“It’s me, Ofélia Maria dos Santos Aguiar.”
Disheartened, I’d open the door. Ofélia would come in. The visit was for me, since back then my two boys were too young for her drawn-out wisdom. I was grown up and busy, but the visit was for me: with an entirely inward focus, as if there were time enough for everything, she’d carefully lift her ruffled skirt, sit down, arrange her ruffles—and only then look at me. As for me, then in the process of transcribing the office records, I’d work and listen. As for Ofélia, she’d give me advice. She had a clear opinion about everything. Everything I did was a bit wrong, in her opinion. She’d say “in my opinion” in an offended tone, as if I should have asked her advice and, since I didn’t, she gave it. With her eight haughty and experienced years, she’d say that in her opinion I wasn’t raising the boys properly; because give boys an inch and they’ll take miles. Never mix bananas and milk. It’s deadly. But of course you do whatever you like, ma’am; to each his own. It was too late to be in your bathrobe; her mother changed clothes as soon as she got out of bed, but everyone ends up leading the life they want to live. If I explained that it was because I hadn’t yet showered, Ofélia wouldn’t say anything, watching me intently. Somewhat gently, then, somewhat patiently, she’d add that it was too late not to have showered. I never got the last word. What last word could I offer when she’d tell me: vegetable pies don’t have a top crust. One afternoon at a bakery I found myself unexpectedly confronted with the pointless truth: there with no top crust was a row of vegetable pies. “I told you so,” I heard as if she were right there. With her curls and ruffles, with her firm delicacy, she brought an inquisition into the still-messy living room. What mattered was that she also talked a lot of nonsense, which, in my despondency, made me smile hopelessly.
The worst part of the inquisition was the silence. I’d lift my eyes from the typewriter and have no idea how long Ofélia had been silently watching me. What about me could possibly attract that little girl? I wondered in exasperation. Once, after her long silence, she calmly told me: ma’am, you’re weird. And I, struck squarely in my unsheltered face—of all things in the face that, being our insides, is such a sensitive thing—I, struck squarely, thought angrily: I’ll bet it’s that weirdness that brings you around. She who was completely sheltered, and had a sheltered mother, and a sheltered father.
I still preferred, anyhow, advice and criticism. What was less tolerable was her habit of using the word therefore to connect clauses in an unerring concatenation. She told me that I had bought too many vegetables at the market—therefore—they wouldn’t fit in that small refrigerator and—therefore—they’d wilt before the next market day. Days later I stood looking at the wilted vegetables. Therefore, yes. Another time she had noticed fewer vegetables scattered on the kitchen table, I who had covertly obeyed. Ofélia stared, stared. She seemed on the verge of not saying anything. I stood waiting, combative, mute. Ofélia remarked in an even tone:
“That’s not enough to last until the next market day.”
The vegetables ran out halfway through the week. How does she know? I wondered curiously. “Therefore” could have been the answer. Why did I never, ever know? Why did she know everything, why was the earth so familiar to her, and I unsheltered? Therefore? Therefore.
One time Ofélia made a mistake. Geography—she said sitting across from me with her fingers clasped in her lap—is a way of studying. It wasn’t exactly a mistake, it was more of a slightly cross-eyed thought—but for me it held the charm of a fall, and before the moment faded, I inwardly told her: that’s exactly how it’s done, just like that! keep going slowly like that, and one day it’ll be easier or harder for you, but that’s how it is, keep making mistakes, very, very slowly.
One morning, in mid-discussion, she informed me authoritatively: “I’m going home to check on something but I’ll be right back.” I ventured: “If you’re really busy, you don’t have to come back.” Ofélia stared at me mute, inquisitive. “There goes a very unlikeable little girl,” I thought very clearly so she could see the entire statement exposed on my face. She kept staring. A stare in which—with surprise and sorrow—I saw faithfulness, patient trust in me and the silence of someone who never spoke. When had I thrown her a bone to make her mutely follow me for the rest of her life? I looked away. She sighed calmly. And said even more resolutely: “I’ll be right back.” What does she want?—I got worked up—why do I attract people who don’t even like me?
Once, when Ofélia was sitting there, someone rang the doorbell. I went to answer it and found Ofélia’s mother. There she stood, protective, demanding:
“Is Ofélia Maria there by any chance?”
“She is,” I excused myself as if I had kidnapped her.
“Don’t do this anymore,” she said to Ofélia in a voice directed at me; then she turned to me and, suddenly offended: “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Not at all, this little girl is so clever.”
Her mother looked at me in mild surprise—but suspicion flickered in her eyes. And in them I read: what do you want from her?
“I’ve already told Ofélia Maria she’s not allowed to bother you,” she said now with open distrust. And firmly grabbing the girl’s hand to take her away, she seemed to be defending her against me. With a feeling of decadence, I peered through the peephole I cracked open without a sound: there they went down the hallway to their apartment, the mother covering her daughter with lovingly murmured scolding, the daughter impassive with her curls and ruffles bobbing. Closing the peephole I realized I hadn’t yet changed clothes and, therefore, had been witnessed in that state by the mother who changed clothes as soon as she got out of bed. I thought somewhat unapologetically: well, now the mother looks down on me, therefore I’m rid of that girl ever coming back.
But she kept coming back. I was too attractive to that child. I had plenty of flaws for her advice, I was fertile ground for her to cultivate her severity, I’d already become the realm of that slave of mine: she kept coming back, lifting her ruffles, sitting down.
On that occasion, because it was almost Easter, the market was full of chicks, and I brought one home for the boys. We played with it, then it stayed in the kitchen, the boys went outside. Later Ofélia showed up for a visit. I was typing away, distractedly giving in every so often. The girl’s steady voice, the voice of someone reciting by heart, was making me a little dizzy, slipping in among the written words; she kept talking, kept talking.
That’s when it struck me that everything had suddenly stopped. Sensing a lack of torture, I looked at her hazily. Ofélia Maria was holding her head erect, her curls completely still.
“What’s that,” she said.
“That what?”
“That!” she said unwavering.
“That?”
We would have been stuck indefinitely in a round of “that?” and “that!” if not for the exceptional will of that child, who, without a word, solely through the extreme authority of her stare, compelled me to hear what she herself was hearing. In the rapt silence she had forced on me, I finally heard the faint peeping of the chick in the kitchen.
“It’s the chick.”
“Chick?” she said, extremely suspicious.
“I bought a chick,” I replied in resignation.
“A chick!” she repeated as if I’d insulted her.
“A chick.”
And we would have been stuck there. If not for a certain something I saw and that I’d never seen before.
What was it? But, whatever it was, it was no longer there. A chick had twinkled for a second in her eyes and submerged into them never to have existed. And the shadow had fallen. A deep shadow across the land. From the instant her trembling mouth had been on the verge of involuntarily thinking “I want one too,” from that instant the darkness had gathered in the depths of her eyes in a retractable desire that, if anyone touched her, would shut ev
en tighter like the leaves of a bashful mimosa. And would shrink before the impossible, the impossible that came close and, in temptation, had almost been hers: the darkness in her eyes flickered like a gold coin. A certain mischief then passed over her face—if I hadn’t been there, out of mischief, she’d have stolen anything. In those eyes blinking with dissimulated wisdom, in her eyes that great propensity for plunder. She glanced at me, and it was envy, you have everything, and reproach, since we’re not the same and I have a chick, and covetousness—she wanted me for herself. Slowly I started leaning into the back of my chair, her envy that bared my poverty, and turned my poverty pensive; if I hadn’t been there, she’d have stolen my poverty too; she wanted everything. After the covetous tremor faded, the darkness in her eyes suffered in full: I hadn’t just exposed her to an unsheltered face, I had now exposed her to the best thing in the world: a chick. Without seeing me, her hot eyes stared at me in an intense abstraction that placed itself in intimate contact with my intimate self. Something was happening that I couldn’t manage to understand with the naked eye. And once more the desire came back. This time her eyes grew anguished as if there was nothing they could do with the rest of her body that was independently pulling away. And they grew even wider, alarmed at the physical force of the decomposition happening inside her. Her delicate mouth became a little childish, a bruised purple. She looked at the ceiling—the circles under her eyes gave her an air of supreme martyrdom. Without moving, I was looking at her. I knew about the high incidence of infant mortality. In her case I got swept up in the great question: is it worthwhile? I don’t know, my increasing stillness told her, but that’s how it is. There, faced with my silence, she was giving herself over to the process, and if she asked me the great question, it would have to go unanswered. She had to give herself—for nothing. That’s how it would have to be. And for nothing. She was clinging to something inside herself, not wanting it. But I was waiting. I knew that we are the thing that must happen. I could only help her in silence. And, dazzled by misunderstanding, I heard a heart beating inside me that wasn’t mine. Before my fascinated eyes, right there before me, like an ectoplasm, she was being transformed into a child.
Not without pain. In silence I was seeing the pain of her difficult joy. The slow fury of a snail. She ran her tongue slowly over her thin lips. (Help me, said her body in its arduous bifurcation. I’m helping, my immobility answered.) The slow agony. She was swelling all over, slowly being deformed. There were moments her eyes became all lashes, with the eagerness of an egg. And her mouth had a trembling hunger. She was nearly smiling then, as if laid out on an operating table saying it didn’t hurt that badly. She didn’t lose sight of me: there were the footprints she didn’t see, someone had already walked through there, and she guessed that I had walked a lot. More and more she was being deformed, nearly identical to herself. Do I risk it? do I let myself feel?, she was asking inside herself. Yes, she answered herself through me.
And my first yes intoxicated me. Yes, my silence repeated to hers, yes. As when my son was born I said to him: yes. I had the audacity to say yes to Ofélia, I who knew that we can also die in childhood without anyone noticing. Yes, I repeated intoxicated, because there is no greater danger: when you go, you go together, you yourself will always be there: that, that is what you will take along into whatever you shall be.
The agony of her birth. Until then I had never seen courage. The courage to be something other than what one is, to give birth to oneself, and to leave one’s former body on the ground. And without having answered to anyone about whether it was worthwhile. “I,” her fluid-soaked body was trying to say. Her nuptials with herself.
Ofélia asked slowly, wary of what was happening to her:
“Is it a chick?”
I didn’t look at her.
“Yes, it’s a chick.”
From the kitchen came the faint peeping. We sat in silence as if Jesus had been born. Ofélia was breathing, breathing.
“A little chick?” she confirmed doubtfully.
“Yes, a little chick,” I said guiding her carefully toward life.
“Oh, a little chick,” she said, considering it.
“A little chick,” I said without being hard on her.
For several minutes now I had found myself facing a child. The metamorphosis had occurred.
“It’s in the kitchen.”
“In the kitchen?” she repeated pretending not to understand.
“In the kitchen,” I repeated authoritatively for the first time, without adding anything else.
“Oh, in the kitchen,” Ofélia said in a very fake voice and looked up at the ceiling.
But she was suffering. Somewhat ashamed I finally realized that I was taking my revenge. She was suffering, pretending, looking at the ceiling. That mouth, those circles under her eyes.
“You can go in the kitchen and play with the chick.”
“Me . . . ?” she asked, playing dumb.
“But only if you want to.”
I know I should have ordered her to, so as to avoid exposing her to the humiliation of wanting to so badly. I know I shouldn’t have given her the choice, and then she’d have the excuse of being forced to obey. But right then it wasn’t out of revenge that I was giving her the torment of freedom. It was because that step, that step too she had to take on her own. On her own and now. She herself would have to go to the mountain. Why—I was confusing myself—why am I trying to breathe my life into her purple mouth? why am I giving her breath? how dare I breathe into her, if I myself . . . —just so she can walk, I am giving her these arduous steps? I breathe my life into her just so that one day, exhausted, she for an instant can feel that the mountain went to her?
It would be my right. But I had no choice. It was an emergency as if the girl’s lips were turning more and more purple.
“Only go see the little chick if you want to,” I then repeated with the extreme severity of someone saving another.
We sat face to face, dissimilar, bodies separate from each other; only hostility united us. I was harsh and inert in my chair so that the girl would cause herself pain inside another being, firm so she would struggle inside of me; getting stronger the more that Ofélia needed to hate me and needed me to resist the suffering of her hatred. I cannot live this for you—my coldness said to her. Her struggle was happening ever closer and inside me, as if that individual who at birth had been extraordinarily endowed with strength were drinking of my weakness. By using me she was hurting me with her strength; she was clawing at me while trying to cling to my smooth walls. Finally her voice resounded in soft and slow anger:
“I guess I’ll go see the chick in the kitchen.”
“Go ahead,” I said slowly.
She took her time, trying to maintain the dignity in her back.
She came back from the kitchen immediately—she was amazed, unabashed, showing the chick in her hand, and with a bewilderment in her eyes that wholly questioned me:
“It’s a little chick!” she said.
She looked at it in her outstretched hand, looked at me, then looked back at her hand—and suddenly filled with an anxiousness and worry that automatically drew me into anxiousness and worry.
“But it’s a little chick!” she said, and reproach immediately flickered in her eyes as if I hadn’t told her who was peeping.
I laughed. Ofélia looked at me, outraged. And suddenly—suddenly she laughed. We both burst into laughter then, a bit shrill.
After we’d laughed, Ofélia put the chick on the floor to let it walk around. If it ran, she ran after it, she seemed to let it be autonomous just so she could miss it; but if it cowered, she’d rush to protect it, sorry that it was under her control, “poor thing, he’s mine”; and whenever she held it, her hand was crooked with care—it was love, yes, tortured love. He’s really small, therefore you have to be really careful, we can’t pet him becaus
e it’s really dangerous; don’t let them pick him up whenever they want, you can do what you like, ma’am, but corn’s too big for his little open beak; because he’s so fragile, poor thing, so young, therefore you can’t let your sons pet him; only I know how he likes to be petted; he keeps on slipping, therefore the kitchen floor isn’t the right place for a little chick.
For quite some time I’d been trying to go back to typing in an attempt to make up for all that lost time and with Ofélia lulling me, and gradually talking only to the little chick, and loving with love. For the first time she’d dropped me, she was no longer me. I looked at her, all golden as she was, and the chick all golden, and the two of them humming like distaff and spindle. And my freedom at last, and without a rupture; farewell, and I was smiling with nostalgia.
Much later I realized that Ofélia was talking to me.
“I think—I think I’m going to put him in the kitchen.”
“Go ahead.”
I didn’t see when she left, I didn’t see when she returned. At some point, by chance and distractedly, I sensed how long things had been quiet. I looked at her for an instant. She was seated, fingers clasped on her lap. Without knowing exactly why, I looked at her a second time:
“What is it?”
“Me . . . ?”
“Are you feeling sick?”
“Me . . . ?”
“Do you want to go to the bathroom?”
“Me . . . ?”
I gave up, went back to the typewriter. A while later I heard her voice:
“I’m going to have to go home.”
“All right.”
“If you let me, ma’am.”
I looked at her in surprise:
“Well, if you want to . . .”
“Then,” she said, “then I’m going.”
She left walking slowly, shut the door without a sound. I kept staring at the closed door. You’re the weird one, I thought. I went back to work.