“Coming,” they said, but didn’t open the door. I started to hop around in circles, even forgot what I was doing there, but the closed door reminded me. I knocked again, they didn’t answer. I sat down on the wooden trunk that had always been next to their door. I could hear them talking in the distance, whispering. I heard them say words I couldn’t catch, that, for the first time, they kept out of my range. They talked and talked. Laughed. Walked from one side of the room to another, and every one of their actions underlined the one they were avoiding: letting me in.
Annoyed, I lifted the lid to the trunk. It was full of handwritten and painted notebooks, embroidered in Esther’s warm hand and the drawings and paintings we’d always known from her. A small nail (like the one I’d painted) was in the center of a white sheet with no commentary. I put them back after reading a couple of lines I didn’t understand. I tidied them and shut the trunk. Then (at last!) my sisters opened the door, silently observed me from a room that was no longer familiar, owners of a new complicity that had erased me, that had no room for me. On the bed lay an object that (more resistant than a lock, stronger than a chain, higher than the highest wall) had succeeded in separating me from my two sisters: a white object, folded in four, displayed on the quilt, which needed only candles to emphasize the sudden veneration my sisters felt for it. I asked them (in pure gaucherie), “What’s the matter? Why wouldn’t you let me in?” and they laughed between gritted teeth, looked at each other, making me feel totally unimportant. I caught another glimpse of the white intruder on the bed, noticed the straps and metal clasps. “What’s that?” I asked. They ignored me as before, or, rather, (why lie, this is the truth), mimicked my voice, and mocked my awkward question. My hand closed in on the white enemy. “Don’t touch,” “It’s not for children, it’s for señoritas.” I took a closer look: yes, I knew what it was, it was a bra like Esther’s, I had seen them in the laundry room. But how did you wear them?
That was the end of our afternoons together, and I couldn’t understand why. One night, a few days after, I went into their room as usuaclass="underline" Malena, not noticing my presence, was pulling on a nylon stocking as she stroked her leg, touching it like the statue of a saint, acting as if it were the leg of a señorita. Suddenly she saw me watching her: “What are you doing here? Go out and knock on the door before you come in.” I turned around and rushed to shed some tears on my pillow, though warm (the grief springs from that temperature), icy in relation to the pain. I cried over the lack of attention from the two fairy godmothers who had protected the threshold of my being, had prevented monsters coming in from the outside, not realizing that what I should have been mourning was the disappearance of the girls who once had been my sisters.
A few days later we went camping with the guides, the female equivalent of the scouts (boy explorers) founded by a gentleman by the name of Baden Powell, a hero similar to Chabelo in my girlish eyes who dressed as a boy (in the organization’s manual illustrations he came dressed in bermudas, neckerchief, and ridiculous hat, a similar outfit to the boy scouts), and who inspired courage in us during the nights in camp, nights when we went to sleep in the countryside and fought off what they wanted to be our routines and talents in childhood: from cleaning our teeth and washing to obeying our parents, sitting (comme il faut) in uncomfortable chairs, in uncomfortable armchairs, eating at uncomfortable tables, sleeping between uncomfortable sheets…We let our bodies enjoy the fresh air, in our view in total disarray and, according to our organizers’ criteria, following the framework of a formative discipline, which fortunately none of us could feel.
This time we camped without tents on a farm. We stayed in empty, luminous galleries. My sisters avoided my company. I stayed at the back and saw them enter the next gallery, with a narrow, communicating door. I spread around the dry pine branches piled about to cushion my sleep and put my sleeping bag down next to nobody in the middle of the cement floor. I put down my sea-blue backpack as a pillow and when I raised my eyes saddened by a sisterly rejection that I now believed to be definitive I saw I was surrounded by an infinity of sleeping bags: there were no cement spaces in the gallery not carpeted by girls and their respective packs in orderly rows and a disorderly trail of dry pine branches that brigades of older girls swept up.
At night, in a scene lit by our battery torches, most girls laughed at Susana Campuzano’s baby-doll outfit (a very short nightdress with matching panties) — she had positioned herself to my right to sleep and at that moment was making her triumphal entry into the gallery, tripping indiscreetly between the lines of sleeping bags, because, being timid, and experiencing the same age of transition as my sisters, she had gone to change her clothes in the dark countryside so nobody saw anything while all the rest of us mortals made a great play of taking our clothes off at the same time as we put others on in Houdiniesque contortions, given that our bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit to be seen by no one…she bounced in cheekily with her ridiculous, miniscule, nearly see-through nightwear, letting out short, sharp cries pretending to be imperceptible to denote shyness, when in reality she was continuously seeking attention, provoking a round of girlish ribaldry at the self-advertisement of her womanly body.
By the time she reached me, she’d stopped shouting. She slowed down and her two sad, blue eyes stared at me. She clambered into her sleeping bag. I saw her untidy hair slashed, the way many women treat their hair, irregularly, not able to fall naturally, almost mannish, but long enough to be pained by the shortness. I felt sorry for her. Then I thought how she certainly had wanted to hide her body from the gazes of the other girls, because I thought she must be ashamed it was no longer a girl’s body, and I thought of my sisters and felt sorry for them, and sorry for Esther, and I thought of Dad, felt sorry because I remembered only men go to war, and thought “How are we going to manage to hide him when they come to take him to the front?” and then stopped thinking about that as I said to myself, “But there is no war, though what if one breaks out?”
Once more, I caught sight of the girl beside me. She turned toward me when she felt my gaze spying on her. “Hey,” I said, wanting to be nice, sincerely moved by the situation. “I understand you, it’s happening to my sisters as well.”
“What is?” she retorted very prickly.
I kept a prudent silence because I wouldn’t have known what to say to her.
Then I was the one who turned over and thought: “This will never happen to me, I won’t let it,” and, thinking that, I fell asleep, not realizing my wishful fantasy would contribute to my own damnation.
12
We were having breakfast. I clearly heard something drop into our garden. In a loud voice I said I’d seen something drop down as if it had been hurled in from the street, but nobody believed me. They were right to a point: I hadn’t seen anything fall. I’d heard it fall so clearly that I could almost imagine the shape of the thing. I quickly finished breakfast and went into the garden by myself, running to the end under one side of the breakfast room.
Something had fallen inside the garden, as if hurled by the paperboy and it had flown over the wall. I’d been wrong about its shape, what shone out on the lawn was something small, flat, and light.
It shone and was beautifuclass="underline" a gilt, plastic frame surrounded the luminous landscape on the shores of a metallic blue sea, a metallic blue sea with scrolls and button roses, and a fake gold-plated wooden frame. In the background, the mountains and between the mountains and the sea a village — but a European settlement, not a South American village — all on shiny paper, like chocolate wrapping paper, what we call orito—gold foil. A few women strolled along the seashore, or apparently enjoyed sitting on the quayside. Nobody was working. The windows in the little white houses were open and every little corner gleamed.