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Constitución isn’t easy, and it’s beautiful: all those once-luxurious alcoves, like abandoned temples now occupied by unbelievers who don’t even know that inside those walls hymns to old gods once rang out.
Maybe I wasn’t the princess in her castle; maybe I was a madwoman locked in her tower.
We did it at the table and also off the mirror in Roxana’s bedroom; she placed it right in the middle and we all sat around it, as if the mirror were a lake where we lowered our heads to drink, and the stained walls with their peeling paint were our forest.
There were a lot of people in the house, lots of strangers, as tends to be the case in drug houses: those people whose faces are half seen in a dream as they take beer from the fridge and vomit into the toilet and sometimes steal the key or make some generous gesture, like springing for more drinks when the party is about to end. The acid was like a delicate electric charge.
Entering through the rusty gate was horrible. I don’t remember it that way just because of what happened later. I’m sure of what I felt then, at that precise moment. It was cold in the yard. And the grass looked burned. Razed. It was yellow and short: not one green weed. Not a single plant. There was an infernal drought in that yard, and it was also winter there. And the house buzzed; it buzzed like a hoarse mosquito, like a fat fly. It vibrated. I didn’t run away because I didn’t want my brother and Adela to make fun of me, but I felt like fleeing home, to my mother, to tell her: Yes, you’re
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I remember I heard them say “hell,” not “shell.” The house is a hell, I heard.
The Runt was different. He was strange. He had no motive besides desire, and he seemed like some kind of metaphor, the dark side of proud turn-of-the-century Argentina. He was a foretaste of evils to come, a warning that there was much more to the country than palaces and estates; he was a slap in the face to the provincialism of the Argentine elites who worshipped Europe and believed only good things could come from the magnificent and yearned-for old country.
“We all make mistakes,” she told me. “The important thing is to fix them.” “And how does this get fixed?” “Babe, death is the only problem without a solution.”
Paula loved her mother-in-law for things like that: for how she didn’t stay too long when she visited, how she never criticized except when asked for her opinion, how she knew how to help without overacting.
Miguel did what Paula feared most. “You’re crazy,” he said, and went downstairs.
A boy who was hard like a war veteran—worse, because he lacked a veteran’s pride—and who spoke a deep dialect understood only by the other children and some social workers more experienced than her.
But she wasn’t dreaming. You don’t feel pain in dreams.
The girl had an addict’s dilated pupils, and in the half-light of the office, her eyes looked completely black, like a carrion insect’s.
At forty years old, Marina Pinat was in good shape; she went jogging every morning and the court employees whispered that she was “well-preserved” for her age. She detested those murmurings; she wasn’t flattered, they offended her. She didn’t want to be beautiful, she wanted to be strong and razor sharp.
Internet in the nineties was a white cable that went from my computer to the phone jack on the other side of the house. My Internet friends felt real, and I got anxious when the connection or the electricity went out and I couldn’t meet them to talk about symbolism, glam rock, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Manic Street Preachers, English occultists, Latin American dictatorships.
But I’d rather forget them because forgetting people you only knew in words is odd; when they existed they were more intense than people in real life, and now they’re more distant than strangers.
was a complex subject to report on, they said, because on one hand it was necessary to sound the alarm about the femicides, and on the other hand the reports had a ripple effect, similar to what happens among teenagers with suicide.
“Burnings are the work of men. They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die; we’re going to flaunt our scars.”
Psychiatry is really expensive in Yankeeland, and the exchange rate works for them here. Plus, we have better mental health professionals. They don’t know anything in the U.S. They just load you up with drugs, end of story.”
