The Right Intention Read online

  The fact that it was nighttime actually made it easier to see what Mamá was really saying: this was a debt that could never be repaid because this debt was a sort of ultimatum on love, or the only way Mamá could conceive love.

  “I’d have to apply for a loan, refinance the house,” she said quietly, as though talking to herself, because she knew that, rather than make Mamá reconsider, this would only reaffirm her mother’s sense of importance. Mamá exchanged her serious face for her vulnerable one, her entreaty face that was absolutely insufferable, as insufferable as the suddenly overpowering old-lady smell, as insufferable as the sound of Mamá’s tongue against the roof of her mouth as she swallowed saliva.

  “María Fernanda is coming tomorrow,” she told her mother. “I called her today.”

  But not even that made Mamá react.

  “You’re going to give me the money, aren’t you, daughter?”

  Again the smell. Again the revulsion rising in her throat, making her crack her knuckles anxiously.

  “Do you know what it would take for me to get you a million pesetas, Mamá? Do you realize what I’d have to do—do you?”

  She’d shouted without intending to, she realized on falling silent, and immediately the sound of a hospital attendant’s footsteps could be heard heading for the room.

  “You’re going to give it to me, aren’t you, daughter?”

  “Yes, Mamá, I’m going to give it to you, this is going to be the last thing I give you.”

  “I’m asking for what’s mine.”

  “And I’m giving it to you, but shut up already.”

  “You don’t know what I went through, to send you and your brother and sister to the best schools.”

  “Shut up!”

  The attendant rushed in and brusquely instructed her to leave. Mamá had started to cry and was speaking in the histrionic tones of a woman accustomed to feigning an emotion she’s never felt.

  “Mothers should be loved and respected, don’t you think?” Mamá asked the attendant silently glaring at her in reproach, as though she were a criminal. “They should be loved and respected.”

  “Of course they should, Señora, now don’t get yourself all worked up.”

  “All I was asking for is the money that’s mine—and love, that’s what I was asking for, love.”

  When Mamá said that, she stopped arguing with the attendant, who was shoving her out of the room, and ran down the hall to get out of there as quickly as possible. She arrived home sweating. Manuel was asleep.

  It’s not the idea of death in general but the reality of Mamá’s death that seems so absurd. María Fernanda is probably already at the hospital. She’ll have spoken to the doctor. She’ll have told Mamá the truth. Although it’s cold out, the sky is clear and Mamá will have seen it from her bed and then turned to María Fernanda and cried, maybe.

  You tell a woman that she’s going to die, you say, “You’re going to die,” and it makes no difference if you do it slowly, or lovingly, or if you hold her hand; you say, “You’re going to die”—something she herself had been aware of all her life and even reflected on deeply, more than once, as though she herself were seventy years old—and it’s like hearing a door slam, like when Manuel’s mother stopped after being told “You’re going to die” and looked at her, not at Manuel or his brother or his brother’s children but at her, over by the door, standing far from the bed out of pure embarrassment, as though trying to escape the performance that would have been required by standing with them, the one impossible for her to feign in the four or five seconds during which her face froze in an idiotic expression (“You’re going to die”) that more resembled a smile.

  That’s why she’s not at all surprised when María Fernanda asks, from the hospital, why she didn’t tell Mamá the truth about the state of her health. She’s not up to arguing with María Fernanda. She’s too tired, she hardly slept all night.

  And she shouldn’t have reacted that way about the money, either, or didn’t she realize Mamá was only asking for what was hers?

  “I know,” she replied, hoping her sister would be quiet. “Look, tell Mamá that Manuel went to the bank to apply for a loan this morning and she’ll have her million in no time.”

  Was she going to the hospital later, after work?

  “No, I’m not; you’re already there, why do I need to go?”

  That wasn’t the point, what on earth was the matter with her, María Fernanda was tired too, for goodness sake, not only did she have a fever but she’d come in all the way from Valencia.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  Nothing, or at least not to her, but she should at the very least go to the hospital to apologize to Mamá, she owed her that much, and so did Antonio; she should call and tell him to go that evening as well.

  “Why don’t you call him?”

  She knew perfectly well why.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Stop playing dumb, she knew perfectly well that Antonio didn’t want to speak to her.

  “What makes you so sure? Have you ever tried?”

  In the end, she caved, agreeing to both things: she’d phone Antonio and she’d go to the hospital after work. Manuel called from the bank to ask for her national ID number, which he needed for the loan application. The babysitter called to say that one of the twins had a fever and the other was misbehaving like she wouldn’t believe: he’d broken the little clown figurine on the counter and she’d spanked him. María Fernanda called again. Antonio said he didn’t know if he’d go or not, he had to think about it. Mamá’s caretaker phoned with another message about Joaquín having called. Manuel called to say the loan had been approved. Her boss asked if she was planning to spend all day on the family helpline. She spilled coffee on a report. She went into the bathroom to cry, and a colleague in there gave her a hug, saying she was there for her, whenever or whatever, because she knew how hard it was to see your mother die, how incredibly painful it was to see your mother die.

  Leaving the office, she thought that if it had been a less beautiful day, colder at least, everything would have been easier, and was shocked at her own detachment, at how little she cared that Mamá was dying, at how indifferent she was to María Fernanda’s grievances and Antonio’s pain.

  When she got home, Manuel said that her sister had called twice to tell her not to go to the hospital, that her mother was being moved to a private clinic that same afternoon. She cried again, just so that Manuel would hold her. He smelled of cigarettes, and mint.

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “No.”

  “Want me to drive you and wait in the car while you go up to see her?”

  “What about the kids?”

  “They can stay with the neighbor, I already spoke to her.”

  Manuel’s love was so warm, so simple. She wished she could surrender to it like a girl awaiting supreme, logical guidance. She wished she could say, “Tell me what to do, how to act.” In the car they spoke only of the loan, its terms. Three years. They could swing it, but there would be no vacation in August, unless of course her mother—and here Manuel paused, as though this were a territory best left untrodden . . .

  “I want no part of my mother’s money, the last thing in the world I want is my mother’s money, do you understand me?”

  “Of course,” Manuel said.

  All three of them were there, and had it not been for María Fernanda the silence would have been more difficult than ever. None of them looked directly at the other for longer than necessary, and when they spoke they did so addressing Mamá—not her face but her hands, or the outline of her knees under the sheet. Mamá stank. She could recall no sharper or more unpleasant smell, and it remained lodged in her brain even after she left the room. Mamá looked notably worse than the day before. The doctors said it was due to the move, and to the incompetence of whoever had put on her brace incorrectly, not tightening it properly. The pain she was feeling now was for her own good, t
he doctor repeated tirelessly, each time he walked into the room, as though what was making her purse her lips in a perpetual grimace might be an unnecessary form of torture. The room was understatedly pleasant, like a classy hotel, and yet couldn’t escape the cold anonymity of a hospital. The little touches to be expected at a private clinic—the delicate vase containing a single rose, the curtains—only served to highlight Mamá’s helplessness, accentuate it to the point that her pain looked so ugly it was grotesque. María Fernanda addressed only her, even when she was actually speaking to Antonio; and Antonio, who arrived later, looking like an interchangeable extra, did not alter his expression once all evening, wearing the timid-brute face so characteristic of his anxiety.

  Mamá slept late and they took advantage of this in order to speak to the doctor, who couldn’t keep from adopting a scientific tone—surely an automatic defense mechanism—to speak of Mamá’s deteriorating condition.

  “How long,” Antonio said, abruptly cutting the doctor off, his intonation in no way resembling that of a question.

  “Do you mean how long does she have to live?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe how crude you are,” María Antonio replied, looking straight at Antonio for the first time.

  “I can’t believe what a hypocrite you are.”

  “Who do you think you are, speaking to me like that?”

  Forced to choose, she’d take Antonio’s brusqueness over the pretend scandalized tone María Fernanda adopted as a means of avoiding the conversation that, if they were honest, would have to be had sooner or later.

  “How long does she have?” she asked, stepping in to end the conversation as quickly as possible, and to quell the doctor’s discomfort.

  “Her deterioration is progressing, quickly. The change has been dramatic since she arrived. But you can never predict these things with any certainty. It could be a month, maybe less. Essentially, it’s up to her.”

  The doctor, who was so young he’d yet to master the skill of dissembling, must have thought that they were fighting over money. The truth, as almost always, was much more complicated and something that not even they could have explained. The sum total of Mamá’s assets, once split three ways, was relatively paltry, but they hadn’t gathered around Mamá’s deathbed out of love or concern either, so it seemed hard not to accept that they were some sort of spectators. Though the idea would have been morbid had it been anyone else, because this was Mamá it was not. It was as though the three of them saw themselves as exclusive spectators, the sole ticket-holders in a three-seat amphitheater on whose stage Mamá was acting out her own death, with the solemnity of something both longed for and not, by turns both grotesque and pitifully touching. María Fernanda took revenge on Antonio by not bothering to look at him when the two of them later argued over whether or not they should tell Mamá. She was the only one who didn’t think they should, who thought it better to wait until closer to the time, and despite claiming that this was in order not to worry Mamá, deep down she was afraid of her reaction to learning how near she was to death.

  Since Antonio sided with her, they decided to hold off, to wait at least five days, see if she improved and decide then. But the following day when she went to the hospital after work, it was clear that María Fernanda had already told her everything. She could tell even before her mother spoke, by the rarified silence in the room, by Mamá’s look, which suddenly bore into her with severity, as though she were a traitor.

  “Would you like it if you were going to die and no one told you, daughter?” Mamá asked unnecessarily.

  “Yes,” she replied, feeling sincere for the first time. “I think I’d prefer not to be told.”

  “It’s clear that I am not you.”

  María Fernanda didn’t look at her then, or during the half-hour monologue Mamá gave that, as always, excluded the two of them, a monologue to which the reality of death lent a strange detachment. Death, which at first was entirely real, the great truth, seemed to distance her from the woman she’d been all her life; Mamá seemed now less likely than ever to die, it was as though the news of her death had somehow revitalized her.

  María Fernanda took the train back to Valencia that night. And if they barely said goodbye, it was because some part of her sister suddenly seemed to acknowledge the toll that telling Mamá had taken. María Fernanda had always been like that, but now, finally, seemed to see it. Her sister was strolling out the door, having fulfilled the expectations of the noble daughter, and leaving her with the problem.

  Her sister had gotten fatter, and uglier. Exhaustion had reddened her eyelids and made her cheekbones look shiny and uneven, slack. She saw María Fernanda’s ugliness as a triumph almost greater even than her remorse. The act of forgiveness (even if María Fernanda had cried, admitted she was wrong) didn’t add anything, really. What was truly significant was not Mamá’s melodramatic speech—almost nineteenth-century in tone and absurdly well-delivered—about the honest daughter and the insincere daughter and death and how hard she’d worked all her life only to be treated like this, but the fact that at this precise moment, María Fernanda was, truly and objectively, uglier than she was. Forgiveness, if silence counted as forgiveness, was a way of avoiding another truth, one that said true salvation came not from granting forgiveness but from asking for it. That sense of satisfaction, which later made her feel strangely afraid, seemed in fact to express a dissatisfaction with the situation; she almost would have preferred to be the one who asked María Fernanda for forgiveness, because that would have made victory resounding and absolute. And nevertheless it was true that Mamá was dying, just as it was true that Antonio wouldn’t forgive Mamá nor would Mamá forgive Antonio, and that each of them could enumerate their resentments perfectly, with facts and dates that justified them but didn’t make them right.

  María Fernanda left, defeated, at 9:35, with just enough time to catch the last train, as though running out of time were another way to ask forgiveness. Mamá, once they were alone again, glared as though at a friend whose duplicity has been discovered.

  Manuel wasn’t distancing himself. Or if he was, it was only unconsciously, speaking about the loan they’d taken out, which, under the terms they’d selected would take three years to pay off. And yet listening to him talk about money in this serious tone, so unlike Manuel, was oddly familiar, reminiscent of her adolescence, of meals at which Joaquín would report ploddingly and meticulously on the factory, with the fastidiousness of a bumpkin re-counting his pile of coins a hundred times just to be sure. Perhaps that was why all night she felt she was having a realization, seeing that she’d wasted too much time running in circles on an absurd track, continuously passing the truth without seeing it. And the truth was suddenly, again, the factory, but now like a living being, another member of the family, the favorite child maybe, one whose life or death or memory was no different to Mamá than that of a human being. The factory was like a thirty-year old river running through her life, one whose course had determined her mother’s joy and sorrow and which, even now that it no longer existed, in some way continued to determine it. All deaths leave one or two things in their wake, things they touched whose mere presence becomes suddenly symbolic, as if death’s final act were to empty every living thing around and then fill it back up with itself, giving it new meaning. Something like that must have happened with Mamá’s feelings about Joaquín and Antonio after the factory burned down. The fact that one of them was her son must have been like finding a kindly person insufferable, someone you feel a desperate, vexatious urge to get away from. It wasn’t that she saw Antonio as a failure, but that she saw him as responsible for her failure and as symbolic of the factory. That was why Mamá showed no interest in the money Antonio made by renting out the property where Alonso Woodworks had stood and yet was insisting that she pay back the million pesetas associated with her memory of wealth. It wasn’t money itself Mamá really wanted, it was money that reminded her of
the factory office, the enormous table and matching writing desk; what she wanted was actually her sense of financial security, and for any reminder of her failure to be hidden, in as dignified a way as possible. That was why the hospital room curtains, the elegant armchair for visitors, the rose blossoming in its little vase—beautiful and yet anonymous, like the elegance of a luxury hotel—were more Mamá than Mamá herself.

  The entire world was nothing but smell the next day in the hospital room, and Mamá was this: a creature who was herself for a few hours, in the early morning, and then, when the Nolotil-induced torpor wore off, began to emit a sharp animal-like wail whose volume increased until it morphed into something that resembled a cry even though it wasn’t, really, and since this quickly dried out her tongue, it left her unable to speak. It was as though Mamá, after María Fernanda had left the previous night, crossed some thin wall, a point of no return. For a few minutes she was almost certain Mamá was about to die. It was during what seemed like a respite, after one of her prolonged monotone wails, which ended, rather than in a respite, in agitated breath-holding. She became afraid. She, who hadn’t feared her mother’s death until that moment, who couldn’t honestly have said that any of her feelings about it had resembled fear, suddenly felt herself slip and fall into the gaping abyss of Mamá’s wide-open eyes. Only her eyes. The rest of her body remained contracted in pain, still subject to what seemed more phony than ever, phony the way Mamá’s pain always seemed, Mamá’s moaning, Mamá’s love, Mamá’s concern, all of it phony except for her wide-open eyes, hard as knuckles, perhaps begging for clemency. She shouted, “Doctor.” She recalls having shouted the word “Doctor” several times, loud, and also having shouted “Mamá,” and then “Doctor” again. She recalls having shouted perhaps not so they would save Mamá but save her from Mamá, so there would be another body present to save her from the absurdity, the horrifically real absurdity, the brutal absurdity of death appearing before her. The doctor rushed in and brusquely pushed her aside. The nurse did too. She gazed at Mamá’s knees, nearly invisible beneath the sheets.