Nervous System, page 14
Did you forget?
How to forget her older brother’s punishment at the slightest provocation. How he’d trip her. The front tooth that never recovered. The pushes shoves low blows, the bruises stamped on parts of her body where the Father couldn’t see.
She let her brother hit her as if each blow could cure a prior wound.
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There he was, on the spare cot, keeping her company with his snoring.
Her brother’s analog and mortal body kept company with another, digital body that couldn’t manage to redeem him from himself. He’d holed up in the apps on his phone. One measured his breathing and told him how well he had slept, another marked the race route, counted his steps, and told him his split times, the average temperature of his body, his pulse rate, his blood pressure. He put in earphones while he did his strength training and splintered off from the world and from himself, because he trusted only those devices. Ella wanted to send him a conciliatory message, but her phone transcribed it in the wrong language: Ahí jopo yo slip well, hay labio.
The phone did the same thing that Ella did when she’d tried to sing, in the past, songs that seemed written in the languages of other planets.
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Did you forget?
She could hear the past repeating like an echo. She heard her brother calling her a murderer or a mom-urderer but didn’t understand what he meant or why her Father told him to shut up. Why the Firstborn defied the Father and kept throwing at Ella that dart of mother and of death, murderer, mother-murderer. Why the Father had lost his head that time, why he’d grabbed the Firstborn by the elbow and put him in a chokehold that dislocated his shoulder and shut his mouth once and for all.
The Father lost his head every now and then. That time in the elevator when he almost left Ella without an arm.
What floor did we live on then? asked Ella. On the sixth, I think, writes the Mother, who after some months in the old apartment and already pregnant with twins made them move to a spacious and shady house she could feel was hers alone. The apartment was number 628, adds the Father, who would never forget where he lived with his cousin, his long-gone dead wife.
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Ella still dreams of being in elevators. A recurring nightmare: the mechanism gets stuck and from inside, from deep inside, through transparent doors, she sees people talking or listening to music on headphones while they wait to go up. They don’t see Ella pounding the walls inside, calling for help.
Different dreams, same time period. The dream of the elevator that can’t go up or down but slides around in the hollow insides of the walls, the whole length of the floor, and shoots out the side of the building. Ella is saved from a fall by waking up. The dream of the elevator that rises, gaining speed, and breaks through the ceiling of a skyscraper like a spaceship resisting gravity. The dream of being unable to enter the elevator because it’s blocked by a woman who’s fallen across the doorway, fat naked shit-smeared.
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Her Friend, who at the time was doing her psychiatric rotation, suggested that perhaps she was dreaming of her dead mother. You never miss a chance to remind me of her, Ella replied, dipping her fingers into her glass of wine and flicking it at her Friend’s face. Just like my brother, what a nightmare.
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It had been a strange case, dying in the delivery room. Even in a dictatorship that sort of death was rare. Women gave birth in the most adverse circumstances, but they died of other kinds of violence.
One women out of every twenty died in labor, said the Mother under her breath, and the daughter was convinced she had made her mother part of that statistic.
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The Friend was sure that under the dictatorship, if an imprisoned mother died, her newborn was secretly given to another family.
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The Father had come back from the hospital carrying his newborn daughter. He gave her to the Lady, who covered her mouth with her hand as she pressed that malnourished baby to her breast.
And she remained there behind him, the Lady, like a howl. The Father walked to the table and sat down and leaned on his elbows and murmured something under his breath, under his teeth, and then he went mute, as though he’d already said everything he had to say to his son. He never mentioned her again, wrapped her in folds of his brain guts oblivion.
The son could never forgive him for that, either. His mother’s absence was an organ that went on secreting anguish within his body.
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It was the Lady who explained to him why his mommy hadn’t come back from the hospital. The boy didn’t want to know anything and he wanted to know everything, but the coldness of those words slashed at him. And then the Lady tried to console him, but the boy was fast and he slipped away from her embrace.
To hug another woman was a form of betrayal.
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Almost nine, that’s how old the Firstborn was when he lost the mother who for him would always be the only one. He would come to love the replacement a little, but he would never call her mom.
Love her before. Love her after. Love her now and never love her again, not then. Because then was always the wrong time. Never the time for love.
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The Firstborn blamed Ella for having aborted his mama in labor, for having adopted that other woman. But that other woman was more Mother to Ella than the body that had contained her until she was dispatched into the world.
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To remind him of the blows, once, at that bar. The Firstborn shielded himself behind his glass of wine, and he asked, with a tongue weighed down by the past, was I such a rat? He composed a stingy smile in which Ella saw her brother’s resentment, his rage, his unresolved jealousy. You were very much a rat, many rats, Ella replied, feeling her voice become poisoned, because her brother had taken his revenge out on her for too many years. Rats lived only twenty-one months, if no one took the trouble to kill them sooner, but her brother was still alive.
He remained a difficult brother, and she still had a bone to pick with him.
He seemed untroubled, but Ella noticed the slight flare of his nostrils, the twitch of his eyelid, a carrion bird crossing his conscience.
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Years later, every time El brandished a shoe in her face, Ella would think of her rat of a brother. She’d swear to herself she would turn El in if he ever touched her, not realizing there was no need for it to come to blows before she left him.
It was her brother who had left home, and that had saved her.
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He didn’t want to watch TV, was his excuse for not sticking around. Had he stayed, he would have changed the channel to avoid seeing the Father recommend aspirin to the entire country. The Father’s unbearable assurance, in his house, in his office, on the TV screen, the little box of aspirin in his hand.
The Firstborn took only dipyrone, and only when the atmospheric pressure changed. Because his bones hurt. Because his bones held up columns of air heavy as lead, his bones full of marrow. He would never take those other painkillers that liquified the blood. Because it was excessive blood that had killed his mother.
He ate little and quickly and finished before his siblings, got up from the table with his empty plate. The family paid him no mind, gaping as they were at the black-and-white screen that showed telenovelas instead of political news. And he left his plate in the kitchen and went out the front door and through the gate, leaving it swinging in the wind, and without stretching first or warming up he hurtled out into the street and ran the kilometric avenues to the park and then up the precipitous hill. And if he wasn’t drained by then he’d sneak over the back road and climb with his hands over earth and skinny trees, yanking on bark, weeds, thorns, until at the top he’d reach a slender plaster virgin with arms outstretched and head bent, granting forgiveness to someone unknown. He scorned her kindly farce, he spat on the edge of her dress before starting his descent, letting the wind dig its needles into him, covered in mud fleas suicide bees and scratches, her brother bit by a spider, covered in old scabs.
Her brother, trained by resentment, was preparing for adulthood.
He gradually ground down his knees, undid his joints. He always returned to the same house, the same table with the same black-and-white TV that they would punch to wake up, only to set off again on his supersonic escape.
Her brother the rat, running on his wheel, believing he was moving forward in his cage.
So as not to be in the living room with all the traitors and strangers who considered him part of their family, the Firstborn got a broken-down bicycle and spent hour upon hour out in the city, and when that wasn’t enough, he pedaled to the lake on the outskirts where he learned to swim.
To swim against the current, never with it.
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All of them gathered and waiting for the Father to appear on the screen, a fleeting star. A smile across Ella’s face. The Twins with their spoons full of mashed potatoes, open-mouthed, engrossed. The Mother saying, kids, please swallow, your food is going to get cold.
The imposter Mother trying to erase the memory of the real one.
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This child has pinworms, the Mother would say, before saying, later, when he started to break, that he had porcelain bones. The porcelain boy, the Mother called him when the Father couldn’t hear. The cracked boy, and she’d lower her voice so the Firstborn couldn’t hear, though there was no danger of that, he was already too far away.
He was getting rid of the rust in his joints with every turn of the pedals and every stroke of his arms. That’s what he said, that it was rust, and other times he said he was oiling his joints.
To run wanting to catch up with the mother who’d left him behind. To suffer muscles hardened by lactic acid. To know that the painful substance, lactate, was also found in mother’s milk.
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Ella waited for him at the finish line, and when she saw him dragging his foot she suggested he sit down on a nearby curb, where they watched the last marathon runners arrive, trotting, tripping, walking. The Firstborn smelled of sweaty earth and cement; he smelled like a stranger. Like someone who no longer needed anyone, someone who could do without.
And yet he had to lean on Ella when he stood up. The air pressure had changed, that’s why he couldn’t walk. That’s what he said. Don’t be silly, Ella murmured, stopping a taxi.
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What was he going to study, medicine? The Firstborn’s fork froze over the chard casserole, and he replied that he detested that profession of charlatans. They gave names to everything they couldn’t cure. And he looked sidelong at his Father, who was silent, bruised by the words. The Father destroyed by the son. The Mother swallowed her food as if her mouth were filled with dirt. No one killed her. No one let her die. When are you going to understand that? Everyone dies the best they can. The Mother knew that wasn’t true, but she turned her white-hot eyes to him and saw the son’s face darken above his incipient beard and beneath his striking brows. His cranial bones vibrated. His chest rose and fell from hyperventilation. He was swollen with oxygen. He was going to explode. He put his palms on the tablecloth, one, two, half a second, rose abruptly to his feet, launching the chair backward, and he went out running running running running running as if fleeing a plague.
That house was the depository of all that would never be his. It was inhabited by the impostor and by his traitor of a sister and other children who were only his half siblings. That house was not the small sixth-floor apartment where he’d had his only mother.
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It was during that time when he got into extreme sports. When he broke the rest of his bones. When they feared for his life.
Someone has to die for a sport to be considered extreme, El noted. If your brother had died it would have been according to his own rules. Stop, Ella said, cutting him off. Can’t you see his corpse would have fallen onto my shoulders?
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Even though it’s snowing, the birds chirp at the top of their lungs. Even though it’s nighttime, the light, white and brilliant as it reflects on the snow, confuses them, and they don’t know what time it is. That’s what she tells the Firstborn, and then she tells him more. The tower rebuilt after the attack that brought it down had powerful beams pointing up to the sky, illuminating the route of so many lost souls. Those rays interrupted the migratory routes of birds, and thousands of them got tangled up in the light, whirling around drugged hallucinating interrogated by bright spotlights, noisily flapping their arrhythmic wings. Trapped in the light, they finally fell from the air at dawn.
Birds with failing hearts exploding on the pavement.
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Speculation about the bone callus. She’d imagined that the Firstborn’s skeleton must be covered in hard scars, but El explains that those calluses are scabs that gradually disappear as the bone recovers its shape. That’s why past fractures aren’t easy to detect against a backlight. But if there are no traces, why do bones hurt? Her brother groans in pain when a storm is coming and creaks when the sun comes out. He’s become an expert at predicting even the slightest variations in atmospheric pressure.
How’re the bones? El would ask over the phone every time Ella called her older brother, the last Sunday of the month. She made sure El was home, she insisted he say hi to her brother and ask about his skeleton. Ella, always trying to mend the fracture of childhood.
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They were eating empanadas downtown in the preterit city, beside the museum where they held the annual human rights conference that El was attending. What are the worst bones? asked the Firstborn, separating the pit from the olive. El didn’t need to think about it, his answer delayed only by a sip of beer. The ones eaten away by sulfuric acid.
That’s what El would talk about that afternoon, about people who didn’t die beaten broken suffocated insomniac earth, but rather disintegrated in industrial-strength acid.
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You remember that filthy stream at your grandma’s house? Ella was opening curtains. The one we washed figs in? Or more like got them dirtier? We were acquiring immunity, answered the Friend’s medicated voice, her ragged voice, so many years later. Her ailing face, her lipstick smeared just like her grandmother’s, whose face Ella could still see, the dust from the road stuck to her cheekbones. And remember when your grandmother caught us throwing eggs in the middle of the dictatorship, you remember?
It was necessary for the Friend to remember those times, and to forget others.
And maybe it was better not to remind the Friend now about the larch tree stump where she’d taught Ella the theory of the concentric circles that would let them calculate the tree’s age. In the trunk’s rings you could read the changes in the earth during its growth, the Friend had said in her high-pitched little girl’s voice. Periods of drought, years of sunshine. She’d planted her finger on the circle closest to the bark. This is where my parents disappeared, she said very seriously, and then fell silent, her nail digging into that line. That, she added defiantly, your stars don’t record. We named them, but it didn’t do any good. Ella hadn’t known what to say then, but looking at her Friend now, slumped on the sofa, those same fingers longer now, that skinny hand scored by veins, she wanted to rescue her from the dictatorship that was coming back to destroy her; she wanted to shake out her clothes, open the blinds, and wipe off the glass with the end of her sleeve; she wanted to point toward the stars they had once stared up at and shared. Because it was true that some stars had already been extinguished, that their light was merely phantom. Ella would have liked to tell her to accept that her parents now belonged to the past, that the two of them also belonged to the past, that there would be a time when someone looked at them from the future and thought they, too, were still there. They would be the mirage. But telling her that would not help quiet her Friend’s neurons, sparking in midcrisis.
She was recovering from a completely atemporal nervous breakdown.
She’d just received their bones, her parents’ bones had just been found.
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Every Friday the Cousin stayed over to sleep in Ella’s bed while Ella, who hadn’t spoken to her since the day she rescued her from the waves, who didn’t want to see her again, who had stashed her bathing suit and her jars of sand and shells in her closet, went to spend the night in her Friend’s starry yard.
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The Cousin and the Firstborn fastened the four wheels to their sneakers and crossed the avenues on skates without brakes. They launched themselves from the top of a paved street. Holding hands, the two of them, rolling downhill with their arms outstretched; they were algorithmic birds flying high that Saturday when they spotted earth and rocks stretched across the street where the hill ended. Scattered in the mud they could see sharp pebbles, but at that speed it was impossible to stop.
Lying on the street she swallowed dirt and spat out her cousin’s name, too scared to look and see what condition he was in. She stood up slowly, feeling her arm was rotated at an unlikely angle, and when she looked at it she saw, through her torn sleeve, that a stone was embedded in it. And she tried to take it out but she couldn’t, because it wasn’t a rock but the tip of her broken bone, the dorsal radius ulna poking through her skin.
To be unable to identify one’s own bones.
Only the radius was broken. The Firstborn thought of his bicycle braking before a fall, of dislocated axes gears punctured tires, of the impossibility of escape. Ella thought, listening to her Father describe that wounded arm, of the radial velocity of the stars.
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They intervened in the Cousin’s arm with plates screws nuts washers, and they sewed her up and put her in a cast. But the plaster was too tight and her hand gradually lost feeling. That haughty Cousin who chewed her nails and the skin around them, bit until she drew blood, pulled off the scabs without feeling it and she kept on going until she bit something very hard in her fingertip.
