According to Mamá, whoever is phoning says I’m a dyke. They say: Your daughter is a lesbian. They say: Your husband is a communist informant. They say: Your daughter is a pervert; this is the girl you raised. They say: Your son is going to kill your husband. They say: This is your last year on earth. The voice, according to Mamá, is shrill, impersonal, the voice of someone who knows. The voice sometimes cackles and adds: I’m inside your head, you dyke, inside your head.
Mamá says that Migdalia is making the calls, but I don’t think she really believes that. She says it to have something to say, to have someone to blame. The idea of not having someone to blame is becoming unbearable. I know for a fact it’s not Migdalia. I’ll come home from work, see Migdalia chatting to a neighbor in the street, go inside only for Mamá to scream that she has just had another call. So it can’t possibly be Migdalia. But Mamá insists it is.
I understand her fixation. It’s unfair, but I understand it. Migdalia was her best friend. Although, actually, when it comes down to it, according to my very personal criteria, there’s no such thing as a best friend, no one is anyone’s friend, everyone is alone. Migdalia and Mamá were alone too, but, for a time, they pretended not to be. A long time, in fact. Years spent feigning friendship, love, understanding.
They are neighbors, both secondary school teachers, both working at the same school. Migdalia teaching physics and Mamá Spanish. They used to go to work together and come home together. Each carrying a handbag, each wearing a gray or black skirt and a print blouse. They gossiped and plotted together. They shared secrets and inanities. It seemed to me that they were always willing to listen to each other. People say that’s the meaning of friendship. Listening to a friend, paying attention, even—or especially—when what the friend is saying does not concern you.
But then, two years ago, televisions and telephones were allocated to each neighborhood committee, one television and one telephone to be shared by an entire building. Neighbors vied for them based on their qualities and their merits. People said they were a reward for behavior; actually, they were the opposite: the seeds of destruction. Rumors quickly began to circulate, and that was the end of everything, because stairwell gossip is a cancer. You start to hear it and day by day you watch as it spreads, and the whole building becomes like a moldering potato rotting in the vegetable crate.
Migdalia stopped coming round, or did so only when she had to. Sometimes she visited just to keep up appearances, the same reason Mamá still visited her sometimes. She would ask to borrow a cup of sugar, a bottle of cold water, or some ice, and Mamá would ask for a few onions, a head of garlic, who knows what. But all this went on because they didn’t know how to live any other way. By that point, their friendship was like a car that continues to coast for a few meters after the engine is turned off. How can a friendship break down between two people who will carry on living next door to each other forever, who will carry on seeing each other, bumping into each other to their dying day? I think they reacted in the most cowardly way possible: by stopping talking to each other. I think they stopped talking at precisely the moment when they needed to talk, but I don’t know, the honest truth is I don’t really know. All I know is that, while the time to patch things up came and went, they were looking the other way.
Then came the fateful day and I felt that, even if we were awarded the television, it was already too late, the damage was done. I was twenty at the time. Diego, fifteen. What difference would a television make at that stage? Everyone in the building gathered in the street at eight thirty, after the news bulletin. We gathered around the steps. A flag fluttered from the balcony. The delegate tasked with explaining the situation asked us to come closer. He stood in the middle, clutching a sheaf of papers. We were a peaceable building, as far as that goes. Why had we been favored? I wondered. Every family that did not have a television or a telephone longed for a television and a telephone. I didn’t, Diego didn’t, but Mamá did. There was so much fear that every face was frozen, as though set in plaster, as the delegate spoke. This balm that was a television and a telephone, this—I don’t know—this privilege, was about to destroy the solidarity that poverty had managed to foster, the bond of penury.
The television and the telephone would be allocated to the family unit that had accumulated the most credits in the various five-yearly assessments. Assessments determined which family was least introverted, which had the most gregarious members, those most likely to greet their neighbors or call to them from their balcony. The reason for their conversation did not matter: it could be because they were draining the water tank, or because you needed some salt or a bar of soap. This was an important point. Which families were most in need? Which needed to ask more of their neighbors? It was important to ensure that all families lacked something; this was a guarantee of altruism.
Families were also classified according to which had the poorest ancestors. Which had most suffered throughout history? The credits accumulated by the living were not enough. If a family could prove that a great-grandparent had died of starvation during some nineteenth-century redistribution of land, or something of the kind, that family had tickets for the jackpot.
We’d heard stories of how the allocation worked from other buildings. A neighbor would nominate someone. Another neighbor would nominate someone else. After that, although people tried to remain civil, the battle between the supporters of one or the other neighbor gradually escalated. The nominees tried to stay above the fray but, obviously, each was feverishly keeping a tally of friends and enemies. At some point, someone would make an offensive remark, someone else would insult them back, and before long everyone’s dirty laundry was being aired in public, as though the neighbors had spent their whole lives silently passing judgment so that they could settle scores on the day the television and the telephone finally arrived.
There were reports of fights at some neighborhood meetings, hair pulling among the women, brawls among the men. But the quarrels where people actually came to blows were not very serious. In most cases, neighbors patched up their differences and some made their television available to everyone in the building. The telephone had previously fulfilled this function. It was allocated to a particular family, but the family had to draw up a schedule of when the device was available to their neighbors, preferably late at night. Although in our building, nobody ever wanted to use it, and even now no one uses it. Why? So there was no bloodshed. So that it was all kept inside, like a spreading bruise that became infected, silently eating away at us.
The delegate concluded his speech. We all looked at each other in silence until someone loudly cleared his throat. Good, said the delegate, let’s have a nomination. No one pointed out that our building was different from all the others, even though we had been through the same things, but it was. No one spoke, no one said a word, five minutes of communal silence. People who had spent their lives talking each other’s ears off were suddenly dumb as fence posts. A nomination, the delegate said again. Migdalia spoke up: Mariana and Armando, she said.
In how many buildings would a rival nominate her opponent? Well, Migdalia did just that. There was an unwritten rule observed by candidates of genuine merit, that they shouldn’t nominate anyone but wait for others to put forward nominations. Some people are more worthy than others, and everyone always knows whose role it is to propose, and whose to wait to be nominated. Migdalia was not supposed to propose; she was supposed to wait to be nominated. Instead she nominated Mamá.
My father told Diego to take down the flag. Everyone went back to their apartment. Migdalia and Mamá haven’t spoken to each other in the last three years. They haven’t uttered a word to each other. It didn’t seem to bother Mamá, not until she started to get ill, but I know that Migdalia is not the person making the anonymous calls. Actually, we all know. I suspect Mamá actually knows who is doing it but doesn’t want to say.
I wonder about that, although to tell the truth, I wonder about a lot of other things. Where Mamá’s illness came from, for example. Whether I enjoy my job. Whether I like having to shoulder the responsibility for everything at home. What my parents were like before they were my parents. But, most of all, the big question, the million-dollar question, the question that has haunted me my whole life, one that sounds preposterous yet somehow isn’t: Why do neither of them eat chicken, in any form, and why have they never talked about it?
Never means never, right? They never eat chicken, and they never talk about the fact that they don’t. Never.