FOR HER twentieth birthday someone gave Camila Ersky a golden bracelet with a rose of rubies. It was a family heirloom. She liked the bracelet and wore it only on certain occasions, when she was going to some gathering or to the theater for opening night. Nevertheless, when she lost it she did not share the pain of her loss with the rest of the family. In her view, objects could not be replaced whatever their value—she only appreciated people, the canaries in her home, and her dogs. In the course of her life, I think she only wept over the loss of a silver chain with a medal of the Virgin of Luján set in gold, a present from one of her boyfriends. The idea of losing things, those things we lose as if by fate, didn’t trouble her as much as it did the rest of the family or her friends, who were a vain lot. Without tears she had seen her childhood home stripped, once by fire, once by a poverty as ferocious as fire: stripped of its most beloved furnishings (paintings, tables, commodes, screens, vases, bronze statues, fans, marble cherubs, porcelain dancers, bottles of perfume in the shape of radishes, whole cases of miniatures with curls and beards), some horrible but valuable. I suspect that her complacency was not a sign of indifference, and that she had an anxious foreboding that these objects would someday rob her of something more precious than her childhood. Perhaps she cared for them more than those who wept over their loss. Sometimes she saw these objects. They came to visit her like people, in processions, especially at night, when she was about to fall asleep, when she was traveling by train or by car, or even when she was going through her daily routine, on her way to work. Often they bothered her like insects: she wanted to scare them off, to think of other things. Often, from a lack of imagination, she described the objects to her children, in the entertaining stories she told them when they were eating. She didn’t add to the objects’ glow or beauty or mystery: that wasn’t necessary.
One afternoon, returning from some errands, she crossed a square and stopped to rest on a bench. Why imagine only Buenos Aires? There are other cities with squares. The light of the setting sun bathed the branches, streets, houses around her: the light that sometimes increases the wisdom of joy. She contemplated the sky for a long while, stroking her stained kid gloves; then, attracted by something shiny on the ground, she looked down and, a few moments later, realized it was the bracelet she had lost more than fifteen years ago. With the emotion that saints must feel when they work their first miracle, she picked the object up. Night fell before she decided to put the bracelet on her left wrist as she had long ago.
When she got home, after looking at her wrist to make sure that the bracelet had not vanished, she told the news to her children, who didn’t stop playing, and to her husband, who looked at her skeptically, not interrupting his reading of the paper. For days, despite her children’s indifference and her husband’s suspicions, she woke with the joy of having found the bracelet. The only people who would have been truly surprised were all dead.
She began to remember with greater precision the objects that had peopled her life; she remembered them with nostalgia, with an unknown anxiety. Like an inventory, in reverse chronological order, her memory was filled with a crystal dove with broken wings and beak; a candy box in the shape of a piano; a bronze statue that held up a lantern with little lightbulbs; a bronze clock; a marble cushion with bluish streaks and tassels; opera glasses with a mother-of-pearl handle; an inscribed cup; and ivory monkeys with little baskets full of baby monkeys.
In ways completely normal to her and completely unbelievable to us, she slowly recovered the objects that had long dwelled only in her memory. At the same time she noticed that the happiness she had felt at first was turning into a feeling of discomfort, of fear, of worry.
She hardly looked at the things around her for fear of discovering a lost treasure.
While Camila was troubled and tried to think of other things, the objects appeared, in the market, at stores, in hotels, in all sorts of places, everything from the bronze statue with the torch that used to light up the entrance to the house to the jeweled heart pierced by an arrow. The gypsy doll and the kaleidoscope were the last ones. Where did she find those toys, belonging to her childhood? I am ashamed to say, because you, my readers, will think that I seek only to surprise you and not tell you the truth. You will think that the toys were different ones, similar to the old ones, not the very same, that of course there isn’t only one gypsy doll in the whole world, not only one kaleidoscope. But fate dictated that the doll’s arm was tattooed with a butterfly in India ink and that, engraved on the copper tube, the kaleidoscope bore Camila Ersky’s name.
If it weren’t so pathetic, this story would be tedious. If it doesn’t seem pathetic to you, my readers, at least it’s short, and telling it will give me practice. In the dressing rooms of the theaters that Camila often attended, she found toys that belonged, by a long series of coincidences, to the daughter of a dancer; the girl insisted on trading them for a mechanical bear and a plastic circus. She came home with the old toys wrapped in newspaper. Several times, on the way home, she wanted to put the package down at the bottom of a staircase or on the threshold of a door.
Nobody was home. She opened the windows wide, taking a deep breath of the evening air. Then she saw the objects lined up against the wall of her room, just as she had dreamed she would see them. She knelt down to caress them. She lost track of day and night. She saw that the objects had faces, the horrible faces they acquire when we have stared at them too long.
Through a long series of joys, Camila Ersky had finally entered hell.