Imminence, page 1
IMMINENCE
IMMINENCE
Mariana Dimópulos
Translated from the Spanish by
Alice Whitmore
Published by Transit Books
2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612
www.transitbooks.org
First published in Argentina under the title Pendiente
by Adriana Hidalgo editora 2014
© Mariana Dimópulos 2014
First published in English in Australia by Giramondo Publishing 2019
Translation © Alice Whitmore 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945492-55-6 (paperback) | 978-1-945492-56-3 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2021941135
DESIGN & TYPESETTING
Justin Carder
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For Cecilia and for Sandra,
for the wise mistakes.
And for Beatriz.
I would have spoiled the whole story, for if God had returned Isaac to me I would have been in an awkward position. What was the easiest for Abraham would have been difficult for me—once again to be happy in Isaac. SØREN KIERKEGAARD
WE’RE ALONE TOGETHER, for the first time. I have to touch him now. I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder. But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest the way they said it would.
The baby has a foot that shines silver from the wool of his bootie. I try again, but I can’t even get close. Removing the covers, removing any of his layers, is suddenly unthinkable. I laugh to myself. I tell myself it’s impossible, and the thought is like a soothing caress; nothing is wrong, it will pass.
Ivan comes into the bedroom and places his hands gently on my hair. He takes the bundle the baby is wrapped in and nestles it between two pillows in the middle of the bed. Only the baby’s slightly red and perfectly round face is visible now, as cryptic as the face of a clock. Ivan tells me dinner is ready and the baby is sleeping, and logic dictates that since the baby is sleeping we can leave him. Logic, in my mind, has always been a woman dressed in white—white now has the lustre of a silver foot.
We both sit down at the table, but Ivan immediately gets up and plunges the ladle into a pot on the stove. He doesn’t want me to lift a finger, he repeats, I have to take it easy after my month in hospital. It’s early to be eating, only six in the evening, and the autumn sun is pushing boldly through the kitchen window, which is open despite the cold. I tell myself: this should make me smile, the last rays of sunlight.
So I smile.
‘Is that the baby?’ Ivan asks.
I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything.
‘I’ll go and check,’ he announces, and gets up from his seat again.
He doesn’t return for a while. I wait for him, dipping my empty spoon in and out of the bowl of tomato soup sitting before me. Then he returns, and he is beautiful like giants are. I would never say you are beautiful like giants. But if he asked me to I would have to tell him because a year ago I swore an oath, not an oath of love or fidelity or surrender or any of those grandiose lovers’ vows but an oath to always tell the truth.
He asks me if there are enough nappies for tonight and I answer him truthfully.
‘We’ll have to change him later.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll have to bathe him later.’
‘Yes.’
He refrains from asking me if I will do those things. This is good.
‘Don’t get up, it’s alright,’ Pedro insisted on that final night, as I got up to fetch water from the refrigerator. We had just started dipping our spoons in and out of our bowls of tomato soup. Then he stopped. He raised his pair of brown eyes and asked me if I could hear that.
‘Hear what?’
He made a face, got up and left the kitchen. He returned a little while later carrying the cat, black and drooping. He had rescued it by the tail from atop a dangerously unstable washing machine we kept on the balcony.
The apartment is silent and the soup is still hot. Ivan starts speaking to me:
‘I’ve been thinking. I wanted to tell you. The baby’s name is Isaac.’
‘Isaac? I don’t know.’
He lifts his eyes—the same deliberate motion with which he’d lifted his body minutes earlier. His eyes are made of snow and water. They have their own sky and their own passing clouds.
‘Isaac was my grandfather’s name,’ he says.
Coming from any other man, this would have struck me as vulgar. The unexpected revelation leaves the two of us momentarily perplexed. Isaac is a name without r’s; every time he says Isaac he will miss the dark, musical r of roses and radios.
‘You don’t like Isaac?’
‘Isaac is fine,’ I reply, and I touch Ivan’s arm.
Was he the first? No, there was another. At a bus stop, waiting for the 132 early one morning, after leaving Pedro’s place, I met a man whose name was also Isaac: dark and sleek-skinned and carrying a map under his arm like a baguette. We boarded the same bus just as the day was cracking open. Not long after I sat down, the seat to my left became vacant; with a smile that was like a gesture, the man sat down beside me and unfolded his map. The fact that the day was just beginning united us in a kind of fleeting complicity. I warned him against all the nonsense he would hear about Buenos Aires from the mouths of guides and well-meaning bystanders, as if he were the last witness left on earth. I took care not to embellish at all when I told him the name of a building, or the name of a street, and if behind it there loitered some national hero or calamity; then there were the theatres and banks and the interminable commerce of the city, interminably announced by all those interminable signs.
‘Are you getting off here? What a coincidence,’ he said when he saw me shouldering my handbag.
We walked a few metres together.
‘That sweet shop is over a century old,’ I pointed out, because I couldn’t see anything older to offer him, and old things are always of interest to travellers.
He asked me for some figures I didn’t know, and didn’t dare to guess. How many people, how many deaths, how many trains. The man named Isaac had a familiar weakness for numbers; he had been named after Newton. He seized his opportunity and suggested we get something to drink in the shop. I said yes, because I’d just come from another man and needed curing.
‘Ladies first,’ he said as he opened one of the bevelled glass doors.
‘I’m not a lady,’ I explained.
‘A woman, at least?’
‘I’m not a woman, either.’
Pedro laughed, Pedro clapped his hands together in the middle of the street, Pedro tried to embrace me when he heard my confession. It was our fourteenth date, and at the end of it I told him the thing that had been weighing on my chest like an impotent talisman: ‘This isn’t meant for me, I’m not one of those women.’ When he heard this he glowed with a radiance I’d never seen on him before. We were heading down Florida Street, fighting shoulder to shoulder for space on the footpath. We were coming or going from the cinema when he pulled me into a café and, against his better judgement, ordered (and was denied) a bottle of wine. Two cafés later we were finally seated. I drank the several glasses he handed to me. I did it for his sake, since I never drink. We got a little drunk on eggnog, drunk enough for him to speak loudly about our future, and his hopes for it; drunk enough for him to use the word us, insistently; so drunk, in fact, that when we left the café he left behind a handful of dusty, mildewed books, bought that same night from some dingy rat-hole on Avenida Rivadavia, now abandoned amid the several glasses we had emptied that evening.
He insisted on walking, so we walked. His happiness was incomprehensible to me; in his moments of silence I stole glances at it, and when he stopped and spoke to me I observed it directly, the way one observes a luxurious object—a feathered hat, for example, or an engraved ring—in a shop window. By the time we arrived at his place he seemed to have come to his senses. There was nobody home. With some pride he showed me the apartment’s two empty bedrooms, as if to prove it. He lived with one of his sisters, who had promised to move out soon. He repeated this fact to me several times, perhaps because he didn’t quite believe it; I tried to help him out by repeating it myself. When we took off our clothes and contemplated one another in the narrow bed, barely covered by the guileless, pitiless patterns of our underwear, he made me swear—although we both professed to be atheists—that I would stay there with him all night, that I wouldn’t steal away in the early hours of the morning to catch the number 132 bus, or, claiming insomnia, sit at his desk doing sums, as I’d done several times before, perched carefully on the edge of the seat, at the edge of the desk, taking care not to touch a single one of the books or papers that cluttered it, humming out some binomial formula, some simple or complex derivative, like a lullaby. Pedro and I fell asleep, and suddenly it was all true: when we woke the next morning it was morning, the sun was up, and we drank imported teas for breakfast, and the teacups were the same teacups, and we didn’t break any of them, and his sister still hadn’t returned and I was still there.
Ivan asks now with his eyes, which are two polished stones, if I am enjo
‘Soil?’ he says in Russian, and I say no, I don’t want salt.
I suspect we are not like all those other lovers sharing dinner tables across the world, the many millions of them, the many more than millions that have existed throughout history. I am suddenly struck by this suspicion, which I don’t deserve. I say ah, without making a sound, and watch as Ivan sprinkles soil on his tomato soup. We’re not like anyone, I think to myself. And I am wrong.
‘Water?’ says Pedro.
The cat was sprawled like a dog beneath the dinner table.
Now I think: I shouldn’t be thinking this, this is not good, this radical idea, but it’s already there, I have just thought it, just a moment before I walked into this kitchen I decided that happiness exists, and as I practise this unfamiliar happiness, which I’ve been doing for the last couple of hours, I realise the extent to which this same happiness might anaesthetise me, blind me, chase me away, as it does everyone else, all the time.
The water from that other night is equal to this night’s salt.
In the age of good sarcasm, in that first flush of youth, Mara used to say that the stork doesn’t come from Paris.
‘She comes from Baghdad, with a bullet hole in her breast, and her feathers are so black she looks like a crow.’
And Ludmila would applaud in delight.
I don’t know if I can do it. In the month and a half we were in hospital I couldn’t bring myself to do it once.
After the birth, after the infection and the convalescence, with my sister at my bedside and my mother in Las Flores, both of them crying as if this were our final farewell, after hearing my sister sob for the twentieth time ‘you’re so pale’ or ‘you’re so thin’, grasping my fingers and lifting my listless arm like a dead snake, after all of that I was finally able to sit up in bed, to slurp at the custard flans and purées offered to me by the unsmiling nurse. But at no point was I able to touch him.
This morning he arrived in his transparent baby carriage. One of the women lifted him up with a movement that was somehow both gentle and decisive and placed him between my lap and my chest, arranging my body just so on the cushions. But even that didn’t work—they removed him straight away, muttering the only possible explanation: you’re still too weak, what a shame.
‘Nonsense!’ Mara said to me a couple of years ago, stroking the hand I’d accidentally left lying on the table. Then she leaned forward, towards a little mirror with a stand that perched on top of her knees, and painted her lips and eyelids. Those were the early days, not long after our reunion, and it was fascinating to see the lips limned with red pigment, the mouth puckering and stretching, the upwards-rolling of the eyes. If I replied: ‘I can’t do it, I’m not one of those women,’ she would plonk me down in a chair and stick her fingers into different creams and powders, employing soft little brushes where necessary, and she would draw all over my face while contorting her own into shapes of mockery or concentration.
If they were still doing dress rehearsals, she would come off the stage and sit with me. Her dressing room was just a plastic desk in the corner, a few steps from the wings, concealed behind a folding screen and illuminated by a cruel lamp half hanging, half falling against the glass of the mirror. She would say (and later she would repeat it, although she was no longer in the play):
‘Father died exactly a year ago, on this very same day, on the fifth of May, on your name day, Irina. It was very cold, and snow was falling.’
This, and a few sentences more about a father we didn’t share, and a Russian snowfall that neither she nor I had ever seen. When I refused to go along with it, she would say: ‘You know this one, it’s Chekhov, it’s the three sisters.’ Perhaps it was her way of talking about Ludmila, who we missed, without having to admit it. When Mara arrived at the theatre or if I saw her in the street beforehand she would never greet me with a hello, she would say: ‘Father died,’ or ‘It was very cold, and snow was falling,’ and I would have to reply:
‘Why do you insist on remembering it!’
It was a half-hearted game—each player indulged herself as she saw fit. Then we would hug, because she was large and invited hugs. This was only after our reunion, mind you; we’d known each other since we were very young, but then we’d grown apart.
On the day of our reunion, Mara arrived and asked me if I could still love her. I told her I didn’t know, because a lot of time had passed and I was used to telling the truth; or rather, telling the truth was the only thing I knew how to do when I opened my mouth and it wasn’t to yawn or to eat. My ‘I don’t know’ was enough for her. We went out together that night, and other subsequent nights. If it was a Wednesday we went to the city, if it was a Tuesday we met at the theatre, and if she insisted and it was a Saturday we would relocate to one of those places where men and women offer themselves to each other, brandishing wineglasses like expensive jewels. If she caught me in time she would force some brushstrokes against my eyes and lips, and if I protested with something like ‘It’s not necessary, I have something to tell you, I’m not a woman,’ she would rebut with her usual ‘Nonsense!’ and grab me by the arm, and off we would go.
At the beginning of it all, at twenty and twenty-one—that is, twenty years ago—Mara and Ludmila and I would talk about coupledom, that thing fashioned from the bourgeoisie and love, as if it were polar ice, or the black floor of the ocean. It was a relief to think of it as something fantastic and unreachable.
‘Is that the kid?’ Ivan asks again. The dregs of the soup are a red tongue at the bottom of the bowl.
We haven’t spoken about his last trip, the one he took to Catamarca or Jujuy, in a truck this time, punctually delivered by the mechanic on Avenida Warnes just a few days after I was admitted to hospital. I know it wasn’t a trip he took for pleasure, it was something he did so we could afford to pay for the furniture in our apartment because tonight, if we eventually manage to get to sleep, it will be on someone else’s mattress on the floor, our clothes still bunched into bags beside us—his because he just moved back in after all the comings and goings to Minsk and to the Argentinean provinces, mine because I only just returned from hospital, after the birth and the massive infection.
Ivan has decided it’s not the kid; the sound is coming from the street. He asks how my sister is. She was here just earlier, she brought me home in the taxi and walked me to the front door. She handed him the baby so I could get up the granite stairs without tripping over. Since this isn’t an important question, I respond with something simple. Ivan serves himself another bowl of tomato soup.
But no, he’s not convinced. He gets up from the table. He gets lost in the hallway; in reality, he simply walks down the hallway; it’s not even that the darkness swallows him up, or that he disappears into the darkness of the hallway as if into a gaping mouth. I know he’s gone into the bedroom and that soon he will reappear through the same door. I decide it’s best to stay where I am. The only other option is to follow him into the bedroom, where I would have to take the baby in my arms and say foolish things to it.
That other night—my last night with Pedro—suddenly returns, dancing like a blowfly.
Pedro, too, got lost in a hallway without getting lost. Then, like now, I remained sitting in the kitchen, like a teacup or a loaf of bread.
Ivan is away a long time, and I can’t help speculating: he must be running a bath; he must have found a cockroach and he’s trying to catch it. But no, I tell myself, it’s autumn, there are no cockroaches.
I waste a good amount of time on this, thinking up explanations. It’s not the first time I’ve been in a kitchen like this, waiting like this for a man, spinning those threadbare, faithful stories that women like me cling to in the hope of forestalling the abandonment that always seems to lurk on the other side of our waiting. I find comfort in it. I tell myself it’s good to imagine bad things.
‘He’s resting,’ Ivan says when he returns. His r’s are like ebony.
I get up and tidy the plates, but Ivan intercepts me on the way to the kitchen bench and gestures for me to sit down, so I sit down. Doing so gives me enormous pleasure. The hospital was exhausting, it’s true. When Ivan turns on the tap to wash the dishes the water shoots out like lightning, then abates to a muddy thread that soon trickles to nothing.
