I confess that Lucía and I were both too slow to accept that the repetitive woman we each visited twice a week and telephoned every day was not the same as the one who used to sing, in the style of a tango vals, the ten verses of Nocturne for Rosario. Perla always had a gift for persistence: if we were ever sad or unwell she, who considered such lapses a personal failing, would harp on so much about the neglectful habits that had brought us to such a state, constantly reminding us about her own infallible methods for restoring good health, that we ended up getting better just so we wouldn’t have to listen to her any more. We were forever shouting at her to back off, because her overwhelming desire for our happiness was so trying, her love so selfish and prodigious that she turned into a kind of mother bear, determined to keep us away from all evil. She was insufferable, but a bit magical too. And we had taken it for granted that she would always be that way, so when her conversations gradually dwindled to the same few phrases, Lucía and I shouted desperately at her to stop, not to keep saying the same things over and over, that we had already understood, and we didn’t even notice that one day Perla had stopped letting the Guardian Angel dress or groom her and that the person we sat opposite every time we went to visit was a dishevelled old lady with white hair, invariably wearing a nightie, who never asked about her grandchildren, didn’t remember El Rubio and had absolutely no interest in how happy Lucía and I were.
It was the Guardian Angel who opened our eyes. One day she folded away her great wings and told us that she couldn’t cope with Perla any more. Lucía and I looked at each other with terror. It was that terror that led us to the Happiness Care Home.
According to a second cousin Lucía providentially ran into during those anxious days, the Happiness Care Home was exactly the place we were looking for. All we had to do was ring a lady called Daisy to arrange an interview. She would take care of everything else. That was just what we needed: someone to shelter us in her bosom and take charge. I called Daisy. Her sunny voice promised the ideal environment to experience the last stage of life as a veritable paradise. Bring granny and her most important bits and bobs, she said, and while we sort out the details, she’ll be looked after by staff who are so capable and kind that of her own accord she’ll beg to stay.
So one March morning, less hot than that afternoon two years earlier when Perla and the lion were almost lost for good, Lucía sat at the wheel of her car and I came out of my mother’s house on the arm of the shaky and demented old lady who had once been our Motherpearl.
With difficulty we settled her into the back seat. I got in next to Lucía.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Perla, as soon as the car started.
‘We’re going, mother,’ said Lucía. ‘The three of us are going.’
‘What did you say?’ Perla said.
‘That all three of us are going,’ said Lucía, shouting.
‘Which three?’ said Perla.
‘You, Mariana and I,’ shouted Lucía.
‘I?’ said Perla. ‘I what?’
Lucía blew out hard.
‘You’re coming with us,’ she shouted.
‘You’re coming with us?’ said Perla.
‘Not me,’ shouted Lucía, absurdly. ‘You’re coming with us.’
‘and’
Under her breath Lucía said, ‘You could speak a little bit too, no?’
‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ I shouted.
Perla seemed uninterested in my observation.
‘I don’t think she can see anything,’ Lucía said.
‘She can see a bit,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think she’s interested.’
‘Where are you going?’ Perla said.
‘To a place I’ve been told is really lovely,’ Lucía shouted.
‘I doubt there’s anything lovely about it,’ I said.
‘I didn’t say it was, I said I’ve been told.’
That’s Lucía. She can be ferocious all right, but she never, ever lies.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Perla.
Lucía murmured something I didn’t hear.
‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘with such dishonest parents, where did we both learn not to lie?’
‘I taught you,’ said Lucía.
‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘You taught me everything. If it weren’t for you I’d be an ignorant brute.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucía. ‘You would be an ignorant brute.’
Perhaps she was right. I’ve often thought as much. With such a capricious mother, such a vague father and given my own natural inclination to contemplate my navel, what would have become of me without an older sister to keep goading me onwards? I didn’t say that to her, of course. I gave her a sideways glance: she was driving too cautiously. My worst trait is laziness, I thought, and Lucía’s is wariness. And what about fear? Where did the fear come from?
‘No speeding,’ said Perla.
I glanced outside. To break the speed limit in these conditions would be nothing short of miraculous. We were advancing along Córdoba Avenue (if ‘advancing’ isn’t putting too optimistic a gloss on things) at something slower than a crawl.
‘I’m not speeding, Mother,’ shouted Lucía, but gently.
I waited for an answer; Perla had never accepted that her opinions were not the only valid ones. But there was no retort from the back seat. I turned round to look at her. She was staring into nothing and seemed completely to have forgotten her earlier admonishment. She may even have forgotten that she was in a car with her two children. Or even that she had children.
‘I think that it’s the best option, at any rate,’ I said.
Lucía looked relieved.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Besides, if it’s got everything they say, she’s bound to love it.’
I didn’t believe that she would love it. Rather I thought that it would be the best solution for us. She, all love and French piquet, had raised a couple of perfect incompetents who hated old age, feared illness, and were scared to death of this new circumstance flung up by fate (why hadn’t Perla educated us for such an eventuality?). That was why we were driving, at walking pace, down Córdoba Avenue trying to convince each other that we were doing the right thing for our mother and for the world and that our destination really was a happiness home in which Perla would finally rediscover her gift for singing tango vals and El Rubio would peer around the door to watch her with his enigmatic blue gaze.
We didn’t look back at her. Neither Lucía nor I looked back. We took it as a given (well I did, and I’d swear that Lucía did, too) that our mother was going contentedly towards the unknown. I didn’t even think (I had to make an effort not to think it but I was managing that, out of a devotion to all that is beautiful and true) that to Perla, who had yearned to travel, this journey by car to the Happiness Care Home was probably much the same as looking at the sea, with El Rubio at her side, from the deck of the Giulio Cesare (something she had dreamt of doing so often, without ever managing a more glamorous crossing than the one across the river to Montevideo on the Vapor de la Carrera), or being taken in a coffin to the city of La Tablada, where he, affable, ironic and ever youthful, had been waiting for her for forty years — but not for this old biddy, please, bring me the one who used to sing tangos, says El Rubio, from his sepia photo, the one in the little linen dress she embroidered herself in cross-stitch, the one who dreamt of being rich but who used to laugh until she cried as if laughing, when all is said and done, were the greatest fortune a person could have — and who could enjoy an anchovy sandwich as though it were a piece of heaven.