TELL ME SOMETHING NICE
When her mother sent her to have a haircut, Ani didn’t protest, either before or afterwards. She wasn’t a disobedient girl. Besides, that Sunday, in the afternoon session at the cinema, they were showing a film she wanted to see. So she swapped her beautiful locks for the chance to watch The Snow Princess. It struck her as a fair deal. Seated in the enormous barber chair, she allowed a large man to dispossess her of her locks without uttering a word. She limited herself to listening to one of those dumb programmes on the radio and attempting to read the aftershave labels and brand names of the hairdryers: Ciba-Geigy, Acqua Vitae… The letters were a bit fuzzy. She had to close her eyes and start again, as in a game. Only if she frowned could she read them.
When the man had finished, she thanked him politely and bent down to pick up the hair that lay scattered all over the floor at the foot of the barber chair.
‘My mother will come and collect me,’ she said simply, and sat down to wrap the hair in a parcel of newspaper.
In the sitting room at home, Ani lies on the carpet, with her chin in her hands, turning the pages of a story. From time to time, she looks up and gazes for a while at her sister, who is sitting on the sofa, talking with her boyfriend on the phone. ‘Now there’s a beautiful woman,’ thinks Ani, ‘and her hair is really nice.’ While Ani is watching her, her sister combs it with a pencil, curls it, holds it in her hand and brings it to her lips, without realizing what she’s doing, so she can kiss it. ‘It’s the same colour as mine.’ Ani pulls out a hair and examines it to make sure. ‘Yep, the same colour.’ Her sister laughs because of something she’s been told on the phone. Ani laughs as well, even though she hasn’t heard it.
‘Come on, Ani!’ says her mother, poking her head around the door. ‘Come on, or you’ll be late for the cinema!’
Ani snorts and sinks her head back into the story.
‘Are you listening, Ana María?’ shouts her mother from the kitchen. ‘You still have to comb your hair. It’s a real mess!’
‘I’m coming,’ shouts Ani.
But before she can make up her mind to move, her mother enters the sitting room with a comb.
‘Come here and let me tidy your hair a little. You won’t arrive on time. And don’t bring your eyes so close when you’re reading, I’ve already told you.’
Before leaving the sitting room, Ani takes one last, furtive look at her sister and sees the expression she has: serious, hard. Beautiful.
‘I look like a boy.’
As her mother handles the wet comb, Ani searches for herself in the mirror. She moves her head.
‘If you keep on moving your head, I won’t be able to comb you.’
‘What colour are your eyes?’
Her mother looks at herself in the mirror, peering over Ani’s shoulder, and says:
‘I don’t know. What colour are they?’
‘I think they’re brown. Brown and a tiny bit green.’
‘Come on,’ she speaks softly. ‘Enough chit-chat. All week long saying you want to see that film, and now you’re going to be late.’
As her mother goes to fetch her coat from the hallway, Ani practises a hard gesture in front of the mirror. She thinks this is her sister’s secret. She knows her sister is beautiful, but she’s still too young to understand why.
MXIORTNT, Intx, nrabpdr, qsprqedfr… The consonants accumulated capriciously in the middle of a nebula. They trembled like objects behind a curtain of steam, and Ani couldn’t make them out. All they were was a confused line, sometimes broken, sometimes continuous. She squirmed in her seat, but no, even like this she couldn’t distinguish them clearly. Then, as the optician added lenses and adjusted them, the outline of the consonants became sharper, until suddenly she could see them with a clarity that amazed her. First, she opened wide her mouth, and then she smiled from behind the optical apparatus.
‘What can you see?’
‘Aliens’ names,’ replied Ani.
‘Tell me, what does it say?’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Ani in her politest voice, ‘but I don’t know how to pronounce it. It’s very difficult.’
The optician took hold of Ani’s head in both hands and placed it back inside the apparatus.
‘Don’t move. You don’t have to pronounce it, you just have to read each letter.’
‘M, x, o…’ Ani started saying, in a school voice this time. ‘R, n… t… Hey!’ she shouted with a laugh. ‘You’re covering one of my eyes!’
‘I know. I’m doing it on purpose. Now carry on.’
‘Oh, I see… I, n, t, l…’
When Ani got home, she was very content. The optician had given her a bag of sweets and a piece of paper, so they could make her some nice new glasses. Ani had it in her satchel, like a glowing school report. She wanted to show it to everybody. But her mother and sister were arguing. Her mother, wearing an apron and holding a glass she was washing, kept going from the kitchen to the sitting room to shout at her sister every two seconds. Her sister, on the other hand, was ignoring her and carried on reading a magazine, seated on the sofa. Ani stood in the hallway and put the optician’s piece of paper away.
She realized they weren’t going to pay her the necessary amount of attention, and surprises are far too valuable to throw them away at the earliest opportunity.
Ani is at the back of the class, watching everything from behind her new spectacles. While the other children flick through the book of natural sciences and chew on their pencils, trying to understand, she plays at reading names on the map at the other end of the classroom. She can make out the names of oceans very well. They’re the ones she always discerns best: PACIFIC OCEAN, ATLANTIC OCEAN, INDIGO OCEAN (she imagines this one must be a special blue colour). That said, she can’t read the names of countries quite so well. They’re a bit small. She can only make out RUSSIA, CHINA and AUSTRALIA. Her eyes continue roaming while her ears pay limited attention to the hum of the teacher’s voice, which is almost as imperceptible as a fly. She can now finally distinguish the poster with MUSCLES OF THE HUMAN BODY and see the numbers written in chalk on the blackboard. She could see them a little bit before, but not when she was sitting at the back of the class. Now she is right at the back, wearing her nice new glasses, and this is something she experiences as an unexpected enlargement of her own private world.
At the school gates, her sister is waiting for her under an open umbrella. She’s wearing one of those transparent, plastic raincoats. It’s pouring down, and her locks are soaked, plastered against her forehead.
‘Did you come to pick me up because it was raining?’ asked Ani.
‘That. And also because I happened to be passing by.’
Ani was sorry she wasn’t wearing her glasses so her sister could see what they looked like but, on coming out of class, she’d taken them off because she was afraid that, if she started running as usual, they might fall and break. She’d stored them in the glasses case with the cleaning cloth, and now they were safe at the bottom of her satchel. To tell the truth, she liked the case almost as much as the spectacles.
Her sister looked around and said, ‘It’s raining a lot. We’d better go to that café and wait for it to clear up.’ She pointed towards a café at the far end of the avenue.
Ani took her sister’s hand and made as if to shelter under the umbrella. She’d thought to herself, ‘This time, I’m going to notice everybody who’s wearing glasses,’ which is why she sometimes dawdled and had to jump a little in order to catch up with her sister. It was amazing just how many people wore glasses.
Her sister ordered a coffee and a glass of water with ice, and a Pepsi for her. It was one of those cafés that resemble small waiting rooms in airports: on the other side of the large, soundproof windows, cars hurried home to be in time for lunch.
‘How was school today?’
‘OK. Are you having breakfast?’
‘I just got up.’
Ani sipped her soft drink noisily.
‘What are you looking at?’ asked her sister with a smile.
Ani was looking at her sister’s handbag. She’d have given anything to take a peek inside. She stretched her neck in a vain attempt to observe what was in there, but couldn’t see anything. She was sure there would be paints, her notebooks with phone numbers written in tiny handwriting, eyeliner pencils, keys, and a bunch of women’s secrets. ‘Women’s secrets,’ thought Ani, probably remembering the title of a film on TV, and the words made her feel the intoxication of being pronounced.
Her sister lit a cigarette. Ani watched the whole operation in fascination: the pack of Kleenex her sister took out of her handbag; the pack of cigarettes wrapped in cellophane, which had to be broken very carefully. Smoking was full of tiny, delicate details, decisive and sometimes sweet gestures. Her sister lifted the cigarette to her mouth with indolence or bit the end of a nail on her other hand. The smoke descended in tiny spirals that became entwined and disentwined in mid-air. Ani stared at her earrings, the ring on her little finger, her tights, all of this with a sincere devotion to beauty.
She would have told her sister how attractive she was, but she already knew this. All attractive women know this.
‘I didn’t sleep at home last night.’
Ani breathed in sharply and clasped her chin.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yep. Anyway, let me see what those glasses look like.’
Ani took the case out of her satchel, carefully opened the lock and removed the glasses.
‘Why do you keep them in that case?’ asked her sister with amusement.
‘Because I like it,’ laughed Ani.
‘Let’s see them then,’ said her sister, putting the glasses on her herself.
She smiled and said:
‘How funny! You look just like a schoolteacher.’
Her sister unlocked the front door. They were just putting the umbrella in the umbrella stand when their mother appeared at the end of the hallway. Ani went running over and grabbed hold of one arm. But their mother didn’t move. She remained rigid. Standing in the doorway, she stared at her elder daughter, who slowly removed the see-through raincoat, folded it and deposited it in the bathroom. She then went to her room, as majestic and defiant as always.
Ani looked at her mother. She was shaking her head and pursing her lips. Ani discovered some wrinkles around her mouth she hadn’t noticed before.
‘Your sister,’ she said, although she may not have been addressing Ani, ‘is heartless. One day, she’ll be the death of your mother, you’ll see,’ and she passed her hand over Ani’s head. A hand that smelled of detergent.
Ani stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, with her glasses on. She had positioned herself in a thousand ways, tried out all kinds of gestures and finally reached the conclusion these glasses made her look like a schoolteacher. That’s right, they were the glasses of a schoolteacher. There could be no doubt. She put them in the case and thought of somewhere to hide them. In the end, she placed them under the wardrobe in her bedroom. She’d already thought of what she was going to say: she would say she had lost them. She then opened her bedside table and, from under a few clothes, took out the parcel of newspaper she’d used to store her hair from the barber’s. She unwrapped it with great care, as if it were a meringue, and examined it for a while, feeling very content, lying on the bed.
Her hair would grow back. She was sure of that. What she didn’t know for certain is whether she’d be able to continue averting all those attacks against her beauty, her radiant beauty.
