Please Talk to Me: Selected Stories

THE CRUELTY OF LIFE

I was at the police station, sitting between a monobrow and a big girl, dark-skinned, who was breast-feeding her baby, and I felt sticky and verging on terrified after a five-hour peregrination on the most stifling March afternoon in living memory, and I was wondering if that intimation of terror owed more to my mother’s disappearance or to the fact of not knowing what I would find, if I ever did find her, when for no apparent reason, the lion appeared. It wasn’t the first time that had happened to me, that some troubling incident popped into my head out of nowhere, there was that room with the dancing legs, for example, and me watching them from under a chair and then the boy who came headlong through them, a boy with curly hair they called Moishke Copetón. From my vantage point under the chair, I couldn’t grasp the concept of parties (even today I can’t be doing with the crush and the noise) and caught none of the words except those very strange ones: Moishke Copetón. Whenever I remember that sea of legs it’s an unchanging image, and it was the same in Precinct No. 17 of the Federal Police as I waited my turn between the monobrow and the brunette, when the lion burst in. Mostly it’s the lion I see but that afternoon, rather than seeing him only from the vantage point of my bed, as he crouched behind the dining room table, I happened to switch the focus towards my six-year-old self, lying in the bed, sensing the lion. That was when — another blow — I realised that I couldn’t think of him any more.

. . .

It wasn’t that I had forgotten the lion: I could still imagine him (there was ample time to verify this before the police officer called me) crouching behind the dining room table, waiting for the perfect moment to leap onto me, and I could also see myself, fighting off sleep with my eyes stretched wide — because I was more afraid that the lion would catch me unawares than I was of the attack itself — huddled in the dark until it became so unbearable to keep still that I had to get up (to provoke the lion, forcing him to attack once and for all). I could also recall the voice of my father, asking from the other bedroom where I was going, the first time with concern, the second a little exasperated and the third on the brink of eruption (I was careful never to get up more than three times; then, as now, I would rather be mauled by a lion than endure certain tribulations of family life), and the unintelligible murmur of my mother, calming him down or perhaps poking fun at me. My mother never had much faith in people (and still doesn’t now, truth be told). I could re-create the desperation I felt as I listened to Lucía sleeping soundly, a mere two yards from my bed — as though the world were not imperilled — and even reproduce the nightly sequence of thoughts with which I persuaded myself that a lion could indeed be waiting to pounce on me from behind the dining room table. What I couldn’t do was know the lion; it was another sensibility, different to mine, that had been frightened of it. I saw her now, fearing the lion in the same way that I saw the lion — but that was all, for I was no longer that child who lay awake in the silence, eyes wide open, straining to interpret signs. It was as if the thread that connected me to her had weakened or broken. Is that what it means to grow up? There in precinct No. 17 it seemed an inadequate term to describe the passage of my years. Growing up. The concept alarmed me. Was I, in that respect, not so different to my mother? I’m getting old now, Mariúshkale, she had said to me on her eighty-fifth birthday but with a certain ambiguity, as though to say ‘we both know that isn’t so: old age wasn’t made for me, I am invulnerable, my daughters are invulnerable, everything I have brought into the world is perfect and therefore immune to fever, pimples, melancholia, failure and death.’ So all that rigmarole, dashing from pillar to post — was it just to come here and discover I’m like her? Not in a million years, I thought with a violence that made me shudder. The monobrow glanced over at me disapprovingly and a friendly nudge from the breast-feeder informed me that it was my turn.

. . .

What are his distinguishing features, asked the officer, disregarding the fact that this missing person — as I had just informed him — was called Perla and was my mother. Female, I answered. Sniggers at my back (I guessed from the monobrow) alerted me to the mistake. I was just so tired. I had endured so many grillings in police stations and hospital emergency departments, had tripped up so many times on the slippery police patter that even if I were to give a less vague answer than ‘female’ or ‘white skin’ I doubted it would spark any understanding in the face of my questioner — of course, of course I knew what he was after, but what was I supposed to say: lying in bed with her throat slit, officer? Lost an eye? A drooling stuttering wreck? And anyway, a few minutes earlier I had discovered something with such disheartening consequences for my future that nobody had any business expecting rational answers from me. Features, not sex, said the officer. I could feel the monobrow’s raspy breath on my neck: he didn’t like time-wasters. I said nothing. Distinguishing features — characteristics, prompted the officer. I wanted to tell him that my mother was, from top to toe, a distinguishing characteristic. I suffered, officer, how I suffered as a child because I longed to have a mother like all the other mothers; a longing she must have inculcated herself with her songs. The mothers in them, when they weren’t blindly abandoning their children, in which case they were called heartless — which is to say unmotherly, given that the heart is the quintessential maternal organ, as can be deduced from that poem (often recited by my mother) in which the son, at the request of his cruel lover, stole his mother’s heart as she slept (probably dreaming of him), and as he reached the dark threshold of his lover’s house he stumbled and the heart called out ‘Are you hurt, my son?’—when they had a heart, as I was saying, they were saints who prayed alone for the nation to bestow five medals on their five heroes or selfless old ladies washing clothes in the kitchen sink, welcoming home with open arms the disoriented son who had been seduced by some other world and swept by the dangerous new passions vice had taught him into a deep, churning sea. Mother! the delirious boy would cry on his return, I’ve been consumed by sorrow, bereft without your love. And she goes: Come here, scallywag, a kiss will make it better. That was how mothers were, according to the songs my mother sang. But not her. She neither cruelly abandoned me nor devoted herself to solitary prayer. And she did the washing, yes, but grumbling all the while, because she thought herself destined for something greater than the laundry. She must have had a heart, but it was arbitrary and deceitful. For instance, on the very day she first met El Rubio she had no option but to lie to him. How could she have had no option, I thought, lying in my parents’ bed. It must have been a Sunday morning, because Sunday mornings in the marital bed were reserved for story-telling. The stories were always different. Sometimes they were nothing more than a detailed account of the previous evening’s movie. (On Saturday nights Perla and El Rubio went to the cinema; he in a wide-brimmed hat and white silk scarf; she with a grosgrain rose pinned to her lapel and a hat that transformed her — Perla looked radiant beneath her hats as though these delicate creations of feathers, tulle or straw had the power to banish the little disappointments of her daily life.) That kind of story was told only once and presented no greater complexity than the plot of the movie itself, which was no small thing because Perla recounted every detail and even (as I found out in time) embellished a few so that, each Sunday as I pressed against the soft body that seemed to promise a safe harbour even as the voice filled me with fear, I would hear about one man’s heinous scheme to convince his wife that she was going mad, or the dead woman in league with a housekeeper to torment her widower’s new, young wife, or the deaf-blind girl savagely raped by a brutal man. What is ‘raped,’ I asked, intuiting some menace behind the word. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman, said Perla, firmly, creating one of those pockets of darkness that I would struggle to elucidate on my journey towards the uncomfortable adulthood I occupied now, as I sat dumbstruck before the officer of Precinct No. 17, trying not to ask myself at which moment the thread had weakened or broken, if there ever had been anything like a thread, anyway. The films in themselves weren’t necessarily disturbing because they always had a beginning and an end and no ramifications. The real-life stories, on the other hand, sometimes linked to stories from other Sundays, but they were unreliable links. And the story could get lost in the details. Or be nothing but details, as tended to happen with clothes. Clothes came as part of a story but then were described with so much theatre that they ended up becoming the story itself, like that party dress in lemon-yellow crepe, covered from top to bottom in rolled-up feathers that Perla called aigrettes, a diamante nestling at the centre of every single one. I had to make an effort not to picture my mother as a bird-woman, gigantic and malign with the face of a sparrowhawk and a feathery body, an image that returned to trouble me at night, like all the others, and which I had seen once in a book; I let myself be swept along by the words—aigrette, lemon-yellow, diamante: words whose significance I didn’t always know but which submerged me in a beautiful haze that had no need of illustration because what was sketched by the words was, for me, better than any picture. When it came to the clothes, however, the process was complicated, not least because it meant believing Perla (how can a dress covered in feathers not be monstrous? Is it possible to distinguish a diamante in the centre of a rolled feather? Early on I suspected that Perla was exaggerating or changing things as she saw fit) but because it also forced on me the appreciation of a beauty that was alien to me. A holm oak, a pitcher, a wagon, these things appealed to my own notion of beauty, but lemon-yellow crepe transported me to a world I could only covet through Perla’s own covetousness.

It was even worse with the accessories, which conferred on an outfit its crowning splendour. Perla, who had carefully drawn a design and saved her pennies to pay for the fabric and the making up and followed with a critical eye the work of the local seamstress until the dress of her dreams was finally a reality, had also given careful thought to the accessories. If even one was missing she would rather shut herself away in the house and never show off her new dress. And given that most of them were generally missing and she never had enough money to buy them she had to spend a long time working on the consciences of her five sisters (who were almost as selfish and quarrelsome as she was) until each one lent her what she needed. Only then, when everything was in its place, the grey beret picking up the collar of the little suit, the crocodile clutch bag in exactly the same colour as the shoes, the gloves no shorter or longer than they should be, would she puff up like a peacock and go wherever she had been invited. I was so beautiful (she would say, finishing her story in bed) that when I came in everyone said I looked like a girl from the aristocracy.

I didn’t have a very clear idea of what the aristocracy was, but I knew that it was a state highly fancied by my mother. What confused me was that, in her songs, aristocrats were dreadful people who invariably thwarted the desires of Perla’s heroes and heroines (consumptive worker-girls, dying orphans and starving poets). Hearing about these tragic lives, to which Perla gave somewhat cheerful expression, singing in the style of a chanteuse as she cleaned the house, I often wept for the world’s wretches. But whenever we went out, all of us, even El Rubio, had to look like members of the aristocracy.

And speaking of El Rubio, why did you have no choice but to lie to him? I asked her eventually, because I was shocked that a girl would think of deceiving the man of her life on the very day she met him. Well it’s simple, said Perla, like someone who’s about to explain the most natural thing in the world: he had obviously asked me when my birthday was because he wanted to give me a present.

Perla had turned twenty-two only a month previously and telling the truth looked like wasting an opportunity. So she took two months off her life and he didn’t disappoint her: on the afternoon of her fake birthday — they were already on their fourth or fifth date — he waited for her at the corner of Pringles and Guardia Vieja with a blue velvet box wrapped in tissue paper: inside, a little Girard-Perregaux watch.

It was that sort of attention to detail that made Perla fall so madly in love with him. Not only was El Rubio the kind of man to give a girl a beautiful bracelet watch, he also danced the tango vals better than anyone and in a café he would pay for everybody, as if he were loaded with money. His friends (Perla said) called him Paganini. One December afternoon, nearly a month after the fake birthday, he even turned up with a new DeSoto. But she didn’t want to get in that day or indeed on their subsequent dates: it’s frowned upon (she told him) for a single girl to get into the car of a single man. It was a shame because after the DeSoto he never had a car again in his life, and she loved cars. She used to imagine herself crossing Buenos Aires next to El Rubio in a gleaming voiturette. He never knew about that at the time. Patiently he would leave the DeSoto outside her house on Pringles Street, then the two of them would take a tram to Lezama Park: Perla adored going to Lezama Park — and singing tangos about dying lovers and having long conversations about her future. If he got sick of all that jacaranda and tuberculosis he didn’t let on: he would never knowingly have slighted anyone. He did accidentally, though. One day during the carnival he arranged to meet Perla at the corner of Corrientes and Maipú and stood her up. Just like that, stranded amidst the streamers and the cheap cologne, in the ecru linen dress she had embroidered herself in cross-stitch.

And then she heard nothing more of him, apart from a photograph, sent months later from Ernesto Castro, For Perla, From the beach. No apologies, no promises, nothing to cling to. It should also be said that the photograph was dreadful: he was sitting on the ground near a kind of shack, in some get-up of shabby pyjamas, fraying hat and espadrilles, looking more like a vagrant than the tango-dancing object of her desire. (Sorting through other photos of El Rubio thirty years later — in Azul, in Olvarría, in General Acha — it struck me that his character was hard to pin down: he could just as easily be pictured as a bather or a gaucho; in an impeccable white suit and panama or in a T-shirt, swilling wine with low-lifers. The only thing we can know for sure is that he loved himself, I said to Lucía, and we couldn’t stop laughing, despite the whispering presence of death. Because he was always taking photographs of himself: in good times and bad. And he even had the nerve to send Perla, who was all willowy elegance and cross-stitch embroidery, that one in which he looked so ugly in the scruffy hat.)

We’ll never know how she came to reconcile the vagrant with the Paganini. She must have been broken-hearted because for five years she continuously sang that tango Be gone! Don’t come here begging me to remember each hour of our tragic romance. But the fact is that she turned twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-six, rejecting one after another, all the suitors who presented themselves to her.

At twenty-seven she went to see a gypsy. (My mother was an odd kind of Jew: she liked priests for their sermonising and gypsies for their fortune-telling, not to mention that every Good Friday she took us to the cinema to weep over the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.) The gypsy told her that she was going to meet the love of her life soon and give him her left hand. She foresaw a home in which there would be daughters but no money. The money won’t stay, she said; it’s going to come in and go out but never stay. Since she was desperate to be rich, Perla decided not to believe the gypsy’s prophecy. And six days later she was waiting to meet a new suitor in the house of the only one of her sisters to have married a millionaire.

The thing she most liked about that house was the Baccarat crystal chandelier in the dining room and what she most disliked was the deep, bitter line on her brother-in-law’s forehead and the wart beside his nose. Subconsciously she assigned the same line to the suitor who was at that moment making his way to the house. She was wrong. That man was a brick, affable and kind. En route to the house he ran into a friend who had just arrived from Bahía Blanca taking advantage of a free passage given to him by virtue of the Eucharistic Congress that was being held in Buenos Aires. There and then the brick invited his newly arrived friend to share in his good fortune.

‘I’ve been invited round to someone’s house,’ he said. ‘Apparently they’re going to introduce me to a pretty girl. Do you want to come along?’

The friend did want to. It was El Rubio.

Of all that happened in that house the one salient fact is that Perla gave El Rubio her left hand to shake because the right one was bandaged up. Knowing her, it isn’t too far-fetched to suppose that the bandage may have been somehow contrived, because she was always a cheat, which isn’t to say that events didn’t transpire exactly as she told them — that two days earlier she got a nasty burn on her hand and needed to bandage it — because it’s also true that there was always something a bit magical about her.

At any rate, afterwards, when the two men were in the street, barely had his friend ventured a few words on how pretty Perla was (he called her Perla, without compunction) than El Rubio stopped him dead.

‘Be careful what you say,’ he said, ‘because that woman is my fiancée.’

And he must have known what he was saying because eight months later they were married.

. . .

So when did you tell him the truth? I ask, in my parents’ bed, more concerned about the moral problem than about the story itself. And not surprisingly. Why would any child familiar with that tale of the girl who plays next to a pond with a gold ball, accidentally drops it in, then gets in return a toad that finally turns out to be a prince, be much impressed by the story of a man who turns up after a five-year absence at the house of the brother-in-law of the woman who’s been waiting for him? The very least one asks of any story is that there be an element of chance in the plot. The problem of truth, on the other hand, does worry me. Although not in the way it worries Lucía, who believes that one should always tell the truth, regardless of the circumstances, because it’s the right thing to do. The problem of truth worries me because I can’t imagine going through life with the weight of certain lies on your back. A fake birthday, for instance. There are literally millions of things relating to a person’s birthday, so if you are going to lie to one person about your date of birth, in order for that lie never to be discovered, you’re going to have to keep modifying each of those millions of things for the rest of your life, not only for the sake of the person to whom you lied but for all those others to whom the deceived person may speak at some time or other. The complications are infinite, beginning at the moment of the lie and ending only at death. All of which goes to show that lying did not actually constitute a moral problem for me. It was a purely practical question — even if, in front of Lucía, I was prepared to swear that the act of lying was abominable in itself. That was a lie that didn’t frighten me because I considered it a matter of self-defence and because it replaced a hazy concept about good and evil that I felt impinged on me, although I wasn’t able to explain it. Besides, it was a lie that began and ended with Lucía (it was cut to her size), which exempted me from having to apply it to millions of cases.

Perla, on the other hand, has no problem lying. Neither in the moral sphere nor in the practical one.

‘I honestly can’t remember at what point I told him the truth,’ she says, putting an end to the question.

. . .

That’s typical of my mother, managing to work herself into the story in a way that reflects well on her and gives her a greater role than the one originally allotted her: that of missing person. But whether she likes it or not, her presence here is incidental and the hunt for her through hospitals and police stations — plus an episode featuring the Happiness Care Home, still to come — is merely the backdrop to this story’s real drama: the missing lion. I could have discovered its absence at any time, but it had to happen on the same day of the other loss, while Lucía was looking for my mother in one direction and I in another, communicating all the while via a complicated system of messages because, to make matters worse, the woman — or guardian angel — who usually helped my mother had gone off to La Plata on some urgent business that meant she couldn’t serve as a bridge between us. It was in the midst of this chaos that I realised I had lost the lion but, what if I had made the discovery on a quieter day? Would I have managed to avoid becoming the creature I was for the next two years (exactly until the morning in March when we visited the Happiness Care Home)? Drained, muddle-headed, incapable of any thought that didn’t somehow rebound back on me and my obvious stupidity? I would reach for a tin of biscuits and some awareness of the banality of that action would detain me halfway, crushed by a suggestion of failure. It didn’t stop me from eating the biscuit after all, but even such a small event held no pleasure for me. It’s an unpleasant sensation, especially for someone who has built her life on the supposition of a certain eccentricity or state of grace. Now I knew that that state, if it had ever existed, was deep in the rock bed of my past and not able to illuminate my present, and that the woman whose hand had reached for the biscuit tin didn’t deserve a jot of sympathy from me.

It may seem extravagant to some that a missing lion had depressed me to this degree but the thing is that, of the three or four formative events that have seemed to shape my life (inconspicuous events which I have nevertheless loaded with significance and allowed to shed light on my every act, however trivial, oh there she is the oddball, reaching out to pinch a biscuit, how crudely her brain grapples with such a simple act, how clearly she sees herself, pathetic, greedy, looking for the one with the most filling; and then, somehow redeemed by my own pitiless gaze, I could calmly savour the biscuit like someone eating consecrated bread), of those three or four episodes, as I was saying, two actually feature lions. In the first of these I’m four or five years old. I’m running in circles around my grandmother’s patio while, in an effort to mitigate my disappointment in the real world, I invent a story of which I am the heroine and in which people I don’t like get their comeuppance while other extraordinary people praise me for my charm and courage. Each time some incident or character doesn’t fit into the picture I have to change it, thus imposing other modifications which in their turn bring new imperfections that I have to remedy. As I get closer (or so I think) to the perfect version of my story, my excitement mounts and I spin around faster and faster. I’m now at a vertiginous point, on the cusp of a time when all difficulties will be over and I’ll be happy. Then, behind me, coming from the kitchen door, and with the same effect as something heavy falling on my head, I hear: ‘She looks like a caged lion.’

The second is not so much an episode as a line of thought, one I follow night after night and which leads mercilessly to the lion. I’m in bed, sensing his presence, and he is behind the dining room table, waiting for the moment to leap on me. All my nights, between the ages of five and eight, are marked by this awareness of the lion. And what I had discovered in Precinct No. 17 of the Federal Police was that the complete memory was there and that I could recount it as often as I liked and pretend to be recounting part of my life, but that for some time now — how long? — I had been telling somebody else’s story.

My actions had been emptied of meaning, something like that. And my punishment was to know it. Perhaps one day my stolidity would reach a point where I could not even recognise that turn of events and I would go through life as a perfect imbecile. For the moment I was a mutant, awaiting my transformation — into someone else? into myself? I still didn’t know from which point I was observing the phenomenon. Like a good mutant, I didn’t have an assigned category.

On the bus or queueing up to pay taxes I surreptitiously studied my fellow men and women. I envied them deeply: they seemed to bear no shadow of worry. I tried a few experiments to speed up the process of transformation. One morning, at the Water Company, I nearly managed it. I was waiting in a crowded area to arrange payment of an outstanding debt which — or so I hoped — would turn me in more than one sense into a good citizen. People were talking all around me. Hearing themselves speak seemed not to bother them. Perhaps they didn’t even hear it. They talked to fill the time and because it was easier to talk than to endure the silence. I decided to join in. First I agreed with a blonde lady that you come to pay your bill and they treat you worse than a criminal, then I made a few contributions to a plan one bald fellow had to get the country booming and vibrant in less than a year. This time no inner laughter distanced me from my companions. I was who I claimed to be, nothing more and they — you could tell a mile off — accepted me without question. I was just beginning to feel comfortable in my role when a voice from nowhere murmured: Art thou, indeed, that woman? Now I see that in a way these words anticipated what I would later discover at the Happiness Care Home. And not because of the question’s meaning: it was typical of the recriminations that regularly interrupted my actions, leaving me speechless, that particular afternoon, in front of my fellow queuers, neither able to speak to them nor to call on the vanity that would have distanced me from them in times past. Not, as I said because of the words’ meaning, but because of that archaic style which reminded me of the question the Sleeping Beauty asks, at the moment she opens her eyes, after sleeping for a hundred years and sees the Prince, who has just woken her with a kiss on the lips. Who art thou Sir, and what dost thou here? a line to which I had returned time and again, trying in vain to penetrate its perfection and wondering if I, woken abruptly after my hundred-year sleep, could have formulated such a rigorous question, condensing — and so politely! — everything that needs to be known in such unwonted circumstances. That flashback should have alerted me, but I was so absorbed by my loss that I didn’t even think about how old-fashioned — or bloody-minded — my subconscious can be left to its own devices. Not to mention Sleeping Beauty. I didn’t let myself think of her, or of the girl spinning in the patio or of the lion. These thoughts felt plundered; they belonged to another person. That girl who knows the lion, with every fibre of her being and can sense him from her bed, not the woman crying for his loss.

Bed is the place for big problems. When Lucía’s asleep, when Perla and El Rubio are sleeping, Mariana can mull over her big problems without anyone coming to scold her for not doing anything. Is thinking not doing anything? In fact that is one of the big problems she can devote herself to considering when nobody’s around to bother her. When she’s not in bed, the only other time she can devote herself to thought is when she’s pretending to be a dog — and she only does that on cold days. On hot days Lucía’s feet don’t get freezing so she doesn’t ask Mariana to come and sit on her like a dog. Lucía feels the cold easily, but not Mariana. She likes to feel an icy wind on her face and she loves frost. What she most likes about frost is the word frost. If she thinks: This morning when I went to school the street was covered in frost, she can believe that she’s in one of those story-book countries where people use sledges to get around. When it’s very cold, her mother says: Today it’s a frosting cold, turning frost into a verb and calling to mind cake decoration, which isn’t nearly as pretty. Her mother comes up with some strange verbs, sometimes. If she’s eaten a lot she says: I’m stiffed. Mariana has never heard other people use either of these words and much less the word musgrevely. It’s a word that features in a very sad song her mother sings that goes: Little Paper Boy they called him and he to see them all musgrevely. So Mariana reckons that musgrevely means demonstrating to others that you are what they think you are. They called him little paper boy and he, without deception, showed that he was one. She even has the impression that he was proud to be musgrevely. But sometimes it seems to her that the song says ‘Little Paper Boy they called him he could see them all most easily.’ Although the day they argue about it Lucía says that neither version is correct. What the song says, according to Lucía, is: Little Paper Boy they called him and he to sea had set out previously. In that case, he had been a sailor before he was a paper boy. The problem is the next bit, says Mariana, who always listens carefully to her mother’s songs. What’s the next bit? asks Lucía, who doesn’t pay them much attention. Mariana sings: Little Paper Boy they called him and he could see them all most easily, when one day on a street corner a mother with no intestines abandoned him to fate. It’s entirely baseless says Lucía, who has read William Saroyan. The two roll around laughing because thinking of that reminds them of the other preposterous lyrics their mother sings, that one about the suicidal lovers, says Lucía breathless with laughter and Mariana sings Goodbye mother, goodbye father, goodbye brothers and sisters, we must go now and we won’t see each other again; if our love on earth was true, in the tomb it will be even greater. Every time they’re about to stop laughing they remember some new example — that one that begins I loved her with the gentle soul of my evidence, says Lucía; entirely baseless, says Mariana — and they’re off again. The trouble is that there are songs they have never heard anyone else sing and the only time they dare to ask their mother if the song about the paper boy is ‘he could see them all most easily’ or ‘to sea he’d set out previously’ she looks at them as though they were completely mad and says: haven’t you two got anything better to talk about? She’s like that, their mother, it’s impossible to get the better of her. She always finds a way to turn things round and walk off cool as a cucumber. She says, ‘I’m stiffed,’ and she says musgrevely and nobody will ever know where she gets these words from. Like sarcirony. Their mother is always using the word sarcirony. She says: Don’t look at me with sarcirony, and she says: He said it with sarcirony. Mariana understands perfectly what sarcirony means. She herself often speaks with sarcirony. And so does Lucía. And El Rubio. They’re a very sarcironic family. But then one day she writes sarcirony in an essay and the teacher crosses it out with a red pencil and says that the word doesn’t exist. She refutes this and even explains the significance. But the teacher makes her look it up in a dictionary and that’s when Mariana discovers that her mother can never be entirely trusted, even when she’s using a beautiful word like sarcirony.

Lucía, on the other hand, does know how all the words should be because she reads the dictionary. She takes it with her into the bathroom and spends hours locked in there where nobody can bother her. The dictionary is a bit battered and has a story that predates Mariana’s birth. Stories from before her birth give her a hollow feeling in the heart. Not the ones from the time her mother and father first met, because those are so old they’re practically fables. The ones about her mother and aunts when they were children even more so. There were six Malamud sisters (not counting the boys) and all of them were wild, but the wildest must have been her mother, because now they’re all old ladies and she’s still wild. Mariana loves the stories about the Malamud sisters because they were very poor and very prankish and laughed at everything, and because they lived next door to a family of cheerful and friendly Italians who ended up being Mafia chiefs. By contrast, the stories in which Lucía features but isn’t yet born give her that sense of emptiness because they show that her mother, father and Lucía lived happily without her and had no need of her existence. She hates that — but nothing is as infuriating as the dead girl. The dead girl appears in some of these stories from the past. Lucía and her mother talk about this child and about how they waited for her and some of the things that happened while they were waiting, but they never mention the thing that causes her the most fear — and not any kind of fear but a peculiar, retrospective kind. They never say that she would not be in the world had this child not been born dead, and that nobody would be any the wiser. Mariana hates this child and is tremendously happy that she’s good and dead. But that also frightens her, since the worst thing you can do in life is take pleasure in the death of another person, especially a sister, so she can’t tell anyone about this and it’s the most terrible secret she keeps. That dictionary dates from the time of the dead girl. It was given to Lucía before the child was born, because nobody knew that she would be born dead, so they were happy and brought round presents. Apparently it came on a little shelf, with six story books, three on either side of the dictionary. Mariana’s never seen a mini-bookcase: she believes that it has been her lot to live in a time in which there aren’t such beautiful objects. She enquires about the storybooks that came with the dictionary. Nobody knows anything, nobody remembers anything, they have disappeared without a trace; vainly she tries to imagine the splendour of those books which will never again be possible on earth. It’s unfair that all that is left of such a splendid collection is the dictionary. She hates dictionaries and that whole business of the words being listed alphabetically. In fact she despises alphabetic order, the ABC strikes her as the most boring system in the world — there’s no way to learn it because there’s no reason in it. If something can’t be rationalised, it can’t be learnt. She used to think that the letters came in an order of familiarity so that you would simply need to decide which was the better known of two letters, the N and the R, for example, and that way work out the position of each letter, but — what was the K doing before the M? And the S after the Q? With the alphabet the only option is to learn it parrot-fashion and it’s a shame to see the words arranged that way, with some very boring definition underneath them, it makes them ugly; she likes to see a word in the middle of other words so that, even if you’ve never heard it before in your life, you work out what it means and it’s like a game. But Lucía loves the dictionary and spends hours locked in the bathroom reading it so as not to be disturbed. Or perhaps it just seems like hours to Mariana because she’s on the other side of the door waiting for her sister to come out so that they can play together. When her sister’s in the bathroom, Mariana imagines that if she comes out and they play she’ll be happy, but when Lucía does emerge it’s hard to believe that happiness can ever be attained: Lucía gets furious because, even though Mariana said — and repeated — that Lucía can stay in there forever, for all she cares, that she’ll never ask her to come out, ultimately she hasn’t been able to bear the wait and has ended up calling her, which (as she already guessed would happen) seems bound to have unhappy repercussions. Not on one occasion, though. That time her dream comes true because Lucía, after her confinement with the dictionary, comes out of the bathroom looking for her: she wants Mariana to listen to a song she composed in the bath about her yearning for an encyclopedia. Mariana knows what that is because, a few days ago, when her sister mentioned wanting one for the first time, she asked: Luci, what is an encyclopedia? And Lucía gazed into the distance and said: It’s a book that has all knowledge in it. She had to make a great effort to imagine that totality of knowledge and another, even greater, to imagine a book big enough to contain it. Was this really the way things were? That Lucía locked herself away to read a dictionary but really wanted an encyclopedia? That she longed for her sister to come out of the bathroom only to regret it and feel even more wretched than before? That perfection was impossible in this world? At any rate, the afternoon that Lucía seeks her out to sing the song she composed in the bath comes pretty close to perfection.

The song tells of Lucía’s longing for an encyclopedia, about the money that would be necessary to buy one, and ends abruptly: And since I haven’t got it I’ll just have to wait. Straight to the point, the way Lucía likes her poetry. What is poetry? You’re asking me? Poetry is you. They say what they want to say, no messing around. But things are rarely so simple. That business with Amado Nervo, for instance — Mariana can’t even bear to remember that ill-fated afternoon, with Lucía lying in bed reading Nervo’s The Immovable Beloved and her being a dog, never happier. She doesn’t even like the title of Nervo’s book, imagining a paralysed woman in a wheelchair whom she can’t imagine anyone loving, let alone writing poems for but, to be on the safe side, she’s never told Lucía that. And then her sister says: Listen to this poem. Lucía always reads her things she really likes and Mariana loves it, especially when she reads her the funny bits out of novels, because she can understand them and they both roll around laughing. But this time she puts on that tone she uses when she’s going to read something sublime so, with trepidation, Mariana prepares to hear the world’s most beautiful poem. It’s called Cowardice, her sister says, and that reassures her, because Mariana knows very well what cowardice is: it’s the worst thing after treachery and no hero ever forgives it. But in the poem Lucía’s reading nobody flees the battle or quakes in the presence of the enemy. The beloved woman walks past with her mother — whose presence in a love poem is already questionable — and has hair the colour of flaxen wheat. Mariana doesn’t know what flaxen wheat is but can’t help picturing the beloved wearing a kind of bush on her head. To make things worse, all the wounds the poet has on his body — we don’t know how he came by them but there seem to be an awful lot — start opening up and bleeding in front of the beloved and the beloved’s mother. The poet says very sadly that he let them walk past without calling out to them, but Mariana can’t help feeling that this was for the best, since he’s gushing blood. Things are no clearer by the end of the poem. Did you like it? Lucía asks. Yes, Luci, she says. Then Lucía, who has a mean streak, says: Explain it to me. It’s the most awful moment of her life. She can only think of the wounds all opening up at once and the scene seems revolting to her but it’s too late to say that. Is she a coward? Undoubtedly. Why did you say you like it if you didn’t understand a single thing? Lucía says. She’s unyielding and merciless, and when she’s with her, Mariana doesn’t know which is worse, to get things wrong about art or to tell a lie. It’s not like with God, who can look into her head and so knows why she lies when she does and knows that she doesn’t do it to hurt other people but rather to benefit herself — and God’s fine with that. It’s so reassuring to have someone really know how you are and not to have to keep giving explanations. Besides he’s happy with her because she talks to him like a normal person, unlike the others who are always sucking up to him. God finds her approach to life refreshing. Every night, when the light goes off, she puts her hands together as she’s seen people do in the illustrations of books, and she asks him for things she wants. She can’t kneel beside the bed because Lucía would notice, but God doesn’t mind about things like that. He knows perfectly well that she can’t kneel because she’s Jewish. She doesn’t fully understand what it means to be Jewish, it’s annoying that she can’t take communion and that, at school, instead of studying Religion, which is so lovely with all those lives of the saints, she has to take Moral Philosophy which seems to be the opposite of Religion, though she doesn’t entirely understand what it’s about and neither, it seems to her, does the teacher. In one class she makes them write an extremely dull essay on thrift, in another she reads them The Brave Little Tailor and in another she recites a poem about a peach that must not be allowed to stain the immaculate whiteness of the dress belonging to the little girl eating it, because the stain will never come out. At the end there’s something about wicked deeds but it’s the least interesting part of the poem and Mariana can’t help thinking that if the author wanted to talk about wicked deeds he should have put them up at the start. The only thing she learns from the poem is that, of all the things that may stain a dress, a peach is the worst and from then on, although her clothes are quite messy and often have ink marks or chocolate and other kinds of stain on them, every time she eats a peach she takes extra precautions because, thanks to that poem, she’s convinced that if peach juice falls on her dress she may as well throw it out — the stain won’t ever come out. But this doesn’t help her to understand fully what it means to be Jewish. Her mother will say of a person who fasts on the Day of Atonement that he or she is ‘very Jewish’ as if that were rather admirable, but she makes no great effort herself to be very Jewish: on the Day of Atonement she simply eats little. Going without food makes me feel listless, her mother says, and she seems sure that that’s an incontestable reason not to fast. Mind you, I don’t eat very much, she says. Mariana thinks that her mother is not very Jewish and her father even less so than her mother, because he eats the same as usual on the Day of Atonement, and Lucía least of all because if she’s told she has to go to the synagogue to see her grandparents on the Day of Atonement, she vomits and falls ill. Clearly as a family they are scarcely Jewish at all, but she still can’t kneel beside her bed or say Little Jesus I Love Thee, because that’s what the goy do. It’s quite complicated: she can not do the things Jews do but can’t do the things the goy do, so instead of saying Little Jesus I Love Thee, she says Little God I Love Thee. And she prays to him with her hands together every night, when nobody can see. As for asking, she does that one thing at a time because God may know what she’s like, but he has no reason to know all the things she wants. There are things she wants just once and things she wants all the time: she asks God for those every night. One of the things she asks for every night is that, in six and a half years, when she’s the same age as Lucía is now, she’ll know as much as Lucía. And a little bit more. The trouble is that Lucía wants her to know everything now, because otherwise she’s an idiot. Who wrote The Iliad? asks Lucía when they’re playing Questions and Answers one day. Homer, she replies. Who wrote Don Quixote of La Mancha? Miguel de Cervantes, she says. Who wrote The Divine Comedy? Lucía asks. (Sometimes, when they aren’t playing, Mariana likes to imagine that they are playing Questions and Answers and that Lucía asks her a question that is so difficult she never would have imagined such a young girl being able to answer it. And she answers brilliantly! But imagination doesn’t get you far with Lucía. Who wrote The Divine Comedy, is what she asked.) Since Mariana hasn’t the faintest idea who wrote The Divine Comedy, she can’t even invent an answer to cover her ignorance. So she opts for the moral high ground. Valiant, honourable, true to the last, she lifts her gaze and says, I don’t know, Lucía. But her sister, impervious to this moment of moral high standing, tells Mariana she’s a moron anyway. You moron, she says, how can someone of six years old not know who wrote The Divine Comedy? And the game ends there.

‘You’re twisting everything!’

This is new. For Lucía to butt into the story is totally unexpected. And anyway, she isn’t twisting anything. She’s simply telling her version of the facts.

‘That’s not true. You’re only telling a part of it, which isn’t the same thing. And the part that makes me look like a monster, too. But, who used to play Shopkeeper with you? And who made you fairy bites? And, by the way, this doesn’t count as butting in, it’s self-defence.’

The Shopkeeper thing is undeniably true. In the afternoons when they sat at the table in the little kitchen to have their milk, Lucía used to be the Shopkeeper. How much cheese would you like, Señora? Would you prefer a baguette or a French loaf? Then brandishing the knife she would cut with the firm but generous hand of our local shopkeeper. Mariana loved it when Lucía pretended to be a shopkeeper. Every afternoon, watching Lucía prepare the milk, she waited for those minutes of happiness to arrive.

‘You see? Your subconscious has given you away. I prepared the milk, I cut the cheese, I made the pancakes. You sat and watched.’

She sat and watched. And gave instructions. She knew it all, the theory of everything: how much flour the pancakes needed, what a bain marie is, how to stir the milk so that it doesn’t stick.

‘And what about the torrejas? Bet I’ve got you there.’

She had indeed. Mariana hadn’t the slightest idea how to make torrejas. She knew as little on this subject as Lucía did, worse luck. Because sometimes they both had an unbearable urge to eat torrejas—the word alone sounded like a promise of happiness. They knew they had bread, and perhaps eggs and honey, but they didn’t know how to make them. So they would spend a long time discussing the properties that something with such a beautiful name ought to have, throwing in everything crunchy, everything golden and delightful that is possible on earth. Perhaps it’s for that reason (and also because of the way life’s absurdities could make them laugh and laugh, clutching their sides and weeping helplessly) perhaps it’s for that reason that over the years, and despite their differences — I pretended to be a dog to warm up your feet, and I had to make your hot milk, I had to look after you all the time because you were a bit stupid — despite the roles, never abandoned, of younger and older sister, they still turn to each other when all else fails.

But let’s not get sentimental. These girls have a peculiar relationship — otherwise there’s no pathos.

‘You see, that’s what I mean. You don’t continue with the torrejas theme because all the perverse stories serve your purpose better. I wonder what else you’ve left out?’

The fairy bites, for sure. She promises to come back to the fairy bites, but not right now. She’s losing the flow, her characters are rebelling and she, usually so careful — this event here, the other one further on, avoid sentimental outpourings unless they’re relevant because if all the elements aren’t in the right place there’s no story — so I lock myself at home and don’t come out until someone lends me a little grey hat? Shh — who’s this interrupting now? — she’s starting to realise that this story, which began with a fairly orthodox I—though perhaps it was teetering even then — and the discovery that she’s lost the lion, has cunningly slid towards a she, who far from confronting her loss tiptoes around the edges, as though venturing that nothing serious has happened here, neither pimples, nor failure nor death. A phrase that can’t help but lead back to my supposed similarity to Perla. And that’s not the story. The story is the lion, how I lost it and how I sat petrified in front of the officer who was asking now for the third time: You can’t recall any distinctive characteristics of the missing person?

None, I said; not one. And with a bovine docility I got the rest of the questions over quickly, so that the monobrow would have no cause for complaint and the nursing mother would think, how nice, what a normal mother this lady has, how normal and loving and perfect all the mothers of the world are and this lady too, even if she isn’t a mother, poor thing, how normal she seems.

Conclusion: I left Precinct No. 17 as ignorant of my mother’s whereabouts as I had entered it and with this new problem of not being able to think of the lion. Heat swept over me like an infernal wave.

I looked for a public telephone. From the answering machine in my house, Lucía’s voice dazed and discouraged, outlined the steps she had taken, the ones she would take next and her readiness to die; on the answering machine in her house I recorded my own recent adventures and my own desire not to die without first killing all the old people in the world. I also rang my mother’s house, just to be safe, although I knew that the Guardian Angel could not yet have returned from her business in La Plata. You go to La Plata, I had said to her less than six hours earlier. Lucía and I can manage. What rubbish, Lucía and I can’t manage anything that isn’t The Divine Comedy or torrejas. Or rather the illusory taste of torrejas, because we still haven’t learnt how to make them. You concentrate on your studies, Perla used to say, when the time comes that you need to cook I’m sure you’ll pick it up. Another of her lies: we know our way around a formula for deoxyribonucleic acid or a hendecasyllable but the simple prospect of frying an egg paralyses us. The Guardian Angel would certainly have been able to find Perla, she knows what to do in these situations, she is competent and friendly; at the very least she could have taken me into her lap, I’ve lost my little rooster taloo talay I would have sung, in the words of the nursery rhyme, and she would have wrapped me in her great angel wings and my mother and the lion and all the lost things screeching at that moment in my head would have vanished from the face of the earth. But she wasn’t home, taloo talay. I hung up and walked aimlessly around Las Heras: all I wanted was to sit down in some doorway and sob my heart out. There, on my right, were the steps leading up to the Faculty of Engineering — why not stop there? After all, I didn’t have Perla dogging my every step, making sure I didn’t fall over, or bump into something, or cry, what reason have you got to cry, Mariúshkale, when I’ve given you everything, cod liver oil to make you the strongest, green apples to make you the most intelligent, stories to feed your imagination, little piqué dresses to make you look aristocratic. What more could you need, my darling daughter? The lion, mother, I need the lion and the sad thing is that I should have realised before, this very morning I could have thought of it, instead of staring like an imbecile at the computer screen, all my energy invested in online patience as if existence came down to this, putting a red Queen beneath the black King, a black Jack beneath the red Queen, moving to the right-hand box the Ace of Spades, the two of Spades, the three of Spades, as though the minute movement of the mouse that generated this displacement of cards on the screen were enough to keep me from noticing a fait accompli: that it wasn’t through mere distraction or poetic idleness that I had been momentarily diverted from a path towards greatness. My God, how long had it been since I last spoke that word, and not with coy italics but loud and clear with the head-to-toe conviction that the girl who had invented a lion from her bed could aspire to nothing less. And yes. Perhaps she could. Except that (I could have found this out playing patience if the phone hadn’t rung then) the diversion wasn’t momentary and appeared to have no solution because I was no longer that girl.

The phone rang just as I was putting a red nine beneath a black ten. I rushed to answer. Was I expecting the call of the muse or of eternal youth? It was neither of these. In fact it was the Guardian Angel: Señora Ema has just called me. Your mother was supposed to be there at noon but she hasn’t arrived. She left here at twenty to eleven and seemed fine. Do you have any idea what could have happened to her?

No, I don’t have a clue. I’m sitting on the steps of the Faculty of Engineering and I don’t know nor can imagine ever knowing in the rest of my life where Perla may be. I picture her dressed in immaculate white leaving her house to walk the twenty-five blocks to see Ema, Specialist in Beauty Masks (quite some title). Ema applies a mask, beautifies you, smoothes away the fatigue, the fear, the corruption, and sends you out ready to face the day. To understand why Motherpearl — eighty-five years old, husband long dead, skin like parchment, cranium disfigured by osteoporosis, ditto crumbling bones — walked twenty-five blocks every month for a beauty treatment you have to try to picture her hard at work in the tiny apartment that El Rubio (after years travelling around provincial towns looking for a job that didn’t make him miserable) finally managed to rent so that the four of us could have a home; you have to picture her polishing the floors until they shone like mirrors, all the while dreaming of herself wrapped in big, fluffy towels, pampered by expert hands that would send her back into the world looking like a girl from the aristocracy, with her lovely face made even more lovely. What I’m trying to say is that Perla went every month for her beauty treatment simply because now she could and it mattered very little to her that her face was falling to pieces. Wrapped in those big fluffy towels doubtless she felt splendid and charmed, albeit belatedly. And she walked those twenty-five blocks to Ema’s — as well as other routes to various destinations — because three years ago, sitting with Lucía opposite the doctor’s desk as he had calmly predicted the gradual deterioration of her bones she, with the authority of someone who is always sure she’s right, had said: Doctor, the day that I can no longer walk I would rather die. And she said it without a shade of self-pity because the years had made her wise. (Or perhaps she had always been wise and it was just that I, overwhelmed by her determination to protect me from every kind of misfortune, hadn’t seen that at the time but only in the last few years when, drinking maté together in her house and cheerfully tucking into the croissants I had brought, I realised that, being so capricious actually made her a better listener, able to understand anything you might care to tell her.) So she started walking for the simple reason that movement is better than immobility and that if one has legs one should use them as well as possible, secretly knowing that if she ever stopped one day she would never start again. She used to look impeccable from head to foot, all in white, coordinating shoes and a matching bag and would set off on that day’s journey like someone who has all the time in the world because old age had granted her enough serenity to sit down every so often in the window of a cafe to get her breath back and watch the world go by. And she always reached whatever objective she had set herself. Through sheer determination and sheer eccentricity. The only exception being that heavy March afternoon when she didn’t arrive at her destination.

And there I was, sobbing on the steps of the Faculty of Engineering, with not the faintest inkling of where to look for her. I’ve lost my little rooster, taloo talay. The song came back into my mind and now I had time to ask myself where it came from. From Perla, of course, her song for lost things. It was infuriating. Lucía and El Rubio and I would be turning the house upside down in pursuit of the missing object while she hindered our efforts with her singing. For three nights I haven’t slept, taloo talay, thinking of my little rooster taloo talay, I’ve lost it, taloo talay, poor thing taloo talay, last Sunday taloo talay. Where did she find them, for God’s sake, all the pimps, the roosters, the blind girls, the handsome swineherd Jerinaldo, the shepherdess called Flor de Té, the poor old man who, from the tram, de dum de dum saw his daughter go by, a shameless hussy, half-drunk on champagne, there are just too many emotions, sometimes I prefer El Rubio, who has only one song. It’s a very sad song and El Rubio says that when he goes to the South with his brother León, they’re always singing it. It’s strange to think of El Rubio and his brother León, who’s quite ugly, driving along the road at night and singing something with the words little Virgin Mary in God’s name I beg you, don’t be mean to my papa, he gets drunk and often beats me, since we lost my dear mama. And the funny thing is that, the way El Rubio sings it, it’s hard to tell if the song is making him laugh or cry. It seems to be a bit of both, that on one side he’s making fun of it and on the other he feels enormous compassion for that unhappy girl. You can never tell with El Rubio. Perla gets annoyed with him because he sings badly and she wants her loved ones to do everything well, but El Rubio sings whenever he feels like it. Calmly — because he almost never loses his temper — but he always does what he wants. He probably doesn’t even realise that it upsets her. The man’s so absent-minded that every lunchtime when he leaves to go back to work he says Bye lads. As if he had never noticed that it’s only Perla, Lucía and me around the table. Bye lads, just like that, and it’s even worse with the chandeliers.

The chandeliers arrive three years after we move in and it’s quite an occasion. This is the first time that Perla, El Rubio, Lucía, and I have lived in our own house. In truth it’s not a house, it’s a tiny apartment, and it isn’t ours because we rent it, but after twelve years of marriage, it’s the first time that Perla has been able to unpack the tablecloths that she embroidered for her trousseau and a blue china tea service given to them as a wedding present. For a while the only furniture we have is the beds we sleep in, a folding table, and a few benches. Every lunchtime for two years Perla spreads out on the dining room floor the poncho that El Rubio won in a country music competition, then brings the table from the kitchen and opens it out over the poncho. When we’ve finished eating, Perla folds the table and puts it back in the kitchen, covering it with one of the embroidered tablecloths from her trousseau. When it’s prettified like that she can forget that it’s an ugly folding table and be pleased to look at it. As more pieces of furniture start to arrive she surveys these, too, with quiet joy. They are big pieces, polished to a shine and filling up all the empty spaces. Only the chandeliers are missing. In every room there’s still a cable hanging from the ceiling and a bulb hanging at the end of it like an affront. Until one day there’s enough money and Perla goes to buy chandeliers. She tells us that they are splendid and for once it isn’t a lie. One lunchtime I come back from school to find them in place. The one in the dining room is particularly sumptuous: ten lights above a shower of lead crystal teardrops. It hangs over the table and seems to fill the small dining room ceiling entirely. Underneath the glassware, Perla, Lucía and I sit ready for lunch, waiting for El Rubio, bursting with excitement.

His arrival is always a happy occasion. As soon as you hear whistling in the corridor you know that a few seconds later the key is going to turn in the lock and that before coming all the way in, he’s going to peer around the door at us, as though checking that we’re the right family. El Rubio has lovely, flecked eyes somewhere between grey, green and blue; beneath his wry, slightly sad gaze the world falls into precarious order. So, on the day of the chandeliers, the lock turns and he peers at us around the door as usual. The three of us are waiting expectantly as he must have noticed, because he doesn’t come all the way in but studies us, disconcerted, from the doorway. We wait with bated breath. Finally Perla can’t stand the tension and asks him: Haven’t you noticed anything different? El Rubio is one of the kindest people I have ever known. He would never knowingly disappoint anyone. And so, still at the door, with that look he sometimes has of being all at sea, he struggles to identify the change that has us all enrapt. Finally his face lights up. With a complicit smile, happy to make us happy he says You bought bananas — right? That’s El Rubio all over. So absent-minded and unassuming that he dies one summer without ever having told us he was ill.

Perla, on the other hand, hasn’t an unassuming hair on her head. Not for her an unheralded death. It’s more her style to disappear off the face of the earth en route to a beauty session. Sitting on the steps of the Engineering Faculty, I can’t think where else to look for her. I keep singing I’ve lost my little rooster taloo talay and the worst thing is that I may not be singing it for Perla but for the lion. And for all the things that once were and will never be on the earth again. But especially for the distraught woman who doesn’t know where to look for her elderly mother.

Grudgingly I got to my feet and went to look for a public telephone. There were no new messages at my house. I rang Lucía’s house and listened to her voice on the Ansaphone but decided there was no point leaving her another message when I had no news to report. I rang my mother’s house in hopes that the Guardian Angel had returned. The phone rang five times. Just as I was about to cut the line someone picked up. There were muffled noises, as though of someone struggling with the receiver. Then came the unmistakable voice of the chanteuse. She didn’t say hello. Sounding bossy and a bit cross, like someone who has decided that, whoever is on the other end of the line must be the cause of her recent troubles, she asked,

‘Who is this?’

‘Mariana,’ I said.

‘Who?’ she shouted. I forgot to mention that she was quite deaf so, as a precaution, I held the receiver away from my ear.

‘Mariana,’ I shouted, attracting glances from a few passers-by.

‘Who?’ she shouted again.

I sighed.

‘Mariana, your daughter,’ I yelled.

‘Which daughter?’ she said, as though she had a dozen. Then I knew for sure that, just as I had been fearing all afternoon, I had got my mother back.

. . .

That night Perla explains that at some point on the way to Ema’s house she felt tired and hailed a taxi. That she gave the taxi driver her address but that when they arrived her house wasn’t there and she didn’t recognise the surroundings. That neither she nor the driver, who was very nice, knew how to resolve such a strange predicament so eventually the driver, poor man, drove off and she was left alone, looking for her house and not finding it. Then a very nice girl noticed her wandering around in a state of bewilderment. She asked Perla where she lived, called a taxi and gave the address to the driver. The driver, who was very nice, brought her home and there she was.

The following day she recounts the episode again. This time the inclusion of a new detail, in direct speech, reveals that Perla didn’t in fact direct the first taxi driver to the intersection on the corner of which she lives but to another formed by the street where she lives now and the one of the little apartment where she used to sing tangos and where she closed her husband’s eyes for the last time. I draw her attention to this, but she doesn’t understand. Only when I’m explaining it for the fourth time does a glimmer of panic light in her face and she asks: How could this have happened to me? What’s alarming isn’t her difficulty in understanding something so simple; nor is that the two taxi rides couldn’t have lasted more than half an hour altogether and she was gone for nearly seven. What’s alarming is that Perla isn’t the slightest bit concerned about this hole in her life. She seems not even to have fully registered it. How could this have happened to me? is all that she’ll say every time she comes to the end of her story, and she’s referring to the mistake made with the first taxi driver, not the seven missing hours. One afternoon, for the first time, she doesn’t tell the story; just poses the question like an unresolved problem or a reminiscence. How could this have happened to me? We’re in the living room in her flat; between us, the croissants that I brought and the maté I’ve just prepared, as though continuing with these rituals were a way to disguise some changes in the real world. How could this have happened to me? she asks out of the blue. This time I tell the story: her setting off on the walk, the tiredness, the first taxi, the mistake, the searching, the second taxi, the homecoming. Every so often I smuggle in a question. Perhaps if I catch her off-guard she’ll end up remembering at which point she got lost, if she was frightened, if, like me, she sat down to cry on some steps. To no avail. Once I’ve embarked on the story, she seems to hear it merely as a kind of familiar music, an accompaniment to the maté and croissants. She only intervenes, now and then, to ask, How could this have happened to me? I’ve already told you a hundred times, Mother, I say eventually, because I’m sick and tired of going over the same ground. She doesn’t acknowledge my exasperation. There is a long silence, then she asks again: How could this have happened to me? Then one day she stops asking; she seems to have completely forgotten the mix-up with the streets. The episode itself slips into oblivion. Along with the croissants. One afternoon, having realised that I can’t stand watching her eat, I stop taking them; Perla eating is an intimate activity that only the Guardian Angel should have to witness, I decide. She never asks about the croissants. Nor about the maté. One day I stop making it for her but she doesn’t seem to notice. Now, when I go to visit her, all I do is sit down opposite her and think of the lion. Its loss is an incontrovertible fact. I’m a suffocated woman with a decrepit mother. And my conversations with Lucía aren’t about The Divine Comedy any more but about Perla’s latest catastrophe.

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.

. . .

It was during that season, which lasted a whole summer and into the autumn, that the four of us lived crammed into a back room and El Rubio, for the first and only time, seemed settled. It was just after the time we spent living with our grandparents and before we moved to the flat with chandeliers. El Rubio had taken on the lease of a small shop and we slept at the back, me sharing a small bed with Lucía then Perla and El Rubio in the double bed, a yard away. It was wonderful: I could feel my sister’s body next to mine and hear my parents’ breathing, their hushed conversations. I didn’t have nightmares in those days. It was a transition period, a time with no ties in which each person could hope for whatever he or she wanted: El Rubio that at last he would be able to buy the car he and Perla had been dreaming of, that he wouldn’t have to count his pennies any more; Lucía that she was going to live in a real house where she could put together a library. I wasn’t yet expecting anything very much — I wasn’t even aware of being happy. (I learnt an awareness of happiness, I remember, one summer night four years later in the flat with the chandeliers. It must have been at the end of January because a few days later it would be my eighth birthday. We were going to have our first summer holiday and for the first time I was going to see the sea. That night I didn’t need to hope desperately that Lucía would wake up and chase away my fears: she was as awake as I was and both of us were sitting on her bed, talking about the sea, about how each of us dreamt that the sea would be. At dawn we went outside to wait for El Rubio’s friend to bring his car. I had never experienced the street at that time of day or the silence, heavy with people’s hopes, that defines that hour. Lucía and I didn’t argue about anything. Arms around each other, united in our excitement, we walked along the deserted street singing a bolero. That was the moment when I understood what happiness is.) During those back-room months I used to look forward to the hot nights, but I wouldn’t have been able to explain exactly why. El Rubio used to pull down the shutters on the little shop, leaving the door open to let in the vibrant summer air and we would turn off the lights so that we couldn’t be seen from the street and eat anchovy sandwiches made with pumpernickel and lots of butter and drink — beer for the parents, Bilz soda for the children — and chat, and laugh a lot, and nobody thought about death. And even though I couldn’t yet put it into words, years later I knew that I had been happy.

There are moments in time when everything seems to be in harmony, I thought. Like the fairy bites.

‘About time too. I thought you’d forgotten.’

And there was I thinking Lucía wouldn’t need to interrupt me, now that she’s a character with her own speaking part.

‘I’m appearing as a character, but not to my best advantage. Let’s agree that that car journey wasn’t our finest hour.’

It wasn’t the finest, or the most pleasant, but those two frightened women who were driving towards the Happiness Care Home were us too. That’s why I have to talk about the trip. And why I’ve never been able to forget it.

‘Speak about it all you want. But first of all tell the story of the fairy bites. I’ve already told you that I don’t want to keep being the ogre in this story.’

I was just coming to that — the fairy bites. The fairy bite, strictly speaking, because singularity was part of the appeal: you didn’t get more than one at a time. The fairy bite was an invention of Lucía’s that came about while we were having our hot milk, and its appearance was independent of the shopkeeper game. I mean, even though we were playing Shopkeeper, at the moment in which she prepared the fairy bite, Lucía was Lucía. The fairy bite comprised all the most delicious things one can eat in the world, the golden crust of the bread, a lot of butter, the middle of the cheese, the best ham in the fridge, tomato, olives, if there were any olives, gherkins, if there were any gherkins. It contained everything necessary for an exquisite feast, but in such tiny quantities that you could eat one in a mouthful. It was like happiness: when you wanted to savour it, it had already passed.

Now we were driving a bit faster and in silence. There was a finality about the rhythm of the rolling car, something that smacked of death, but that was less august, more wretched than death. So I said to Lucía:

‘Once we’ve left her there, we won’t stay long, right?’

And Lucía said:

‘Well first we have to make sure that she’s comfortable and everything.’

I looked behind me. Perla was still gazing blankly out of the window. I tried a little experiment.

‘Are you feeling all right, Mother?’ I shouted to her.

She didn’t even turn towards me but continued immobile and inexpressive, as if I hadn’t said anything.

‘Are you all right, Mother?’ Lucía shouted.

‘No speeding,’ said Perla.

And that was all she said until we arrived at the Happiness Care Home.

It looked promising from the outside. White, two storeys, the front door and window frames painted green.

‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ said Lucía, determined to convince herself that everything was going well.

‘It seems decent enough,’ I said, not able to give Lucía full satisfaction, even though it would have benefited me, too.

Getting Perla out of the car was no easy task. But it wasn’t the near impossibility of moving her that struck me; it was her complete lack of resistance to what Lucía and I were doing with her body. She’s given in, I thought. She’s finally given in. I remembered the lion and wanted to cry.

So there we were, the three of us facing that green door. On a sign to my left I read: The Happiness Care Home. Recreational Residence for the Elderly. I’m getting old, Mariúshkale, Perla had said to me less than three years earlier, and she didn’t even believe it herself then. Now it had happened: she was incontestably old. All three of us women waiting at the door to the Happiness Care Home were old. What kind of unappealing tableau would we form for the person who was going to open the door any second now? I could hear hurried steps from inside.

Now she stood before us. A robust lady in a pink coverall overflowing with kindness. They were expecting us, yes, yes, Señora Daisy was genuinely excited to meet us, and was this lovely lady our mother? I was too cowardly to look at Perla; I don’t think Lucía looked at her either. We distanced ourselves, letting the lady in pink praise Perla and paw her, manhandling her into another coverall, this time in pale green. I’m not sure at what point we lost Perla: my attention was focussed on following Pink Coverall.

You could see that the place was well organised. Lovely chairs, lovely plants, lovely little old people with blank expressions dotted around. I tried not to look to either side of me. Walking beside Lucía I kept my eyes fixed on Pink Coverall, who never ceased doling out greetings and loving gestures, wiping a mouth here, rocking a chair there, spreading cheer wherever she went. She left us in a very tidy office and there, behind the desk, was Señora Daisy. She was blonde and buxom. And very talkative. I think she was already in full stream when we arrived, and was still talking when we left. It may well have been her natural state, as much a part of her as the big bosoms. Everything she said to us was wonderful. Even we, on her lips, were wonderful. She was very psychological and had realised straightaway that she was dealing with educated and intelligent people and that was particularly gratifying to her because it seemed that people on our intellectual level were better equipped than hoi polloi to appreciate the stimulating atmosphere of the home. From what I could gather of her speech, they got the old people to sew, to do embroidery, to gambol through meadows of wild flowers, and clap hands, and blow glass. I was trying to picture Perla — who had lately seemed so far away — physically cajoled into clapping games or sing-songs when, in the gap Señora Daisy left between two words, I heard Lucía shakily pipe up. ‘The thing is, our mother is quite an unusual woman,’ said my sister, incredibly, and I drew in my breath because now it had been said, and Señora Daisy was not going to be allowed to believe, like the police officer and monobrow and even the kind, dark-skinned girl that our mother was any old missing person. She sang 1920s tangos and said ‘I’m stiffed’ and wrapped herself in lemon-yellow feathers to look like an aristocrat. And she was so magical, that is her love was so excessive and magical that it had the power to chase away all misfortune. Until the day I lost the lion, I thought suddenly, and all the misery in the world came down on my head.

Without resistance (at least on my part, because by that point I had decided that it was pointless to resist), we were led here and there, chivvied along by Señora Daisy, who wanted to show us around the home personally so that we could appreciate with our eyes its delights, which were perfectly suited to a person as special as our mother. What rubbish, I wanted to say to Lucía, there’s nothing special about Mother any more, or about any of us, all we have is the perfect memory of that beautiful thing we once were or of that which we now think was once beautiful. Balderdash, I heard someone say and stopped in my tracks. It felt like a dream, but couldn’t have been because Lucía had clearly also heard it. She stopped and looked at me. Both of us knew there was only one person in the world we had ever heard use that word. Because Perla could lie like the best of them, but if she suspected the mere whiff of deceit in another person she would come out with those strange words the origin of which, even today, is still a mystery to me. Balderdash and poppycock. What’s wrong, dears, asked Señora Daisy. We didn’t get the chance to tell her: a small commotion nearby brought us all to a halt. Calm down Granny, we clearly heard a wheedling voice say. I’ll give you Granny, said the voice of the chanteuse.

Disregarding Señora Daisy, Lucía and I rushed to the place from where the voice had come. We found Perla on her feet, holding onto a chair for balance and clutching in her free hand an object I couldn’t identify but which she seemed prepared to hurl at the first Coverall who dared to touch her. Calm down, Granny, said the Coverall again. Perla raised her hand to her breast. Me, your grandmother? she said. And then a small miracle occurred: she laughed. And I swear she laughed with sarcirony.

Something must have come over Lucía and me because we pushed Señora Daisy — who was trying to hold us back — out of the way, then went one to each side of Perla. It’s all right, Mother, we’re going now, said Lucía. And Perla: It’s clear that you two need to be kept on a tighter rein. We admitted that she was right and in the teeth of Señora Daisy’s shrill explanations of how natural and even healthy our mother’s reaction had been and how this little incident merely confirmed how stimulated our beloved and very special mother was going to feel in this optimal environment, we took Perla by the arms and made our way towards the exit.

We could scarcely contain ourselves, Lucía and I, we had to cover our mouths and stifle the odd snort so that Señora Daisy and the Coveralls didn’t notice our predicament. As soon as we were outside with the door closed behind us, we exploded. We had to let go of Perla so as to double up and laugh properly, long and hard. They would have had her playing nursery games, said Lucía, weeping with laughter. And I said: That Daisy woman had no idea who she was up against. Clutching our stomachs we leaned on each other so as not to fall over, helpless with laughter beneath the recriminatory gaze of Perla who was gradually retreating into a world we didn’t know but about which I, there in the street had begun to have an inkling. I remembered the torrejas. That afternoon on which we had such an overwhelming desire to eat torrejas that we couldn’t wait another second before sinking our teeth into one. Then I, in the same way that I deduced every night the presence of the lion, worked out a formula that we worked on feverishly, perfecting it to a point where Lucía could have a go at making them. The end result looked more like dispirited doughnuts. It was wonderful, all the same. Pointing at the doughnuts we murmured torrejas, torrejas, and laughed so much that Perla, who was just coming home, heard us from the passage and when she came in and saw the doughnuts wanted to get angry but fell about laughing instead.

Now as then, I saw us from the perspective of Perla’s empty gaze, laughing until we couldn’t laugh any more in front of the green door of the Happiness Care Home. And there and then I was sure that I had never stopped knowing the lion. That, in the middle of the night I still conjured his menacing presence and, paralysed with fear and curiosity, I still waited for him to leap.

And I understood that the cruelty of life is precisely that: you never really lose yourself. Although the teeth may soften in your mouth and a mist of forgetfulness and tiredness cloud your understanding, you’re still prey to the same vanity, the same fear, and the same uncontrollable desire to laugh that illuminated the other ages. Even if you have forgotten what you were frightened of, and there is no longer any reason to be vain, and you aren’t sure what the hell it is that’s making you laugh.

The three of us got into the car and set off home. Lucía and I not knowing what we were going to do with Perla, Perla not knowing where she was being driven, all three of us terrified and full of a sense of triumph that was entirely baseless. Absurd, devastated, invincible. Until the end.