Nervous system, p.20
Nervous System, page 20
It will rain again and clear up again, the perfect blue mountains will again be visible, snowy down to their feet. A clean sun will ignite among the watery clouds, filling the large window, and Ella will sit beside that Father centuries older, sicker, beside him Ella, old hooknosed mustached bitter, a useless lie still stuck in her throat.
✷ ✷ ✷
Waiting for the taxi that still hasn’t come, Ella thinks she should tell him while she still can. Tell him how she never wrote that dissertation. How she missed the deadline to turn it in. How that morning she’d received a letter from the university informing her of her definitive expulsion. There’s no turning back now and she should feel liberated, but she thinks she’s more a prisoner than ever, with that letter life sentence scaphoid screws still in her inbox. Her heart shrank, turned cold when she read it.
To say dad as the downpour intensifies. To hear a decrepit voice say, did you say something? To reply, aren’t you cold, dad? and repeat the question over the rain in a broken voice. To hear the Father whisper, is something wrong? as if he knew without needing to turn his head toward her, standing behind the wheelchair. No one can hear them. No, dad, says Ella, and her tongue is a hiss, her voice a reed soaked by the storm, and then she pronounces a clumsy, that’s not true, dad, I’m not sure, but the words end there. The Father stretches his elderly eyes toward Ella as if seeking her dilated pupils in the umbrella’s gloom. Yes, agrees the Father, nothing is certain, and that’s the genuine truth.
The problem was never the theory of physics, much as her evidence was weak and her approach speculative. The problem was, or is, and she rushes her words because the Father tries to interrupt her, that the mathematical proof was killing me. Ella had ended up accepting that she cared only about what she didn’t understand, what couldn’t be seen, the conjectural, fumbling her way through the dark room of the cosmos. Not putting her eye to telescopes so powerful they let you read an open newspaper on the moon. And the Father shakes his head as though asking her to be quiet but Ella can’t be quiet and she tells him, agonizing, that she tried but couldn’t do it and she spent her Father’s last cent. Your savings, your retirement.
I already knew, murmurs the Father, shivering in the cold. And he pauses before finishing, because he thinks he sees a taxi in the distance and he raises a hand to flag it down. You’re not a good liar, hija, and, moving from the present tense to past he adds: You blinked a lot every time I asked you. You blinked the way your mom blinked when she lied to me. The same quick blinking, the same flash in your eyes.
✷ ✷ ✷
She wanted to tell him she’d read in a book, not long ago, that one who listened carefully didn’t need to see. She wanted to tell him that that line had shaken her, it had stung, she’d coughed convulsively and then closed her eyes and understood something she couldn’t put into words, and that’s why she didn’t tell him.
✷ ✷ ✷
They’re still on the sidewalk, between lines of parked cars, the two of them. Abandoned, the two of them. Ella pushes the wheelchair farther from the hospital to see if she can find a car that will get them out of those wet streets. Then she realizes there’s a transportation strike going on in the city. The metro trains, buses, taxis, all those drivers standing downtown, holding signs. Things are a mess here, says the Father when Ella reminds him, too much of a mess for me. Customs strike, transportation strike, and there’s one at the architects’ association announced for Monday, teachers on Thursday, and another student protest, then immigrants, then hundreds of women who’ve been raped and beaten and murdered in this country. And bank robberies, falling bridges, droughts, political troubles, corrupt and shameless politicians. And it’s not just here, says the Father. It’s everywhere, in every country. It’s incredible that earth is still spinning in one piece. How many seconds are we from global catastrophe, half a minute? he says, raising his wounded-bird voice. What’s the latest from the doomsday clock? But Ella doesn’t reply, she can’t speak, this Father still short on red blood cells but full of energy, this resuscitated Father is saying that the future is the color of ants, and he’d like to escape to another planet.
We should fix up this planet, not take off to another one where we’d repeat the same mistakes. The same mistakes, repeats the Father, what mistakes could we repair? Which one would you start with? he asks, staring off into space, closing his eyes, dreamy anemic lamb to the slaughter.
Rekindled by the wind he adds, you have nothing now, not even that man of yours, right? The scientist you lived with? And I can’t support you. What are you going to do? What do you want to do? Ella looks at him with emptied eyes, as if she’s disappeared inside herself, as if she were drowning. Cut and run with you? and she raises her eyebrows. Off to another planet? and she stammers, her voice is many voices, her question is nervous nebulous shooting short circuit of stars.
It’s a deal, says the Father, seeing sparks around his daughter, his daughter touched by the light. Plus, he says, you owe me that, I’ll need you on that trip. You’re the expert on the great beyond.
LINA MERUANE is an award-winning Chilean writer of short stories and five novels, including Seeing Red, winner of the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (Mexico) and the Premio Valle-Inclán (UK). She is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Viral Voyages: Tracing AIDS in Latin America. She has also received the Anna Seghers Prize and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she was a DAAD Artist in Residence in Berlin. She teaches global cultures and creative writing at New York University.
MEGAN MCDOWELL has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today, including Samanta Schweblin and Alejandro Zambra. Her translations have won the English PEN award and the Premio Valle-Inclán and have been nominated three times for the International Booker Prize. Her short-story translations have been featured in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
The text of Nervous System is set in Century Old Style Std.
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Lina Meruane, Nervous System
