Issue 24

Nadia Villafuerte
Translated by Pennell Somsen

It was as if the mirror reflected only my image and not hers. We shared a room, but my imprint was everywhere: my clothes, my dressing table with sprays, my bottles of glitter and perfume, my calendar attached to the wall with thumbtacks. I was the older sister and I wore tops, I didn’t wear the one-piece jumper that Karenin still wore, but instead a blouse tucked in at the waist of my pleated skirt and knee socks, not nylon stockings, nor were they ten centimeters higher than her socks, but they made me feel more grown-up. I wasn’t prettier, just older. More important, I was in the first year of high school and she was in her second year of middle school; we were barely two years apart, but the frontier between our grades in school was the beginning of our separation. I had a much more demanding schedule, and my pile of books gave the room another trace of my personality. After school, Karenin slouched on the sofa watching videos at maximum volume. She didn’t care at all about homework. “That thing of reading difficult words that you have to look up in the dictionary I find really annoying,” she would say as she threw a cheese stick into her mouth. She was happy and she was a mess: her hair limp, the hem of her jumper undone.

I don’t know at what moment the rift between us began. Our relationship went back and forth and sometimes we were great accomplices. I have many unconnected images from my childhood, photos taken with the Voigtlander camera that my father bought at a flea market. If he hadn’t been following us with it, I would have so much less to fantasize about. There is one that I love: the river shines like a sharpened knife and my mother’s hand crosses the picture. Or this other one: you don’t see the beach, but you can hear it, or it’s the same sea as ever but without the black and existential threatening cloud that I am accustomed to see suspended in the present. From the photos I know that we dressed the same or with small variations. She in a green bikini, me in the same model in yellow. And the similarities went beyond looking alike to what we enjoyed doing together. We didn’t have a shred of morals. One time we murdered a plague of ants with the water from the hose. We had just a couple of fights, in one Karenin pulled my hair until I gave her back the thing I’d stolen, in another I was on the point of skewering her with scissors. The best part is that we were shipwrecked in the present and so we didn’t hold grudges. We didn’t try to defend our honor or take credit for anything. And if we mostly behaved as equals, the idolatry of a younger sister didn’t bother me, nor was it a reason to be conceited: she agreed with everything I said and she also believed it, because if two years’ difference can be inconsequential, I was, simply for being twenty-four months older, supposedly more worldly. When she turned ten and we were ready for her party, I poisoned myself by drinking from a bottle of Clorox. She scrutinized my face, had her doubts, but we got in the car, waited while Mom took the wheel and we went to the emergency room, where they pumped my stomach. Wearing her party hat, she screamed, “Hey, we’re going to the hospital!,” and for that they let us through and we got there on time. When I say time, that time, I’m referring to the period in which we floated aimlessly, immersed in an idiotic existence, that in which we didn’t try to spend our time wisely but rather were content to pass the hours simply.

One day, or one afternoon, or one night, it ended.

We lived in a dreary part of one of the ugliest cities, in the neighborhood San Juan in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Quickly enough, the wastelands near us were bought to build houses for neighbors. There still wasn’t enough money in our family for everyone to have their own room, so after the shared queen-size bed came two single beds that marked a bit of personal space. I painted my side military green and she painted hers electric yellow. She chose austerity; I, in contrast, put posters on my bed board, bought candles, put a paper screen on the lamp, and so I would lie down with my eyes closed hoping to calm the anxiety of being a stranger in my own body. What a joke. When I opened my eyes, everything was the same. Karenin gave me a what the fuck look. She told me that she didn’t understand why I liked black and white images, that according to the pop references she quoted in screeching tones, my photos gave off an aura of a distant and forgotten world.

I ignored her.

“There aren’t any sanitary pads.”

“Then use tampons”

“Nadi,” she grabbed my T-shirt and I went through my notes without reacting.

“What’s going on with you?”

“Everything,” was my answer.

And in reality, everything was happening to me. I had classes in the mornings and studied and read at night, that along with the newness of being in high school. Inside, in the classroom, the others were bored, I wasn’t. Outside, against the back wall of the building, things were better for the others, but not for unsociable me: the boys would circle around like turkey vultures and the girls would smoke cigarettes, choking with smoke, dark snorts of laughter, and anecdotes over their most recent gropings and how it would be to do it in the bathroom supported by doors full of formulas or messages of hatred and pleasure.

I, who listened as a bystander, fell into a trance over it, but I didn’t know where it was going. I didn’t like to talk with anyone and I had a different type of hunger, that which was fed with books with impossible titles taken out of the library: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, In Cold Blood, stories in which the world was full of temptations and flights for those who, like me, are seduced by and fear those temptations. Reading like that isolated me a lot and earned me morsels of advice from those who believe that reading makes no sense. But I loved it. I loved that wildly deformed reality. It was that, or the necessity of believing in something, because some of those books shocked me tremendously, debates between being and not being, between affirming and negating, optimism and sadness, the coming and going of a time of life that I only half understood. I am unhappy. I am guilty. I have lost interest. I only like what doesn’t exist. I can’t eat. I eat too much. Am I fat? I am fat but I’m tall. I can’t manage to like anybody. Medication panics me. I can’t manage to be alone. I can’t manage to be with others. My hips are too wide. I don’t like myself. Is it possible that a person is born in the wrong body? I’m not here and I never was. There are intolerable things. You can avoid them most of the time.

Obviously some books I never finished and others I opened just to impress the neighbor across the street.

The neighbor appeared out of nowhere one afternoon and she dazzled me. Her black hair with its silver lock, a glimpse of her tranquil face, sleepy when you saw her from our garden, her red sneakers and that gold chain that shone over her shirt: she wasn’t either beautiful or ugly, just different, and she looked at us out of the corner of her eye. Also, her father was a mechanic and sometimes she helped him, lying on her back on the abrasive concrete, and I imagined that underneath those cars, with her hands full of grease, she had the opportunity to think and make plans, like how to get out of there. She never wore a uniform, but she was beyond books and calendars and obligations, and this made her, at least for me, a beautiful mystery. Her body moved vigorously, her dyed streak of hair rising up like a feather, her upper lip lifting up a little as if she were kissing a bubble. She had droopy eyes, and when she wasn’t under the car she would sit in her doorway and look toward the clouds, something that made me think that I could stay there, watching her watch the sky, as if the two of us knew that we could lose ourselves underneath the same splendor. To the point where sometimes I would read words that would relate to her. “I want to be with you in the Rex and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoias and give you CDs that you will never listen to and see good films and see bad films and let you steal my cigarettes and you will never have a light.”¹

In contrast, at home the opposite happened, that rule that later taught us something about love came between Karenin and me: you look down on a person who admires you a lot or seeks you out, and in the same way you idolize someone for whom you barely exist. Karenin followed me, and the neighbor ignored me. Without seeing it coming or having the power to prevent it, I began to treat Karenin badly. At first, she did everything she could to attract my attention: she would sing almost right in my ear in a loud, harsh voice, and I even saw her study in spite of her not liking it. In response, sometimes I would throw her insults, warning her that because she hadn’t studied, she would end up with bad papers marked up with a pen, and going from there to being a sad employee in a cheerful looking uniform. Then Karenin would withdraw to the brightness of the TV or the rhythm of the songs that surely crackled inside her head like a bonfire. Sometimes I couldn’t stand her. If she suggested that I use more color and accessories (“no one wants to talk with a girl who only dresses in black”), I’d tell her to piss off, telling her that a meteor was coming and the world would end, that no one would miss us, with make-up or not, wearing black or bright colored jackets, we were alone. “Well, how depressing,” was her answer.

And that was how it was: I was piling up more books on the desk and I’d open them and then I would look out the window to watch the comings and goings of the neighbor, while Karenin became for me a distant shadow that sang aggressively happy songs. I vaguely heard and responded to her requests. She said something about failing a class, of trying to study and not being able to, something about homework. Weeks passed, perhaps a month. I took my exams, I continued to follow the fire, I felt nostalgia for places I’d never been, Karenin continued to change channels every afternoon at four o’clock, the world was coming to an end with all the terrible news (the price of electricity and gasoline went up, there was a war somewhere), I finished A Repulsive Happiness and The Ballad of the Sad Café, I continued to lose confidence in my body, my messenger chat kept blinking, the neighbor dyed her hair red, Dad bought more books of crossword puzzles, Mom bought a new plant for the garden.

“What are you looking at all the time?” she demanded one night after I jumped up when I heard the neighbor yelling in the street. I don’t remember all the nasty things I said to my sister, but even as I said them my eyes were on the mystery outside: why was the neighbor laughing so loudly? “You don’t even know her name,” my sister said, and added, “But I do.” I tried not to care but after a little bit, just to torment me, Karenin said, “Her name is Sonora.” That night that name, the name of discord, imploded in the darkness.

I dreamed that Sonora and I kissed. Or was it Karenin and Sonora that kissed? Something confusing. In the dream, the air was so humid that you could drink it. Something so abrupt and offensive in front of everyone that after it happened I had to take a few steps back. The dream fell on my body like a dead lizard with its transparent stupid silence. And so it was, as if the dream were a dead lizard, I tried to get it off so I could get up. The room was tensely quiet. I was awake but with a strange mental confusion. For a moment I was sure that Karenin had heard the details of my dream, the sounds that mouths make when they are full of kisses.

“How do you know?” I asked her the next day. “Know what?” I didn’t know how to interpret the way she was looking at me. “Her name, how did you find out her name?” I don’t remember if she responded or if I listened to her, but from the night before to the next morning Karenin appeared to emerge gracefully from the dream in which I had been confined. As simple as that: Karenin knew the name of the neighbor and that made her more daring than me. That act made me see her more clearly than ever, as if after my withdrawal I finally knew her: with her hair swinging around a face that was darker than usual with its shiny taut skin. “Where did you get that tan?” “On the patio.” Also, I noticed suddenly that her ugly jumper with the ripped hem was the same except that now the hem was even. I saw it coming. One day she would have her period and the next her breasts would start to sprout and the body hair and her butt would swell and nothing, nothing would be the same. Then Karenin rewound the conversation to mention that the neighbor was seventeen and from the north of the country and I don’t know what else. I was consumed with envy. I imagined her going up to the neighbor, surprising her with her stories of why her jumper was ripped, going with her to the electronic game place on our block, the two of them putting on make-up to go to a party. Then, with a shocking calm, Karenin said that she would be taking not one but two make-up exams. It was as if before the implosion of that name, Sonora, I’d not noticed what was going on around us. I went to our room and looked at the wall and the drawers and the closet and everything was the same except my sister, suddenly growing and swelling.

One afternoon Karenin brought a balloon from Plaza Galeria to the house, a long bright green balloon. She attached it to the blinds, where the balloon rocked with the breeze. Another afternoon I saw Karenin and Sonora talking on the sidewalk and my mind began to whirl. So they’re friends, I thought, and I became so jealous, so envious, although it wasn’t jealousy or envy but insecurity: because in the end, in spite of feeling taller with my socks up to my knees, I was ashamed of my timidity and solitary ways, while my sister seemed to manage easily whatever came her way. One time I smelled her clothes and discovered that she was using my perfume. I couldn’t study. I found some bottles of my glitter in her backpack. When she took the make-up exams, she came home, hugged me, and told me that passing the exams was important but the most important was being sisters. I couldn’t stop thinking about the neighbor across the street with a name like a desert (Sonora was in the north and we were in the south), nor about the balloon hanging on the blinds, nor about how now I was the one waiting for my sister, anxious to see her changes. If Karenin said, “Loan me your blouse,” or “Let’s go to TodaModa,” I took it out on her yelling, “Leave me alone!” Something burned inside of me, even the books where I had once found an escape no longer moved me.

“Why have we stopped being like we were before?” Karenin asked after a large sigh. “Why can’t we act just like we did in the old times?” That “just like we did in the old times” resonated in my head and I could clearly see the problem. “Why? Because you’re an imbecile, an annoying imbecile, and you know absolutely nothing, although you think you do.” “Know what?” she repeated.

That they don’t tell you anything doesn’t mean that the others don’t know your secrets. And all because we lived in the same bedroom and I didn’t even have the privacy to lie down and cry by myself. The situation had calmed down, but then I said, “Besides being lazy, you’re a thief.” “Lazy and a thief?” “Admit it: in spite of how it looks you’re a complete dunce. And a thief too because you stole my glitter.” “That’s how it is?” Silence. “That’s how it is?” Silence. “Is that how it is or not?” Long silence. “Do you look down on everyone or just me in particular?” “I don’t look down on you.” “No?” “Yes, I look down on you,” I concluded in a harsh voice.

Karenin rose up, grabbed her backpack, pulled out the glitter and threw it at me. I turned off the light and flung myself on the bed. We were both bitterly surprised. The room began to shrink. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t dare. By then I was no longer furious, just sick of it. Yes, I was the one who read and got good grades, but I saw my own spitefulness: it was horrible to accuse her of theft and call her a complete dunce and even more because I didn’t even know why I did it, although at least one reason was the confusion over the dream, of the neighbor with her thick streak of hair, her chain above her blouse, her red sneakers: a ghost moving in my subconscious. Maybe it was an unresolved and private crush that I couldn’t tell anyone. A sexual falling in love. The nervousness of being near someone before being with someone. The violent heartbeats like knives and forks rattling in a plastic bag. Maybe it was no more than a dream that included fears and desires and future humiliations that would turn me into a stranger with no chance to return. “Have you seen the worst of me?” “Yes.” “I don’t know anything about you.” “No,” was my internal monologue. But it wasn’t just that. Or it was that and the beginning of a transformation, an emptiness opening in me that neither books nor sister nor house nor dream could fill. I’m sure that if Karenin had heard me she would have laughed uproariously. I told her I was sorry the next day. A week later she was leaving the room and I was entering, or the opposite, and we crashed into each other. My nose hitting the door provoked the migraine that had already begun, that and a deviated septum made my self-confidence crumble, and I took refuge in the library. That time she was the one who offered an apology, belatedly, as often happens when there is no solution.

When my first semester was over, I saw that a cocky boy with sunglasses showed up at the house across the street. I saw that he and Sonora stood on tiptoes to kiss: within three months Sonora was pregnant. Her destiny, at least, had been determined outside of our reach: she would stop being a rich daughter, would have to confront the situation and forget about herself for a while.

On the other hand, my relationship with Karenin didn’t get worse nor did it get better. There are self-help books about romantic break-ups, for when the love of your life leaves or because you were born with a broken heart or because you beat yourself up for being alone et cetera, but not for saving relationships with members of the family; none for how to cut loose without ruining those relationships in which father, mother, and sisters hang around the house waiting, demanding, depending on each other and asphyxiating themselves.

Our father and mother continued to behave as usual, sometimes well, sometimes terribly, he did crossword puzzles, she pinched pennies from payday to payday. I thought that affection couldn’t simply disappear; those people, who I had been, the neighborhood. I thought that some things only moved from place to place and that we should dedicate ourselves to finding them. Now we couldn’t even find ourselves, at least not in our shared bedroom: austere on one side and ugly on the other, with my black and white posters of an extinct world. “We aren’t in that world, right? To get a stomachache conjugating verbs in English or to have a tragic feeling is okay, but Riri is right: it isn’t good to think too much, thinking is a form of hypochondria,” Karenin told me one day. “Who the hell is Riri?” I didn’t know what music Karenin listened to but I know that she loved phrases like, “The one who breaks you saves you.”

I saw her one afternoon with a tattoo on her left arm, filling the mirror with her changes: she seemed like a complete stranger. Then I knew that the distance was already immense. I suppose she saw me as a stranger when she asked me, “Where are you going?” “To the psychologist.” “To what?” “To the one who gives me medication.” Meanwhile, Mom asked, “What’s going on, why is it so quiet?” and I remembered when she took both our hands to cross the avenue, holding on to us tightly and warning us, “If you let go, you’ll be lost.”

We began to accept that apart from the space that tied us together, the only constant was the difference in our ages. Thirteen versus fifteen. Fourteen versus sixteen. “Why did you slash your wrist?” Karenin asked me the night when I turned eighteen. “To defend my space, to affirm myself, to get attention, to be seen and heard, to be free, to seduce the others,” I said all at once. “May I see it?” “You can see it but you can’t touch it.” At the end of this short journey we were never again what we had been and the time came when we stopped trying, in part because each one of us had to fight her own battles, and then she began to go out and I left. She dedicated herself to spending her youth impatiently in fits and starts; I brooded over my nostalgia for lost moments.

Literally, we were distant, in two different cities, and I missed that old life. The fun and sad relationship that we had had, one that included being trapped in the Volkswagen in the rain and equally when I accused her of being a pickpocket and she screamed, “You’re sick,” and we looked at each other with a look that made us believe that if we could have we would have killed each other. The light in the photos has the brilliance of truth: we appear distracted, the grandness of our souls was the size of our pajamas, we could spend all day in our underwear, stained with pizza, eating ice cream without guilt. We looked at the shutter as if to say: now or never. Those images were innocent and true, emerging more from fantasy than reality, taken with that Voigtlander that at some point broke, as a million things inside broke, impossible to repair.

1  Imperfectly remembered from Crave, a play by Sarah Kane