Ever since a childhood accident, Ema has doubted her bond with her mother, equally troubled and fascinated by her. Years later, now with questions about her own motherhood, she joins a family road trip to her mother’s hometown to quench her need for answers. With deceptively simple language, precise brevity, and vivid imagery, Salt explores daughterhood and unearths a family’s intricate past and secretive present. An intimate, brilliant debut novel by Argentine author Adriana Riva, translated by Denise Kripper.

Salt is now out via Veliz Books.

i. The Fall

From December to March we spent our summers in the seaside city of Mar del Plata, in a big stone house that belonged to my paternal grandparents. On top of the mossy tiled roof, a Santa sleigh weathervane protected us from misfortune. It had been rusty for years, arbitrarily pointing East.

My sister Julia and I were always in charge of decorating the house for Christmas. We set up the tree next to the fireplace. It was a plastic eyesore, so scrawny it looked like one of those unremarkable poplars in the foothills. We spruced it up with an eclectic collection of ornaments: balls of different colors and sizes, a little one-eyed angel, a bright pink beat-up Star of David, a puppy inside a red stocking. The final touch was showering it with garlands and cotton balls. The cotton was key: it gave the illusion of being swaddled in snowy white, a cloak of happiness.

Next, we set up the manger inside the fireplace. The figures of Mary and Joseph belonged to the same set, but baby Jesus was larger than both his parents put together. There were also two Balthazars among the Three Wise Men. No one ever noticed; everyone looked at our collection and saw a manger—there was a general attention deficit at home.

Finally, we took the Christmas cards that came every year around the holidays and put them up on display. Most of them bore only the uninspiring signature of some manager, one of Dad’s colleagues, but collectively they gave the impression of something important. Mom didn’t help us at all, totally oblivious to tradition; instead of buying the customary turkey or vitel toné for our Christmas Eve dinner, she got ham and cheese ravioli.

Two days before a sticky hot Christmas, when we were about to start putting up the holiday greeting cards around the mantel, fireplace, and stairs, Julia announced she wasn’t into it anymore. She was thirteen, two years older than me. She dropped the cards and disappeared down the hall. We had a communication problem, my sister and I. We used to pull each other’s hair, scratch and spit at each other. We hated each other for days on end. When I yelled for her to come back she couldn’t even be bothered to answer. I just took the cards and put them all Still annoyed by her insolence, I decided to surprise everyone with something special: using two leftover shiny garlands to decorate the sleigh weathervane.

I took the decorations and walked out of the garage, where there was always a ladder leaning against the wall. I started to climb. The hydrangeas surrounding the house shrank below me. With the wind, I thought, the garlands would turn the weathervane into a shooting star. I looked down the deserted street. There was only one car parked on the whole block: It was my mother’s. The driver’s window was open, and her elbow was poking out.

I kept on climbing. Behind the neighbor’s hedge, a black Lab was sleeping on the grass. Outside the house across the street, a man in a muscle shirt was skimming the pool. Our roof was a lot higher than the others, but I wasn’t afraid; I was excited about the change of perspective, pretending I was a giraffe. When I got to the top, I took a deep breath and with the back of my hand pushed my sweaty hair from my face. The wind brought a fishy stench from the coast that made me scrunch up my nose and all of a sudden the ladder started pulling away from the wall.

I clung to the sides in fear but realized too late that I was already falling backward. I let go and jumped, thinking I was closer to the ground than I actually was. I turned in mid-air, and my whole body smacked against the flagstones around the house. Later they told me it was a ten to fifteen-foot fall. The last thing I remember is a pale stray cloud in the sky and, far below, the fleeting look of my mother’s face, inside the car, her jaw dropped, watching me fall—an image I’ve since tried in vain to process.

“Don’t move, Ema. Please don’t move,” my mom told me when I came to, lying face-up on a hard bed, no pillow. I had been rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Buenos Aires.

“What happened?” I asked, my mouth dry. When I tried to turn my head to see where we were, I felt a jolt so intense that, before losing consciousness for the second time, I saw tiny stars flickering around me, like in cartoons.

When I came to again, my dad was holding my hand. I knew it was him before I even opened my eyes because I recognized his calloused and hairy fingers. He had the hands of a beast.

“Ema, I need you to be as still as a statue. I’ll give you a quarter for every minute you don’t move,” he whispered in my ear. “Stay put…stay, stay,” he said as if speaking to a pet. Once he was sure I had understood, he explained that I had crushed three dorsal vertebrae: the third, under the shoulder blades, the sixth, a little bit below that, and the eleventh, right where I’d have breasts someday.

“What is dorsal?” I wanted to know. Dad found a piece of paper somewhere in the room and drew a bunch of horizontal lines, one under the next, in a column. Those lines were the vertebrae that made up the spine, he explained, the structure holding my skeleton. Three were damaged. He highlighted them to indicate they were broken. On top of those horizontal lines, he drew a long, vertical one—my spine. He smeared a few little lines around it to signify that it was swollen. By the time he was finished drawing, all I saw were menacing hieroglyphics, and I felt even more lost than before.

As he spoke, I glanced at the room around me, moving my eyes from one corner to the other like a cuckoo clock, trying to make sense of my new reality. The pain had faded along with my clarity. I felt blurry. At times, I dissociated and saw myself from impossible angles. Years later, I learned I was given IV morphine.

“And that’s why you can’t move, Ema, not even a little bit. Not until this line in the center gets better,” Dad said, pointing with the pen to my spine. Before leaving, he kissed me on the forehead and gave me a pinch on my chin.

Deciphering the meaning of “dorsal” was my one obsession during those first days of convalescence. Little by little I came to learn that and a few more things, through half-heard whispers, the hoarse voices of doctors responding to the tense voice of my mother somewhere in the room. Because of this constant whispering, in my nightmares I swapped witches and ghosts for paraplegics and amputees, uncertain of the kind of monster I was up against.

The orthopedic surgeon checked in every afternoon, poking my feet and legs. He smiled every time I said it hurts, it hurts. I named him the Tin Man. He never offered me a lollipop or a kind word, but I later found out he traveled all around the country telling my story at conferences and collecting enough diplomas to plaster the walls of his office. My accident had been labeled exceptional—it was a miracle I wasn’t paralyzed.

The first two nights I spent in the hospital, Mom stayed with me, sleeping on a chair I couldn’t see because I couldn’t move my neck. I know there was also a window somewhere because nurses opened it daily to air out the room, though they couldn’t really get rid of the smell of iodine and lethargy stuck in my mouth. My vision was limited to the moon-like white ceiling, where water stains turned into mice, birds’ beaks, and mouthless faces. These were my imaginary friends during my hospitalization.

On the third night, when she was told again that it was not possible to provide an extra bed for overnight stays, Mom went home to sleep and sent Juvencia instead, a Paraguayan maid who had started working for us three weeks before. It was she who endured sleepless nights on a chair without armrests while I was in the hospital. Her only comfort was a pillow the night nurses smuggled in for her, which she had to secretly return every morning.

Juvencia was stocky, with dark skin and frizzy hair. Her brown eyes were the size of the marbles my cousins kept in a jar. I don’t know what kind of clothes she wore because I only ever saw her in the blue uniform with white polka-dots that fit tightly around her hips. Whenever someone entered the room she hurried to put on her flip-flops. The rest of the time she preferred being barefoot.

She spoke to me in Guarani with a sweet smile, like a guava fruit. Che mitãkuña, che mitãkuña, she’d say, my girl, my girl. That’s what she called me from day one. Every morning she washed me for hours with a damp cloth that now and then she twirled with her chubby arms. All the while she whistled a calming mantra, but I couldn’t surrender to the ritual. Her touch between my legs, my thighs, and armpits made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to physical contact. Mom had never hugged me. Dad wouldn’t even put his arm around me for a picture. We were like a family of bowling pins. I put up with this ceremony for two weeks until I finally asked Mom to please tell Juvencia not to take so long cleaning me. She blushed.

“I specifically asked her to do it like that so the morning would go by faster. I thought you’d like it.”

“I don’t. Just ask her for a quick wash, please,” I begged her. From then on, the bath took ten minutes.

Mom and Dad had decided against putting me through surgery. They were suspicious of shortcuts, so my recovery took the longest road: casting and waiting. The former happened three weeks after my admission into the hospital when the doctors burst into my room waving an X-ray and proclaiming loudly: “The swelling went down!” To put the cast on, they took me on a gurney to another room, where they hung me vertically from a harness while a crowd of white coats inspected me. I felt the dissociation of the first days again. It was as if I was seeing myself from the opposite corner of the room. What I saw was a life-size puppet being covered in bandages and plaster. I felt high, happy; the cast meant that I’d be able to leave the hospital in a few days. But when they took me back to my room, I first saw my reflection not in a mirror, but in my mother’s eyes. She was crying in horror. She had to cover her mouth with her hand to hide the tremor in her lips. She hadn’t understood the armor would cover me from top to bottom, including my head. Only my face and arms were bare. A mummy in a sleeveless shirt.

“It’s okay, Mom, I’m fine,” I comforted her.

It didn’t work. There was no way to cheer her up. A malignant growth of denial had been developing in her for many years.

Translated by Denise Kripper