The hospital had strict visiting hours. We couldn’t see her in hospital because Dad decided we should go to school as normal.
The doctors didn’t understand her symptoms: she was seeing images in reverse (not all the time, but suddenly they’d volte-face), hearing a constant thud, vomiting uncontrollably — and it all lasted three days before she died of what they diagnosed in the post-mortem as a brain tumor.
Dad insisted on her body lying at home. I couldn’t stand it. Now I was afraid of Esther as well. Amid all the steps, I made out hers in the slippers she wore around the house, trailing them in her usual manner. One night I even thought I saw her in her pink flannel dressing gown coming toward me until just as she was about to touch my shoulder I shouted from within my dream: “No! No!..” Dad ran into my room.
“What’s the matter?”
“I was dreaming.”
Why didn’t I go with her? She wouldn’t have saved my life, of course, no need to say I’d have lost that with her as well, but what is the point of thinking about that now. It’s too late, too late for me to regret anything, anything at all.
14
Although I almost never liked going to play in my girlfriends’ houses I accepted Edna’s invitation because the oppression I felt at home from the ebullient steps, sated on Esther’s body, bloated and arrogant, was veined in sadness. We arrived (I wasn’t the only guest) and they decided we were going to swim in their pool. Edna lent me a swimsuit. Maite, Rosi, Tinina, and Edna chatted as they took their clothes off. I didn’t know what to do. I held the swimsuit between my palms like an altar boy and distractedly looked at the garden through the window.
“Don’t you like it?” asked Edna. “Shall I give you another costume?” “No I like it, I’m off to the bathroom,” I replied, or something to that effect. I shut the door in order to change and heard them continue their conversation. In a flash I heaped my uniform on the ground and slipped on the swimsuit. I went out with my clothes in a ball under my arm; I was embarrassed to find a pretty young girl in the mirror. I tried to catch the familiar look sunk between the eyebrows: I met a pair of cat’s eyes. I drew my face back: a cat’s face. I stepped back to the wall to see as much of myself as possible in the mirror: I managed to check myself out from head to shin, a pretty girl who set off walking to the pool.
Someone pushed me, two timid hands on my waist and I fell in, barely clearing the side of the pool. I opened my eyes under the water, clean and glinting, rippling, waving and pulsating gently like a huge heart: tum, tum, tum…I tried to propel myself and felt my body burning, felt my body about to burn up, and felt the water wouldn’t allow me to strike out to reach the surface. I stretched out my hand and grabbed onto a rung of the bars. I gripped tight, closing my stinging, blinking eyes in the water and when I opened them I looked at the boys’ shoes. One of them most have thrown me in.
Edna handed me a towel. “You didn’t even wet your hair,” she said in amazement. “How did you fall in?” “Did you dive in on purpose?” “Did you hurt yourself?” “Did you hurt yourself?” The boys stayed silent. Nobody looked as if they’d pushed me in. I touched my hair: it was dry, totally dry, as neat and tidy as I’d just seen it in the mirror, parted down the center and the ends slightly shaped toward my body.
“That’s Jaime, my brother, José Luis Valenzuela, the Cyclone, Manuel Barragán.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Let’s get changed.”
I wanted to go home. I telephoned. Only Inés was in. I’d have to wait.
There was something in the garden I couldn’t understand, something I couldn’t hear although it was pursuing me. I took my time changing, but they waited for me. Something was trying to undermine me. We sat on the bed to chat as I pulled my socks on. I looked up, searching for my shoes and took the opportunity to glance into the garden. I heard laughter. “It’s my sister, the cocky one,” Edna said. The laughter entered the room next door, crossed over and out into the passageway and stopped opposite the door. They opened without knocking.
The Angel from Purgatory and the Good Angel stood there, wearing the same uniform they’d worn that morning in the bathroom. The Good Angel said: “Don’t shut yourself inside, girls.” They turned around and walked on.
“Who’s that?”
“Cristina. She’s a bore. Let’s go outside, she keeps whining to Mom. When I’ve got girlfriends in the house, she doesn’t like me being with them in my room.”
We went out and bumped into her Mom in the passage. She was wearing a clasp that held her hair slightly loose on the nape of her neck, and she stopped herself with both hands on both walls in the passage…She was wearing canvas shoes and dragged them lightly as she walked. She didn’t say hello to us.
The sound of those steps was like the sound of Esther’s slippers. I should have left Edna’s house as quickly as possible. We walked by her mom as Edna gave explanations she didn’t listen to: “We’re going out…we were getting changed.”
The boys were waiting for us in the garden. The two Angels showed no sign of life.
Dusk was falling, and my distracted self would have liked to be in the sun about to set. It had been decided we’d play hide and seek in couples. Manuel Barragán said come on to me and started to run. We hid behind some volcanic rocks while waiting a safe amount of time before trying to touch base, and there he asked, sticking a v for victory sign under my nose: “Do you know what this is?” and I answered, because who at that time among us didn’t understand that obscene gesture: “You’re painting violins for me.” (What did “painting violins” mean?)
He was emboldened by the fact I recognized the sign. He took me by the hand to run together, a damp, clumsy cold-fingered extremity, something terrifying. I pulled on him to stop. “Let me see your hand,” was all I could think of saying to him. He showed it me. It was a hand but in my hand his hand was a deformed cudgel, something rough covered in skin, an icy, jagged hook wanting to gut me. He pulled at me again to get me to run. What was undermining me in the garden? By the time I’d realized that, he’d pressed his face against mine and a thick, clumsy, cold tongue was trying to sink itself between my lips.
I started running toward the house. It wasn’t that the kiss frightened me. I can say I had wanted someone to kiss me (out of curiosity, to see what it was like), but his stony-cold hand and icy face did terrify me. How could his body temperature be cold and the icy pool like a geyser? I started running to clear myself of the garden.
When I went in the house, I found the Good Angel sitting in an armchair with a man who seemed as handsome as a fairy-tale prince. One of them asked me: “Is something wrong?”
I told them I didn’t want to be in the garden. “I don’t like being in the garden either. They designed it so nobody feels at ease there,” added the Good Angel looking at her boyfriend. “Now you’ve seen what Mom’s like. Sit down with us.”