From the winner of the 2022 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize: a fractal exploration of a woman’s grief as she moves through disjointed segments of time.
CAREFUL WITH THE PEARLS
You open the front door. The light marks the coat of gray carpet in the living room. She’s gone. In the kitchen, you examine the trash and establish her breakfast: eggshells rest atop rotting vegetable carcasses. The air clings to the smell of boiled water, you find a lit burner, the coil is glowing bright red.
You go into the bedroom, you don’t look for her, knowing she’s gone, but still, curiosity moves you; it’s rare to be in someone else’s house and free to contemplate her belongings, scrutinize traces: the comforter with the impression where she sat down—she changed shoes before leaving; the scent of the air she had breathed; the bathroom faucet, still dripping; the wet toothbrush. On a small bookshelf, her rings. She left with her hands bare forever.
You go back to the living room. Sit on the love seat. Look in all the corners like you might find something else there. Just one detail could make all the difference. There’s a toy ball in the jumble of TV and telephone cables. (You remember she had a cat, Faustina, who ran away after one week.) At the other end of the room, under the bench where she placed three flowerpots, fraying carpet.
It’s hot. You open the window to let in some air. Just then the phone rings. Her recorded voice informs the caller, correctly, that she isn’t home. After the recording, a message.
“Hey, please call me when you’re back.”
The house is small and pierced by light. There’s a number three hanging beside the front door.
The whiteness of the walls is slightly blinding.
She must have left without anyone seeing. Maybe she peered through the window to make sure no one was walking around the courtyard. Maybe she even turned the key slowly so it wouldn’t make a sound. For a long time, she had dreamed of leaving without being seen, you know that.
You stand and walk toward the door. The key is hanging in the lock. If the key is in your hand, how did she leave?
You hear the motors of idling cars while the light is red, then they go. She left early, an hour after sunrise. Wearing a green dress, the black shoes with ankle straps, hair pulled back into a ponytail. The street was almost empty, as expected. Just a red car, latest model, stopped at the light. Inside a man sat shaving with a device hooked up to the vehicle. The man did see her, glanced at her, but just kept going. She closed the door softly and left the building.
The sun is now in the center of the sky.
You hear the sound of the fridge, then go to the kitchen and open it. There are two large, full bottles of water, a jar of jam, a red ceramic butter tray. In the vegetable drawer: a head of garlic, an eggplant, an onion sprouting green shoots.
Three packets of instant oatmeal on the shelf beside the fridge.
You have to pee, so you go to the bathroom. The white shower curtain touches the floor, and you notice it’s spotted with black—unmistakably mold from the dampness. You admire the tile floor, its geometric figures, the smallest is pink and the largest, dark purple; magnificent rhombuses unfolding on a white background.
That tile was once splattered with her blood. The day the wine made her fall. This story is also about the woman with the high forehead.
You look in the mirror over the sink. Where she put a sticker of a mandala. That mirror will hang on another wall, in another room, and reflect the face with the high forehead, the woman who will die. Across from the sink, you see two small flowerpots on the window ledge. In those plants lives the woman whose teeth stick out. If you look closely at the base of each plant, you will see her: there, the miniature woman, her body the size of a finger bone, is tending the earth, watering the flowerpots.
You flush the toilet. Your urine vanishes.
On the shelf, you see a jar of cream with day and night written on the lid in childlike handwriting, followed by a small smiley face.
You go one room over. On the desk is her computer. A lucky find. It’s the same scene you had dreamed. The interior of the machine makes you think of a body. It’s obvious, but the metal pieces within, the slender cables, confirm the truth of the dream. This machine, you think, is where they uploaded her brain.
You turn and look at the study walls, which catch your eye because they’re covered in Lotería cards. The sombrero, the devil, the dandy. They fill the space between shelves stacked two rows deep with books, almost collapsing.
Out the window, you see someone crossing the courtyard. A man, medium build, moving slowly, like his legs are hurt; his shoulders dance, one rises, the other falls. He has large sheets of cardboard under his arm, he’s moving toward the street.
You go into the bedroom to hide. Sit on the bed, in her imprint, and look out the window facing the courtyard. You take your time getting your shoes off, as if you had all of eternity, and, slowly, you lie down; once your head is on the pillow, your feet come up. You place your hands on your abdomen, fingers laced, and gaze at the ceiling. The dampness has only gotten as far as the walls. Little by little, sleep comes. You drift off. You’ll go toward the depths. She has only just left. She’s traveling to the island.
•
The man you saw takes the cardboard boxes to the roof. He’s standing up there, you could see him through the window if you were awake. He stacks up all the boxes and then, with a worn length of string, ties them together.
After eating the egg with a little salt, pepper, and lime, she throws the shell in the trash. She washes the cup she used as a bowl and puts it on the drying rack. Doesn’t realize she left the burner on.
She stops in the kitchen doorway and looks at her hands. Closes them into fists as if testing her strength. She inhales deeply. Seems nervous. Goes to the door. Turns the key, silently takes one more breath. Something disturbing is waiting outside.
Peers out just before crossing the threshold, makes sure no one’s there, at that moment, walking around in the courtyard. Leaves her house. Doesn’t look back. Pulls closed the handle. Goes, with no coat. Two pearls adorn her ears.
SUPERIMPOSITIONS
Ten people are lined up at the latrine. Next is you. You go in, crouch, strain to defecate. Down below, on the far side of the orifice where the waste drops, are humpback whales. When you finish, you wipe with beige paper whose cylinder hangs from a wire.
Outside, the person behind you in line has gone.
Summer afternoon has arrived in an immense city.
Now you walk along the street and are met with that foul odor: vapors rise from the manholes.
You get to the next crosswalk. The red car, latest model, hits a pole. The driver dies.
You sit on the sidewalk to wait. You want to see if the ambulances will get there fast or slow; it doesn’t matter, anyway, if they’re slow.
A few minutes pass. Pedestrians stop, like you, to watch what’s happening. The foul smell from the manholes now seems more intense, maybe it’s the smell of death.
The paramedics hurry out of the ambulance. One of them uses a mallet to smash in the driver’s side window. Then he leans in half his body, comes out, declares: He’s dead. Goes in again, searches the dead man, then says, through his living body: His name was Serafín.
You stand. Look up and see, high above, an enormous blimp floating in the air. It’s branded with the name of the world’s most famous soft drink (which you then read): Coca-Cola. She bursts into your thoughts, the woman with restless eyes who left for the island. She, in fact, is you.
•
Two hours have passed since you fell asleep. When you wake up, you feel refreshed. The sewer smell was there because it had to be, you think.
You remember you witnessed an accident on the highway not long ago, and the boy who died, just fifteen or sixteen years old, had the same name as the driver in your dream: Serafín.
You go to the kitchen and fill a glass with water. Look through the window at the color of the sky. It’s going to be a spectacular afternoon.
You close your eyes and think of your mother, who is no longer in this world.
Something you told her when she was dying:
“The property, Mom, it’s so beautiful with the trees you planted, they’re huge now.”
“That was a good thing to do,” she replied from her death place.
She had wanted the stretch of earth along the street to be thick with pines.
Once, those trees had burned in the flames of a wildfire.
As kids, you would search for pre-Hispanic artifacts there, in the freshly worked earth. And you’d find them: shattered pots, obsidian arrowheads, small clay faces, encircling holes dug by moles who chewed at the roots of the plants.
Then, lodged in your socks, you found peculiar, round, spiny-edged seeds that pricked your ankles.
•
Faced with the memories and her death, you extend threads from your temples, a proxy for reaching what’s no longer there, what no longer is, and you fail. It makes you angry.
And you asked her, as she was leaving:
“Give me your hand, let me warm it up a little.” She extended her left hand. You had never experienced cold like that. Took it between your own hands and cradled it like a strange baby.
Her nails shone bright, were alive.
•
Talk about the link between earth and sky. Say: If we’d wanted to, Mother, together we could have dissolved our entire surroundings. Your powers, almighty, could have made ghosts of the furniture, of the walls. Maybe they did, and I was just incapable of seeing.
•
Maybe the employees at the funeral home turned my body on the bed, and there rushed from my mouth a grotesque black liquid, à la Madame Bovary. Then they might’ve taken me feet-first to prepare for the wake.
It’s true that you went to her wardrobe and took out the coral silk dress she had shown you months earlier. You thought she wanted to wear it that day. You knew—it was a superimposition.
You could have opened the window so her spirit would exit freely. Could have lit a candle.
“Please, even a small flame,” you could have said in a whisper.
Just before she died, she asked when you would quit smoking, and you went to get a cigarette to show to her, to smoke later on the balcony, a slight.
Translated by Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn
Divided Island is now out via Deep Vellum.
Lizzie Davis is a translator, a writer, and former senior editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent translations include Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize) and The Devil of the Provinces; Elena Medel’s The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Daniela Tarazona.
