And that’s when, very slowly, Chela stops nodding her head, unfolds her legs and bends over like a folding chair to do up her witch shoes. And she does all of this so slowly Marina can’t tell if she’s leaving or just feeling chilly. But then she gets up, goes toward the door, and by the time Marina understands that Chela is indeed listening to what she’s said, that Chela is leaving the mews without having knocked on her daughter’s door, her daughter who she hasn’t seen in three years, Marina understands the price of that invisible bronco, she understands that she’s spoken her last words; her final, malignant, and satisfying words. And before Chela has even opened the door, Marina is awash with a feeling of remorse, or perhaps just of abandonment. Everything is tinged with that Sunday feeling: the end of a play date (the game was: Afternoon Tea). Marina then makes what she deems to be an aesthetic effort to concentrate, appreciate, and mentally record these last Neptunian moments, as the beautiful, defeated beach-creature wraps her flimsy scarf around her neck, takes her old-fashioned jacket from the back of the chair and puts it on. Chela then opens the door, picks up the soaking trash bag, and wraps it around her head like a cape, or a hood, the most pathetic of armors. Chela is leaving, and Marina didn’t tell her — isn’t ever going to get the chance to tell her — that her first name is Dulce. And yet, before closing the door behind her, as if she somehow did know, and from inside the two parentheses that cup her mouth when she smiles, Chela promises her, ‘You’ll go to heaven, sweet Marina.’
2002
Reborn dolls are handmade. The people who make them are known as reborners. Once Noelia had made up her mind to buy herself a little doll, she did some research on the sketchy, dial-up nineties Internet and chose a reborner who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon: so that’s where we went. For the first time, tiny size-0 garments — all strictly folkloric — found their way into our cases. Noelia bought the clothes as a gift for the reborner, but we both knew that they were actually for Maria (as she’d already decided to name her doll).
‘Noelia,’ I said, ‘calling a doll dressed up in traditional Mexican outfits Maria is as ludicrous as calling a dog Pup, or a pub The Tavern, or a wine bar Bar à Vin.’
To which she replied that Maria was going to be neither a pet animal nor a drinking establishment, and that she wasn’t best pleased about me calling her a doll, even though that’s precisely what she was, and even though Chris had told us that it was very important that we never forget that that’s precisely what she was. The way Noelia saw it, given that we didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of forgetting she was a doll, it was hardly necessary to keep reminding ourselves every five minutes, and so wasn’t it just better if we didn’t refer to the doll as a doll, because she didn’t like it, period. I was about to protest but she held up her index finger and said, categorically and when we were already on our flight to Heathrow, ‘Promise me you’re not going to call her that again, at least not between us.’
I promised, but I also told her that ‘baby’ made me very uncomfortable. And so we agreed to call her ‘the girl’. The girl seemed more neutral to me. No, if I’m honest, it seemed more ironic. It gave me the hope (the false hope, as my wife would make sure) that I was going to be able to keep my distance from the whole thing. For me the girl was a thing. Then they became two things. And then, inevitably, they became The Girls. But that came later.
Chris was an American lady Noelia exchanged emails with before she decided to adopt a reborn in Stratford-upon-Avon. Noelia read me out her emails, which recounted Chris’s deadly-boring life in microscopic detail. I can’t say I thought much of Chris, and then she started sending me separate emails urging me to understand my wife’s needs, after which I positively loathed her. Chris was a consummate collector, not to say sick in the head. Her fifty-plus collection of reborns had their own outhouse in the garden, and on top of names and surnames, they’d each been assigned their own hypothetical future.
‘So-and-so is going to be a doctor like you,’ she told Noelia when she went to meet Chris in person, taking advantage of a cardiology conference in the States.
My wife returned from that trip explaining to me that a) Chris is a psycho killer with frills, you know the type? and b) she was going to buy herself a reborn, whether I liked it or not. Chris was also a reborner, but a lousy one. A large part of the decision to go to England was to avoid offending Chris who, according to Noelia, ‘would’ve sniffed us out the very second we ordered from any other reborner in the States.’ I’d never been to England, so I didn’t argue with the casual paranoid presenting herself to me.
We spent three days in London and then drove all the way to Stratford on the wrong side of the road. To say we drove is a manner of speaking, of course, because I don’t even drive on the right-hand side, let alone the wrong one. I map-read. We settled into our hotel, then went to meet the reborner and put in our order. More than anything we wanted to make sure that there was a dark-skinned model in the reborner’s catalogue, and that she wasn’t going to lumber us with some totally inappropriate little blond dolly. Without having told me, Noelia had packed a bag with photos of us from childhood so that the reborner (what was her name? Marissa? Melissa? I don’t know, but I’m sure it had a double s in there because that was my prompt to be doubly condescending) could take inspiration from our younger faces. I spent the whole visit swinging between the giggles and pure disgust. I was pretty unbearable really. Noelia sent me to the car and ended up ordering Maria alone.
I remember lots of painted wood and a little yard at the back of the hotel in Stratford where we lived while we waited for Maria’s rebirth. Hidden among the flower pots was a life-sized stone statue of a pig. I remember the stairs with their Persian carpets, and how they perplexed me. I still can’t figure it out. Are they made to measure, or are they existing carpets molded and nailed down to each step? But my clearest memories are of the breakfasts. Served on porcelain dishes with domed metal covers, the whole thing was incredibly imperial, and totally unbefitting a modest, four-bedroomed guesthouse. Each night, on a little list, you had to mark a series of crosses against whichever food you wanted to appear on your porcelain dish the following day. Noelia and I ticked the same boxes every night: sausages, roasted tomatoes, and baked beans (with bucket loads of added sugar), which gave rise to a fleeting but intense obsession. I remember that when we got back to Mexico I tried to make them with black Cuban beans and brown sugar: an all round disaster. That’s one thing I’ve learned about food through pure empirical research: food is a patriot. Under no circumstances will it be replicated outside of its mother country.