If the sea had asked people what they wanted her to be
they would have made but a muddle of her.
“Peter and Rosa” by Isak Dinesen
We didn’t arrange a religious service for her, and she was a believer, Estela said. Alicia and Marta looked at each other, then they both looked at Liliana, and Liliana looked at them, and the three of them looked at Enrique, and Enrique, who seemed at a total loss for words, said, Wait, what’s the matter with you? Where are we going to find someone to perform a religious service?
She asked not to be buried without a blessing.
When?
A long time ago, when we were still living in her house.
I never heard her say that.
You never hear anything, Estela said.
Mimí’s request from long ago had come to Estela’s mind, striking her like a falling rock, a rock she then threw into the middle of the wake so that nobody could play the fool. Enrique would have preferred her to stay out of it, even if he did hear his mother say it, even if he did see it in her eyes. After all, he’s in charge of the wake as Mimí’s only surviving child, now that Ricardo’s dead. Not the only child left, no, because there’s also Elsita, but Elsita doesn’t count.
Estela isn’t too worried about whether her comment irritates her husband or her sister-in-law. When she gets something into her head, no one can get it out and that’s what infuriates Enrique.
You’re not going to stop until you have your way, are you? You’re not going to leave me alone even at my mum’s wake.
Estela, sure enough, won’t let it go; she speaks with Alicia, and Marta, and Miguel, and Liliana, to see if any of them knows a priest who could carry out the wishes of the deceased, but it turns out the local priest isn’t available, nor is the priest from the nearby villa1, nor the one from… It’s January fourth and the priests have either gone on spiritual retreats or on holiday.
There isn’t a man of faith within a hundred kilometre radius, says Alicia, who has taken on the challenge, telephone and directory in hand, in an effort to appease Estela. Everyone laughs at Alicia’s turn of phrase, except for Enrique who sees Aunt Chichi coming in the door of the funeral home.
* * *
Aren’t you going to ask a priest to recite the Lord’s Prayer?, says the aunt, determined to stay standing, leaning on her Canadian walking stick, you haven’t even put up a crucifix, you haven’t even been capable of…
It’s January, Aunt Chichi, we couldn’t find anyone.
Not even a nun, not even a lay clergywoman, not even a churchgoer? The truth of the matter is it’s all the same to you, but I’ll tell you something, Enrique, as your godmother, you’re not to move Mimí from this spot without a funeral prayer. Disrespectful, hopeless, all of you…!
As she speaks, her voice, mouth and jaw tremble, If only your father were alive…
I told you so, Estela says to Enrique.
But where do you want me to conjure up a priest from?
If you had bothered to go to mass even once, you’d know where to find one, the aunt says, all flushed, probably from heat exhaustion; her assistant runs to get some water, puts a sweet in her mouth, Calm down, Ms. Chichi, for the love of God; remember what Doctor Romano said.
Please, Aunt Chichi, calm down, or you’ll give yourself a heart attack, Enrique says, and Miguel, an Emergency Room doctor, making the most of the commotion, puts a few drops of Ribotril in her mouth.
* * *
They’ve all rallied around Estela to find someone to lay Mimí to rest, and it turns out one of Alicia’s sisters who couldn’t attend the wake has a neighbour who has a friend who knows a redemptorist nun always ready to bring solace where it’s needed, but they’d have to go find her in Villa Cornú. The nun is called Noemí, just like the deceased, a pure coincidence. She doesn’t arrive dressed as a nun, she wears a pair of flat leather sandals, a long skirt and a white shirt, belonging as she does to a congregation that fought for years to get rid of the habit. It’s forty degrees according to the thermometer on this midday in January, but nobody can take their eyes off this woman as she enters the room light on her feet, acknowledging everyone with a slight nod of her head and positioning herself next to the deceased before offering some words of comfort that satisfy Estela and console Aunt Chichi…
There’s no crucifix behind the coffin, only a purple cloth hanging on the wall and two spotlights that give off an equally purple shade of light, like a freezer. The redemptorist says that this afternoon is Mimí’s afternoon. She lets the phrase linger in the air, allows it to clash with the silence, and perhaps because the silence is uncomfortable, Estela says Elsita isn’t here.
Enrique’s face says it all. We can’t move Elsita, she’s lived in that bed since she was born, she has no idea what’s going on, who knows if she understands anything?
She and grandmother understood each other pretty well, says Mimí’s granddaughter, Estela and Enrique’s daughter. The nun insists it’s important everyone says their goodbyes.
Please, for the love of God, Enrique says, my sister is bedridden, it’s very difficult to move her.
* * *
So Noemí asks those present to consider where, in what barely illuminated, dark recess of their hearts, lies the truth, that tree in the middle of the swampland, she says. Estela thinks it’s the nun’s faith in God that keeps her from insisting on Elsita being there; they all watch as she takes out an image of Santa Noemí from her bag and places it on the chest of the deceased. Before opening her prayer book, she tells everyone she was a missionary in Guatemala for many years and that the Guatemalan Indians believe that the past is before us and the future behind us, that before us we see the backs of our elders, the back of Mimí, in this case. She marks the path for us, and since I didn’t have the good fortune of meeting her, I would like to ask for your help.
Enrique can’t tolerate carrying on without smoking, things going the way they are, so he takes out a cigarette and lights it. Soon after, Alicia lights up too and so does the Emergency Room doctor; the silence is broken by the striking of a match, the sparks of lighters. What does Mimí’s back tell us?, the redemptorist inquires, and when nobody replies, she expounds on the biblical Noemí, whose name means sweetness. Was Mimí delicate?, she asks. Everyone looks at Enrique… She’d lost her way some time ago, but she was… yes, before Elsita arrived she was… she used to sit us on her lap to tell us stories, she had a sad childhood, but she was happy to talk about it all… The nun says that Noemí of Judea allowed her daughters-in-law to marry again, so here we have an aspect of the story that leads us to wonder how Mimí treated her daughters-in-law. Are the daughters-in-law present?
Yes, said Estela, and then Liliana also said yes. She was very good to me, Estela said. When they arrested Enrique, she went with me everywhere, my father-in-law would drive us to the police station, but she was the one who came inside with me, neither of us having a clue as to what was happening…
But you didn’t want her to come live with us, Enrique said quietly.
I wouldn’t have minded, it was for the children’s sake.
* * *
No light shines brighter than the light of a memory, in memory everything shimmers, like the foam on waves… , says the redemptorist, adding that the past and future live within the present, with their visions and recollections, and that we are ignorant of it all, that we don’t know anything about the night or the wind, or the moon on the water, or death… To Estela’s surprise, Enrique has started to open up, talking first about what his mother was like, then, getting worked up, about details of her homelife that Estela had never heard before and once again about that business of the land which he’s mentioned many times, but everything seems different now, because all of a sudden his tone has changed, as if he’s worn out. She was quiet, he says again, not submissive… quiet.
And so eager to fall in love!, says Aunt Chichi. If she told me a secret or two, it’s because we were friends before we were sisters-in-law. We used to go to the matinée2 on San Martín Avenue and Bulevar, a tearoom frequented by celebrities, and one afternoon we saw Tita Merello, she was having a secret rendezvous with Luis Sandrini… Enrique smiled, I don’t know where this is going, he said, under his breath, to Estela.
* * *
The redemptorist has returned to the topic of the Guatemalan Indians and the backs of the elders, backs with wings, she says, and speaking of wings, she gets sidetracked telling the story of a husband who, while stroking his wife’s back one night, realises that she has a scab right at her left shoulder blade. The next morning he discovers that another scab has formed on her right shoulder blade, and the next day the scabs have become wings and a little later they look like angel wings. The husband consults the parish priest and the parish priest says that if they were true wings, Godly wings, they would be capable of flying … so he takes his wife to a clearing surrounded by very high trees and asks her to take off her coat; the woman takes off each item of clothing until she is left with only her pair of wings, and after a few light footsteps tries to fly. A fluttering of wings is heard in the air and all of a sudden the woman is a few meters high…
Without anyone knowing why, Enrique’s friend, the Emergency Room doctor, tells a story about when he was taken to the wake of a beautiful young woman as a child, and how he felt so bewitched by her that he wouldn’t have minded dying himself…
* * *
She has long hair, this redemptorist, with braids tied together in a low bun. Mimí wore her hair in a bun too. Estela had been at university when she’d met her; talking about mothers was the favourite pastime of all the girls back then, it was simply a matter of not being like them, of studying, getting a job… Having aspirations was the maxim, at the very least a profession, none of this business of staying at home for a husband and children. But then the years passed and—Lord knows—she did what she could, but there had been a time when she’d crossed her fingers, touched wood and avoided walking under ladders, all so she wouldn’t turn out like Mimí. Mimí died, Estela had said, we won’t have a wake for her, only a brief viewing during the service, before we move on to the crematorium; but later things had turned out differently, playing out in their own way.
* * *
The redemptorist asks everyone to close their eyes, to look inward, what makes evidence appear in the heart that cannot be bent to one’s will?, she asks. Until that afternoon, it had seemed to Estela that Mimí was nothing. No one. A little animal, that’s what she’d been. She had lived for years in a stupor and before that… they’d all forgotten what she’d been like before. Now—she saw it clearly—they had become bound to one another. Was that living? Was becoming bound to one another living? Dropping the anchor on one’s dreams, on one’s puny life, and always being bound to others?
This nun has asked them to remember and now Enrique can’t stop; he explains that during the years of easy money,3 his father had wanted to sell the land, some land he had inherited, but that one night his mother threw a stack of plates on the floor and screamed that they wouldn’t sell that land over her dead body, and the land was never sold… I was a little boy, he said, it scared me… because she was more of a quiet person… Imagine putting the money from the land in the bank, in the bank!, Estela knows there’d be nothing left of that money now, that they wouldn’t have been able to buy their house or start the pharmacy, or… , quiet, Enrique repeats, not submissive, she wasn’t submissive.
What can we be certain of?, the redemptorist asked out of nowhere, have we ever wondered what we’re certain of when the night comes and we’re left alone with ourselves? And in the morning, what are we certain of? That’s why faith is essential. That’s why we can’t survive without faith.
* * *
The redemptorist was speaking with her eyes closed and her words took the form of a hymn and that’s the moment the deceased became much more than a body rotting in the sun. She became a tree. A lone tree in the middle of a swampland. And there were clouds and beams of light between her branches… Nobody knows what to say at this point. In memory, everything gets a second chance, we have to endeavor not to forget, having a beating heart in the present is endeavoring not to forget, Noemí says. And the past, at that moment, is an animal with its mouth open and the mourners are moles digging caves below the earth, while Mimí rises above the trees towards the sky, high up, so high up, far away, with her delicate fluttering wings…
Translated by Alina Lazar and Anna Evelyn White
1 A villa or villa miseria is a poor neighborhood characterized by improvised structures and a lack of formal infrastructure, such as paved roads, sewage, and electricity.
2 In Argentina, a matinée (or matiné) refers to a nightclub party for teenagers, typically aged fourteen to eighteen, held on weekend evenings, usually from around seven p.m. or eight p.m. to midnight, without alcohol.
3 Plata dulce (“easy money”, or literally, “sweet money”) is an Argentine expression referring to the economic policies of the late 1970s and early 1980s that led to high speculation, prosperity, and fraud in the financial sector, and the push for consumers to store money in savings accounts. The period was short lived, and was followed by decades of financial instability and crisis. The popular 1982 film Plata Dulce captured the ethos of the period.
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