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  PRAISE FOR SUCH SMALL HANDS

  “An unsettling, tightly controlled book.”

  —Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books

  “Such Small Hands is a stick of dynamite. Nothing like having your world rearranged in two sittings.”

  —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore

  “I don’t think I’ve ever read such a massively tiny book. A poignant and truly gratifying novel.”

  —Nick Buzanski, Book Culture

  “Andrés Barba’s magnificent novel will haunt you, and continue to haunt you when you least expect it.”

  —Caitlin Luce Baker, University Book Store

  “In stunning prose, Andrés Barba probes the fissures that words stitch together long enough to form a scar. Love, hate, trauma—they’re tightly coiled in Such Small Hands into that most universal of scars, childhood, and the results, also like childhood, are unsettling.”

  —Brad Johnson, Diesel, A Bookstore

  “Andrés Barba is one of several impressive writers from Spain at work on fiction that brilliantly dissects the business of being alive.”

  —Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

  Published by Transit Books

  2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

  www.transitbooks.org

  Las manos pequeñas

  Copyright © 2008 Andrés Barba

  Originally published in Spanish by Editorial Anagrama S.A.

  English Translation Copyright © 2017 Lisa Dillman

  Afterword Copyright © 2017 Edmund White

  ISBN: 978-1-945492-02-0

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016961681

  DESIGN & TYPESETTING

  Justin Carder

  DISTRBUTED BY

  Consortium Book Sales & Distribution | (800) 283-3572 | cbsd.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Such Small Hands

  Andrés Barba

  Translator’s Note

  Lisa Dillman

  Afterword

  Edmund White

  For Marina and Teresa, who were girls both

  luminous and dark, like these.

  And when the doll was so disfigured that she no longer looked like a human baby, only then did the girl begin to play with her.

  ANONYMOUS, A Woman in Berlin

  HER FATHER DIED INSTANTLY, HER MOTHER IN THE HOSPITAL.

  “Your father died instantly, your mother is in a coma” were the exact words, the first ones Marina heard. You could touch those words, rest your hand on each sinuous curve: expectant, incomprehensible words.

  “Your father died instantly, your mother is in a coma.”

  Lips pronounce them without stopping. Quick, dry words. They come in thousands of different, unpredictable ways, sometimes unbidden. Suddenly they just fall, as if onto a field. Marina’s learned to say them without sadness, like a name recited for strangers, like my name is Marina and I’m seven years old. “My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital.”

  Her mouth hardly moved and once she’d spoken, her lips were expressionless, the upper one jutting out slightly above the lower. Not making a face, though. Sometimes the words came slowly, rolling in from afar. As if they had chosen her, rather than she having chosen them. A strange homecoming, those words, a strange return to the things that made home. Fragrant. The words take on dimension, shooting upward and outward, making the air thick. Becoming something, becoming a thing. But a thing that’s always veiled, and so she has to say:

  “My father died instantly, and then my mother died in the hospital,” and then make her way back through that thought to the other one, the real one, the slow one, the accident. Nothing as fragile as that surface. Nothing as slow or as fragile. First the sound of the road beneath the tires, the muffled, maritime sound of the road, the feel of the back seat, the danger at first almost imperceptible.

  A second later it broke. What did? Logic. Like a melon dropped on the ground, split in one go. It started like a crack in the seat she sat on, its contact was no longer the same contact: the seatbelt had become severe. Before, long before the collision, was the smoothness of the seat she’d felt so many times, the upholstery with its fine white lines, which had somehow altered. Mamá’s voice, to papá.

  “Don’t try to pass.”

  And that was the source of the fissure, the one that started in the seat, that included the quiet sound of the road beneath the tires as the car accelerated.

  The impact was colossal.

  The car jumped the meridian, flipped, and slid upside down across the oncoming lane before smashing into the rocks just beyond the shoulder. And the whole accident, which Marina was unable to recall with any precision until four months later, was born of speed, sheer speed. There was nothing to be gleaned from it, nothing to unravel.

  It was sound, too. A violent sound, but different from the one produced by the accident itself. A hollow, disjointed sound that erupted and then was immediately muffled in the distance, a sound that was not prolonged or sustained, and yet somehow accompanied the car as it flew over the meridian and flipped upside down.

  The car falling, and where it fell, transforming. The car, making space for itself. That, more than ever, was when she had to fall back on the words. As if, of all the words that might describe the accident, those were the only ones that possessed the virtue of stating what could never be stated; or, as if they, of all words, were the only ones there, so close at hand, so easy to grasp, making what could never possibly be discerned somehow accessible. And after the sound, silence. Not the lack of sound, but silence. A silence that was neither a void nor a negation but a positive form, one that solidified what just a few instants ago had been elastic and supple: the metallic taste in her throat, her thirst.

  Marina remembers thirst almost the second everything stopped. An unrelenting thirst that was part of the silence and the stillness, a thirst that couldn’t be quenched even when she felt hands unbuckle her seatbelt, saw the face of that heavy, bleach-blonde woman, heard the other voice, the man.

  “Don’t touch her head; leave her like that, don’t touch her head.”

  “Water,” she said.

  She said water the way you think of water when you learn that the human body is almost entirely made of it: an abstract water turned solid.

  “Little girl. Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  The heavy woman with bleached hair was bending over her now, the bottle in her hand. Marina could see every single black root of the woman’s hair, but nothing was taking root in Marina: not the liquid she was drinking, not the metallic taste of blood on her gums, not the heavy woman’s roots; she felt like clay, as if everything inside her was soft, formless, slippery.

  “Her head looks okay; it’s her arm that’s hurt.”

  Their muffled conversation filtered through to her. She felt a hand under her neck, slowly reaching under her back, another man, his hand was enormous, a hand that could have split her in two if it wanted, and yet was gentle.

  “Respiratory tract’s not obstructed.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Marina.”

  “Marina, do you think you can move?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to lie back on this stretcher.”

  When she was lifted she felt the pain for the first time.

  An electric charge, searing through her entire torso and then subsiding, abating immediately, like her thirst. She couldn’t move her left arm.

  “What’s that white stuff?”

  “Those are your rib
s.”

  And then when she sat up she saw the extent of the injury: the motionless arm, the raw flesh, the gaping flesh, sliced so cleanly that the skin fell away like a curtain, her ribs. She had to find a way to the words that would make it make sense, the words that were about to disappear.

  “Marina, your father died instantly and your mother died just now.”

  They’d laid everything out beside her, ready for a panic attack, but the attack didn’t come. Marina was still watching the words as if they were an airplane, flying from one end of the hospital room to the other; she was staring after the white contrail the words left in their wake. The girl doesn’t erupt, doesn’t cry, doesn’t react. There were three people in white coats and black shoes: two women and a man. Three people with legs and arms and that unreal, almost magical quality that adults had always had for Marina; these ones in particular, though, were distinctly unmagical. Pause, wait for her to take in their words. But the girl doesn’t cry, doesn’t erupt, doesn’t react. The girl still inhabits the suburbs of the words. Or perhaps it was just that creative thinking disassociated what it had no possible way of assimilating. The words were still polished and clean and superficial like the adults’ black shoes.

  “Do you understand what we’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re telling you that your parents are dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Both of them.”

  “Yes.”

  You were supposed to say yes, keep repeating yes. A yes as polished and superficial as their shoes. Number and word: yes. Silence and sound: yes. Word detached from language, prior to language, forlorn, pure, limpid.

  MARINA AWOKE with the vague feeling that there was something she had to do, that she had some obligation she hadn’t met to the doctors who came to see her every morning and every afternoon. Maybe it was the obligation to be human, to cry and stamp her feet, to suffer. Over those two months of convalescence, Marina sank into their looks the way you sink into a tub. It was only right before the doctors came that she felt her parents’ absence, but in such an abstract way that it never showed, like when you almost grasp a concept and then don’t. She’d drop her hands onto the sheet, onto the picture of a house that the psychologist had made her draw, not because she was being dramatic but because letting her hands drop was a way of moving the throbbing pain in her arm to the paper, the house, the mountain and the tree, above the sun and the puffy-cotton cloud.

  “You’re really good at houses.”

  “No, I’m really good at trees.”

  “Will you teach me how to draw them?”

  “First you make a fat trunk. Then three points. All brown. And then you do the leaves with light green.”

  “Like this?”

  “Don’t push down so hard. I’ve drawn tons of trees. That’s why mine are so good.”

  “Look what I brought you: a doll,” the psychologist said.

  The doll was small and compact. The psychologist gave it to her to make her a real girl once and for all.

  At first she was ecstatic. The doll, with her wide-open eyes, plastic eyes, heartrending eyes, eyes that opened and closed. To get them to close you had to lay her down and say, “Now you’re going to go to sleep, aren’t you, dolly? You’re going to go to sleep because it’s nighttime and you’re very tired and you have to go to sleep, little dolly.”

  There, in bed: her.

  Dolly repeated over and over, dolly always waiting to lift her arms and be picked up, and the past shrinking, loneliness shrinking. She had three fingers on each hand. And a light green dress. And a smiling, painted mouth. And legs that didn’t bend. She navigated space like it was nothing, from the bed to the edge of the nightstand, from the cozy cavern of the bathroom to the boundless future of the window, always in Marina’s hands, flying.

  One day she said, “We have the same name: Marina.”

  Suddenly. As if it were a revelation.

  “Your name’s Marina.”

  And what if, like her, Marina started to have fewer memories, fewer and fewer memories, hardly any memories, no memories at all?

  “We have the same name.”

  Because dolly was the only one who didn’t lie. She was the only one calm, as if halfway through a long life. And she looked different from everyone else. Time passed over her, and she remained ever alert, like a visionary, astonished, lashless eyes (broken: now even when you laid her down, they didn’t close).

  “Now you’re always awake, dolly; you’re broken.”

  But she wasn’t broken at all. Now what had never been visible became visible from up close: her skin. So real, that skin. Marina was entranced by the curve of her ear, her lip, the folds in the plastic, skin you could examine from up close, too close, too real to be true. She’d bring her face up to dolly’s face, stick out her tongue, lick her eyes.

  “Now you can see better.”

  And she could always see better. The past, the present, the future. What if Marina left dolly on the windowsill watching people walk by on the street for days in a row? She’d end up knowing everything there was to know and she’d grow and grow and the seams on her back would burst, like the scar on Marina’s shoulder, and someone would have to come remove each one of her stitches with a pair of little black scissors.

  The day she was supposed to be discharged from the hospital had almost arrived. The psychologist had told her a week ago, but she hadn’t given her any additional information. She was leaving. Where was she going? She didn’t know. To an island. To a mountain. To the sea. No, not to the sea, to a sea. Everything was a, a place that already existed. It wasn’t so much the fear of leaving that terrified Marina but the idea of that space, that intricate, bountiful, preconceived place, full of beforehands.

  One day she asked the psychologist.

  “Where am I going to go?”

  “To an orphanage.”

  But at that point the word held no meaning for Marina.

  The doctors came to say goodbye, each in a white coat. All three of them told Marina how pretty she looked, all three smiling, puppet-like, marionettes in a hurry to leave quickly because they had so many important things to take care of. They’d stood there, asking her to raise her arm one more time, asking if it hurt when she held it this way, that way.

  “You’re going to live in a nice new house, a very pretty place with other girls, you’ll see,” the psychologist said.

  “No parents?”

  “No. But it’s very pretty, you’ll see.”

  Then a second later the psychologist was gone.

  Marina peed in her pants. She felt the hot, acidic urine run down her legs to her shoes and she felt the shame, which was also hot: a dark, robust, inescapable mass. She cried, a slave to that hot shame. Marina’s face, when the psychologist returned, was that of someone who’d been terrorized, and she wanted to calm her. She put her hand on her back, a hand with no conviction, like the words she’d just spoken, solemn as a newsflash.

  “Here, I brought you some chocolate. Oh—did you have an accident?”

  Saying yes was too humiliating, so she said nothing.

  “Don’t cry; come on, we’ll get you changed.”

  But her shame did not subside with clean underwear. Her shame was elastic, something that swelled, like the maritime sound of the road beneath the wheels.

  It was too hard to look forward to the orphanage; she didn’t know how to do it. And unable to picture it, random images jumbled together and came gurgling out like a death rattle. She looked at dolly to quiet them. Someone had gone to her house and packed her a doubtful suitcase. Winter clothes and summer clothes all jumbled together.

  Marina’s cheeks burned when the car pulled up at the entrance.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  And it was.

  “Yes, it is.”

  But it was something else, too. It was haughty. It rose up with an odd pretension, as if superimposed over the playground was another playground, a
s if over the building someone had traced a very fine black line in the air that ran over the border of each of the windows and doors. The whole house looked like it was outlined against the landscape.

  “It’s enormous,” the psychologist said.

  The playground made Marina feel devotion in her stomach, and it felt nice, felt like intimacy. You couldn’t put roots down in that devotion, but you could love it. The house made Marina feel afraid, as though the two of them—she and the house—were actually two people forced to live under the same cruel tyrant. A narrow, paved concrete path ran from the front gate to the orphanage door, its cement cracked by the plants and tree roots surrounding a black statue of Saint Anne.

  At first glance, she looked soothing. Her arms were open in welcome: fine, maternal arms, though black and inescapable. You couldn’t see her face until you got up close, and then she looked like a little girl, the childlike expression on her face refuted by how old and how black the sculpture was. A black, childlike, little old lady.

  No one was there that day; the girls were on a field trip, not coming back until the following day. The principal wore a brown skirt and black shoes with gold buckles. Though her lips barely moved when she spoke, she gave the impression that she was always smiling.

  “You’re Marina, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name’s Maribel. I’m the principal. You’re very pretty, Marina.”

  And the word pretty sounded strange then, as if it had been split in two. And everything she said became part of the spell cast by that broken word: the dormitory, hallways, classroom, dining room, bathrooms, closets, the red-haired clown at the door with a chalkboard in his stomach on which someone had written: Tomorrow, Field trip to Cola de Caballo and tomorrow was now today, because the girls weren’t there, because no one was there. Everything conspired to give that word back its meaning, and Marina had the urge to say that the dining room was pretty and so was the classroom, and the beds, all lined up in a row. That pretty was a giant hole swallowing everything up.

  For dinner they had salad, three croquettes each, and a pear.