Elena Knows Read online

  5

  Elena lets herself be driven along. She decides to take her medication early. She knows it’s okay, that even if Herself, that fucking whore illness, might not like it, Elena can manipulate her time with pills, although only barely. She opens her handbag, rummages inside and pulls off a piece of the cheese sandwich she packed before leaving home, she knows the pill is easier to swallow when it’s mixed with the wet crumbs, which is why she carries that piece of bread and cheese beside her wallet and keys. She chews, swallows, some crumbs fall to the floor of the taxi and Elena tries to cover them with the paper mat before the driver notices. When she finishes chewing she opens her handbag again, she finds the pill case and the juice box, she rips the straw from its wrapper, she takes the pill, pinched tightly between her thumb and index finger, and places it in her mouth, as far back as she can. She holds it in place with her tongue. She stabs the little straw into the juice box and drinks. The pill won’t go down her throat, it won’t go past her tonsils. She takes another sip. The taxi driver is talking to her, she ignores him, breathes in deeply through her nose to keep from suffocating. A honk startles her, then another. Idiot, the driver says, and if Elena could see she’d know he was referring to the man who didn’t make it to the other side of the avenue before the light changed. But if I run him over I’m the one who’d have to pay for being in the right. Elena takes another sip, pressing the box to make the juice come out faster and even though the pill doesn’t move it begins to dissolve from all the liquid. If she could just lean her head back a little she’d be able to swallow it, but she can’t, her body won’t permit that little shake of the head everyone else does to swallow an aspirin. So she leans sideways on the seat, she slides down to help the pill get over that hill it can’t climb, and this time she manages it, the pill scrapes down her throat and disappears. In relief, Elena drops onto her arm, straightens the juice box so that it doesn’t spill, lays on her side across the seat. She waits. Someone walks up to the car and tries to clean the front windshield. Elena can see the squeegee through the space between the seats, but the taxi driver honks his horn, repeatedly, until the hand wipes away the detergent it had splashed onto the windshield and disappears. Elena can’t see who the hand belongs to, probably a kid because it was a small hand, because it wasn’t wrinkled, but these are merely guesses, from her position she can only be certain of what she sees on the dirty roof of the taxi that is driving her. What animals, the driver says, and Elena doesn’t have the courage to ask who the man is referring to, so she remains silent, tries to move the arm she’s lying on so that it won’t go numb under the weight of her body, she manages to shift her weight and feels proud at her small victory over Herself. The taxi driver turns on the radio and she hopes it will keep him from talking, but she’s wrong, because the radio host only riles up the taxi driver. The driver begins to rant with even more fervour, angry, gesticulating in his rage so as to leave no room for doubt. That’s exactly how it is, he agrees with the radio announcer, looking for Elena in the rear-view mirror. Did you drop something? I dropped myself, Elena answers. Are you okay? I’m okay, I’m okay, Elena replies from her inclined position. Do you need help? No, no, I already took my medication. Do you want me to pull over? No, I want you to keep going. You’re not about to hurl, are you? Hurl what? To vomit, ma’am. Of course not, sir, I’m ill, that’s all. What illness do you have? Parkinson’s, Elena says. Oh, Parkinson’s, he repeats. They once told me I might have that but no, it was the drinking, the shakes I had were from the drinking, I like to drink. Oh, how nice, Elena says. But my wife gave me an ultimatum, quit drinking or take a hike, that’s how women are, final, they think they’re in charge, and you let them think it, anyway when I’m working I don’t drink, almost never when I’m working, but I like to drink, what can I do. And Elena thinks that she doesn’t know if she likes to drink, but that she never does. She thinks about the wine she doesn’t drink as she watches a spider walk from one seam in the roof of the taxi to another. She should’ve got drunk at least once in her life, and learned how to drive, and worn a bikini, she thinks. A lover, she should’ve had a lover, because the only sex she ever knew was the sex she had with Antonio, and that had been a point of pride, having been only for one man, but today, old, stooped, lying on her arm, knowing there will never again be any sex for her, Elena doesn’t feel pride, she feels something else, not sadness, not anger, she feels an emotion she doesn’t have a name for, the feeling you get when you realise you’ve been foolish. To have saved her virginity, for who, to have been faithful, for what reason, to have remained celibate after becoming a widow in hopes of what, believing what? Virginity or fidelity or celibacy means nothing now, lying there on the back seat of a taxi. Not sex either. She wonders if she could even have sex if she wanted to. She wonders why she doesn’t want to, if it’s because of the Parkinson’s, because she’s a widow, or her age. Or because she’s so out of practice after so long without even thinking about it. She wonders if a woman with Parkinson’s who wanted to have sex would be able to. She laughs imagining herself posing the question to Dr Benegas at her next appointment. And a man with Parkinson’s? Could a man with Parkinson’s make love? Would he be able to penetrate a woman? It must be harder for a man, she thinks, because he can’t just lie there and let it happen. Does a man who’s ill like her have to time sex around when he took his pills? She feels sorry for this unknown man, she’s sympathetic, she’s glad she’s not a man. The radio begins to play a bolero and the taxi driver hums along. Bésame mucho, the song goes and the driver echoes it, como si fuera esta noche la última vez. Then he realises he doesn’t know any more of the words so he switches to humming and then starts talking again about wine and drinking. My wife is going to kick me out if I keep drinking. The last alcoholic beverage Elena drank was a strawberry-flavoured sparkling wine that Roberto Almada brought over the first time he came for dinner. It was the ‘official introduction’, even though they’d known each other forever. Who’d have thought that the little hunchback would end up being practically family, huh Rita? Don’t call him a hunchback. It’s not an offensive term. Of course it’s offensive, Mum. Do you want to see if he gets offended? Roberto and Rita were united by their convictions more than anything else, that way they both had of stating the most broad, arbitrary, clichéd notions as absolute truths. Convictions about how another person should experience something they themselves had never experienced, how people should walk through life along the roads they’d walked down and the ones they hadn’t, issuing decrees about what should and shouldn’t be done. Their first, their deepest connection, branded with fire in a secret pact that joined them together, was their mutual fear of churches. And in Roberto’s case the terror wasn’t limited to rainy days, he feared them under all climactic conditions. He’d had the problem since he was little, from his time in Lima. His mother, Marta, or Mimí, as she’d started calling herself when they’d returned from Peru, had followed a boyfriend there, a tango dancer who was not Roberto’s father, who’d given a free concert at the Sports Club where she tended the bar on Sundays and bank holidays. She took the boy with her when they moved, She had to, who else would’ve taken him? His hunchback was obvious even as baby. That’s enough Mum. And shortly thereafter the tango dancer had got sick of them both and kicked them out without a peso to their names in a country they had no other connection to than his mother having felt horny. So she learned how to do hair, before she’d only done manicures, and she rented a room in the Barranco neighbourhood from a classmate at the beauty school where they taught her how to style, cut, and dye hair. The logical thing would’ve been for them to come home, but she wasn’t willing to admit her failure, and returning so soon would’ve made it all the more obvious. So even though in Peru she could barely make enough to feed her son, she stayed there in that city perpetually swathed in clouds, where it never rained, where the ocean was a daily reminder of how small they were. The years passed by unnoticed as the boy grew and with him his hump, and
while his friends took girls to the Bridge of Sighs to whisper lies about eternal love, he went every other day to the same bridge, alone, to look up at the Chapel of the Hermit, where they said the bell had once fallen during an earthquake and smashed open a priest’s head. A stain on the pavement, picked at random by whoever was telling the story, had been left by the priest’s spilled brains, marring the ground for all eternity. If you misbehave the headless priest will take you, said the old lady who watched him while his mum went to work or did whatever she did. And Roberto grew up terrified not of the priest, because he didn’t even know how to misbehave, but terrified of bells, constantly calculating the probability that another one might fall and kill someone, always standing back far enough to make sure he wouldn’t be the one decapitated. It didn’t matter to Roberto that there had never been an earthquake recorded in all of Greater Buenos Aires, he still didn’t want to go too near any church. That’s why Roberto couldn’t have killed Rita and hung her from the bell, because aside from the fact that he would’ve been no match for Rita, who was so much stronger than her beau, Roberto also never went near any church, Elena knows. The police cleared him of suspicion in any case, but for other, less transcendent reasons. He’d been at the bank all day participating in an internal audit, doing a cash count, with more than twenty people who could confirm his alibi, the police chief had told her when she insisted that it was murder, that they should look into suspects and motives. You don’t have anyone to help you, ma’am, the driver asks her as she watches the spider disappear through the half-open window. No, I don’t, Elena says. You’re all alone in the world? Yes. Son of a…! And the rest of us complain. I had a daughter but they killed her, Elena hears herself saying almost without thinking. You just can’t live in this country, ma’am, we get killed just for going out on the street, that’s the way it is, says the driver. But she lets the driver draw his own conclusions from her words, I had a daughter but they killed her, and she doesn’t care who the we is that the driver includes her as part of. Elena just wants him to be quiet for a little while, to play another bolero, so that she can concentrate on the task at hand, on moving this body that, for a while now, she knows, has not belonged to her.

  Even though Elena doesn’t see the taxi move down Libertador past the Hippodrome, it’s noon and she knows that the sun must be directly above her, heating the roof of the car. A bus braking loudly beside them startles her, but immediately she realises that everything’s fine, that it was just a noise, that a noise doesn’t mean anything more than that, and she goes back to concentrating on the fact that in several more blocks she’ll have made it to her destination and the body she’s trapped inside will have to move, to get going again. She tries to give it the order and make it listen. From her horizontal position she raises her right foot, just a few centimetres, she lowers it, then the left. They both respond, she tries again, right foot up, then down, left foot up, down, and again, one more time. Then she rests, despite the fact that she won’t be able to sit up without someone giving her a hand, she knows she’s ready, that when the taxi arrives at her destination she will only need a point of leverage to be able to pull herself up, a hand, a stick, a rope, and once again she’ll be able to walk, one foot in front of the other, for a while, between one pill and the next.

  6

  Mimí couldn’t have killed Rita either, Elena knows, which is why she never suggested that Avellaneda add her name to the useless list. She must have wanted to, Elena thinks, but it’s not a crime to want to kill someone, not even if that person is your child. No one can go to jail for thinking or feeling something, only for doing it, and even then only sometimes. And Mimí didn’t do it, although she probably wished Rita dead at some point, for threatening to take away, over her dead body, the only thing she had in the world, that hunchbacked boy who loved her unconditionally, attached to his mother like an infected appendix no one dared to remove. Mimí couldn’t have killed her because Elena was with her at her hair salon, before, during, and after the moment that Rita was hung from the church bells, exhaling the last breath that would ever enter her lungs.

  It had been Rita’s idea. Elena never would’ve thought to waste an entire afternoon of her life in that place lined with mirrors and yellowed old posters of women with outdated hairstyles. She didn’t want to spend time in that hair salon or any other. Rita worked hard to convince her mother to go to the appointment she’d made for the wash, cut, dye, styling, manicure, pedicure, and waxing. And she’d made the appointment around her medication schedule, so that Elena’s body wouldn’t be without levodopa. Just go and stop complaining, you’re going to feel much better when it’s over. But I don’t feel bad, it’s only my toenails that bother me, and you can cut them for me next week. That’s true, Mum, even though I think it’s disgusting, I can cut your toenails, I could even do it today, but then what? What do you mean? After the toenails, then what? I don’t know how to dye or cut hair. Is all that necessary, Rita? Her daughter glances at her briefly before saying, Have you looked in the mirror, Mum? No, Elena answers. Well, it shows, go and stand in front of a mirror some time. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror but I can’t see myself, I can only see the tap and the sink. Take the mirror down off the wall, Mum, and put it in front of your face, look at yourself and then you’ll understand. Why do you care so much about how I look, Rita? The problem isn’t how you look but who has to look at you. I’m the one who has to look at you, every day, Mum, I help you out of bed every morning and see your toothless mouth, your expressionless eyes, I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner across from you, watching your drool mix with your food into a disgusting paste, I put you to bed at night and I bring you a glass of water so you can put your teeth inside it, but it’s hard for you to get them in so I have to touch them, to pick them up and put them in the glass with my own hands, I go to sleep but the day doesn’t end there because a few hours later you’ll be calling for me to take you to the bathroom, and I take you, I pull down your underwear, I pull it up, I don’t have to wipe you, that’s true, I won’t wipe you, that’s too much, but I sit you on the bidet and hand you a towel, and I hang it up to dry, I flush the toilet so the water will carry your urine away, I lie you back down in bed, I tuck you in, you stare at me from bed, toothless, with your eyes that look constantly surprised and your whiskers sticking out of your cheeks like wires, and I’m about to leave when you call me back, again, to arrange your feet, or the sheet, or the pillow, so I go back, I see you again, and once again I smell that stench of piss that never goes away completely because it’s you, because it has saturated your skin, and I hear you take your hoarse, snoring breaths, I turn off the light on your bedside table and I see your teeth again, the ones I put into the glass myself, with my own hands, I wipe them off on my pyjamas, but they still smell, like you. So the problem is me, Mum, the problem is that I have to look at you. And that’s going to change if I go to the hairdresser? No, you’re right, if it were up to you nothing would ever change, but you’re going to go anyway and you’re going to change. And she dragged her to the beauty salon and left her sitting on the wicker chair in the waiting area. She was more surly than usual and didn’t say hello to anyone, not even Mimí. I’m leaving her here, she said, and she left. Elena sat still, waiting, her eyes on the woven rug that clearly hadn’t been cleaned in months, peppered with hair of all colours. On the coffee table was a pile of tattered magazines that had been new at one time, and another pile of flyers for natural foods, royal jelly, aloe vera patches and other products of the kind that promised to improve the health of anyone who tried them. Except her, Elena knows, for her there was no hope. She stretched out her arm and grabbed the closest magazine, she flipped through the pages pretending to read while she waited. The stuck-together pages turned a few at a time, so Elena wet her index finger to separate them, which was bad manners but Rita wasn’t there to scold her, to say, Don’t be disgusting, Mum. Can’t you see that the Parkinson’s makes it hard for me to turn the pages, de
ar? Don’t make up excuses, Mum, you’ve always done that, don’t blame the disease for things that are no one’s fault but your own. There was music playing in the background, an attempt at a piano concert garbled by the speakers hung in the corners of the salon. The smell of shampoo and conditioner mixed with the smell of hair dye and hot wax to create a strange aroma. Elena couldn’t decide if it was pleasant or not. It just smelled the way it smelled. A girl came to get her when she’d almost finished flipping all the pages of the magazine. Come along, grandma. Grandma my ass, Elena answered, and then laughed before the girl had time to react. She’d learned a long time ago that hiding an insult inside a joke would cancel out any anger. Grandma my ass, she repeated, and held up her hand so the girl could help her up. The girl pulled but not hard enough. Another girl came over and pushed Elena from behind, grabbing her under her shoulders, saying that she knew what to do because she’d taken care of her grandmother until the day she died. Once they got her standing, even though it wasn’t necessary, they each took one of her arms and guided her to the chair, like they were a walking armrest. The hair colour was first, they covered her chest with towels, then slipped a black plastic cape over her, open at the back. Are you sure you can’t raise your head even a little, Elena? Mimí complained. And Elena tried, but no sooner had her head raised up a tiny bit than it fell back down to where it always hung, where Herself, that fucking whore illness, told it to stay. She sat for twenty minutes under a dryer with a current of hot air hitting her directly on the back of the neck. Getting the dye off her hair in the sink was the hardest part. It took three of them together, one holding her, another holding her neck and pushing her back, another waiting with her arms open not doing anything, as if her job were to remain alert, ready to avoid any possible catastrophe. It was impossible. Despite the precise instructions Mimí gave from where she sat on the stairs leading up to the massage parlour. She ended up getting mad at her employees and trying to do it herself, but that didn’t work either. Finally they brought over a bucket and poured water over her head using a tea kettle, which they had to refill twice, Elena took deep breaths between the streams of water, until the water that fell into the bucket she held on her lap ran clear. I’m tired, let’s save the rest for another day, Elena suggested. No, no, no, said Mimí, I don’t want to get in trouble with my future daughter-in-law. She was lying, Elena knows, since she didn’t care about making Rita mad. Rita asked me to give you the works and you’re not leaving here until you’re looking brand new. Brand new, Elena repeated. Do you want to rest a minute on the massage table? No, thank you. One of the girls can loosen you up. I said no. Offended, Mimí took her by the arm and sat her in the chair, she detangled and styled her hair in silence and only after her anger had been erased by hundreds of brushstrokes she said, I hope they make us grandmas. And once again Elena didn’t believe her, if there was one thing this woman didn’t want, it was for her son to be taken away by Rita and for a child to be born of that union. Rita’s forty-four, Elena pointed out. So what?, Mimí replied. I don’t think she’s going to be able to make anyone a grandma. Oh, don’t be silly, Elena, didn’t you see on the news how a woman gave birth at age sixty-five? I’m almost sixty-five, I’m a year and a half away, but… Elena said, trailing off, and everyone went silent. I’m almost sixty-five myself, she said again but Mimí didn’t dare to say anything, neither did anyone else, although they were all surprised by Elena’s age, which didn’t match her body. They changed the subject, Elena stopped listening. It was clear that the woman who gave birth might’ve been her same age but she didn’t have the same body. Could a woman with Parkinson’s give birth, she wondered. Would there be room in her bent body to house a child? Would she be able to push? Could she breastfeed? Would the medication she has to take harm the foetus? She wondered if when Rita was born she already had that whore of an illness inside her without knowing it, like a seed, waiting for fertile soil in which to germinate. She thought about the illness like a child of her own body. She wondered if her daughter carried that same seed inside her and if one day it would germinate and her daughter would suffer the way she suffers. A useless question because even though Elena didn’t know it yet, by the end of the afternoon there would be no seed capable of germinating inside her daughter’s body.