The Dust Never Settles, page 28
In the taxi back to the house, Rupert was all nuzzling, telling me how beautiful I was, how beautiful Our Baby was. Yes, everything was beautiful-beautiful. He kept lifting my hair to kiss my neck and tell me how in awe he was of my body and the miracle of life and in the end I asked the taxista to pull over because I had to vomit. When he pulled over I jumped out and ran off into the Inka Market, where it was easy to scurry away among the stalls, bobbing between vendors and tourists. I could hear Rupert calling out for me, but it was easy to lose him, get to the back entrance, and hail another cab to take me home.
By the time Rupert got back to Mamabue’s house, I was in a cool bath Q’orianka had run for me, because the heat was getting insupportable. Rupert burst in, demanding to know why I had run off. Because I needed space. Space! he said. Space! This is what he does when he is angry, taken aback or incredulous. He repeats the last word I say. I suppose he expects that I will then explain myself, so he cries, Space! Space! And then I might say, Yes. Space. Because I was feeling overwhelmed by your excessive attentions. And he would cry, Excessive attentions! That’s right: I am uncomfortable with affection because I find myself grotesque and any evidence to the contrary will lead me to believe I have to revisit the self-image I have cultivated over more than two decades of life and, frankly, I don’t have the energy.
This sort of illuminating and productive interchange, however, never takes place. Instead he cries, Space! Space! and then I either mimic him in a scornful tone (which means he cannot in turn repeat my last words or we would simply be parroting each other – Space? Space? Space! Space! and so on – endlessly, forever, until the end of the world) or I roll my eyes and walk away. But on this day, I was in the bath, slippery and naked, acutely aware that my now ginormous breasts were bobbing around like buoys and that I had not had a wax since my arrival in Lima. The hairs of my pubis were waving in the scummy bathwater like anemone tentacles.
I told Rupert that whatever his problem was, it would have to wait until I was done, and he said, Oh did I want Space? And I said, Yes. And then he sat on the toilet and stared pointedly at me, and I pretended not to care, tipping my head back as if to relax further into the bath, but really he was making me feel like I was naked, more naked than I already was. As if everything about me were exaggerated. As if I were a woman from a Botero painting.
But I remained calm and said, Rupert, please. This can wait until I’m out of the bath. Wait. Wait, he said. He felt like he was always waiting for me. Waiting for me to call. Waiting for me to feel better. Tiptoeing around my moods. Well, he was tired of waiting. We had to talk.
All right, I said. All right! I surged out of the bath like a whale rising for air. Bathwater everywhere. Breasts and enormous pubic hair everywhere. All right, let’s talk now! I looked around the room for a towel. No towel. Obviously I had forgotten to bring one. I stormed past Rupert, into the bedroom, water dripping everywhere, cascading onto the parquet.
(¡Por Dios! The parquet!
Quick! Fetch a mop!)
I rifled among the bedclothes for a robe, a kimono, something to wear. Rupert followed, ranting about something at my back. For God’s sake where were all my clothes? There was nothing but bed sheets. All the time Rupert was going on about the house. More specifically, This Nonsense With The House – he emphasised each word, pausing in-between, as if I’d lost my sense. Wasn’t it time I gave it up? This nonsense?
Nonsense? It was me repeating his words this time. He thought this house was nonsense? I was facing him now, leaning a little forward from the waist in the manner of clichéd anger, arms stretched out behind me (palms forward), face screwed into a Commedia dell’Arte mask (enormous nose, probably), pendulous hapiñuñu breasts pointing down. He thought my house was nonsense? (This isn’t your house.) Whereas Casa Napier was what? A perfect paradigm of rationality?
It would sound better if you completed the alliteration.
A perfect paradigm of puh-rationality?
Pues, no, that’s not a word.
You think I don’t find your family crazy sometimes? What’s my family got to do with anything? Don’t bring my family into this. You don’t think your family is a bit kooky? A bit kooky-dooky? (And I spun my index fingers in wheels by my ears to indicate lunacy.) Kooky-dooky? He repeated my words again, derisive.
The boy’s right. That’s not a word.
Fuck you, Rupert. Fuck me? Yes, I said it. And what’s more, I told him, I wasn’t leaving this house. I wasn’t going back to his family or England. I was staying here. Right here. And I pointed at the ground below my feet.
I flung open the double doors of my bedroom and went out onto the balcony overlooking the Sevillian patio. He followed me out, seemed not to have heard what I had said. Are you serious? Fuck me? Yes, Fuck you.
Q’orianka was down on the patio, pulling weeds. She looked up, startled. What kind of creature was I now, in her eyes? Bearded legs apart in a pugnacious stance, hands gesticulating wildly, wet hair plastered to my face, tetas al aire like a wiry demon-hag. A wild pishtaco. Beware me: I will feast on your fat. Especially now that I am so enormous.
I was my mother, I realised. Tearing screaming through the house. Rampaging. Throwing things. Letting it all out in front of the empleadas. Shameless. People say that in parenthood you become your own parents. Even if they are dead, they rise behind you and gobble you up. And here I was, being my mother, unstable, shrieking, voice of a screaming cockerel, face of a snarling dog. I didn’t even care any more that I was naked. Let him see. Let Rupert see what he had done to me with all his sex and his nuzzling. He had turned me into this: a zombie of my mother.
Rupert apologised to Q’orianka. She waved as if to say no importa, it’s all right. Don’t apologise for me, I screamed at him. What was his problem? He had started this whole thing. He was the one who wanted to talk right now. So now we’re talking. Like this (I indicated my naked body with my hands). We’re not talking: we’re yelling. Yelling/talking: potato/pope, what difference does it make? What the hell are you saying? If he knew Spanish, that would have been a funny joke. But did he know Spanish? Did he? No. Had he taken the trouble to learn it? No.
I threw open the doors of the next bedroom, Tío Ignacio Segundo’s childhood room. Weapons everywhere. Guns, rapiers, cannons. Some fantasy, some real – too many real. This was how family tragedies happened. A couple in a fight. A conveniently placed knife. A husband staggering along the balustrade with a blade in his gut. A long-drawn-out death accompanied by mournful string music, a coloratura soprano singing portamento. ¡Triste! ¡Triste!
A crime of passion. That is what I would have to say. A crime of passion. Q’orianka would have to testify: she had witnessed it. She would say that the señorita (Señorita? the attorney would ask. Yes, señorita, because she was unmarried. Unmarried, but with child? Yes. Aaah. Hums of disapproval. That explains it.) lost her temper. The Señorita was provoked. It would not look good for me: women losing their temper, hysterical, do not fare well.
I was rifling around in Tío Ignacio’s wardrobe for clothing. I found a dress shirt and some wool slacks (mid-twentieth-century, rat-pack-gangster trousers, wide leg with the crease down the middle) that smelled of naphthalene. I pulled the clothes off their hangers as Rupert continued haranguing me. He was saying something about buying a house. Something about good schools and catchment areas. I jumped towards him and let out a gruff sound from the back of my throat, somewhere between a bark and a cough. It startled him. He stepped out of my way and I left the room, slamming the door behind me to block his exit.
By the time he got out, I was halfway down the stairs to the patio, pulling on the wool trousers as I went, kind of hopping, my feet slippery with bathwater on the marble stairs. Ani, be careful, he said. Don’t tell me to be careful. I’ll be careful when I want to be careful. It’s my body, Goddammit. If I want to break my neck, I’ll break my pinche neck, and nobody can stop me.
Está loca.
She’s not loca: she’s angry.
Pues, as they say: mad.
Mad as in angry and mad as in mad.
By the time we were both on the patio, I was dressed, but the slacks were too big for me. I had to hold them up with one hand. I looked like a clown. Plus, they were itchy: wool plus heat plus bathwater. But I didn’t want to scratch myself in front of Rupert, so I was making tiny jerking movements inside the trouser legs, trying to relieve the itch by rubbing my skin against the fabric, which was a doomed plan from the start, because the scratchy wool only made the sensation worse. It became a prickling. Then a stinging. I was probably developing hives down there. Uglier and uglier by the second.
You want to raise a child in this environment? That is what he asked me, gesturing around at the scenery. A backdrop of decay. Yellowing weeds grew between the mosaic tiles, reaching up in lament. Along the back wall was a pile of junk: a pornographic ceramic huaco with a cracked erection; a metal jack-in-the-box, half peeking out from under the dented lid; a pile of yellowing newspapers. The fruits from the trees, unpicked, rotted on the ground where they fell in explosions of juices and colours and seeds. The columns, lined with cracks and pockmarked, drip-painted with pigeon shit, some crusted and grey, some glistening yellow-purple and slick, still, just perceptibly, sliding gently southward. Irreparably weathered, the fountain, its twelve monsters toothless and aged, and the fine, grey dust of Lima powdered everything with its thin gossamer of transience.
A few hours later, I lay alone on a recliner on the patio, wrapped in a sheet, and it all looked the same – the weeds, the shit, the broken-dick huaco. But there were also birds: yellow canaries, colibrís, lime-coloured parakeets and enormous macaws diving into the terrace to feed on the rotting fruits. Occasionally they stopped, peered around and sang. This is what I wish I could have shown Rupert when he asked, You really want to raise a child in this environment? I wish I had said, You don’t understand how it feels when the pretty birds sing.
Instead I said, All I know is I don’t want to raise a child with you, and at that the very casona gasped. All the doors gaped in horror. Rupert dropped his arms. Not dropped. They didn’t fall off his body onto the floor. They were not props. They were his own arms. He lowered them. And also his voice. Sotto voce, now. Dolente. You didn’t mean that, he said.
¡Ti amo tanto, tanto!
Uriel appeared from somewhere, carrying an uprooted lemon tree that had dried out and died. Its roots were desiccated, its leaves anaemic and crisp. The fruit on its branches had withered into shrunken stones. It was an obvious metaphor, worthy of the stage. He crossed the patio, upstaged us for a moment, then exited to the front of the house.
Rupert said he thought I needed space. I resisted the urge to reply with sarcastic surprise. This was no time for irony. Did he want me to return his ring? He did not. Things were not over between us. This was a difficult time. We would overcome it. (From somewhere else in the house, a tenor sang an aria. Tremulous crescendos. Doleful piano. Expressive strings. ¡Ay, dolor!) He was returning to London and would wait to hear from me. He would wait until the end of the world (or some such mawkishness). Take care of her, Q’orianka! (Q’orianka had appeared from the wings, or rather from the kitchen. She nodded.) Kisses on either cheek. Goodbye! Goodbye! Farewell, my darling! Both my darlings (he said with a hand on my belly).
And then he left, to rapturous applause. Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo! No applause for me, of course, who – as it turns out – was the villain after all. No roses flung in adoration from the balconies. No shower of petals raining down.
It takes practice, querida mía, to be the ingénue.
It is hard to be the ingénue when you are a cow. The quadruped is never the heroine. It can only get worse for me. I am too big now, and too misshapen for my own clothes. It did not even occur to me when I packed my suitcases with enough clothes for a year that I would soon not be able to fit into most of them, and possibly never again. My old body is gone. It is a kind of death.
One morning (I can’t remember how long after Rupert left me), I woke and found myself on my back, four cloven hooves straight up in the air, an enormous bulbously veined udder stretching from navel to perineum, and I screamed. I tried to scream, I should say, but instead there emerged from my throat a bestial noise – a long, bovine vowel, emitted from the same place where vomit comes from, but as if the vomit were paused there, somewhere around the tonsils, and abandoned. It was a disgusting sound. The sound of an aborted attempt at a purge – of quasi-catharsis, the contaminants lifted but not quite extracted, blocking the oesophagus, the airways. And it just kept coming, that bestial, pharyngeal sound.
I repulsed myself and started to cry, tried to roll over but couldn’t. I was immobile for a very long time, lying there, weeping with the shutters closed. The bovine form persisted: it persisted longer than any of the other forms – the lemur, the egg beaters.
Yes, this body of a cow, it lingered. I was certain this was the end of Anaïs, certain that in a few months, someone would wonder, Whatever happened to that poor pregnant girl? and would come looking, push open the crumbling doors of the casona and step out into the decrepit courtyard to find an anaemic Friesian heifer munching on the weeds, ruminating, driblets of part-digested gunk oozing from her jowls, her tired, filmy eyes expressionless, fixed on the sky and pats of stinking excrement exhaling their fumes. Poor cow. How did you get here, cow? They would gift me to a country family who live on a farm with five or maybe six children who would pat my rump and all day long I would stand in their field, chewing the cud, crying silently into the sod. Maybe they would summon a vet and say, Look at our cow. Why does she cry? Maybe the vet would prescribe an ointment for the eyes which they would rub into my caruncles, holding my muzzle tenderly. They would say, Isn’t she a sweet cow, our cow? Isn’t she tame? And I would resign myself to this life, forgetting day by day that I used to have thoughts that were, in their fashion, intellectually complex.
I lay there helpless, dolefully lowing until Q’orianka came running, wrapped her arms around me and rocked me gently. She led me to the bathroom and lowered me into shallow, tepid water. With a sponge, she cleaned the chunks from my hair and my chin. Then she dried me and dressed me and fed me broth with a spoon, and all I could do was spiritlessly let her tend to me. Like a child, or a doll, I was listless.
It was later, when I came back to myself, that I realised she had dressed me in maternity clothes – a large smock dress with a pussy bow at the neck. Attire for an overgrown baby. Gingerly, I got out of bed, all the time feeling like my body was a thread that might snap. I groped my way out of the room – not because it was dark, but because the house seemed to be tilting – and down the stairs, along the loggia, taking care to stay out of the sun, which was too glaring, too much of a threat. I reached the kitchen, where Q’orianka was de-leafing culantro. An enormous pile of it. The smell was spiralling and fluorescent. I fell into that neon spiral – descending, descending. When I reached the bottom of my fall, I found I was sitting on a chair, Q’orianka putting lime on my tongue. It worked. The acid brought me back.
She told me, when I asked her, that they were my mother’s clothes, the ones that I was wearing. In her bedroom, folded in protective paper, my mother had kept all her maternity wear with the intention that I should use it one day. Sorry, what? Had I heard her right? Yes, I had. I felt hurt. Not as myself – it was a nice gesture, a sentimental act, that my mother had thought of me in this way. I felt hurt on my mother’s behalf. I imagined her kneeling, her bare shins against the parquet, naked feet (inexplicably, because my mother always wore shoes, indoors and out) and her face soft, contemplating the shift dresses and capacious blouses as she folded them carefully, smoothing the creases, nestling them in tissue paper. She missed me. She was regretful over all the lost time. Her hair was greyer, her eyes duller. God, I miss her, deeply.
But this is not the mother that I had. This placid, remorseful woman on her knees, this woman who enacts nostalgic rituals in advance, who sows the seeds of future, dewy-eyed moments to share: this is not my mother. She is an invention. She is merely the idea of a mother I wish I had based on things I have witnessed – films I have seen, interviews I have read in which celebrated people reminisce about pleasant mothers with soft hands who smelled like roses, whose bedrooms were bathed in a peach gossamer haze. Compelling, intoxicating, but utterly fictive.
My mother was a woman of intensities, a junkie of only the most potent emotions: it could never be irritation, it had to be fury; never sadness, only abject despair. I do not believe she felt love. Or, at least, her love was not the tender, respectful kind, nor the kind that casts serene smiles across a comfortable distance. My mother was either completely on top of me or completely gone, smothering or disappeared. It was she who did the disappearing – not me. I was always here, waiting, terrified that she might not return, or that, if she returned, it would be for Leo and she would leave me behind. With me she played a painful kind of peekaboo. I would ascertain that she was there. Check again: she was there. And now? Still there. Then suddenly – absent. And absent and absent and absent. And, when I had mourned her, just about got used to my solitude, haHA! Peekaboo. Mami loves you. Mami adores you. Mami wants you right here in her arms always-always, amor de mi vida, reina de mi corazón, chiquilina bella. Hers was not the kind of love that releases others. It was an irate, unpredictable love: an ardour that might throttle you in your sleep just to breathe in your scent as you died, just to drink up your breath, your very essence. That is how it felt: as if she wanted to gobble me up.
And yet Q’orianka was not lying. I went up to my mother’s room to check for myself. I stood at the door and pressed my palm against it as if my hand were an ear or a stethoscope. I wanted to feel the room before I entered, to check whether it was weeping or breathing, had caught fire or fallen into an abyss. My mother’s room was off limits to me as a child, in case, I suppose, I went in to destroy things. She used to lock it with a key. I was, after all, the library vandal. I ruined things, was calamitous and delinquent. When I was sick in the night, I went to Mamabue’s room or even to the maids’ corridor, but never here. What was the point? When I had knocked on this door in the night, had there ever been an answer? I’m not sure my mother was even in there. Perhaps at night she turned into a bat or a dove and flew out of the window.
