The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo

Author:Margarita García Robayo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Margarita García Robayo;the delivery;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2023-08-07T12:30:20+00:00

9

‘I can watch the child, if you want,’ my mother says, as she picks up the tray from the wheeled end table I bought months ago but haven’t used much. We’re in the living room, where we’ve just finished a breakfast of café con leche and fried plantains with cheese.

How could she have heard my conversation with Susan?

I picture her with an ear pressed to my bedroom door, trying to decipher words and silences. I picture her pressing so hard she can hear the internal creaking of the particle board.

I ignore her offer, lean back on the sofa, and let her walk away.

I look at the table covered in crumbs. What a useless thing. It’s so tiny that we had to put our mugs on the floor, and I was tense thinking I was going to kick them over any second. But really it was more hunger than concern; I ate with the voracity of a shrew. So we could be more comfortable, I’d got two chairs from the terrace and brought them inside. When I went out to get them I felt the drastic contrast between the cold outside and the heat inside.

Now, from the sofa, the view beyond the terrace is of fog settled on the horizon. The grey crests of buildings rise up like icebergs. Catrina isn’t around, she’s disappeared again. It’s always like that: if my mom is here, the cat leaves.

‘Poor woman,’ my mother says from the kitchen, ‘she’s so sorrowful.’

Sorrowful is not a word of my mother’s.

Down in the dumps, or in the pits, or knocked sideways. Those are my mother’s kind of words.

She comes back to the living room drying her hands on a dirty dishcloth that she uses to brush the crumbs from the end table. She crosses my visual field: her dark shape is overlaid on the background of fog. All that remains of the blow to her face is a slight shadow over one cheekbone and eye; it’s a floating island that has been sailing around the upper half of her face, coming to rest in different areas for a time.

‘Have you heard from Eusebio?’ My question comes out of nowhere. There’s a name for that in neuroscience. Sometimes it’s not a question, but a random sentence with no direct relationship to anything that’s happening. They are often inappropriate words, sensitive, wounding. I think of a mutant whose eyes give off random electrical charges. These sentences self-generate like mushrooms in a region of the brain whose name I forget.

My mother shakes her head:

‘Nothing.’

I see her go out to the terrace and, once again, throw her handful of crumbs off the balcony. Why does she do that? I want to grab her by the shoulders and explain a few things to her. What things? Thinking about it is exhausting. Organizing concepts, establishing categories: this is correct, this is incorrect. According to whom? According to the universal social ethic.

Years ago, my sister told me that Eusebio had destroyed part of the house. No one knew why: ‘He walloped every door like he was fighting off Godzilla.

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