Read an Excerpt
"Stonewords"
I had wished for the lamp to fall on her head for so long that sometimes I think that it really did happen, that it came down and fell on her, but it didn’t. The lamp was a little loose already; one side had come away from the ceiling just a few centimeters, something no one had realized and which I certainly wasn’t going to point out. There was a risk that if it did come away completely and fall that it would also hurt my uncle, but I thought that was unlikely because he rarely slept in their bed. My aunt, on the other hand, slept there every night and took long afternoon naps, too, complaining of headaches. It was simply a question of waiting for the miracle to occur.
In those days, I thought that the intensity with which I wished for something could make it happen, that the harder I wished the easier it would come true, and so being an essentially realistic young person and knowing that my desire also put my uncle in danger, I wished that the lamp would kill her but only slightly injure him, at most. It was a heavy lamp made of pieces of green glass held together by a bronze frame, glass hexagons in the center and triangles at the base, where it narrowed to the shape of a teardrop. I remember it in such precise detail because for hours I studied the gap between the upper piece of the fixture—a heavy, solid cylinder corroded by the damp—and the plaster ceiling—yellowing and most likely weak—gauging whether or not it was growing over time. Given that the lamp hung right over her chest, I believed that my aunt surely wouldn’t survive. This was not the only way I imagined her death.
For instance, sometimes I wished she would crash her old Renault 5 into a wall. I specifically imagined the wall at the entrance to our street, where you had to maneuver a bit at the turn. It was a brick wall on which someone had painted NO LAYOFFS AT BOCAL and, in English, FUCK MAY 68 FIGHT NOW, which I read thousands of times in those days, not really knowing what “fuck” or “Bocal” meant. In any case, it was more likely that she’d die crushed by the lamp than smashed against that graffiti because my aunt rarely took the car and when she did she was a very careful driver. She drove slowly and ranted at anyone who passed her, especially kids on scooters. Other possibilities that I eventually ruled out—a frying pan full of hot oil, ruthless thieves breaking into the apartment, an earthquake, a flood—also seemed uncertain and improbable. At nine years old I was, as I said, essentially realistic.
Tinker always told me to relax. Relax a little, he’d say, you shouldn’t be thinking like that at your age, what are you saving for later? He didn’t know that my aunt also had him in her sights, that she always badmouthed him, like she did about pretty much everyone, she talked bad about every-one, but especially about him. Why are you hanging around with that man, she’d say, why don’t you spend time with girls your own age, what are you doing with that old cripple? I didn’t want to tell Tinker that she called him that old cripple because he’d already suffered enough, and because it was true, he was old—forty, at least—and he was crippled—from the accident—but also because he was kind and he knew a lot about cartoons and he always warmed up the little squares of chocolate in the sun before putting them in bread for a snack. When I tried to explain all this to my aunt, she said that old pervert—I didn’t know then what “pervert” meant—had no reason to be making my merienda and certainly no reason to sit and watch TV with me, and she forbade me from seeing him. After I started to sneak away on my bike when she’d leave to do the shopping, she took the bike and gave it to some gypsies. You’ll end up like your mother, she always said, and my uncle shares the guilt for this too, because he never defended me. One time he even showed up at Tinker’s house and right there in the doorway—he didn’t want to go in even though Tinker invited him inside—he grabbed me by the arm like I had done something wrong and told Tinker to leave me alone, he even threatened to go to the police, asked what an old guy was doing with a young girl, repeating my aunt’s words, carrying out orders, what kind of friendship is this, and all the rest. Tinker didn’t do any-thing to defend himself. He told me to leave with my uncle, asked me to obey him. He was a little sad, it seemed, but he didn’t even look at me as I walked away.
Tinker was, or had been, my best friend. The only person who spoke well of my mother. Everyone else either kept quiet or hinted bad things about her. Some of them closed their eyes as if it hurt to remember her. Others pursed their lips or glanced away. They looked at me with pity and patted my head. Oh you poor little thing, at least you have your aunt and uncle. None of this hurt me. Not anymore. It annoyed me more than anything, the repetition of it. I liked that Tinker was different. He told me that my mother was very beautiful—he said it naturally, like someone saying that a dog is cute or that the stars are brighter than usual—and he also told me that she was generous and shared what was hers with everyone else, that she was always laughing and loved cats and had the same dimple that Silvio and I have in our chins. I asked my aunt about the dimple, if it was true that we had gotten it from my mother—neither she nor my uncle had one—and she told me that Tinker was an old cripple with no respect for anything. I didn’t see the relationship between the two things, being an old cripple and remembering my mother’s dimple, but I decided it was better to keep quiet. The first thing a girl of a certain age should learn—by then I’d turned ten—is to keep quiet. Silvio, for example, didn’t know how to stay quiet yet. He asked for mamá much more often than I did, and when he did my aunt would gather him in her arms and coo at him between deep sighs, when it was obvious that he was looking for answers, not comfort. In contrast, such questions made my uncle very nervous. He’d say, shh, shh, let sleeping dogs lie. That was one of his favorite expressions: let sleeping dogs lie, don’t bring it up, don’t talk about it, let sleeping dogs lie.
In the end, we were left not really understanding what had happened. We had to make do with speculation, rumors, the sentences we sometimes half-overhead in the darkness of the living room after we’d already been sent to bed.
