A Beautiful Young Woman

My mother was a beautiful young woman. Her skin was pale and opaque; I could almost say it was bluish, and it had a luster that made it unique, of a natural aristocracy, removed from mundane trivialities. Her hair was black, of course—I already said she was a beautiful young woman—her hair was straight but heavy, and she wore it in a way that I haven’t seen since. I’m not talking about her hairstyle: no matter what she did with it, her hair fell gracefully and in shape and always seemed tidily cut. I’m talking about the outline of her hair, of the linear sketch of that ocean of flexible antennae rushing into the sea of her face. Her hair began symmetrically and became visible in its contrast, each strand powerful, and it traced a subtle heart at the top of her head as it flowed down over her elegant temples.

My mother was a beautiful young woman, and she was voluptuously delicate; even as we spent our lives in almost total solitude, she had an extraordinarily sensual way of being, just for herself. Of course, I was there too, only seven years old, and she was like that just for me.

She spoke in a way that was profound but at the same time stripped of pretension, of appearing intellectual, or even seductive. In the middle of pronouncing an unusual word, she loved to linger in her own language. Verbal instincts kept her lively, and she would pull her heavy hair from one side to the other like the sumptuous cape of a bullfighter; she would lock her brown eyes on the ground—have I already said that my mother was a beautiful young woman?—and then slowly raise them to meet mine, starting again quickly with her lines of argument that were almost always indignant, almost always offensive, almost always naïve.

We lived in a two-room apartment with a bright kitchen that looked out into the light well of a modest but sophisticated building, one of those constructions from the 1950s with no more than three floors and no elevator, cool in summer and freezing once autumn arrives. Our home had a bathroom festooned with black mosaic tiles, pale green porcelain, and once-grand bathroom fixtures that had worn down faster than one turns the pages of a several-seasons-old fashion magazine. The apartment had a balcony that was unusable—merely opening the sliding door caused the moldings to crumble off in chunks. My mother hated the soot that came in from the avenue two blocks away, and she hated the noise that came from even farther away, from the auto shop and the truck beltway, and she was afraid of the birds that made their nests in the ash trees that shaded our two windows. One time I saw her in my bedroom hiding from a pigeon chick, still without its feathers, that the mother bird had thrown out of the nest because of its imperfections. It lay dying on the edge of our balcony. With a stick I pushed it over the edge so that my mother could come out of her hiding place and the tiny monster could end its gasping directly on the street below.

For a while, I kept an eye on the chick to try to see the exact moment the gelatinous mass would settle, the exact second of the final death rattle. It had no feathers, and its eyelids were still sealed, but it had been snubbed by its own mother and feared by mine; it deserved to die quickly.

—

The house was a living room with red walls that ran up to plastered ceilings hiding fluorescent tubes that tended to flicker in rhythmic agony rather than light up the room. A few adornments hung from the walls: a Mexican sombrero, made of silver, about the size of the palm of a small hand; a bronze casting of an Aztec sun with a sour expression and a colorful woven beard with a handful of bells on the end; a framed photograph of Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant that my uncle had sent from Paris; a photograph of Che Guevara, whom my mother called her boyfriend, stuck to the wall with a pin; a reproduction of a graffiti by Alonso—a woman sitting on the ground, her back arched and seemingly naked—and a few other postcards.

My mother liked postcards from Holland in tulip season; she bought them herself, wrote little travel tales on the backs of them, and put them in the post so that I would receive them about forty days later. Then we would get together in the kitchen to drink tea and eat fruitcake, and she would tell me everything she hadn’t been able to write in the small space of the postcard. My mother loved describing all the tiny details of the journey: the red valleys where poppies grew spontaneously, the measured comforts of the carriage in the train that arrived from the Urals, skirting around the Danube or that took her first to Pest and then Buda, or the delicious violet sweets that were sold in the patisserie Sachel, in Vienna. My mother’s dark pupils grew large with fascination, and she made the most of the storytelling, using it to instruct me on a range of matters, from the geography of daydreams to the anthropology of European exaggerations.

Up until that point, my mother had never left the country and had only visited Chapadmalal, the Río Tercero dam, Córdoba, Necochea, Tandil, La Reja, Highway 12, and El Etrusco, a little hotel in Paraná.

Nonetheless, every time she visited a new neighborhood, she returned home like Marco Polo exhausted by the excitement of his journey. She would tell me about the strange customs of our neighbors in Floresta or in Villa Real, the types of trees they had by their sidewalks, if she had seen packs of street dogs, if she had discovered libraries or museums, or if she had seen an old man urinating in a drain.

We loved to travel, and I took the opportunity to pick out the pieces of shiny fruit from the cake and peep through the holes they made while my mother, completely engrossed by her stories, gathered them up with surprising dexterity and ate them without noticing and without scolding me.

—

At nighttime the living room became a bedroom. That’s where she slept, on a sofa that folded out and provided comfort after a laboriously complex set-up process. My mother complained that she could never find sheets that would fit her stretcher—they were either too long or too wide, and even small sheets weren’t the right size for her bed. One time she came home with a shopping bag filled with a piece of white percale, a huge pair of silver-colored scissors, some needles, and a spool of thread. The first thing she did was get out her thimble, a porcelain treasure handed down from the diluted women of who knows which generation of the family on her father’s side. A jewel that no one used, beautiful but uncomfortable, loaded with an unbearable power: the smudged history of those women who arrived to us all mordant, defeated, and mutilated through my grandfather’s line.

I watched her face as she unfolded the handkerchief in which she kept the thimble, and I never knew what that word was, the one that I had to spell out from the air of the moment to comprehend the scene before me.

Tomorrow, I’ll make them, she said with enthusiasm.

The bag with the white percale transformed into a cat, and with each new day it became more and more comfortable between the cushions of the sofa until it became an unnoticed bundle. Each time night fell and the living room needed to be turned into a bedroom, I heard her rediscover the bundle and mew softly to herself, Tomorrow…

Then one day I stopped seeing the bag altogether, and the percale became a stuffed animal perched high up on a shelf.

Our house wasn’t a good place for pets.

—

I remember seeing three books on the tiny table that only became her nightstand once her bed had been made and her hair rested on the pillow. There must have been many more, but I remember only these: The Golden Bough, a study of magic and religion by James Frazer, published by the Economic Culture Fund, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Manipulated Man by Esther Vilar. Of the one Latin American book, the title alone was enough to summon all my prejudice against the author; I wasn’t going to allow myself to be drawn into all that. How much time had my mother spent carrying that book around, how many times had I seen her slip it into her purse before heading out, and how many times had she placed it back on the table, the very first thing she did when she got home? The blue squares and the red letters on the cover were a printed motif that stayed with us a long time— with us, a long time. Perhaps even for a whole century. I knew that book by heart.

I remember the impact that the end of the Vilar’s dedication to the reader had upon me; I think it was the first time, and I’m not sure if it was the only time, that I heard a book as it spoke to me: To those who are too old, too ugly, too sick…

Of the other book, I remember only that it had many pages and that my desire to read dwindled very quickly after the first few lines. Reading always fascinated me, but books always ceased to be interesting almost at the same time as I took them on a plane and decided to venture forth into adventure. Books seem like women. Or they seem like men.

—

When we were at home my mother used to shell green beans, broad beans, or pods of black beans; I can’t recall the meals she made with these vegetables, although I do recall the steam and the brilliance of some of them. Other vegetables perfectly resembled the skin of the long and elegant fingers on my mother’s hand. Her index finger passed smoothly but firmly over the vegetable seams and found the exact spot where the structure would give way under pressure, an inaudible creaking that unsealed the natural lock of the beans and instantly made the green pearls or the veined buttons fall into the bowl, where they would bounce until finding their definitive resting place.

My mother was like the perfect murderer of vegetables; I watched her do away with them with a natural coolness of which she herself was not truly aware.

Every now and again she stopped for a moment and lit a 43 70 cigarette, rotating through her tasks. But for her, in those moments, it didn’t seem to me like a sensual pleasure. Perhaps due to smoking a mix of dark and blond tobacco, rather than affirming her with a You’ve come a long way, baby, each puff seemed to paint her as a country girl who looked on in terror at the road signs, frightened in her flight, only a few steps beyond the limits of town.

I think I can remember (although, is it just a strip of loose images that I’m editing together to have a magnificent film, a story to tell myself?) that my mother’s hands spent entire afternoons peeling vegetables and that in the evenings I had to empty the tea towels my mother deployed in the kitchen to catch the waste from the broad beans and the peas, the empty pods and the tangle of green fibers.

I put everything in plastic bags my mother made appear from one of the drawers in the larder as if to suggest I should free her from all the mess. I did it just as the sun went down, when my mother shut herself up in the tiny service room we had behind the laundry room, to cry—or to curse I suppose—or to plan the best lives in which I might not have appeared.

In truth, I don’t think I ever filled one of those bags. What I’ll never forget is the smell of the incinerator room. The black void when I lowered the hatch, the fresh air that flowed out of its dark mouth, the need to build up the courage to let go of the bag, not being able to run away quickly enough to avoid hearing the bag fall and bounce into the basement, because I had to close the hatch again before getting out as quickly as I could, spurred on by impalpable monsters. I don’t know exactly why I walked toward the incinerator with an assuredness that I myself was not aware of, my feet flat on the ground, my