Merny doesn’t see it like that. On the contrary. She’s never said as much, but it’s clear that she’s proud of her sons’ names. You could almost see it as an act of affirmation, a brief exercise of power, a victory. She has given birth to a child who will, no doubt, have a pretty hard time of it. Her baby is just another dot on the poverty line in the national statistics. Merny will probably have no control over anything. Hers is an existence bound to the state as regards health, education, and work. Poverty seems to trace a path that always ends up in the state’s apartments — be it bureaucracy or prison. Perhaps the only personal, private thing Merny could offer her children in that first moment was a name. A special name, a name like Willmer that has a ring of the future and of the north about it, something unusual. Or a different name, like Yurber, so different that only she could have thought of it. That perhaps is her personal seal, the one thing she can control, the surest thing she can give them. An illusion with a ring to it. The opportunity of a name.
Once, years ago, when she’d first started working for his father, Andrés had to drive her home. Someone called her from a public phone, from the barrio where she lives. Willmer would have been about nine months old. “Something’s wrong,” they said. “He’s sick. You must come.” Merny got very worried, but she looked at Andrés, taken aback, when he offered to give her a lift. He happened to be visiting his father that day. He even offered her medical help, but Merny refused. Almost reluctantly, she allowed him to take her in his car to a place near where she lived. They took the highway, and she spoke very little, but kept restlessly moving in her seat, as if she had a strange ability to move her spinal column from one buttock to the other. And sometimes she waggled her fingers. Andrés tried to calm her and said again that if it was anything serious to please let him know. She asked him to drop her in the avenue at the foot of the hill, the vast mountain where the marginalized have slowly constructed their own difficult realm. There she would get a jeep that would take her a few miles farther on, as far as a hill, near a police station, where she would get out and continue on foot up the concrete steps to her barrio, her house, and Willmer’s fever.
It could take more than an hour. The last stretch alone consisted of more than four hundred steps. Her sister counted them once, she said, one by one, as she climbed them. She was coming back alone, at night. Four hundred and twenty-two steps, to be exact. She did it to take her mind off feeling so frightened.
Andrés can vividly remember giving Merny that lift. It was at the height of the electoral campaign. On the way back home, he listened to the party political broadcasts on the radio. “The moment for the poor of this country has arrived,” bawled one candidate, meanwhile inveighing against the old political parties and promising a new paradise. There’s also a heaven where everyone is called Willmer.
Merny still lives in the same place and in the same way, with the same fears. How much time has she wasted going up and down those steps in order to come to his father’s apartment? Twice a week every week. She comes to clean, to get rid of the dirt produced by someone else. Four hundred and twenty-two steps there and four hundred and twenty-two steps back. Plus the jeep, the avenue, the bus to the train, twelve stations to another subway station, another avenue, and another bus to the door of the apartment building. It’s a long way to come just to kneel down and get to grips with a stubborn stain between the tiles on the floor of a kitchen that isn’t hers. Is that how she sees it? Is that how she feels? When she goes up the steps to her house, after a day’s work. When she looks at that vast hill, crammed with tiny houses and hovels. Not even the police will venture into some of those barrios. When she goes up those steps and thinks that Willmer is no longer a baby with a fever, but that there are other dangers, like being old enough to kill someone. He could turn out to be a complete lout. What must she do to avoid that? How can she help him?
For a moment, Andrés wonders what lies behind Merny’s look, behind those eyes which he sometimes finds elusive or even incomprehensible. What are they hiding? She’s not happy with her life. How could she be? No one could be happy with those four hundred and twenty-two steps. Is that what lies behind her look? Is that what lies behind her gaze? A dark, silent, long-repressed resentment? He suddenly feels cold. Perhaps Merny doesn’t care about his father at all. She’s spent years here, so close, so much part of their lives, but, at the same time, so far away. He looks at her now and feels that he doesn’t know her, that he doesn’t know what she thinks or feels about his father. Perhaps she’s just thinking about her work. Perhaps, for her, the death of old Miranda is simply a work-related incident. Perhaps not. He’s suddenly terrified by the thought that Merny might secretly hate them. Does she hate them?
At last, she speaks. She does so hesitantly, almost sadly, but without disguising what she feels, without hiding what she thinks. Merny doesn’t like the idea of working for a man who is about to die. It’s nothing personal, she just doesn’t want to be in the apartment when, inevitably, Javier Miranda passes away. That, at any rate, is what Andrés deduces. She doesn’t say as much, of course. She utters sighs more than words. She converses in vague sounds, interjections, thoughtful pauses. In the end, she says that she’ll think about it. That’s all. She’ll think about it.
“I’ll tell you later. Now I’ve got to finish cleaning the bathroom.”
Dear Dr. Miranda,
I have a confession to make: I’m following you. I’d love to see your face now, to see your reaction. What do you think? Does it bother you? Does it worry you? Does it frighten you perhaps? Or maybe you don’t even care, perhaps you even find it amusing. I no longer know what to think. Let me just make it clear that I haven’t begun following you because I want to, but out of sheer desperation. I’ve tried everything, but you don’t answer my e-mails, your secretary lies to me, and I don’t know how else to get you to listen to me, to resolve my situation.
Now I think that perhaps this is the only way to make you understand how hounded I feel, how all this is affecting me. I’m even starting to have problems at work. I’m beginning to think they might fire me. I mean it. The attacks are getting ever more frequent, and every time that I feel I’m about to faint, and my blood pressure plummets, I usually try and get to the restroom quickly. I splash my face with cold water and breathe deeply. Sometimes, too, I do a quick handstand, like we used to in gym lessons at school. I support myself on my hands and rest my feet against the wall. That way the blood flows back into my head and I know then I won’t faint.
A little while ago, a supervisor came up to me with a strange smile on his face and said that a rumor was going around that, lately, I spend most of my time in the bathroom. Another day, I was doing a handstand, as I’ve explained, and a colleague from the next office came in. Needless to say, he was very surprised to find me there like that. I tried to explain the situation to him, but I’m sure he didn’t believe me. Perhaps he thought I was mad. The truth is I feel more and more uncomfortable at work. I can tell they’re talking about me, and they look at me suspiciously. I know that when they see me, they nudge each other and whisper.