CONJUGATIONS

The great revelation of the five years was that the wise men existed. Likewise, she was convinced that Mom lied when she told me that Dad had died. When she asked him if God existed, he replied:

-It is unverifiable. For those who have faith, yes.

It was clear that existence depended on what each one believed. I had a sign ritual. If he found the jar with the leaves and the bug that he had hidden in the old closet, it would confirm that Dad was alive, and it turned out that he had found it.

Mom proposed to continue insisting on the subject in the square. I dragged my soles against the red stones making noise so as not to hear what he was saying. The purpose was educational:

"Death hasn't changed the course of things," she said.

I deduced that this was because that death had not occurred because if it had, the world would have collapsed. I chose the bench facing the hammocks so I wouldn't have to look at Mom.

-It's obscene. Death has nothing to do with what ends but with what does not stop.

I thought about the strangeness of the word “Obscene”, it sounded mythological and familiar at the same time. I remembered the story of the navigator forced to fight the one-eyed monster, Polyphemus, "obscene" sounded similar.

I remembered a recurring dream. I was going up a ladder. He came to a terrace with a fresh tar floor. If he could get his feet off the ground he could fly.

–Get me another dad, I told him as long as he stopped talking.

I'll do my best but I can't promise.

He was lying again, he was promising.

Mom sighed in relief, she assumed that I had understood the reality of death. That was the goal of the saga in the square. The school psychologist whom Mom considered banal and “retarded” had suggested a lively outdoor place to talk about it. It was getting dark. When the hammocks and trees disappeared, the lanterns suddenly brought them back. Another sign.

Mom talked like a sleepwalker while I remembered my dream. I tried to take off the feet of that verbal tar to fly away and I asked him:

-What would happen if you died?

-It is not said I would die. It is said die or die, she answered while she fastened my coat.

Two years later, she fulfilled his non-promise and Rómulo appeared in our family syntax.

THE RED BALLOON

The cat disappeared before dad died. Except for my grandmother, no one interpreted that as a sign.

At the time mom left her room wearing dark glasses and told me we were going to the movies. When we went outside she realized that autumn had arrived and we went back to look for coats.

-God! she yelled as she opened the closet. Looks like the cat had a litter in here. Before disappearing, her skinny body had begun to round out.

Mom put her hand in it and pulled it out fast as if the insides were burning. Something had caught on her hand, a pair of flesh-colored pantyhose dripping with a sticky, vital liquid. Your father used them for theater, he said holding up that strange paternal emblem with two fingers.

Mom took things out without looking, as if from a bolero. The clothes and objects of the dead began to pile up on the floor and the bed. Standing at attention to one side, she put on the boots that her grandfather used to ride in the mountains, dreaming that one day she would be able to join the army instead of drawing maps for the Military Geographic Institute. There was also the whip with which she patted an old horse to make it walk. The image intimidated me, I knew that on one occasion I had used it when my uncle Jorge, at the age of nine, started up and crashed one of the trucks they used for expeditions along the coast. He remembered that in the freezer of my grandfather's house there were some bottles of brandy that he prepared himself and my grandmother used to hide from him.

Mom used to say that this was a country of “Catholic Indians” without associating that her father was a creole with sallow skin who passed around his bible when he went out with the troops to draw maps. She preferred to describe him as Prussian.

As he pulled out the little checkered apron, I vaguely remembered a cornered yellow-eyed animal baring its fangs.

@katieworkman100 Ooh that sounds like a good combo. I'm never sure how to cut parsnips I think something in the middle needs removing?

— S. Jain Wed Sep 11 23:08:57 +0000 2019

"You had this apron on," he said. It was night and I was feeding you in a high chair. You didn't want to, I tried to put the tip of the spoon between your teeth so you would open your mouth and you moved your head from side to side, making the chair wobble and the food splashed on the wall. The cat was under the table and she started rubbing on my legs, you pulled her tail up, she got furious and bit my heel. "I have the mark," she said, running her finger over the scar. You were dying of laughter.

She carefully unpacked a box with a sign that said “Ships”. When my uncle Jorge got married, his wife asked him to leave the toys at his parents' house. Offended, he put everything in a box and left it in the back of that closet without telling anyone. In truth, there were the beginnings of his vocation as a sailor. After his father's whipping, he had quit the army trucks. He patiently assembled those frigates from minimal parts until he could get on a real one.

Once mom got everything out and put an end to the anecdotes, we found the place where the cat was with her kittens. For some reason she couldn't bring herself to get it out of her. He remembered that we had tickets to see The Red Balloon. He put an old blanket in the closet and closed the door a crack.

On the way he told me the plot that was longer than the movie. Apparently, the protagonist was the son of the director who wrote plays just like dad. Every time he mentioned it, the conversation was interrupted and the silence seemed eternal. Then it continued as if nothing had happened.

The movies she chose never matched the cartoons the other kids watched. She repeated that those of Walt Disney were reactionary and sentimental so that people would cry their eyes out and that was not good at all.

When we got off the bus on Corrientes street, the giant posters had neon lights that framed photos of the characters that made us cry. The movie theaters she went to with Mom were on the streets parallel to the avenues. They were dark cellars with no candy vendors. The minimal print programs told the whole story just like mom.

I sat in the hard chair ready to fall asleep as soon as the titles began. The movie confused me, at times I thought I was that boy accompanied by a balloon. Sometimes he felt that he was the balloon following another in his loneliness. When the lights came on I was trying to hide my tears as Mom swallowed them back. In the end, all the movies produced the same thing, or maybe they were different types of tears.

Photosynthesis

I turned the page of the album and I was erasing myself in the mountains of Córdoba taken by the disproportionate ears of a motionless donkey. In the next one my parents are embracing each other in a 1960s pose. He has thick-rimmed glasses and waves to the camera with a pipe in hand. She, in full mesh and an improvised turban, has her right leg slightly forward. They smile.

On another page I vanish disguised as a Geisha in a silk kimono brought by my uncle Jorge from some overseas trip. Tiny fingers protrude from the embroidered sleeves, holding the bowl like an offering. A huge chrysanthemum hangs over my face.

In the following photo, I lean my cheek against Mom's, who has a high hairstyle, collected on the back of her neck, the two of us rehearsed a cinematographic smile that would fade after a few months. I think there should be a verb tense for the imminent future. The image is deleted. I remember the grammatical harshness with which she told me that dad had died. I confirmed that when you learn to conjugate verbs you lose your innocence.

I skip two pages, my uncle is dressed in a blue uniform in a church full of chrysanthemums like the ones in my costume. Combed back, he showed an unknown stiffness. Beside him, motionless as those flowers, a woman in white gauze. An omen. The same day he was getting married I was delirious with a fever without being able to attend the ceremony or the photo.

Turning the page, she was perched on a wall. Grandma was holding my ankle. Behind the forced smile, threats, premonitions: You're going to kill yourself. I had survived them all.

Intermingled, the family animal house. Rescued cats, uncertain fish, the turtle Paf!, a hamster that time proved to be a guinea pig and a dog. It wasn't my grandmother's blind man or the one who bit me in the square. It was Lassie cut out of a magazine.

The school photos she would have preferred to burn reflected uncontrolled mutations. With the apron of the six, without the front teeth, the one of the eleven with the bow that could not mark the waist or hide the incipient breasts. The blue headband didn't overpower the fuzz on her forehead. Compositions of shame that like a fluo frame highlighted what I was trying to hide.

Mom and Grandma make Rómulo a place in the photo. My new father forced a smile.

Rómulo's jokes had a somber effect on Mom.

When she took the picture of her in the bathroom, she was putting on makeup for a party, she was trying to line one eye with her face pressed up against the mirror. On tiptoe I followed the line. Romulo must have thought it was a charming shot. Rómulo fired, the black line faded inside the eye and mom swore in satanic language: Caracho!

Rómulo had the roll developed, Mom tore up the photo, he took it out of the trash and put it among her things. After her death, Mom glued the pieces together with duct tape and stuck it in the album.

At the age of the mirror mutation, I had a hard time recognizing a body that didn't look like my own. The photographer at the bowling alley had made me taller and slimmer thanks to the elephant leg pants that covered the platforms. The wide belt fell with feigned nonchalance over the pelvis. He had discovered another night. The one with verbal plains, away from mom's linguistic torment. In the morning there were no wars against makeup remover. Dark circles of mascara reached my cheekbones. At school the reprimands went through the improper locker room. I would drag the shoelaces to the bench and try to sleep off the nightmares until the following night. I stretched when drawing the black line on the eyelid. Punished, I waited for Mom to fall asleep and climbed out the window with a book in her bag, a talisman, Materialism and Revolution. Exhaling a cloud of smoke that he couldn't swallow, he went up to the car that roared at the door.

In another photo I am lying in the grass on a spring day. It was a property ceded to the student center. The future of the nation and the world was settled there. The militancy menu was offered to me like a tray of canapés until I brought out the family anarchism.

-I am atheist. In this way I justified my indifference to the issues of the world beyond the last love disaster.

In a photo I felt the perfume. It was the season of white flowers. The loose dress suggested pregnancy, the tyranny of health, away from the poisons of the world. Militancy in the order of yoga and jasmine. Tobacco, and alcohol prohibited, moderate fats and sugar.

In the next photo I am with Laurita in my arms, a year later, with Florencia.

The chronology continues in the courtyard of the wisteria. The girls play with hoses in a makeshift pool. I sort through the divorce papers while answering awkward questions about the fate of it all. I promise you happiness in words that knotted in my throat. While rubbing with the towel the indisputable conclusion of Florencia. "It doesn't matter because today tomorrow is going to be yesterday."

In the following photos, with the man from that morning and with the newborn Facu.

Then different views from across the ocean

In the church of San Marcos a striped floor and crumbs in the hands. An invisible squadron of claws pecks at my arms and hair. The smile of pain.

Another ocean crossing. In Toledo, a sunny patio where I read in a book the secrets between Isabel I and the inquisitor Torquemada. The museum of torture and its not so old machinery. Pulleys that lift the bodies, wooden planks with pulls that stretch them and the torment of the water that silences everything. I remembered a joke that my uncle Jorge used to repeat: If you misbehave, I'll hang you by the thumbs.

That night I dream that I have blood on my hands. I feel no pain. That blood is not mine.

The last photo fell from the album with the lightness of a body floating in water. On a twilight beach the shore is a silver edge. The fishermen move away swaying with the gentle current. As the image blurred, their boats became infinite spots on the still surface of the sea.

Alejandra Jalof was born in Buenos Aires, she is a psychoanalyst and writer. She is a member of the Lacanian Orientation School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. She was a teacher at the Faculty of Psychology of the UBA, she published numerous articles and essays in newspapers and magazines in Argentina. She currently dedicates herself to clinical practice and collaborates with Página12 and the magazine Ñ. This is her first short story book, she has a novel in preparation.