Forgotten Journey by Ocampo Silvina; Boullosa Carmen; Levine Suzanne Jill

Author:Ocampo, Silvina; Boullosa, Carmen; Levine, Suzanne Jill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Siesta in the Cedar Tree

Witch hazel, 86% distilled water, and a woman running with two branches in hand, a shapely woman against a stormy yellow background. Looking at the label, Elena dampened a cotton ball with Humphrey’s Maravilla Lotion for those little ribbons of blood curling around each knee. She needed the pain to be able to cry, and so she had fallen on purpose. Swinging higher and harder to reach the highest branches, then dragging her feet on the ground to stop short and letting go of the swing suddenly, she had finally succeeded in falling. Nobody heard her in that house of sleeping shutters at siesta hour. She cried, her face against the ground, her mouth filling with pebbles and tears—any tear that wasn’t shared seemed wasted, lost like a forgotten penance . . . She came crashing down so that someone would feel her suffering as she kneeled, baring her knees like two wounded little hearts.

Her best friends were the gardener’s daughters, skinny barefoot twins named Cecilia and Ester. They lived in a modest house covered with mallow and honeysuckle vines and surrounded by small flowerbeds.

One day she heard the chauffeur say, “Cecilia has tuberculosis. That makes three dying of the same disease in that house.” Quickly she ran to tell her nanny, then her sister. What in the world was so sensual about that ivory-colored word? “Don’t get too close, just in case,” they told her and added softly, “Be careful if she coughs.” The color changed, the word turned black—the color of a horrible, fatal secret.

The next day a hollow-eyed Cecilia came over to play. Only then did Elena notice her coughing every five minutes, and each time it felt like the world opened up to swallow her whole. “Don’t get too close,” she heard them say in every room, “and don’t drink water from the same glass.” But she avidly drank water from the same glass.

When Cecilia left at five that afternoon, walking alone through the woods, Elena ran to her mother’s room and said, “Cecilia has tuberculosis.” Suddenly a fence sprang up around her, and now that the news had reached her mother’s ears, she was trapped.

From that day on she was hidden behind closed doors, listening to voices grow, fade, and vanish into other rooms: “It’s dangerous,” they’d say. “Cecilia won’t be coming to this house anymore.” That’s how they separated her from Cecilia, gradually, indirectly, from behind closed doors. The summer days passed with the heaviness of a soft, sweaty hand, and with the humming of mosquitoes as thin as pins. During siesta she would watch the sleeping garden through the slits in the shutters. The cicadas sang starry songs that echoed in her ears like the red stains that flooded her vision after she stared at the sun too long. She watched Cecilia enter through the garden gate, gathering acorns: they resembled tiny pipes that, pretending to smoke, they used to pass back and forth like men sipping maté. She

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