Elena Knows Read online

  As the evening wore on everyone gradually went home. The souls of the just are in the hands of God and no torment shall touch them, Father Juan prayed before leaving, They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. Elena wanted to stay, foolishly staring at death. She didn’t want to go home to rest like a neighbour suggested, Come back tomorrow, Elena, in the morning when it’s light. As if the morning and the daylight were good things. What did that man know about what the morning meant to her. Forced to open her eyes once again. Daylight signals the start of the fight she has ahead of her, from the moment she tries to get out of bed, pulling on her ropes until her unresponsive back unsticks from the wrinkled sheet, resting both feet on the cold floor tiles, gathering momentum to stand up, dragging her feet towards the toilet where she’ll try to sit to urinate, lower her underwear, try to stand, stand, drag her underwear up, tangled, damp, try to straighten it, and then after that, after that, always after that, always a new challenge, as if the struggle just to go to the bathroom on her own in the morning weren’t enough. Every morning Elena wakes from sleep to be reminded once again, for yet another day, what awaits her. If it were up to her, she’d have stayed sitting in that chair, in that funeral parlour beside her daughter’s body, staring foolishly at death, and she’d pretend that that day, the one she was living, would never end. And that another would never begin. If it were up to her. But the funeral parlour employee insists she leave, saying, For security reasons the parlour is closed at night. Who holds vigil overnight, then? she asks. Times have changed, madam, we have to look out for the living.

  Very early the next morning, after her first pill, she was there again. The first two hours alone, but after nine o’clock the people who hadn’t been there the day before showed up, along with those who had been there the day before but who wanted to accompany her daughter to the hole in the ground where she would be deposited to rest eternally. At ten o’clock Father Juan returned to give the eulogy. The souls of the just are in the hands of God, and no torment shall touch them: they seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction but they are in peace, hallelujah, he said and everyone said Hallelujah. He’s on about the foolish again, she thought, and she wondered who the foolish people the Father was talking about were, if he meant her, who believed that her daughter had been murdered, or if he meant the people who said hallelujah like they said anything else they were told to repeat. Or was Father Juan the foolish one, calling her daughter a just soul even though he assured anyone who asked that Rita had committed suicide, an unpardonable sin for the kind of Christian souls he dealt in. Was Dr Benegas foolish, or Inspector Avellaneda, or the neighbours? Was Rita foolish, or was she? And who was just? May the Lord have the glory of our sister Rita, that he may take her with him to share in his Kingdom. To have eternal life. Elena would’ve liked to believe in glory, and in the kingdom, and in that eternal life. But just as she didn’t believe that we are all of dust and to dust we must return, neither she nor Rita could be taken in by a prayer, even if it was a priest praying it. Elena can pray street names, from last to first and first to last, and levodopa, dopamine, dopa, and the dethroned king and Herself and the naked emperor. Backward and forward as many times as necessary. But she can’t pray Father Juan’s prayer because she’d be lying. And even though it’s not her prayer and even though she rejects it, and even though she refuses to repeat it, she knows that she has it inside her, like Herself is inside her. That fucking whore illness. For Rita’s soul, so that the angels in heaven will keep her company. Hear us, Lord. For all the dead, so that they may be called to share the holy Kingdom. Hear us, Lord. For those who remain here on this earth, especially for her mother Elena, so that we may separate from Rita and help her on her departure with resignation and joy, with the same joy she expressed in her time here on this earth. What joy? Elena thought. Did her daughter express some joy around other people that she never saw? Was she joyful when she was around this priest, around Roberto Almada, who’s nodding at everything the priest says? Let us pray. Hear us, Lord. Elena didn’t know if the Lord would hear them, but she did hear them, and she didn’t feel any joy and nor did she recognise any in her daughter lying there cold, stiff, like an empty bag. She did feel resignation, yes, because she knows there’s no coming back from death, whether she’s placed in an oak coffin or one made of balsa wood, no matter who hears her prayers or whether the one hearing her prayers even exists, whether the entire neighbourhood weeps for her dead daughter or no one weeps at all, there’s no possible return.

  Shortly after the second pill it was time for the burial. A neighbour helped her get to her feet. The funeral parlour employee closed the wooden lid over Rita’s expressionless face and said in a loud voice, Would the gentlemen who would like to help with the casket please come up to the front? And Elena heard the gentlemen but she went anyway, she didn’t bother to ask for permission, she raised her left foot, moved it through the air and when it passed her right foot she set it down, and she repeated the movements, slowly, as best she could but determined, towards the front-left bronze handle of the coffin in which they’d take her daughter to the cemetery, in front of the handles gripped by Father Juan and Roberto Almada, in front of the ones held by the neighbour who gave her the box his 29-inch TV had come in, in front of Dr Benegas and the owner of the private car service on the corner of her street.

  They had to wait for Elena to take her place, to turn to face the exit, to straighten her body as much as Herself would allow, to align it with the coffin where Rita lay, to take a breath, and then, with her right hand, the one that responded better, to grab that handle, the first one on the left, the one that wasn’t held by any gentleman, and to carry her daughter’s casket to its final destination.

  7

  Sitting on the train that is taking her to the place she hopes to find, Elena watches the trees race past outside the window. She can rest for a moment as the stations slide by and her only task is to watch the trees chase each other in the opposite direction. Trees and houses blur together as if one tree were eating the other, one house eating the next, she thinks. Elena watches it all out of the corner of her eye, the only way she can. She accepts the punishment that Herself, her illness, imposes. At least her eyes are still loyal, although they’ve lost their expressiveness, they still look where Elena tells them to. But her neck has become stiff, hard as a rock, and it demands total submission. It reminds her who’s in charge. Elena’s body responds to Herself, forcing her to lower her gaze as if she’d done something wrong and should be ashamed. A few months ago she began to drool since her stooped position made it harder and harder to keep her saliva inside her mouth. Can you try not to drool on the table while we eat, Mum? A viscous drool that stains her blouses so that she always looks dirty. Every morning Rita gave her a clean and ironed handkerchief so that the drool wouldn’t drip all over the house. A handkerchief like the one she carries in her purse today, which she had to wash and iron herself. But her daughter’s attempts had been in vain; she’d find the damp handkerchief wadded up in random places around the house, on the TV set, the kitchen table, beside the telephone, displayed like a trophy or like a souvenir wherever Elena had set it down, without intending to offend her daughter. Isn’t there anything that disgusts you, Mum? Cockroaches, she answered. Rita also tried to address the problem of the drool using bibs, she found a box of ten for a good price, but even though they were disposable Elena refused to throw the used ones away. Did you see how much those things cost at the pharmacy? So she wore a damp and wrinkled blue paper bib smeared with unidentifiable food stains around her neck all day. She’ll probably never feel clean again; there’s no cure for her illness. There’s just palliative care, little tricks to help her do things she can’t do anymore, bibs, but no cure. She will be sick as long as she’s still alive
, and Rita still dead. Till her final days, days like the long one she has ahead of her now which won’t end until she finally takes the evening train home, alone.

  She travels on. Burzaco, Adrogué, Temperley, Lomas, Banfield, Lanús. Lanús, Banfield, Lomas, Temperley, Adrogué, Burzaco. She travels. She looks out of the corner of her left eye. The trees are still eating each other. Then out of the corner of her right eye towards the aisle as if she needed to make a symmetrical effort. Herself requires her to keep her head down, orders this act of contrition that the muscle enforces and Elena doesn’t argue with the order but she mocks it. She doesn’t laugh or even feel a sense of pride or bravery, she mocks it in order to survive. She’s drooling again. She rummages in her purse for the damp handkerchief which she balls up and wipes across her mouth. She looks up and arches her eyebrows in an expression of surprise but she’s not surprised, she’s merely trying to look forward by pointing her pupils in that direction. The muscles of her cheeks and eyebrows hurt when she does this. Elena wonders if cheeks are muscles, like the muscle that pulls her head down. She never wondered what kind of thing cheeks were. She’d never had to think about her neck, about her eyebrows, to wonder whether they were muscles or flesh, or just skin, and she doesn’t know what they are, but they hurt. Something hurts, some part of her body that wasn’t used to making this movement that Herself, the illness, forces her, Elena, to attempt, only to mock her. Because there’s no way she’s resigning herself to staring at the floor from now until she dies, she thinks. If necessary I’ll lie down on the ground and look up at the sky, at the ceiling even, just to defy her, to disobey her, and I’ll wait for death to come. Her own. One more act of defiance, perhaps the last. But before that, from now until she dies staring up at the sky, she’s going to have to find other ways to rebel if she doesn’t want to become a slave to that whore who’s in charge. Ropes to help her stand up from different places, more bibs to catch her saliva, foam neck braces to lift her chin, hard plastic neck braces when the foam ones aren’t enough, adapters for the toilet seat, more ropes, medications that help her swallow, that keep her from urinating on herself more than she already does, medications that make other medications more effective, or that keep the other medications from destroying her stomach, more ropes. That’s why, even though it hurts, she makes an effort with her cheeks and her eyebrows so that her eyes, still loyal, can look at something other than the floor. On the train she never looks straight ahead, it would be too much effort just to see the back of the seat in front of her. After the man who tapped his knee to the rhythm of his music got off, Elena managed to move to the window seat, dragging herself over and holding onto the frame. Her skirt got balled up underneath her but she didn’t care; she sat there beside the window, with her head down, moving her pupils from one side to the other, enough to see the trees and the houses racing past in the opposite direction, blurring together, their colours merging into a rapidly moving undefined stain until the train gradually slowed, allowing each image to step forth and retake its original shape as the train finally came to a halt at some intermediate station, before once again repeating its ritual of arrival and departure.

  It’s been years since she’s travelled by train. The last time was when Rita insisted they attend a support group for Parkinson’s patients that met once a month in Hospital de Clínicas. But it just made Rita feel worse than ever and she never asked to go back again. It was hard to even find the meeting, they got lost in the hallways that led who knows where, the dark stairwells, the elevators that didn’t go up nor down, the people waiting anyway, weary, and banners listing the union’s demands hanging out of Elena’s line of sight so that Rita had to tell her what they said. The smell. What was that smell? Elena wonders but she can’t remember, she can’t pin it down. It wasn’t death, the smell of death is different, she now knows. She didn’t know it when her husband died, because the death of her daughter was the real death. The smell of illness maybe. Of pain. The smell of the future, she thinks. Because, there, they saw for the first time what awaited them. They thought they knew, but that afternoon they saw it. Up to that point Elena had just a slight shuffle when she walked. Like when someone starts walking but they hesitate. That’s something that happens to so many people, Elena thought. She thought, but now she knows. She knows what awaits her, her future, because she saw it. Before, with just a little medication, she could get going. And then everything seemed almost normal. Normal like putting on a jacket without help. That was the first sign, the day Elena couldn’t put on the left sleeve of her jacket. Who would’ve thought that being able to get your arm in a sleeve could be such a big deal, she thinks. Now she knows how important it is. The right one, yes. But the left one, as much as her brain orders her arm to lift, to point the elbow forward, to stretch the forearm back with the palm of the hand up towards the ceiling and into the arm hole and once inside the sleeve to keep sliding down the hole in the fabric to return to its habitual position, her body did not obey. The arm up in the air, the elbow facing forward, the hand searching in vain for the hole and the sleeve hanging empty. Because Herself, the whore, had decreed that her left arm would never again go into a sleeve. That’s why Elena adopted the habit of using a little shawl or poncho that her neighbours made fun of and didn’t understand until the illness finally made itself evident. Another act of defiance. The shawl was the first defiance, if she remembers correctly. If my arm won’t go into a sleeve ever again as long as I live, then there won’t be any more sleeves, Elena had decided. And she preferred to let them talk about her behind her back than for them to know the truth. Because for a while the illness had been a secret between Rita, Elena, and Dr Benegas; hidden like a lover. If you’re lucky enough not to shake, Rita had said, why go around telling people? They’ll just pity you. But if no one sees you shaking no one’s going to know you have Parkinson’s, and the longer it takes for them to give it a name the better, Mum. Elena didn’t shake, still doesn’t, and at that meeting at the Hospital de Clínicas they both realised, she and Rita, that far from being an advantage, not shaking was worse. Aw, poor thing, you don’t shake. They say the patients who don’t shake have it the worst, that the Parkinson’s advances more quickly, the lady sitting next to her, shaking like a leaf, had told her. And the two of them, Elena and Rita, heard her but they didn’t say anything, not even to each other. They didn’t even feel the need to ask Dr Benegas about it at the next appointment. Because they’d observed the others that afternoon. That was enough. They looked at each of the people around them, the ones that shook and the ones that didn’t. Elena couldn’t see herself in any of them. She didn’t have a vacant stare like the man who told the group how he’d had ropes and railings installed in his bedroom so he could get up in the night. Her fingers didn’t wave in the air like she was counting money or dealing an invisible hand of poker. She didn’t drool like the woman crying in the first row. She didn’t shake like the woman who’d said poor thing. She didn’t identify with any of them that afternoon, but she knew her fate because she saw the Elena that she would become.

  That was the last time she’d travelled by train into Buenos Aires, she thinks. That time she hadn’t needed to watch everything out of the corner of her eyes because she didn’t yet know that her sternocleidomastoid could turn on her, she’d never even heard its name. If the king had already been dethroned, the news was kept within the walls of the palace. Herself was at work only in the shadows. Secret lover. The messenger arrived with his levodopa in time for every battle. But much more important than all that, Elena wasn’t alone on that other trip. Rita was sitting beside her on the train, even if all she did was help her put on the sleeve of her jacket. And she fought with her, quick lashes of dry leather, then she marched off to walk several paces ahead. They’d fought that afternoon too. It had taken Elena a long time to get on the train and Rita had got impatient. She’d been worried they weren’t going to make it, so she pushed her through the door. She placed her two open palms on her mot
her’s backside and pushed her hard, almost knocking her over. Try a little harder, Mum, she said. Stop busting my balls, Elena answered. Because she did try hard and still does, otherwise she wouldn’t be sitting now on that other train watching the trees chase each other out of the corner of her eye. But sometimes, Elena now knows, trying hard isn’t enough. Rita also knows now, she thinks, if in the place she ended up, the place where we’ll all end up, a person can know anything. But that afternoon she’d become furious with her mother. If you think I’m busting your balls you don’t want to even imagine the state mine are in. And if Elena, with her sternocleidomastoid muscle, and her drool, and the sleeve that won’t let her arm in, wants to keep on living, despite all that, she can’t believe that her daughter wanted to die. She can’t believe it. She is dead, it’s true, but she couldn’t have gone up that belfry on that rainy evening, she couldn’t have tied the rope around the bell yoke and then put it around her neck, she couldn’t have made that knot, she couldn’t have kicked away the chair she was standing on and let herself hang by her own weight until she died. She couldn’t have. She wouldn’t have been able to. It was raining that evening. Elena knows it wasn’t ‘an accident’ like Inspector Avellaneda puts it, trying to soften it for her. She never trusted the police. Not now, not ever. But she’s alone, and it doesn’t matter whether they believe her, she just needs someone, anyone, to listen to what she has to say. The coroner didn’t listen to her, or the police inspector. Avellaneda had listened but then they ordered him to close the case and he wouldn’t see her anymore during working hours. He did meet her a couple of times at the café on the corner of the police station when he came off duty. I can only talk to you in an unofficial capacity, Elena, he had let her know. They’d also met a few times under the ombú tree in the square. But it’s been a while since then and anyway he only ever repeated the same story, which Elena doesn’t believe, that her daughter committed suicide. Father Juan would still agree to meet in the sacristy, but she’s grown tired of those visits. They don’t do any good because he just listens to her like someone confessing, and she doesn’t need to confess, what she needs are answers to her questions. The director of the Catholic school agreed to see her too, but he just looked at her and listened and nodded his head like he agreed, but he didn’t have anything to say besides, We’ve planted a tree in Rita’s memory, Elena and what does she care about a new tree. Rita’s co-workers won’t listen to her, or the neighbours, even the one who cries when she talks to Elena, and says, I understand, you don’t know how much I understand, I wouldn’t be able to accept it either, but who asked her to understand, all she wants is to be heard, for them to try to remember and to report what they know, but no one knows anything, no one suspects anyone, no one can even imagine any possible motive or think of any enemies her daughter might have had. So, since they don’t know they just repeat what the police say, suicide. Elena’s deaf body is surrounded by deaf ears, she thinks, more deaf than her feet when they won’t walk. All of them deaf, deaf people who say they understand even though they refuse to listen, Elena knows. Roberto Almada listened to her at first, and he’d still listen to her if she’d let him. Don’t come by anymore, Roberto, she told him one afternoon when he dropped in on his way home from the bank and started crying in her kitchen. It’s nothing against you but don’t come by anymore. He had listened to her but he hadn’t done anything about it, and nor was he going to. He was the first to accept the theory of suicide, he didn’t tell her that, she read it in the report, he said that Rita hadn’t been well lately, that she wasn’t the same, she wasn’t interested in anything, she didn’t laugh much. When had she ever laughed much? Elena read Roberto’s transcribed words, and she reread them twice to make sure that’s what it said, that she hadn’t been mistaken, that she didn’t laugh much. She didn’t laugh much. What would he know, Elena thinks. Deaf. Blind. Even though they can walk, move freely, and do everything she’s been robbed of. That’s why she’s trying to get to Buenos Aires on that train that stops at another station she can’t read the name of because the letters are blurred, slanted, in the corner of her unfocused eye. She counts on her fingers and guesses it must be Avellaneda. Like the inspector who will only see her off duty, sitting on the curved and twisting root of the ombú tree in the square.