The Right Intention by Andrés Barba

Author:Andrés Barba
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945492099
Publisher: Transit Books
Published: 2018-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Nuria left that day. When it was announced in the dining room, everyone looked at her as though it were impossible that she, the girl no one had even really noticed up until then, was actually going to be the first to go.

“What do you mean you’re leaving,” asked Maite, whose authority had been undermined since the incident at dinner.

“You heard,” the nurse remarked, “she’s leaving, and if the rest of you follow her example you’ll be able to go home soon, too.”

Nuria had been an invisible presence up until that day. She spoke, but never too loud or with too much conviction. She ate, but never finished first. She was, ultimately, substitutable.

All of the girls, with the exception of Ana and Sara, seemed to take the nurse’s advice quickly, intuitively, because starting that very afternoon they fell into emulating Nuria’s invisibility. No one wanted to speak, or eat, or laugh more than anyone else. But silence, too, was dangerous; silence betrayed them. What happened next was rather like life: their performance, at first self-conscious, over the course of the day took on the routine nature of something automatic, and in their sessions, perhaps without even realizing it, they began to describe themselves not as they were but as they pretended and, perhaps, really believed themselves to be.

For Sara, accompanying Ana to their room became a reprieve from that increasingly irritating situation. They took off their clothes, like the first time, but now with no need for words. Sara would give her a look, or Ana would motion with her eyes, and the pair of them would head to their room. Silent, naked, standing closer each time, on the verge of touching though without ever doing it, the smell of Ana’s body rising up in a mix of soap and shampoo, Sara’s feet cold on the floor tiles, the metallic sound of carts being wheeled past the door. All of it precise, all of it repeated in the same slow ritual, the rules created as they went.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.