Seven Empty Houses Read online

  Also by Samanta Schweblin

  Fever Dream

  Mouthful of Birds

  Little Eyes

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Spain as Siete casas vacías by Editorial Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2015

  First American edition published by Riverhead, 2022

  English translation copyright © 2022 by Megan McDowell

  Copyright © 2015 by Samanta Schweblin

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission from the family of Juan Luis Martínez to print an excerpt in translation from his poem “La desaparición de una familia” from La nueva novela.

  Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Schweblin, Samanta, 1978– author. | McDowell, Megan, translator.

  Title: Seven empty houses / Samanta Schweblin ; translated by Megan McDowell.

  Other titles: Siete casas vacías. English

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2022. | First published in Spanish by Editorial Páginas de Espuma as Siete casas vacías, Madrid, 2015.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022004587 (print) | LCCN 2022004588 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525541394 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525541417 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Schweblin, Samanta, 1978– —Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PQ7798.29.C5388 S5413 2022 (print) | LCC PQ7798.29.C5388 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23/eng/20220204

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004587

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004588

  Cover design: Grace Han

  Cover art: Detail of Le modele vivant by René Magritte, 1953 / © 2022 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  Book design by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_6.0_141494713_c0_r0

  To Liliana and Pablo,

  my parents

  Before his five-year-old daughter

  got lost between the dining room and the kitchen,

  he had warned her: “This house is neither large nor small,

  but make the least mistake and the road signs will disappear,

  and of this lifetime at last, you will have lost all hope.”

  —Juan Luis Martínez, “The Disappearance of a Family”

  A: I like your apartment.

  B: It’s nice, but it’s only big enough for one person—or two people who are very close.

  A: You know two people who are very close?

  —Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

  contents

  None of That

  My Parents and My Children

  It Happens All the Time in This House

  Breath from the Depths

  Two Square Feet

  An Unlucky Man

  Out

  None of That

  We’re lost,” says my mother.

  She brakes and leans over the steering wheel. Her fingers, slender and old, grip the plastic tightly. We’re over half an hour from home, in one of the residential neighborhoods we like the most. There are beautiful and spacious mansions here, but the roads are unpaved, and they’re muddy because it rained all last night.

  “Did you have to stop right in the mud? How are we going to get out of here now?”

  I open my door to see how deep the wheels are stuck. Pretty deep, deep enough. I slam my door.

  “Just what is it you’re doing, Mom?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?” Her confusion seems genuine.

  I know exactly what it is we’re doing, but I’ve only just realized how strange it is. My mother doesn’t seem to understand, but she does respond, so she must know what I’m referring to.

  “We’re looking at houses,” she says.

  She blinks a couple of times; she has too much mascara on her eyelashes.

  “Looking at houses?”

  “Looking at houses.” She indicates the houses on either side of us.

  They are immense. They gleam atop their hills of freshly mown lawns, shining in the dazzling light of the setting sun. My mother sighs, and without letting go of the wheel she leans back in the seat. She’s not going to say much more. Maybe she doesn’t know what else to say. But that is exactly what we do. Go out to look at houses. We go out to look at other people’s houses. Any attempt to figure out why could turn into the straw that breaks the camel’s back, confirmation of the fact that my mother has been throwing her own daughter’s time into the garbage for as long as I can remember. My mother shifts into first gear, and to my surprise the wheels spin for a moment but she manages to move the car forward. I look back at the intersection, the mess we made of the sandy dirt of the road, and I pray that no caretaker catches on that we did the same thing yesterday, two intersections down, and then again when we were nearly at the exit. We keep moving. My mother drives straight, without stopping in front of any of the mansions. She doesn’t comment on the huge windows or fancy doors, the hammocks or awnings. She doesn’t sigh or hum any song. She doesn’t jot down addresses. Doesn’t look at me. A few blocks down, the houses grow more spaced out and the grassy lawns flatten: carefully trimmed by gardeners and with no sidewalks in the way, they start right there at the dirt road and spread over the perfectly leveled terrain, like a mirror of green water flush with the earth. She takes a left and drives a little farther. She says aloud, but to herself:

  “There’s no way out of this.”

  There are some houses farther on, and then a forest closes in on the road.

  “There’s a lot of mud,” I say. “Turn around without stopping the car.”

  She looks at me with a frown, then pulls close to the grass on the right and tries to turn back the other way. The result is terrible: just as she manages to get the car in a vaguely diagonal position, she runs up against the grass on the left, and brakes.

  “Shit,” she says.

  She accelerates, and the wheels spin in the mud. I look back to study the scene. There’s a boy outside, almost on the threshold of the house behind us. My mother shifts gears, accelerates again, and manages to move in reverse. And this is what she does now: with the car in reverse, she drives across the street, goes into the yard in front of the boy’s house, and draws, from one side to the other across the wide blanket of freshly cut grass, a double-lined semicircle of mud. The car stops in front of the house’s picture window. The boy is standing there holding his plastic truck, transfixed. I raise my hand in a gesture that wants to apologize, or warn, but he drops the truck and runs into the house. My mother looks at me.

  “Go,” I say.

  The wheels spin and the car doesn’t move.

  “Slowly, Mom!”

  A woman pushes asid
e the window curtains and looks out at us, at her yard. The boy is next to her, pointing. The curtain closes again, and my mother sinks the car deeper and deeper. The woman comes out of the house and starts to walk over to us, but she doesn’t want to trample her grass. She takes the first steps along the path of varnished wood, then corrects course to come toward us, practically walking on tiptoe. My mother says shit again, under her breath. She lets off the accelerator, and also, finally, lets go of the steering wheel.

  The woman reaches us and leans over to talk to us through the car window. She wants to know what we are doing in her yard, and she doesn’t ask nicely. The boy looks on, hugging one of the columns by the entrance. My mother says she’s sorry, she’s really very sorry, and she says it several times. But the woman doesn’t seem to hear. She just looks at her yard, at the wheels sunk into the lawn, and she repeats her question about what we’re doing there, why we are stuck in her yard, if we understand the damage we’ve just done. So I explain it to her. I say that my mother doesn’t know how to drive in the mud. That my mother is not well. And then my mother bangs her forehead into the steering wheel and stays like that, dead or paralyzed, who knows. Her back shudders and she starts to cry. The woman looks at me. She doesn’t know what to do. I shake my mother. Her forehead doesn’t move from the steering wheel, and her arms fall dead to her sides. I get out of the car, apologize to the woman again. She is tall and blond, brawny like the boy, and her eyes, nose, and mouth are too close together for the size of her head. She looks the same age as my mother.

  “Who is going to pay for this?” she asks.

  I don’t have any money, but I tell her we’ll pay for it. That I’m sorry and, of course, we will pay. That seems to calm her down. She turns her attention back to my mother for a moment, without forgetting about her yard.

  “Ma’am, are you feeling okay? What were you trying to do?”

  My mother raises her head and looks at the woman.

  “I feel terrible. Call an ambulance, please.”

  The woman doesn’t seem to know whether my mother is being serious or pulling her leg. Of course she is serious, even if the ambulance isn’t necessary. I shake my head at the woman to say she should wait and not make any calls. The woman takes a few steps back, looks at my mother’s old, rusty car, and then at her astonished son behind her. She doesn’t want us to be here, she wants us to disappear, but she doesn’t know how to make that happen.

  “Please,” says my mother, “could you bring me a glass of water before the ambulance gets here?”

  The woman is slow to move; she seems not to want to leave us alone in her yard.

  “Okay,” she says.

  She walks away, grabs the boy by the shirt, and pulls him inside with her. The front door slams shut.

  “Could you please tell me what you’re doing, Mom? Get out of the car, I’m going to try to move it.”

  My mother sits up straight in the seat, moves her legs slowly as she starts to get out. I look around for medium-sized logs or some rocks to use as ramps for the wheels, but everything is so neat and tidy. There’s nothing but lawn and flowers.

  “I’m going to look for some wood,” I tell my mother, pointing toward the forest at the end of the street. “Don’t move.”

  My mother, who was in the process of getting out of the car, freezes a moment and then drops back into her seat. I’m worried because night is falling, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the car out in the dark. The forest is only two houses away. I walk into the trees, and it takes a few minutes to find exactly what I need. When I get back, my mother is not in the car. There’s no one outside. I approach the front door of the house. The boy’s truck is lying on the doormat. I ring the doorbell and the woman comes to open the door.

  “I called the ambulance,” she says. “I didn’t know where you were, and your mother said she was going to faint again.”

  I wonder when the first time was. I walk in carrying the pieces of wood. I have two, the size of two bricks. The woman leads me to the kitchen. We walk through two spacious, carpeted living rooms, and then I hear my mother’s voice.

  “Is this white marble? How do they get white marble? What does your daddy do, sweetheart?”

  She’s sitting at the table, a mug in one hand and the sugar bowl in the other. The boy is sitting across from her, looking at her.

  “Let’s go,” I tell her, showing her the wood.

  “Look at the design of this sugar bowl,” says my mother, pushing it toward me. But when she sees I’m unimpressed, she adds, “I really do feel very bad.”

  “That one’s for decoration,” says the boy. “This is our real sugar bowl.”

  He pushes a different, wooden sugar bowl toward my mother. She ignores him, stands up, and, as if she were about to vomit, leaves the kitchen. I follow her resignedly. She locks herself in a small bathroom off the hallway. The woman and her son look at me but don’t follow. I knock on the door, ask if I can come in, and wait. The woman peers at us from the kitchen.

  “They say the ambulance will be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  The bathroom door opens. I go in and close it behind me. I put the wood down beside the mirror. My mother is crying, sitting on the toilet lid.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  Before answering she folds a bit of toilet paper and blows her nose.

  “Where do people get all these things? And did you see there’s a staircase on either side of the living room?” She rests her face in the palms of her hands. “It makes me so sad I just want to die.”

  There’s a knock at the door and I remember the ambulance is on its way. The woman asks if we’re all right. I have to get my mother out of this house.

  “I’m going to get the car out,” I say, picking the wood up again. “I want you out there with me in two minutes. You’d better be there.”

  The woman is in the hall talking on a cell phone, but she sees me and hangs up.

  “It’s my husband, he’s on his way.”

  I wait for an expression that will tell me whether the man is coming to help my mother and me, or to help the woman get us out of the house. But the woman just stares at me, taking care not to give me any clues. I go outside and walk to the car, and I can hear the boy running behind me. I don’t say anything as I prop the wood under the wheels and look around to see where my mother could have left the keys. Then I start the car. It takes several tries, but finally the ramp trick works. I close the car door, and the boy has to run so I don’t hit him. I don’t stop, I retrace the semicircular tracks back to the road. She’s not going to come out on her own, I tell myself. Why would she listen to me and come out of the house like a normal mother? I turn off the car and go inside to get her. The boy runs behind me, hugging the muddy pieces of wood.

  I enter without knocking and head straight for the bathroom.

  “She’s not in the bathroom anymore,” says the woman. “Please, get your mother out of the house. This has gone too far.”

  She leads me to the second floor. The staircase is spacious and light, and a cream-colored rug marks the way. The woman goes up first, blind to the muddy footprints I leave on each step. She points to a room with the door half open, and I go in without opening it all the way, in order to maintain a semblance of privacy. My mother is lying facedown on the carpet in the middle of the master bedroom. The sugar bowl is on the dresser, along with her watch and bracelets, which for some reason she has taken off. Her arms and legs are splayed wide, and for a moment I wonder if there is any other way to hug a thing as massive as a house, and if that is in fact what my mother is trying to do. She sighs and then sits up on the floor, smooths her shirt and her hair, looks at me. Her face is less red now, but the tears have made a mess of her makeup.

  “What’s going on now?” she asks.

  “The car’s ready. We’re leav
ing.”

  I peer outside to get a sense of what the woman is doing, but I don’t see her.

  “And what are we going to do with all of this?” asks my mother, gesturing around herself. “Someone has to talk to these people.”

  “Where’s your purse?”

  “Downstairs, in the living room. The first living room, because there’s a bigger one that looks out onto the pool, and another one past the kitchen, facing the backyard. There are three living rooms.” My mother takes a tissue from her jeans pocket, blows her nose, and dries her tears. “Each one for something different.”

  She gets up holding on to a bedpost and walks toward the en suite bathroom.

  The bed is made with a fold in the top sheet that I’ve only ever seen my mother make. Under the bed are a balled-up bedspread with fuchsia and yellow stars and a dozen small throw pillows.

  “Mom, my god, did you make the bed?”

  “Don’t even get me started on those pillowcases,” she says, and then, peering out from behind the door to be sure I hear: “And I want to see that sugar bowl when I come out of the bathroom. Don’t you do anything crazy.”

  “What sugar bowl?” asks the woman from the other side of the bedroom door. She knocks three times but doesn’t dare enter. “My sugar bowl? Please, it was my mother’s.”

  From the bathroom comes the sound of water running in the tub. My mother goes over to the bedroom door and for a second I think she’s going to let the woman in, but instead she closes it and starts gesturing at me to keep my voice down, that the faucet is running so no one can hear us. This is my mother, I tell myself, while she opens the dresser drawers and pushes aside the clothes to inspect the bottoms, making sure the wood inside is also cedar. For as long as I can remember, we’ve gone out to look at houses, removed unsuitable flowers and pots from their gardens. We’ve moved sprinklers, straightened mailboxes, relocated lawn ornaments that were too heavy for the grass. As soon as my feet reached the pedals, I started to take over driving, which gave my mother more freedom. Once, by herself, she moved a white wooden bench and put it in the yard of the house across the street. She unhooked hammocks. Yanked up malignant weeds. Three times she pulled off the name “Marilú 2” from a terribly cheesy sign. My father found out about one or another of these events, but I don’t think that was why he left my mother. When he went, my father took all his things except the car key, which he left on one of the piles of my mother’s home and garden magazines, and for some years after that she almost never got out of the car on any of our excursions. She’d sit in the passenger seat and say “That’s kikuyu,” “That bow window is not American,” “The cascading geranium flowers should not be beside the spotted lady’s thumb,” “If I ever decide to paint the house that shade of pearl pink, please, hire someone to just shoot me.” But it was a long time before she got out of the car again. Today, however, she has crossed a big line. She insisted on driving. She contrived to get us inside this house, into the master bedroom, and now she’s just come back from the bathroom after dumping two jars of salts into the tub, and she’s starting to throw some products from the dressing table into the trash. I hear a car pull up, and I peek out the window that overlooks the backyard. It’s almost night now, but I see them. He’s getting out of the car and the woman is already walking toward him. Her left hand is holding the little boy’s, her right hand working double-time making gestures and signals. He nods in alarm, looks toward the second floor. He sees me, and when he sees me, I realize that we have to move fast.