Elena Knows

by Claudia Piñeiro

You were never truly together with one you loved until the person in question was dead and actually inside you.

And she wonders if Parkinson’s is masculine or feminine, because even though the name sounds masculine it’s still an illness, and an illness is something feminine.

They argued. Always, every afternoon. About anything. The topic was unimportant, what mattered was their chosen mode of communicating. Arguments

They were two hopeless creatures, two losers in love, or not even, two lonely people who had never even entered the game, who had contented themselves with watching from the stands.

memory for details, Elena knows, is only for the brave, and being cowardly or brave is not something one can choose.

She chose the cheapest wooden casket. Not only because she’s never had much money but so that Rita would rot quickly.

They pick fancy caskets just to show off, she thinks, why would they do it otherwise, if they know neither the coffin nor what’s inside it are destined to last but to rot, to be eaten by worms, both the wood and that body that no longer holds the person it was, a body that no longer belongs to anyone, like an empty bag, incomplete, a pod without seeds.

But Elena is not astray. Elena knows. She waits. With her bowed head and her shuffling feet, without seeing the road or what it will bring. She doesn’t go astray, even if she sometimes wanders.

Is she still a mother now that she doesn’t have a child? If it had been her who’d died, Rita would have been an orphan. What name does she have now that she’s childless? Has Rita’s death erased everything she was?

Her illness didn’t erase it. Being a mother, Elena knows, isn’t changed by any illness even if it keeps you from being able to put on a jacket, or freezes your feet so that you can’t move, or forces you to live with your head down, but could Rita’s death have taken not only her daughter’s body but also the word that names what she, Elena, is?

was raining, Father. If you keep talking about the rain, Elena, I’m going to have to conclude that you’re committing the sin of arrogance. What are you saying I’m committing? Pride and arrogance, to think that you know everything, even when the facts show something else. But isn’t that what you and your church teach every day? We teach the word of God. Appropriating the word of God is the greatest act of arrogance, Father, pure arrogance.

Am I a mother, Father? Why would you doubt it? What name do you give to a woman with a dead child? I’m not a widow, I’m not an orphan, what am I?

Elena walked out onto Ramsay street crying, when she got into Roberto Almada’s car he asked her, What’s wrong Elena, why are you crying? They treated me kindly, son, she said, and couldn’t say anything more.

Bésame mucho, the song goes and the driver echoes it, como si fuera esta noche la última vez.

That afternoon, Rita, who was not a mother and never would be, forced another woman to become one, applying the dogma she’d learned to another woman’s body.

People like your daughter, who didn’t even know me, your daughter who didn’t have the nerve to become a mother herself but who treated my body as if it were hers to use, just like you, today, you didn’t come here to settle a debt but to commit the same crime all over again twenty years later. You came here to use my body.

People confuse thinking with knowing, they let themselves confuse the two.

wouldn’t have ever known I was capable of doing such a thing until my menstruation stopped and the lab test came back positive. What test could life have placed in front of your daughter to make her do something she never thought she’d do? What could’ve made her decide she didn’t mind going to a church on a day like that? What could’ve been so terrible that she preferred to walk through the thunder and lightning she believed could kill her? Maybe she wanted the very thing she’d been so scared of before, for a bolt of lightning to split her in two. And when it didn’t happen, when she got there and realised it was all a lie, that she was soaking wet but still alive, she chose to climb the tower, tie the kind of knot she’d never thought she knew how to tie, put the rope around her neck, and hang herself.

him. I do want to live, you know? In spite of this body, in spite of my dead daughter, Elena says, crying, I still choose to live, is that arrogance? Not long ago I was told I was arrogant. Don’t keep the names other people give you, Elena.