Antón Lopo
TRANS. BY Jacob Rogers
Excerpts from Extraordinary
1
My sister Ana sounds distressed when she calls to tell me that Mom broke her femur. I don’t say anything. She fills my silence with a [detailed] description of the situation. She knows that bringing up Mom makes me uncomfortable [we’ve avoided this subject in our conversations for years], but “I didn’t have any choice but to call you.” She’s exhausted after five days and nights in the hospital, where she only has one free hour to eat. Thankfully, our cousins from Toldaos, and Marisé [an old neighbor], have come by a few mornings. But she can’t relax. She’s afraid Mom will die and leave her alone. She asks me for help. “What about our brother?” I ask. “Marcos says they’re having work done in their house. I really, really need you, Óscar,” she says, and as she does, a ray of sun climbs up from my feet and bursts into my eyes. I’m bound to the past by a piece of straw so thin in my memory that even the smallest motion could break the bind and send pain shooting through my body. I take a deep breath. I search for some calm in the pit of my stomach. My heart is beating in the palms of my hands. I gulp: “don’t worry, Ana.”
2
The last time I saw Mom was over thirty years ago. She had a defiant gaze, bleach-blonde hair falling in ringlets down to her shoulders, Caribbean blue nail polish, an impeccable blazer with gemstone buttons, and not a single scar on her legs. She couldn’t stand scars or [worse still] spider veins. To her, they were both ghastly symptoms of neglect, as were bags under the eyes and sloppy lip and eyebrow waxing. Time’s effect on people’s bodies wasn’t, in her mind, a biological phenomenon, but rather a result of ignorance and poverty. And for her, “poverty” encompassed spiritual matters just as much as economic ones. She felt that each was the fruit of a moral failing.
Breaking away from my mother made a definitive mark on who I am [it’s painful for me to look at myself in mirrors]. I had conflicted feelings for the first few years. Overcome by an urge to call her, I would dial her number only to hang up when I heard her say “Yes?” on the other end of the line. Ana told me in her letters [or messages once cellphones became more popular] that Mom only talked about me to complain that I was ungrateful [I never visited or called]. She couldn’t help but worry [an act] what had become of me, what circles I moved in. “He’s a buffoon,” she would say. As the years went on, my name faded from her lips, largely due to the birth of her grandchildren thanks to Marcos, her favorite son, the only one who [she bragged to her friends] had it all: an honest man’s integrity, a good job, and a model wife.
For my part, I gained a strength I’d never had before. I made my own decisions about my time and affections, and my only constraint was the need to make a living. I did lots of odd jobs. I got by. But I wasn’t very ambitious. I earned enough to live and go on trips, and was the first in my entire extended family to travel for pleasure rather than emigration. That fact didn’t escape me. I grew up at a time when the world still contained [at least, so I thought] places that were beyond the reach of touristic wandering, the endless drilling of business, and war. I think it was probably the gentleness of those new frontiers that helped me overcome the agonizing thought that Mom could live without ever loving me.
3
I don’t want to go back to my hometown by car, so I check the train schedule. I call the agency I’ve worked for during the past two years and ask Sandra [the director] to clear my schedule. “No problem. Fall is always slow. I’ll let it slide as long as you’re back before All Saint’s Day. You have an appointment with a widow who wants to go with you to the cemetery, the theatre, and then out to dinner. Some widows feel especially lonely on All Saint’s, and you’ve gotten a reputation for being obliging and discreet,” she says, and hangs up with a kissing sound. I’m the only employee she’s never received a complaint about. I’ve achieved perfection in my work, that is, perfection in the social role I play, unbound by life and personal traits. After the conversation with Sandra, I turn my work phone off but leave my personal phone on.
The most popular times of the year tend to fall around the holidays and spring and summer weekends. During the holidays, I’m always booked for a Christmas Eve dinner and a Christmas Day lunch, which I spend with the family of a client. She introduces me as her boyfriend. She says that ever since she started bringing me, her mother has been more affectionate with her, her sisters haven’t badgered her about her love life, and she’s had more peace of mind. She also calls me for events and parties thrown by her relatives, so that we can keep the fantastical illusion of our courtship alive. Some women call me to go skiing, take a short trip, get out of their routines, or explore a city they’ve never been in before and have me act as their guide, which requires me to do research in preparation, one of the most stimulating parts of my job. Other women want to have dinner, let off some steam, and have a bit of sex without the exhausting preamble, the boring men, or the unpleasant surprises that come with Tinder. I love to weave for them the fantasy of being in a couple, to make the travails of love more bearable.
The majority of my appointments are with women. I only see men if they have references. They’re generally struggling through intense internal conflicts. They have an unpolished emotional side, and a pitifully underdeveloped sense of affection. Working with them isn’t worth all the effort. It’s exhausting. They always complain about the price. Women seem to be more generous. They don’t mind spending the money if they receive dollops of happiness in return. Men, though, have a harder time decoding satisfaction. The last time I fell in love with a man, it was a disaster. His name was Alberto, and he was essentially two women. One of them lived on the outside. That was his mother, and she presided over all his actions [she wanted him to get married and have kids. All the women he loved, he did so through this external, teleological woman]. The other woman had been buried inside him, in his muscles, his guts, his lymphatic system. She lived in a hidden prison. This part of him was really more of a girl [the girl he had been] than a woman, still naïve and sweet. A girl who had been fossilized while growing up, with her disproportionate little arms and legs, the elastic body of young girls, with no breasts or hips, childlike, clean, abstract [odorless] genitals, and creamy skin, yet to see the light of day. The girl was no longer breathing, but she continued to jerk and twist against her bonds. Her tiny heart still beat, blood still pumped to her brain, and her lymph nodes made their presence known through occasional allergies that doctors could never find an explanation for. Allergists performed tests but never got clear results. He said he was allergic to life.
Alberto was the only person who has ever truly known me [he could tell what I was thinking by the way my eyes moved], and I was the only person who ever got close to him without coming out traumatized. His awakening sent rage surging through his body. He slammed doors. Battered his head against the walls. Shouted. Argued with socks. His neck was like a map of vast rivers transporting immense quantities of blood from his heart to his brain. He had a terrifying look on his face [all forethought obliterated], as if he had spared the sock, or me, our lives, and I could do nothing but look on at his frenzied actions. I tried to enter him and found myself with the imprisoned little girl. He went blind with rage, his nails ready to tear away at my skin. He seemed burnt out.
He sent me a letter a little while ago. I’m not sure how he got my address. in the letter, he tries to reflect on the frustrating outcome of our relationship [I simply disappeared from his life one morning], and mentions that he’s never forgotten me [insulting me all the while]. Outside of whether or not I share his view, or whether his letter is an accurate or distorted portrayal of me, I think our romantic utopia ended in failure. I’m at peace with that. What I’m truly in love with now is the ocean, the consistency of its waves. Climbing onto my surfboard and escaping the break.
8
I go straight to the hospital in a taxi that takes me around the edge of the city, along a new beltway with anti-light-pollution streetlamps. I roll down the window as we pass City Hall so that I can get a better view of the clock tower and the semicircular dome with its chimes. The tower was built to distract from the silence of the factory sirens during the restructuring in the 80s, which led to entire families being pushed out of the city and left their houses looking like rusted oil drums. Some garish buildings made out of granite, slate, and colorful aluminum have been built around the hospital, hiding the convent’s baroque bell towers. Off in the distance, the square tower at the Marist School, built during the gruesome austerity period after the Civil War, seems to have survived. Country and city melt into and repel one another at every stretch along the way.
Mom is in room 212. Ana welcomes me with a hug and rests her head on my shoulder. She rubs my back with her fingers spread out. It’s a gentle, comforting pressure. I can feel the heat from her hands and breath. “Thank you for coming, Óscar.”
Mom’s mouth is open. She’s asleep. Her lungs creak as if there’s an insect chirping inside them. It’s hard for me to accept that this ragged woman in front of me is her. The hair is pushed back from her face in a sweaty mess, leaving her white roots visible and adding to her sickly appearance. Without their lipstick, her lips have softened into a defenseless sneer. Her eyebrows are unpainted [she lost them when she was younger]. There’s not a single trace of powder, makeup, eyeshadow, or mascara. It must be serious: not for her life would she agree to be in the hospital without an eyebrow pencil. Her moles have gotten bigger [the one to the right of her lip has inflated] and she’s developed liver spots. Her body is shrunken under the covers. Her breasts, still large, move up and down with each breath. Her arms, stretched [limply] along her body, are covered in flaccid skin that has lost all its elasticity. She’s gotten thinner. There’s an IV in her wrists feeding her blood, saline, antibiotics, and Dexketoprofen for the pain.
Ana and I take advantage of the momentary lull to go to the hospital café. It’s after five in the afternoon and there aren’t many people around. We sit at a table beside the window, far away from the bar. A circumspect waiter wearing black polyester pants and a polo makes us coffee so terrible that we let it go cold in the mug after a couple of sips. The coffee maker’s logo is printed in blue on the mugs, matching the napkin holders. I get up and grab a veggie sandwich wrapped in plastic. It says veggie, but there’s tuna in it. Hospitals make me feel equally hungry and tired. Ana, on the other hand, has lost her appetite since Mom was admitted. She’s living off Meritine, hoping the syn- thetic protein will keep her from losing too much muscle mass.
The doctors [she tells me] are guarded. They’re envisioning a long operation. Trauma surgeries involve massive losses of blood, and Mom already lost a lot to internal bleeding after the fall. She was home alone. Ana was at a weaving festival in Burela. When she got back, she found Mom in the middle of the kitchen, lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Her guess is that Mom was cleaning the light fixture because the stepstool was beside her and she had out the glass cleaning spray, a rag, and a roll of paper towels. She must have fallen into the table and chairs, because they were on their backs. The tablecloth had come off and taken the fruit bowl with it. There was fruit all over the kitchen and some persimmons had rolled into the blood. Ana runs her hand along her neck as she remembers the details. She has chubby fingers. On one of them, a thick, worn golden ring that used to be Mom’s. She winces. “You could see the bone. It must have been so painful...I keep won- dering why she would have been cleaning the light fixture...she can’t keep up physically, Óscar. The Parkinson’s has gotten to her entire right side. It’s more of a stiffness in the muscles than it is shaking. She’s lost some of her facial expressions. She barely even blinks anymore.” I lean over the table and kiss her on the forehead. She smiles. She sits up straight and rolls her neck. “You can’t begin to imagine how much I’ve missed you...” “Are you saying I have no imagination?” Tears caught in her eyelashes, she replies: “you’re an idiot.”
Ana is the spitting image of Dad. The long, oval face. The deep, green eyes [a muddy river]. The thin lips. The round chin and pink, happy cheeks. If I didn’t know she was a nondrinker I’d say she had more of a taste for wine than Manuela. She got Dad’s straight, light brown hair, too. Even her slow, measured movements remind me of him. Her hips have gotten wide and her belly has gotten flabbier, though she hides it under a loose blouse with Indian patterns. All she got from Mom are the bows in her blouse, the flowers embroidered into the chest of it, and the animal-shaped hairpins in her hair, all remnants of a style Mom fire-etched into Ana’s tastes through sheer discipline.
Why Ana stayed in the city, living with Mom, is a mystery to me. She says she can’t imagine living anywhere else, and that she won’t leave Mom all by herself. Whenever she goes away [even if only for a day], she misses her bed, her weaving students, the cat colony she feeds, the dogs at the animal shelter, and the familiar smells and light. She sees truly unique colors here, shades you don’t see anywhere else. The way the light filters through the year-long humidity and the sun shines in the forests. Golden in spring and fall. Pink in winter. Savagely bright in the summer.
Her shyness is like a rug she hangs in front of her as an indication of her reserved personality. I’ve never met any boyfriends [she doesn’t like to talk about her intimate feelings]. Marriage seems to her like a game of win or lose. She hates losing, and has no desire to win. You might think she’s stuck in a stage of childhood, but the one time I mentioned that to her over the phone, she got angry and said she wasn’t Wendy. “I’m tired of everyone trying to tell me who I am...why would I do what you all want me to if I’m not interested? Have you ever considered that you’re the ones who are wrong? I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want men or women. I don’t want to feel accepted or needed...the most wonderful part of my day is when I’m alone and I can watch my bobbins weave together the web my fingers have dreamt up.”
9
Mom is still asleep when we get back to the room. Ana is wary of this extended lull. Mom sleeps too much during the day. “She gets lost in some deep stage of sleep at night and can’t get out of it.” In the early morning [Ana warns me], “she’s extremely confused.” The nurses were calling it sunrise syndrome. They said it was normal for an elderly person. In her five nights at the hospital, Mom has experienced an extensive range of hallucinations and stirred up a lot of trouble. She insisted on getting up for her mother’s death day and had to be strapped to the bed. She never remembers any of it in the morning, and becomes distraught at the thought that she’s losing her grip on her memory.
When she wakes up, Mom thinks I’m a nurse and that I’m going to take her blood pressure. Ana pushes me to the front of the bed. My feet dig into the vinyl flooring and I stop. Swallow. “It’s me, Mom.” She lifts a hand, as if to stroke me, then lets it fall. “You...I wasn’t expecting you.” She closes her eyes. “This hospital is terrible, and the nurses are extremely rude.” She opens them again. “Will you fix my pillow, please? I can’t rest my head.” She acts indifferent, as if I’ve just come back from a short vacation.
10
During Marisé’s routine visit [she’s too scared to kiss me in greeting], Ana takes me back to our house. She drives a metallic gray Ibiza and shifts constantly up and down, like a street racer. I mention that Marisé looks just like the Marisé I remember [not one wrinkle, light brown hair, anorexically thin, pantsuit with a floral shirt and a matching neck scarf]. “I’m glad you’re so optimistic [Ana laughs]. You’re going to need that tonight. You still haven’t seen the worst of it. Mom turns feral.” “She’s always been that way.” “Well then, imagine that, but worse.” “You’re scaring me.” “Good,” she says, and thanks me for being with her.
The two of us have maintained an absolute trust in one another. We were able to create a peaceful bubble beyond Mom’s omnipresence, and it acted as a vaccine for the virus in our house. Ana fantasizes about me coming back to the city after Mom dies and the two of us growing old together. She says she’ll take care of me. “If Mom dies first [I say, tongue in cheek], she’s going to stick around in some incorporeal way, like a ghost, a specter, an apparition, a reincarnation, or a vindictive mummy.” “I’m impressionable, Óscar, don’t say things like that to me!” I make claws with my hands. “She’ll probably come back as a bloodthirsty zombie.” “You’re going to give me nightmares!” I put on a spooky voice, “Just know that your mother will never leave your side.” Ana screams. We burst into laughter.
11
The entryway to our building has been remodeled. They’ve put rococo framed mirrors on the walls and plaster planters with Greek motifs [Laocoön and His Sons being devoured by snakes] in the corners. The two cerimans that once guarded the doorway have been replaced by artificial plants. There used to be a piece of paper on the door between the entrance and the elevators, with a handwritten watering schedule that the ladies in the building drew up to make sure no one overwatered the plants [the ideal frequency depended on the season]. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the temperature: it’s always cold, no matter what the weather is like outside. The elevator’s abrupt stops and starts are just the same as I remember them too.
Ana walks into the apartment with the leisureliness of daily routine and leaves her jacket on the coat rack in the hall. She looks at herself in the mirror [round, framed by Gothic blades meant to look like the sun’s rays] above the dresser. She sees me standing paralyzed in the reflection. My hand is wrapped around the suitcase handle like a vine. I’m too scared to cross the threshold. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Óscar,” Ana says, and motions for me to follow her in. I stop thinking and follow. My reflection in the [bright] parquet hallway makes me look like a lame duck in a silver pond. I see more paintings and more furniture. There’s a Chinese pot on a pedestal with artificial flowers [magnolias and gladioli]. Ana improvises a tour. “Mom went to some community craft workshops and did these paintings [a still life done with a palette knife] and riverscapes [the shadowy winding of a river, an idyllic boat floating along with no one to row it]. She can’t anymore. She’s lost the flexibility in her hand.”
My room is intact. I sit down on the bed, get a [melony] whiff of my adolescence, and listen to the creaking of the metal and wood bed frame, with a wool mattress that Mom refused to get rid of because she said that my spine was warping and that spring mattresses only aggravated back problems. It still has the same crochet blanket. The same matching lace curtains in the window. There’s not a speck of dust on the metal Multistrux bookshelves. “Mom still cleans them,” Ana says, before going to the kitchen to make the food for her cats. My science fiction novels are still there, along with the folder containing my collection of Christmas cards, my thick General Basic Education textbooks, some rocks I collected for their appearance [quartz and iron-streaked minerals with burn marks], and the picture of Elías and me in front of a graffiti that appeared on a wall in the city one morning and caught his attention: “We want fish tanks with colorful fish.” The photos of Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, and Sandra Mozarowsky are still thumbtacked to the inside doors of my closet. My clothes are all folded within. Shirts and sweaters on the shelves. Underwear in a drawer. Pants, jackets, and coats on the hangers. Shoes resting glossily at the back.
I stand up on a chair and try to remove the cover of the windowblind box. My journals should still be in there. The cover won’t budge. I notice the fake dog tags I used to wear from a chain around my neck hanging from the bookshelves, and use them as a wedge. The cover comes off. I hold onto the blinds so that they don’t unfurl and come crashing down. This was all part of my routine as a teenager, operating in silence after Mom and Dad went to bed. I stick my hand behind the cylinder. It just fits. I feel around but can’t find the journals. I reach further in [up to my armpit]. My fingers brush against something and I squeeze them together to extract one of the journals [with a blue cardstock cover]. There were three, and if one’s still in there, so are the other two. I stick my arm back in and feel around until I find the other two journals embedded at the back of the box. I sit down in the chair and flip through them. The handwriting is bizarre. I use my reading glasses as a magnifying lens and struggle to decipher the words [I’d started to write unintelligibly in case Mom ever fished them out].
Everything I take in [the journals and rocks, my picture with Elías, the clothes in the closet, the family photos all along the dining room sideboard, the table with the green-enamel fruit bowl and its matching candlesticks, the stemmed wine glasses in the display cabinet, the chalice Uncle Xermán used for mass, a communion plate, a cane, the beds and their sheets, the faux leather couch, the travel blanket folded over the back of it, the jewelry boxes distributed amongst the dressing tables and shelves, the honey jar on the kitchen counter, the mirror with its Gothic blades, the curtains, the Portuguese bronze candlesticks, the pots, the laurel branch behind the Saint Pancras figurine, the dining room table, the sideboard, the olive oil cruet, the smell of disinfectant in the kitchen, the wooden cross on Mom’s bedroom door, the framed photo of ancient Greek ruins, the glass paperweight, the souvenir from our vacation in Benidorm, the wooden chairs on the balcony in the back, the mats, the Bible, the Majorica perfume, the lamp with the five gold-trimmed tulips, the rug...], every single thing, feels posthumous to me.
12
The cats that Ana gives food to come up and sniff her the moment she walks out the door, then congregate in the unfinished lot in front of the apartment. They meow. They arch their backs. She insisted I go down with her. She talks to them. The cats start to climb onto her after she sits down on an old foundation on the property. They hiss at her. She scolds them. It’s a big colony, with tiger-striped, black, white, mixed, auburn, and gray cats. She feeds them twice a day—leftovers and an amazing food she makes with the pork lungs she gets for free at the butcher’s. She boils the lungs and then slices them with gloves on [she hates the texture of animal guts]. Mom doesn’t want her to do it in the kitchen. She doesn’t like that Ana feeds the cats, either. They argued about it, “but she had no choice but to accept it. I gave her an ultimatum: either me or the cats. Without the cats, I’ll die.” In her free time [she says as she struggles with one of them], she volunteers at the animal shelter. She organizes successful fundraising events around Christmastime. The compassion in her gaze is infallible. She says that animals know an incommunicable truth, that we’ve forgotten it and find it again when we stare into their eyes.
13
Mom doesn’t want to have dinner. Her mouth is sealed shut out of panic [she thinks I’m going to poison her]. The aide comes to help me and tries to break the seal with a spoon. She talks to Mom as she makes her attempts. “Come on, honey...come on...just one spoonful for the sake of your son, look how far he’s traveled...just one spoonful...just this tiny bit...see how little it is? It’s small enough for a little girl. It’s soup, it’s delicious. Chicken and greens...give a saint some comfort...you need to get your strength back so you can go home...look how happy your roommate is with her food [the woman in the other bed cackles, “quit being a cow and eat.”] See? She’ll be going home before you, because she eats her food. Since when has food ever been bad for anyone?” Mom glances at her out of the corner of her eye, as if to say “this loaf must think I’m an idiot.” I keep my mouth shut. I don’t care whether or not she eats. I just want her to go to sleep as soon as possible.
It’s eight at night and almost completely dark out. Through the window, I can see the first stars in the sky [Venus is especially bright]. Mom’s roommate finished her dinner in two mouthfuls. She had surgery on both her knees, and her daughter [who’s with her twenty-four-seven] says that they’re going to discharge her in a couple of days. They squabble constantly. They fight over the smallest things. They live together. Alone. The daughter, knowing that her mother can hear her, brags that she would gladly send her to a retirement home. The mother [eighty-two years old, three more than Mom] gets angry, “you’re a wolf.” The daughter chuckles in our direction, where her mother can’t see [the caring look on her face], and says, “when you live around wolves, what can you do but howl?”
The aide hasn’t given up. She nudges Mom’s mouth without trying to force her lips apart. Mom swivels her head to look at the daughter. Her face so far to one side that the aide has to pause, she rasps: “what an inappropriate thing to say.” The aide clears off the bedtable [spoon, bowl of soup, bread, tray] and leaves. “Your mother still has saline [she tells me], she won’t starve to death.”
Mom relaxes and asks me to raise her adjustable bed. I lift her legs to get her in a comfortable sleeping position. She won’t look at me. I sit in an armchair and dive into the novel I brought with me. The conversation between the roommate and her daughter fades away, along with the bustle in the hallway and the rolling of the aides’ carts [I can never tell if they’re nurses or aides]. The door is cracked open because the woman in the other bed hastrouble breathing if they close it when she goes to sleep.
A nurse comes in with the medication. Three pills in a small, transparent plastic cup. Mom takes them without putting up a fight. After the nurse leaves, she asks me if I recognized her. No [I say]. “That’s Lidia’s daughter. Lidia was the woman who sold meat in the square...do you remember her?” Another no. “What about how handsome you were when you were little, do you remember that?” “Not that either.” “That’s a shame, because none of the pictures I have do you any justice. You never were very photogenic.”
14
When I was little, Mom occupied all the space in my eyes. Large, enigmatic. An atlas ranging from the mountains down to the deserts, a cinemascope movie screen, the blue sky on an end-of-June afternoon. She was naturally beautiful [the kind of beauty that hypnotizes] but the cosmetics she used made her even more attractive. She began her facial routine with Milox, a thin strand of exfoliating paper that she would lace between her fingers the way boxers wrap bandages around their hands before putting on their gloves. Then she would apply a cream and some Egyptian-colored powders that gave her skin an Eastern youthfulness. There was a sense of ceremony to her movements. To finish, she would pencil on her eyeliner with the steady hand of a designer [eye and hand absorbed in her elegant tracery].
On holidays, when we went to Grandma’s house in Sobrado, or on San Brais, when we blessed the aniseed donuts, Mom would wake up early and spend hours doing her makeup. She would turn on the radio, heat up the hair removal wax, and the house would fill up with the smell of paraffin. I would climb out of bed in secret, tiptoe to the kitchen, and there she would be, in the thick of it. She would have one foot up on a Formica stool, lathering her legs in wax and ripping off the strips. Her face would scrunch up in pain for an instant, only to return to normal with her beauty enhanced, like a tree that grows juicier fruit when pruned. Afterwards, she would take a bath, locking the door and leaving the key in the hole. I would put my ear against the door and perk up my nose. The scents and sounds told me exactly which part of the process she was in: first the soap [always Lux, the soap of the stars], then the shampoo [a single-use, egg-based mixture she had me pick up for her at the store], and then the Nivea she rubbed on her arms and legs. And, for the final touch, a few drops of Maja perfume, the same brand as the powders she sprinkled onto her armpits.
She would then wrap her hair in a towel and roam around the house. She would curl her eyelashes with the edge of a blunt knife and trim her toe and fingernails. She would diligently file her cuticles with manicure clippers. She would moisturize her nails with Atrix and then polish them a shade that matched the clothes she had laid out on the bed in the guest room the night before.
The most captivating part of this ritual was when she straightened her hair with the clothes iron, a trick that required my assistance. That need made me feel important. She would separate her hair into sheets and cover them in wrapping paper. She kept meticulous time of how long they were exposed to the heat. Too long meant her hair would pick up static, and not long enough meant it would start to curl again after a few hours. I only remember her doing it wrong twice, in both instances because I had distracted her [she said] with pointless comments. My job was to run the iron down her hair and wait for her to tell me to stop. She never let me touch a single strand. Only she knew how to handle it. Once straight, she would part her hair to each side with a fine-toothed comb. Then, she would use the comb to gather bundles of hair and tease them up with a swift flick of her brush. Finally, she would pile the tangled, teased hair towards the back of her head and hold it all together with an amber clip. She would do all of this in front of a small, square mirror she’d placed on the kitchen table, while humming along to the songs on the radio.
Her style fascinated me. Torixas, a fashion designer in the center, made clothes from the fabrics brought by her [emigrant] relatives in France. Mom made on-the-spot decisions about what she wanted, without needing to think. She had a natural talent for it. None of our neighbors had ever seen anyone wear a paisley dress until she debuted the below-the-knee one she’d seen on Julie Christie. “You’re the most modern woman in the city,” Carme once told her, and Mom accepted the compliment without a crumb of modesty: “it’s true.”Fashion was a minor part of their conversations. Fashion meant modern, and modern meant modernity. They wanted to be modern, but modernity [fashion] horrified them: it came from elsewhere and involved short skirts, fabrics with geometrical patterns, flashy colors, trapezoidal jackets, sunglasses with thick amber frames, tight-fitting, hole-embroidered blouses...it was all perfectly fine in magazines, but they were scandalized by it in real life. Mom was the only one who managed to sensibly make the impertinent clothing work for herself. Everything looked good on her. She was tall and thin, with wide hips and a voluptuous backside that hung over a pair of round legs with firm thighs and toned calves. She alone could take up all the space in a home. She could look at you and the world would mold itself to her presence. But if I was the one looking, she would get uneasy and say: “stop staring, you’ll break my concentration, or something else.”
15
Mom falls asleep at around ten o’clock but becomes agitated after a few hours. She clutches at the sheets. Talks in her sleep. Moans. I call the nurse [Lidia’s daughter]. “This is nothing. If it gets worse, I’ll inject her with an antipsychotic. It’s the only thing that works.” Not five minutes later, she starts to shout [ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay]. I try to calm her down. She grabs me by the shirt and pulls me in close. “Try to murder me and I’ll rip you apart. I want to see your guts.”
I can’t get her hands off my shirt. She has a primitive, ancient strength. The saliva builds up on my tongue. It starts to cover my lips. I disengage one hand and use the beeper to call the nurse. Mom won’t let go. She really thinks I’m going to try to murder her. The nurse sticks a syringe into her wrist and her body goes slack. She unclenches her hands. I’m free. I get a cup of water from the fountain in the hallway. I pace around the lobby, the elevators, and the cubicles. I can’t make sense of this whirlwind of emotion. My eyes sting from holding in the tears. I can’t get to sleep all night, as I sit in the armchair beside Mom, with the thick novel about family conflicts in my lap but unable to open it, hypnotized by my own panic.
The sedative lasts until morning and she docilely eats her breakfast. She breaks up the cookies and dips them into her coffee. She eats ravenously. Then she asks me to peel an apple for her. She watches me as I peel it. “You have beautiful hands, like mine.”
Antón Lopo (Monforte de Lemos, 1961) is widely considered one of the most important figures in Galician literature for his contributions to regional journalism and criticism as well as his artistic work, which spans from fiction, poetry, and biography to performances and audio-visual work. He has won countless awards, including the prestigious García Barros Prize for Obedience (2010) and the Spanish Critics’ Prize for Extraordinary (2018), which was awarded a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Grant.
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. His translations have appeared in places such as Epiphany, ANMLY, and Asymptote, and he is a winner of a 2020 PEN/Heim Grant for Antón Lopo’s novel, Extraordinary, and the 2019 Words Without Borders and Academy of American Poets Poetry Translation Contest. His translation of Manuel Rivas’ novel The Last Days of Terranova is forthcoming from Archipelago Books.