Authors: Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
I’M SORRY
but that he was serious. I said we couldn’t leave, I had my own business, I had a mortgage, a car. I simply couldn’t drop everything and run away. He gave me a condescending look and said,
SO YOU’RE A WORKING SINGLE MOM, HUH
He said it was moving. He said I sure was an inspiration to other women. He said now it was clear to him I was with you only because I loved you.
OR WAS IT THE SEX
he asked, the motherfucker. I wondered how much you’d hate me if you knew what I was going to do, and I realized I might never see you again. I wished someone were next to me in that moment, my parents, the friends who had stopped talking to me, to stand up for me. I felt like rising from that uncomfortable plastic seat attached to the table, where my butt had grown cold and numb, fetching my son and walking away, but I decided I didn’t want to.
YOUR FATHER WAS RIGHT, YOU’RE SUCH A PUSSY
I said, and stood up slowly, hoping that it would make me look taller than I am. I grabbed my purse. I took the red plastic tray with the burger I didn’t finish and chicken nuggets Laureano didn’t eat and the cups of soda, and tossed everything into the trash. I was so nervous I even discarded the tray. I felt your son’s heavy gaze follow me. I feared he’d come after me, but he didn’t. I did my best to ignore him, knowing I couldn’t afford it but doing so anyway, and I never once turned back. I just walked away into the PlayPlace.
Some kids stopped playing and gawked at me, frozen, as if I were Gulliver’s girlfriend, taking over their realm. Laureano kept swimming and splashing in the ball pit, oblivious of my presence. I removed my earrings and put them in my purse, left the purse on the floor, took off my shoes, and inched into the pool.
Laureano cheered when he saw me and asked what I was doing there, surprised, as if he were on the concerned kids’ side. He stood waist deep in the sea of rubber balls. I hugged him as best as I could, feeling his body frail and warm against mine, his
soft hair that smelled like home, never wanting to let him go. In his ear I said that every time we came I’d see him having such a wonderful time in that pit and I’d always wanted to join in the fun, but I’d never been brave enough to do it. He said that was pretty cool, and took a dive; his head disappeared amid waves of plastic balls, red and purple and green and yellow and blue. I’d always been worried those balls were too rough or cold to the touch or too smelly, let alone all the germs they surely carried, but they weren’t. They felt soft and balmy. They smelled like lemon trees. I looked back at the restaurant, searching for Victoriano, but he was gone. I lay faceup on the surface of that sea, and let it carry my weight. I felt time pass and the scream of kids grow thin around me, until a young man from the staff tapped me on the shoulder and very kindly, while I opened my eyes, said that the day had turned into night and that it was probably a good idea for me and my kid to go home.
• • •
When we got to our house, Laureano asked me to let him go out to you. I had very little to say, so I said okay, and he dashed to his room. Minutes later he returned with the backpack on his shoulders.
On his way out, I asked if he’d give you a message. He said of course he would, and his freckled face blushed as if he wondered whether he’d learn something about you, or me, or both, that he shouldn’t, something he’d long wished he would. He was so beautiful and faint in the yellow night light. I said
TELL DADDY I MISS HIM
His face grew serious and sagged, he looked like the man he would become one day, the man who would forget how to splash
into pits of colorful infiniteness and be merry, the man who one day would hurt and be hurt by the world of men and everything that came with it. He approached me slowly and gave me a hug that encompassed all his little, helpless might. He buried his bony, perfect cheek and your scratchy, everlasting hair in my tummy, and he promised he’d deliver my message to you.
I sat on the ottoman in the living room and watched our son cross the backyard in the charged, nocturnal air of the city that wanted to push us out. I saw him walk on the dewy grass wearily, as though the animals he was carrying were real, living things, and it seemed to me that the distance that separated our home from the tree house had grown fathomless. It was a velvety, navy, screamless night that felt stolen from a better latitude of the earth.
HER ODOR FIRST
I enter my baby’s room and find him against the bed, knees nailed to the carpet, branchy hands clasping the comforter like running sand. He doesn’t notice me. My baby sees me, hears me, no more. I carry on to his dressing room and busy myself caressing his button-down shirts, smoothing out his polos and jerseys, which still smell like Suavitel, ancient and upsetting, like the back of the house always did when I was alive. My specter cuddles in sleeves and collars and cuffs crisp and free of wrinkles, as if their fabric were made of clouds, all of his clothes pure white, because ever since my baby became a man that’s the only color he’s worn on top. My baby, the once mighty and immaculate. He was an angel that used to thunder through the days, thrashing others like they were flies, before this afterlife.
I call him my baby but he doesn’t know. He never knew. My baby, bold and ill-tempered and cute as hell since the day he was born. He still possesses formidable arms like razor blades and bright, sunflower hair, like his mother’s. She took pride in giving birth to him, to all of them, but my baby was mine all along. His demeanor used to make me shiver, not
only me but everybody else in the house, siblings and servants alike. Now his hands tremble and his eyes tumble darkened with the trueness of fear, with the absoluteness of death that I and everybody else in the back of the house had long experienced like the inevitable everyday occurrence that it is, that simply happens to you when you’re an ordinary nobody, but he, they, hadn’t, safe in this fortressed realm, until now. None of them had yet been touched by the one mighty will that makes us all equal. The poor, stupid kids. My baby and his siblings, now gone away.
They now know loss, and from this distance, I smile.
My baby took refuge in his room as boxes kept arriving at the door. Boxes brimming with so-called precious things that the siblings left behind. It was distressing and exhilarating all at once watching them scramble. They grew so scared after receiving Don Victoriano back in parts that they ran away, as quickly as they could, shitting in their fancy pants and pencil skirts, babies again, dragging stinking diapers around the house until I changed them, sometimes immediately, if their mother or Don Victoriano were around, but frequently only after they had rashes around genitals and cracks, for I needed these kids that would cry for everything to learn something real about pain. Alas, just a bit.
Expensive paintings that looked as if they had been drawn by fools, silver tea and cutlery sets inherited from their parents and grandparents, leather-bound photo albums filled with thousands of family pictures, extensive records of their decades of glory—the happy, selfish, arrogant days that preceded this dismay. Pictures where I appear every now and then, sneaking into focus at birthday parties while helping their mother serve the cake.
My baby had those countless boxes stored inside the house,
in the hallways and the mezzanines, the living room, the dining room, the library, the playroom, Don Victoriano’s, his siblings’. Every room but his own. Only my baby remains in the house and yet a flock of boxes without tags, labels, or names has been shoveled in to keep him company, to shield him. The boxes multiplied like a plague. In a matter of days they were everywhere, like larvae in a bad dream.
Stacks, rows, piles, heaps and mounds of boxes lay heavy along the hardwood, the marbled floors. They’ve formed narrow labyrinthine passageways that connect one room with the next. It’s become impossible to take in the full size of the spaces, the beauty of their arrangements—this house was stunning and magnificent; their mother, I admit, had class—and the smells of Don Victoriano and the faint manly aroma of wood and tangerine that trailed after my baby when he still wore eau de toilette.
Their mother used to smell like a porcelain doll, flawless and inanimate, but her fragrance faded away shortly after she died. I made sure there were cut-glass vases with roses from the garden in every room for my baby and his siblings, Don Victoriano too, to forget her spell quickly—her odor first.
Now all you see is the maze of boxes, the corners of boxes, the crumpled fortress of boxes, and all you smell is the smell. The whole house reeks of rotten bark, the prickly way damp cardboard does. I drag myself along these box-carved narrow corridors, from kitchen to dining room, from the library to the billiard room, and the house tells me it’s devouring itself.
I can hear it yell.
The father’s house eating the children’s.
Soon there won’t be any trace of their existence. All of them gone. Only my baby, who always lived here, and the house stand. Still for me to care for. And me, in this disgrace.
Help me, God.
When my baby could still hear me I suggested that we store the boxes in the garage and the basement. There’s enough room in the service areas of the house to put away the kids’ leftovers, to secure the past behind walls, but he cried no. The eyes of my baby eloquent with fright, like a lightbulb about to burst.
My baby senses me as I’m coming out of the closet and he looks around, chasing my presence. He knows I’m here, we remain connected. But I can’t meet his cornered-bull eyes. I can’t touch his sagging face. From this distance, forced upon us by my fate, I can’t soothe him. I can’t caress his reddened cheeks and bring relief to his expression, wet, drunk, full of angst. I’ve never seen my baby like this before, and for once I’m glad he can’t see me either.
It’s late October. The night air is sweet and cool. Life around the house has grown stale; it’s been several weeks since the children fled. Nothing moves. If you stand still and listen carefully, you can hear echoes of the lives that this house held, the children’s, the parents’, ours, fading out.
“How come boxes keep arriving?” at some point my baby asked. It was late September, days before I tripped on the corner of a box as I was coming out of the kitchen and fell, my forehead hard and irremediable against the corner of a mahogany chest, on my way to the dining room, where my baby still had dinner at regular hours. I was still providing him with a regular service, trying to maintain a regular life. Alas. “When is this going to end?” I didn’t know what to say.
“Dinner is ready, Vic. Are you coming down?” I wish I could say to him right now. On a night like this I’m sure he’d order something warm, nice and cozy. Caldo tlalpeño or cream of leek and potato soup. Handmade corn tortillas. A
glass of red wine. Then he’d ask, “What’s for dessert, Erme?” My baby, my sweet-tooth boy forever. I’d announce I made arroz con leche the way he liked it, al dente, very creamy, with an extra pinch of cinnamon. And he’d beam, full of bliss. My baby backing down for once, revealing his harmless side, only to me. Because it was only to me he never expressed contempt. I was the only one who never feared him. I was the only one he really ever loved.
I’m sure I was the reason he never left.
Now I’m standing right before him, by his filthy, messed-up bed, hearing his derailed breathing, about to choke, watching the collapse of his family through his own.
He can’t see my tears. My serenity escapes him.
BAREFOOT DOGS
It’s not the baby, or the dog, or the memories, or the ghosts that wakes me up. It’s the delivery trucks. I hear the whoosh of their sliding metal doors, the clanking when the drivers slam them shut, the thuds against the asphalt as the drivers unload beer kegs and crates full of produce and groceries. I hear the rusty doors of the businesses down the street as they open for the day—the supermarket on the ground floor of our building, the pharmacy with its green flickering neon cross at the corner, the bar to our left. To our right. There’s a bar every hundred feet in Madrid. They reek of smoke, chorizo, and sweat. Madrid is a bar that never shuts. Noisy and full of boisterous people who always seem unnervingly happy.
The sounds of the city blast into our room as soon as dawn breaks. The room where Catalina, the baby, and I sleep overlooks the street, and we keep the windows open to let a breeze in. There are no curtains or blinds on the windows because we don’t care about privacy and security here. We don’t have to worry about that anymore.
Six a.m. in Madrid and I’m already awake. And hot. The T-shirt I wore to sleep is damp and sticky. It’s white, but my
perspiration has left peach-colored stains on the chest. September like I’ve never experienced it before. Oppressive and devoid of rain.
Six a.m. in Madrid means 11:00 p.m. in Mexico City. Back home it’s yesterday. Still night. Streets packed with people getting ready to celebrate Independence Day. Streets where I grew up, became a father, and lost mine. Masaryk, Reforma, Periférico Norte, Montes Elíseos. Full of cars. Headlights on.
I miss the nights.
I rise from bed and peek at the crib. The baby’s alive. He’s moving. Already awake. The jet lag hit him hard, and two weeks after landing in Madrid, he still wakes up too early. Outstretched arms and legs. Drooling.
He makes gurgling noises that Catalina insists are the beginnings of words—she thinks he is precocious. I don’t know much about babies myself—I was the youngest at home—but those noises sound more like he’s drowning in his own saliva.
I approach the crib, and the stench of shit and scented diaper hits me in the face. I take the baby out and feel him looking at me. I avoid his eyes. He is an exact replica of me. It gives me the creeps.
I place him on the bed and start to change his diaper. It’s overloaded. His sky-blue onesie is a mess. I clean him up as best as I can, but the whole room now reeks of shit.
I wish it smelled like baby wipes, flowery and powdery, the way I think babies should smell when I look at the picture of the gorgeous, merry baby printed on the container of baby wipes.
The baby was born a few days after the first box arrived. Twenty-three hours into labor, he got stuck. Dr. Castañeda had to perform a C-section and wrestle him out. He handed him to me, and I had to cut the umbilical cord. I couldn’t help
thinking about my father, the suffering he was experiencing. I didn’t have the guts to refuse, but I closed my eyes when I severed the cord. It didn’t feel human; it felt like cutting a copper wire in two. When I first looked at his face, he was covered with blood and goo. Purple and swollen, but already a mirror. He opened his eyes and rolled them around the room until he rested them on me. We looked at each other for a spell before I passed him to Catalina. It was the last time I looked. The next day, when Dr. Castañeda stopped by to check on Catalina and the baby, he confessed it had been one of the hardest deliveries of his career. He sounded apologetic and embarrassed. Catalina and I were speechless. My fingertips tingled with panic. I realized that at some point my son would die, and that there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. I feared him for the first time, as I feared that anything could happen to him. That afternoon, I asked the hospital to assign a bodyguard to us and the baby.
I get him in a fresh, clean onesie, and place him alongside Catalina. She’s still sleeping. She sleeps a lot these days. She says she hasn’t recovered yet. She says she feels as sleepy as she did during the first trimester of pregnancy, but she didn’t sleep that much back then.
I rub her shoulder gently and whisper her name.
“What is it?” she says, her eyes still closed. Her voice is heavy.
“It’s Belisario,” I say quietly. “I think he’s hungry.”
Catalina pulls up her T-shirt and bares a breast full of milk. She brings the baby’s mouth close to her and plugs him in. Belisario starts to suck like an animal; the sounds he produces are primitive and primal. And squeaky. As if his lips or Catalina’s nipple, or both, were made out of rubber.
Whenever he eats, I take the chance to peek at his face. He’s tightly attached to Catalina’s breast, and this pressure deforms
the shape of his nose, redefining his features. His cheeks are endless and rotund. His lips are redder. His frown furrier. He doesn’t look like my son. He’s a watchable, bearable stranger.
Catalina remains asleep. She manages to feed him while she dreams. I envy her. The baby’s presence, his mere touch, seems to make her happy even when she’s not awake.
Twenty minutes later the squeaking stops, and the baby starts to moan. He wants the other breast. Whenever he’s tired, or hungry, or if he needs a clean diaper, he grumbles. He hardly cries.
In one clumsy, acrobatic movement, Catalina scoops him up and switches position. The baby’s now on the other side of the bed and hooked up to the other breast. She’s a bear with her cub.
The squeaking resumes. The walls in the room are naked, like the rest of the apartment. We wanted to bring our furniture from Mexico City with us, but we didn’t have time. We wanted to find a new home for our palm plants, but we couldn’t. The day we left, Catalina and I dragged them out to the backyard, hoping that they would catch the summer rain and make it. On our first days in Madrid, when we started looking for a place to live, we were offered furnished flats in fancier districts, but we turned them all down. The idea of using someone else’s furniture was humiliating and depressing. We settled for this empty apartment on Guzmán el Bueno Street in the Argüelles neighborhood, on the second floor of a gray building from the mid-Franco era.
Someone at the Mexican embassy suggested Ikea. On our first visit we bought the bed, the crib, some chairs, a table, a couch, cutlery, blankets. It was fun and cozy. It seemed like a newfound home, orderly and safe. Everything was so inexpensive we could have afforded half the store, so on our second
trip we went crazy buying candle holders, framed photographs of skylines, pillows, cactuses, handwoven baskets, stuffed snakes. In our apartment, the things that we bought felt cheap and used, like hand-me-downs. We went back the next day and returned almost everything. We have a TV that we got at El Corte Inglés. When the baby’s asleep and we want to stop talking about Mexico or thinking about my father, we turn it on. We laugh at the way people speak here on TV; everybody sounds pompous or impertinent. Late-night shows feature people who get naked in front of the cameras or insult each other with phrases like
Me cago en tus muertos
or
Hostia puta
, that no one would dare utter back home. We watch TV a lot, but we don’t watch news.
Belisario finishes breakfast. Catalina’s nipple hangs in the air, glossy purple and blistered, until she pulls down the T-shirt and cuddles back in bed. I place the baby back in the crib. His eyes chase mine, but I look at his knees, his toes. I turn on the mobile that hovers above his head, and a herd of stuffed horses chase each other in circles.
I need coffee. I head for the kitchen.
In the living room I find Zurbarán stooped over a pool of something visceral, throwing up. His belly lets air in and out heavily, like a squeaky toy. The puddle is almost his size, green and revolting; little dark red lumps float on the surface like islands of blood adrift in a sea of bile.
He notices me and squints; his little nugget starts to rattle. It’s around the time I normally take him out for the first walk. We stroll around the neighborhood at least three times a day, but some days even four, five, especially if Catalina tries to get me alone with the baby. Zurbarán is my out.
He’s a mutt, but he doesn’t look like it, except for the tail and the crooked ears. When he was a puppy, the kids in the
gated community back home used to mistake him for a German shepherd—it was hilarious to see their scandalized faces when I explained that he wasn’t pedigree, that he was just a stray dog from the streets.
Catalina found him one evening when she was coming home from work, on the corner of Reforma and Prado Sur. He was just a pup, full of worms, his body the size of a human heart. Someone had macheted off his tail, but the abuser saved one caudal bone, a bright white tip collared by a rim of ruby flesh that eventually grew skin and hair, and that he now shakes like a single maraca whenever he’s anxious or merry. But mostly anxious.
He throws up again. There’s more blood. Last night he was fine. When we got his passport and immunization records back in Mexico, the vet said he looked healthy as a gem. He barfs silently. I don’t know if it’s the stench of baby shit or what, but the vomit doesn’t have a particularly unpleasant smell. His front legs tremble each time he lurches forward.
I don’t want this to be real. I need to wake up. I walk to the kitchen.
The size of the apartment isn’t bad, but the kitchen, fuck. Our walk-in closet back home was larger than this. In Mexico, houses have separate laundry rooms. Washing machines would never be installed in the kitchen. The real estate agent said it was a regular kitchen by middle-class European standards. She said it as if it were a highlight.
Yesterday’s coffee is in the carafe. I pour a cup and heat it in the microwave. It tastes trashy and metallic.
In Mexico, we’d never have to brew coffee ourselves.
I pour a second cup and go back to the living room, waiting to see Zurbarán ready for a walk, jumping high in the air like every morning. The puddle gone.
I reach the living room. The mess is still there.
Zurbarán’s lying next to it, belly and hind legs and paws soaked in vomit, eyes closed. I squat down next to him, and he opens his eyes. I breathe in, and the only smell that reaches me is the aroma of microwaved coffee.
In our room Catalina and the baby are now awake, lying in bed. The air is stifling. Down on the street, motorcycles dash by one after another, and two women are fighting over someone whose attention they’re both after. The argument is getting heated, but neither Catalina nor the baby seems to care. He’s playing with the tips of her frizzy brown hair. She’s humming a tune I don’t recognize. “Hey there,” she says sweetly, giving me a lazy smile. “Come on, join us.”
“Something’s wrong with Zurbarán,” I say. “Looks like he’s been puking all night.”
“What?” she asks, stroking the baby’s back. The smile vanishes.
“There’s a pool of vomit in the living room. There’s blood in it.”
“Oh my God.” She covers her mouth. “Is he gonna die?”
“Don’t know. I know nothing about sick dogs.”
“What are we gonna do if he dies?” she whispers, as if she didn’t want the baby to hear. Her face turns white, like the blanket.
“I don’t know.” My eyes fill with tears. Catalina, and the baby, and the room grow blurry in front of me.
The first box arrived six weeks after my father disappeared. We hadn’t had any news of him yet. The kidnapping expert recommended that we all move to my father’s house. One Saturday in early July, around noon, the doorbell rang. Ermelinda, one of the maids, answered the door. She came back to the living room saying a FedEx guy was asking for my brother.
Victoriano went outside and came back with a box. It wasn’t a FedEx box; it was a regular box, one you could get for free at a grocery store, badly sealed. He said it was heavy and cold. The living room grew silent. Victoriano placed it on the table, and we all circled around it. The label said it had been sent by Alice, no last name. Everybody in the house sensed it had something to do with my father, so the maids and the gardener came out of the kitchen and joined us in the living room, but my brother asked them to leave. The label showed the box had been shipped from Wonderland, Texas. The kidnapping expert, Ramiro Alcázar was his name, opened his laptop and googled it, but he couldn’t find the place. Catalina felt dizzy. I asked if she was okay. She said she was, but her face had turned pale. My sisters coaxed her to go upstairs. She was due in a matter of days. The women in our families would look at her swollen belly and say it was pointy. They’d say we were expecting a boy for sure. We had decided not to find out. I wanted it to be a girl, but I never told anyone. I couldn’t bear the idea of having a boy.
The label read: “This is the first gift.” Alcázar lifted the box, sensing its weight. He suggested it would be better if he opened it alone, but Victoriano and I refused to leave. He said we needed to be ready for whatever might be in that box, but my brother cut him off and yelled, “Open the fucking box already!” Alcázar slit the box top open with a cutter and took out a ziplock bag filled with ice. He slid open the bag and found another ziplock bag inside. He slid open the second bag and found my father’s right foot.
• • •
It’s around ten, and we’re on our way to the vet. Zurbarán hasn’t thrown up again since we left the apartment. He walks
more slowly than usual and limps every now and then, but he seems as happy to be out in the sun as ever. I don’t know how he pulls it off, this enthusiasm, blinding and absurd.
Buildings around us grow taller as we walk. Madrid is a maze of bricks and aluminum, dull facades, and dry, suffocating air. A desert of urban debris. Three a.m. back home. The city is more alive when it’s dark than when the sunlight struggles to push through smog. Dew and quiet are blanketing Mexico City, and I’m here, at the other end of the planet. Stoplights blinking out of order, decorations of the Mexican coat of arms glowing on every corner, incandescent and meaningless. And someone’s probably being pulped to death somewhere in the rough edges of the city, in the core of the city. The city, somewhere. Brutal and impossible to let go of.