9
MOM WAS MY BEST friend. It wasn’t one of those choices that defines a personality, or any other sort of choice, but a necessity. We were alone, isolated. What did we have left to cling to but each other? In such cases we make a virtue of necessity, which doesn’t mean it’s any less virtuous. Or any less necessary. Our necessity wasn’t deep, it didn’t have roots or ramifications. It was a casual, provisional necessity. It would be hard to find two beings with fewer affinities than Mom and I. We weren’t even complementary opposites, because we were alike. She was a dreamer too. She would have preferred to hide it from me, but some tiny sign gave her away. Our secret personalities are revealed by furtive actions, but they were what I noticed first of all, so poor Mom had no hope of pretending with me. My monstrous, piercing eyes prevented any living being from merging into the background of my life.
Nevertheless, I made a friend that year: a boy, a neighbor, we played together, a friend in the normal sense of the word … I was becoming almost a normal little girl, in the normal sense of the word (the word “normal” that is). But no, that’s going too far. The story of my friendship with Arturo Carrera is peculiar in the extreme.
We lived, as I think I’ve already said, in a run-down tenement in a poor neighborhood of Rosario, near the river. We occupied a single room, one of the better ones, as it happened, on the top floor. Places like that are normally swarming with children, but the owners of the building didn’t allow them. They had made an exception for me because I was an only child, because Mom was desperate and, above all, because she told them I was mentally retarded, which was believable given my appearance. There must have been some more complicated reason why they made an exception for Arturo Carrera, but I’ve never tried to get to the bottom of it. (Although it’s the key to everything.)
He had lost his father and his mother; his only living relative was his grandma, and she in turn had no one else but him. The same situation as Mom and me, but much more so: we were temporarily alone in Rosario; they were definitively alone in the world. Also their relationship was not at all like ours, since they were so different from us. The grandmother was very old, as small as a child, with white hair and a black dress. She spoke a Sicilian dialect and no one except her grandson could understand her. Nevertheless, she went out and did the shopping on her own, and talked with all the neighbors. I don’t know how she managed.
As for Arturito, he was very small for his age. He was seven, a year older than me, but his head didn’t even come up to my shoulder, and I wasn’t tall. He had a very pale, waxy complexion and blond hair, which he slicked back with oil. But what really made it obvious that he didn’t have a mother or a father or aunts or anything were his clothes. Any reasonable adult would have made him dress in a manner more suited to his age. As it was, he could indulge his whims. He wore suits, with starched white shirts, cufflinks and ties; sometimes they were three-piece suits with a waistcoat, or a checked sports jacket with grey flannel trousers, and claret-colored moccasins buffed to a high polish. He looked like a dwarf. His taste in fabrics and cuts was appalling, but that was nothing compared to the fabulous incongruity of wearing that kind of attire. And yet, it has to be said that he didn’t attract too much attention. Perhaps the people in the tenement and the neighborhood had gotten used to him. Perhaps those ridiculous outfits suited the kind of kid he was. He had a strong personality, you had to give him that. And perhaps the price he had to pay for it was the incongruity of his clothes. By contrast I had no personality. I was prepared to pay the price, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. As well as being impossible for financial reasons, imitating Arturito wouldn’t have done me any good, although there was no one else I could have taken as a model. So I gave up the idea of imitating him and having a personality, dimly intuiting that my only hope of being someone lay in this renunciation. I became anxious. I looked at myself in the mirror and couldn’t find a single distinctive feature. I was invisible. I was the girl in the crowd. Without a moment’s hesitation, I would have exchanged my regular, pretty features for Arturito’s nose …
No portrait of my friend could be complete without a mention of his most salient feature, that enormous hooked nose of his, so huge it gave form to his whole face, projecting it forward. Another notable characteristic was his voice. Or rather, his way of talking, as if his mouth had been pumped full of gas or stuffed with a hot potato. This gave him an affected, ruling-class sort of air, indescribable but not inimitable. Nothing is inimitable.
Arturito considered himself rich. He thought he was worth a fortune. As the last and only scion of a family of wealthy landowners, he would logically inherit all the properties and the income they yielded … But this was sheer fantasy. He and his grandmother were extremely poor. They barely scraped by with what she earned from odd sewing jobs, and Arturito’s sartorial expenses were ruining her. It was odd that he persisted so unshakably in his conviction, when all she ever talked about was how wretchedly short of money they were and her fears for the future: if she died he could end up begging on the streets. It’s true that she said all this in her dialect, and nobody apart from him could understand. But since he understood, how could he ignore what she was saying and what it meant for him: precisely that he wasn’t rich. He let her words wash over him. As if she was playing to the gallery, complaining to the others, who couldn’t understand her!
In spite of these peculiarities, or because of them, Arturito was a happy child, one of those non-existent typical children, immune to the characteristic torments of middle-class childhood, of which I was such a striking exemplar. He didn’t have a care in the world. Extremely sociable and popular, always at the forefront of fashion, he was in his element at school. The only reason I got to know him was that we happened to live in the same building, otherwise I would never have had access to his magic circle. He became my protector, my agent, always praising my intelligence to the skies. Like everything else about him, his courtesy was over the top. He never missed an opportunity to celebrate my virtues, the towering superiority of my intellect relative to his … And perhaps he was right, without realizing. For a start, I kept my inner life to myself, while he revealed his. Concealment means you have something to conceal. I had nothing but concealed it anyway, stepping onto the world’s stage like someone who has just buried a treasure. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be best friends with the most popular boy in the school, but even this incredulity was duplicitous. For a start, I was careful to conceal it from Arturito. And then I didn’t follow his example in matters of style. He was no help to me in that regard. The hallucinatory style of which I was the supreme mistress remained pristine within me, immune to his influence or any other. Style-wise, Arturito represented another world, the world of wealth … His hallucination threw mine into relief … being rich meant jumping to a whole new level, beyond style, precision and refinement: life became one radiant, compact mass, without the halftones and subtle differential movements that gave my life sense. So without really meaning to, without malice, I concealed myself entirely from Arturito. I concealed a small part of myself and that part concealed the rest … I betrayed my one, irreplaceable friend. How could I have done it? I don’t know. Or maybe I do. It was as if I had put on a mask, to shield the twists and turns of an ever-changing subject.