Nervous system, p.12
Nervous System, page 12
The Mother is awake, getting to know her wound. What did I do to deserve this? she says, and the older daughter looks up. This, says the Mother, as if she had to explain, losing it all. Is it punishment? she wonders, doubt stuck to her voice. The back of her hand perforated with a needle, the dripping, intermittent IV. You’ve done so many things, says the daughter, sighing without taking her eyes from the gravitational waves she is finishing calculating on the screen. But not all are so bad, she adds, closing her computer and staring at the foot sticking out of the sheets. A toenail ingrown into the Mother.
Of course it wasn’t divine punishment, Ella thought, applying the Mother’s frugal of course and the Father’s dry tone. People were dying like flies from cancer. Every decade the number of patients doubled, and Ella was sure it was because of the increasing atmospheric radiation.
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A bible on the Mother’s bedside table. Without asking, Ella took it to her room and opened it: that antiquated smell brought up memories that couldn’t be hers, but arose in her head as her own. Well into the winter evening the Mother came to turn off her light, and, seeing Ella behind the covers of her lost bible, she was pleased. The bible was a big medical tome.
In its pages she learned of the seclusion of patients who suffered from that deep whitish coarse tumor that was leprosy. And she read the word pestilence and the word abomination. And she read that nudity was prohibited between family members, and Ella had seen the Twins naked and she’d dried them with a towel. Sin. She’d kissed her Cousin on the mouth to receive her germs, and her Friend, too, in desperate times. She’d showered naked with her Father. And her Father had sinned with that distant cousin whom he later married and had his first two children with. That mother who birthed her was, then, also her abominable cousin, and the impenitent Father would be struck down with lightning, but when? struck down when? she wondered, and when was Jehovah going to give them a thrashing, when would he burn them all with his brimstone?
And what could it mean that in the beginning there was only the word and the word became flesh? She abandoned the medical treatise under her bed and never returned it to the Mother.
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Retching and vomiting that awakened her suspicions. She took a urine test, but her fears were unfounded and only a single line appeared: negative. That same night she dreamed she was on an elevator full of passengers who shook pink pom-poms every time Ella spoke. Every time Ella moved her head. She knew, as one knows only in dreams, that those pom-poms meant she was pregnant. She went back to the pharmacy and the bathroom and urinated on the stick that gave a positive in two red, broken lines.
A doctor who was shorter than Ella confirmed the result, showing her a pale embryo on the screen. It was a seed bean distant planet floating in darkness, surrounded by a white web. Stuck to the side of her uterus was where Ella saw it, and she wanted to cut out her eyes. Cut off her face. Cut and run.
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Some of the ancients were convinced that the uterus was a mobile organ whose uncertain orbit produced unbearable pain and fits of madness. What they didn’t understand was why a uterus settled into place during pregnancy.
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She’d seen the doctor of the stray asteroid seed from a distance when she’d gone through this with her Friend. Because his practice was forbidden in the country of the past, he changed offices every year, moving to new houses more and more frequently, this doctor.
It was an autumn of chronic rain. It was pouring, and her Friend had yet to arrive. The nurses were turning off the lights until none remained on, not even the one in the flooded garden they pushed her out into. Let her wait there, in the dark, while the scornful nurses returned to their lives.
It was raining like in the bible, she thought, and immediately discarded that maternal idea.
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Her Father would go around turning off lights in the house so as not to waste electricity. It wasn’t necessary, all that yellowed light, all the white light that altered the circadian rhythms of the species. Seventy percent of mammals had a purely nocturnal existence. But Ella wasn’t one of those mammals, not on that black, wet night when she waited for her Friend to pick her up.
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Portrait of a photon, the indivisible light molecule. How were photons calculated in the starry milky way? she thought, but she saw no stars in that water-covered sky.
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The Friend took her hand and led her through streets so covered in leaves you couldn’t see the flooded gutters. She opened an umbrella that the wind made sure to twist up, break, drag off into the night, and the Friend cursed the storm that had stolen her umbrella. She opened the door, folded Ella in two to fit into her car, her apartment, some dry clothes, and into her own bed. She injected her with a vial of antibiotics because who knows what kind of conditions that doctor operated in? She lay down beside Ella. Caressed her ear until Ella slept.
Ella hadn’t thought again about that bitter, stormy evening.
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The body doesn’t lie, but perhaps that isn’t true. It’s the image that doesn’t lie. But that wasn’t true either: the Mother’s cancer undetected by x-rays was irrefutable proof. And chemotherapy was diffused throughout her body because those cells were fertile, fierce, and invisible as they searched for the organ where they would multiply.
Back in the country of the present, she calls the Mother after each chemo session. The poisoned Mother doesn’t remember those calls, or doesn’t remember what they discussed. She tells the same story every time.
Every time, she talks about how she has a tube inserted into her sternum so all that poison they’ll keep pouring into her won’t make the veins of her arms explode.
Whenever someone tells me they’re going in for chemotherapy, I feel a terrible sadness, says the Mother, every time.
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Anyone can forget and then remember, but Ella has a memory that eliminates everything: 410 error.
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And she never stops asking what it is that Ella is writing. I know it’s not a novel, stammers the Mother, overcome by confusion. No, it’s not a novel, I’m not a writer, confirms the impatient daughter. It’s a dissertation. A dissertation, repeats the Mother. It doesn’t have a plot, the daughter continues, it’s full of holes, and I don’t know when I’m going to finish, because I haven’t even started. I’m just now choosing a subject, and her voice wavers in panic as she speaks those words. Maybe there’ll be a chapter on radiation, and she knows she’s lying but she emphasizes the radioactivity in case that word resounds and remains in the Mother’s dazed brain. I don’t know if I want to read it, replies the Mother, sinking down again into her chemical nap. Every time.
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The Firstborn had already left home, but the other three remembered the plague of rats that only the Mother could manage to eradicate. The Mother, who in her laboratory years had worked with little rats so white it hurt to look at them. She put them in her pockets and let them climb up to her shoulder, making the Grandmother go faint when she saw the red rat eyes, the nose peeking out from her daughter’s pocket.
Those rats were raw material for all lab experiments because their genes were 90 percent human. And there were so many, though no one knew the number: some calculated an average of four rats per person in the world, but the urban legends ventured eight or nine per human. The only certainty was that a female could birth up to two thousand babies a year.
Her house of the past had housed rats in legendary proportions.
Hundreds of tiny claws darting across the attic: no one could sleep. How were they going to exterminate the creatures? was the question all three of them asked at breakfast, before heading off sleepy-eyed to school. If they found one in the toilet and flushed, the rat went down the pipes and swam back. If they threw one off the roof, it survived unscathed. And it wasn’t a matter of giving them just any old poison, said the Mother, shifting a bite of bread to one side of her mouth. They’re very smart, she said as she swallowed, they send the oldest or the sickest to try what I put out for them and they wait a few days to see if the envoy survives. If he does, the others dig into what’s left.
The rotten-egg stench had already alerted them that one rodent had indeed been sacrificed by the others, which scurried away into holes in the kitchen, leaving trails of shit and terror.
The Mother found a delayed-action rat poison that managed to trick them; for a time the frenetic racing of tails claws speeding tetrapods in the attic slowed, and the stench grew.
In the alleyways of her country, in the stadiums and in houses that didn’t belong to Ella or to anyone she knew, another fetid breeze was blowing. The Friend, who in those years of the past, like Ella, wore a blue jumper down to her knees and a frayed tie and who sat with Ella at a wooden desk, had told her about the sidewalks where human cadavers had been left, and no one dared remove them.
Those dead people had been labeled as rats.
But live rats were what the soldiers stuck between legs vaginas screams of the female prisoners before killing them.
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A poison that was infallible because it was irresistible. One with sex appeal, announced the Mother, without going into detail. She went up some stairs, opened the hatch to the attic, and pushed in some gray balls, then washed her hands with soap and a lot of water to get rid of the smell that excited the rats, which scurried around until dawn, possessed by an orgasmic death.
The rats above succumbed to the Mother below, leaving that horrible smell as collateral. What a rotten stench, exclaimed the Lady when she walked through the front door with each hand holding a Twin’s, letting go of them to cover her nose. No, no, said the Mother, watching the little ones put their arms around each other and run into the house. There’s no smell, she said. She was smoking cigarettes to cover one smell with another; she ashed her third and blew out a smoke that the Lady cursed. It can’t smell bad, she said, because the beauty of that poison is that it mummifies the rats, she murmured in a voice that seemed to come not from her but from the smoke that surrounded her. It leaves them dried out, just skin and bones.
Necrotize was the verb that described that perfect ending. It’s not so bad to die that way, murmured the Father. No one’s going to want to eat them. We, on the other hand, are worm meat.
The Father had asked to be cremated when his gray matter faded to black. He would stay at home, his presence turned to dust inside an urn, and maybe if she sifted the Father’s ashes, Ella could still rescue fragments of his fingernails.
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The singeing rays of radiotherapy were filling her mouth with sores and scorching her skin. It wasn’t so long between when they stopped burning sinner women to a crisp at the stake to save their souls and when they started applying radiotherapy to save their bodies. The radioactive pyre went on burning them alive, or furnished them with a slow death that became evident only decades later.
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Her hair falls out all at once in the shower, frayed water clogs up the drain, swirling with shampoo suds and the Mother’s tears.
The Lady hears her cries and comes into the bathroom without knocking, feeling sorry for her boss, who sobs as she stares down at her aborted hair. With fright. With grief. Naked even of her eyebrows and dripping wet, the Mother embraces that Lady, who has never accepted her, caresses the mat of thick unshakeable blue black night hair just like the locks she’s lost.
She had worked in the house even before the Mother appeared, and she went on exercising her wavering loyalty, as if the Mother had a magnetic power that the Lady, rage and all, couldn’t resist.
The Lady had gathered up all that black hair and thrown it into the garbage. Then she’d fished it back out again, rinsed and dried it, because Ella, who never called her, had phoned to request it. It’s going to smell bad, insisted the Lady, who just couldn’t understand what Ella wanted it for, when she wasn’t even the Mother’s daughter. Or do you plan to sell it for a wig? Ella didn’t want to answer, because she knew the Lady was going to say the same thing as always, in her nasal voice. Niña cochina. Dirty girl.
Ella begged her to save it between sheets of newspaper until she returned to the past, and she added, her voice thin, please don’t ask me any questions.
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The Boy Twin had told them about the time he saw her talking on the phone with the wig on, or on top of her grown-out hair, a little disheveled; something didn’t fit and he kept watching her until he realized, thanks to that nasally voice, that it was the Lady disguised as the cancerous Mother, flirting with the mirror.
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Those aunts of hers, the ones who would die before reaching old age, had very thick body hair and they got rid of it with a candle flame. They passed the flame quickly along the skin so as not to burn themselves, and the hair would crisp, the ash would fall in a pile on the floor. Ella gathered it up along with the wax drippings and saved it for future experiments.
Her classmates removed their hair with wax. It wasn’t good to shave armpits or legs because then the hair grew back thicker, longer. To see if that was true, she started with her eyelashes. She cut them with scissors and put them all into a jar; she looked at them up close, so trifling. She hadn’t thought about how, without eyelashes, her eyes would fill up with dust. That she’d be left with stumps lined up along the eyelid, and every time she rubbed her eyes that edge would scrape her corneas.
They would grow back, longer. And she would burn the midnight oil without batting a lash, all night long. Because for Ella, night was nothing more than the electrical extension of the day. Because Ella had made the night her subject of study.
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She’s not sure how old she was that time she got separated from the Mother and lost her in a big store full of women sweaters scarves spindles. She saw her from a distance, from behind, and ran toward her, took her by the hand, hung from her warm fingers, feeling her long nails, her ring. Ambient music. Her enormous coat of blue wool and her hairdo stiff with spray. All that jet-black hair turned and showed her the surprised face of a woman who was not the Mother. What an odd little girl, thought the stranger, watching her disappear into the crowd.
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The forms she filled out in doctors’ offices in the country of the present certified that Ella was a lifetime member of a cancerous breed. Drastic cancers of the colon, pancreas, melanomas on her genealogical tree.
The godmother, pregnant with her own death, couldn’t zip her pants. Absorbed in her cigarette, blowing smoke with a trace of a cough, looking at herself all swollen, she’d cried out, they won’t button, and I’m so skinny! The godmother’s frail chest, her rickety ribs, her ruined cheeks and that deceptive pregnant belly. They’d given her a benevolent diagnosis but the godmother smiled, cocking her head to one side and squinting her eyes as if she wanted to focus on each one of them, to let everyone know she understood what was going to kill her.
They’d been lying to her mercilessly.
Your boob’s out, Ella told her godmother. They were staying in the same room, and from her bed Ella noticed that the godmother’s baby-doll nightgown had slipped down. Crowning the breast was a small nipple, like a wart. It’s just skin, wrinkled skin with some crazy hairs, observed the godmother, and she winked an eye before returning to her book.
The godmother read in bed, smoked in bed, exhaled through her nose, and let the ashes fall to the floor. The godmother, who as a child had set fire to the palm tree at school to see how it would burn, how fast the flame would ascend, coiling up the bark. The godmother, who passed a lit candle along her legs. The burned smell impregnated the air around that godmother, who demanded to be cremated the day she died.
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And her other aunt had lived more years than predicted by undergoing treatments that couldn’t quite halt the reproductive enthusiasm of her cells.
The Father examining his own sister, the eldest, a prematurely old woman. She lay unconscious, plugged into a ventilator that prolonged her last gasps. Saliva curdled in the corners of her mouth. Her head sank forward, toward hands flopped on the sheet as if she’d fallen asleep while praying. The Father pushed that head up by the chin, moved it side to side. He separated her eyelids and shone a flashlight into her pupils, which still contracted. He held the inside of her wrist with his fingertips and counted seconds on his wristwatch, then dropped that arm with its lost pulse.
The eternal bedside doctor: a general hardened by the successive losses of his troops. And although he no longer had a heart, its beating kept him alive. Those three hundred grams of muscle were turning out to be enough to let him see everyone else die.
Why don’t they unplug her? Ella asked, hating the artificial life provided by that machine breathing for her aunt. The tenuous swish of her chest was her only movement. And a heart that insisted on beating, that would hesitate for a fraction of a second, would skip one beat and then another before it finally stopped. Those tenuous beats were the only thing that separated her from definitive death, but it was so difficult to die. They’d have to give the aunt something more than the intermittent morphine drip, they’d have to help her. That’s a decision I can’t make, murmured the Father. And it’s illegal in this country to help someone die, even if you don’t like it. Ella flinched, thinking that her aunt was already dead.
To whom did it belong, that body that was no longer her aunt? To her uncle, sunk into exhausted sadness. To the uncle who died of a sudden cancer just a few months after his wife.
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Ella is wondering how likely it is that some other surreptitious cell will appear in another maternal organ.
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The Mother will tell her what it’s like to choose a wig that matches her hair, to go to bed in her wig, wash it in the shower the way the Father, when he travels, washes his shirts. Wash them while wearing them, scrubbing them with soap like they were his own skin.
