In 1970, mother and father were married. There aren’t many photos left of that wedding, only those mother wanted to last, which are still in exactly the same place mother left them: inside a box inside a dresser inside a dining room that was almost always cast in semi-darkness. In those photographs, mother appears happy, with a clear smile and twinkling eyes. Father, handsome but serious, looks distant, thinking about something that is not happening there at that moment. I imagine I still remember the day mother tore up the other photos. I was only a baby and lacked the precise words to ask her why she was tearing herself up like this. Nor did I have the sufficient capacity of comprehension to fathom the meaning of the anger and sadness that had possessed her.
She was sitting on the floor of the dining room. The doors and drawers of the lacquered wood dresser father had brought back from one of his trips were open. Mother was sadly and irritably destroying letters and photos. On the carpet were small piles of onion skin paper and bits of broken bodies. Father’s anatomy had been especially carefully dissected. Nearby, within reach, as if affording them protection, she placed the photographs and letters she had decided to keep. She would later deposit the letters in the chest of drawers in her bedroom, alongside her underwear, but the photos would remain confined to the box inside the dresser inside the dining room that was almost always in semi-darkness.
I don’t know where I’d come from – perhaps I’d been for a walk with Felisa, my nurse – or why I entered the room. All I remember is mother painfully purifying memory, breaking the delicate lace in which memories are woven. It was as if she were rubbing out the lines traced on the map of a territory that was far too dangerous to forget the return path to sanity. That said, I’m well aware the photos she would remember best were precisely the ones she destroyed. And the words that would torment her most and she would try to banish with a flick of her hand, as if taking a swipe at a fly, were precisely the ones she pretended had never been spoken or written. I don’t recall what I did after that, or why. I just happened to be there at that exact moment so I could see and record in my mind the image of mother tearing herself to pieces.
Or trying to put herself back together.
The memory served in time to arouse my curiosity and a wish to reconstruct mother’s sentimental biography. I never managed to do this, I never felt confident enough with her or my uncle and aunt to ask them questions. Besides, the constant struggle I’d had with her ever since I was a child discouraged me from showing the slightest bit of interest, even though the memory of that afternoon in the dining room would eventually help me to view her with a certain amount of compassion.
It’s also true I’m in the habit of forgetting things very quickly. I think I’m only really interested in questions. Answers, when I have them, bore me. In the end, I accepted the reality offered by the narrative I myself constructed in order to comprehend certain behaviour that would allow me to survive and understand my family. My family wasn’t much: Uncle Cándido, Aunt Natalia and Miss Felisa. Ramón as well. I always talked about Ramón in the present, fool that I was, but he’d already left the day I came across mother sitting in the semi-darkness of the room. Had he still been there, things would have been totally different, because mother would not have been so hurt or furious.
Ramón liked to rummage around inside the dresser and show me sheaves of letters grouped together and tied with silk ribbons according to the year they’d been written. We also used to rummage around inside the box of photos. In the fragrant, dark space of the dresser, mother kept bars of perfumed soap, delicious assortments of sweets, and the satin and velvet boxes with the few pieces of jewellery that had belonged to grandmother. Ramón despised the letters in which he recognized father’s handwriting and ignored the photos where father gazed at us with his beautiful, ever absent, blue eyes. He would start muttering whenever he saw this man giving us a forced smile in places we’d never visited, with people we’d never seen, and accompanied by women with exotic faces and smooth, long, black hair. Ramón didn’t like those photographs or letters.
Nor did mother, it seemed.
Aunt Natalia, as tall, slim and elegant as I remembered her, was waiting for me at the airport. Despite being in her sixties, she insisted on looking young by wearing tight-fitting clothes and having blonde, shoulder-length hair with white highlights. She blew me a confused but effusive kiss when she spotted me behind the glass doors, waiting for my luggage. I waved back. When I came through, she embraced me and wanted to take my small suitcase on wheels.
‘Is this all you have?’ she asked disappointedly.
‘This, and a rucksack.’
She didn’t even bother glancing at the rucksack on my back, it can’t have been a pleasant sight for her exquisite eyes. I realized my appearance also irritated her a little. It was summer, I was wearing an old pair of jeans, a camisole and black, leather sandals. She tried to apologize for me: ‘I see you’re tired, it must have been a long trip, you university types don’t worry much about your appearance.’ That’s right, I thought, and took her hand as I used to when I was little and walked beside her. I only wanted her to calm down. She was nervous, we hadn’t seen each other for three years: I’d abandoned the city in June 2004, and it was now the beginning of July 2007. I must confess I also found it strange to be returning home, to the city, and seeing my family again. Confronting mother once more. Natalia squeezed my hand and lifted it to her lips so she could kiss it. I liked this gesture and felt protected.
‘Don’t worry, girl, everything will be fine.’ In the end, she was the one trying to calm me down.
I think I’ve only ever done two good things for mother in my life: one was leaving home when she asked me. She asked me the day I turned nineteen. Her present to me was a monthly allowance of 1,500 euros, which I would receive on condition, as soon as the term was over, I found somewhere else to live. My uncle and aunt were appalled by this drastic decision and immediately offered to take me in. But I’d already made my own plans: I would study marine biology, I had the best academic record in the year and a desperate wish to go and study grey whales far away from mother and as close as possible to the attainment of my desires. I once loved someone with a heart that weighed at least a thousand pounds, who insisted on finding out how to turn into a whale. He would say, ‘Whales sing, whales breathe underwater through their lungs, whales pump the milk of their teats into the mouths of their young, who are born from their mothers’ tails.’ I knew little more than this about whales when I began to study them. Mother also loved this creature who was half liquid, half gaseous, but as solid as the pillars of a building, driven crazy by an imagination that couldn’t distinguish between reality and fiction, and with an enormous heart that only knew how to love mother and me: Ramón. The loss of Ramón was undoubtedly the greatest pain mother ever suffered. My loss, however, was the greatest relief for mother’s greatest pain. Coming back when she was ill, according to Natalia, was the second nice thing I would do for her.
Or for myself, I wasn’t quite sure.
When we sat down in the car, Aunt Natalia – an enormous, pale strawberry smile – thanked me, took my face in her hands and squeezed it as if I were still a baby. She pinched my cheeks and recommended a moisturizing cream for the care of my skin. She then apologized for me again: ‘Your skin’s all dry, you spend the whole day in salt water, under that Mexican sun that makes even the fish shrivel.’ This made me laugh. I told her I was only a student, I went to class, collaborated with a team of whale spotters and occasionally helped out at a vast aquarium where dolphins were bred in captivity. Aunt Natalia searched in her handbag for a pack of cigarettes.
‘But you do know how to dive, don’t you?’
‘Yes!’
I don’t know why my aunt was so excited I could dive. Perhaps she sensed an unusual freedom in the ability to move about underwater with a bottle of oxygen tied to your back. She started the car, and I was grateful to her for remaining quiet on the journey towards the city. I felt alert. On the plane, I had been assailed more than once by the fear I would lack courage and want to turn around. But this didn’t happen. I followed Natalia’s lead and noticed the intervening years had coated my skin in something impermeable to nostalgia. I could see, but not feel. The images passed through my eyes and slid down to my feet. I sensed at some point my feet would start to fidget, as if they were walking on nails or steel tips. But for now everything was OK: I didn’t want to feel and felt nothing. As we were about to enter the city, I turned to Aunt Natalia and asked her if she knew, if she knew I was coming.
‘But, girl, it’s only your mother!’ There was a little annoyance in her words, as if she were fed up of repeating them. And she was fed up. She’d acted as an intermediary between my mother and me a thousand times, when I was still a baby, then a girl, then a teenager and a university student. Later, when I left, she would phone me at least twice a week to find out how I was and to tell me about mother and my family. I gazed at her with tenderness, trying to cling to her strength. I remembered the day, barely a month earlier, when she’d rung me to ask me to come. I was on the beach, drinking tequila with Kazuo, a Japanese guy who’d just arrived in the bay, like so many others, to record whale songs. Ángela was there as well, a teacher from the Canary Islands researching jellyfish for the University of California.
My aunt’s voice was familiar to me from every place I lived in after mother asked me to leave. It accompanied me everywhere like my favourite books, the old, decrepit marine Kent Miller, which had once belonged to my brother, and a brief, concise photo album. The old soldier Miller was missing a leg, my books had become a little worse for wear on every journey, while the photo album had grown a little fatter with every journey, but Aunt Natalia’s voice remained the same – songful and prominent, at times unstable – and from its tone you could tell the colour of the sky at the other end of the line. But, when she had rung a month earlier, her voice was serious, as if dressed in a thick, woollen overcoat. It was the same serious voice with which she had informed me, two years earlier, that mother had taken the irrevocable decision to shut herself in her room for ever. Mother was in the habit of taking terribly drastic decisions, which were in no way open to debate. It took her a long time to decide, she pondered, studied all the possible outcomes in the utmost secrecy and finally uttered a couple of words, at which point the Earth would change direction. It was a decision like this she took when, given Uncle Cándido’s passivity in charge of the ironmongery, she agreed to expand the family business and set up a shop with electrical goods which, in time, would turn into a chain of establishments specializing in household supplies. Furniture, carpets, bed linen, crockery… The kind of shop where customers could find conical jugs, methacrylate sugar dispensers with flies trapped in the lid, chairs that imitated the painful chairs in my grandparents’ house, towels from Italy, Indian blankets and copies of African statues. But in between her decisions, which made her into a brilliant, triumphant businesswoman, mother could be monstrous or turn into a completely depressive, utterly vulnerable being. Whenever she fell into one of these impenetrable, inconsolable states, Aunt Natalia and I would say, a little cruelly, that she was ‘trapped in the spin drier’. Thinking about mother inside a spin drier made us laugh, made us feel close, and this stopped us succumbing to despair. In truth, these were unbearable moments for all the family.
When she decided to confine herself to her room, she had just turned fifty-five. For a while now, the shops had functioned without the need for her help and were doing really rather well. So it was time, as had happened throughout her life, for her to fall into one of those painful whirlpools. When she shut herself in her room, she was defeated, she wanted to be taken to a place where a destiny was waiting. It didn’t matter what one: mother always required a destiny to force her to act, to abandon the voluntary exile from herself she went into at a time when neither death nor the people she loved moved her in the slightest.
I was searching for questions that would make me enthusiastic about life, but she desperately needed a mission, a precise, concrete obligation, something to justify the ten fingers on her hands, the joints of her bones, and the tenderness that at some distant point had congealed in the honeycombs of her belly. Here, in life, she seemed not to have found it in years. I imagine, when she shut herself in her room, for some time now mother had been unravelling the lace of memory it took her so long to make; and the day I came across her sitting in the semi-darkness of the dining room, she was starting to come apart at the seams, to unravel herself and erase the paths that might bring her back. I think it was a totally voluntary act, like that of suicides who take the decision to kill themselves not at the height of their suffering, but in their most lucid moments. Before tearing father to pieces on the floor of the dining room, however, things had happened.
The loss of her destiny, for example.
