The first time was five months ago, a muffled thud. The human body doesn’t sound like a vase shattering. It doesn’t sound like a crystal glass. It sounds like a sack of cement, like a thick, heavy dictionary. There was a spot of blood on a corner of the wardrobe; I noticed it straightaway. Mamá was lying on the floor, unconscious. There was a gash in her cheek like the hollow in an agave. I did everything you’re not supposed to do. I moved her from where she was lying; I tried to put her in a different position. She was a dead weight. She’s tall and heavy, and I couldn’t get her to her feet. After about three minutes she started to stir, and after a while she came round. We thought it was an isolated incident, but people think a lot of things.
The second time was on the front balcony, while she was watering the plants. The third time was on the balcony at the back. She was hand washing a few of Diego’s old shirts she’d found in an old drawer. That’s one of the symptoms, apparently, doing things that don’t need doing. I asked what she was doing. Washing Diego’s shirts, she told me. She flashed me the childlike look of a happy or mischievous little girl. Her hands carried on scrubbing at the ridges of the concrete washboard that look like the ribs of an elderly smoker. I asked her why she was washing shirts Diego would never wear and she said that of course Diego would wear these shirts, that he had phoned, that he had been given a furlough next weekend and was coming home.
I didn’t want to contradict her; I simply stood and watched. Just then, she hunched over and the strangest thing happened. Her face drained away, seemed to contract, like when you clench a fist, as though everything was drawing back around her nose. Her eyes fell, her forehead and her mouth shriveled, and her cheeks began to wither. Then she burst into tears and collapsed.
I don’t know where the rest of her body went. Her head grazed the edge of the sink and her forehead slammed into a metal bucket where more shirts and a pile of rags were soaking in cloudy, soapy water. I kept my composure; there was no one else in the house. There had been no one else the last two times she fell either. I thought maybe it was something my mother and I shared, that it wasn’t really happening. Like a sign, maybe, a code between women. But it was nothing of the kind.
I felt a welling fear and a wave of sadness. Somehow or other, a pair of hands was still scrubbing Diego’s shirts. The shirts disintegrated into tatters and Mamá’s eyes rolled back into her head. Then my father arrived home from the hotel. He dropped his briefcase and scooped Mamá into his arms. This was a mistake, the rear balcony is very narrow, and it is always piled with junk. It used to drive me mad: the automatic washing machine I bought to replace that old Aurika that had given up the ghost, canvas sacks splotched with red mud, a bag of clothespins, the trash can, a corner crammed with cleaning equipment, a dustpan, a mangle, a new broom and two tatty old ones, a clothes rack still hung with pairs of underwear, empty milk bags pinned to the washing line to dry, the steel vegetable crate and, inside, something, I’m not sure what, plantains or cassava or yams or potatoes—not all at the same time, obviously—and a few shriveled strings of garlic.
In that moment, I realized that debris had collected under the washing machine. There were greasy dusters, floorcloths riddled with holes, a plunger, an empty bottle of bleach and another of disinfectant, makeshift plastic funnels, and a bucket filled with rusted tools and nails.
Later, we were told that if Mamá had a fall, we should leave her where she was, since moving her might cause more pain. Aches in her muscles and her joints. We rushed her to the hospital, EEGs, CAT scans, MRI scans, three weeks of tests before she was discharged with a prescription for clobazam and magnesium valproate, which, when the seizures did not abate, was changed to topiramate and clonazepam, though these have not done much good either.
The diagnosis states the patient’s condition as “medial temporal lobe epilepsy,” brought about, according to the doctors, by the side effects of chemotherapy. Six years ago, Mamá had surgery for endometrial cancer. I knew about it, but Diego didn’t. In fact, Diego still thinks Mamá’s epilepsy came out of nowhere.
Epilepsy, or seizure disorder, I was told, is characterized by periodic disturbances in electrical brain activity, and in Mamá’s case, the area most affected is the temporal lobe. This is the area that processes memory and emotion, controls moods, and is central to hearing and language recognition. Seizures occur more frequently if the patient suffers physical or emotional stress or lack of sleep, though there are other causes.
In Mamá’s case, an epileptic crisis or seizure presents by physical collapse accompanied by auras, which can be olfactory, sensory, or visual. Then come the tonic-clonic contractions, convulsions that can last from one to three minutes and are followed by difficulties with speech, coordination, and the ability to walk. Mamá doesn’t remember what happens during the seizure, nor understand what is being said. This may be followed by confusion, headaches, exhaustion, and sleep.
I learned all this by heart, went to visit Diego at the barracks, explained it to him. I told him he had to come home as soon as he could get leave. He didn’t understand, he said, it wasn’t possible. He asked if Mamá was a vegetable. Was she a vegetable? Complete bullshit! If—given what I’d told him—the temporal lobes control memories, emotions, and moods, surely Mamá would have falls all the time? A person who can’t remember is surely agitated or constantly exposed to some imminent emotion, whatever the nature of that emotion. Disgust or joy or sadness or hope or something.
He carried on talking. His outlook on things has always been complicated and confusing. He told me emotion and memory was a daunting subject. I didn’t see it like that. I didn’t see anything, actually, but what seemed terrible to me were the falls. The jolt, the blood, the illness, the debility, and, to some extent, the humiliation. One moment you’re here, then something happens and you move into dangerous territory, as though exiled, forced to march from the land of the healthy to the land of the sick. This, surely, was the danger—not memory or emotion.
I told Diego that there was no medical basis for his hypothesis. He insisted that I didn’t understand, that if Mamá’s seizures were triggered by memory and emotion, then, to save herself, she would have to stupefy herself with drugs. In order not to feel, not to remember. But if a person stops feeling, stops remembering, then what are they, huh? What are they? he said. Hey, I said, hey, what the hell is wrong with you? We were silent for a moment, then Diego said that things were going to get much worse.
And they did. Mamá continued to fall, and I had to give up my job. She forbade any of her pupils or the teachers at her school from coming to visit her. Sometimes, she might have eight seizures in a week, and we could not avoid all of them. The falls are grinding her down, they make her forget the words she needs to say, wants to say, but sometimes she has flashes of memory, like trances, in which she recalls some forgotten incident from her childhood or adolescence or from mine or Diego’s childhood. Remembering these things makes her happy, but I know there’s nothing to be happy about. I know it’s better for her to remember nothing, to have no reason to remember. And then, at some point, things got even worse. We started getting anonymous phone calls and my father fired René from the hotel, which piled more responsibility onto me.
I carried on working as I always had. I told Mamá I wanted to give up my job and stay home to look after her. Mamá told me not to. I know that I can’t, but I told her that I wanted to, so she would know. I carry on putting food on the table, splitting myself in three, in four. I don’t watch television, and though I’m twenty-three, I don’t do anything for fun. Not that I can think of anything that might be fun. The one thing that has changed is that, in recent months, I’ve developed a reflex reaction to sounds. Even at the hotel, where I know my mother can’t be, I flinch at every thud, every creak.
After a number of falls, a body sometimes sounds like a sack of cement, like thick hardback dictionaries, but sometimes it also sounds like a glass or a porcelain vase shattering. I am like a frightened cat. A fork clattering on the floor makes my hair stand on end. But I don’t say a word, I bite my tongue. I think I’m a good daughter, and a good person in general.