Ariana Harwicz
Die, My Love
Translated by
Sarah Moses & Carolina Orloff
I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular. Behind me, against the backdrop of a house somewhere between dilapidated and homely, I could hear the voices of my son and my husband. Both of them naked. Both of them splashing around in the blue paddling pool, the water thirty-five degrees. It was the Sunday before a bank holiday. I was a few steps away, hidden in the underbrush. Spying on them. How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife in her hand, be the mother and wife of those two individuals? What was I going to do? I burrowed deeper into the ground, hiding my body. I wasn’t going to kill them. I dropped the knife and went to hang out the washing like nothing had happened. I carefully pegged the socks to the line, my baby’s and my man’s. Their underwear and shirts. I looked at myself and saw an ignorant country bumpkin hanging out the laundry and drying her hands on her skirt before returning to the kitchen. They had no idea. Hanging out the clothes had been a success. I lay back down among the tree trunks. They’re already chopping wood for the cold season. People here prepare for winter like animals. Nothing distinguishes us from them. Take me, an educated woman, a university graduate – I’m more of an animal than those half-dead foxes, their faces stained red, sticks propping their mouths wide open. My neighbour Frank a few miles away, the oldest of seven siblings, fired a shotgun into his own arse last Christmas. What a nice surprise it must have been for his pack of kids. But the guy was just following tradition. Suicide by shotgun for his great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather and father. At the very least, you could say it was his turn. And me? A normal woman from a normal family, but an eccentric, a deviant, the mother of one child and with another, though who knows at this point, on its way. I slowly slide a hand into my knickers. And to think I’m the person in charge of my son’s education. My husband calls me over for a beer under the pergola, asks, Blonde or dark? The baby appears to have shat himself and I’ve got to go and buy his cake. I bet other mothers would bake one themselves. Six months, apparently it’s not the same as five or seven. Whenever I look at him I think of my husband behind me, about to ejaculate on my back, but instead turning me over suddenly and coming inside me. If this hadn’t happened, if I’d closed my legs, if I’d grabbed his dick, I wouldn’t have to go to the bakery for cream cake or chocolate cake and candles, half a year already. The moment other women give birth they usually say, I can’t imagine my life without him now, it’s as though he’s always been here. Pfff. I’m coming, baby! I want to scream, but I sink deeper into the cracked earth. I want to snarl, to howl, but instead I let the mosquitoes bite me, let them savour my sweetened skin. The sun deflects the silvery reflection of the knife back to me and I’m blinded. The sky is red, violet, trembling. I hear them looking for me, the filthy baby and the naked husband. Ma-ma, da-da, poo-poo. My baby’s the one who does the talking, all night long. Co-co-na-na-ba-ba. There they are. I leave the knife in the scorched pasture, hoping that when I find it next it’ll look like a scalpel, a feather, a pin. I get up, hot and bothered by the tingling between my legs. Blonde or dark? Whatever you’re having, my love. We’re one of those couples who mechanise the word ‘love’, who use it even when they despise each other. I never want to see you again, my love. I’m coming, I say, and I’m a fraud of a country woman with a red polka-dot skirt and split ends. I’ll have a blonde beer, I say in my foreign accent. I’m a woman who’s let herself go, has a mouth full of cavities and no longer reads. Read, you idiot, I tell myself, read one full sentence from start to finish. Here we are, all three of us together for a family portrait. We toast the happiness of our baby and drink the beers, my son in his high chair chewing on a leaf. I put a finger in his mouth and he shrieks, biting me with his gums. My husband wants to plant a tree for the baby’s long life and I don’t know what to say, I just smile like a fool. Does he have any idea? So many healthy and beautiful women in the area, and he ended up falling for me. A nutcase. A foreigner. Someone beyond repair. Muggy out today, isn’t it? Seems it’ll last a while, he says. I take long swigs from the bottle, breathing through my nose and wishing, quite simply, that I were dead.
I’m in my son’s room, lit by a faint blue light. I watch my nipple satisfying him with every slurp. My husband – I’ve got used to calling him that by now – is smoking outside. I hear the puffs at regular intervals, fffff, fffff. The baby chokes on my milk and I lean him against my chest to burp him, ridding him of the air that gets trapped in his stomach, air from my milk, air from my chest, air from my insides. After he burps he becomes a dead weight. His arms hang by his sides, his eyelids thicken, his breath grows sluggish. I lay him down, wrapped up in my scarf, and while I swaddle him: Isadora Duncan. Who gets which life. What body do you end up in. I can no longer hear the smoke slipping between my husband’s teeth. I throw out the heavy nappy and walk towards the patio doors. I always toy with the idea of going right through the glass and cutting every inch of my body, always aiming to pass through my own shadow. But just before I hit it, I stop myself and slide it open. Outside, my husband is pissing a stream the colour of the mate he was drinking earlier. I can see the hot, greenish-yellow drops cascading down the garage’s corrugated metal. He turns and smiles at me with his hands on his limp, dripping member. Want to go and look at the stars? I’ve never been able to make him understand that I’m not interested in stars. That I’m not interested in what’s in the sky. That I don’t care about the telescope he’s now struggling to carry to the bottom of the garden, where it slopes down into the woods. I don’t want to count the stars, look at their shapes, see which is the brightest, learn why they’re called Orion’s Belt or the String of Pearls or the Big Dipper. He busies himself setting up his precious three-legged device. My husband’s an enthusiastic kind of guy. Do you see the String of Pearls? Yes, dear. Look at those bright twinkling specks, don’t you just want to eat them with your eyes? They’re so tiny, and to think they’re actually huge masses. No, I thought, I don’t like illusions. Not optical illusions or auditory illusions, not sensory, olfactory or cerebral illusions. I don’t like black objects in the sky. They make me feel alive, he says. Look at that constellation and try to jump from one star to the next as though you were crossing a rickety wooden bridge… And look at that face, it’s like a skeleton! His elation hurts me. He hugs me, puts his arms around my shoulders. It’s been months since we’ve hugged. We don’t hold hands either, we’re always pushing the buggy or carrying the baby instead. Do you see the Great Bear and the Little Bear? Yep, I say, and hug him, but my eyes linger in the starless space, in the absence of light. We face the threat of the dark sky above us, every night… A meteor! he shouted, letting go of me in his excitement. I missed it. You have to pay attention, you can only see them when they’re close to the sun, and only for a split second. Didn’t you see its trail? he asked, annoyed. Then he lit a cigarette and said, It’s about getting your bearings in the sky. Look at that group of stars and follow an imaginary line, okay? It’s no more difficult than reading a road map and following the dotted line so you don’t end up in the sea. I thought the child might be crying, but I hear him crying every night and when I go to him I find absolute silence, as though a few seconds of his cries had been recorded and were playing back of their own accord. But sometimes I don’t hear anything. I’m sitting on the sofa, a few feet from his room, watching a programme about wife-swapping or super-nannies, or painting my nails, when my dear husband appears, his underwear hanging low, and says: Why won’t he stop crying? What does he want? You’re his mother, you should know. But I don’t know, I say, I haven’t the faintest idea… Don’t you find the moon relaxing? Go on up to the lens, take a look at the moon right now because it won’t be the same tomorrow. Those grey craters, they make me want to eat it, smoke it even! I did look at the moon, but all I could think about was the sound of the baby crying, my body secreting, impatient for him to stop. The advice I was given by that young social worker who came to our house when my mother-in-law called, alarmed: ‘If your child cries so much that you feel like you can’t go on and you’re about to lose control, get out of there. Leave the child with someone else and find a place where you can regain composure and calm. If you’re alone and there’s no one to leave him with, go somewhere else anyway. Leave the child in a safe place and take a few steps back.’ If only there were santiguadoras living in these parts,