An hour had gone by and still God had not spoken. He looked on in silence as He always does. I thought that maybe my father could give me an answer that made sense. I looked into his eyes but they were quite dry now, and he had adopted his customary expression of unequivocal hardness. He was not lost any more, there was no sign of that child in his face. He was in control again. He took Berta and me by the hands and led us outside.
I turned for one last glance at my mother, to engrave her image on my mind. She remained unmoving, with her eyes open, expressionless and pale.
‘Everything’s going to turn out fine,’ said Papá.
But I was tormented by uncertainty.
I left the hospital without shedding a single tear.
In the following weeks, our lives became more difficult.
My father tried to cook without having the faintest idea how. He left long thick hairs on the pork, which made us want to run out and throw it to the dogs; he boiled the rice until it resembled a paste that might have been useful for building walls; the beans were watery and hard enough to break a tooth. But we dared not complain. We took deep breaths and swallowed the entire culinary experiment almost through apathy.
Our only preoccupation was the question none of us were allowed to ask out loud.
Would Mamá get better?
We could not imagine life without her and our sadness seemed to permeate the air of the apartment. My sisters cried every day. I always tried to hold out, but the image of her that was etched on my mind would tighten its sinister grip and then I would dissolve into tears.
We tried to carry on: the old man cooking and working, my sisters going to class, and me getting up at five in the morning to attend ballet school. Even when I made it there on time, however, I found it almost impossible to concentrate – all I could think about was Mamá.
One day, Lupe announced that we were going to learn a new step and so, with both hands on the barre, she showed us how to execute the assemblé. She explained how the step began from fifth position, you did a plié, one leg came out, scraping the floor, then you jumped and landed back on two legs again. She said that this step could also be performed en dedans, which meant that you would start with the front leg and move it backwards, but that today we would just do it en dehors, which meant starting with the back leg and moving it forwards. We spread ourselves out, leaving sufficient space to move without hitting the person next to us. I placed myself just in front of the iron bracket that held the barre up without noticing that the barre was loose. On Lupe’s command we jumped. The barre fell to the ground with an enormous crash and the iron bracket hit me on the neck leaving a large gash. It happened so quickly that I did not even have time to cry. Within three seconds the flesh was livid and blood was oozing out.
Everybody screamed. My classmates around me all had the expression people wear after there has been an accident with lots of blood – a mixture of ghoulishness and curiosity. They covered their mouths with their hands, but kept their eyes open, not wanting to miss even the slightest detail. The blood kept flowing, completely saturating my T-shirt. Lupe took me to reception, and from there I was taken to a nearby emergency clinic. On the way there, I wished I could be admitted to the same hospital as my mother. We would be able to look after each other. I would visit her every day and make sure that the nurses were tending carefully to the wound in her head so it did not get infected. I would feed her mouthfuls of food and wash her face with a damp cloth. But halfway through my daydream I began to worry that maybe she would not recognize me – she would open her eyes and they would roam around the room without stopping – and then I prayed that my wish would not be granted after all.
At the clinic, they gave me a tetanus injection and disinfected the wound with alcohol. Fortunately it was not too deep and would not need stitches. Stitches terrify me. The smell of medicine terrified me too. It brought back the image of my mother in her hospital bed and I was very frightened. Everything in my life seemed to be going wrong. First, my parents force me to do something I hate and stop me from becoming a sportsman; then my mother goes and has a brain haemorrhage; and then I gash open my neck and nearly bleed to death …
The doctor interrupted my morbid thoughts and told me that everything would be fine and that I should rest for two weeks. He repeated the word rest several times and explained to me that it meant staying in the house, in bed and not going outside. He kept on repeating it to me very slowly as if I had learning difficulties.
‘Don’t forget, rest means complete rest.’
I could see he thought he was being funny.
He finished cleaning the wound and applied a small dressing. I returned to L and 19 to collect my things. I was not at all sorry to have a break away from the world of ballet. I was tired of getting up at five o’clock every morning and struggling with the buses. My classmates’ parents always collected them, but nobody was ever there to take me home at the end of the day. I wanted to get out of this monotonous existence as soon as possible, which was looking less likely since someone had had the bright idea of telling my father his son had talent. I did not know how I was ever going to convince him to let me stop now, but I decided to have one last try.
With nothing else to do while I recuperated from my injury, I waited, like a lion watching his prey, for the right moment to speak to him.
One afternoon, the old man arrived home early, in an apparently good mood. He was laughing and humming off key the tune to a Benny Moré song that he liked.
Now was my chance. I breathed in deeply, hid my fear with determination and went to meet him.
‘Papito, I need to tell you something.’
‘Go on then, I’m listening.’
My father continued humming the song.
‘I want to be a normal boy, not a dancer.’
The humming ceased.
Benny Moré was abandoned as my father adopted the murderous expression that scared me so much.
Everything happened so quickly that I did not have time to take in the peril of my situation. He grabbed me by one ear, dragged me over to the window and pointed to a group of boys outside in the street.
‘Are they what you call normal?’ he screamed. ‘Those layabouts and delinquents? They’re not normal, and you’re not going to end up like them! I’ll kill you first!’
He let go of me abruptly and walked towards the kitchen muttering that I was intolerable. I stayed frozen where I was, in considerable pain. My father had claws instead of nails and he had stuck them right into me. I was becoming accustomed to a whole lot of new pain. I took a few deep breaths and tried to think about something pleasurable. I needed to forget the pain in my ear. It was just a scratch with red blood seeping from it. Already I was learning that if I thought of myself as a tragic victim of circumstance I would suffer more. I wiped the blood away and told myself, ‘Relax, nothing matters, nothing matters.’
The end of the school year was in sight, and with it my first stage appearance. We had paraded before, but that was only walking. The moment to show that we really knew how to dance was fast approaching. The girls in my class were dieting. All were skinny and scrawny already, but according to them they had to watch their figures. I found this quite convenient because it meant that there was