If one could say: I sees the moon rise, or: I has a pain behind our eyes, and above all: you the blonde woman was the clouds that are still racing before my your his our their faces. To hell with it.
“Blow-Up” by Julio Cortázar, tr. Paul Blackburn
Your uncle picked you up after school and took you to eat pozole at your favorite stand in the market. As usual he dug into his wallet, bringing out a wrinkled photograph of his family. He rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward to point out the smiling faces of his kids. You were always surprised that your cousins, now serious-looking adults, could have once been boys the same as you.
Your parents were already gone. Your uncle had offered to pick you up two or three days a week while your sister was at work. You had met your mother’s brother and his family once or twice at Christmas, and you had seen them once at a birthday, no more than that. Your uncle had been divorced for years now. He was old and fat, his hair turned gray. He twisted his long fingers together while he talked.
You finished the whole plate of pozole, so for dessert, as a reward, your uncle let you order a jericalla while he drank his fourth beer. You were just a kid but you already knew that part of being drunk was going on about how cute your kids had been when they were little.
“You’re cute, too,” he said, reaching over to fluff your bangs. “You should know that. It’s important.”
You climbed into his car still feeling the blush on your cheeks. Like always, you leaned the seat all the way back. You lay back, watching the white clouds appear and disappear through the windshield.
“Well,” he said, “I just wanted you to know how much I like you.”
You looked at the sky and stayed quiet, embarrassed.
“You have a mark on your thigh,” he said, squeezing your leg.
You told him it was a birthmark. He nodded. And you pulled on the hem of your shorts to cover it up.
The shades in the house were down, meaning that your sister was still at work. You said goodbye to your uncle and got out of the car. He said that he had better not leave you alone, and he followed you up the front stairs, his hand on your shoulder as you crossed through the doorway, propelling you towards the living room. You remember that he sat next to you on the sofa, that you chatted, that he told a joke. While you were laughing at the joke he slid his arm around your waist, his gold bracelet poking you just under your rib. He started to play with the hair at the nape of your neck, tickling you. You felt the impulse to shake him off, to run away, but your fear was stifled by decorum. His face approached yours, the smell of beer on his breath. Then his lips landed on your neck, climbing wetly like a snail dragging itself slowly up to the tip of your ear, leaving behind it a trail of spittle.
You wanted to yell, escape, run away. You thought about giving him an elbow to the face. But you did absolutely nothing. What you did was this: you froze, stuck to the sofa, while you heard a voice that spoke to you, your voice, repeating over and over, get up, move already, you’re in danger. And you stayed there, motionless, while your uncle stroked your cheek and asked you, not with a voice but with a gasp, if you wanted to lay your head down on his lap. You stayed frozen. At last you managed to let out a shrill little noise from your throat, a thread that could barely be heard and that seemed to not belong to you at all.
“I have a lot of homework,” you said.
Your uncle opened his mouth and started talking quickly. He said a bunch of things that you didn’t hear because you were watching his hands. They circled closer in the air, flapping in the half-light like the wings of a moth. You leaned back, retreating, you sprang up and ran out of the room. You thought that you were walking, but in reality you were running flat out, taking the stairs three at a time, until you reached your room. You locked the door and only felt safe when you heard the engine of his car driving away down the street.
A hundred hours later someone opened the door to the house. You ran to the stairs to see who it was. Emma Bo Frankie Cosmos.
“Hi,” you said.
“Hey,” she said, “Is something wrong?”
“Why should something be wrong?” you asked, coming down the stairs.
“I don’t know, you’re a little pale, that’s all… Have you eaten?”
You looked at yourself in the mirror on the living room wall. Your right ear throbbed, a souvenir of your terror, but the spittle hadn’t left any stain, no visible mark. You went over the sequence of events and you weren’t sure that anything bad had happened to you after all.
“Nothing’s wrong,” you said.
“Go on, tell me, how was your day at school?” she said, “Did you win at Dragon Ball?”
“I didn’t win at Dragon Ball because it’s not a game. We just watch it and talk about it all the time,” you said.
“Do you want me to make Mom’s chicken soup for dinner?” she asked.
You sat next to your sister on the couch to eat dinner and watch TV. You always did the same thing, flipping between channels until one of you said stop and then you would watch that channel for a while until one of you got bored and said next. It was usually fun.
“You’ve let me watch the whole news segment,” she said, “Should I be worried?”
Someone rang the doorbell. From the sofa you could hear your uncle’s hoarse voice. You felt your stomach shrink into a ball. He joked with your sister. He was just passing through the neighborhood and wanted to make sure that everything was okay. She said yes, everything’s great, and invited him to stay for dinner. Fortunately he didn’t accept the invitation. You spent the whole night with your eyes open, fixed on the ceiling above your bed, counting the cracks.
The next day, at school, you went over the incident again and again, pretending to pay attention in class. You knew that yesterday something important had happened. Something that had to do with the fact that today you were wearing long pants instead of shorts, even though it was a warm spring. At recess you were on the cusp of telling your friends about it. But you weren’t sure how to steer the conversation from Dragon Ball towards your problem. When the final bell rang, you went to the bathroom. You shut yourself into one of the stalls. You opened your backpack, took out your scissors, held them in your fist and delivered a stab to the wall. Then you slid them into your pants pocket and left the bathroom. In the parking lot, your uncle was waiting for you, leaning on his red car, his long fingers waving around.
You got into the car without saying a word. You left the seat upright. Your uncle smiled too much, he was extremely polite to you. You didn’t laugh at a single one of his jokes. When he asked if you wanted to go eat pozole, you said you weren’t hungry. During the ride you watched the sky through the windshield, checking from the corner of your eye on his nervous smile, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel. The car stopped in front of your house. You sat in a prickling, uncomfortable silence, that amplified an automatic guilt for having been so rude. You looked at his hollow eyes and felt pity. The episode of the day before began to fade. The scissors in your pants seemed somehow ridiculous, an exaggeration.
“I love you like one of my sons,” he said, taking the wrinkled photo out of his wallet.
You lowered your eyes and looked at the photo. On the left was your uncle’s wife, made-up, pretty, her face serious, slightly separated from the rest of the group, leaving a crack through which the trunk of a tree could be seen. In the middle of the picture, the two boys, their arms straight, backs rigid, smiles forced, as if wishing for the pose to be over. Behind them, your uncle. A grimace stretched his mouth into a strange smile. His hands rested on the shoulders of his sons, like a master with two dogs, imprisoned by those sluglike fingers that in the image now began to move, climbing, alive, over the white sweaters of the boys, over their necks, sliding towards the openings of their ear canals. The rest of the photo did not move.
You looked up. Outside the car, the wind blustered. The gray sky heralded a storm.
“Starting tomorrow I’m going to come home on the school bus,” you told him.
He raised his eyebrows, surprised. He folded the photo and tucked it back into his wallet. Then he turned in his seat, reaching out his hand to touch your hair. You shook yourself; from your pocket you took out the scissors and pointed them at him. Your uncle’s gaze punctured you like a dog’s teeth, biting down. You were shaking, you couldn’t help it. He reached out, calmly, resting his sluglike hand on your fist, covering it, negating it. You didn’t resist as he took away the scissors. Now they hung from his fingers. He stroked them along one of your legs, then the other, in a vertical caress. He smiled and the inside of his mouth was black, blacker than his eyes or his eyebrows or his black leather jacket. You opened the door and dashed away from the car. You could hear him yell after you that you forgot your scissors.
You made sure to turn all the locks on the front door. Also on the patio door. You checked that none of the window frames was loose. You went up to your room and dragged your bed over to the door as a barricade. You got in it to give it even more weight. When your sister arrived, you confessed everything. Your fear was stronger than your shame. She shook her head; her agitated breathing felt like broken glass. Immediately she called him on the telephone. Your uncle said that your imagination must be running away with you, that obviously the deaths of your parents had affected you psychologically, that in effect, you had gone crazy. By the end of the call, she was insulting and threatening him. Listening to your sister, something inside you, although minute, was restored. You wanted to rest, to enjoy that tiny victory in your parents’ bed, to fall asleep with the noise of their TV singing you a lullaby. But she made you get up and put your shoes on.
She drove to a Home Depot and asked you to wait ten minutes in the car. For once, ten minutes were actually less. A plastic bag hung on her shoulder. She put it in the backseat, got into the car, and drove off. You recognized the route. At every corner you hoped that she would turn the car around, that you would just go home. But another part of you was curious to see what your sister was planning.
“Get out and don’t be afraid,” she said, parking her car behind your uncle’s red one.
Night was falling, the lamps in the garden illuminated the entrance walk and cast a sinister glow over the terra cotta figures in the garden. Facing the front door, your sister dropped the plastic bag onto the grass. She rooted around in it and took out an ax. In her hand it looked enormous. She told you to stay next to her. She began to hit the door with the blade, splinters jumped from the wood into the air. The first dogs to begin to bark were the ones next door, then the ones across the street. The ones halfway down the block howled. Every blow echoed like a clap of thunder. A neighbor came out to watch, holding a phone in his hand. Your uncle appeared at the window and slid the curtain all the way to the side. His gaze, full of resentment, tried to catch your eye in vain. But you could smell his hatred, the stench of his spittle entering your lungs. You took shelter behind your sister.
She put down the ax. From the plastic bag she took out two cans of yellow spray-paint. She placed one in your hands and pointed to the right-hand window. She went over to the side where your uncle looked out. She opened the cap, shook it up, and started to spray the glass. She graffitied the word RAPIST over his face. You ran to the right-hand window, the can in your hands, without any idea of what to write. Your uncle appeared in the window with his poisonous look. You avoided his gaze, still, you felt how his eyes followed your hand as you sketched out the only word that came to mind: SNAIL.
Red and blue lights lit up the street. A man and a woman in uniform got out of the cop car. She wrote down what you told her. The whole story. The man told your sister that what they had wasn’t enough to start anything, that all they could do was talk to your uncle to clear up the misunderstanding. That it was just a family dispute, that’s all. The woman put her notebook away in her pocket. She took out a honey-flavored Halls and offered it to you.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, sweetie?” she asked you.
“A writer,” you answered.
“Lucky you,” she said, “These kinds of things don’t happen in stories.”
Translated by Madeleine Arenivar
“Snail” is a chapter of the novel Huesos de bolsillo (weRstories, 2022). The English translation by Madeleine Arenivar, Pocketful of Bones, is currently seeking an English-language publisher.
