For my mother,
who remade the world for her girls again and again.
That night we mixed Coca-Cola with Sprite in cut crystal tumblers to imitate the grown-ups, who were drinking whisky. We raised toasts to each other. All the cousins clinked our glasses and downed our drinks, giving rise to an imaginary drunkenness that made us feel bubbles on the napes of our necks, like tickles, which were only in the mind. This is what we’d been told by the Relative, who also brought us a test one day to determine if we were indigo children.
What do you call your grandparents?
- Grandma/Grandpa
- Granny/Grandad
- Gran and Gramps
- Nana Papa
But we were worse than common children. We used to injure our own noses by sticking fingers up them and eat butter by the spoonful.
That night there was plenty of whisky. We also danced, just us girls, who adored Britney and Selena in equal measure and had learned how to tie our shirts to show off our bellybuttons. Then came the sobbing. Round here, there’s no cumbia without heartache. Before midnight, grandma poured the whisky down the drain, yelling: You’re all a bunch of foolish creatures! Grandpa and the uncles became irate but were so drunk they couldn’t do much about it.
That’s when the Relative arrived, stepping out of her red Fiat Punto and saying it was time. Time for what? No one knew. But we all listened to the Relative because she was well-educated and always loaned people money. She handed out sparklers to the kids and slipped banknotes into the pockets of the grown-ups. Within minutes, she had us all inside the house and was telling us how everything would end.
The end of days is upon us. Don’t worry, my little darlings. I’ll take care of what remains.
***
Who knows how long ago that was. It was New Year’s Eve, and as the neighbors leapt over bonfires and the ashes of their Old Year effigies, we watched our sparklers flare up, with our fake whisky and the halo of that fire that grew inside us, while the Relative covered up the windows with grubby yellow newspapers and garbage bags and shut off the music forever. All the clocks will stop, my loves, hush now boys and girls.
That night ended with grandpa asleep in his armchair and grandma removing the robes and wigs from all the saints and virgins. Bald little heads. Cloth bodies, with gorgeous carved hands. And no private parts. Just how grandma imagined all of us. My mother wept in her old bedroom as the Relative declared that we’d survived the end of the world. From the sky shall come a great King of terror, she said, before and after, Mars shall reign as chance will have it. And her small square frame inside a black housecoat drifted through the rooms like a snub-nosed ghost.
The new day arrived. We could almost hear the turquoise jays singing. And yet we couldn’t see a thing. Not even the dogs devouring the remains of the end-of-millennium garbage, nor the ashes of grown-ups with half-burned masks depicting politicians, sports stars and celebrities, because for us that day heralded the beginning of another era: the era of the New Man.
The New Man has hair that causes envy. And he carries death. This is how it has been for all eternity. Every war creates a single man, who hides in the shadows like a savior, but soon comes apart. The New Man is usually very tall and has been gradually killing himself in some lightless room, and when a person enters they can detect only the flies that accompany him and the stench of New Man, which is like smelling god himself: a blend of budget shampoo and sheep droppings.
First the plants died, without any natural light. Only the begonias survived. Today we eat them, crushing them up entirely and swallowing the green mush that helps us raise whatever we carry inside us. The walls became covered in mold; the Relative replaced the bags and newspapers with planks, and before we knew it, we were pissing and shitting in sacks the Relative made vanish. Our hair reached down below our waists and our breasts grew larger. That’s when things began to go south. We must prepare to go out into the new world, she would say in her tattered black housecoat, which she refused to take off. When will we see it? When will we see the world? we asked her. Hush now, she told us, first we must create life. Like turnips and cabbages. We must resprout.
So here we are, creating the New Man, and yet our fetuses have not survived because it’s well-known that a union between close relatives is destined for failure. In this family we inherit shiny, silky hair, thick and black; but also the tendency to sweat too much and have nerves like scorched straw. At night we tremble and have nightmares, and any disturbance can leave us dazed.
But no one cares about that.
One day, Juli was on the verge of giving birth and her womb deflated, releasing a dirty dust down below. And yet she didn’t cry, because we’re used to it. It isn’t our fault. Who wants to bear the child of their father, their brother, their cousin. We don’t want to save the species. I’m not even convinced I could tell the difference between a turnip and a cabbage.
For a long time, all the women in this house have been hallucinating. The Relative tries to stop it. She submerges us in tubs of tepid water and then fries our neurons. It’s for your own good, she says, hush now. Shhh. It’s like homemade electroshock. We lie floating in the water, our skin completely wrinkled. When she activates the current, we all let out a long, collective moan, and then our bodies seize up and, though I’m unable to see them, I know the others are nearby—Juli, Renata, Maribí, Catita—convulsing girlwomen with long and beautiful hair, which slithers like viperine serpents.
We don’t know how to leave the water.
The worst thing is we aren’t sinking either.
Before, the cat used to come and console us. Billy, Billy, Billy! When the Relative lifted us out wrapped in towels, Billy would lick our legs, his fur standing on end due to the electricity. But he didn’t mind. Billy died, of old age or grief or who knows what, and all fried on the inside, his guts turned to ashes. The Relative wouldn’t allow us to see his body. She said he’d woken up stiff as a post and smelling of urine, and she’d had to get rid of him. At night, we used to make Billy sleep between us; he would lick our noses if they came in. He’d warn us. Sometimes, I believe he’s locked inside one of the rooms of this house. Billy, Billy, Billy! Like mamá and grandpa, who were first to be punished. They tried to rebel and leave. They claimed that, outside, the world was carrying on as normal, they thought they’d heard the turquoise jays singing. Hush now, said the Relative. Turnips and cabbages. Now they moan from behind doors, and at night they scratch. Grandma just stays silent and gets on with her life. Dressing and undressing saints and virgins. Caressing their hands and reciting pious prayers to them. Then she looks at us and calls us filthy, lazy, stubborn creatures. Our cousins, fathers and uncles, on the other hand, are all living the good life. The Relative forces us to feed them, like big fat babies, and once a month one of them visits us in our rooms. It makes no difference if we scream or cry. For a long time, we’ve preferred silence. We let them do it, imagining we’ll forget all the horror inside the tubs of electrified water.
We long to turn ourselves into water snakes, into medusas, and escape down the drainpipe until we reach a sea we can no longer remember the sight or sound of. Was it like rattles? Catita always asks. It was like hearing the Virgin pee, I tell her. And we all laugh.
What’s got me losing sleep is that, this time, I felt the kick. I’m certain the New Man is inside me, inside my womb. The fetus has already formed. If my womb doesn’t deflate like Juli’s, I’ll give birth to a homunculus destined to bring about the end of everything. When he kicked me, I sensed the horror, a well-formed little fish, muscular and violent. He isn’t kicking me to let me know he’s alive, he wants to come out of me as soon as possible, he kicks at me with hatred until my insides hurt.
The Relative must never find out.
Maribí helps me to wrap myself every day and my tummy doesn’t show. The other day, my uncle told me I should eat less or, better yet, even fast a little. It fortifies the spirit, he added. There’s no problem with putting on a little weight, he said, but consider us. It isn’t nice seeing you like this, muffin, and thinking about the other thing.
The Relative gave me dirty looks.
Grandma said: You’ve gotten very pudgy, stubborn creature.
It makes no difference, the Relative always gives us dirty looks. If we eat too much, or eat too little, or if we’re ungrateful, or if we haven’t given birth to even a single child. When we stop bleeding, during the first months, when something starts to grow inside us, she accuses us, because she believes we’re conspiring with our spoilt-little-girl attitudes, she believes we can prevent the fetuses growing. She believes our infantile thinking—magical, all-powerful—can achieve more than the rotten milk injected into us by the men of this family. Filthy liquid that impregnates us and makes us look more and more like old ladies. If anyone ever manages to open up this house, they’ll find a bunch of plump, gigantic babies, with pink cheeks, and an army of servile old ladies, small and wrinkled, with hollow bellies that have given birth to nothing but dust and evil, sustaining this wretched humanity. They won’t blame us; we had no choice but to subjugate ourselves.
When the New Man arrives, the world subjugates itself, to then sink beneath his feet, turning his bones into a carpet, his recollections into charred ashes in tubs of pure water.
The New Man I carry inside my womb cannot be born.
In spite of the electric tubs, I haven’t been left completely witless. It was worse for Catita, who for several months has been unable to say her own name, and also struggles with words beginning with H. Ope, she says, ibiscus, azel, ummingbird, ug me tightly. Who knows how the electricity works on our brains, if it sears whole pathways, if it scorches parchments and entire books written in the dullness of our childhoods, if it erases memories or only the inscription of those memories on the gray walls of our cerebral mass, and if one day we might find ourselves imagining another life, transformed into a fantasy full of butterflies whose wings are turned to ash by merely blinking.
I ask myself if there’s anything I’ve forgotten. Sometimes I make lists, of names, of fruits, of plants of the high forest, of plants of the primeval forest, of everything I knew when I was outside this house. I believe the lists are complete – when I read them, I recognize what I’ve written. The one I’m writing now says:
Cloud forest:
- Common Mallow
- Mist
- Kidney
- Hare
- Llama
I had to stop writing because the Relative came in for an inspection. She does this from time to time; I can’t even say if it’s been days or months. Time has been converted into small lines on the wall for the things that matter: the birthdays of the little men, the festival of Saint Dominic Savio, patron saint of the impregnated. We don’t say impregnated, screams the Relative, we aren’t animals! We girls don’t get lines on the wall, except for our last bleeding. And the Relative doesn’t allow us to see them. In the beginning, we kept calculations. We had our own system. Scratches on our legs, locks of hair we cut for every period. But the Relative has become shrewder over time. Also, the fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins enter our rooms more often than they’re supposed to, and sometimes we confuse this with the other bleeding. Because they’re beasts. They don’t care about tearing us. Nor do they care who we are; sometimes I get called Juli or Maribí. I turn out the lights, though this annoys them, and cover myself with blankets or take off my glasses. I should have replaced them long ago. I see very little. The contours of the Relative. Shadows of men. The stains on the underwear we’re forced to wash. When I was small, I used to hate my glasses, it felt like having a prosthetic for my eyes. Today, I’m grateful for losing my sight, and sometimes, at night, I take a sip from the alcohol the Relative keeps for curing wounds.
My dream now is to live in darkness.
On asking me to remove the wrapper, the Relative discovered what I’d been hiding from her. She flogged me and I didn’t so much as whimper. I want the pain to fill me to the point of reaching the New Man I carry inside, for it to contaminate him and, being only small, him to be unable to endure it. But I know this won’t happen. My body wants and does not want him. My body cares for and abhors him. My body sometimes wants to live, to race to a virgin forest and leap into the ponds. My body wants to trap grasshoppers and place them in my bellybutton, so they can spring inside and multiply. I want to be able to flee this house and touch the forest, I want to smell the grass and hear the turquoise jays and live there in a dark cave, fur-covered and moaning, darkly eating turnips and cabbages, cabbages and turnips.
I don’t know when I lost consciousness, but on waking, Catita tells me how my waters broke as soon as the Relative placed her hand on my tummy. Ug me tightly, she says, I’m ere.
I get out of the bed; there’s blood everywhere.
I don’t want to ask if the baby’s dead.
I don’t want them to tell me the baby is alive.
But when I least expect it, I hear his cry. The Relative, in her ghostly black robe, cradles him all over the house. The uncles, cousins, fathers and brothers look at the baby as if they had souls. So pink and rosy! they say. He looks just like you! they yell, pointing at one another. Then they clap their hands and open bottles of beer the Relative has kept solely for this occasion.
I stagger over to them. I look at the baby boy, who is actually pink and wrinkly. Who is like grandma’s saints and virgins. Who smells of turnips and cabbages.
The New Man has been born from me.
Carefully and quietly, I head for the tubs. The Relative doesn’t notice. She’s so busy with the child, so happy at having brought a baby boy into the end of the world, that she even forgot to feed us the green soup this morning. As I get into the tub, I feel my body expand, the water fills me, fills the hole where the fetus was, fills the damaged and deflated uterus, fills my eyes with new and hopefully blinding water. I know the switch to activate the electricity is far away, but I also know I need only submerge the cable that gives it power. A mere touch and I’ll fry. I take the cable and launch it in the air.
One, two, three.
Brain fried.
I smell the scorched forest. I hear the crackle of fire everywhere. Butterflies of ash. Turquoise jays sing, dogs bark, but I don’t know where they are. Perhaps they’re everywhere. I hear rattles. The virgin peeing. A door opens: the new world! In the distance, a small voice whispers old on, ug me tightly, and a scream: What a stubborn creature!
Translated by Victor Meadowcroft
