Issue 19

Elvira Vigna
Translated by Adrian Minckley

There is a piss smell wafting from one of the corners (the left one) and, towards the front, the foot resting on the table in the black Havaianas sandal, and the toenail that hardens a little more each day—which is to say that it (the nail) is getting ready for days when there won’t be a sandal.

(And that is scary.)

It hardly grows anymore (the nail), going weeks, months even, without needing to be cut.

Soon the piss smell gets worse, every time the wind picks up.

And the little knickknack, a cute little owl, you look like a little owl, babe, with those big glasses on …

The guy’s a good fuck, and this is something Izildinha learned about herself: that is it.

That is it, beibee, she would say if she were someone else and had already gotten used to tossing English words around without the Nordestino accent coming out, it doesn’t matter how many layers of cream, lipstick, or cinema you cover it in (the accent).

Also in what could be considered towards the front, there is the photo of a little boy whom Izildinha is constantly telling herself and others that she likes a lot, despite finding it hard to like someone who doesn’t know how to talk. It’s a strange sort of liking; one she decided to feel. She doesn’t know what the little boy is like when he isn’t being defined as being a little boy, and so it’s like liking a collective or particular kind of thing, pork for example, don’t even think about it (not anymore at least, but until recently, pork, oof, the grease would slide down your fingers and neck, and drip onto the napkin).

There’s the bottle of alcohol for cleaning the black and brown lines that get on the table when the foot, the one with the nail that hardens a little more each day, moves from the table and leaves more or less straight lines behind, grime from the floor where it has already been and where it will then return to (the foot).

There’s a pen for scribbling the lines that bind her to the present, though it’s never really the present, it’s always future; always something for later. Life always happens later.

There’s another line that connects her to the future, and that one is gray and ends at some point at an outlet in the wall. What happens after the wall, in what manner the future can be understood as a seamless material snaking its way among grains of sand held together in cement, this she does not know. It’s called a computer cord.

There’s the lamp, on or off, it doesn’t matter, because it’s a weak lamp, and hardly lights up anything.

And a nail file that she saves for the most acute moments, when she files away her nails, since you can’t file moments, and waits for them to pass (the moments).

(She files her fingernails, because her toenails are hard and don’t grow, and anyways they’re too far to reach from any even remotely comfortable position).

To the right is the doorway, which she crosses multiple times a day, every time as if it were the first, and as if she didn’t know that after the doorway exists something similar to what’s before it. She walks, when she goes—every time she goes—facing forward and sure-footed, until she reaches the wall, which is right there, and where she stops. Her body, not her eyes. Her eyes don’t stop. They keep going, inviting her body. One day it will accept the invitation. There are eight floors.

Past those eight floors, just after the short walk to the right until the wall (crossing through the doorway), there is a forest. Woods, a little patch of woods. And those woods, even though they may seem to come after multiple other things (the door, the wall, and that something that made her take her foot off the table, get out of the chair, and go all the way there), aren’t after. They’re before. Because Izildinha has woods in her past. So, when she goes—if she goes—to the future (present?) she’ll really be going to her past. And even though the distance is great (between the wall and the woods), she thinks she’ll catch the scent of the woods when, and if.

Stuck with magnets on the door are: instructions for a medication that she doesn’t want to take anymore, notarized mail receipts that really it doesn’t matter whether or not they arrived, a certificate for a class she took, various magnets without anything underneath them, and an ad for a pizzeria that, by already being magnetized, was easy: just throw it on the door. The door is metal and, to keep the wind from slamming it (the one that brings the piss smell), there is a complicated apparatus consisting of a rubber tube—one of those from a bicycle tire—with a wire at one end that hooks on the door latch, and that’s fastened by its other end to the base of the desk lamp. The creator of this apparatus that is ugly but also functional is him. Him, who sometimes even does things.

Towards the back, there’s the couch with variously colored pillows that get stuffed with the couch fabric each time the couch is reupholstered, and that multiplied by two one time, and four another, since the old pillows already bore the imprints of their bodies and so weren’t thrown away. Today, the couch is one color and the pillows are others; the pillows and the couch aren’t the same color because the couch was measured wrong, and there wasn’t enough fabric left over to cover the pillows that either way already existed, and so the mistake wasn’t considered serious enough to be fixed.

Izildinha doesn’t know how many pillows there are. She would have to turn herself around to determine that. She knows. But to know, she would have to relearn how to count, dig around in her memory, and settle on a number that would necessarily exclude others. What number will she choose as the now number, the number that will acknowledge all the numbers that existed before it and that piled up to make the now? That’s the problem with inventory: the piles that will be never be complete (there are cushions that have gone astray and ended up on the bed or on the armchair, and others that were given to other people, and there are numbers that are just unpleasant, like seven, for example).

To the left, the aforementioned smell of piss and also the trashcan, behind which the tortoise hangs out, source of the piss smell.

The tortoise is cold to the touch.

Izildinha is jealous of anyone who manages to be cold to the touch and seem perfectly okay with it.

In the center, which is arbitrary like all centers, there are Izildinha’s eyes, which have become heavy and old, very old, despite the cream she applies daily, both in the morning and at night. And inside her eyes, but lower, a bit, there’s the recurring nausea that begins in the stomach and rises up through the nose and eyes, which become, because of the nausea, heavier than they already were. But nausea comes with an excuse: oh, I’m nauseous. So they take advantage.

Somewhere, in that same setting, there’s the guy. The one that’s a good fuck. The insufferable one. The one that makes a scene when she says he has to pick up the papers, fix the leak. He says he doesn’t have to. That it’s her responsibility, atavistic, ancient, to say that he needs to pick up the papers, fix the leak. This is the responsibility she writes of escaping from, through the lines if she can (the computer cord and the others, those that bind her to what exactly?), over the wall if she can’t. Or on the bus, on its way back, which is not an option, since the bus (what it will do, would do, the way back) will eventually reach its destination, and when it does (the bus), it will be in that nowhere place, the dusty bus station, not smelling like piss (that smell that will be, would be, then, pleasantly familiar, known) from anywhere. Or through the television, which is more likely (the escape).

Izildinha had a Diet Coke, had the hairdresser layer her hair because that’s how you do it—that’s how everyone does it—and no one noticed. The jeans she bought don’t look good, the haircut doesn’t either. Izildinha needs to find out what her “look” is. Tony the hairdresser thinks so anyways, and raised his hands to where his breasts would be if he had any breasts, and flopped them to the sides (his hands). Izildinha also has courses to be completed, work to be done, smiles to be smiled, cakes to be made and people to be invited over for cake to say, mmm, how delicious, Izildinha, did you make it?, after which she will smile a half smile (because a full smile for a cake is really sad, too sad, really, and she wouldn’t be able to handle it).

The wardrobe also needs to be glued. But he took care of that.

She asked before. He didn’t do it. She asked other times, he didn’t do it those times either. And when she finally said he had to pick up the papers, fix the leak, do something, and he argued, made a scene, shouted, and slammed the door, the next day when she got up (before him, like always) and, on purpose, didn’t close the wardrobe, he, after getting up and going to the kitchen without speaking to her (they haven’t spoken for multiple days), fixed it without a word. When she entered the room, it was already glued.

He didn’t mention it. She didn’t either.

So she’s optimistic that he’ll fix the leak and pick up the papers. There’s also the chair that’s broken, the one in the study. And the wheel that needs to be changed on the other one, the one with wheels. There’s the tile in the kitchen, there’s the air in the world that is much too hot, the belly that’s growing and that will someday soon produce another little boy who she’ll say she likes a lot; there’s the day that gets more boring each time it comes, unbearable really, and maybe that should really be moved to the top of the list; there’s the tabletop that isn’t broken yet but that will be, as soon as she gives it a kick, with the tips of her toes, a nice hard one. And a shout.