in mine I’d end up pregnant and the professor would never marry a disabled student.
Betina wheeled around more than ever when the professor came for my private lessons and examined the boards and canvases piled up along the wall intended for the art exhibition in Buenos Aires.
One time it got late and my mom invited him to dinner which he accepted. I trembled thinking of the disgusting sounds and emanations coming from the pile known as Betina. But as the captain commands, the sailor obeys.
Rufina had cooked cannelloni. And on top of that I remembered the cannelloni from the lunatic asylum. I wanted to paint to calm down. I painted a board that no one else understood. A cannelloni with eyes and a hand blessing it. In mente I whispered: if you have a soul may God receive you in his bosom . . .
The dinner
Rufina set the embroidered tablecloth that my mom kept away and the nice plates that she kept too. Whenever she set the table like that her eyes would mist over because they were wedding gifts. It must’ve been the memories of when her marriage unraveled and my dad gone. It never hurt me because I didn’t love her.
Let her cry . . . my dad must have found someone better without a pointer. My dad must have had normal children not idiots like the ones she had and which were us.
In the middle of the table was a smart ceramic statuette of a pair of villagers embraced on a thicket under a willow. One day I’d paint what that scene made me feel because at seventeen every girl wants to be embraced in a thicket under a tree.
We ate on the fancy china because the everyday things were chipped and stained from use. The silverware was also the good ones that my mom was careful with because she said it was the set from her marriage. The crystal came out after several years away and looked like solid water. It didn’t seem like the same stew dressed up in such luxury.
There was even sweet wine. Not the other kind because there wasn’t money for it. In the water pitcher there was water, of course.
My mom sat down first at the head of the table and next to her the professor who arrived exactly on time and with candies.
Across from the professor, me, and next to me Betina.
My mom said first something to pick at. I wondered where she was keeping a pick and if that was some other kind of utensil we never saw it, but that wasn’t what it was but actually some plates of salami and cheese with tiny swords in them.
My mom said serve yourselves and she put wine in the adults’ glasses and water in mine and Betina’s and when the bell rang and in came Aunt Nené my mom said it was the surprise she had for us.
Rufina went back and forth busily. Now Aunt Nené helped her.
The main dish arrived delivered by the hands of Nené. The same chicken stew as always but in a silver dish and dressed up with the vegetables that Nené brought it seemed like an offering to a king.
And so the meal began, each one as best they could. My mom watched us without her pointer but I knew she had it within reach under the table.
Betina struck a visible and frightening note. Brutish resonant belches chased by my mom’s apologies that the poor thing at sixteen had the mental age of a four year old as a result of the disability according to the tests that they’d given her.
Aunt Nené concluded the melody with poor Clelia—that was my mom’s name—two retards for daughters, and immediately stuffed a piece of breast meat in her letterbox-red mouth.
The professor said I wasn’t retarded but a dreaming visual artist and that I was exhibiting paintings in Buenos Aires and that in the city I’d already sold two.
Aunt Nené
Aunt Nené painted too. She’d frame her canvases and hang them all over the walls of the house she lived in with her mother who was my grandmother and my mom’s mother. Two paintings signed “Nené” hung in our house, portraits of ladies with perfectly black eyes, like cows, and these big faces that frightened me. One had a mustache. Nené said she liked being a portraitist and she said it to the professor who asked her where she’d studied the art of manipulating oils and the rest, she confessed that she was an amateur, that she didn’t need anyone holding her hand because the pictures poured from her heart like water from a spring.
The professor didn’t respond. Nené looked at one of my boards and said the lines didn’t mean anything, that she didn’t like the new painters and that once she’d laughed at Pettoruti’s absurd cubism. The professor lurched and because he was looking at Nené’s painting it collapsed onto the floor.
Then Aunt Nené said that my squiggles might make sense to me, what with my cognitive deficiencies, but can we even know what the handicapped think and feel, she said in the form of a question.
The professor insisted that I was the best student at the fine arts school, that I’d graduated and was going to exhibit soon, and Aunt Nené asked what must the other students be like and the situation started to sour.
My mom added that my painting was kids’ stuff and it would soon pass.
The cow eyes Nené painted stared out at us from between the wood frame. Suddenly I said something that would earn me a few lashes later: It’s like a cow is staring at me wondering if I’m going to eat her because this painting is boring like a cow face and ugly like an ugly woman’s face.
Nené screeched like the monkey in the zoo and screamed how long was her sister going to put up with me and that it was about time they sent me to the loony bin.
The professor said his stomach hurt and please excuse him he had to go to the bathroom to vomit. I felt as happy as if they’d given me a prize at an exhibition.
Total silence until my mom told Nené that she’d overstepped and to remember that it made me feel good to paint those things on the boards and canvases that the professor gave me. Nené pounced like a wasp: can’t you see that man looking at the girl with bad intentions, she said in the form of a question and my mom scolded her for her dirty mind and added that she agreed that such big eyes couldn’t fit in any woman’s face unless she was a cow.
I sensed that my mom accepted me and I held back a tear that was at the point of crashing to the ground because it would’ve been the most giant tear I’d ever cried since I could mostly understand the basics of conversations between so-called normal people like my mom and Nené were. The professor came back from vomiting and started saying something that she interrupted immediately, which was the following:
Miss, he began and she said that she didn’t go by miss and he begged her pardon and added that a woman as pretty at her age could never be called miss and that he was sure her husband must be pleased to have a painter at his side and she informed him that she was separated because her ex’s ordinary habits bothered her. The cultured and educated professor couldn’t stop himself from saying that it seemed like no one in that house was ordinary.
My mom could tell that the spoiled dinner bothered everyone but Nené. She brought a tray and the champagne glasses. She’d kept the champagne to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of one of her daughters which were me and Betina but she hadn’t opened it knowing that it didn’t make sense when our mental age didn’t keep pace with the hours and the days.
We went back to the table. Betina snoring, asleep in her chair. So ugly, so
