothered her was the bad influence the ghosts might have on her children, particularly on her frivolous elder daughter. Since Patri was given to building castles in the air, certain chimerical spectacles could lead her to the utterly misguided belief that reality is everywhere. It was just as well that the family would soon be leaving the building site. They would have left already, if her husband had listened to her. Meanwhile those jerks were still staring at her. Or was it the other way round? She turned away and went on with the washing, trying to concentrate; what with the distraction she’d probably gone and put in too much bleach. She was always doing that.