organize
Undershirts, tights with holes, threadbare clothes and dreams, skirts, unraveled cassette tapes, novels listened to and misplaced, and long hairs, bras, sheets twisted up on the mattress. And my fingers with their open eyes beneath the nails choosing and separating the clothes by material and size: the wool goes at the bottom of the suitcase because I’m leaving winter behind; on top the cotton and polyester fibers to bear the northern summer. I pause on each garment, reconstructing the memory of its stitches and zippers, sketching out where I got it or bought it, who gave it to me, what was happening when I wore it for the first time. I leave everything on the bed to settle for a few minutes while I shower and gather up the last of my things, the insulin and medicines for all my neurotic pains. It’s only five minutes, or maybe ten — my time now is always approximate. Wrapped in a towel, I go back to the room and detect in the air the indescribable and unforgettable but always fleeting perfume of my mother. Mom? What are you doing? Nothing, she says with a sorrowful voice. I called upstairs but you didn’t answer. I came up to help you, your clothes were still on the bed, but don’t worry, everything’s organized in your suitcase now, she finishes with industrious maternal resignation. A silence opens between us that I fill with resentment. Those clothes, Mom, I say caustically, still wrapped in the towel. The clothes were already organized. I chose them and folded them and organized them myself with these hands, with these ten fingers that now have their own lidless eyes on their tips. You see them? Who? Who asked you? Who asked you to do anything? I’m barking at my mother, baring anxious teeth, I’m going to sink my fangs into her, smear her with bitter saliva. Kneeling on the floor, doubled over, agitated and angry, showing no mercy to my mother who has just turned into a trembling little girl. I look intermittently at her with my very blind and very wide eyes, and I grab the suitcase and dump it over the rug. I touch the clothes all unfolded, gravely injured, mauled by my mother and the perfume that reminds me of my childhood. I identify each article of clothing, slowly, in a silence full of daggers, and I again put polyester with polyester, cotton with cotton, denim with denim, then the wool and at the bottom, the Argentine leather gloves, the sheep leather coat, the belt. The boots. The impossible tapes of books that I’ll never have the patience to listen to again. Everything so that afterwards my hands can find it. My mother is so quiet she seems to have stopped breathing, but I know, as if I were seeing it, that she’s biting her lips until they’re white. Finally from between them slips the word daughter, and then another aphonic syllable, without letters, as if my mother were so poor she didn’t even have sounds to pronounce. But my mother has never been so poor she had nothing to say, and she says dear, I only wanted. To help, I say, finishing her phrase. To help me do things the way other people would do them. How I used to do them myself. But don’t you understand? I go on with inherited insolence. I don’t know if I’m going to get better. I have to learn how to be blind. You’re not helping. But dear, my mother whispers as if to her own shadow, knowing that everything she says can and will be used against her. Your help invalidates me, I repeat, giving no quarter to my mother who is innocent but also, in a way, terribly guilty. She receives the stones I hurl at her like a martyr, and she starts to cry. It’s a crying that is unforeseen and turned inward, a tense crying that includes all the miseries of life I’ve brought her. I hear her cry as I close the suitcase with all the clothes, the tapes, my slings and arrows inside. I get up from the floor and go over to her. I don’t feel anything and it’s better not to feel, better to simply let my fingers softly caress her face, her disheveled hair.
black box
(At night, headed north like weightless particles. Crossing the cloudy sky over the mountains. Cruising speed: eight hundred kilometers per hour. Ten or twelve thousand meters high. Minimum friction, minimum consumption of the oil that causes the wars you study. We were traveling in the pressurized and hermetic cabin unafraid of the windows exploding, or any bottles or our own circulatory systems. Cabins specially designed to prevent everything but thrombosis. Those seats don’t induce sleep, nor did the captain help, that loquacious pilot set on tormenting us with supplementary information: the height of the peaks and the cubic meters of pure water deposited in them, pure ice, he said, addicted to the loudspeaker. I don’t know if you remember the stewardesses interceding with a rolling cart of drinks, after which we heard the captain return to the speakers to point out, stentorian, that soon we would head straight northward, that we would pass along the heights and the desperate depths of the Bolivian natives, before landing in Lima, where we could get off the plane or not. That no one should feel pressured to visit the mestizos at the duty free — do you remember? the cholas wrapped in their skirts — not even to find out how much they still hate, with deserved hostility, us Chileans. The laughter grated in the microphone, and with that he wished us good night for good. Finally, he shut up, you said, dozing from the cocktail of pills you’d taken for vertigo or air sickness, for your fear of planes mangled in flight, your black-box anxieties. You’d taken out pills for acid reflux and you’d also swallowed those, without water. You put it all in your mouth without disgust and before the stupor knocked you out, you carefully took off your glasses and asked me to put them away. Do you remember that, Ignacio? I covered that head of yours with the blanket, and I also covered my own. Ignacio, I whispered, and I blew on your face, and then raising my voice I repeated your name and squeezed your arm. But you didn’t respond, you’d drugged your will away; you were as though dead, but a dead man who was completely mine. I rested your head on my shoulder and I went against the only rule you’d imposed on me. I was improvising as I went, running my fingers calmly, greedily, over your sleeping eyelids, feeling on my fingertips the soft touch of the eyelashes, feeling your skin opening and letting me touch the cornea, damp, rubbery, exquisite, and then my avid fingers ignited, they ignited but you didn’t realize it, and I couldn’t tell you now that I couldn’t stop. I separated your eyelids and I ran the tip of my tongue along that naked edge that I felt like my own nakedness, and soon I was licking the whole thing, I was sucking on your whole eye softly, with my lips, with my teeth, making it mine, delicately, intimately, secretly, but also passionately, your eye, Ignacio, until the stewardesses came down the aisle imposing breakfast on us and I thought you would wake up. They left and then came back to take away trays, and little by little you began to resuscitate. I felt you stir, stretch forward, rescue a smile, and sink a finger into my cheek. How’d you sleep? I asked cautiously, and you said with nostalgia and presentiment that it had been weeks since you’d slept like that, so deeply, so happy not to be anywhere, forgetting about a wait that was still gathering. If only it weren’t for your eye that was burning. It’s so irritated I almost can’t open it, and you cursed the plane’s dry air with your voice still somewhere else, rubbing the eyelid a bit and putting on the glasses I handed you. The plane touched down lightly and slid forward. I, on the other hand, didn’t sleep a wink, I told you, smiling with a sad happiness. I wove my fingers between yours and there we stayed, together, until all the passengers had left the plane and you stormed the aisle full of pillows.)