Issue 22

Xurxo Borrazás
Translated by Jacob Rogers

“So, Xisto’s boy fixed up the house?”

She had announced herself by banging on the door with an open fist, and those were her first words, open-fisted. At noon, I was a ghost: I hadn’t washed up or eaten, my head was throbbing, I was hunched over, the light hurt my eyes, and my breath stank. My breath always stinks in the morning, it’s something with my stomach. Sometimes I put my hand in front of my mouth and exhale to disgust myself, but I wanted to be friendly with my neighbor. I would get nothing out of slamming the door in my visitors’ faces without any provocation. Not protecting my territory right from the start, however, could have some godawful consequences. Just like tragedies and cherries in a basket, stories never come by themselves, especially not the unreal ones.

“Come in and see the house, no need to stand outside. Can I help you with anything?”

The spider had decided to claim its prisoner.

At this point, I hadn’t yet discovered that the red slug was carnivorous, that it had coiled around the common snail, cracked its shell, swallowed its head starting with the eye stalks, and was now sucking it up with its tentacles sunken into the snail’s insides. Such Puritanism!

“You want to help me? You always want to help me, with what?” She said this as she wiped the dirt off her hands and kicked her boots on the threshold. She moved beside me and the stench nearly made me faint. How long had it been since she changed clothes, months?

“I was thinking of having a coffee, so you could join me. Have you already had one today? I’m no expert, so I won’t brag, but I don’t make mud either. Anything else and I wouldn’t, you know, but coffee … I drink it by the pot. Mom says I’m a real expert at drinking it.” I laughed at my own joke, faced with her expression of dry curiosity. “It makes some people’s stomachs churn and some people can’t get to sleep, but maybe you … I can have a dozen cups no problem, I lose sleep over other things.”

“Money? Women?” she spit out rudely, like a detective or a gangster.

“Anything, really.” What a smell, Je-sus Christ! I couldn’t even think.

“I’m leaving the door open,” she cut in. “Since there’s no one around, you know, no good people or bad people, and no thieves either.

“Right, right.” I started to get uncomfortable, even full ventilation couldn’t have done much. “It’s just a habit for me, you’re right. If there’s no one here, who’s going to come in? In Vigo it would be reckless, you know? That’s how city life is. People are afraid of each other, they don’t want to interact, it’s normal.”

Within half an hour, rats, beetles, flies, a magpie, and a damselfly had come in. Mom says country villages are made for animals. She doesn’t understand why people insist on living against their nature: the wildest people go to the city and the most civilized flee to the mountains. Then there were the two of us, Mom and me, a group of our own. We weren’t wild animals, but all forms of residence were hostile to us. For example, Mom had inherited a shed in Ardaña, in the country, which reminded her of her origins, and she took it as an insult. She sold it without even making a trip there, went through an agency, and didn’t get much for it. She said that when the world went crazy and finally accepted us, to us it would just seem like a pile of shit.

“Us?” I protested. “You and I are different, Mom, we aren’t anything alike.” She looked at me the way a teacher looks at the kids who rediscover the Nile, or the center of the universe, year after year, and rebel against everything.

“You and I!” she said. “Look me in the eyes.”

Intentionally or not, Mom always adorned her sentences with obscure codes. She left her thoughts half-finished, and when I turned them over in my head, it gave them an added mystery, always assuming she meant what scared me most. Well, what scared me, or attracted me.

The woman currently paying me a visit was staring at the computer. She had never seen one, and we surfed around the web, looking up places in the Ancares, children’s music, women’s fashion. We went to Editorial Universo’s web page and gazed at the photos from the prize dinner.

“That’s me,” I said. I had put some cotton balls up my nose to deal with the smell, and my voice went nasal. “And there’s Jordi Pujol, the Catalonian president, before he retired.”

I showed her some pictures of Vigo and the bay. The sky was blue, and the sand on the Morrazo and Cíes beaches was gleaming in the background.

“It’s live,” I informed her.

“Which house is yours?” she asked.

“My house!” I exclaimed. “You can’t see it. Around here, more or less.” I pointed at the panoramic photo on the screen.

“Are there people there or did everyone leave?”

“Right now? Mom probably is, my mother.”

She brought her face up a couple inches from the image and concluded:

“It’s true, you can’t see it.”

“Have you been there, ma’am?” I inquired. “Are you familiar with it?”

She stared more eagerly at the Morrazo peninsula, the Cíes Islands, and the San Simón inlet.

“And what’s that?”

“The keyboard. The letters. You press them down and it writes on the screen. That’s the screen.”

“Who writes them?”

“They do.”

“Can you tell them apart?”

“Yes.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

“I haven’t but gone down for some festivals in Navia de Suarna. The last time was to go to the savings bank and the town council, to take care of my pension. To Navia, never farther. You can’t get back in a day if you go any farther, where would I sleep?”

“You’ve never seen the ocean?”

She wanted to go outside to pee, so I showed her to the bathroom. Before going in, she admired its cleanliness and confessed:

“Years ago,” her eyes were glistening out of irritation, or tearfulness, “I promised myself that when I started to collect my pension, I would gorge myself on yogurt, one every day. The store-bought kind, not curdled milk with sugar. I was stupid back then, I’d never done something like that before, and I said it into the wrong people’s ears. That’s right, they laughed at my expense as much as their lungs could take. They wouldn’t have done it to any other lady in town, they did with me because, well, it was me.” She took a breath. “The time came and I couldn’t eat the yogurts because I didn’t have a refrigerator. By then almost everyone had left, died, or forgotten. Everyone but me. And nobody laughed anymore.” She smiled bitterly and went into the bathroom. She ran her filthy hands along the walls, starting with her fingers and then her fingertips, leaving a trail of grime on the tiles. She turned around, stepped carefully onto the rug, and closed the door.

“It’s not because of thieves,” she assured me.

I’m an only child to a single mother. I have plenty of experience in that realm, and I pay my debts religiously and without complaint. You must think the fact that I’m writing in solitude means I’m trying to do some reflection, but no one’s going to ask me for answers and I don’t have to weigh the emotional or aesthetic impact of every clause. Talking to you is like playing solitaire, I know that. All I need to have in mind is my limited space, how much blank paper is left. No pacing myself or being ashamed. You can read it however you like, I’m writing the way I want to. I don’t care if everything I say is idiotic, I won’t blush and I’m not going to succeed or fail based on your impressions.

It was the unexpectedness of the situation that day, or rather our difference in age, culture, temperament, and origin, along with that way she had of watching, the mysteriousness of her unfinished sentences, and even the story of how she had become the butt of a joke, that led me to conclude that this woman moved about with a sort of “aura” around her. That’s right, an aura, is there a problem? Her name suited her well. Aurora. I can’t remember if I thought of it that quickly, the past flattens things out. In the moment you’re telling things, it doesn’t matter whether they happened twenty days or twenty years ago. Beyond that, her “aura” also inspired a combination of respect, magic, and attraction in me. But I have to admit, I wouldn’t recognize myself if I had those kinds of weaknesses sticking out of me.

If someone were going to read this, I would never have written it. Dozens of classic authors have come before me and said similar things, but I’m always serious. Seriously serious. Seriously seriously seriously seriously seriously seriously serious to infinity and beyond, I never twist my words. All fiction chooses its readers, and mine would have to be either fictasmal or phantitious. Not you. When I say “you” it’s a license, I’m talking about the other I’s that are fighting inside me, listening right now with cynical, evil intent. That’s not it either, I’m inventing you all for the occasion. This act of writing is so oralized that I’m doing it in Galician, that is … seriously.

I made the coffee and waited. Maybe a yogurt—what was that story all about? I stared at the fridge as if it were the transfiguration of a spaceship or a nuclear reactor, a nitroglycerine shipment, a gigantic, oily crab coming towards me out of the deep sea, a car race that I had to watch from right in the middle of the track, a smart bomb, a scorpion’s nest, the belly of a queen termite. Its humming entered my ears and I moved away with a shiver.

I could hear the animals below: the flies, the magpie, the sparrows, the damselfly. I went down to shoo them off, and when I came back up, I inquired in front of the bathroom:

“Are you all right, Mrs. Aurora?” There was no answer. I breathed on the door and watched the condensation shrink against the wood. “Do you need anything?”

“No, but thank you, child.”

“If you need anything, just ask, there’s basically everything you could ever need in the drawers. Well, not everything.”

What was taking her so long in there? What could I do? Then, all of a sudden, she came out. I jumped up in a pirouette, and she asked:

“How old are you?”

“Me? How old?” I hadn’t told her my name and the lady was asking how old I was, to make herself seem superior. Knowledge is power.

“Yes, sir, you. I hope I’m not embarrassing you.”

“Thirty-three years old,” I said nonchalantly. I brought over two small mugs of coffee and placed them on the table, then grabbed the sugar and screwed off the top. I had brooded endlessly during her absence, but truthfully all I did was stare at the fridge while I waited. “Oh and, please, no need to call me sir.”

“I’m seventy-four, maybe a summer more or a winter less. I’ll die any day now, and I don’t have anyone to put me in the earth. The crows will be happy, no sense avoiding it. I’d almost rather it be the crows than the worms, rather it be pain than rotting.”

“Don’t say that, Mrs. Aurora.”

“It was a joke, child. Be better to die after how long I’ve been dead. If God’s keeping track, He knows I’m not afraid of death anymore. And if he needs a map of Hell, I can chart it for Him.”

“No one can escape death.”

“No, not if God wants. But it’s funny that the woman who enjoys life the least would take the longest to die. Have you ever seen a dead person rotting?”

“A person? No, just animals.”

“It’s all the same.”

I looked for a way to cut her off, so that my tongue wouldn’t get the best of me and she wouldn’t get out of hand and come at me whining about how her children and cousins had forgotten her after they had taken advantage of her, or launch into a long rosary where instead of beads, it would be all the ailments she had been overcome by, ora pro nobis. Arthritis, cataracts, neck, dizzy spells, gums, pray for us. I grabbed hold of my literature and changed the subject:

“Do you know how to read and write, ma’am? It’s a wonderful pastime for some older people, it would get you out of your routine. Like reading a short book with large print or keeping a diary, if it doesn’t tire your eyes. ‘Today, I went to look for herbs,’ ‘the cold hasn’t come yet this winter.’ Simple things: ‘The river overflowed.’ ‘A man appeared in the village.’ There are tons of large-print books. You’d never think it, it must be because they all have a bit of fantasy and parable to them: Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl, Heart of Darkness, Marcovaldo, Pedro Páramo, The Metamorphosis, The Stranger, Bartleby. There are tons. If it doesn’t tire your eyes, you should try. I could even send you some.”

Poor old woman, what did she know?

“There are no books here,” she thundered. “Some appeared in a nearby village and nothing good came of it, no letters or school or priest or judge. There’s about as much need for them as the devil. Where do you see letters around here? Anyone who learned their letters already read the signs and ran off. ‘To Lugo,’ ‘to Barcelona.’ The signs … maybe it was the signs that took people from here. My eyes don’t get tired. It’s the rest of it that tires me. And don’t call me Mrs. or ma’am, don’t make me feel as old as time.”

“All right then.” She was going to come at me with the ailments, I had to act fast. “What about a TV? I don’t know a single older person who doesn’t kill a good bit of time in front of the television. A lot of them go on it and tell their story.”

I was willing to interrogate her just to keep her from interrogating me. I was playing defense by going on the attack and wriggling around to out-of-reach topics. She remained condescending, the way a grandmother who lived through a war would look at a child playing with tin soldiers and toy cannons. Of course, I didn’t see it like that at the time. I thought I had the upper hand. The lady was in my house and didn’t understand a thing. In her eyes, I could pass for a theoretical scientist or a fearless adventurer. All she could do was be led through or left behind in the jungle of technicalities. The old woman.

“Don’t you feel lonely? Don’t you have family elsewhere?”

She parried with the thing about the yogurts, the pension, and the refrigerator, continuing to stare at my fridge in bewilderment. If it seemed to me like a monster, what would it have seemed like to her: the tree of knowledge, the monolith in 2001, the Chernobyl reactor, the God of the Old Testament?

“When Xisto ordered the renovations and I saw the workers come,” she didn’t take her eyes off the Zanussi, “I figured he was going to install one of these things. The men would pick up their beer bottles, spit on the ground, wash their tools, and go back to town to sleep. Then I would walk by the locked house and imagine it was there, on the other side of the door. Is it easy to use?” she asked.

“The fridge?” I was dumbstruck. “You just open the door and stick your hand in to get whatever you want, simple as that. When you open it, a light turns on. You can open it in the dark and the food gets lit up, like a shrine. The top part cools and the bottom freezes.” I opened the icebox and the cloud rolled down to the kitchen floor.

“Wintertime.” Straight from her heart.

I opened the icebox and the cloud came out again. It was like showing off a new car.

“Something like that,” I concluded.

“You must have to ‘plunk it in,’ or however on earth you say it.”

“Plug it in?” She nodded uncertainly. “That’s right,” I said. “You have to have a current and plug it in, that or turn it into a cupboard. From what the landlord told me, he brought the electrical line, there wasn’t one before. But you can get current from a gas generator. I don’t know about solar panels, here in the valley … Anyway it wouldn’t be worth it for you, ma’am, the electrical line is easiest.”

“Don’t you see, young man? Nothing in life comes easily. And stop calling me ma’am, damn it!” she snapped. “When I made my promise, I thought it would be like a bread trough: open the hatch and take something out, like you’re picking up eggs from the chicken coop or grabbing fruit from low-hanging branches. The problems came afterwards, that’s why it’s best not to promise anything. They say it’s bad to swallow your dreams, but nobody says that talking too much is worse.”

I thought the same, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of my agreement. If she hated confiding, why was she doing it with me?

“It’s different with you,” she said immediately.

The old witch. So many years waiting. The thing with the yogurts became a challenge that ultimately ended in failure, coinciding with her old age. She had avoided answering me about her family and I figured they didn’t get along too well.

“If I’d eaten yogurt when I was younger, I’d have more teeth, and better bones,” she lamented. “Take a look at yourself if you don’t believe me, I’m sure they filled you up with it when you were a boy. You can probably tell them apart just by the smell. You open the fridge, like you said, and that’s that. It doesn’t mean anything else to you.” I shrugged. “Can I see your teeth?”

What the hell? I gulped and showed them to her, uneasy like a horse that knew which breeder was going to buy it at the fair, and this wasn’t him.

“Your mother probably ate yogurt too. Is she still alive?”

“She’s fifty-two years old,” I replied.

“Well she’ll probably have her good health for years, she’s a spring chicken. She must be eating yogurt, I’m sure you also have a fridge and current to plunk it up with over in Vigo, how could you not! I’ll bet even your grandmothers are alive.”

“One grandmother.” Dry, restrained, almost constipated. And then I shit myself: “Mom was single when she had me and I never knew who my father was. She would tell me it wasn’t worth knowing, and then I stopped asking. At school, I even convinced myself I deserved all the taunting from my classmates and didn’t bother to look. In my mind a father was an enemy. Of all the fathers in the world, none of them wanted to be mine, you know? Once I started getting smarter, I became obsessed with searching for him among the people we knew. I looked for resemblances in the mirror, studied my neighbors’ and cousins’ noses, chins, ears. I compared myself with the pictures of every dead person that had some relationship to my mother, and there was a part of me in all of them, like how when you study any combination of numbers, a pattern always appears. I thought back to the treatment I got from the men who came by the house when I was a kid, who gave me a few pesos and who a kiss, who took me in their arms, who would look at me with something between sadness and mistrust, who with indifference. I tried to remember Mom’s attitude towards them and thought I could see resentment here and warmth or nervousness there. Nothing definitive, just suspicions, and a father had to have left some unmistakable sign: my blood itself, something he would wear on his face, something I could smell from afar. Mom was right, we didn’t need a father. As time went on, I dug through the list of famous artists, scientists, and writers from back then who were single-parent children. There are more than you would think, and I felt like I had something in common with all of them, a heroic sadness.”

“We all carry our own burdens.”

I was going to respond in some way, but she continued:

“Except that some of us also live inside it, in A Pena.” She raised her eyes and concluded: “I only say live to put a word to it.”

“I’m going to wash the mugs, or would you like another?”

“No, that’s all right, but thank you. The neighbors and your mother … do they treat her well? Do they count on her?”

“Just the normal amount. It’s she who doesn’t talk to some of them. According to Mom, with enough time, you’ll piss off even your best friends.”

“Does she have any?”

“No.”

“How about your grandmother, then, does she live with you? How old is she? I’ll bet you get along great and she used to sing you old folk songs and tell you stories about Moors and curses before you went to bed.”

The conversation was falling apart and it was partly my fault. My grandmother singing songs, what an idea!

“She’s older than you, ma’am,” I said, and she probably was because she’s about to turn seventy-five. “My grandmother is crazy,” I went on. “She has to be bathed and fed with a spoon. She spends the day grumbling while she farts and digs her finger into her nose so she can eat the boogers. She wears diapers and even still the whole apartment stinks like pee.” (The journalist from Madrid would have liked that ethnic touch.) “She cries non-stop at night and bangs her head on the furniture. She doesn’t sing.”

Aurora didn’t say or do a thing, as if I had said nothing at all, or nothing interesting. All she did was hint at a compassionate expression. This is what I got out of becoming famous and a millionaire.

I went to the fridge and grabbed a vanilla yogurt. I saw the way it made her heart pick up. I opened it for her, and she started to cry silently. The scene could have been described as dramatic and moving: she, the yogurt. But, it also wouldn’t have been wrong to see it as funny or grotesque: she, the yogurt. I tried to console her by stroking her hands and tangled hair. Was this really happening? To me? I cursed the day I had decided to cast myself away in the goddamn countryside. What could you expect from a fraud who shipwrecks on purpose? My fate was just the same as that writer in Miss Lonelyhearts, another large-print book, who goes into a bar full of depraved, horny men in order to familiarize herself. Fucking fate.

I had docked in the countryside with the feeling that I was doing something courageous. Who the hell was going to argue with me if there was no one here? I could be whoever I wanted, it was enough to wish it and it would be so. With the audience in the dark auditorium and the spotlights above the stage blinding you, anything is possible. The actors become real. They mean what they say, so long as what they say is intelligible. What happens in the scenes isn’t exactly virtual or fantastical. Theatre is true because the world itself is nothing more than a comedy. All that changes is the marquee, the wattage of the bulbs, the patches in the curtain. You can put on Shakespeare or Sophocles in a pigsty if that’s your thing.

I envisioned myself rolling around on the prow of a pirate ship, not rocked by the waves but on top of a horse I myself had tamed: facing the hurricane, dampened by the spray of the mountainous waves, naked and alone as I screamed into the claps of thunder, possessed by an epic inspiration, a trip around the world, a pre-Raphaelite painting, a Wagner opera, captain in absentia.

Instead, the spotlights went off and here I was, basically cleaning up an illiterate old woman’s spittle, listening to her weep, and then, for the rest of my month, constantly on guard for the presence of this old lady who probably had dementia piddling around me. I might as well have brought my grandmother. Shaking the spoonful of porridge in front of her and making conversation about sick family and neighbors’ funerals. Watching her deteriorate and rant and rave, with her eyes wide open and her head in another world.

“Do you have crops around here or do they bring you food in the Land Rover, ma’am?” Everyone knows that bringing up crops always works in these villages. Anyway, it seemed more appropriate to me than expounding on the treatment of solitude in Rulfo or Conrad. The lady smelled like rotten milk, I thought, and as I thought it, I got the sense she was reading my mind. I didn’t mean to think that, I defended myself. If you’d like, we can go back to Kafka, I’ll read him to you, ma’am. He’s not as serious as people think.

She ran the back of her wrinkly hand along her eyes to wipe away the tears and didn’t respond. I felt uncomfortable and repeated the question nearly at a shout, as if she were deaf:

“I said do you have crops!”

“A long time ago, when the people from the hill were still here, Cockeye’s brother would come on Tuesdays and bring me milk, salt, and olive oil. I also had a little patch with potatoes and turnip greens, for fun. These past few years I’ve lived off what I find in the ground: chestnuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, figs, apples, cabbage, strawberries in spring, mulberries in autumn, some maize, an unripe corncob … whatever comes my way. I just clear the weeds and brambles from the fields with a stick, I don’t plant in them or sow them, and the yield gets smaller every year. There’s no yield at all now.”

“It’s also less work.” I must have been trying to seem nice, I’m not sure why. Maybe because there was no escape?

“My holidays,” she went on, ignoring me, “come when I fill up a half dozen jars of honey from the beehives in the apiary. The bees sting me all over. I occasionally befriend a rabbit—I stay still, talk to it with my eyes, grab it by the ears, and roast it over the embers. I suck out dove eggs or pick up whatever the city folk who pass through the mountain leave behind: loaves of bread, chocolate bars, spreading cheese, oranges, pieces of omelet, cream, bananas, sausage. I don’t go hungry, or not often. A lot of nights I think about how much darn food is going to be wasted when I’m not here, or how much is already being wasted: the rotten fruit, the mountain fields, the trash on the pathways, the abandoned beehives … there are always creatures making the most of it, a few little animals, you know, but the people … who’s going to come to A Pena?”

“The tourists, ma’am, the ‘city folk,’ as you call them.”

“Sometimes they leave hats, socks, bathtubs, wheels, even a car. Two years ago, I found a dead body with a rifle in its hands. No one has come looking and the bones are still there.”

“A hunter.”

“If I follow their steps, I always find something or other they’ve left behind.”

“Tourists bring pre-packaged food and don’t want to take anything back. They must like places like A Pena more and more because they prefer the brush to the fields.”

“What kind of people would like that?”

“Me, for example.”

She laced her fingers together and tried to wipe off the sole of her left shoe with the edge of her right. A ball of dry manure came off onto the floor.

“And the dead person’s rifle, who has it?” I asked.

“It stayed there. Sometimes, when I hear a shot, I imagine it’s her firing that rifle, or him.”

“Do you want this yogurt?” I retreated.

She sighed and looked at the container, without any urge to respond. I placed the spoon on top and slid it across the table to her. No artificial colors or preservatives, zero percent fat, enriched with vitamins and calcium.

“It has calcium, it’s good for your bones. You mentioned that earlier,” I remembered.

“What’s calcium?”

“A mineral. Foods with calcium are good for the body, especially for older people, because our bones are made out of calcium.” Nowadays, those of us with an education open our mouths and turn into a cross between a moralist and a witch doctor. “I assumed that was why you liked yogurts, ma’am.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“What was it, then?”

“Once, I found a refrigerator on the mountain, and some other things: equipment, rubble, and a refrigerator. I decided to carry it home, and when night fell, the moon made it go wild. I laid it carefully on its side, took out its shelves, and slept in it. It wasn’t so bad. After three days of pushing and shoving, the door came off, it cracked in dozens of places, lost some screws in the back, and sank into the muck. I hadn’t eaten for a few days and couldn’t save it. Anyway, it didn’t have current and they probably left it because it was broken, crazy old woman that I am. Would you mind reading me what it says there?”

“On the packaging?” She nodded and I obeyed—the brand, ingredients, expiration date, manufacturer information, and nutritional facts.

“Keep refrigerated,” she said, as if it were poetry.

More tears flowed from her eyes. She dug around in her holey overalls and discolored skirts until she found a ragged and yellowish cloth, blew her nose, and went back to the bathroom. I sat there and ended up convincing myself I understood her. It wasn’t that she wanted to eat the yogurts now that she was old, it just stung that she couldn’t when she was younger. I got up to put the little plastic cup in the fridge, to keep it from getting warm. I sat down again, scratched my stomach, and started to bawl too, but not on purpose. Ever since I was a kid, if someone cries around me, I can’t help it, I feel like it’s my fault.

I thought I heard the water running in the bathtub. The spigot went on and off—she was testing the temperature, I guessed. Water splashed for a few minutes and then stopped. A quarter of an hour went by and I started to worry. Had she fainted? Had she drowned in clean water? Had she sliced her wrists or throat? Had she unintentionally drunk bleach? Intentionally!? She had locked herself in feeling sad and downcast, and now I was going to pay for her loneliness and her accumulated lack of calcium and fermented lactose. Calling out to her again would be ridiculous. Plus, I wasn’t this lady’s goddamn caretaker, I wasn’t her son or her nurse. What the hell was I supposed to do when she locked herself in my bathroom and fucked up my vacation without even uttering an “and?” She could have at least given me some warning before she went in, so I could prepare: “I’m going to wash my pussy and kill myself in style.” Was that so much to ask? “When you kick in the door, don’t get scared, you’ll see my eyes open under the warm water and my hair floating on the surface. No matter how much it weighs on you, you have to take responsibility for me, so do it with love. Going through these vital moments nervous or in a rush never turns out well.” She had to be fucking kidding me!

I heard the door unlock a few minutes later and she came out naked and barefoot, a snake wrapped in my bathrobe. She was small and the bottom of it dragged on the floor. She limped with a kind of swaying of her body and her steps were somewhere between light and delicate, but what I mean is that the arthritis slowed her down. She had bathed and washed her hair. She was wearing her hair wet and combed back, and a drop of water ran down her tanned, now clean forehead. She had gotten some color back in her cheeks. This little old lady had some nerve, I was positive she had left the tiles slick and the bathroom a total mess. The towels too! I was going to have to do a load of laundry when she left. At least there was no blood.

The computer speakers were softly, almost inaudibly, playing a folk album. She surveyed all the baseboards and doorframes in the room. Probably looking for the bagpipers. Little bagpipers with sashes, pointy hats, and pompoms on their socks, tiny as silverfish.

“All done,” she said contentedly.

I raised my eyebrows in disbelief and tried to indicate something, either about the bathroom or the sound from the speakers. All I managed was a kind of vague wave of my hand through the air.

“Mama, may she rest in peace, was as good at livening up a party as she was at lightening up a wake. When I was a young girl, she taught me to dance the muiñeira, the xota, and the paso doble. I brightened up seeing all the young men jumping and skirts flying, and even from listening to the bagpipes and tambourines,” she said in a confessional tone, ashamed for either remembering a moment of happiness or having desecrated the temple of the Holy Spirit.

“I don’t know how to play any instruments,” I blurted out, “or how to clap or carry a rhythm. This is a CD.”

What was next? Asking me for a dance? Giving me tambourine lessons? I had to stop her feet before she went all folkloric on me and the misunderstood familiarity dragged us into a second date. In spite of the erratic nature of all the sentences and comments she had ambled into the house with, she suddenly came out with a narrative earful that was hard for me to digest. I listened to her breathlessly and stood stock still.

“Xisto’s father always ran around with the idea that you had to wash three times a week—four during summer—and switch towels once,” she droned on, “and that in Barcelona it was normal to walk around the house barefoot, and this here and that there, because hands were to be washed before and after touching anything, and when it came to food you could never do enough. He must have been really clean when he died. And he must not have worked much, otherwise none of that would make much sense. First of all because you have to have the bath in your house, and second of all because washing up then getting dirty is like working twice, and I imagine there must be regular people in Barcelona, too. Xisto didn’t shake hands with anyone around here, I saw that for myself. But just because you don’t wash yourself like a frog doesn’t mean he needs to call you disgusting, and it’s no surprise some people took it badly—people are proud, you know? He told us about the dangers of ticks in the bed sheets and spelled out the names of the soaps in his colorful bottles: body, head, teeth, nether regions, armpits, clothes, dishes … craziness. The neighbors nicknamed him ‘Mr. Shampoo’ and no one called him Xisto except for me, but I never talked to anyone. It looks like his boy is the same way, that bathroom has everything.”

“I brought that stuff,” I interrupted her.

Was she really this naive or was she making fun? As we drank our coffee, she wouldn’t stop looking at her hands and feet, maybe because they were clean and smelled nice. Poor old Xisto must have had a rough time preaching about the benefits of personal hygiene to people who had stables inside their houses, took shits in the woods, and slept in cloudy fields swarming with insects, in hay bales crawling with rats and mites, or in their granaries above the rows of wheat. After I finished my coffee, I apologized for not measuring out the pot.

“The water here is different, you might be more used to an Ivory Coast or a Yemen or a Colombia blend. The water by itself is better to drink, but then it takes more coffee, or a lighter roast. There are more differences than you might think between one water and another: chalky, metallic, carbonated, thermal, chlorinated. Water is like its own universe.” I hurried towards the haven of the kitchen. I brought another yogurt and gestured at it.

“Eat it, Aurora. Eat it.”

She squinted at the palm of her left hand. She was going to consult her palm lines to see whether the signs said it was favorable or unfavorable to leap into the unknown! To eat was to defy the fate God had predestined for her. In the end, she stretched out her arm and wrapped her sweaty fingertips around the plastic container. She removed them again and consulted me with her eyes. I reacted quickly and peeled off the cover.

“Go on,” I encouraged, “the yogurt is for you.”

The belt on the bathrobe came undone and the whole thing opened up. Her naked body was on full display. I had never seen an elderly woman’s body before, not even my grandmother’s, but her legs and stomach didn’t look too bad, I was expecting worse. Some sixty-year-olds would have envied her breasts. The wrinkles around her neckline formed a kind of layer of pearls around her neck. Her skin was white, like plain yogurt, but what surprised me the most was her silvery, polar-bear-like pubic hair. I experienced simultaneous feelings of embarrassment, disgust, and confusion. Out of the hundred times this must have happened to a woman in front of a stranger, ninety-nine of those she would have definitely covered herself up right away. Not doing so struck me as premeditated.

“Nothing is easy, child.” She was coming back to the subject from twenty minutes ago. “Nothing besides dying. And making mistakes.”

She delicately picked up the little spoon and, as if into an open wound, she sunk it into the lactically fermented, curdled milk. She ate the yogurt just like that: uncovered and fully unconcerned with my presence. As if she had been around since the Paleozoic and I was completely insignificant, just a fleeting, faint, and aimless wisp taken way out of his element. I nodded every time she swallowed a spoonful and nervously went to look out the window. Were there other neighbors hiding under the rocks, lying in wait with resin-smeared eyes among the leaves, inside the chestnut trees, in the ashy insides of the chimney, a jazz band? The horde of crazy souls or old people: toothless, wild-horse-smelling, with their filthy hands outstretched towards me, and the dried brains.

The old woman scraped out the container, first with the spoon and then her tongue. I thought about the girls in TV yogurt commercials: toned, thin, smooth-skinned, and soft-haired, lying on a couch with their blouses open and their white cotton panties on. Coming out of the shower, running through the budding flowers in a figure-accentuating leotard, wearing a bathing suit on a heavily lit beach in a photographer’s studio, smiling in a gymnast’s leotard as they flex their core with their tits pressed together, doing aerobics, riding a static bike with the rocking motions of a sensual dance. Erotic myths, grown-up girls, and living dolls. Triumphs of the imagination.

She licked the spoon front and back and placed it carefully beside the plastic cup. She hadn’t stopped crying.