count to a hundred
Ignacio is still in the airport, a disconcerted frown on his face. Ignacio standing under the glowing screen. Departures. Arrivals. His glasses glint over his now-empty eyes. It’s an aged and ruined Ignacio. An Ignacio cracked like an old statue on the verge of collapse. His shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his linen pants utterly tattered and his dull bronze shoes fixed to the floor. Centuries have passed, I think, and there he remains, covered by the ash or dust of my departure, clutching the anxious kiss I blew to him from a distance and enduring the unintelligible, cosmopolitan whisper of the travelers around him. His hands empty, he wished like never before for a cigarette between his fingers. I had vanished and already forgotten him, and I made my way among the travelers pushed by a woman with an iron will. She must have been obese, because she dragged her feet, she shuffled and complained. But she wouldn’t give up for all that. With the canine bearing of every good civil servant, she would carry out her mission. She knew all the terminal’s nooks and crannies, all the rules of the security checkpoint, every one of the employees. Her booming black voice cleared our way of any obstacles, and she pushed me up to the very door of the cabin. And with an offhand “There you are, ma’am,” she dumped me there. I got up as though on a spring. Alone. Without asking the attendants for help, I felt my way along the backrests counting seat numbers until I reached my spot and could sink down. The passengers went on stowing their suitcases and briefcases and bags, jackets and coats and all kinds of colossal gadgets that barely fit in the overhead compartments. They talked about being overweight, they laughed, they excused themselves diplomatically for stepping on each other, Ay, sorry, thank you, pucha que no entra esta huevada; that’s what their voices said as they melded into an incoherent tangle of words. I just had my backpack with the syringe ready to inject myself, and that’s what I did: I took off the cap, stuck the needle in wherever it fell, and pressed the pump, ignoring the uncomfortable sighs around me. Then I fastened my seatbelt in the hopes of dying for at least a little while on that overnight. But I wasn’t going to fall asleep, not yet, unfortunately. Because suddenly I noticed my legs were shaking, and that due to a strange but effective mechanical chain reaction, my whole body was trembling. My knees were clapping together like cymbals. My teeth were chattering. Wait a minute now, I said to myself. What’s this? Am I having a seizure? But it wasn’t a seizure, it was an electrical discharge that arose intermittently from my nerve center. This is just what I need, I thought, separating from myself and grabbing hold of Lucina, the Lucina who was me as I moved closer to Chile, and I grabbed her, like that, by the shoulders, and I started to shake her violently and to tell her, that is, tell myself: not now, Lucina, not a stupid panic attack, don’t put on a little show now and make them kick us off the plane and leave us at the airport. Right now, I told her, telling myself, you’re going to count to ten or a hundred, forwards or backwards, now, ok, get going, we’re counting now. And that’s what I did, but starting with uno and getting quickly to seis and when I got to diez I kept going without stopping because my disobedient body still wasn’t under controclass="underline" the shaking was worse. And so it went from treinta y cinco to sesenta y siete and when I got to a hundred I started again, but in English this time: three five six, and I remembered as if I were back there, that was how I used to count when I was seven years old in the school I went to when I returned to Chile. In New Jersey I’d forgotten all my Spanish. Later, in Santiago, I’d forgotten English. Now I’m forgetting myself, I thought. I took a breath, covered my nose, went into the numerical trance of that divided childhood, and that’s how I reached a hundred again and started over, one more time, in one of my languages, thirty-three, treinta y tres, thirty-three.
claw
Count the next morning, too. Count instead of dropping pebbles that would guide my way back, or breadcrumbs that the birds would have eaten if I were crossing an enchanted forest and not walking down an airplane aisle. So I walked and counted seats, in search of the bathroom. Twenty-four. Everything under control, I told myself, balancing on the chemical toilet. On my way back the turbulence started, and my hand became a claw clutching awkwardly at the air, trying to grab hold of a backrest but landing, instead, on something warm, soft, meaty. My owl-fingers with their badly trimmed nails had come to rest on a shoulder. Or a breast. Or was it an ear? A sleeping body that I was shaking awake. I’m sorry, I stuttered, not really knowing where to direct my apology, I’m sorry, trying in vain or more like pretending I was trying to retract the claw from the mouth that opened suddenly to complain. What is this idiot doing? I heard a voice say, waking other people up. Trying not to fall over, I slid my hand up over a forehead of rough and impatient folds, and there my hand stayed, seizing up as we hit violent turbulence. Realizing the precarious balance I found myself in, my torso leaning forward, the woman took a firm hold of my hand, pulled it finger by finger from her face, and forced it back to where it belonged. That’s your seat, she groused, as if I didn’t understand anything, as if I were mentally challenged or worse, to her: a gringa. Take one step back, she said, and maybe talking to her companion she murmured, if she’d take those glasses off, maybe she could see something. That accent, so unmistakably Chilean, harbored the glacial poem of the mountain peaks and their snows in eternal mid-thaw, the dark whisper of the south dotted with giant rhubarbs, the mourning of roadside shrines, the herb-garden smell, the rough salts of the desert, the sulfurous copper shell of the mine open to the sky. The entire nation embodied in the bitter, uncertain tone of that traveler who suddenly, as I lifted my glasses, understood. Blind? There was no need to explain to her I wasn’t entirely blind, that I could distinguish contrasts. That I knew the flight attendant had opened a window and it encased me in its rectangle of light, and that someone else had closed it again, that the light beams of a movie were shining intermittently. I was a blind woman capable of detecting flashes of light, and, from afar, also the compassion of others that came after surprise. Blind? That compassion made me crawl with hate. Blind! she said again. Sit down, please, repeated the woman, but I couldn’t move. That pity of hers had paralyzed me. It had me stuck there while my memory traveled quickly into the past. The woman must have thought I didn’t understand, and as if I were a dog trained in British English, she raised her voice and said sit, miss, you’re going to fall, sit! Shit, I thought, but instead of cursing her I chewed a short sí and another sí, ya le oí, I heard you, ma’am, and I even understood. I speak the same Spanish as you. I turned around and sat down diligently, turning on my walkman to listen to a book, any book, and I buckled my seat belt and tightened it to the point of asphyxiation.