wonder if you were imagining it – and that doubt left you utterly alone – but the baby did listen. Sometimes she seemed to smile a sweet, crazy smile. Her temperature had to be taken every four hours, her oxygen had to be regulated, she received food and antibiotics through a tube. Mariela and Mauro personally carried out the nursing duties. During the nine marathon months of her daughter’s life, Mariela’s eyes turned yellow, forever changing from their usual honey colour.
‘Idiot,’ says Mariela while she fills the kettle with water. ‘Going into the lifeguard hut during the worst storm.’
He had faith in the hut. Apparently he went there a lot. According to Aunt Laura, it wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night there.
‘I know, I talked to him. He didn’t worry much about taking care of himself.’
He didn’t give a shit.
‘He didn’t have kids. What was it Mum wanted?’ she asks. ‘For you to text him? Poor woman.’
After a few minutes of talking about who knows what, if we even talk at all, I ask Mariela if she doesn’t think it should have been me who died instead of Alejandro. Mariela looks at me disconcertedly from the other end of the kitchen while she stirs the pot of chicken stroganoff.
I mean, if someone had told you one of us was going to die, who would you have bet on? I ask her. Wouldn’t you have bet on me?
Mariela says she’s never thought about it. Me neither, I tell her, but a second later I wasn’t so sure.
I’ve always believed I’d be the first.
‘And why would you think that?’
Because I’m the oldest?
‘I’m the oldest.’
But she was a woman. Women don’t count. Women live longer than men. Mariela shakes her head. She thinks it’s very strange for me to think that way, as if these things followed some kind of logic. She thought I was smarter than that.
But it’s not a question of intelligence, I think. Intelligent people were capable of believing the most ridiculous things. There was a time when I’d wanted to write about that, the idiocies dreamed up by people who are known for their superior intelligence. It was all based on what happened to Fernán, a friend of mine, a few years after he got married. The first thing he thought, when his wife didn’t get pregnant, was that she was the problem. He thought of himself as a paragon of fertility just because he had a massive libido and was always ready to go. He thought the two things were synonymous. When the tests said he was the infertile one, he refused to believe it. He found it inconceivable. And he’s one of the smartest people I know. Psychologist, journalist, essayist. I’m thinking about Fernán and about Bob Marley, Mariela’s teenage hero who worshipped an Ethiopian torturer, when Timoteo comes back in asking for the water. Mariela had forgotten to put the kettle on the stove. She promises Timoteo she’ll bring him the thermos as soon as it’s ready. Then she asks me to go and ask Paco, Juan and Cata if they want to eat in the kitchen or in the other room while they watch the film. They unanimously come out in favour of the film. Then I lock myself in the bathroom to call La Negra.
At the end of December she’d moved the boys and her older daughter Yamila to Shangrilá, the neighbourhood where I’d grown up, to live with Fabricio, the fat guy she’d been dating for under two months. By some miracle, she answers my call. When I tell her the news, she cries: ‘No! No! I can’t believe it!’ as if she and Ale had been close.
I ask her if she could come and pick up the boys: you think maybe you should come and get them? There are a lot of people in bad shape here, it’s all really sad. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, I don’t know.
‘What happened? What happened to Ale? What was it?’
Maybe it’s OK for the boys to experience this. It’s a death, nothing out of this world.
‘Stop it. I’m on my way.’
Back in the dining room, Mariela is standing in front of the TV, and Marcos is on it, wearing dark glasses, his long hair pulled back into the same ponytail as always. He’s carrying one of Alejandro’s surfboards and has a bag slung over his shoulder. Dad, his silver head bobbing, walks in front of him. They’re shown from a distance, walking between some low dunes. Maca (twenty-seven), Marcos’s girlfriend, brings up the rear, carrying the other board. Mauro isn’t in the shot; he must have gone ahead. Mariela is looking for the remote so she can turn up the volume. I tell her I’m going to let Mum know that Dad and Marcos are on TV, and Mariela tries to stop me.
‘Why tell her?’ she asks. ‘Leave her be.’
Mum is waiting for Ale to respond to the text message. I find her on her side of the bed, sitting in front of the window that looks out on the street, the curtains drawn. She immediately gets up to come and see the TV. Mariela doesn’t look at her at any point, doesn’t see her freeze at the sight of the screen. Same shot, only now Dad, Marcos and Maca have stopped and are talking. Mum sits down in her recliner. While she settles her arms on the armrests, she becomes aware of the remote control in her left hand. She looks like she’s about to use it, but she keeps the volume on mute until the end.
‘I always thought one day I would see Ale playing guitar on TV. Not this,’ she says, changing the channel.
‘The water’s ready,’ she says later, when the kettle starts to whistle.
The kettle still shrilling, Mariela moving to take it off the stove, I get a text from La Negra: she’s at the front door. I can see her behind the green bars of the front window, her head down, hands clasped over her belly.
‘Are you going to let her in?’ asks Mum, who can see her perfectly well from her seated position.
Instead, I open the door and go outside. La Negra has done her hair in a hundred little braids. She follows me a few steps to the jacaranda tree, out of sight from the house.
‘How are you? How is everybody?’
I need some air. I ask her to hug me. She does, quite deliberately resting her open palms on my shoulder blades. I can’t remember the last time I had her so close. I try to smell her, but my eyes start searching for the fat bastard’s white pickup; I can’t help myself. I find it parked twenty metres up the street, pointed toward Giannattasio Avenue, the sun glinting off the glass. One of my hands comes to rest below her waist, where La Negra has a protrusion instead of a valley, the truncated tail from when she was an embryo. I tell her I’m sorry.
‘What happened?’ she replies, separating her ear from my chest, letting go of my shoulder blades, taking a step back.
I want her to forgive me for being an idiot. The calls, the messages, the invitations. I lost control. You don’t know the hell I was in, I tell her.
‘It didn’t seem like love to me…’
My world was collapsing. Now I know it was nothing. This thing with Ale made me realise. It’s over. The clouds have parted. Death is incredible.
‘Apology accepted,’ I hear her say, and I see her raise a hand to her heart.
On her way to the bus stop, a little girl with a backpack on, her hands stuffed into her jumper pocket, looks at all the cars parked in front of my parents’ house: Mariela’s, Leti’s, my aunt and uncle’s, the cousins’,
