Armando puts his arm around my shoulder, hugs me, and says sorry. I accepted his apology because he is a man in disgrace and because there are certain moments in this movie—I won’t deny it—in which I remember him fondly. You know a man is dying and already his fate leaves you indifferent. You won’t save him, you won’t deal the death blow, and so you let him go, you let him feel a little better about himself, because what is happening to him now is a process, only in his imagination will anything ever happen to him.
I also want to say something to you all, and to ask you something, my mother says, but I’ll wait until María gets here. My sister has just finished her shift at the hotel, probably robbing the place right and left, she’s good at that. Only the three of us were home. I had just come back from military service. There was no piñata, no paper hats, no straws, no strawberry cake, no old friends, no uncles, no cousins, no gift-wrapped presents, not even a special dinner waiting for me.
There was my mother, contorted, limp as an old rag, deathly pale. There was my father, staggering, a shadow of himself. There was me, with my army uniform in a cardboard box. There were the telephone and the television. Outside, it was raining, the sky was leaden. It seemed like an afternoon of revelations. My father had apologized. My mother confessed that she had something to say. And so did I. I had gone over and over the speech with which I hoped to free myself from the useless burden I had needlessly taken upon myself.
I’ve got something to confess: I’m the one who made the phone calls. I’d like to talk about a delicate subject. Listen. I don’t know what I was doing, I wasn’t myself, life as a soldier is hard. Sometimes, you get bored, you know, there’s nothing to do, it started out as a joke, you call one day, you say something, you want to stop but you can’t, you’re having fun, you feel more positive. Please, sit down, I’d like to broach a subject but I’m not sure how to begin. The fake voice, Mother, that was me. Remember those strange phone calls? You remember them? They weren’t really that important? Good. Well, in any case, it was me, and I’m deeply sorry. You remember them? They were serious? They left you traumatized? All right, I’m the one responsible. You racked your brain trying to work out who was calling? It was me, no one else, it wasn’t one of your neighbors. I’m not proud of myself, but I did it. I thought about keeping my mouth shut, I thought about saying nothing, but—you know what?—I’m not going to be silent, it just makes me feel like more of a shit than I do anyway. I’m the one who made the phone calls and said all those insulting things. You already knew? I don’t have to say anything? What are you asking me? To shut up? Listen, I’ll get this over quickly. The phone calls? I made them when I was on sentry duty. There’s no easy way to say this, I need you to listen to me and not shout or insult me until I’m finished talking, I need you to listen to what I have to say right to the end. You go mad cooped up in those places, you don’t have any friends, you can’t trust anyone, there’s just an emptiness and an avalanche of time that falls on you with every step.
I couldn’t bring myself to speak up. We were sitting in the living room, Armando asking me things and me answering without taking the time to internalize them. My mother had barely reacted when I arrived. On the way home, I had imagined coming through the door and my mother rushing to throw her arms around me, covering me with kisses, shedding a few tears. I had hoped, with a little luck, for the reaction to my homecoming to be as unsentimental as possible, something that would not make my act of confession more difficult, but now that I had my wish, I found I did not want my mother’s lack of emotion, her vacant stare, her reserve. I longed for her warmth, for some little gesture of affection or joy that I was home, however hard it would later be for me to break free.
I asked Armando when he was giving the car back and he said in two days, after my mother’s medical checkup. We were going to drive to the hospital in the Nissan. All of us? I asked and he said yes. Have you any objections to coming with us? he asked. No, I said, none, we’ll all go to the checkup. I couldn’t remember ever having been in a car with Armando, except that day when he got it into his head to drive us to the beach. Your mother wants to go to the hospital on her own, Armando said, we argued about it earlier today. You can’t go on your own, I said, and my mother barely blinked. She’s gone through the treatment more or less on her own, Armando said, but there’s been no improvement.
Perhaps my mother’s confession would be significant or dramatic enough to blunt or neutralize the effects of mine, I thought without much hope. Armando did most of the talking, he had already apologized and was rubbing our faces in his affability. I was starting to regret having forgiven him. I should have hung on to my forgiveness and used it as a bargaining chip, a pardon for a pardon.
A little later, María arrived back from work, sopping wet. She kissed us all. She said how happy she was to see me home. She set some parcels on the kitchen table and went to her room to change her clothes. I felt an overwhelming urge to follow her but decided to hold still. My sister came back into the living room, glanced at us, glanced at my mother, told us to keep an eye on her, and started putting the groceries in the fridge.
Now that María’s here, I said to my mother, what did you have to tell us? My mother, from the balcony, mumbled something that I don’t think anyone heard and then said she had to go to the bathroom and would be right back. Rain was still pattering on the windows and, above this noise, some seconds later, a muffled thud, an unmistakable sound, one that I had never heard, but had only to hear once to know what it was and where it came from.
We all ran to her. Armando and I looked at each other and I was about to let out a hysterical scream when María roughly pushed us aside and elbowed her way through. Go away, she said. María looked at me with contempt. She knew how to deal with this crisis and was happy to brazenly rub my nose in the fact, knowing that I could do nothing, since this was hardly the moment to criticize her arrogance and her bossiness. I’m a better daughter than you are a son, she seemed to say with every helpful gesture. Saying things without saying them is what my sister does best.
Supporting Mother’s head, she raised her a little so she could breathe more easily. She laid her in the cramped confines of the bathroom. She stretched out her legs and arms to allow the convulsions free rein. A deafening clatter of limbs, as though my mother were a submachine gun. Then, for a moment, she seemed to die.
A gentle, peaceful expression came over her face. A deep groove stitched her lips together. Her cheekbones were jagged, her eyes spent, her eyelids swollen, like pouches filled with dirty water. And yet she wasn’t dead. Her left foot twitched continually, moving of its own volition, like the severed tail of a lizard. On her forehead, just above the right eyebrow, there was a trickle of blood.
No one said anything. Only the objects seemed to scream, in dramatic tones. Tiny mouths, inaudible to human ears, opened in the walls and in the mirror. Blood on the rim of the toilet, blood and water in the washbasin, blood in the gaps between the floor tiles, blood, now black, on her blouse and her glasses. Drops, blotches, pools, violent disproportions. The object imperiously demanded to be cleaned.
I felt ashamed by the fact that I was not the one bleeding. The blood was sticky and gruesome. Its rhythm slow. There was something reptilian about its pulse. No spurts, no sudden sprays, no gushing arteries. The horror of blood that seems unaware of itself and still slithers on.
Worse than the sight of the blood was the smell. It made me retch and the retching sent me into a rage. We still could not move my mother from where she lay. Rage made me start cleaning up the blood with a scrubbing brush, and carry on scrubbing even after it was clean, as though I were not simply trying to wash away the dirt but to rub out the present moment that was already becoming definitive. The wound did not close, the eyelids, the cheekbones, the mouth did not return to their normal state, and still the smell lingered. After a while, I stopped scrubbing.
Armando lifted my mother to her feet and she attempted a few steps, but her drunken legs were shaking. I looked at her beautiful varicose veins, her ankles, shapely in spite of everything, the millimetric moment when her heels made contact with the floor as she attempted to propel herself, to take another step, to project herself forward, as though the heels were the whole person and the rest of the person was nothing more than a dead weight carried on the heels.
Her tongue was tied in knots, a fifty-year-old woman who was starting to behave like an animal nosing around. She asked nonsensical questions, stammering constantly. Is this what it means to be young again?
She clutched her head and started saying that it hurt. What had happened? We arrived at the clinic and laid her on a metal gurney. Everywhere there were boxes with different stickers, nebulizers, tweezers, gloves, antiseptic creams. My sister reeled off a series of words that I realized I would have to learn: clobazam, magnesium valproate, clonazepam, lamotrigine.
They put a needle in her vein, sutured the wound. The needle moved through the skin, the thread closed up the gash. There was a swelling on her collarbone, a purple contusion. She had scars in almost every place it is possible to have a scar, and also in places I didn’t think possible. My mother as a threadbare shirt that should have been thrown out, like a piece of long-outmoded clothing that someone still loves and so continues to mend, patching the holes, resewing the buttons, adjusting the collar, taking in the sleeves. Some clothes are like that, comfortable, irreplaceable, clothes you can never bring yourself to get rid of.
She began to regain consciousness and become aware of where she was. My sister and Armando sitting on the edge of the gurney, me standing, pacing up and down. No one else showed any concern for my mother. The pace of the clinic was not what I’d expected. I realized that a sick person is conspicuous when surrounded by healthy people but does not stand out among other sick people.
There was a crippled old man with one arm shorter than the other. He took short, stiff steps. His pain was faster than he was. When pain begins to reach us before we reach ourselves, I thought, that’s the point when we begin to die. There was a distraught woman begging for some pills. There was a teenager with asthma. There was another woman who burst into the clinic screaming, who seemed to be known to all the staff. I didn’t like her. She thought her suffering was greater than everyone else’s. She talked about medications and diagnoses as though she were a doctor, but it was obvious that she wasn’t.
I went on looking at my mother, her pretty black moccasins with their buckles, like two vinyl hands cupping her feet. I looked at the lines of stitches over her right eyebrow and thought I saw, instead of a suture, one of those blue ties girls used to wear to school back when my mother was a little girl. They told us we could leave, and told us not to miss our appointment at the hospital.
The insufferable woman who had delusions that she was a doctor carried on desperately drawing attention to herself. I took my mother by the shoulders and walked behind, supporting her as she took small, agonizing steps toward the exit, where we summoned a horse and cart to take us home. On the way back, Armando supported my mother. I talked with my sister.