Nocturne

Juan Pack is asleep. Every night upon saying goodbye to his fiancée, before leaving her house, he would inspect the huge bedroom closet, checking for burglars. He was never at ease; he always heard the same strange noise behind the slatted doors that would not stay closed. The pipes in the upper floors of the house made gurgling sounds, like giant intestines. The wet, panting steam of nearby trains dispersed into the night, masking other noises like a translucent door. Juan Pack is asleep with an invisible racquet in his hand. A sunny tennis match would splinter the dreariness of the days at the office, bathing him now in the soft dream of childhood. Saturdays were for playing tennis, Saturday nights were for sleeping like a boy again.

Pack’s fiancée is asleep in a tall, eight-story house surrounded by a sea of sounds growing in the night, with that huge bedroom closet: gathering place of dresses, winter and summer coats, and big blue straw hats with red and white ribbons. There is no burglar in the closet, only the endless parade of hangers with broad shoulders in tightly packed rows. Just one dress is different from the rest, in both size and shape: it’s white and is laced with a honeycomb pattern on the hemline, cuffs and sleeves. It was the party dress Eulalia sewed and tailored ten years ago, when Pack’s fiancée was thirty pounds lighter, sixteen years old, and had never had a boyfriend. A thick ring hugged the finger on her left hand, a ring that was hidden inside a wedding cake or a cookie on the wedding day of one of her cousins.

She was reminded that day that weddings were something she had to endure, the same as with deaths: first it was her sisters, then her girlfriends, leaving their houses empty when they went away. She didn’t believe she would ever wear a wedding gown, besides the one that the tulle of the mosquito net fashioned over her head in the mirror, so lovely to wake up to in the mornings. From far back in her childhood, she could still see the illuminated coaches pass by carrying bride and groom, stiff twins on display as if through a shop window, the bride holding a bouquet of white flowers steady as a vase on a table. She could still hear them chanting “Matilde! Matilde!” as she pulled at her older sister’s veil on the day of her wedding. But Matilde, cold and distant despite her tear-soaked face, was embracing relatives and girlfriends, her cheeks stamped with red kisses, resisting the tugs at her veil as though it were caught in a doorway and not in the pleading hands of her sister. And yet they had slept every night holding hands, with their beds pushed together.

Back then they lived in Lomas de Zamora in a house with polished hallways, wicker chairs, and a lawn framed by flowerbeds with poppies and deep-blue cornflowers. Eulalia was the seamstress, the housekeeper with many keys to keep, and sometimes she had the time to water the flowers and the lawn. And then the house was sold; they had to move to an apartment downtown. Nobody in the family wanted to move, but they obeyed as if following an invisible order. “Lomas de Zamora is very far for the girls now that they’re grown,” the parents repeated as they bid farewell to the house. The move was difficult. Six cars weren’t enough to take all the furniture, so the rest was auctioned off.

Passing by the house not long after, they saw a sign going up that said “Property of the Academy of the Immaculate Conception,” which they read from the corner of their eyes, for fear that looking at it head-on would harm their eyesight. But Lucía saved her white dress adorned with honeycombs, the poppies from the garden surely still in its folds; there were also still the little green iron chairs, the four palm trees, and the siestas they took, stretched out in the damp rooms of the old house.

Ten years ago, Lucía Treming is in her closet, dreaming. She is wearing the white dress. She opens the windows of the house in Lomas de Zamora, and a tall young man walks through the gate: it’s Juan Pack, but they don’t know each other yet. He reaches the other side of the property without turning back, and Lucía, feeling faint, sits on one of the little green iron chairs and waits for that tall stranger to pass by again, that stranger who will lavish her with smiles for the rest of her life. Eulalia’s daughter runs around the garden with a butterfly net, ensnares Lucía’s head, and imprisons her in the dark under the net. Her fiancé calls to her from afar, unable to see her—they don’t know each other, they always see each other from afar.

Pack is dreaming in the spacious garden of his country house, where there is a freshly sprinkled tennis court without a net. He calls to the gardener, “Where is the tennis net?” “Sir, we’ve lost the net, but there is a flowering bromeliad plant behind the eighty-five-horsepower tractor.” He goes into the office, searches for the net in the desk drawers, but doesn’t find it. He checks Lucía’s room, where she is sleeping, and, opening the enormous closet, makes his way through the dresses and walks and walks. There are no dresses or ribbons or hats, but an enormous tennis net covered in cobwebs clings to his hands, endlessly unfurling—“Lucía, Lucía, we’ve lost your dresses. Your dresses have been set free and are running around the room.”

A permanent mystery resides in this closet, which Pack attempts to unravel: it’s the broom closet where as kids they would pretend to take out each other’s appendixes and play hide and seek in the dark.

Fear, nurtured and kept close, peeks out with the face of a burglar, takes him by the hand, and stares at him with the wide, adult smile of a monster.