The Right Intention Page 17

  “Daughter, it’s one tragedy after another,” Mamá says, and the words make her jump up, as though she’d been teetering on breaking point, and head for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She made no noise closing the door, made no noise rushing down to the street. It was 1:30 a.m. when the taxi dropped her off at home. She rode up in the elevator, a knot in her throat, as if she were about to cry or to tell a humiliating secret. The kids were asleep. Manuel said, “How are you?” when she walked into the bedroom, but she didn’t respond.

  “Are you OK?”

  Collapsing onto the bed beside him, she got a faint whiff of toothpaste.

  “Are you OK?”

  She felt ugly beside Manuel and something dark inside her took pleasure in that feeling. She put her hand on his crotch and stroked until she felt him grow excited.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She got on top of him without looking him in the face, with the urge to hurt herself, trying to hurt herself, desperately, as though seeking punishment. Manuel didn’t give in easily, first asking why she was doing this and then, writhing away, as if to distance himself from his satisfaction, he stared into her eyes, holding her hair away from her face with one hand. They said nothing more, and the silence intensified the sorrow of Manuel’s flesh, sinking into her without understanding her.

  But the silence is also this:

  Mamá waiting at the hospital.

  María Fernanda.

  Antonio saying he’ll go see Mamá tomorrow, and that it will be hard.

  The kids asleep in the next room.

  And by virtue of trying to hurt herself she ends up hurting Manuel, who takes on a strange beauty with his pajama bottoms down at his knees, and who—relinquishing his attempts to understand, at least for the time being—pushes her down on the bed, trying for a more standard position that she refuses to grant without knowing why; the only thing she knows is that she has to plumb the depths of this senselessness, to sink into it, and Manuel accepts this, motionless, until finally a dry metallic taste starts in the back of her throat and a fleeting satisfaction descends from far away, a satisfaction which, as she pulls away, seems less a result of physical pleasure than of the familiar beauty of Manuel’s erection, the simplicity of his sexuality. It is Manuel whose hands tuck her hair behind her ear, who strokes her cheek, who lies breathing beside her.

  “What happened. Tell me.”

  It started with the smell, the memory of the smell of sanded wood at the factory, rising up from those mounds of shavings piled beside the saws at Alonso Woodworks. María Fernanda would have thought it stupid of her to begin answering Manuel’s question this way, but at the moment she found it more logical and coherent than any other answer. And not just the smell. She recalled that when Mamá wasn’t around she used to kneel down in one of those mounds of sawdust and sink her hands into it as if it were the warm guts of an animal. She couldn’t have been more than ten at the time but still recalled the warm almost sweet smell of the wood, and Joaquín there beside her, looking after her like a well-trained beast, almost fearful, not daring to scold her. Admitting this, she slowly realized, still not looking Manuel full in the face, was like facing up to herself: accepting that not only had she never truly hated the factory but that in fact there was something about it she’d loved dearly; and if that seemed strange now, ridiculous even, it was because deep down it was the opposite: perfectly clear, and significant. Admitting that she’d loved the factory was no different from admitting she’d loved Mamá—not the woman now in the hospital with a broken hip, but doña María Antonia, the one who strode silently among the saws with her tough female authority, Joaquín at her side like an enormous hunting dog. Or maybe not loved her but had at least been seduced by her power, the same power that María Fernanda had so naturally exerted over her throughout their adolescence.

  They were, Mamá and María Fernanda, two faces of the same fear. And telling Manuel all of this now was like finding a word that perfectly described a feeling, and, having done so, seeing that reality take on a whole new significance.

  “The factory burned down nine years ago today,” she said, and Manuel’s lips parted, as though he were giving a tiny little involuntary smile.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “I hadn’t realized, Mamá told me at the hospital.”

  “How is she?”

  “Bad.”

  “What did your brother say?”

  “That he’s going to see her tomorrow.”

  “I think you should go too.”

  “Yes.”

  Saying yes, agreeing to Manuel’s sensible attitude and at the same time knowing that she was the one who’d made the decision was an act that suddenly possessed such simple, everyday beauty that she had the urge to pretend she was still upset, so as to draw the conversation out all night.

  “Are you going back to the hospital?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think I should?”

  “I think you need to get a little rest.”

  “Yes,” she said, and seeing Manuel’s exhausted face, added, “You’re right.”

  On the other side of the wall, in the room next door, a child coughed.

  Her stomachache worsened on walking into the hospital room and the penetrating odor of the hallway, alternating between neutral sterilizer and rancid sweat, followed her in. Mamá was awake.

  “I didn’t sleep all night,” Mamá said immediately, recriminating her for not having stayed. She didn’t reply immediately.

  “Have you had breakfast yet?” she asked.

  “Don’t change the subject, don’t treat me like an idiot, I’m telling you I didn’t sleep all night. I’m your mother.” Mamá’s apparently unconnected words showed the disjointed thinking of a woman trying to condense into a single sentence what she’s been ruminating on all night. “People love their mothers. Or don’t your children love you?”

  Mamá’s brow was drawn, indicating that she was truly in pain, not like the standard performance she put on when she came over and complained to Manuel or the kids, as though convinced that love would automatically follow on from compassion.

  “Yes, they do love me.”

  “Well then. You’ve never told me that, never once said, ‘Mamá, I love you.’”

  This was Mamá to a T, or at least Mamá’s most ridiculous face. It seemed even more pitiful now, thinness exaggerating her woeful expression, helplessness clearly visible behind the bags under her eyes—helplessness, on a face like hers, that had always had a staunch aristocratic beauty about it. Mamá’s melodrama was not only pretense but also the clearest demonstration of her ineptitude, her lack of emotional competence. She asked for love, and if it wasn’t forthcoming then she demanded love, and what’s more she demanded it like that, the way she would have demanded that her workers re-sand a strip of molding back when the factory was still up and running.

  And yet, behind Mamá’s thousand faces (or her only one) something was changing, had perhaps already changed, that very night. In the same way that there was a before and after with the factory fire, an after seemed to be created now by Mamá’s standard melodramatic reaction that was, nevertheless, somehow different.

  Mamá ate breakfast in silence and with great difficulty, since the brace that had been put on kept her from sitting up; after finishing, she asked what time Antonio had said he’d come.

  “I don’t know what time, he said today,” she replied, fearing that Mamá’s questioning would continue.

  “He won’t come.”

  “He said he’d come, really.”

  And she suddenly felt silly, like a little girl who’d told a lie and, on being caught, insisted a thousand times over that it was true.

  “He won’t come.”

  Truthfully, given the choice, she herself would have preferred that Antonio not come. Last Christmas had stirred things up
more than any time since the fire, and in the end it had solved nothing, leaving them in a state of tension that divided the family into two camps: she and Antonio on one side, as if accepting their victimhood, Mamá and María Fernanda on the other. Though nothing really different had happened that year, they each seemed to feel the overwhelming need to make a stand, and rather than accomplish anything, this only gave the hours-long Christmas dinner a sort of affected, almost grotesque theatricality in which the three of them, pretending it was a normal get-together, each blamed one another for their own unhappiness, albeit never openly. Manuel, the kids, Antonio’s wife Luisa, they all seemed mere bit players in this silent confrontation, presided over by Mamá, who finally stood, as she did each year after dessert, and demanded that they sing Christmas carols by the nativity scene she always erected by the front door. Had it not been for the fact that Antonio broke a wineglass against the edge of the table, they might all have gone home with the same sense of assumed failure as they did every other Christmas.

  “Time to sing carols,” she said, and Antonio shattered the glass decisively. Mamá then tried to cover it up, acting as though it had been an accident, but her fakery—like that of the joyous carols—was suddenly odious.

  Antonio and Mamá hadn’t spoken since, and the fact that he was now coming to visit made her as uneasy as she had been Christmas day. She suggested turning on the TV so as to fill the silence, and so Mamá would stop complaining, but then regretted it because her mother wanted her to leave it on a channel showing some sort of courtroom reality show. A man who said he had cancer was suing a tobacco company, claiming that when he became addicted there were no health warnings on cigarette packs.

  “So,” the prosecutor was saying, “you went to your doctor when you noticed the early signs and, as the report states, and he urged you to quit smoking . . .”

  Antonio appeared in the doorway looking somber, like someone forced against his will to do something unpleasant, and he was alone, no sign of Luisa, who no doubt would have made things easier. Suddenly it seemed like a planned gathering, and yet without María Fernanda there, Mamá’s face took on a vulnerable expression.

  “But I was already addicted by that time, you’re the ones . . .” the man’s voice trembled and the camera, sensing he was about to cry, zoomed in, “to be held responsible for my death, and the deaths of thousands of men and women like me who . . .”

  Mamá was no longer watching but Antonio was, as though trying, even now, to escape Mamá.

  “Come here, son.”

  Antonio moved brusquely, banging into a notebook filled with the doctor’s notes about meals that was hanging by the door, and kept swaying back and forth with an exasperating clink each time it swung.

  “Come here.”

  It must have been cold out, because Antonio’s ears and nose were pink.

  “Is a distillery, by chance, held responsible for deaths resulting from drunk drivers?” the prosecutor asked, smoothing his tie. “Is it not, in fact, the consumer’s responsibility to make responsible use of the product?”

  Though he was thirty-nine years old, standing there before Mamá Antonio looked like a brutish kid who’s just had a fight and, finding no way to justify himself, stands in silence. He approached slowly, in a mixture of fear and rancor she didn’t recall having seen since the fire, since the night Mamá slapped him in front of Joaquín.

  “Would you like it if you were going to die?” the man on TV asked.

  “I’m not saying I want you to die, I’m simply saying that it was your responsibility . . .”

  Mamá asked for a glass of water. Suddenly the conversation on TV had gotten uncomfortable and she rose too quickly to go and get her mother’s water, making obvious what might not have been until then: that she, too, was uncomfortable. When she returned, Mamá drank it down slowly, staring at Antonio the whole time.

  “Do you know what cancer is?” The man on TV took off the hat he’d been wearing, revealing a gleaming white, clearly chemo-induced baldness. The audience froze with a timid, “Ohhhh.”

  “I think things are getting a little overheated here.”

  “I’m going to die,” the man replied. “Does that not justify things getting a little overheated?”

  The program, though clearly tragic, though it was true that the man was going to die, contained an element of dramatic posturing that made it sickeningly absurd.

  “I’m going to die,” the man repeated.

  “Do we have to watch this shit?” Antonio asked brusquely, almost shouting without realizing it.

  “I don’t think it’s shit,” Mamá responded. “That man is going to die.”

  It wasn’t the fact that he was going to die that made it sickening, though, it was the fact that he was clearly playing the role of the dying man, the same way Mamá had begun playing—even if her pain was real—the role of the infirm.

  “Give me a kiss,” Mamá said. “Give your mother a kiss.”

  Antonio’s face froze in a look of shock that gave a whole new meaning to his silence up until that moment. Whether or not Mamá realized what she was asking seemed, by this point, almost irrelevant. Antonio walked over quickly and gave her a peck on the cheek, attempting to disguise how hard it was for him.

  “You love me, don’t you, son?”

  “Do I love you?”

  “You love me, don’t you?”

  And Mamá’s question vacillated between pathetic and authoritarian, for despite being insincere, it did not allow no for an answer. The of course with which Antonio replied was simply the only quick and dignified way out, and they were still in close proximity when the arrival of the doctor suddenly made everything easier, placing them once more in the realms of people feigning ordinary concern. Mamá made no comment when Antonio left after offering an excuse that—given that it was a Sunday—took on a clearly vengeful character: he had to get to work. What she did do, however, was take for granted that she would call in to work and take the following day off.

  “Tomorrow, before you come in the morning, stop at my house and pick up my other robe, the green one.”

  “I work tomorrow, Mamá.”

  “Well, tell them you need the day off. Someone has to stay with me, don’t you think?”

  On TV the judge found the tobacco company guilty. The audience applauded feverishly.

  She wasn’t sure what she was afraid of, but she didn’t want to be alone. It may well have been the fact that she’d been unable to keep from siding with Antonio, yet having done so somehow made her feel ashamed. Antonio wasn’t completely right either. No one was, really, and when she got home and Manuel asked how things had gone that afternoon, she thought that even he wouldn’t understand, even if she recounted everything Mamá had said and the way Antonio had reacted. It all stemmed from things so far in the past, things that had gone unspoken for so many years that there was no way to sum it all up now, to articulate it concretely. And just as it couldn’t be explained, nor could it be resolved. It simply was. Her relationship with Mamá, and María Fernanda, and Antonio simply was; it couldn’t be described, or altered, or resolved; it rose up before her like a spider’s web made of stone, one in which hostilities and hard feelings no longer resembled hostilities or hard feelings but the unsettled scores of people who had given up trying to understand one another, if indeed they had ever tried at all. That was why, when she first met Manuel’s family, she got the feeling that their relationships were completely unreal, got the feeling that their love was a sham even more elaborate than that of her own family. Discovering later that their affection was genuine turned her against Mamá in a subtle way, because in the same sense that Manuel’s mother had been solely responsible for the love in his family, Mamá must have been to blame for the distance and envy in hers.

  The needy way she loved Manuel’s mother resembled that of an orphan trying too hard to please her adoptive parents, to the point of coming off as ridiculous, and every time she thought about her mother-in
-law (now that the woman was dead), she got the almost comforting urge to cry, recalling how quiet and kindhearted she’d been, how tiny. There was no sense fooling herself, either: no matter how she’d tried to make her own family resemble Manuel’s, Mamá’s overbearing shadow always triumphed in the end. Since she and Manuel lived far away, Mamá, since the fire, had taken to spending the entire weekend with them, to be with Manuel and the kids. If she had ever been given the chance to reproach Mamá, it wouldn’t be for coming over but for doing so the way she did—condescendingly, with no sign of gratitude, as though looking down on someone simply doing their duty out of a sense of obligation. She refrained from bickering with her mother, because doing so always made her feel cruel, and because she didn’t want Manuel to realize how on edge she was. Mamá could be very convincing, and being upset made her behave abruptly, so whenever there was an argument she ended up feeling her mother had won, and consoled herself by believing that everyone takes silent revenge, and this was hers: offering Mamá her home, but not her affection. Which was why, when she got back from the hospital that night, she took down the photo Mamá had put in the living room, because it was her silent revenge, and she could no longer stand her corkscrew curls, her black-and-white photo-studio smile, aged twenty. Then she called the office and said she wouldn’t be able to come in the following day, that her mother’s condition was serious and she needed to be there for her.