![]() He didn’t find her physically attractive, which was practically insane on his part-I had never seen a woman as beautiful as her. Natalia placed the flowerpot on the kitchen table, told my aunt, her mother, that she had planted the azalea, and greeted me with a kiss on the head. She was carrying a flowerpot and smoking. Natalia, tanned as always, wearing a loose white dress, her hair long and dark and dishevelled-I saw her through the fog of my irritated eyes, which I couldn’t stop blinking. Natalia was my aunt’s oldest daughter and my favorite cousin. That was how we were when Natalia came in. My aunt pushed my head under the faucet and let the water wash my eyes out for ten minutes. How many years was I going to spend that way, disgusted when I heard his voice, pained when we had sex, silent when he confided his plans to have a child and renovate the house? I wiped away my tears with hands covered in soapsuds that burned my eyes and made me cry even harder. Juan Martín wasn’t violent he wasn’t even jealous. “He could be like Walter, who raised his hand to me.” “Well, child, it could be worse,” she told me when I started to cry. “Those are the only poisonous ones”), drank too much beer, spoke with zero modesty about how well his business was going, and commented several times on the “underdevelopment” that he saw in the province.Īfter we ate he sat with Carlos, drinking whiskey, while I helped my aunt in the kitchen. Juan Martín squealed when a spider brushed his leg (“If it doesn’t have a pink cross, don’t worry,” my Uncle Carlos told him, a cigarette between his lips. One meal on the wide porch of their big house was enough to dispel that hope. But I still felt abandoned, and because of that solitude I fell in love too quickly, I got married impetuously, and now I was living with Juan Martín, who irritated and bored me.įinally, I decided to take him to meet my aunt and uncle to find out if seeing him through other eyes could transform him in mine. My cousins stayed to keep me company on weekends. During the first months of mourning, they offered to have me come live with them in the north I said no. My aunt and my uncle were the custodians of the memory of my mother, their favorite sister, who was killed in a stupid accident when I was seventeen. “How could I be hiding him? I’d love for you to meet him-we’ll come soon.” In February I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Corrientes, because I was tired of their reproaches: “You got married and we haven’t even met your husband! How is that possible? You’re hiding him from us.” ![]() But as chicharras they make me think of the heat, rotting meat, blackouts, drunks who stare with bloodshot eyes from their benches in the park. If they were always cicadas, their summer noise would remind me of the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees along the Paraná, or of the white stone mansions with their staircases and their willows. They’re also called cicadas, which I think has a smoother sound. My aunt says they’re horrible creatures, spectacular flies with green wings that vibrate and smooth black eyes that seem to look right at you. And everything is slower during siesta there is only a rare bicycle in the empty streets, the ice-cream shops seem abandoned, with their ceiling fans spinning for no one, and the chicharras shriek hysterically in their hiding places. You start to struggle as soon as you arrive, as if a brutal arm were wound around your chest, squeezing. It’s harder to breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can turn from limpid blue to stormy black in minutes.
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