I would always follow her, Antonio’s former wife says, my grandmother called me her tail because I would shadow her everywhere, to the point, I remember, she wanted to use the bathroom, but of course I was there, right behind her, okay can I please use the bathroom by myself, she would say, oh, okay, I’m going to wait right here, I would say, whatever she was doing I would follow her, and she would constantly tell me what she was doing, explaining it to me, okay I am spreading the oil in the frying pan, there’s so much that I know because she would constantly tell me, like what, Antonio says, simple things, Antonio’s former wife says, I am watering the plants right now, she would say, come Ida let’s water the plants, I was her assistant, her tail assistant, her shadow, I remember walking behind her, and she would say let’s water the plants, how old were you, Antonio says, it went on all my life, Antonio’s former wife says, until I was ten when her Alzheimer’s started and I’d reached an age when I needed to be away from everyone, and as Antonio reads the words he has transcribed from his 58:44 recording of his former wife, he tries to remember if his former wife ever followed him around as she’d done with her grandmother, not because he wants to fabricate some temporal linkage of great significance between her grandmother and him, no, of course our games from childhood live on, of course our adulthood consists of reenactments, but he, well, he doesn’t know why he’s trying to remember if his former wife has ever followed him around, perhaps he wants to retrofit her grandmother into his life with his former wife and his two daughters so as to feel more protected — your grandmother is still among us — of course she’s still among us I think about her every day, Antonio — just as, when he was a child, he would feel more protected during his imaginary conversations with the Virgin Mary — dear mother of god today I didn’t have one bad thought — think of me always — I don’t talk about you anymore how could I explain you to others please forgive me — and although he can’t remember one specific moment when his former wife followed him around, one of their domestic skits does include her shadowing him from room to room in silence, without touching him, pretending to have a crucial message that she’s unable to verbalize along his trajectory inside their apartment, a trajectory he would prolong for her sake by inventing a menial task in the kitchen or the closet, was there something in particular that was your favorite thing to do with your grandmother, Antonio says, just be with her, Antonio’s former wife says, watch the news, a soap opera that she would always watch with an apple in her hand, and I would bring my little chair and sit with her, and she would peel the apple and tell me that most of the vitamins were in the peel, there was this couple, she would say, man and woman, and the man would always peel the apple, and his wife would always bicker with him and say but all the vitamins are in the peel you shouldn’t peel it, and one day the husband peeled his apple, sliced it for himself, and handed back the peel to his wife and said here’s your vitamins, eat them, yes, I liked hearing that story, Antonio’s former wife says, but of course Antonio would prolong his trajectory inside their apartment not only for her sake but for his, too, a trajectory that, even after she’s gone (and here Antonio’s surprised at how easily he can imagine his former wife at their doorstep, the day after their daughters leave them for college, a quaint suitcase on each side, her task done, ready to fly back to Czechia (when did their roles shift? because for years he was the one on their doorstep, ready to flee to New York or Berlin or Barcelona after their daughters leave), and it occurs to Antonio that perhaps he has borrowed the image of the doorstep and the quaint suitcases from The Sound of Music or Mary Poppins, movies he’d watched for the first time at the Nuart Theatre with his daughters, both movies screened as singalongs that included a party kit (crown, glowsticks, bubbles) and two hostesses who instructed the audience on how to use the party kit and what to holler when — the curtains, Maria, the curtains! — and if years from now someone were to ask him was there something in particular that was your favorite thing to do with your daughters, he would omit any preambles about the blanks in his childhood and say the singalongs, Maria, the whole theater singing along to songs that he likes to believe he probably heard as a child but has forgotten, his daughters amazed that they’re allowed to blow bubbles inside the theater, the whole theater a gyration of glowsticks during the underwater songs of The Little Mermaid (and here Antonio closes his eyes and sees the dark theater lit with glowsticks, sees a dark dance club called Universe in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a college town where he lived with his grandparents when he was eighteen, soon after arriving to the United States (and here Antonio pauses Górecki’s Miserere, removes his oversized circumaural Sennheiser headphones, and searches online for the music he’d heard at Universe twenty-two years ago — I’ve come down from the violet skies to save the day, a solemn trance music voice says, I’m about to reveal the tales of your life — the three-story brick building that was Universe suddenly switching from white lasers and bass to darkness and silence, except for the distant sound of spaceships, yes, he will keep his eyes closed in his cubicle and stand in the dark at Universe, marveling at a family life that shouldn’t have happened to him but did, his new family next to him at the Nuart Theatre, singing their songs of the sea)), his daughters hollering the curtains, Maria, the curtains, Ada dressed as the curtains the second time they attended The Sound of Music singalong, and as he thinks of those singalongs he remembers a story about a father crying due to his son leaving for college, and although he doesn’t remember many particulars of that story, he remembers wondering what kind of life do you have to live to have a father who cries when you are leaving for college (later that night, after Ada leaves them for her first sleepover, Antonio and his former wife watch old videos of Ada as a baby and he tells his former wife about the father crying for his son and Antonio cries, too, and yet the next morning he considers his reaction to that story and remembers that when he left Bogotá to attend college in the United States, his mother did cry for him — the light left the house after you left, Antonio — and so perhaps the right formulation isn’t what kind of life do you have to live to have a parent who cries when you are leaving for college but what kind of upbringing do you have to procure for your children so that they’re moved by your tears), a father that says, as he hopes he can say to his daughters, I was lucky to have spent all these years with you — where was I? — ah, yes, but of course I would prolong my trajectory inside our apartment not only for Ida’s sake but for mine, too, a trajectory that, even after she’s gone —) will continue with her at his side, shadowing him along with Dora, Silvina, his mother, la Madre Dolorosa, his sister, Ida’s grandmother, shadowing him and saying, as Ida would say toward the end of their domestic skit, you don’t love me anymore.
My grandmother was a hamster, Antonio’s former wife says, a carryover after the war, I suppose, because back then you never knew what you were going to need so you had to collect everything, to the point that she would buy margarine, keep the container, wash it, and store it in her maze of a basement, where you could find these humongous old wooden closets from before World War II, which contained her dresses, little pieces of jewelry, buttons, sewing equipment, I could open a drawer and spend hours looking at these little treasures, do you remember some of them, Antonio says, I remember my grandmother’s feather coats, Antonio’s former wife says, my Mom told me my grandmother was always beautifully dressed, and her makeup was perfect, her jewelry matching, no jeans or pants, because women didn’t wear jeans or pants, but I don’t remember her this way because as a kid that wasn’t what mattered to me, how I remember her is in her favorite dress, which unfortunately was plastic, with a lot of static, which she would wear every day, how do you mean plastic, Antonio says, acrylic, Antonio’s former wife says, gray and green with little flowers, an acrylic dress that would sparkle with static against her tights when she would undress, and so my Mom also told me that when my grandmother was younger she would change three times a day, and she would ride a scooter to town, whereas when I remember her she didn’t ride anymore because she had eighty-six breaks in her bones, she was limping in one leg, her knee couldn’t fold, so she would just live in her kitchen, her bedroom, she had a little garden on the side of the house gated from the dogs, her kingdom, her garden, her world, she built her little world in our house and didn’t leave it, so she didn’t talk about the outside world, the way she remembered it, was she part of the resistance during the war, Antonio says, I think she was somehow involved with the antipropaganda newspaper, Antonio’s former wife says, and here Antonio pauses his 58:44 recording of his former wife and remembers the massive World War II history book he’d read on his first trip to Český Krumlov, almost twelve years ago, back when he was still trying to avoid traveling to far away countries because he didn’t want to disrupt the world he was trying to build inside his first novel, a world populated with his memories of Bogotá, him playing soccer at his Jesuit high school, for instance, him conducting imaginary conversations with the Virgin Mary, a world so tenuous, so pockmarked already that a long trip to Czechia might relegate some of his memories to the dark corners of a place like the Central Registry in All the Names by José Saramago, where the index cards for the dead are stored, him on a plane to Czechia reading about the impact of the war on Czechia and Poland, and although he doesn’t remember any of its contents, he does remember feeling like he was carrying a portable coffin due to its thickness, its black cover, its cast of doomed resistance fighters, so that, by the time his plane landed, the Czechia of his former wife had become the Czechia invaded by the Germans, who had orders to exterminate buildings and people, although over the years the Czechia of the war also became the Czechia of his former wife’s parents, who, on his first trip to Czechia, tested Antonio’s endurance to Chopin, their favorite vodka: on Monday the mother would serve Antonio Chopin shots and the father would complain about her serving herself too many Chopin shots, leaving the table in a huff, on Tuesday the father would serve Antonio Chopin shots and the mother would complain about him serving himself too many Chopin shots, leaving the table in a huff, yes, Antonio thinks, he’d enjoyed their brand of bantering (neither of his former wife’s parents spoke English or Spanish so he’d interpreted their exchange as bantering), and after his former wife’s parents became resigned to him being the father of their two granddaughters, they welcomed him into their family, and although he detested the exhaustion that stayed with him for weeks after flying to Czechia, he’d flown there multiple times, toward the end of summer #1, for instance, six months after Ada was born, soon after he’d called his former wife in Český Krumlov and told her he didn’t know how long he could continue to playact at being father and husband.
My grandmother on my father’s side was murdered, Antonio’s former wife says, two weeks before my aunt’s wedding, while everyone was preparing for it, back then it wasn’t like you just drove to the store, you had to grow your own pig, make your own sausages, so they were storing everything in the barn, and my grandmother happened to need something from the barn, where someone had been hiding, and this someone smashed her head with an ax and killed her, and so my dad, since he was the oldest, had to be involved in the investigation, and when your mother did her work on my dad, when they were both staying with us, my dad opened up, and it was scary because my dad doesn’t talk, especially not about his Mom, he just started talking and talking and couldn’t stop, what work did my Mom do on your dad, Antonio says, your Mom did Reiki on him, Antonio’s former wife says, your Mom’s theory about my dad going blind is that he doesn’t want to see, which is weird because if you think about my dad, he’s incredibly intuitive, really good with people, but as far as emotions, he pretends they don’t exist, so many things he pretends they don’t exist, kind of like you, I didn’t even know about the head thing, so your Mom didn’t know how it was going to turn out when she was holding her hands above my dad’s head, she said she feels this heavy weight above him, and she sees his Mom, only the head, everything else is dark, as if the rest of her body didn’t exist, no eyes, just the head, and she said she sees my dad not wanting to see, and I was translating her words to my dad, and of course he was trying to be silly about it, but afterward his face changed and later he told me that, after his mother’s funeral, after she was buried and everything, the investigation had gone on and on, and the police were so pissed they couldn’t find the murderer that they decided to dig up her grave, and my dad had to identify her, and they didn’t want to dig everything out so they just chopped off the head, and my dad had to identify his own mother, which you can imagine after six months it’s not just bone it’s still flesh, swollen, smells, it’s partially eaten by bugs, worms are sticking out, and he had to identify his own mother this way, and he did and then passed out, so when I was telling your Mom about my dad losing his eyesight, she said it’s all linked to his inability to, I didn’t even remember his mother existed, Antonio, I always thought everyone has only one grandmother, I didn’t know she even existed because my father never mentioned her — whenever I think about my former wife’s father, Antonio writes, I think about Ida flying to Czechia for three days to surprise her father for his seventieth birthday, or I think about Ida during summer #6, driving to the hospital in Prague every day to sit by him while the surgeons decided what to do about his ailing heart — what do you remember most about those days when your father was in the hospital, Antonio said, the traffic, Antonio’s former wife said, the traffic because from our house in Český Krumlov to the hospital in Prague I had to drive for two hours, and sometimes I would roll up the windows, turn up the radio, and scream, just as I used to do as a teenager, when my Mom would shut the windows of our house, turn up the music, and tell us to scream or bark or growl, what else do you remember about those trips to the hospital, Antonio said, the phones always ringing at the nurses’ station, the sounds of those ancient, stationary phones, now whenever my dad and I hear those phones anywhere we shudder — so you know all this pretending his mother’s murder didn’t happen, Antonio’s former wife says, pretending his mother didn’t exist, grieving after the funeral but never again after that, because according to my mother my father and his two brothers met at our house after the funeral and locked themselves in the bedroom for three days, drinking nonstop, and my uncle’s wife and my Mom would prepare food, knock on the door, deliver the food and leave, and they would keep drinking, but after that, after those three days, they left the house and didn’t grieve again, goodbye, like nothing ever happened, never any pictures of her, nothing, gone, puff.
My childhood was a blast, Antonio’s former wife says, I grew up surrounded by greenhouses, a walnut tree forest, and so much land that I could vanish and no one would even notice, or I could build my own bonfires and no one would tell me oh you’re going to burn yourself, or I could hide behind the trees, or I could venture out to our three detached garages, by my dad’s workstation, that was another activity of mine back then, watching my dad fixing things, I think that’s why I’m so good at it too, I would spend hours next to my dad watching him fixing and building, and every weekend, since there was nothing else to do, my parents and their friends would meet in someone’s house and throw a party, and there would be music, dancing, tons of alcohol, Coca Cola from the black market, and the kids would just roam around the farm, because all of our friends were farmers, what else do you remember about your parents when you were growing up, Antonio says, they didn’t worry, Antonio’s former wife says, no one checked where I was, they were always busy and they partied a lot, every weekend they would either take us with them or they would leave us with our grandmother, and if they went by themselves they would come back with more guests and would continue the party at our house, what about your Mom, Antonio says, my Mom was the one who played with us because my dad had to wake up at three in the morning or he was on the farm, Antonio’s former wife says, he did take us ice-skating though, but my Mom was the one who would always pick up some kids from the other farmers and take us sledding, or hiking, or to the pool, kind of like I do, funny, what else do you remember about your dad, Antonio says, the greenhouses were our primary income, Antonio’s former wife says, and there was this plan that consisted of my dad bringing aszparagus seeds from the United States, asparagus, Antonio says, no asparagus is food here, Antonio’s former wife says, anyway you added aszparagus to bouquets of flowers, and because back then there was nothing in the stores, and in Czechia, in Czech culture, if you visit someone’s house you don’t arrive empty-handed, you always bring something, and since there was nothing else in the stores, you would always arrive with a bouquet of flowers, so every morning, at three in the morning, my dad would load these bunches of green thingies, these aszparagus thingies, drive to the bazaar and sell them there, and he would make a lot of money from it, so he would come back home, back then we had no banks, no credit cards, so it was all cash operated, so he would always come home with stacks of money, and my dad would count the money as fast as a machine, always, every morning, by the time he was back at seven from the bazaar, I would be getting ready for school and I would see him at the table counting the money, it was amazing, he can still count as fast as a machine, although no one has that much cash anymore, did your parents ever hit you, Antonio says, never, Antonio’s former wife says, my dad I think I remember once when I was maybe six or seven, we were going to a dance class and my Mom drove us there and left us while she went downstairs to the store, hoping they would have something, and we saw that the class was canceled so we went back down to the store but couldn’t find her, the car was still outside so we went back inside, but in the meantime she’d left the store and we see her driving away so we run toward the car, it’s like fifteen minutes from our house walking, so it wasn’t far but it was already 7:00 p.m., but because I was little I couldn’t make it, of course the car is faster, and my sister is superfast, and I keep running and running but I can’t make it, so I start walking, and my sister leaves me there and runs home, and when I arrive home she tells my parents that I saw friends and left with them somewhere, and because my parents were so worried about me, my dad hit me with a belt I think, I don’t remember, I was so confused, you left me there and I am getting hit, so that was the only time my dad hit me, but I know he was just so scared that something had happened to me.
My sister was a difficult child, Antonio’s former wife says, she didn’t sleep, was colicky, cranky, would always cry, the entire house would take turns staying up with her because she only slept during the day, or she only slept if someone rocked her stroller, and when she was two years old Ida was born, and Ida was perfect, Ida didn’t cry, Ida was always smiling, slept through the night, and everyone started falling in love with Ida, so suddenly all this attention my sister had for two years went away because everyone was fascinated by how good Ida was and how bad she was, and look how good Ida is and you are such a bad girl, and of course now everyone knows what a mistake it is to say that, but given her personality, her temper, that was just the worst you could do as far as siblings, and I still remember how they would say oh look Ida is eating everything, because if you gave me pork I would eat pork, if you gave me an apple I would eat the apple, I was fat and chubby and I was cheerful and I had red cheeks and I was healthy and she was sickly and skinny and little and she only wanted to eat hard-boiled eggs, so what would she do to you, Antonio says, she would just create situations to get me in trouble, and she would use how naïve I was and my need to be loved by her, accepted by her, because I was so naïve, I wasn’t a clever child, I wasn’t sneaky, she would use that to manipulate me, for instance she would play cards with me and she would cheat, so I would constantly lose, and she would set up the game so that the loser would have to do chores, for instance we had a sofa bed and every morning we had to take our sheets and fold them, and in the evening we had to spread out the sheets and the blankets again, and the loser had to do it for the other person, and of course if she was cheating, I was so stupid and naïve, she would always win, oh and if you didn’t do it by seven you had to do it an extra ten times, so I would have to make her bed a hundred and fifty times, and if I didn’t do it she would hit me, or she would break my toys, and her being angry at me was so scary, I hated that feeling, when she was in a weird mood, angry or mad, she would take it out on me the most, or little things like she would lock me in that sofa bed, but I hear that is very common, she would drag me in there by my hair and lock me there, and because our house was so big, even if my parents wanted to intervene, my Mom was either in the kitchen, or cleaning, or doing laundry, we are on a farm, my dad is out working, there’s no way anyone would see it happening, unlike in an apartment where it’s so easy, you turn around, you see it, you hear it, no one would hear me in this humongous house, and by the time she would let me out we both would rush to my Mom and I would say Mom she locked me in the bed and she would say what, I would never do such a thing, and so who do you believe, I can’t blame my parents for not seeing it, my Mom when I asked her about it she said when we would fight and she couldn’t take it anymore she would take me to my grandmother and my sister to my grandfather, who was an alcoholic, and she would make drinks for him, light cigarettes for him, he had a bunch of multivitamins, which were very sweet, and she would eat them, hey, we survived, but the scariest incident was when my parents were changing the heating for the greenhouses from coal to gas, and for that they needed a different furnace, so my dad ordered this huge furnace, steel, with a bunch of doors and pipes inside, and it wasn’t hooked up yet, it was still standing inside our garage, and there was a party in our house, of course, and the kids were running and playing hide-and-seek, and my sister talked me into going into that furnace and she locked me in there and left, I don’t know how long it lasted, it was pretty long because when I came out everyone was leaving, again, huge farm, no supervision, no way anyone could hear me, I could have easily died, there wasn’t enough oxygen, but there were these layers of pipes, so I squeezed myself in and around the pipes, up and up, and there was a tiny little window to look inside and see if the furnace was burning properly, and that wasn’t latched so I pushed it open and somehow pushed myself through and came out, and instead of going to my parents and saying you know what your goddamned daughter did, I went to my sister and said na na fu fu, look, I escaped.
Sometimes after arriving home from his eight hours of SQL queries at Prudential Investments, Antonio lingers on the stairs by the doorstep, unzipping the boots of his work costume and listening to the children’s music inside, the lyrics in Czech, of course, a language that, despite reminding him of the garbled, invented language in The Silence by Ingmar Bergman (the white noise of Bergman’s train the same as that of the airplanes on his way to Czechia), soothes him, and as he unzips his reasonable work boots — so friends, Wendell Berry says, every day do something that won’t compute — his database analyst boots that do compute — there’s man all over for you, Didi says, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet — twice a week I bandage my feet before playing soccer, Antonio thinks, and twice a week I limp to work because my left foot hasn’t recovered from its previous injury — he considers how his attempts to deplete his body through soccer have allowed him to momentarily rest from his linkage with his sister, as if by draining the batteries of the antenna in charge of receiving signals from his sister he can be momentarily at peace, and perhaps the Czech language, which although familiar still doesn’t compute for him — Czech sounds like Russian to me, Antonio thinks, and when I think of Czech I think of the poems in The Mirror by Tarkovsky’s father — no more dinner for you if you compare Czech with Russian ever again, his former wife said — has contributed to his recurring disbelief that he still shares this warm apartment with his former wife and his two daughters, although if he had to explain his current living arrangement he would have to diagram a timeline whereas he lived at Home with his former wife and his two daughters (t1), The Other Home next door to Home but visited every day after work plus Saturday (t2), The Other Home next door to Home but was allowed to sleep at Home three days a week (t3), and in that interval between (t1) and (t2) he might pause and explain that in the aftermath of their divorce proceedings his visits to Home consisted mostly of him taking Ada to the pool at the Jewish Community Center, the only location nearby where they could spend time together in the evening during the workweek without his former wife, the reverberations inside the underground pool facility like those inside a cathedral or a submarine, the occasional Russian grandfathers wading into the adult pool, their bellies like floaters, the kids’ pool empty, the warm water to his chest when he sat with his legs outstretched, an awkward sitting position, like someone’s wry idea of levitation, alternating between a feeling of vacancy and an overwhelming desire to produce warm father and daughter memories for Ada, as he’d tried to do in a one-page memoir piece entitled Fathers Fated, which he’d addressed to Ada and had set during the first time they attend a performance of The Velveteen Rabbit — a father in the audience was crying, Antonio wrote, you didn’t notice because you were pointing at the crocodile on the stage — a piece he’d never tried to publish because he’d been unable to capture both the wonder of the moment — you placed your finger to your lips as a reminder of the silence we’d agreed on, Antonio wrote, twirled your hands above your head like we’d practiced after your ballet class, shuffled in your seat because you were so little that the seat would fold in on you if you didn’t sit on the edge — and the disbelief he felt at being a new father — before the show you ran in the garden outside as if you’d just snatched the ball from the dachshund you’d been petting, Antonio wrote, the patter of your slippers on the grass reminded me of nothing and that was wonderful — Ada splashing the surface of the kids’ pool inside a cathedral or a submarine and him splashing after her as Tata Shark — everywhere we went I saw grandmothers looking at us and marveling at a world where fathers and daughters held hands, Antonio wrote — wonder and disbelief but also an impulse to record their time together — soon after our first Velveteen Rabbit I purchased my first camera, Antonio wrote, I needed the evidence that it was possible, that that father was really me — and yet the videos are also for you, Antonio wrote, I like to believe that if you ever decide not to see me again, like my sister and I did with my father years before you were born, you can watch how we were together and change your mind — and after their pool sessions Antonio would cross the dark laundry room between Home and The Other Home (Antonio abhors overt symbolism in his own so-called fictions, plus the outside world barely exists for him in retrospect so he can’t concoct symbols out of blank landscapes, but because he has been crossing this laundry room for so many years, and because the laundry room looks like a dilapidated basement with cables like entrails, storage spaces like coffins, rats like eels either slithering by or trying to wriggle free from their traps, television voices coming from the ceiling threatening one another in a language that doesn’t compute for Antonio, an old tenant with a disfigured mouth who wears a homemade plastic raincoat and patrols her washing machine, he has come to associate the laundry room with purgatory), returning to The Other Home, also known as his quaint nook, where he would panfry his meat and tortilla dinner while listening to Michael Silverblatt saying to a group of Oulipo members that as a child he loved math — dear Mr. Silverblatt, Antonio writes, during a rough interval in my life, when I couldn’t read or write in the aftermath of my divorce proceedings, I found consolation in the sound of your voice — dear Mr. Silverblatt I wanted your voice to be a father asking me about fractals — yes, sometimes when he enters the apartment where his daughters live he still feels like an intruder, or like a prospective renter being shown an apartment that comes with furniture and a family, or like a character in one of those Christmas movies who is given the chance to watch how his life might have turned out if he hadn’t, for instance, abandoned his children as Antonio had planned to do after his second daughter was born, not abandon them, no, leave them in their mother’s custody so as to become a weekend visitor, but most of the time he can’t linger on his doorstep for too long because his daughters know the sound of his motorcycle so by the time he climbs the stairs the door is already opened and Ada is saying Tata come see my new storybook, and Eva is saying hurry come see the platypus I drew for you, and their new dog Perrito is jumping and peeing out of excitement, and his former wife is preparing dinner for this family of his, which, amazingly, still includes him.