There’s certainly something stony about the concept of selfhood; something that leaves Marina cold. Not indifferent, but insensible. She finds nothing in her swampy insides to connect ‘selfhood’ with. The only thing she’s come across to gain some mastery of the whole issue is to think about it in English. Yes, instead of the Spanish yo misma, ‘self’ works for her. Succinct and detachable, in English the term sounds like somebody else’s name: ‘Marina, meet Self.’
*
Lately, some nights, before falling asleep, Marina tries out some of the affirmations suggested by her therapist. She tends to stop after a minute because she struggles repeating the same thing over and again, and all too soon the affirmations turn into something else entirely.
‘I am a beautiful and productive woman; I am an artist. I am a fruitful and defective woman; I am an artiste. I am a fearful and resentful zoo-man; I am a sadist. I am a dutiful representative of batshit; I am batshit, I am zoo shit. I am a fruity loopy arsonist.’
Affirmations were obligatory at the ‘alternative’ hospital and had to be performed out loud for the ever-supportive staff. They made it sound easy:
‘Now all we’re going to do is simply repeat the same positive thought ten times before bed.’
And by ‘we’ they meant ‘you’. Not wanting to give in to those enlightened nurses, Marina prayed instead. She didn’t know any others apart from the Lord’s Prayer, and only bits of it at that, but that’s what she repeated. By the second round the whole thing would start to degenerate into free verse: ‘Our Father, who art in Devon, halloweened be thy name. Your whiskey gone, you will be prone to bursts of laughter and rage. Give us this day our daily taste of fasting, and forgive us our thefts as we forgive your bad taste. Our Father, who art incompetent, hollowed be thy name, your fiascos come, give us each day our daily fail, and forgive us our lack of hunger, forgive our breath if it comes out stale. Your wisdom come, I will be gone…’
The night nurses made sure to praise Marina’s creativity, and then proceeded to recite her affirmations for her, in a whisper.
‘You are an artist,’ they’d repeat ten times, and Marina would cover her ears like a little girl. Although every now and again, once they’d left, a little smile would spread across her face.
Since then she’s realized that she actually enjoys affirming things, and making them up even more so. It’s just repeating the same thing over and over that seems unbearably sad to her.
‘I’m a blue cheese,’ she affirms. ‘I’m a blugheese.’
‘Third time lucky,’ she affirms. ‘You have to lure the cravings with details.’
The flavor. The flavor was so rich it would go straight to her brain, like a chili, though not spicy. She liked the texture, like butter but better, slower in the mouth, with more lumps, smooth and explosive. She pictures the cheese for so long it starts to repulse her. Then she goes out to the yard, takes a deep breath, leans against the water tank and looks up to the sky.
‘Go-back-to-your-room!’ some part of her drawls.
Where was he now? In the restaurant, maybe, or holding Mom’s hands: ‘Don’t-bite-your-nails-Mother.’
She breathes how they showed her to. She looks up to the sky how they showed her to. It’s a stubborn dark gray color: it’s never fully night in the mews. Years ago, Marina invented the word graycholy. It might be the first color she ever invented: a bit gray, a bit melancholy. And yet, that wasn’t the shade of a fake night like this, but rather of a foggy afternoon in Xalapa, one of thousands. This big city’s sky is something else, with its blanket of electric light emitting a sort of sonic-luminous fusion: a low, droning ‘brrrrrr’. What’s it called, then? Darktric, maybe. Is it ever really night in Mexico City? Marina never goes far enough out of her comfort zone to be able to confirm such a thing. Maybe if you go up one of those skyscrapers they say exist in the business district you can escape the darktric, leave it all below, look up to the black sky again and see the darkness as it was meant to be: without the buzz, and interrupted only by stars. Marina lights a cigarette and holds it up as a satellite. There are a few loose butts next to an ashtray on the window ledge, no doubt left there by Chihuahua who likes to stand alone out in the yard from time to time, to make himself seem interesting. Marina loses her appetite when she smokes, and the truth is that that’s both why she started and why she quit. And now she’s waiting for it to reappear, the hunger, and she hasn’t mentioned to the doctors that she’s smoking again. The therapist swears her appetite will come back.
‘Marina, your body knows,’ he tells her.
But what Marina thinks is that Mr. Therapist doesn’t know shit. She suspects that he would have liked to be a surgeon but could never tell his blood cells from his blood clots. She suspects he had to throw in the towel, the kudos, and all the other more pressing issues they take care of elsewhere in the hospital. She suspects he had to resign himself to Floor 8, Psychiatry: Sudokus for the soul.
*
A few raindrops fall on the water tank. The wet black gleams: weckbleam. When she first rented Bitter last summer, it rained every afternoon, even inside the house, and she dashed around here and there catching the drips in pans and thinking to herself cheerfully, ‘Wasn’t Mexico City supposed to be dry? Wasn’t Mexico City really, really dry?’ Back then she had no more to her name than her nineteen years and some waitressing savings. The money she gets now — the fat, guilt-ridden check her father sends her — didn’t exist during those first months. She stored her things in a makeshift closet built out of bricks and boards, which she painted gold in a burst of enthusiasm. (Goldasm.) She drank out of yogurt pots. She bought a mattress and a single pillow. These days she looks at the house and feels suffocated by all the stuff she’s collected. She sees the money from the restaurant in everything — the restaurant and the cooks’ sweat; how they’d pick their teeth with their index fingers and then, without a second thought, work the meat with their hands, blood and fat on their apron pockets. On the street the relentless Xalapan drizzle, and in the kitchen the tiled floor growing steadily more filthy as the day went on, making the soles of their shoes squeak against the accumulated footprints that marked the senselessness of it all. And that senselessness played out from one day to the next, but — she’d often felt this in the kitchen — merely repeating itself. In her growing collection of stylish pillows she sees the thousand layers of mascara on the provincial middle-class women who would flock to the restaurant desperate for a ‘girls’ night out’, which always seemed to Marina too hysterical, too high-pitched to signal any kind of real friendship. They called each other ‘girl’, because youth was their holy grail. The rejuvenation cult never fails to disconcert Marina who, no matter what age she turns, always wishes she were older.
The women would call her over, ‘Pst! Hey! Señorita! Miss, another pitcher of sangria.’ Perfect teeth, too much perfume, never a morsel left on their plates. Some of them would shamelessly click their fingers at her, then slip her an extra tip because she knew their daughters.
‘An Italian restaurant!’ Marina explained to her therapist, with a floating exclamation mark. But he doesn’t get the irony. He is incapable of visualizing the Italy of the Mexican provinces: Venice — its eternally vanilla sky — depicted in shoddy frescoes on the walls, and the pasta routinely, even purposely overcooked. Mr. Therapist is too worldly to even begin to imagine the stale cosmopolitanism of those who hop over the border for some retail therapy in McAllen, Texas, but don’t dare venture to Mexico City. And he is far too optimistic to see how everything she owns is linked to the restaurant, to her father’s temper, to the damp walls, and a social class she can despise all she wants, but which still pays her bills.