Thus Were Their Faces Read online

  “I always carry a nail file and a tape measure in my pocketbook, just in case,” she said.

  “What a madwoman,” Boquita shouted boisterously, “you look like a dressmaker.”

  They measured their waists, busts, and hips.

  “I bet you my waist is a twenty-two.”

  “I bet you mine is less.”

  Their voices echoed as in a theater.

  “I would like to win for my hips,” one said.

  “I would be happy to win for my bust,” another one said. “Men are more interested in breasts, haven’t you seen them staring?”

  “If they don’t look me in the eye I don’t feel anything,” said another, who was wearing a sumptuous pearl necklace.

  “It’s not a matter of what you feel, it’s what they feel,” said the aggressive voice of one woman who wasn’t anyone’s mother.

  “I couldn’t care less,” the other answered, shrugging her shoulders.

  “Not me,” said Rosca Pérez, who was beautiful, when it was her turn to be measured; she bumped against the armchair where I was hiding.

  “I won,” said Chinche, who was as pointed as a small-headed pin, shaking the nine silver bangles she wore on one arm.

  “Twenty,” Elvira exclaimed, examining the tape measure that was wrapped around Chinche’s tiny waist.

  Who had a twenty-inch waist, except maybe a wasp? She must have been a wasp. Could she make her stomach go down like a yogi? She was no yogi, but she was a snake charmer. She fascinated perverted women. Not my mother. My mother was a saint. She felt sorry for her. When people gossiped about Chinche she would comment, “Such nonsense.”

  Not on your life. I had never heard a scoundrel say “such nonsense.” It would have been out of character. That was very typical of her. I’ll go on with my story. At that moment the phone rang beside one of the armchairs. Chinche and Elvira answered it together. Then, covering the receiver with a pillow, they told my mother, “It’s for you, dear.”

  The others jostled one another, and Rosca took the phone to listen to the voice.

  “I bet it’s the one with the beard,” one of the ladies said.

  “I bet it’s the elf,” said another, chewing on her necklace.

  Then a phone conversation began in which they all took part, passing the phone along from one to the next. I forgot I was supposed to be hiding and stood up to watch the ladies’ enthusiasm, marked by the ringing sounds of bracelets and necklaces. When my mother saw me, her voice and expression changed. As if she were in front of the mirror she smoothed her hair and pulled up her stockings; she then carefully put out her cigarette in the ashtray, twisting it two or three times. She took me by the hand and I, taking advantage of her confusion, stole the fancy long matches that were on the table next to the whiskey glasses. We left the room.

  “You have to attend to your guests,” my mother said severely. “I’ll attend to mine.”

  She left me in the dismantled living room, without a carpet, without the usual objects in the glass cabinet, without the most valuable furniture, filled instead with hollow horses made of cardboard, with cornets and piccolos on the floor, with little cars whose owners seemed like impostors to me. Each of the children was hugging and pulling on a balloon in an alarming way. Atop the piano, covered with cloth, someone had put all of the presents my friends had brought me. Poor piano? Why don’t you say poor Fernando instead! I noticed that some presents were missing: I had carefully counted and examined them as soon as I received them. I thought they must be somewhere else in the house and began wandering through the hallway that led to the garbage can, where I dug out some cardboard boxes and pieces of newspaper. These I triumphantly took back to the dismantled living room. I discovered that some of the children had taken advantage of my absence to take possession once more of the presents they had brought me. Smart? Shameless. After much hesitation and much trouble dealing with the children, we sat down on the floor to play with some matches. A nursemaid came in and told her companion, “There are very fine decorations in this house: there are flower vases that would crush your foot if they fell on it.” Looking at us as if she were speaking of the same vases, she added, “Each one alone is a devil, but together they’re like the baby Jesus.”

  We made buildings, plans, houses, bridges out of matches; for a long while we twisted their heads. It was not until later, when Cacho arrived with his glasses on and a wallet in his pocket, that we tried lighting the matches. First we tried to light them on the soles of our shoes, then later on the stones of the fireplace. The first spark burnt our fingers. Cacho was very wise and told us that he knew not only how to prepare but how to light a bonfire. He had the idea of surrounding the vestibule next to the dining room, where his nursemaid was, with fire. I protested. We should not waste matches on nursemaids.

  Those fancy matches were destined for the private room where I had found them. They were the matches belonging to our mothers. On tiptoe we approached the door to the room where we could hear voices and laughter. I was the one who locked the door with the key; I was the one who took the key out and put it in my pocket. We piled up the paper the presents had been wrapped in, and the cardboard boxes full of straw; also some newspaper that had been left on a table, the bits of trash I had collected, and some pieces of firewood from the fireplace, where we sat for a moment to watch the future bonfire. We heard Margarita’s voice, saying, “They’ve locked us in.” I haven’t forgotten her laughter.

  One of them answered, “That’s better, that way they’ll leave us alone.”

  At first the fire threw off only a few sparks, then it exploded, growing like a giant, with a giant’s tongue. It licked the most expensive piece of furniture in the house, a Chinese chest with lots of little drawers, decorated with millions of figures that were crossing bridges, looking out of doorways, walking along the banks of a river. Millions and millions of pesos had been offered to my mother for that piece, and she had never wanted to sell it at any price. You think that’s a shame? It would have been better to sell it. We drew back to the front door where the nursemaids had gathered. The voices calling for help echoed down the long service staircase. The doorman, who was chatting at the street corner, didn’t arrive in time to use the fire extinguisher. They made us go down to the courtyard. Bunched together under a tree, we saw the house in flames, and the useless arrival of the firemen. Now do you understand why I refused to light your cigarette? Why matches make such an impression on me? Didn’t you know I was sensitive? Naturally, the ladies gathered by the window, but we were so interested in the fire that we barely noticed them. The last vision I have of my mother is of her face pointed downward, leaning against the balcony railing. And the Chinese chest of drawers? The Chinese chest was saved from the fire, luckily. Some little figures were ruined: one was of a lady who was carrying a child in her arms, slightly resembling my mother and me.

  THE PUNISHMENT

  WE WERE facing a mirror that reflected our faces and the flowers in the room.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her. She was pale. “Are you hiding something from me?”

  “I don’t hide anything from you. That mirror reminds me of my misfortune: that we are two, not one,” she said, covering her face. “When I see you looking so stern I feel guilty. Everything feels like infidelity to me. I’m twenty years old. What good is that? For fear of losing me, you don’t want me to look at anything, to try anything; you don’t want me to live. You want me to be yours once and for all, like a thing. If I went along with you, I’d end up retreating to the first moments of my life or would be driven to my death or, perhaps, to madness,” she told me. “Aren’t you scared of that?”

  “You’re hiding something from me,” I insisted. “Don’t try distracting my attention with your complaints.”

  “If you really think I’m hiding something from you, I’ll recount everything that has happened to me during the last twenty years, my whole life up till now—I’ll sum it all up.”

  �
��As if I didn’t know the story of your life!” I answered.

  “You don’t. Let me rest my head on your knees, because I feel sleepy.”

  I settled into the sofa and let her rest comfortably on me, rocking her as if she were an infant.

  “The only sin that existed for me was infidelity. But—how to be faithful without being dead to the rest of the world and to yourself? In a room with flowers painted on the wall, Sergio held me naked in his arms. He suspected I had deceived him and he wanted to kill me. I hadn’t deceived him, because in my acts of unfaithfulness, if there were any, I had been searching for him.”

  “Why do you name me as if you were speaking of someone else?”

  “Because Sergio was someone else. For three years I knew perfect love. Everything united us: we had the same tastes, the same character, the same sensibility. He controlled me: he devoured me the way a tiger devours a lamb. He loved me as if he had me inside him, and I loved him as if I had emerged from him. After three years of joy and of torture, we learned, little by little, in ways ever more romantic and modest, to know not how to even kiss each other. Shame covered my body, like a dress that’s too tight, with too many snaps and ties. I refused to see him anymore. I felt repelled by his kisses. He wrote me a letter suggesting obscene things to me. I threw the letter in the fire. ‘What will be inside this letter?’ I thought when I saw the envelope; I was full of hope. I held it in my hands for a while before opening it.

  “We arranged to meet in a church; we scarcely looked at each other. Later, furtively, in a square. For a time I lived enveloped in a sort of fog, troubled yet fortunate.

  “Some months later I met Sergio in a theater.”

  “Don’t name me as if you didn’t know me. I feel like I could strangle you,” I told her. She continued as if she hadn’t heard me:

  “How handsome a stranger is! I was moved to see those eyes looking at me for the first time. I trembled with emotion, like someone who sees the beginning of spring in a single tiny leaf while the rest of the garden is still deep in winter, or like someone who sees a cliff amidst blue mountains and bushes with dazzling, distant flowers. Vertigo, I felt only vertigo. Surely we’d met in some previous incarnation: we didn’t greet each other, and yet it seemed natural to me. ‘I would like to know him in this life,’ I thought with some vehemence. Swiftly I forgot Sergio.”

  “I forbid you to play with our love,” I told her, trying to disrupt her thoughts. She didn’t listen to me.

  “I was happy, with that happiness produced by anticipation. I danced before the mirror. I played the piano incredibly well, or at least that’s what I thought. I was waiting for—what? I didn’t know. For a boyfriend, no doubt. I was already tired of studying. Not even bashfulness saved me from boredom, from nervousness during exams. My philosophy teacher was my best friend. I brought her bouquets of roses, or of flowers that I had picked in the countryside. She invited me to have tea at her house. She stopped being my friend. She treated me with scorn or indifference.

  “ ‘Take a bouquet of flowers to your teacher; if you don’t pay attention to her, she’ll never show you any kindness,’ my mother told me one day.

  “ ‘Does kindness have to be bought?’

  “ ‘Who taught you that ugly word?’ she said to me.

  “ ‘Which one?’ I asked, with obvious prevarication.

  “ ‘Bought. You can buy fruit, food, clothing, God knows what, but not human feelings,’ she answered proudly.

  “ ‘Everything can be bought, with or without money,’ I told her.

  “I don’t know why I remember that conversation so clearly. The days were growing longer, wider, deeper. There was time for everything, mostly for forgetting. It took me a long time to forget how to dance and play the piano. My body lost its balance; when I tried to stand on tiptoe I wobbled; my fingers lost their agility, sticking to the keys as they stumbled over scales. I felt humiliated. I tried to kill myself one winter night, sitting naked by an open window, motionless, shivering with cold until dawn; and later, with sleeping pills I secretly bought at a drugstore; and again, with a revolver I found in my father’s room. I always failed because of my indecisiveness, my nervousness, my good health, but not because of any love for life. Alicia disappointed me with her betrayals and lies. I resolved not to see her anymore and, before parting forever, to recount her sins to her whole family, some day when they would all be gathered before those mystical paintings so carefully illuminated in their living room. Alicia and I confided in each other. She was my best friend. We slept together in the summer with mosquito nets over our faces. We always fell in love with the same boy, but he would always be in love with me. Alicia thought they were in love with her. We got annoyed with each other for no reason. We laughed at everything, without cause: at death, at love, at misfortune and happiness. We didn’t know what we wanted, and what we most enjoyed sometimes turned out to be tedious and boring.

  “ ‘These kids think they’re grown-ups,’ my mother would say, or my aunt, or one of the servants, ‘they need a good beating.’

  “We read pornographic books that we hid under the mattress; we smoked, we went to the movies instead of studying.

  “We swam every morning at the municipal pool, and won prizes in four or five races. We swam in the river too, when we were invited to spend the day in some resort at Tigre; or in the sea, that summer we spent in a house my aunt rented at Los Acantilados. I saw the sea for the first time! There we learned to float, learning with some difficulty because we were afraid. We were forgetting how to swim. Oh, how we sank in the water! One day we almost drowned, hanging on to each other, trying to save ourselves or pull each other under.

  “ ‘You’re going to drown,’ my mother warned me. ‘When you learn to swim, you’ll lose your fear, and soon you’ll be winning races.’ In my chest of drawers I collected postcards I received from Claudina. I couldn’t sleep for the thought of going to school: shame before the other children, fear of the older ones, curiosity about sexual pangs. Everything tormented me.

  “We spent days and days of happiness in a huge garden with two stone sphinxes that guarded the entrance by the gate. In the afternoon we went down to the river for a walk. From the road to the Yacht Club you could see the church of San Isidro, where they took me to hear Sunday mass. I was a mystic, devoted to the Virgin of Luján. Instead of wearing a bracelet on my wrist I wore a rosary. Claudina went to Europe. We bought fresh eggs in a little house hidden behind a gigantic vine. Sometimes they let me go on a bicycle, with Claudina or by myself. During one of my outings a man looked at my tiny breasts and said obscene things to me. I was frightened and told Claudina about it. I wasn’t used to having breasts. Time passed and the bicycle became extremely tall for me. I lacked the balance necessary to ride it.

  “ ‘Fraidy cat,’ the gardener would say to me, looking at my knees and stroking his mustache.

  “The scar I have on my forehead is from a blow when I hit a post while going downhill.

  “I took my first communion. I dreamed about my white dress. I had a straight body—no hips, no breasts, no waist—like a boy’s. They took us, Claudina and me, to the photographer’s house, dressed in white tulle, bearing missals and evil thoughts. I still have the pictures.

  “I remember the day the new bicycle arrived at our house, still in its crate. And later, my mother promising it to me if I got good grades in school. ‘Riding on a tricycle is boring! When do I get a bicycle?’ my voice said.

  “I rode around and around the furniture in the house on my tricycle, thinking about that bicycle. We were in the city.

  “With a crew cut, like a boy, I climbed trees. I was convalescing only slowly, for my mother couldn’t get me to keep still. Three doctors surrounded my bed. I heard them talking about typhus. I was shaking in bed, constantly drinking water and orange juice. My mother was frightened: her eyes shone like precious stones. A doctor must be called.

  “That same morning she said, ‘My dau
ghter doesn’t have anything. She has an iron constitution,’ and she sent me to school with the nursemaid.

  “I was drinking water from a swamp full of garbage the day I met Claudina. Nobody ever spoke of my prank.

  “I didn’t yet know how to ride a tricycle. The pedals hurt my legs.

  “We took a trip to France: the sea, which I saw for the last time, fascinated me. And later, for a long time, I asked my mother, ‘What will France be like? What’s the sea like?’

  “I pretended to read the newspaper, like the adults did, sitting in a chair. Rosa, Magdalena, and Ercilia were my friends. We were all the same age, but I was the most precocious. I could recognize any tune. On the swings at Palermo Park, I swung without any fear, and would climb the tallest slide without a moment’s hesitation. Then, little by little, they no longer allowed me to climb any but the lowest slide, because the other one was dangerous. Danger, danger: What was danger? They tried to teach me what it was: with knives, with pins, with broken glass, with electric outlets, with heights. They didn’t allow me to eat chocolate or ice cream, or ride on the merry-go-round by myself.

  “ ‘Why can’t I eat chocolate?’ I would ask. ‘Because it will give you indigestion,’ they would answer. I adored my mother: I cried when she didn’t come back home early. My friends stole my toys.

  “Someone scared me one night with a stuffed monkey, and the next day gave me the same monkey, which I didn’t like. People made me afraid or happy. I didn’t know how to write except with rubber blocks: rose, house, mommy. The days grew longer and longer. Each day included little dawns, little afternoons, little evenings, repeated over and over. I cried when I saw a dog or a cat that wasn’t a toy. I couldn’t recognize letters, not even the easy ones like O or A. I couldn’t recognize the numbers, not even zero that looked like an egg, or the one that looked like a little soldier. I started tasting certain fruits and soups for the first time, then the sweet taste of milk. This is my life,” she told me, closing her eyes. “Remembering the past is killing me.”