The Right Intention Read online

Sara didn’t write Luis nor did she call him, but the fact that she didn’t write him or call him didn’t mean she didn’t think it was the right thing to do, it simply meant she wouldn’t have known what to tell him, aside from the truth: that she didn’t care about him. As the weeks went by it all built up inside her like some ball of dissatisfaction that, lacking an object on which to project itself, turned against her. First she felt despicable for not caring about him, but that only lasted a few days. Then she thought that sooner or later some other boy she actually did like would appear, but that, too, struck her as unlikely. Finally what materialized intact, redoubled, was that feeling of repulsion for her own body. “It’s my period,” she thought, but it continued in the weeks that followed. Sara disliked her period the way she disliked any other form of excretion, including her own sweat. She sprayed on cheap cologne twice a day for fear of smelling bad, but she couldn’t stand perfume, either. It would have been ideal to have no smell.

  Sometimes Sara dreamed she was invisible, that she got out of bed and wandered around the park without anyone perceiving her presence. When she woke up, the memory of that weightlessness would make her smile and she’d close her eyes to hold onto it for a few more seconds, but instead the awareness of her body made her bitter, and she’d usually give up in annoyance.

  It was October twenty-eighth and windy the first time Sara used her mother’s letter-opener (so pretty—gold, embossed with three bronze turtles) to make cuts on her legs. She was home alone and her mother wouldn’t be back until late. She could hear the murmur of the television in the living room, distant. She tried to recall what she’d gone in there for when she saw it on the desk, next to some mail from the bank. That wasn’t where it belonged. She stroked the tip carefully, almost sorrowfully. It was Tuesday and yet seemed more like it should have been a Thursday, or a Saturday, the night so bright with lights. She slid it down softly until the tip was against her thigh, then pressed the handle harder and harder. Sara watched it pierce the thin material of her pajamas, sink slightly into her skin. The pain was sharp, concentrated, simple. She realized her heart was racing as a spot of blood encircled the tip of the letter-opener, which was still stabbing into her leg. She didn’t enjoy the pain but she could take it. She got the impression, at that moment, that the leg bleeding there was not her own but that of some weak and distant enemy for whom she must show no mercy. Without her pressing the tip any further in, the bloodstain spread into a perfect circle, a sun of blood. When Sara stopped pressing down and placed the letter-opener back on the desk she felt woozy. And then smiled. She’d won; she didn’t know against what or whom.

  Wednesday came, and Thursday and Friday, and on each of them the ceremony of the letter-opener was repeated like a simple, age-old ritual that had to be performed with absolute accuracy. Sara accepted it the way one accepts an ancient religion. If she knew her mother wasn’t going to come home she did it right there, beside the desk, but if she was home, Sara would take the letter-opener, go to her room, close the door and turn the music up loud so that her mother wouldn’t call her. Beside the wound from the first day—a dark spot, purplish around the edge—came others, some of them more superficial, most of them much like the first. Because she didn’t know how long she’d spent pressing the tip into her flesh the first time, she decided she would do it for ten minutes. Sometimes, if she did it on her bare leg, she balked, because that made her more conscious of what she was doing. And yet once the first five minutes had gone by, she lost all awareness and it felt like plunging the letter-opener into a hunk of inanimate white flesh, into a ball of wax.

  Just as most of life’s events are of no significance, Sara didn’t expect this one to be much different. The fact that she did it didn’t mean she liked the pain. A pain produced voluntarily and which led to a feeling of pointlessness, of absurdity; but if she kept at it a little, waited for sensation to eclipse the threshold of reason, then came a pleasant state of self-possession, of control.

  This feeling of self-possession, of hardening, put her in a good mood during those weeks, and yet her happiness, like all happiness, could not be shared. Who would understand? Her mother? Her father? Luis? One afternoon, on the way home from school, she was on the verge of telling Teresa, but right before doing so recalled the day they’d undressed together in the changing room at the pool and stopped immediately. No, Teresa wouldn’t understand either, Teresa would get scared, think she was crazy, maybe even call her mother and tell her. Sara was afraid her happiness would be stolen from her, would be misinterpreted, and her fear grew deeper, and denser. The decision not to say anything to Teresa led to the decision not to tell anyone, ever, and the realization that it was a secret made Sara fear someone would find out. She began to hide and to embrace her happiness with a sort of angst that inevitably made her feel guilty. But guilty about what, before whom, she wondered.

  Her father had been overly affable all weekend long. He’d asked too many questions about her classes and her girlfriends, kissed her too many times. Then he’d told her that he’d met a woman, Sandra was her name, and that sometimes in life you had to take stock of things and try to start fresh. They were at her grandparents’ house in a small town, just the two of them, and Sara had spent the morning on a long walk. Wandering into town, which was no more than two kilometers away, she’d witnessed a bizarre scene: a feral dog had gotten onto someone’s property and was mounting a female dog chained to a doghouse. The bitch was trying to escape but the male held her in place, trapped beneath his paws. There were times in a man’s life, her father said, when it wasn’t easy to be alone, and then when you least expected it, someone just came along, someone who made everything seem worthwhile again. The dog’s claws were black and curved, as was its insistence on penetrating her. The bitch’s eyes were watering. He was talking about tenderness, ten-der-ness, he said, drawing out each syllable as if to give the word a deeper warmth. She threw a rock at the male. A heavy black rock that filled the palm of her hand. It struck the dog’s rump softly and he let out a quiet whimper, followed by a guttural, slobbery growl, but didn’t stop mounting the bitch. She’d understand one day, too, maybe not now, maybe not right this instant, but she’d see, the years would go by and one day she’d recall that afternoon and think: now I understand what my father meant. So she grabbed another rock, a bigger one, and with all the force she could muster hurled it over the fence. She missed. She was more mature than other girls her age, so she shouldn’t be embarrassed about it or let anyone make fun of her. He’d been lucky enough to learn what life was all about before it was over, yes, that’s what he’d been—lucky. She tried with a long stick she found on the ground by her feet; shoving it through the fence, she began striking him on the muzzle. The male stopped mounting the female at that point and lunged for the fence like a fury. Sara jumped back, terrified, but when she realized the dog couldn’t do anything she approached again and kicked the fence. Her heart was pounding. Your heart always pounds when you know you’ve found the person you’ve been looking for, but you had to be careful, it wasn’t just a question of feelings, you had to be compatible too, because with her mother, it didn’t matter how much they’d loved each other—and they’d loved each other so much—in the end there’d been nothing they could do except admit they couldn’t live together, and that wasn’t sad, it was just life. The barking made the owner come out of his house and scare off the dog who, before taking flight, turned to her to growl one last time.

  “I’m going to the kitchen for more coffee. You want anything?”

  “No.”

  “Good girl,” said her father, and smiled wide, showing all his teeth.

  That afternoon Sara waited on the balcony overlooking the park for the sky to take on the appearance of what it is: an enormous, empty blue backdrop. She loved that, especially as November approached. Autumn spread over the park like a beautiful disrobing. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Teresa in two weeks, and the space her friend had occupied, which for the first
few days had seemed so makeshift, so replaceable, ended up taking on a leaden consistency. She missed her. She phoned three times that afternoon without catching her at home and then, ten minutes after her third try, Teresa called back. She let her down. Sara had thought Teresa was her friend, and Teresa let her down.

  “I can’t go out with you later because I’m meeting Javier,” she said. “Well, now that I think about it, there’s going to be other people there too; Luis is coming . . . It’s probably better if we go out another time.”

  “Fine.” Sara’s voice came out cold, unmodulated, as though irked that the conversation had lasted even that long.

  “Aren’t you going out with Teresa?” her mother asked after she hung up.

  “No.”

  She thought she was going to cry, so she walked out of the room, put on her coat, and went down to the park. Sara always went down to the park when she didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t just that she liked going for walks but also the tingling sense of danger that rose in her throat when she went there late. A lot of things happened there at night.

  “Drug addicts,” her mother said, “bad people. They leave the gates open and people just go in and kill each other like animals.”

  It was like straddling two worlds: the daytime one, with couples and lovers and children, and this other one, the nighttime one, which sometimes appeared on the news because of rapes and overdoses, or in the doorwoman’s frightened eyes as she recounted—crossing herself—what went on there.

  Sara recalled one time she’d seen them pull a dead body from the lake. That was two years ago, one August morning, very early, when she’d gone for a walk. There was no one out and it was hot. She approached, drawn by the police car’s lights. It was only a second, but she remembers perfectly his purple face, a T-shirt that said USA. She remembers that he had a bare foot—just one—and that that seemed somehow violent, and grotesque, and almost impossible. She remembers dreaming about the man many times, about the strange beauty of that man hoisted out with ropes which pulled him to the railing that bordered the walking path, the man whose body, as it was lowered over the rim, inexplicably flopped its head toward her in what had seemed like a voluntary movement, beautiful and hideous at the same time, calling to her.

  That afternoon, everything was painful—the air, the dogs, the lovers—as though swept in from that August of the drowned man. She walked slowly toward the lake. It was Sunday, so the paths were crowded with clowns, guitarists, puppeteers.

  “Where could that witch be?” asked a puppet.

  “Over there!” a chorus of children shrieked, pointing.

  “Where?”

  “There!”

  There was a dark heavy quality to the lake and, though it was cold out, couples were still renting rowboats. Four, five couples, all of their faces tinged with a sort of grayish weariness, an age-old tedium. Sara sat down to watch them. She wanted to cry but contained herself. The discovery of her own fragility, her need for Teresa, had once more left her confronting a person who resembled her without being her, a person she once more reviled. She got cold but did not button up her coat. Icy air blew in through the cuffs of her jacket and pierced her sweater and shirt, hardening her. She was made of stone now. Hard as stone, she thought.

  She stopped using the letter-opener to puncture her leg because it no longer took any effort, and because, since her conversation with Teresa, even that didn’t make her feel better. She still went school in the mornings and came home alone at lunchtime. Her hardness, the feeling of being almost impervious to the things going on around her, was replaced by a sort of falling apart when she got home, went into her bedroom, and found herself alone. Sara felt so fragile she thought that anyone could have shattered her with nothing but the sound of their voice. Those feelings, though intense, were not prolonged, and after they subsided Sara felt an immeasurable desire to hurt herself, to test the limits of her endurance. Her body appeared before her then as total potential for change, an enormous project or an immense block of marble within which lay a precious sculpture.

  She stopped eating one Wednesday that seemed it had arrived from long ago, from childhood perhaps, because—just like in childhood—there was a surreal, fictitious happiness to it. She was alone in the kitchen and had heated up some leftover chicken thighs from the previous night’s dinner, but when she opened the microwave and saw them steaming in shiny mucous Sara was overcome by a sudden, involuntary wave of nausea. She tossed the chicken in the trash and, though she was hungry, ate nothing. Her stomach rumbled for half an hour, at the end of which, after a few minutes of mild irritation, she no longer felt hungry.

  That night her mother got home earlier than normal and announced that they were going out to dinner with Aunt Eli. Aunt Eli was her mother’s sister and they’d always gotten along exceedingly well. Sara admired her Aunt Eli because she’d never married, because she lived in Barcelona, which was so cosmopolitan, so clean and civilized, with all those Gaudis everywhere. Aunt Eli was a civil engineer and always smelled like a brand of lotion you couldn’t buy in Spain. Aunt Eli was happy.

  Her mother tried to persuade Aunt Eli to go a restaurant close to home but she flatly refused and said that, if she was the one treating, she got to pick. They took a taxi to an elegant restaurant, one of those kinds of places she probably went to all the time.

  “This is so expensive,” her mother said, but no more had she finished her sentence than Eli, with a single sweep of first her hand and then her whole arm, had hushed her, signaled the waiter, and headed—as though floating through all the people—to a table in one corner that bore a handwritten Reserved.

  “You’re still wearing the sun charm I gave you,” she said.

  “I am,” Sara replied happily, and they smiled at one another, each imagining that their smiles communicated many things that most people would have tried to explain but that they, wisely, preferred leave unspoken.

  Work was the excuse Aunt Eli had used, but none of them was fooled as to why she’d made the trip. Ever since Sara’s mother had discovered that her ex had a new girlfriend, she’d been oscillating between the languid, lazy tristesse she’d sunken into and occasional tears and nervous breakdowns which generally manifested in cleaning out the most unimaginable closets and storage spaces. Aunt Eli had come to save her mother, Sara thought.

  Through most of dinner the only sound was that of Aunt Eli’s voice as she recounted a trip to London, how marvelous London was and how terribly behind the times we in Spain were; how elegant British English was compared to the English they spoke in the US, or at least in New York (which she said in English, just like that, New York, like it was no big deal); and especially how astonishingly well she’d been treated everywhere she went. She accompanied each anecdote with a gesture that was simultaneously simple, practiced, elegant, and inimitable, and it struck Sara that if Aunt Eli were stripped naked and placed upon a table, the whole of her would gleam like a Lladró figurine.

  Sara went to the bathroom and, on her return, found them talking about her father. Her mother, recounting how she found out, and how she felt, wore a pathetic stifled expression that barely concealed her obvious urge to cry. Aunt Eli listened in silence, fingers interlaced beneath her chin, their bones illuminated in the faint light. As soon as her mother, whom Sara was starting to feel almost embarrassed for, finished talking, Aunt Eli would set things straight, tell her mother to stop being weak, teach her how to get over it.

  But Aunt Eli, inexplicably, said nothing. Her mother, who also seemed surprised by this, kept talking.

  “You should get out more, try to cheer up,” Aunt Eli said finally, almost timidly.

  “I’ve tried,” her mother said, “believe me, I’ve tried. I thought I was doing better compared to a year ago, but now there’s no place I can go without thinking: I’m going to bump into them, now I’m going to bump into them and then what do I do? Sara can tell you. Before, when he came to pick her up, he used to come upstairs, we’d chat;
now he just buzzes from downstairs. ‘Come on up,’ I say, and he’ll say, ‘No, I can’t, I’m in a hurry,’ or whatever.”

  “I’d like to be able to say something that would cheer you up, and a month ago I think I would have, but I’m in more or less the same position.”

  “Wait. You?” her mother asked, surprised, voicing Sara’s surprise as well.

  “Remember how a year ago,” she elaborated, “I used to go down to Málaga all the time, I said we had a bridge project going there? Well, it wasn’t a bridge, it was a man named Ramón. He was separated then, had three daughters—he’s a dentist. We went out all year. He asked me to marry him. I said no.”

  There came a long silence during which Sara wished she weren’t there, wished she hadn’t heard what she’d heard. Her incredulity vanished when she discovered that Aunt Eli, too, wore that same expression of helplessness, of weakness.

  “Do you regret it?” her mother asked, and she felt blood rushing to her temples; no, she didn’t regret it, she didn’t.

  “I went to Málaga to see him a couple of weeks ago. He was unhappy, you could tell. He told me he’d gotten back together with his wife. Do I regret not having married him? Yes, actually I do,” said Aunt Eli as though talking to herself. “Maybe ten years ago I wouldn’t have regretted it, but now? I do.”

  Her mother stroked her sister’s back slowly, comfortingly.

  “Quite the night for secrets, isn’t it?” she concluded, attempting to smile, and then they both turned to her as though suddenly shy, as though ashamed of having laid themselves bare.

  Aunt Eli died in Sara’s imagination like an orchid whose cerulean beauty has weathered twenty long days and then, suddenly, shriveled in a single night, reduced to a horrible, wilted excrescence. That was exactly the way Aunt Eli had died—no pride, no class. If Sara behaved strangely the rest of the night, it was only because she felt deceived. How could she have admired that woman so much? A woman who suddenly admitted her ridiculous weakness, pressed her hands to her stomach, wore an expression of sharp pain, took an antacid.