Bonsai

III. LOANS

First came Timothy, a rice doll who looked vaguely like an elephant. Anita slept with Timothy, fought with Timothy, fed him and even bathed him before returning him to Emilia a week later. At that time they were both four years old. Every other week the girls’ parents made arrangements for them to get together, and sometimes they spent Saturday and Sunday playing tag, imitating voices, and making up their faces with toothpaste.

Then came the clothes. Emilia liked Anita’s burgundy sweatshirt, Anita asked for her Snoopy T-shirt in return, and so began a solid commerce that grew chaotic over the years. At the age of eight there was the book about origami which Anita returned to her friend somewhat destroyed at the edges. Between ten and twelve they took bimonthly turns to buy the magazine Tú, and they exchanged cassettes of Miguel Bosé, Duran Duran, Álvaro Scaramelli, and the group Nadie.

At fourteen, Emilia kissed Anita on the mouth, and Anita didn’t know how to react. They stopped seeing each other for a few months. At seventeen Emilia kissed her again and this time the kiss was a little longer. Anita laughed and told her that if she did it again, she would slap her.

At the age of seventeen, Emilia enrolled at the Universidad de Chile to study literature, because it had been her lifelong dream. Anita, of course, knew that studying literature was not Emilia’s lifelong dream, but rather a whim directly related to her recent reading of Delmira Augustini. Anita’s dream, on the other hand, was to lose a few kilos, which did not lead her, of course, to study nutrition or physical education. Soon she enrolled in an intensive English course, and continued for some years to study in that intensive English course.

At the age of twenty Emilia and Anita moved in together. Anita had been living alone for six months, since her mother had recently made a relationship official, for which she deserved — that’s what she said to her daughter — the opportunity to start over from scratch. Starting over from scratch meant starting without children and, probably, continuing without children. But in this account Anita’s mother and Anita don’t matter, they are secondary characters. The one who matters is Emilia, who gladly accepted the offer to live with Anita, seduced, in particular, by the possibility of shagging with Julio in the comfort of her own home.

Anita discovered she was pregnant two months before her friend’s relationship with Julio dissolved completely. The father — the one responsible, as was said then — was a student in his last year at the law school of the Universidad Católica, a detail she emphasized, probably because it made her mistake seem more respectable. Although they’d known each other a short time, Anita and the future lawyer decided to marry, and Emilia was the witness for the ceremony. During the party, a friend of the groom tried to kiss Emilia as they danced cumbia, but she evaded his face, claiming she didn’t like that kind of music.

At twenty-six Anita was already the mother of two girls and her husband was torn between the option of buying a station wagon and the vague temptation of having a third child (to close the factory, he said, with an emphasis that tried to be funny, and that maybe was, since people tended to laugh at the comment). That’s how well it went for them.

Anita’s husband was called Andrés, or Leonardo. Let’s agree that his name was Andrés and not Leonardo. Let’s agree that Anita was awake and Andrés half-asleep and the two girls sleeping the night Emilia arrived to visit them unannounced.

It was almost eleven o’clock at night. Anita did her best to evenly distribute what little whiskey remained and Andrés had to run to a nearby grocery store. He returned with three small bags of potato chips.

Why didn’t you bring a big bag?

Because there weren’t any big bags left.

And didn’t it occur to you, for example, to bring five small bags?

They didn’t have five small bags left. They had three.

Emilia thought that perhaps it had not been such a good idea to arrive unannounced to see her friend. While the skirmish lasted, she concentrated on an enormous Mexican hat that reigned over the living room. She almost left, but her purpose was urgent: at the school, she had said that she was married. In order to get a job as a Spanish teacher, she had said that she was married. The problem was that, the following night, there was a party with her co-workers and it was unavoidable for her husband to accompany her. After so many T-shirts and records and books and even padded bras, it wouldn’t be such a big deal for you to loan me your husband, Emilia said.

All her colleagues wanted to meet Miguel. And Andrés could pass perfectly as Miguel. She had said Miguel was fat, dark, and nice, and Andrés was, at least, very dark and very fat. Nice he was not, she’d thought this from the first time she’d seen him, years ago. Anita was also fat and extremely beautiful, or at least as beautiful as such a fat woman can be, Emilia thought, with some envy. Emilia was rather coarse and very thin, Anita was fat and pretty. Anita said she didn’t mind loaning her husband for a while.

As long as you return him.

You can be sure of that.

They laughed heartily, while Andrés tried to capture the last pieces of potato chips from his bag. During adolescence they had been very careful with regard to men. Before getting involved in anything Emilia would call Anita, and vice versa, to ask the standard questions. Are you sure you don’t like him? I’m sure, don’t be uptight, stupid.

At first Andrés acted reticent, but in the end he ceded, after all it could turn out to be fun.

Do you know why rum and coke is called a Cuba Libre?

No, answered Emilia, a bit tired and thoroughly ready for the party to end.

You really don’t know? It’s pretty obvious: the rum is Cuba and the Coca-Cola is the United States, is liberty. Get it?

I knew a different story.

Which story?

I knew it, but I forgot it.

Andrés had already told several anecdotes in that vein, which made it difficult not to consider him insufferable. He made such an effort to keep Emilia’s co-workers from figuring out the farce that he even let himself tell her to shut up. One supposes that a husband, Emilia then told herself, shuts up his wife. Andrés shuts up Anita when he thinks she should shut up. And so there’s nothing wrong with Miguel making his wife shut up if he thinks she should shut up. And since I am Miguel’s wife I should shut up.

Emilia stayed that way, silent, for the rest of the evening. Now not only would no one doubt that she was married to Miguel, but her colleagues would also not be too surprised by a conjugal crisis, say, two weeks in length, and a sudden but justified separation. Nothing more: no calls, no friends in common, nothing. It would be easy to kill Miguel. I broke it off in one fell swoop, she imagined telling them.

Andrés stopped the car and deemed it necessary to sum up the night, telling Emilia that it had been a very entertaining party and he really would not mind continuing to attend such gatherings. They are nice people and you look gorgeous in that cobalt dress.

The dress was turquoise, but she didn’t want to correct him. They were in front of Emilia’s apartment and it was still early. He was very drunk, she had also been drinking, and maybe because of that it did not seem so horrific that Andrés — that Miguel — should pause awhile between one word and the next. But those thoughts were violently interrupted the moment she imagined her voluminous companion penetrating her. Disgusting, she thought, right when Andrés came too close and rested his left hand on Emilia’s right thigh.

She wanted to get out of the car and he didn’t want her to. She said to him, you’re drunk, and he answered no, that it wasn’t the alcohol, that for a long time he had been seeing her differently. It’s incredible, but that’s what he said. “For a long time I’ve been seeing you differently.” He tried to kiss her and she responded with a punch in the mouth. From Andrés’ mouth came blood, a lot of blood, a scandalous amount of blood.

The two friends did not see each other again for a long time after that incident. Anita never found out exactly what had happened, but she managed to imagine something, something that she didn’t like at first and that later produced indifference, being that Andrés interested her less and less.

There was no car nor third child, but rather two years of calculated silence and a separation that, all things considered, was rather amicable, that with time led Andrés to think of himself as an excellent divorced father. The girls stayed in his house every two weeks and spent, also, the whole month of January with him, in Maitencillo. Anita took advantage of one of those summers to go visit Emilia. Her guilty mother had offered several times to pay for the trip, and though it was hard for Anita to accept being so far from her little girls, she allowed her curiosity to defeat her.

She went to Madrid, but she did not go to Madrid. She went to look for Emilia, of whom she had lost all trace. It had been difficult for her to obtain the address on Salitre Street and a phone number that seemed, to Anita, strangely long. Once she got to Barajas she was about to dial that number, but she desisted, inspired by a puerile, atavistic leaning toward surprises.

Madrid was not beautiful, at least not to Anita, to the Anita who that morning had to dodge, at the metro exit, past a group of Moroccans who were plotting something. They were actually Ecuadorians and Colombians, but she, who had never in her life met a Moroccan, thought of them as Moroccans, since she recalled that a gentleman had recently said on television that Moroccans were the great problem of Spain. Madrid seemed to her an intimidating, hostile city, in fact it was hard for her to select a trustworthy person whom she could ask about the address she had written down. There were several ambiguous dialogues between the moment she got off the metro and the moment when she finally had Emilia in front of her, face to face.

You’ve gone back to wearing black, was the first thing she said to her. But the first thing she said was not the first thing she thought. And she thought many things when she saw Emilia: she thought you look ugly, you’re depressed, you look like a drug addict. She realized that perhaps she should not have come. She carefully examined Emilia’s eyebrows, Emilia’s eyes. She pondered, disdainfully, the place itself: very little floor space, a complete mess, absurd, overpopulated. She thought, or more accurately she felt, that she did not want to hear what Emilia was going to tell her, that she did not wish to know what she seemed in any case condemned to know. I don’t want to know why there’s so much shit in this neighborhood, why you came to live in this neighborhood full of caca, replete with cunning glances, with weird young people, with fat ladies dragging bags, and with fat ladies who aren’t dragging bags but who walk very slowly. She examined, once again, carefully, Emilia’s eyebrows. She decided it was better to stay quiet in regard to Emilia’s eyebrows.

You’ve gone back to wearing black, Emilia.

Anita, you’re the same.

Emilia did say the first thing she thought: you’re the same. You’re the same, you’ve kept being like that, the way you are. And I keep being like this, I have always been like this, and perhaps now I will tell you that in Madrid I’ve come to be even more like this, completely this.

Aware of her friend’s unease, Emilia assured Anita that the two men she was living with were poor fags. Fags dress very well here, she told her, but these two who live with me, unfortunately, are poorer than rats. Anita did not want to stay as a houseguest in the apartment. Together they looked for a cheap hostel, and one could say they spoke at length, although maybe not; it would be incorrect to say they talked as before, because before there was trust and now they were linked, rather, by a feeling of discomfort, of guilty familiarity, shame, emptiness. Just before the end of the afternoon, after making some urgent mental calculations, Anita took out forty thousand pesetas, which was almost all the money she had with her. She gave them to Emilia, who, far from resisting, smiled with genuine gratitude. Anita knew that smile from before, and for two seconds it reunited them and then left them again, alone, face to face, one of them wishing that the tourist would spend the rest of the week occupied with museums, Zara stores, and little cakes with syrup, and the other one promising herself that she would not think anymore about how Emilia would use her forty thousand pesetas.