I think about my parents. All the times they must have been waiting for a letter from me. . I write them rarely, if ever, to tell the truth. I don’t want to. I’m not interested in reading their letters, either. There are envelopes I don’t open for weeks. I imagine Anita peering at an envelope from me, full of distrust. I think: Maybe she’d rather not open it. In fact, she doesn’t answer my letters. I think: How does she get along with Rodrigo? That sudden friendship that snatched her away from me fills me with rage. I don’t like it. She looks like her father, her nose, her slender figure, her slightly curved legs, her unsettling smile, her tranquil eyes. Incestuous images come into my mind. My therapist is interested in those. She turns them around: it’s me I’m imagining there with my own father. They are explanations. Understanding isn’t enough to exorcise the ghost. Anita, she’s the one who matters to me. And Anita isn’t with me. She left me, just as her father did when as she was beginning to grow in my belly. I never could have imagined this. I started to love her right from that moment. He didn’t. He never even wanted to meet her. Until now, until this sudden whim. It’s not fair. My soul is torn away along with her.
When I dream about her — and now that happens a lot — she’s always a little girl and we’re in Stockholm. She never appears in my dreams as the woman she is now, always as she used to be. I wake up: Could it be true? I look into her room. Everything just as it was: the same bedspread, the curtains, the books, the clothes in her closet, her CDs. Her photos, photos of her as a little girl, cause me pain. She’s the same little girl who visits me when I sleep. I try to convince myself that the little girl in those photos doesn’t exist anymore, she’s changed and it couldn’t be any other way, and she’ll never again be the person she was before. I have to resign myself to this new person. I put the photos away. I don’t want to suffer. I put them all away except for one. It shows us here in Stockholm with a ship in the background, and we look so happy. So much time ahead for the two of us. Like never before, like never again. I’m suffering a lot, I say to myself. I try to forget her and I can’t. Can a mother hate a daughter? I catch myself starting to hate her, and I’m horrified.
And if I dared to ask her: Are you still my daughter? What would happen if I asked her that over the phone? I have to accept her as she is. But it would be easier if she hadn’t changed so much. I can’t stop thinking that the real Anita is someone else, the one I lost, the one she let escape.
FIFTY-FOUR
And she’s not here. The one who is with me is Roberto. Without him, I don’t know what would have become of me. His accent caresses and numbs me. I don’t want to make love, I want his voice to pacify me, I want him to sing into my ear: Bésame, bésame mucho / como si fuera esta noche / la última vez. . And he smiles and starts to sing softly, almost in a whisper, and it lulls me to sleep. Que tengo miedo a perderte, / perderte después.
Could someone else accept me if I couldn’t accept myself? “You’re too suspicious, too susceptible,” Roberto tells me. It’s true. I know it. Thanks to therapy I understand it all. But understanding isn’t enough. My therapist asks me if I think of myself as the daughter of a good-looking and absent father and an intelligent professional who wanted me to be the beauty she wasn’t. My psychiatrist likes to ask questions. Too many. From his chair behind me, while I’m below, on the divan. Him above and me below. And he asks his questions in a neutral voice, as if it wasn’t him I’m answering but God. I’m just a case. It isn’t a conversation. He’s giving me his professional services. That’s what he’s paid for, obviously, to listen to me.
He asks me if I feel as though my mother has failed me, if I feel guilty for not having been able to keep my father from leaving home and marrying someone else, if I feel resentful toward my father, if that’s why I’m attracted to rough men and their guns. . I let him ask. Even here in Stockholm you have to put up with those banalities. In exchange for a prescription for sleeping pills and antidepressants that otherwise I couldn’t get in the pharmacy. My mind wanders somewhere else.
He tells me that “terrorists” suffer from “free-floating anxiety,” that they suffer from “personality disorders,” that in order to stabilize the “ego” they join the movement, that the collective cause becomes greater than the “ego.” Now I’m the one who asks: And?
And Roberto is there. He goes on being there, he goes on taking me to visit islands on the weekends. One day he takes me to Gotland. A forty-minute flight. From there we go to Faro. Roberto wants me to see the stones with etchings left by the Vikings in Bunge. “You always loved the Vikings, right?” But I’m more impressed by the beauty of some cows with clean and shining hides, an old windmill made of stone, and, of course, the rocks. We walk along a pebble beach, and there are those strange, dark, rock sculptures rising up, chiseled by millinery winds. The sea is dark gray or very white. I’m startled by a ship’s siren. They have the tonalities, I think, the spiritual atmosphere of Persona. It occurs to me that we should find out where Bergman’s house is and go past it. But I discard the idea before suggesting it to Roberto, which is for the best. He would have been capable of ringing the doorbell once we got there.
“I know I’m not capable of inspiring love,” I tell him out of the blue, and I lean against one of those bleak, forsaken rocks. “I always know I’ll be abandoned and betrayed, it’s what I deserve.” But he caresses me in silence, he wants to redeem me. He thinks his love can save me. “I’d like to believe you,” I tell him.
I know I’m lying to myself. I want someone to forgive me and love me unconditionally, exactly as I was and am and will be. But I’m afraid. I defend myself. I don’t want to tie myself down. I care for Roberto a lot. I need him, but maybe because of that, it’s difficult for me. I defend myself before the fact, in anticipation of rejection. I demand too much, I’m insatiable, I know it. I demand unconditional and absolute love in exchange for nothing. First I want to be loved just because. Then I can start to love. I want to put my misery on display and to be loved for it before anything else. I don’t just want to be loved. Someone also has to pay, someone has to suffer for me, and it will fall to whoever wants to love me now. It falls, though it’s not what I want, to Roberto.
I make the one who loves me submit to tests because I don’t want to believe in his love, and I give little in return because I’m afraid of disappointing him, of boring him. I’m so insecure. I hide inside myself.
Roberto talks to me. He tells me I’m not well, he tells me I’m sick, I need to take my pills. Roberto is so naive sometimes. . I ask him: “How do you know?” He says from my face. “And what is my face like?” I ask. He tells me I’m not going to like the answer. I insist. He says I look ravaged, sometimes: my jaw droops, I breathe roughly through my mouth, my gaze is emptied out as though I’m looking at the void. I say: “The void? Death?” I start to laugh and I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t see what he sees. I’m skinny and gaunt with dark bags under my eyes; ugly, in a word. “That’s what you’re seeing,” I tell him, “I’m ugly. That’s my ‘illness’ you’re so worried about.” He denies it.
But I’m afraid that he won’t find me attractive and I’ll be punished. Roberto is attractive to other women. I realize that. More than to be with him myself, what I want is for him not to be with anyone else. Jealousy consumes me at the mere thought of him with another woman. So I punish him. He doesn’t love me enough. That’s how I feel and I tell him so. I would have liked for him to love me until my jealousy and my fears dissipated. We fought and made up. Obviously. Who doesn’t?