Two Stories

Translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude

The Solitude of Bats


Until she died, none of us knew that Aunt Victoria was the only one who went to visit the dead. We and the rest of the family accompanied her in the ritual of the wake, the procession and the niche but after that we forgot about our aunt and all the others.

The cemetery is a gloomy park. Not because it’s full of bodies. It’s gloomy because the neglect is obvious. The overgrown grass on the paths and tombs, in the crypts. It’s very quiet except for the wind rustling through the willows or the birds shifting lazily on the branches. Sometimes pigeons perch on the cement and plaster with their tumorous feet and leave their shit behind as though in pity. They don’t leave much on the faces of angels or crosses. They’re not looking for food, they’re just passing through. You see a sparrow occasionally. Flighty, confused. Because of the neglect. Birds follow the light, food and heat. Birds don’t prevent decay.

Aunt Victoria kept up an old tradition; she took care of the dead. She’d go to paint on Saturdays. She bought carnations. She’d take me along when I was left at her house, which is how I know that she put one in each of the plastic recipients for flowers, and poured in tap water from a little bottle. The carnations smelled of Aunt Victoria. Her clothes and her tablecloth, wardrobe, and patio, her yellow cat and her widowhood. To be a widow was a serious thing. Rather than the death of a husband, I thought that what all widows shared was that composure, that non-negotiable adulthood, that rigor. Aunt Victoria took me on walks through the cemetery. These walks weren’t sad, quite the contrary, but there was a silence that, without our having agreed upon it or it having been imposed upon us, we were happy to respect. She’d point things out, telling me where to look. A cat sometimes, others an interesting statue. Always, every time, the bat cave.

It wasn’t a cave. It was more an entrance to a dark forest. At my age, at my height, it looked like a portal that had opened up among the trees. But without saying anything out loud, that was what I called it: the bat cave. We never went inside. Instead, I imagined it.

It was cold and dark and full of bright little eyes. Like everyone else, I associated bats with monsters and the night. I thought that they were what I’d heard stories about: an enormous, voracious burst of blackness, fangs stained with blood, mythological creatures that thrived on fear. I had also convinced myself that carnations kept bats away so that they didn’t interfere with the rest of the dead.

I don’t remember any conversations from those afternoons, because there weren’t any. But I do know that Aunt Victoria talked to me about rest. She didn’t mention death, or bodies or coffins. She said that this was somewhere where one found rest. And that was how I understood death. Unchanging repose, a sleep shared by everyone who had tired of being in this world. It was my aunt, silence, neglect, the gloomy park with barely any birds, red and white carnations. The serenity with which my aunt lit candles. New and used, even though there was no one to see them: they filled the crypt with small, flickering flames. I couldn’t understand why the dead would need light.

Until she died, none of us knew that Aunt Victoria would be the last of the family to take care of the dead. She lost weight when she got sick. I only saw her three or four times like that. People told us to listen to her with love but not too hard: she was delirious. From what I could make out later, she would have liked for me to get a taste for it. She didn’t mention the ritual directly, or the cemetery, or the flowers and candles, or keeping up the tradition, but she did tell me that I was wrong about bats.

They were small, hairy and ugly. They didn’t have the grace we imagine in a vampire. Which is why they were left alone. The truth was that they didn’t bother anyone. People were afraid of them because, when everyone had gone to bed, they came out of their caves. She told me that nocturnal creatures were necessary, they got rid of pests at night. She told me that bats knew how to face head on what others avoided, that they didn’t need the sun because they had a radar in their head, that people were scared of them because they were blind but their eyes glowed.

The day that Aunt Victoria died, I wasn’t at her house. My mom was there. I expected her to say something more, something better, something more significant, but my mom said that the last thing she heard Victoria say before she never woke again was to leave her alone.

The Giraffe


You don’t have to invent other worlds. Somewhere on this planet of shiny phones and dressed salads, maps of oceans and brass doorknobs, a giraffe is greedily separating seeds from a pod with its violet tongue.

The catechism teacher threw wild animals in our faces like cream pies. A universe created at random, a Godless world, would never be able to create something as complex as a leopard, a rhinoceros, or a giraffe. Nothing in the scientific imagination, or science fiction, can match the creativity, delirium and precision of the Divine Plan. The catechism teacher presented us small children, still testing out our bodies, the milky sweet flavor of our mothers still lingering on the tongue, with the undeniable truth of his faith: God was responsible for the mystery in all its forms, in all its detail and precision. Our job, in the short time that was granted to us by his grace, was to admire its unfathomable greatness.

What the catechism teacher said to us in church, like everything else before I turned seven, had coagulated into a gray ball of fluff stuck to the floor of a pitch black basement buried deep in my memory. A patch of nothing, a crude lamp dangling from the ceiling of a tool shed in the middle of a field.

The voice of the man with gelled hair, short-sleeved shirts and a straight tie made no sound in my head. He was so American, such a Jehovah’s Witness, such a car salesman. The way he paced up and down at the front of the classroom, his leather shoes squeaking, that rigid waddle. I left him there at the back of the dark basement with the rest of the things I remembered about myself at that age: a little girl at kindergarten, afternoons in a playground that smelled of soup and deep frying, the constant nausea, the fear that I’d never see mom and dad again, the urge to jump over the white wall. But the catechism teacher shook off my forgetfulness, climbed an invisible staircase, and opened the door with a cry. Suddenly lit clearly, he stepped out, gesturing in his familiar way, on that afternoon at the movies a few years later, when the giraffe appeared once more.

It was definitely a Saturday. We were at the Regina, just us and the boys, each with their paper bag of popcorn and bottle of Coke or Fanta. The whole afternoon: three movies. The first was the shortest, serious cartoons with classical plots; the second was science fiction or adventure but badly made, confusing. The third was another cartoon, this time the kind you see on TV: Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, occasionally Mighty Mouse (who I loved). In Arrecifes, our parents didn’t have anywhere else to put us where we would be out of the sun and they knew we’d be safe; not the street or the countryside. Only the school and the cinema had walls.

But we still roamed freely around the carpeted halls. The eldest went into the bathrooms to smoke. We knew the place was ours. There were a couple of older kids in purple jackets with torches, there was the man who sold us popcorn, sodas and chocolate peanuts, and other adults in shirts and dark pants, but they left us alone. They were bored to be there. Unless someone broke a nose or got into a fight, they didn’t care if we smoked, listened to the radio, or chatted with each other about the same old things. Everyone at the cinema: the parents outside, us indoors, kids and adults each doing their own thing, passing the time.

In the bathrooms, they’d set up the mirrors to look like dressing rooms, framed in round yellow light bulbs. The girls liked to go into the bathrooms to look at ourselves in these Hollywood mirrors and make faces. We’d flutter our eyes and say lines we remembered from the movies: “Life would be so wonderful, if only we knew what to do with it”; “When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it any place.”

In one of the mirrors of the Regina bathroom, I saw the giraffe for the first time. The hooves under the door of a cubicle, the long neck forced to bend against the ceiling. She snorted and brayed, honking in a way I didn’t know giraffes did. She indicated a place, a path, and urged me to get moving. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t need to tell myself that I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t need to tell myself anything. I followed her.

She walked through the reflections in the mirrors and tiles and disappeared in opaque surfaces. A reverse shadow, a trotting animal light.

She led me to a new door. In a corner of a corner. A man and a girl were going inside, there was something shady going on, they locked it after them. The giraffe led me on down another long hallway until we both came to a halt. She nodded toward a group of people. I looked for an adult and found one in a white uniform topped with a sailor cap, their shirt stained with coffee and sweet crumbs. I told him what I’d seen. The door, the man, the girl, the key. The adult thanked me, told me not to worry and that I could go back to the cinema. He stood guard at the door. I went back into the theater, they were showing a film about Donald Duck and squirrels. Donald was never going to get one of the nuts. The giraffe had gone.

There was another time. One afternoon. Throughout my adolescence, home was a soporific blur of sheets hanging out to dry and something cooking slowly over a blue flame on the cooktop. There was the sound of domesticated birds and large women passing jars from hand to hand. At home, when I was twelve or thirteen, every day was the same and that afternoon the only thing that made it different was mom’s cry. Uncle Gerardo and Uncle Roberto had argued over money. Whenever they got together, they fought. They were always suspicious that they weren’t getting a fair deal. I read magazines in the courtyard, rolling up my t-shirt to get some sun on my shoulders and belly. Things happened elsewhere. I could hear what they were saying but I didn’t really know what inheritance meant. I had no way of knowing whether ten thousand or a hundred thousand pesos was a lot of money. When they stopped fighting, I saw Uncle Roberto leave, swearing loudly as he slammed the door behind him. Then, between the dining room and the courtyard, I saw the giraffe standing quietly in the double glass doors. I heard my name ripple through the air, mom’s voice had broken into a scream. She was telling me to go out for help. Uncle Gerardo was dying, she needed someone to come save him, please.

Mom was in the large bedroom, pushing down with both hands on my uncle’s chest as he sprawled on the bed, dialing the number for fire, ambulance and police, and I, barefoot and sweaty, followed the giraffe to the door, ran across the alley and tracked her through the puddles in the cobbles, down the storefronts of Triunvirato, in the windows of taxis and buses, and up the stairs of a white building with a turquoise cross. I went into a large room where people were waiting on sofas and shouted for help, my Uncle Gerardo, his heart, he was dying. I looked so distraught that they didn’t laugh but the tension was palpable. They weren’t so much upset as indecisive, they didn’t know what to do with me. The giraffe and I stood still. We weren’t going to find any help here. Taking his mask from his face, the dentist explained that they didn’t respond to that kind of emergency. The dentist didn’t say “emergency,” he said “situation.” He said “dental surgery.”

When I got back, alone, without the giraffe and without help, Uncle Gerardo had died and was covered in a light blue sheet. I’d never seen a dead body so close up, so intimately.

A giraffe’s eyes are soft and a single color. They look like the flesh of a fruit, a sea creature. They can’t convey sorrow, joy, or fear, the eyes of a giraffe. When they appear in the mirror or window out of nowhere they are the point from which the rest of the animal unfolds. From out of their gaze sprout the spongy muzzle, the tiny ears and horns, the neck, spots and the skinny legs. It’s not the eyes that attract your attention like with other animals. It’s the impossible body, the cantering run and the way their alien neck is always pointing at something. Every time the giraffe has appeared, I’ve followed her. She’s taken me to a tree of poisoned mulberries, to the only beach where I saw someone drown, to an empty lot where people were skinning cats with a knife. The giraffe led me to a windowless room where they put a cloth over my mouth to anesthetize me, to the blue light of a train from which they dumped a body at night, to the place where they throw away old flowers from the cemetery. I thought, because of how I was brought up, that the giraffe was a miracle, a sign from God. I would crouch down in the cellar, suddenly lit up again, to listen to the catechism teacher telling us about the impossibility of randomness. I waited for him to speak to me, or the giraffe maybe. I followed the giraffe because she was there, because being there was part of a plan. Because we have to do something with what we have. But I grew up, and over the years, I let the urgency pass, I stopped running and stared fifty times into her eyes. I accompanied her calmly, unhurried, and saw that there was nothing in a giraffe’s eyes. Every time she appears, the giraffe looks at me the same way. Dumbly, without depth, she points to a specific horror. She sends me a warning I don’t understand either. The giraffe does what she does with what she has, what she is. Forsaken by God, she keeps on going.