Juan José Saer: Scars

On April twenty-third it broke out. It rained all day and neither of us went out that night. My mother, who was typically acting like a panther, that night seemed like that special kind of panther who has tasted human flesh and likes it. I always let her do whatever she wanted, but what I could never stand was her walking half-naked around the house, especially when strangers were around. A certain scruple had always existed between us, meanwhile, regarding the gin and cigarettes. The unspoken agreement, especially since my old man died, was that we each had our own bottle of gin and each our own pack of cigarettes, and whoever ran out simply went and bought some. And so around eleven, when it’s raining like crazy, I go to the fridge looking for my gin, bought the day before and which I hadn’t drank more than two fingers from, and realize she took it. I walk slowly down the hall (it was raining buckets), not annoyed at all, just the opposite, and I stop at her bedroom door and knock.

— Who is it? my mother asks, as if fifty people were living with us.

— Me, Ángel, I say.

She hesitates a second, then says to come in. She is laying in bed, reading a comic book, a cigarette hanging from her lips, a glass, the bottle of gin, and an ice bucket on the night table. I’ve seen a bunch of trash heaps, and every one has seemed cleaner than my mother’s bedroom. If she had been naked, the impression would have been more seemly than the one you got from the underwear she had on. Less than three fingers were left in the bottle.

— Mamá, I say. Would it put you out if I poured myself a little glass of gin? That’s the last bottle.

— I thought we agreed that if you need gin you go out and buy a bottle, my mother says.

— That’s true, I say. But don’t you think that with this weather and how late it is that it would be kind of problematic to go out and find a store where you can buy a bottle of gin?

— You should have thought of that earlier, my mother says. It’s not my problem.

— That’s fine, I say. I’m only asking you for a little glass of gin and to try to look away when you talk to me because I could faint any second.

— I hope you’re not trying to say I’m drunk, my mother says.

— I’m not trying to say anything.

— Besides, my mother says, I never liked you drinking.

— Well I never liked my mother letting me see her practically naked, I say.

— I’m not the one walking around naked all night in the middle of the courtyard, my mother says.

— In the dark and when I’m alone, I can walk around however I like. It would be something else entirely if I knew people were watching, I say.

My mother pretends not to hear me and goes back to reading her comic book. Eventually she looks up and realizes I’m still there.

— Still raining? she asks.

— Yes, I say.

My mother looks at me a second, blinking. She puts out the cigarette, stretching her arm out to the night table, sitting up slightly, without taking her eyes off me.

— Besides, I say, staring back. It’s my bottle. You drank my bottle.

I see her smooth, white face go suddenly red, but she doesn’t move for a few more seconds. Then she leaves the comic book on the bed and gets up, very slowly, without looking away. She walks toward me, not furious or hurrying, staring me in the eyes, and stops half a meter away. The flush that had stained her face gradually vanishes. My mother raises her hand and slaps me twice, once on each cheek, then stands there, staring, and probably the two red stains are now on my cheeks instead of hers, as though we traded them. After a few unblinking seconds I raise my hand and slap her twice, once on each cheek. The red stains, now disappearing on my cheeks, appear on hers. Tears gush out. She’s not crying — they started gushing for some inexplicable physiological reason, because no one who is crying could have such a hard look on their face. A pale circle forms around her pressed lips.

— I should have died instead of your father so I wouldn’t have to see this, my mother says.

— Not just this, I say. Any way you look at it, it would have been more convenient.

She slapped me again, and I went into a rage and started hitting and pushing her, threw her on the bed, took off my belt, and didn’t stop hitting her until she started screaming. She didn’t even try to defend herself. When I saw all she was doing was crying, I calmly put my belt back on and poured myself a glass of gin, careful to leave some for her, then dropped two ice cubes in the glass and went back to my room.

I couldn’t concentrate on reading anymore because I had said one unfair thing to her, about the supposed convenience of her dying instead of my father. That was unfair any way you looked at it because my father was so insignificant a man that if the smallest ant in the world died instead of him it would have made more of an impact. He was a middle manager in a public office because he was too stupid to have a regular worker’s responsibility and too weak a personality to be able to give anyone real orders. He didn’t smoke or drink, never felt disillusioned or ever experienced any sort of happiness he might take pleasure in remembering. He had dodged military service through some defect in his sight (he told the story fifty times a day, in such detail and with such enthusiasm that you would have thought he was the general San Martín recalling the battle of San Lorenzo), but it wasn’t such a bad defect that he was prescribed glasses. He was thin but not too thin; quiet but not too quiet; he had good handwriting but sometimes his hands shook. He didn’t have a favorite dish, and if someone asked his opinion on anything at all, he invariably responded, Some people understand those things — not me . But there wasn’t an ounce of humility in his response, rather an absolute conviction that it was the truth. And so when my father died, the only change in the house was that there was now air in the space he had occupied in the bed (for the last six months he hadn’t gotten up). I think that was the most noteworthy change he ever produced: to make space. To open up 1.76 meters (because he was also average height) of vertical space and a certain width so that what he displaced with his body could be reconverted into a breathable substance for the benefit of humanity.

When I went to the paper the next day and found out that Tomatis had gone to Buenos Aires and wouldn’t be back until the twenty-ninth, I felt bad. I had planned to tell him everything. I don’t really know why, since Tomatis rarely seemed to be listening, but still he was the person I trusted the most, and he might understand me having hit my mother. She, meanwhile, stopped speaking to me, and when she had to she used the formal usted . We barely ever saw each other, and now that it was cooler out (it rained almost every day in April, which made it so I could copy the same weather information several times without anyone noticing) my mother didn’t walk around half-naked anymore, like she often did in the summer. Truth is she would put on these loud sweaters that would have been too tight on a fakir, but that was the way she liked to dress and I had to let her even though I didn’t like it. She kept going out at night, and when she came back would go to bed without coming to my room. I would get up late and go to the paper at ten in the morning and wouldn’t come back until ten at night, and sometimes not even then. I remember the fight over the gin happened on April twenty-third because the next day I turned eighteen. I asked for an advance from the management and went to eat a steak. I barely touched the food, but I drank a liter of wine. I wasn’t angry or anything, just wanted to drink some wine, for the fun of drinking it and for the comfort of knowing that I could always have my cup full, to empty in one swallow, and if the bottle kicked I could call the waiter and ask for another from the long rows stacked up on the walls — all that made me feel amazingly good. Then I hesitated between the movies and a hooker and chose the hooker. I didn’t have to wait or anything. They showed me through an entrance where there wasn’t anything but a wooden bench and a standing coat rack, then down a corridor, and finally they put me in a kitchen with two women in it. Both were blonde. They were drinking mate and didn’t even get up. One had a comic book in her hands. I picked the other one. They were so alike (both had on black pants and a white sweater) that now I’m not sure if in fact I went to bed with the one with the comic book or the other one because they might have passed the comic book from one to the other without me noticing, or the one with the comic could have left it on the table as I came in and the other one grabbed it before I noticed. In any case, my selection wasn’t so precise, since I only made a gesture with my head in the direction of the one I thought didn’t have the comic book, and I’m not even sure anymore which one of them got up first. The one who led me away — the one with the comic, or the other one, I’m not sure anymore — took me through a courtyard into a room filled with what I remember as the odor of Creolin, and which was so clean and organized that immediately I thought of my mother’s, by contrast. When she got naked I saw she had the mark of an operation on her belly, a half-moon scar, crisscrossed by the lines from the stitches. I went to bed with her and then went home to sleep.