Circle

Carlos Franz

Dolores M. Koch (Trad.)

For Lastenia Oliva,
who managed to tell me this story

Giving a name to describe what she saw in her grandmother's bedroom would have been arbitrary. She was six years old and had no need for names. Now that an eternity has elapsed, she only remembers that it all seemed to be engulfed in mist. A mist frozen into an aseptic frosty ether, and probes, and threatening syringes, on the bedside table. Or was it something even finer, something so intangible... The fact is that in her crisp organdy dress, she was only six, and listening to the squeaking sounds of her rubber soles on the polished parquet floor when, reaching up, she pulled all her weight on the door handle, and the door opened. Her grandmother's life was suspended from the walls of the room. There was an oil painting of her grandfather in riding garb, just as he was dressed on the day of the accident. Her grandmother also had portraits of each one of her daughters on the day of their first communion, and in their fluffy dresses when presented into society; or floating in tulle, evidently so rosy-cheeked that it even showed in the sepia photos, as they left church on the arms of solemn, heavily mustachioed men. There were also miniatures of her mother, of remote great-grandmothers, of ephemeral children who died of innocuous diseases. But the girl did not recognize anyone. And even more frightening than those faded faces from the past were the hatboxes up high on the tall wardrobes, together with an image from atop the chest of drawers of the Infant Jesus of Prague, whose extended hand was offering her a sphere. Perhaps - and this is as much certainty as she was able to draw from the somnolence that shrouds her childhood - perhaps what frightened her the most when coming close to the cagelike grid of her grandmother's brass bed were the scents of her D'Oriza powder and, after forty years of use, her Flower of Love cologne, redolent in the barely worn silk petticoats stuck in the drawers, layer upon layer. Perhaps what she feared was the acrid smell of the Cape jasmine petal pressed in her missal, the lavender fragrance of her small lace handkerchiefs that emanated from the wardrobes and rose to hide between the curtain folds. Perhaps all these smells, together with the bright bands of sunlight, the shadows of the brass grid on the bed, and the sullen expressions of the portraits, were really what caused the nebulous condition of the bedroom. And perhaps that was what made it feel so deep. Like a time well into which she was falling fast.

Sometimes she does not feel the back of her head and neck for quite a long time. Then she imagines, considering that her angle of vision is limited on both sides by rounded white hills, that what is happening is not that she has lost sensibility in this area, but that the big pillow must be so soft that her head sinks softly into its hollow. It means that the white hills she perceives on each side must surely be the same big pillow or others around it. «Now, if I have been able to think this thing out», she concludes, «it means that I am not asleep. I was, a while ago, or maybe I woke up a long time ago. That's difficult to know without a watch». She imagines that if her bed has, as usual, a low railing at her feet, and a headboard that is taller, it would be possible to fix on it a structure like a small metal mast from which to hang a watch, exactly at the center of her field of vision. «And in order for it to hang, the watch must have a chain. A gold chain, like the one Arturo used to wear». Now she could see the watch clearly, and the white hills could easily be sand dunes. And so, in between the sand hills, two gossamer silhouettes, vaguely human, are advancing as if they were weightless shadows. One of them stops, while the other proceeds toward a green patch of sea. The one that stopped has Arturo's watch in his hand. When the small gold lid opens, it produces a metallic sound. «So this must have been Arturo», she says to herself, «unless I have fallen asleep».

Other times, by lowering her eyes as much as possible, she manages to see the upper part of a door. Then, looking up, she can still see the plaster moldings at the corner where the walls meet the ceiling. As far as she can see, the molding is an interminable succession of grapevines loaded with fruit, petrified up there. Upon opening her eyes, this is the very first thing she looks at. This way she can tell whether her body position has been changed while she was asleep. Because, upon waking, she always suffers an anguished vertigo: the moment her eyelids open, she is suddenly falling facedown toward the immense saline plain of the ceiling, over which she has been suspended. But she never experiences this anguish coming back from her memories.

Other times, she well knows what is going on. Though she might forget names, and certain blurred faces might confuse her, she finds herself trembling with affection, or at least, that is the way it feels. That is how affection felt. Even though now perhaps it is just the coldness of those evenings when the sun winds its yellow disc so obliquely that she can barely see it. Then she knows that one season has followed another, and that this one is colder than the previous one. On those afternoons, her attic rack of a body writhes, making her hips ache like in the days when she still was a woman. She trembles. She keeps shivering until someone comes in the morning, and through the fuzzy veil of her cataracts she sees a mirror held close, and she is made more comfortable and has her dry tears wiped, tears from an interminable night spent in a daze and of not knowing who Arturo was.

Other times, during her dead hours, she distracts herself with the old vanity of sensing her body. And since she cannot move, she only recalls how it felt to make a fist, or with a little more concentration, she attempts to feel the bedsheets covering her bony knees. After playing this game for a long while, she no longer knows whether she has fallen asleep again, and therefore she dreams that she is really touching the wrinkled net of her dry stomach. Then, halfway in between the salty blank sky of the ceiling and the luminous warmth of her persistent siesta, it all becomes blurred. An enormous tin sign screams out a hotel's name: «Plaza Hotel», and while she believes she is touching her withered navel, that gets mixed up with another image. It must be that of Arturo, who incessantly opens and closes his pocket watch with the accompanying metallic ring of a xylophone note, and he dances with her to this, amid the rustle of flapping coattails, of starched shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons, and of the young ladies' billowy muslin gowns overflowing the marble staircase. Yes, it is Arturo at last, embracing her tightly while the waiters pop champagne corks and someone shouts «New Year», as if saying New century! or New eternity! A new eternity to live again... And Arturo hugs her and confuses her. She gets so confused that she no longer knows if her own flaccid breasts -those of an old mother, now unnecessary- are the same ones that surge firmly a century later, or if they belong to the other, the one still remaining in the fugitive region of her memory, whose bosom almost shows in the satin and lionskin neckline as she dances and blushes in all shades when Arturo whispers sweet things in her ear, even though she cannot hear what he says because of the insistent starbursts of exploding fireworks. A blast of consecutive flashes that brings her back to the knotty ruins of her body, dragged by a cascade of disappointments, while the other, the irretrievable one, keeps on dancing, with her breasts up high, in the balcony of the Plaza: like the ballerina on a music box lid, bidding farewell to the old year, to the century, to eternity, dancing to the metallic quavers of Arturo's watch.

Other times she sees, on the salty plain of the ceiling, the reflections of clouds and traceries that come through the windowpanes when someone leaves the shutters partly open. Timid crisscrossings of shadows that announce the hours until all is dark, though her eyes still keep their anguished vigil over her creaking joints and uncontrollable sphincters, which have gone slack. And then comes the horrified scream of an unfamiliar nurse: «She did it, she did it again!» And acrid vapors return her to the humiliation of diapers, to the quick alarm of infant diarrhea, to the great shame at the smell of her own body every morning.

Other times, people enter her room. They surround her, propping her up with pillows. An instinctive twitching of her lips reminds her that she should smile. To smile, which is almost as difficult as knowing who are those people greeting her loudly at her ear, and who come up to the static lightwell of her eyes, shaking their heads: «We'll all be getting there». And soon they disappear, leaving her in the same condition as before, without her being able to tell them to fetch from the wardrobe the Indian rosary that belonged to her great-uncle, «who was a bishop», and the silver comb to fix her thinned out hair, «because it's been such a long time that I don't brush it, and I used to stroke it a hundred times every night». They leave before she can ask them who was Arturo? who are they? who is she herself?, before they can give her an answer, a clue, before the night is back again. The night with its brutal puzzles of names, its impossible guessing games: how did it happen, when, where. Was it my son or perhaps my father? A man or a woman? Day or night? Did he exist, or have I only invented him?

Other times she is delirious. Defying the dim certainty of geometry, she finds herself on a bottomless prairie. The stealthy zigzag of a serpent warns her that she is in the realm of her feverishness. And inside her fever is her husband, Arturo -now she knows it is he- galloping at the head of a stream of riders, just like that winter morning when he died. They are hunting an unreachable fox, lost in the tumult of time, multiplied by the countless visions of foxes in her dreams ever since. The fox gets closer, followed by Arturo, and finally he is coming, out of breath, to take refuge behind the bony wall of her forehead. Arturo and the stream of riders are approaching her, and there is no use warning them that she is there already, seeing them riding across that prairie and toward her eyes, as if she were watching them from the edge of a table. There is no use because the horses keep coming closer, driven forward by the carnivorous barking of the dogs, and they come galloping into her head, brushing their sweaty flanks against her parietals, exacerbating the humid pumpkin of her brain. Then Arturo's horse stumbles, rolls over him, and crushes him with a creaking of branches, leaving stamped on his temple a brilliant U from of one of its hooves. Then silence, silence: there is only the hissing of the serpent.

But there will be another morning, an unrepeatable dawn when she will think she is hearing small shoes squeaking on the polished parquet floor. The little girl will walk around her room looking for a way to look into her knotted body. The little girl will come with anguish in her heart to see her grandmother. She will pull all her weight on the door handle, too high for her, and the door will open by itself. She will walk to the foot of the bed under the threat of the hatboxes and the frowning portraits, and then move closer to the side of the bed on tiptoe, until all of her six years can look into the lightwell of the eyes in the bald head. Her grandmother will finally wake up from the deep and see above her those gray eyes -just like her own had been- observing her with an entranced expression. Then, the plaster mask of her own face upon the pillows will contort, will smile. And for a vertiginous second, she will believe that the past centuries have been an illusion, that the sands of time are flowing back over her, that she sees herself in the girl's small face framed by curls, and brought back to the time of seashells and chalky fingers. She will believe she is not the one crumpled on the bed but the one standing by the bedside, six years old, looking curiously at her grandmother. Even though this vision might last only a second, and the little girl who entered the forbidden room might run away frightened, wanting to play and live her life, to her this will be enough for eternity. It will be enough to make her smile by herself behind the lightwell of her eyes.