—Don’t bunch up your clothes; I’m not your maid and don’t need to be taking care of it. You’re old enough to know how to treat your clothes.
I wouldn’t say a thing and walked back to my room. She glared at me the whole way until I sat down, picked up the book, and started reading again. She went back to her room and less than half an hour later she was back.
—Are you going to sit in there all day? she would say. All that garbage you have in your head.
—Garbage? Head? I would ask, confused, looking up at her from the book, not understanding a thing.
She would look back furiously, the cigarette hanging from her lips.
—Do whatever you want, just don’t play stupid with me, she would say.
Then she would disappear again. One afternoon she hit me for saying, as gently as possible, that I didn’t like her answering for the milkman in her bra. She walked straight up and slapped me. I grabbed her arm so hard, to stop her from hitting me twice, that I cut her with a fingernail and she bled—it left a black mark for like a month. When I saw the blood stain on her round, white arm, I let go and let her hit me until she got tired. She went at it until she had enough and then shut herself in her room crying and didn’t come out until that night. All day I felt fine, and around ten she brought me a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of wine and then disappeared. She was dressed to go out, in a yellow dress that fit her like crazy. She didn’t even look twice when she saw that I was using my white shirt as a towel to dry my sweat off.
Fall came at the end of March, though on the twenty-first I made a small comment in the weather report about the change in temperature, the odor of fluttering mothballs, the golden leaves falling from the trees and forming a crinkling carpet on the ground. When he read it, Tomatis cracked up laughing and asked if I had been reading the modernistas again. In the fall the nights under the stars and the glass of gin in the courtyard stopped, and instead I sat in my room, in an armchair, under a lamp, until the morning. My mother came in at dawn, clicking her high heel shoes on the tiles in the corridor. And it didn’t matter if I heard her come in—she actually seemed to have some interest in me hearing her. Sometimes she even looked in my room and said, with some hostility: Oh, you’re still reading, or, It’s obvious he’s not the one who pays the electric bill, and then disappeared. I knew when my mother was about to get home; first I would hear the sound of a car stop and then start up and drive off. Then the sound of the door to the street and then the high heels clicking. Only once did she come in my room after having been in the bathroom then gone to her room and even turned off the light. I was sure she was in bed, and I was completely absorbed in reading The Long Goodbye, which I was reading for the third time in a little over a month, when suddenly the door opened and my mother appeared, in a nightgown, barefoot. The expression on her face was a mix of resignation and distress. She looked at me a second, and just to say something she muttered, Don’t read so much, you’ll get sick in the head. Then she closed the door and left. I had jumped up, startled. Luckily, I was fully dressed.
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