Plaza Requiem Read online

  “You look exhausted.”

  “Yes, I’m tired, but don’t worry.”

  “Why don’t you take a nice bath in Becky’s tub? It’s a good way to relax.”

  “What if she gets angry?”

  “She won’t. You’ll find some clean towels there. Go on, it’s the best bathroom in the house!”

  “I’m embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll be in the bedroom waiting for you.”

  When I saw Father cross the garden toward the house, I decided to come down and straighten up in my workshop. I had not planned to do any more sculptures until I got back from Berlin, but I did want to sit down and do a sketch, and the table was still covered with the remnants of the figure I had broken. I left my bedroom cautiously. I didn’t want to run into Edith.

  The sky was completely dark when Edith stretched out her legs and arms, allowing the water to surround her and cover her slowly. Steam began to fill the room gradually. At that instant she thought she had never before felt so much at peace, so satisfied. The wait had been worth it. And since the first day she had wondered what it would be like to be soaking in that tub.

  I heard the noise of the water. In my bathroom. There was someone in my bathroom. It had to be her. How dare she?

  As the water level rose in the tub, Edith imagined what her future would be like with Fabián. She would be always at his side, caring for him. Rebecca would just have to get used to it. Besides, perhaps it wouldn’t be long before she wasn’t an only child anymore: Edith had resolved to convince Fabián to have a baby.

  What was she doing in my bathroom without my permission? And in my tub, nonetheless? This time I would have the nerve to tell her off, to say to her face what I really thought of her.

  She stood up when she saw Rebecca enter, furious, almost running toward her. She tried to apologize to her and calm her down. But Rebecca was ranting uncontrollably. Edith thought her anger made her look bigger, stronger than ever, almost bestial. For the first time she was afraid of her and took a step backward in retreat.

  And when she stepped out of the tub she slipped. I saw her fall on her back and strike her head against the edge of the tub. The blood seeped out and stained the mosaic tiles around the feet of the tub. I don’t know how or when she hit her head. I didn’t get a good look because I closed my eyes. At that instant, just at that instant the image I had been searching for appeared in my mind: the smiling face of Euterpe with her arms outstretched, as though she were waiting for someone.

  My heart was pounding and my hands trembled. I thought immediately of going for help, telling Father about Edith, but first I had to run and sketch that silhouette on a sheet of paper so I wouldn’t forget a single detail, so I could execute the sculpture when I returned from Berlin. To help me calm down a little and take my mind off what had just happened, I cleaned off the table and put the tiles in order. I realized that Edith’s clumsiness couldn’t be helped, it was what it was. And I wouldn’t have time to do my work later, would I? The preparations for the trip, Edith’s wake, and the funeral would be a source of worry for me, keeping me away from my workshop. And I wanted to finish my sculpture so I could give it to Father for his birthday at the latest.

  Before returning to my bedroom, I went in to look at Edith. Luckily, her blood hadn’t reached the wood of my sauna. Everything else could be easily cleaned with chlorine. It would all be back to normal soon.

  I turned the lights off in my workshop before heading back to the house, but I left the light in my bathroom on, so as not to give rise to any suspicion. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone would find her. In hindsight, it was a fortunate accident. Father couldn’t blame me for anything, and the best part was that from then on, when he played his violin in the evenings, it would be for me. For me only.

  Ants

  I had insomnia and spent the whole night killing ants.

  Since early summer, when Tomás died, they’ve taken over the house. One long row of little black specks moving along the wall, scurrying back and forth from the window to the kitchen table. They’ve invaded the bathroom, my closet and the cupboard, too, even though it’s empty. Some of them were speeding nervously along the tabletop, as though they figured the freedom I had unwillingly granted them would be short-lived and they wanted to enjoy the remnants of the feast of sugared wax and ground cocoa. Others, who had reconnoitered the rest of the rooms more thoroughly, decided to set up camp in the drawer where El Flaco is. I don’t like to look at them, so I never go near there.

  When I first decided to go on a diet, we’d hidden some cookies on the shelves of the armoire, underneath the mattress, even inside the old tape recorder with no batteries. It was Tomás’s idea: at some point, when I was unable to cope with my hunger, they might be a help. Then he got sick and died, and I forgot about them. They must be spoiled by now, but the ants like them anyway. They walk onto them, eat their fill from the tops of the cookies, then haul the crumbs off to some place outside the window. I haven’t discovered their anthill, but I know it’s there in the yard, maybe near Isabel’s rusty swing. The grass has grown high and uneven and it’s covered with dry leaves, because autumn arrived a few days after I made up my mind not to leave the house, and I haven’t swept or raked since then.

  In case Isabel might come back, I’d always set three places at the table. Tomás never resigned himself to her being away, and he was insistent that everything should be impeccable to greet her when she returned. It was out of the question to get rid of the swing or any of her other things: her photographs, books, the doll with the matted hair, and her clothes all remained exactly where she had left them. Right after Tomás died I tried to keep up the routine, but setting two places instead of three and seeing that every afternoon one of them was left undisturbed began to depress me, so I stopped doing it. Now it seems useless and stupid to clean a place where I’m the only one, and I don’t even sit down at the table to eat any more. Until recently I only used the table to prepare the candles, but the sugar ran out, I ate the cocoa, and everything else is full of ants, so there’s no way I can continue casting the spell.

  Besides, after today it won’t matter.

  I began doing it in secret, a few days before Tomás died, to see if I could get Isabel to come back home. I knew how important it was for him to see her again; that’s why I did it. I went and bought several packages of tallow candles, and with a wooden toothpick I’d write the names of Tomás and Isabel on them one by one, over and over, in tiny letters, until they were completely covered. Then I’d coat them with the sugar and cocoa mixture and light them while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. At first I did just one every night, so that Tomás wouldn’t notice, but when he took a turn for the worse and couldn’t leave his room, I’d fix up two or three and leave them burning until dawn.

  I sent Isabel several emails, but she didn’t answer. “Maybe she’s taking a trip,” I told Tomás when he asked about her again, although I knew for a fact it wasn’t true. I knew she was in the city and she didn’t come home because she still hadn’t forgiven me. The smell of smoke and medicine soon filled the house, particularly after I closed up all the windows to keep out the draft. The odour got worse because of El Flaco, but by now I’m used to that, too. The ants were able to get in through a tiny hole in the sill; a spider wove her web a little higher up, near the crank. Until yesterday, the spider was the only one concerned with the ants.

  The last few nights of Tomás’s agony were the hardest. I would have felt abandoned if it hadn’t been for the arrival of El Flaco, a scrawny, flea-bitten cat who, after one can of tuna, turned into my cat and was constantly at my side, as I’d give Tomás a sponge bath or feed him while I cleaned house or prepared the candles. Tomás spurned the animal, but he was too weak to protest when El Flaco began roaming freely about the house. No, I hadn’t forgotten that Isabel was allergic, but I wasn’t going to banish the cat solely on that account. I promised Tomás that if Isabel came back I’d k
eep the cat in the yard.

  It wasn’t necessary. El Flaco left on his own when I no longer had anything to feed him. I left him on the street before I shut myself in. It was only two – maybe three – weeks ago that he came back, but at first I refused to let him in. He just stayed there, meowing and meowing, and I stood behind the door with a knot in my throat, because how could I explain things to him? A lady rang the doorbell one morning to let me know that “my cat was outside and wanted in.” I told her he wasn’t mine and she could take him if she wanted. Then I changed my mind and opened the door. El Flaco looked pretty sick, so I picked him up, took him to my room and kept petting him until sleep overcame me. The next morning he was stiff and cold. I couldn’t endure the idea of burying him; he didn’t deserve it. I wrapped him up in a plastic bag and put him in a drawer.

  I think he was so inconsiderate that he only came back to me in order to die. As if I hadn’t suffered enough with the death of Tomás.

  Isabel didn’t come to the wake or the funeral. I telephoned her several times, but she’d hang up as soon as she recognized my voice. I left messages on her answering machine but to no avail. Just because I had so many left over, I kept on with the candles, praying for her to return so that we could talk. The last candle burned out the day after El Flaco died, when I had already given up hope. I didn’t think it had worked. But I was wrong.

  Isabel came to see me yesterday afternoon.

  I wasn’t going to let her in. I should have refused. Tomás wasn’t there to stop me, and honestly, at that point I was the one who wasn’t willing to forgive her for abandoning us like that. For shutting us out. For not loving me back. Even so, I finally went and opened the door. She had a point: the house belonged to both of us. But she had gone away and I stayed. She lost her rights to the place and to Tomás, although she was always his darling little girl. Our darling little girl.

  Isabel was quite surprised when she saw me. “You look thin, very thin,” she emphasized. And dirty – of course, because I haven’t paid the water bill, which she didn’t actually say, but I know she thought it. But I don’t have any gas either and I hate to take a bath with cold water. And naturally I was going to be thin, because I had just finished my diet when Tomás died, and after that the food we had in the house started to run out.

  When she looked out the kitchen window and compared the yard to a jungle I couldn’t say anything. Time, I guess, had just been doing its thing all along.

  Then she suddenly bent over the kitchen sink and vomited; I suppose the odour got to her. I thought of telling her about El Flaco, but she would have taken it wrong. Then I realized she was aghast at all the ants, and it was only then that I noticed how many there really were.

  How many there really are.

  She started the argument. She didn’t have to lie: if she’d really been worried about Tomás and me, she would have come sooner. “I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing you,” she told me. “You make me sick.” Then I asked her why she’d never really made a clean break from Tomás and me. Why she kept in touch, randomly phoned Tomás to check on him, and altogether made us believe that she’d drop in unexpectedly some afternoon. I stood there in front of her, looking right at her, but she couldn’t withstand the intensity of my gaze. Now she was the one who didn’t know how to respond.

  Coward.

  Tomás was all I had. I loved feeling his caresses, the way his hands and his lips moved along my breasts. Isabel was always there with us. It was impossible to hide from her. I always told her I wasn’t trying to take her mother’s place or steal her father away from her. The proof of that was the fact that the best nights were the ones all three of us spent together. Isabel’s sweet scent mixed with the odour of tobacco from Tomás’s pipe. Her tender skin was so soft that he and I would have wanted to caress it forever. With our hands, our tongues. But then she grew up and began to refuse our company. She was becoming a beautiful young lady, and she didn’t want us to touch her anymore. She wouldn’t even let us bathe her the way we used to, taking turns to wash her soft skin and run our hands over her tender body. She’d shut herself up in her room and not come out. We tried to force her into submission, until it became impossible to hold on to her.

  This isn’t – wasn’t – the first time she tells – told – me that I make her sick.

  “If you forgive me, I’ll forgive you too,” I said, although I wasn’t entirely convinced that I meant it. Her rejecting our unique kind of love would be hard to forgive; her not coming home to see Tomás before he died was unforgivable. But I owed Tomás to give it an honest try. I tried to stroke her hair and touch her face. It had been so long since I’d seen her that I’d forgotten the way her skin smelled. But she pulled away. She was leaning on the stove and walked over toward the wall opposite the window, as though trying to get away from the ants as well. That hurt me deeply.

  She had no reason to look down on me like that.

  Not after I had waited for her for so many days, with her place set at the table and the house all clean.

  But I couldn’t tell her that, because when I tried to approach her again she felt cornered and threatened me with a butcher knife. The drawer was broken, and the utensils were spread out all over the counter. She said there was nothing she needed to be forgiven for, that it was the other way around. I laughed at her, at her fearful little eyes and that absurd knife in her hand. I knew she wouldn’t hurt me; she had hardly changed at all since the last time we saw each other. I thought she wanted to play, like when she was a little girl and she’d beg me to chase her around the yard. This time the door was shut, and she couldn’t run away.

  I went up to her slowly, and finally she lowered the knife.

  No sooner had I stretched out my arms to put them around her shoulders than she raised the knife again to attack me. The sudden look of determination I discovered in her eyes unnerved me, but feeling the knife blade graze my hand prompted me to react. We struggled. I don’t know where I found the strength to defend myself. Then I felt her body shrink back and, almost at the same instant, something warm soaking my blouse. Before I could hold her head up she fell to the floor. It took me a few seconds to understand what had occurred.

  What I still can’t comprehend is how it all happened.

  She, too, had come back to me in order to die.

  I wiped the blood off her hands and abdomen with the sheets from Tomás’s bed, so she could feel something of his. He would have liked that. Now my fingers are red, too. I tried to lick them clean but it’s useless. Saliva doesn’t dissolve blood after it’s had a chance to dry.

  I’m thirsty and afraid, but most of all I’m very sleepy.

  All night long I was killing ants.

  Deeper and deeper inside Isabel.

  R is for Radishes on Remembrance Day

  It’s still dark when I enter the kitchen in the early morning to check on the radishes. I’ve never planted anything before; I’m nervous and eager to see what I’ll find nesting in the moist soil – I feel like a little girl about to unearth a treasure. The leaves are bright green and look almost happy, as if they, too, had been waiting for today. Not a sound can be heard. Gabby is still sleeping and I know I have to wait for her to wake up before exploring the contents of the ceramic pot that has been sitting on our windowsill for twenty-five days now. Outside, the hushed wind seems to pay its respects to my memories. In my mind, I hear Galina’s strong voice declaring the radish a most loyal vegetable, because every part of it can be eaten and it’s easy to plant and care for. Her smile was yellow and nonchalant. I’m wearing her favourite pink robe and suddenly wish I had some of the lilac perfume she used to wear, to feel her even closer.

  It’s been eleven years since we were last together in this same place. I wanted to do something special to say goodbye. To part with her in a happier mood, and feel less guilty about letting go. No. Letting go is a euphemism. I was betraying her and even though everybody said I was exaggerating and she wouldn’t know she
was being moved into an old-age home, it was enough that I knew it. Her getting out of the house unnoticed and wandering alone around the city for an entire day, in the cold, asking for directions to get to her childhood home – striving to arrive at an apartment that had been long gone, on the other side of the world – finally did it for me. Remembering the fear that gnawed at me during those merciless hours trying to find her still makes me shiver. The police reports, the driving around the neighbourhood screaming her name, the making of flyers in a flash to hand out to anyone who would take one made me realize how blind I had been. I couldn’t take care of her on my own any longer, especially when I was about to become a single mother. Only a few days later did it dawn on me that our last afternoon together happened to be on November 11.

  For weeks now have I been trying to decide how to share the story with Gabby. What will she say when she sees me dressed like this? At what point should I tell her about Galina’s notebook? A shy ray of light is starting to crawl through the window. It will be a partly cloudy day. Perfect to fit my mood.

  As my Galina – she never wanted me to call her Grandma, complaining it made her feel old – began to fade away, I made an effort to claw her back from oblivion. To keep her with me for as long as I could. So I began doing the things we always used to share together: baking cookies, going out for walks to familiar places, reading stories. I reminded her again and again of the time she gave me a “pooch of honour” for being brave at the hospital when my appendix was removed. I smile and look at it now, still sitting proudly on top of the microwave table – it’s a stuffed toy in the shape of a lamb but she called it pooch, with a strong p. Everything about her had always seemed strong and everlasting, and that’s what made it so hard to witness the frustration in her eyes and her half-open mouth as she tried to reach inside herself to retrieve words and memories that were eroding. Even her body seemed to shrink as she forgot how to sit and walk straight. I didn’t understand how small she had really become until she started mistaking me for her little sister, Agnieszka, who hadn’t survived the war. It was then I remembered a story Galina had told me once, about how during her last summer at home with her mother and sister – they never saw my great-grandfather again after he joined the army a year before – they had tried to rekindle a feel for happiness.