Margarita García Robayo
TRANS. BY Thomas Rothe
It Could Be Worse
Titi was named Ernesto, like his maternal uncle, who often filled in for his dad. Titi’s dad lived in another city with his other family, but visited him every fifteen days. The city wasn’t far away, only an hour by car, and his dad drove a fast car. Titi usually waited for him on the curb outside his house, dressed in dark jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that was too hot. His mom liked to dress him this way when his dad came to visit. From the curb, Titi could hear the motor roaring a few blocks away; seconds later a screech would fill the air and lift a cloud of yellow dust that covered everything.
In his mind—as he explained it to himself or, sometimes, to his uncle
Ernesto—Titi liked to see his dad, but in real life he didn’t enjoy spending time with him: they didn’t have that much in common. Titi’s dad, Daniel, was essentially an athletic guy. He practiced all kinds of sports and ran every morning with a group of people who always signed up for amateur marathons organized by sports brands. Titi inherited not even one of those genes. He was a strange case. His mom, Fanny, was not as athletic as his dad, but she was a woman as slim as a heron: that’s what her friends from the book club would say when they got together at her house on Tuesdays. Every time they said this, she would peer over at Titi, who pretended to be watching TV, sprawled out on the floor paunch-side up, like a small mammoth. Then she would make hand motions to her friends to change the subject.
“You were born this way, honey, there’s nothing we can do to fix it,” his mom explained the first time Titi asked why he was so unbearably fat.
Titi was born uncommonly overweight, and his condition, according to doctors, was not properly treated from the beginning. At first, Fanny didn’tsee any problem with having a fat baby; on the contrary, she considered it a sign of good health. Daniel, on the other hand, insisted on putting the baby on a diet and consulting with a nutrition specialist.
“You want me to give him a liposuction?” Fanny would say. “You want your son to look like your anorexic lover?”
By this time Titi’s dad was already living with another woman. She was like him: athletic. She was also much younger than Fanny and worked at a transnational company, not at a public library. When Titi was five years old, a little sister came along who, by the age of six months, was winning crawling races at the nursery she attended; at nine months she was walking; at fourteen months she was running faster than a hunted rabbit. At least according to his dad, who had ordered t-shirts with a picture of the girl holding a trophy like a baby’s bottle that said: “I’m fast.” When Titi wore the shirt, his little sister’s face stretched on both sides. But he didn’t wear it much—as soon as Fanny found it among his dirty clothes she started using it as a mop.
His dad spent most of their time together encouraging him to take up a sport or, at least, walk around the block in the morning.
“The first day walk to the corner and back. Then add the next block and so on, and you’ll start setting new goals each day.”
Titi carefully listened to his dad, facing him while slurping his sugar-free fruit juice, which was the only thing his dad allowed him to drink when they went out together.
“So you’re gonna do it, kiddo? he finally asked, with such a devastating look on his face that Titi nodded energetically, even though he knew he never would; he couldn’t do anything like that because of his respiratory problem. He thought it strange his dad didn’t know that, but he didn’t feel like explaining it.
***
There was a time when the girls in Titi’s school would discreetly circle him, then slowly close in and all of a sudden poke his belly with sharpened pencils to see if he deflated. Sometimes he bled, and that was serious, because Titi had problems with clotting. In that case, he would run to the nurse’s office, with some difficulty, to be treated and then have his mom or uncle called. The boys would play other jokes on him: they often filled his desk with leftover food; they usually did this on Fridays, near the end of the day, and when Titi arrived on Monday he’d find a cloud of bees and flies hovering over his seat, stuffed with rotten food. This is why he no longer left his books and binders at school. He hauled everything around, every day, even though it hurt his back. Luckily, his uncle Ernesto dropped him off each morning and picked him up each afternoon, and helped him with his backpack. But at school he was seen walking around, his face buttered in sweat, with books bulging from his back like a huge shell. Some teachers would invite him to eat with them, and only then would Titi unload his things, sit down and rest a bit. Titi always liked his teachers, but he never understood why they couldn’t stop the other kids from picking on him.
***
When Titi turned twelve he stopped wearing jeans. The size for large children or small adults didn’t fit. Medium-sized adult embarrassed him. “Embarrassed by who?” Fanny shrieked, and Titi looked at the saleswoman and shrugged his shoulders. They chose the cotton sweat pants. Soon after, his uncle Ernesto said it was time they give him a little more independence: at twelve years old, all the boys went to and from school on bike or bus. Even Titi, with their permission, had already gone out by himself a few times. Fanny opposed. First of all: Titi didn’t fit in the bus seats and other passengers, instead of showing comprehension and compassion, pushed him aside abruptly, forcing the boy to withdraw to the back steps, where he sat like a mound of trash. From there he couldn’t see his stop and ended up missing it. Titi didn’t find this particularly bad: seated on the steps, he could look up women’s skirts and see their panties, and he liked that. Second, Titi’s bike was too clunky and he never learned to ride it well. He could fall and scrape himself and, God forbid—Fanny would say with her chin trembling—he might bleed to death before an ambulance arrived.
No one brought up the topic again.
“How was your day, champ?” Lately, his uncle called him champ, and Titi didn’t like this. It was clear he wasn’t and would never be a champion of anything and he found it rude that anyone would call him that. Titi shrugged his shoulders and growled some incomprehensible response.
“It’s adolescence,” Fanny told her brother when he mentioned Titi was acting strange, sullen and introverted. Fanny didn’t like the excessive attention some people gave her son’s flaws: as if everything he did or stopped doing was related to his weight. And no, Fanny told herself, some things were just no. Ernesto didn’t insist but he remained uncomfortable and irritated because, as he got older, Titi evolved into a more absent person. He spent hours with his eyes buried in a videogame that consisted of hunting people with an enormous net that automatically regenerated every time the player spit phlegm. Titi designed his player to look exactly like himself.
***
“His condition prevents him from socializing normally—he spends more time in the nurse’s office than in the classroom.” The teacher spoke in a way Fanny thought was entirely forced. “It can’t be that bad,” she said.
Daniel, who was sitting next to Fanny, looked at her as if he had just discovered she was there.
By this time, Titi was fourteen, weighed one hundred and nine kilos and they had detected a new condition: he was allergic. He wasn’t allergic to this or that, he was simply allergic. Every now and then rashes swelled up on his skin, itching horribly, and the only way to control them was with an overpriced injection.
“What do you recommend we do, miss?” Daniel said, slightly frowning at the teacher with a look that tried to resemble worry but that, Fanny knew, was pure and plain lust.
“I would say he needs a special school,” the teacher said, and Fanny felt like someone punched her in the face. She looked at Daniel, who was pensive: his brow streaked by three straight, thick lines. Fanny imagined that he was imagining the things he could do to the teacher with his tongue. The man was obsessed with his tongue; years had passed but she remembered it all too well. She stood up from her seat and took a deep breath, pressed her index finger between her eyebrows and moved it in a circle.
“Do you feel alright, ma’am?” the teacher said.
“What you’re saying is unacceptable,” she responded. “You know I could report you for discrimination? I can’t believe you don’t want Titi in this school just because he’s fat.”
“It’s not that, Fanny, it’s that . . .” Daniel started to speak, but Fanny grabbed her purse and left the office, the school, the block, the neighborhood and walked all the way home.
This time Ernesto was on her side.
“Absolutely not.”
Titi was in the room.
“I want to go to a special school,” he said, without diverting his eyes from his videogame. Fanny, torn up, looked at him:
“But you’re not special.” Her shoulders, usually held upright as if on a clothes hanger, fell. Ernesto looked at the floor. Titi pressed the shoot button and killed three. He looked up and said to his mom:
“Then I don’t want to go to any school.”
***
“Your son isn’t special,” said the director of the special school and Fanny clenched her fists.
“Of course he’s special. Didn’t you see him? I could spend hours reciting all the obesity-related illnesses he suffers. Or maybe it’s the other way around: maybe the obesity is just another symptom of all his organism’s illnesses. But we’ll never know.”
That day Titi was dressed in a gray outfit: baggy pants and a very wide cotton shirt; his mom had it specially fit with a neighborhood tailor. He was a small Buddha. Fanny thought that, by exaggerating his fatness, they might persuade the school to consider him more seriously. Titi waited outside the director’s office with his uncle Ernesto, who praised the school’s open spaces and lush gardens and the chemistry laboratory with those small fetuses in formaldehyde, while Titi reached the last level of his game.
When Titi was playing his game, it was like he was in a trance: his pupils dilated, the vessels injecting blood into the yellowish cornea and the rest of his face limp; his jaw would drop and anything in his mouth would fall out. Saliva, mostly.
“Let’s go,” Fanny left the Director’s office with a determined stride, and Ernesto jumped up from his seat:
“So? When do classes start?”
“Never.”
***
At sixteen he could only wear kimonos. His obesity, they had discovered, was progressive and, at this point, uncontrollable. With time, his body functions would first deteriorate and, then, his internal organs. It was difficult to predict how fast. For the time being, walking was the most complicated thing So they decided to limit it as best they could. A nurse assisted him from nine to five, when Fanny came home from work and took over. Regardless, Titi did little more than play on his computer (which they had placed with its controls on a fold-up table in front of his bed), eat what little his diet allowed (grains, soup, and baby food), and walk to the bathroom.
“How’s my Prince Valiant doing?” The first thing Fanny did when she came home was go to Titi’s room. She always found him in the same position: hunched over, with his mouth open, and eyes glued to the computer screen. “Did you have a good day?”
“Great, mom. I had a fantastic day,” he responded, bitterly.
“You want to play Monopoly?”
“No.”
“Parcheesi?”
“No.”
Titi had made progress in his videogame. He had downloaded a program that let him modify the initial design: now virtual Titi no longer spit phlegm but carried a gun that shot tiny baby heads which exploded upon hitting their targets. The city he moved around in was made of rubble and leftover body parts. The main street was paved with bones that, when stepped on, cracked.
“How about cards?”
“ . . . ”
At exactly nine o’clock his dad always called. They didn’t see each other much: Daniel was busy with work. He had a new job that involved, as he described it, yelling at a bunch of useless people.
“Talk to me about something, son.”
“I don’t have anything to talk about.”
Titi tried not to lose patience or concentration in the game: he did best at that time of the evening. In the morning, he got up in a bad mood; after lunch he was tired; after his nap it was hot. None of that helped improve his ranking.
In the afternoon his mom came home with her babbling, then his uncle appeared with a pathetic look on his face, and when everyone finally left, his dad called. All Titi wanted, just once during the day, was to take control and shoot tiny heads.
***
“Is it definite?” Daniel’s voice was shaking.
“The doctor talked about an alternative treatment, something experimental done in the United States . . .” Fanny was crying. She whispered into the phone in the kitchen, all the while keeping an eye on the hallway, as if Titi could possibly get out of bed and spy on her.
“If that’s what he needs, we’ll take him there.” Sometimes Daniel adopted an optimistic attitude that Fanny detested. “Did the doctor mention how much the whole treatment would cost?”
“No.”
“Will it stop the deterioration?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“It could prolong . . .” Fanny stifled her words.
“It could what?”
Fanny hung up. She opened the faucet, washed her face. She walked to Titi’s room and went in.
***
“No,” Titi said, not letting her finish.
“But, honey, it’s a simple treatment, completely reliable. You could do so many things that . . .”
Titi didn’t even look at her, he didn’t notice the seriousness in her voice—he surrendered to the screen. And to his cough. That was a new symptom of his respiratory problem: one of the most dangerous, because if he coughed up phlegm, he could choke. That’s why it was better for him to sit upright.
The room’s air was so thick with smells that Fanny felt dizzy. She sat down on the edge of the bed, cried in silence and folded her hands together. On the computer she saw the character’s face, the same as Titi’s but full of scars. He had webbed feet; claws for hands; and he had long boobs, reeds that sagged to his knees.
“You don’t have boobs, Titi,” she said, in a tone more like a question than an assertion.
“Does Titi have boobs?” Fanny asked Ernesto several nights later as they were drinking herbal tea after dinner.
“What?”
“It seems he thinks he has boobs.”
“He doesn’t have boobs.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Both sipped from their cups. Both thought there was not much more to say on the matter. It wasn’t something to debate: Does Titi have boobs? Yes or no? No. That’s what they said. And that was that. Period.
“I need to poop,” Titi said.
For several months now a husky male nurse assisted him because the other nurse could no longer deal with his weight.
“What’s that?” the nurse asked, bringing his ear closer to Titi’s mouth.
Titi’s voice had weakened. Or not exactly: the illness had made his body heavier, but some internal organs stayed the same size and became insufficient. X-ray images showed how his vocal chords disappeared within the immensity of his vocal tract: “He has the larynx of an elephant but with a fly’s capacity,” as Fanny once explained it.
The nurse sat him down on the toilet, closed the door halfway, and waited outside.
“Okay,” Titi said after a bit, and the nurse went in to get him.
Around this time he grew bored of his game. He was having trouble moving his thumbs; besides, as the nurse said one afternoon, he had already beaten all the possible rankings. He began playing online with other players and beat them too. They were few: his game was so customized no one was as fascinated with it as he was. Not even himself. One day virtual Titi allowed himself to be killed by a group of flying kids who shot acid from their belly buttons, and he didn’t regenerate. That same day he discovered the window.
“I want to go out.”
“What’s that?”
When he figured out what Titi was saying, the nurse drew back in silence. After a moment he said:
“I’ll check with your mom.”
Fanny thought Titi wouldn’t bear the neighbors’ pity. Or she wouldn’t. She thought it better not to invent unnecessary complications. Life had dealt them this hand and things were alright. Relatively alright. And it could be worse. . . . So many things could be worse.
Then she looked at her son’s expectant eyes and said:
“I think it’s a great idea.”
“Me too,” said Ernesto.
The nurse agreed.
It took them three days to organize the outing. On Friday at around eleven in the morning, with a wheelchair the nurse had borrowed, they took him to a nearby park, practically empty at that hour. After a week it became a routine. Daniel asked for time off and went to pick them up: Ernesto and the nurse rode in the back, Titi in front. When they arrived at the park, they helped him out of the wheelchair, sat him on the grass, his back leaning against a stone bench. If Fanny had found out, she might have suspended the outings because of the allergy issue; but no one told Fanny anything. The three men sat around Titi, guarding him from dogs and kids and flying balls. They drank beer and gave him sips; they told jokes and talked about women: they threatened to take Titi to a brothel. They laughed. Titi went along with it, said little, and smiled more for them than for himself. Then he would say: “My back hurts,” and they would help lay him face up, his head raised on a pillow in case he coughed up phlegm. There he stopped listening to them. He watched the clouds slowly crawl across the sky: he wondered if they were coming or going. Where to. Hours passed, days passed, clouds passed and Titi wished one would stop and melt furiously over him. Until it smothered him, until nothing was left.
Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia. She is the author of the novels Lo que no aprendí and Hasta que pase un huracán, as well as four volumes of short stories. Her most recent collection of stories, Cosas peores, was awarded the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize in 2014. She has worked as a film columnist for El Universal, Project Coordinator of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation, and Director of the Tomás Eloy Martínez Foundation. She currently lives in Buenos Aires.
Thomas Rothe has translated the work of various Chilean poets, including Rodrigo Lira and Jaime Huenún. His translations have been published in Amerarcana, Jacket2, InTranslation, OOMPH!, Lunch Ticket, Asymptote, and RED Ink, among other journals. His translation of Jaime Huenún’s Fanon City Meu is forthcoming from Diálogos Books.