Story: Never in my life

 

Never in my life

Story

Fernando Ampuero

 

Source: Literary Magazine of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico

In the silver-framed picture on my bedroom shelf, I see her walking through Plaza San Martín. It is a black-and-white photograph taken in the early 1940s. Who took it? Some itinerant photographer, no doubt; there were many of these in the squares of Lima. But the image, captured in motion, is not blurred or distorted in the slightest. It is a sharp, well-contrasted, vertically framed snapshot that records the walk of a slender eighteen-year-old girl. A girl with high heels and a loose, light dark coat over a light dress, and whose accessories—a small purse, a turban hat, a flower in the lapel of her coat, a pearl necklace—match perfectly. In other words, I am looking at an image that, in the second decade of the 21st century, is glamorous, because the fashion style in the 1940s was full of elegance and distinction. That fresh, distracted girl, who I now see as so pretty, would be my mother in a few years.

 

Mom died relatively young. She died of a heart attack caused by an electroshock in a psychiatric hospital at the age of fifty. I wrote a few lines about this in a novel, leaving open the possibility that the reader might interpret the event as fictional. It was not.

 

Mom's drama began with her first period, with a sudden pool of blood between her legs and a chemical disorder. She was diagnosed with diabetes and acute melancholy. "Manic depression," she was diagnosed.

She was hospitalized for three months and recovered.

 

Her first psychiatrist was Honorio Delgado, an illustrious doctor who corresponded with Sigmund Freud; the second, Javier Mariátegui, Honorio's favorite disciple, was the son of the Marxist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party. Both of them managed to alleviate Mom's crises with the experimental medicines of the time, which were not as good as those of today. Sometimes, if the doses were high, Mom became frantically happy; she ran around the house, laughed, played the piano and was the life of the party.

At other times, she behaved normally. I often remember her in that state: serene, affectionate, understanding.

 

When I was six, in my aunts' opinion, she was a model mother. She looked after me and pampered me as if I were the most precious child on the planet. Every three days she ordered my pyjamas to be changed, as well as the sheets and bed covers; and, at bath time, she herself bathed me with warm water, combed and groomed me, and after arranging the soft pillows at the head of the bed, which I used as a backrest during my reading, she perfumed me with the refreshing Drowa cologne.

 

When she had finished her task, she would utter joyful comments:

 

—How handsome you are! Not only are you intelligent, but you also look like a very handsome child! You look like a maharaja!

My wife believes that my strong self-esteem was born there, in those days. That people can say anything outrageous about my actions or my works and that I will remain safe, unharmed.

 

Mom, I think, gave me more cuddles than she did to my older brother. She felt guilty. I soon found out about this guilt, at thirteen, one night when, without asking permission, I went to one of my first parties with dancing and drinks, and returned home at three in the morning. Disturbed by the worry that something terrible had happened to me, Mom began to scream and my grandfather had no choice but to sedate her. Then my grandfather, who was waiting for me at the door of the house, greeted me with a mad attitude and suddenly said what everyone was hiding from me.

 

"Your mother is sick!" He raised his voice, as he rarely did. "She is a very nervous woman! It is time for you to know!"

 

“Very nervous” meant that she was on the verge of insanity. She had been crazy, actually. Apart from her brief confinement in her teens, she had been confined for a year when I was three months old, because one afternoon when I woke up crying from my nap, she approached the crib and tried to strangle me. Her hands were squeezing my neck, and her sweet gaze—she had clear green eyes—showed a well of darkness. Grandma and a housemaid stopped her. When she realized what she had done, she was afraid of going crazy again and, according to her psychiatrist, she thought that her second birth, the one that brought me into the world, was the cause of her imbalance. I also learned that she had tried to commit suicide. She tied the cord of the Lord of Miracles’ robe around her neck and hung herself from the shower; luckily, the thick iron of that old bathroom broke. Grandpa told me all this in less than three minutes. And, referring to some of her relatives, she added that the real fault came from a hereditary problem, genetic, as it would be said now ("she was born pretty but damaged"). »), and to make matters worse, she fell in love with my father («an irresponsible man»), from whom she was separated. Grandfather hated my father and would not allow him to even visit her.

 

So many revelations, apparently, did not affect me. Apparently. Anyway, my older brother raged against Grandfather; he said that I was not old enough to be aware of such sad things, and certainly not in that way. I kept quiet, or calmed them all down.

 

They put Mom to sleep for a while. And as soon as she woke up, she was an angel of sweetness again. Did she remember what had happened? Vaguely, said the psychiatrist. But some hidden impulse used to bring her closer to me, as if asking for forgiveness or trying to protect me.

 

A few months later, I became ill: I had asthma. I was choking, I felt like I was short of breath and therefore I breathed with hoarse gasps. Grandma resorted to a home remedy: toast with garlic, parsley and olive oil; the doctor advised me not to get agitated and, preferably, to stay in bed. In response, Grandpa, knowing that I was hyperactive and could get bored, brought new books: wonderful stories and novels, The Thousand and One Nights, Treasure Island, White Fang and other classics.

But the asthma did not subside. And one night, as I looked out of my bedroom window at the stars, I noticed that I was turning blue from lack of air. I got up and tried to open the window, but I couldn't, because something was stiffening the lock, so I took a small jug of water and threw it against the glass; it shattered and fresh air came in. Then, alarmed by the crash, my entire family burst through my bedroom door.

 

Everyone was irritated, of course, except my mother, who looked at me and smiled as if it were a simple prank. Was it a symptomatic smile? It didn't seem so to me. That's why, for me, Mom's sporadic fits of madness have not constituted serious, indelible wounds; only one, in any case, brings back memories, although I admit that something of it left a mark.

The mark, to be precise, is an unconscious habit or a nervous tic, which would be an exaggeration to call a psychological injury. And how did it happen? Through another routine event, also at night. When I was fifteen, I was sleeping soundly in my room when suddenly a nightmare disturbed my rest. I screamed twice, apparently insane, and, according to what Mom told me; I started talking in my sleep. It was midnight and she heard these screams from afar. Mom was in the kitchen, having woken up hungry and wanting to make a sandwich. She ran quickly to my bedroom to see what was happening. She found me asleep and talking in my sleep, and then she became curious about what I was saying. She picked up my desk chair and, taking care not to make noise, she moved it to the edge of my bed; then, still as a sphinx, she sat down to listen to me.

 

She didn't understand much. In her opinion, my dream was about a fight, yet another one!, and the speech was confused, but it was in that trance that I woke up. The time it took my eyes to adjust to the darkness lasted two seconds; it was a clear night and the window curtains were open. Besides, at that time, I don't know why, I always slept facing the wall. And so, as soon as I judged that I was not alone—I sensed another breath in the room—I turned quickly in bed. Seeing her and being surprised were the same thing. Mom, with an absent expression, was disheveled and in her nightgown, sitting with her knees together, but what was most disturbing to me was seeing her hands in her lap: they held a sharp knife.

That was a stereotypical view; good horror films, from Psycho to Carrie, were imitated by television and were a substantial part of everyday life.

 

“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”

 

“Nothing,” she replied, smiling. “I wanted to hear what you were saying, but it was difficult. I only heard clearly the word “dog” and several swear words… You had a nightmare, with screams and everything…”

 

“A nightmare?” I couldn’t remember anything. “And that knife?”

 

“Oh, well… I was cutting bread to make a sandwich when you started screaming. How strange that I brought it!”

 

We didn’t talk any more. She immediately returned to the kitchen and, ten minutes later, Mom and I, each in our room, tried to get back to sleep. But I, in fact, was already a different person. To say the least, my way of sleeping underwent a change. Never in my life, from that night on, have I slept facing the wall again. Never in my life. I slept that night, and would sleep from then on, facing the bedroom door. To this day I cannot sleep if I do not watch the door.

With affection,

Ruben