A little while later she climbed in bed on my side, entwined her legs with mine, turned on the television and said, How nice, The Pest is on, it’s been so long since I’ve seen it, and she started to laugh at some of the characters’ jokes and I laughed, too, cautiously, alert to any sign, any change, remembering that a few months ago I would have been annoyed if she had interrupted my reading by turning on the television, I wouldn’t have said anything but it would have annoyed me, especially if the show was a mindless one like The Pest, and to think that the very same action that would have bothered me before now brought me back to life, as if this was all life needed to be, as if The Pest’s jokes were enough, and with Agustina still peaceful I surprised myself by being prepared to kneel down to give thanks, and I would have done it if I’d known to which god I owed the miracle. Agustina watched television and I watched her, her face familiar and beautiful again, as if the evil fog had cleared at last. But when The Pest was over and I asked her whether she wanted to turn the television off now, she looked at me again with a blank expression on her face and I knew that the respite was over.
The truth is, my wife’s face has changed since she’s been sick, to use a word I’ve heard her use to describe her own state these days. I miss her mocking look of a lost girl, the look that disturbed me so much the first time I saw it, outside of the film society, and that made me say something very gauche to her that I wouldn’t have said if I hadn’t been so naïve, You have the enormous eyes of a starving child, I told her, giving her fuel to make fun of me for a whole week, but in the end what I said wasn’t so far off, and every once in a while there they are again, those eyes of a starving child, but only for a few moments, because when she looks at me without seeing me it’s as if she no longer has eyelashes or retinas or irises or eyelids, and all that’s left is hunger, a ferocious hunger that can’t be satisfied. Agustina, my beautiful Agustina, is shrouded in a cold brilliance that signals distance, behind the barred door of the delirium that won’t let her out or me in. Now she has a permanent look of having just spotted a hair on her plate, a grimace of simultaneous surprise and disgust, the opposite of a smile, a flutter of disappointment. And I ask myself how long this will last.
MY MOTHER IS GETTING ready because tonight she’s going out with my father, says Agustina, maybe they’ll go to the movies or some party. She’s happy and I’m keeping her company in the bathroom, a song is playing on the radio that I think is very pretty, my mother knows the words and I’m proud of her, she’s singing along with the voice on the radio which she never does in front of my father because he makes fun of her and says she has a tin ear, anyway my father thinks listening to the radio is something only lower-class people do. Leaning over the sink, Agustina’s mother is washing her black hair, and her only daughter, who is me, Agustina, is helping her rinse it with a jar of warm water, I pour the water over my mother’s bent head and watch how it slides down her neck carrying the remains of the suds down the drain, my mother, tall and thin, dressed only in a grape-colored nylon slip trimmed with lace, I remember it clearly, says Agustina, because it must have been one of the few times in my life that my mother and I ever had a conversation.
Mother, I ask her, why don’t girls wear nylon slips, Girls wear underskirts, she tells me, to show off their flouncy dresses. Now Eugenia, Agustina’s mother, has pinned curls all over her head and she’s drying them with the hair dryer as her daughter watches, No, I’m not looking directly at my mother, only at my mother’s reflection in the mirror, I’m keeping her company in the bathroom because I like to watch how she puts her green wool dress on over the grape-colored slip, a very fitted dress because she’s so slender, Mother, I don’t want to wear the underskirt that makes my dress flouncy, I like dresses like the green one you’re wearing to go out with my father, You’ll have one when you’re big, when you go out with boys, Not with boys, thinks Agustina, I’ll go out with my father, For now you should wear your things, Eugenia continues, your dresses with embroidered bodices and full skirts, look at your friend Maricrís Cortés, she’s lovely in the dresses that her aunt Yoya sews for her.
Tell me, Mother, what does your name mean, I’ve told you a thousand times already, Tell me again, Eugenia means of noble birth, And what does Agustina mean, It means venerable, Venerable? I would rather have been called Eugenia, My mother puts on bright red lipstick and she tells me that when I’m fifteen she’ll let me wear lipstick, too, but it will be pearl pink, she doesn’t like it when young girls wear red lipstick, she says that their parents shouldn’t let them, that that’s what pearl pink is for, it’s more delicate and subtle. My mother dabs perfume behind her ears and on her wrists, the inside part, where there are little veins that carry the scent all over; she tells me that she only uses Chanel No. 5, which is what my father always gives her for her birthday, and she puts some on me, too, a little on my wrists and behind my ears, which is where it lasts. I ask her if she’ll let me wear Chanel No. 5 when I’m fifteen and she says no, that the best thing for young girls is pure rose water because the stronger scents make them seem old. When her perfume is dry she fastens her pearl necklace around her neck, but not before; she warns me that perfume should never touch pearls, because it kills them. Are they alive, then? Yes, they come from the sea alive and you keep them alive with the salt of your body. And the smell of perfume kills them? It’s the alcohol in perfume that kills them, silly.
The telephone rings and my mother puts down the hair dryer to go answer it, maybe it’s my father calling to remind her that they’re going out tonight, my mother turns down the radio so she can hear him clearly and runs to tell him that she won’t be much longer, that she’s practically ready now, from the bathroom Agustina hears that they’re arguing on the phone and she knows that they’re fighting. Aren’t they going out after all, and won’t her mother wear the green dress? What was the point of the pearls, the curls, or the perfume that she put on for nothing, for no one? Her mother is still in the bedroom and the hair dryer is within Agustina’s reach on the bathroom cabinet, she turns it on and lets the warm air blow on her face. I curl a wet lock of hair, like my mother, then I dry it and turn off the hair dryer because the noise prevents me from hearing the angry words that are being spoken, my mother’s tearful voice, I look into the tube where the air comes from and I see that inside there’s a coil of wire. I turn it on again and I watch the coil turn bright red, like candy. I feel the urge to touch that red wire with the tip of my tongue. My tongue wants to touch it, so red, so red, my tongue comes closer, my tongue touches it.