theological certainties and her genealogical connections, she continued with her part of the dialogue that we repeated almost every day on the island: ‘I’m coming from a place of love, Quity, I want you to know where Kevin is. He’s in heaven, you idiot. He’s happy.’ ‘Sure, Cleo, and he’s eating ambrosia cookies, right?’
Death pained me. His and mine and my daughter’s, even though she wasn’t alive yet in the strict sense of the word, that is to say she still hadn’t been born. Everything hurt. When your consciousness opens up to death or death opens up to your consciousness an abyss rips through the centre of your being, leaving cracks of lacerating emptiness, emptiness that anguishes, asphyxiates, obsesses, and all you can do is wait for it to pass.
I used to dream of the dead, of everyone who’d ever died, buried one on top of the other for centuries and millennia until they formed part of the earth’s crust. But what tortured me most were the images of my own dead rapidly decaying thanks to the third-rate wood of their cheap coffins, making new dirt for the Boulogne Cemetery in Buenos Aires. Kevin, Jonas, Jessica, all of them had turned to dirt on me, to humus and the warm, wet plains of the Pampas, fertiliser for the carnations and geraniums that adorned their miserable tombs.
Thousands of years after Homer, when nothing was left of his world except a few shitty columns piled up for the entertainment of tourists and archaeologists, I dreamed of Kevin with the same desperation as Odysseus when he dreamed of his mother. It’s still impossible to hug the dead, composed as they are only of memory, which also dies in the end.
I dreamt of Kevin. He could appear at any point in any dream and it would never be shocking: I’d be at home and I’d come across him, always in the morning and always in the kitchen. I’d seen the footage of my little boy’s body, distorted by death, blood flowing from his head until he dried up and then the blood dried up. But I’d find him in the kitchen in the morning and it didn’t surprise me: I’d been hoping to see him and no one’s very surprised when they encounter something they’ve been hoping for, even if they’ve been hoping against all realistic expectations. Almost out of reflex I’d give him some milk and his favourite biscuits, the ones shaped like animals. I picked out all the red elephants for him, for Kevin. My little boy, I thought.
His death had ended up shining a light on my maternity: it had made me his mother. And there, in the kitchen, in my dreams, he would tell me what he’d done on the days since we’d last seen each other. And nothing had happened. He told me about what life in the slum was like without me, as if it weren’t he and the slum that were no longer there, but just me that was missing. I mean, as if they weren’t all dead and him too, as if the slum hadn’t been bulldozed over and converted into the cement guts of a real-estate venture, and he, Kevin, my boy, hadn’t been converted into a little jumble of bones and worms squirming in the belly of a nearby plot of land, right there in the Boulogne Cemetery.
But the moment Kevin tried to grab the cup of milk the dream splintered and cut me, sending pain ripping through my body: he couldn’t drink the milk or eat the biscuits that made his little black eyes sparkle as if those eyeballs were still filled with life. Not much time had passed but the eyeballs, I think, are the quickest to decay in bodies when they stop being bodies and become something else, as blindly and inexorably as lava turns into rock and a bunch of rocks into an island and then an island back into a bunch of pieces of rock. He was trying to grab the milk but he couldn’t: his little hand passed through the cup, which by this point in the dream was as solid as anything else in the world and not about to let itself be picked up by a ghost. And then the death that tormented me most repeated itself, and nothing else mattered any more. I could hardly feel anything as I tried to sit him on my knee, as I tried and failed to help him drink his milk. But I felt something beating against my lap and it was so impossible that something could beat and not be alive that I couldn’t help but try and hug him, as if death were merely a procedural error. I tried a thousand times without ever taking hold of anything but air, and I ended up hugging myself again and again, alone, accompanied only by the beating of a heart that wasn’t mine. I would wake up crying, almost suffocating, and it was true: Kevin was no more, he was totally dead, turning to dirt in the cemetery. Who knows, I thought, through roots and photosynthesis he might end up somehow becoming air, water, a storm. What a load of crap – he could just as easily be a salad or an earthworm used as catfish bait and most likely he was nothing at all, nothing more than what I could remember of him.
What was beating was my tiny daughter and I held my belly with my hands to hug her. I’d often go back to sleep and dream of her: my daughter being born a fragile little baby like they all are, as wounded by death as anyone else, a passing whim of matter like everything else. But then my little girl used to turn into a little turtle and I could carry her in my pocket and if she fell out it was fine, she just stuck her feet and head inside her shell and lay there belly up, rocking on the curve of her back made of minerals until I reached down and put her back in my pocket.
It’s always made me feel safer to carry the most important things right up against my body. That’s where I carried my gun for years, and I still carry my money and a good luck charm close to my skin. But even though I carried her inside my body I didn’t feel safe about María Cleopatra. I was afraid she’d be born dead, a little body already turning into something else, not even dirt but a clot of my blood, and whenever I felt her move I found a moment of peace, some sense of bearable order to the universe.
But then I’d fall asleep again. I never knew if it was the pregnancy or the weight of the recent deaths that made me sleep through most of the time we spent on the island while Cleo did I don’t know what. Pretty much everything, I suppose. She was my mother and my father and my provider. She dressed me and fed me. She collected firewood and brought in a television and that’s how we lived and that’s how I survived during the few hours I spent awake. Because my life, I mean this being made up of matter that is me, is not without its spirit of perseverance, its will to continue being.
I spent months this way, sleeping, looking out of the window or listening to the sounds of the delta. I heard what I’d never heard before: the mud piling up among the reeds, the seeds bursting into roots, the tension of the trees holding the edges of the island together. And the water, the deep sounds of the rising and falling of the tide. And I heard what I couldn’t possibly have heard: Kevin’s little body bursting into putrid bubbles as the water fulfilled its desire to return to itself and leave the dust to dust.
2. Quity: ‘We were given a new life’
We were given a new life
by the American Dream
we took over Florida
making all our fans scream.
It took a long time, but the fog finally lifted. My daughter woke me up, all mine that morning like never before and like so few times after, stomping joyfully inside me. I began to feel like I too was floating in a warm bright fluid: the only shadows were the soft and restless shapes cast by the willow branches that combed the air between my window and the river.
‘Good morning, Quity, my love!’ Cleo was beginning to appear. Sweet and chatty as she is, she never appears out of nowhere: you always know she’s coming. This morning she was all domesticity with mate and pastries, and I first heard her, then smelled her, and then finally saw her. She threw herself onto the bed and gave me a kiss, such a passionate one that her makeup smeared, one set of her fake eyelashes fell off and her Doris Day hairdo was ruined. ‘The sleeping beauty has awoken!’ she said, starting to laugh, her teeth shining. She’s pure happiness, white and radiant and queer and devout and adoring and she speaks like she’s constantly singing a bolero about a bride on her way to the altar. ‘Come, my light, my love, my wife, the three of us are having lunch at Fondeadero because I got a canoe and you and I have a lot to talk about. You’ll see, today’s going to be an unforgettable day.’
