For her, wearing a watch wasn’t necessary. If you pay attention to the air, to the light in the air, to how light fastens to things, you can tell time. In summer it’s easier, but in winter the light always confuses me. There are days that start out gray and never change, that end up devouring themselves.
My mom didn't like the night, her part of the day was always the morning, that rush in her chest that came with something new, knowing yesterday’s problems wouldn’t return. She would turn on the radio and make us breakfast. She spoke about the weather, the news, or about whatever things she’d learned. She read astronomy articles in old newspapers and encyclopedias that had belonged to her dad. She had a poster of the solar system taped to her closet.
“You know how long until the sun dies?” She said one morning.
“How long?”
“A long time…but before going out, it’ll grow bigger and bigger until it burns everything.”
In the last few years, she had stopped reading; she was old, and most of what she said she made up. She made collages with the sentence fragments that people on the street left floating and rattling around the entryway to her house. I would visit her in the mornings before leaving for work, when she was more lucid and responsive.
She would sit on the patio to smoke a cigarette after cleaning the kitchen, after sweeping up and opening the windows, and she would stare at the back wall, a dividing wall that marked the end of the garden, of what belonged to us, a wall that said nothing, but that she fixated on while resting.
Once she said that people are like crops, batches of things that rise from the earth in common shapes. Each one is a grain that believes it’s special, but we share nearly everything with all the others. Ours, hers, mine, they’re ordinary crops, she said, ordinary but efficient. She said it because she had heard the neighbor out back saying about us, about our family, that we were ordinary. She didn’t speak about each of us in particular, but she said our last name and last names are a kind of bond, a rough handful that unites you with the others even if you resist.
I was sitting beside her cutting my nails and Paola was drawing when the neighbor peeked over the dividing wall. She asked when we were thinking of trimming the lemon tree because it was already hanging over her garden. She said there was no reason why she had to deal with a patio covered in leaves. Mom was taken aback. She responded that she hadn’t realized, that as soon as my father came home from work she would ask him. But the neighbor stood there, strands of hair covering part of her face.
“If you don’t cut it, I’m going to report you to the municipality. You’re intruding on my property.” She lowered her gaze to the garden. “I’ll report you for that and for your filth.”
Afterward, she lowered her hands from the wall and stepped off the bench she must have been standing on to return to her house. But we could still hear her, a voice that came as if from the wall:
“Dirty, all dirty and ordinary, the Ruizes.”
For the first time, I felt a secret and acrid type of shame for my family. For my mom sitting there without knowing how to defend herself and for my dad and his obsession with collecting garbage from the street and bringing it to our garden; veneer and wood, cardboard boxes, wooden boxes, broken lamps and chairs that other families had tossed out and that he resurrected for us.
A few months back, he had been fired from work. He was a regional salesperson for Grandby, a powder soap company that during those years had built itself up as a strong brand but that in 1992 was acquired by a German company that decided to shake up the personnel and fired everyone. There were Christmases when family-sized tubs arrived filled with turrón, wine, powdered milk, and chocolates, along with five boxes of powdered soap; all wrapped up in green and blue paper with drawings of triangles with eyes–the brand’s mascot–and tied together with a thick ribbon that read “NO STAIN IS TOO TOUGH FOR A GRANBY.”
Now I think fondly of those holidays, but I didn’t appreciate them then. Nothing seemed that great. After they fired him, he went on to have bad jobs. He delivered oils and jams for a distributor, sold items from a catalog, and visited his friend’s offices to ask for work.
I still keep photos from those years. In one, I’m with Mom looking at the sea, looking at the beach, looking at the pointillism of families down below. In another, the three of us are standing on the balcony, in underwear and t-shirts, ready to go. Paola holds a plastic bucket with shovels, and Mom, a straw hat. You can see the sea on the horizon. Mom smiles but I remember the truth, her mood when she got lost on the beach and Dad found her playing with some kids three beaches to the south. The night she got drunk and Dad carried her to bed while she screamed that he was a liar. When she secretly bought the telescope from the mall showroom and we had to return it because we were out of money.
A colleague of Dad’s at Granby had lent us that apartment with views of the beach, of the wind, with views of other families that spent their summers like us.
“I like to look at the sea,” I told my mom one day.
“Me too,” she roughly massaged sunblock into her arms. “It’s the planet’s ulcer.”
Those vacations were Dad’s idea. But all the other ideas, those that defined the world and people, belonged to her. Shrill remarks she uttered standing in the center of the kitchen, powerful whispers, mantras fine-tuned with melancholy. She was afraid that we were poor, that we were really ugly, she was afraid of the new neighbors and of the cats that wailed at night like abandoned babies. She was afraid of what we thought of her and so she never left us alone. When she shut up, she went rigid like a statue on the patio, smoking, worrying everyone. I found out later that with each bristle she plunged into my hair as she brushed it, she buried a fear of hers within me.
“My sadness,” she said once “has the strength of a tsunami. Don’t be like me, smile.”
But it was a stoic sadness. She traced it on the oilcloth, hung it in the kitchen like a curtain. We used to run past it into the garden, to look at Dad’s garbage, at what was supposed to grow and didn't, at the dry earth. She embraced disenchantment after someone told her to think harder about what she was feeling. But she never said it. She never said it aside from yearly exceptions, a party that ended badly, the day her mom died, a crazy morning. After that, life progressed like network programming. Her mood came and went between commercials and segments that didn’t last long. The hosts directed her pauses, her silences, her privacy. But no one saw her cry, not in years, never. It was a permanent mother show.
One morning she woke up and finished losing her mind. She got out of bed, walked naked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and dumped milk over herself. She said she was purifying herself and that she didn’t know what she was doing there nor who we were.
“You should do something to your hair,” she told me when she saw me. “You’re wearing the clothes of an old woman.”
My dad sat her down on the bed, dressed her, and shouted at us to get out, to go to school. She was interned for several weeks, but my sister and I only visited her twice. She stared at the window the way she stared at the wall at the back of our house, smoking the same way, her hands resting on her legs, her body still; everything was almost the same but inside something seemed broken. I watched her stare at me and it was like scraping your nail against a chalkboard.
“You’re the girl who dresses like an old woman…”
When she returned home she spoke less, painted watercolors, and changed our names. She forgot everything. She forgot my sister and me at school, my sister at the roller rink, us at the bus stop. We stuck notes on the fridge hoping chance would confront her with our schedules, with our activities. “At 5 you have to pick up Paola from the roller rink.” Notes on the mirror in her room: “If you wake up before 3, get the clothes from the washing machine.” So that she would see them in the morning on the bathroom mirror and would read them while washing her face. “Buy milk, noodles, take out the trash, pick us up from school.” And sometimes we wrote her name, our names, our address on her arms. My sister liked writing on her.
Once, we wrote down random things. Dad had gone to Mendoza to contact ex-colleagues for possible work. A friend of his was driving the whole night and they planned to return in a few days. Our aunt, Dad’s sister, had come to watch us but her boyfriend kept her busy for long stretches in the entryway to the house. She put on a long flowered dress and Paola and I watched as he flirted with her.
Mom sat on her patio chair, put her feet on the table, and turned on the radio. Paola danced. It was hot and we told her it was her birthday. We wrote on her arm: the 15th of March of 1993 Mom’s birthday. She cried, she said that Dad had gone to the beach without us and he hadn’t even called, there was no party or cake, and we were cruel. We got scared and went to look for our aunt.
The next morning she woke me up. She was sitting on the bed beside me. When she looked at me she said that, when I figured it out, it would disappoint me.
“What will, Mom?”
“What we see are dead stars, dead for centuries, that keep on shining.”
