Seven Empty Houses Read online

  “We’re leaving, Mom.”

  She’s removing the hooks from the shower curtain, but I take them from her hand and throw them to the floor, grab her by the wrist, and push her toward the stairs. It’s pretty violent; I have never treated my mother like this. A new fury drives me toward the door. My mother follows, tripping on the stairs. The pieces of wood are at the foot of the steps and I kick them as I pass. We reach the living room, I pick up my mother’s purse, and we go out the front door.

  Once we’re in the car, as we’re reaching the corner, I think I see the lights of another car pulling out of the house’s driveway and turning in our direction, following us. I reach the first muddy intersection at full speed as my mother says:

  “What kind of madness was all that?”

  I wonder if she’s referring to my part or hers. In a gesture of protest, my mother buckles her seat belt. Her purse is on her lap and her fists close tight around its handles. I tell myself, Now, you calm down, you calm down, you calm down. I check the rearview mirror for the other car but don’t see anyone. I want to talk to my mother, but I can’t help yelling at her.

  “What are you looking for, Mom? What is all of this?”

  She doesn’t even move. She stares straight ahead, serious, her forehead terribly furrowed.

  “Please, Mom, what is it? What the hell are we doing at other people’s houses?”

  An ambulance siren wails in the distance.

  “Do you want one of those living rooms? Is that what you want? Those marble countertops? The damned sugar bowl? Those useless kids? Is that it? What the fuck are you missing from those houses?”

  I pound the steering wheel. The ambulance siren sounds closer and I dig my nails into the plastic. Once, when I was five years old and my mother cut all the calla lilies from a garden, she forgot me and left me sitting against the fence, and she didn’t have the guts to come back for me. I waited a long time, until I heard the shouts of a German woman who came out of the house brandishing a broom, and I ran. My mother was circling the house in a two-block radius, and it took us a long time to find each other.

  “None of that,” says my mother, keeping her gaze forward, and that’s the last thing she says during the whole drive.

  A few blocks ahead, the ambulance turns toward us and then hurtles past.

  We get home half an hour later. We drop our things on the table and kick off our muddy sneakers. The house is cold, and from the kitchen I watch my mother skirt the sofa, go into the bedroom, sit down on her bed, and reach over to turn on the radiator. I put the kettle on for tea. This is what I need right now, I tell myself, a little tea, and I sit beside the stove to wait. As I’m putting the tea bag into the mug, the doorbell rings. It’s the woman, the owner of the house with three living rooms. I open the door and stand looking at her. I ask how she knows where we live.

  “I followed you,” she says, looking down at her shoes.

  She has a different attitude now, more fragile and patient, and though I open the screen door to let her in, she can’t seem to bring herself to take the first step. I look both ways down the street, but I don’t see any car a woman like her could have driven here.

  “I don’t have the money,” I say.

  “No,” she says, “don’t worry, I didn’t come for that. I . . . is your mother here?”

  I hear the bedroom door close. It’s a loud slam, but maybe it’s hard to hear from outside.

  I shake my head. She looks down at her shoes again and waits.

  “Can I come in?”

  I point her to a chair at the table. On the brick-tiled floor, her heels make a noise different from our heels, and I see her move carefully: the spaces of this house are more cramped, and the woman doesn’t seem to feel at ease. She leaves her bag on her crossed legs.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  She nods.

  “Your mother . . .” she says.

  I hand her a hot mug and I think, Your mother is in my house again. Your mother wants to know how I pay for the leather upholstery on all my sofas.

  “Your mother took my sugar bowl,” says the woman.

  She smiles almost apologetically, stirs her tea, looks at it, but doesn’t drink it.

  “It seems silly,” she says, “but of all the things in the house, that’s all I have left of my mother, and . . .” She makes a strange sound, almost like a hiccup, and her eyes fill with tears. “I need that sugar bowl. You have to give it back.”

  We sit a moment in silence. She avoids my eyes. I glance out at the backyard and I see her, I see my mother, and then I distract the woman to keep her from looking out there, too.

  “You want your sugar bowl?” I ask.

  “Is it here?” asks the woman, and she immediately stands up, looks at the kitchen counter, the living room, the bedroom door nearby.

  But I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve just seen: my mother kneeling on the ground under the clothes hanging on the line, putting the sugar bowl into a fresh hole in the earth.

  “If you want it, find it yourself,” I say.

  The woman stares at me, takes several seconds to absorb what I’ve just said. Then she sets her purse on the table and walks slowly away. She seems to have trouble moving between the couch and the TV, between all the towers of stackable boxes, as if no place were good enough to start her search. That’s how I realize what it is that I want. I want her to look. I want her to move our things. I want her to inspect, set aside, and take apart. To remove everything from the boxes, to trample, rearrange, to throw herself on the ground, and also to cry. And I want my mother to come inside. Because if my mother comes in here right now, if she composes herself quickly after her newest burial and comes back to the kitchen, she’ll be relieved to see how this is done by a woman who doesn’t have her years of experience, or a house where she can do these kinds of things well, the way they should be done.

  My Parents and My Children

  Where are your parents’ clothes?” asks Marga.

  She crosses her arms and waits for my answer. She knows I don’t know. On the other side of the picture window, my parents are running naked in the backyard.

  “It’s almost six, Javier,” Marga tells me. “What’s going to happen when Charly comes back from the store with the kids and they see their grandparents chasing each other around?”

  “Who’s Charly?” I ask.

  I think I know who Charly is—he’s the great-new-man my ex-wife is dating—but at some point I would like for her to explain that to me.

  “They’re going to die of shame when they see their grandparents, that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “They’re sick, Marga.”

  She sighs. I take deep breaths and count slowly to keep from turning bitter, to instill patience, to give Marga the time she needs. I say:

  “You wanted the kids to see their grandparents. You wanted me to bring my parents out here, because you thought this place, three hundred kilometers from my house, would be a good spot for a vacation.”

  “You said they were better.”

  Behind Marga, my father sprays my mother with the hose. When he sprays her tits, my mother holds her tits. When he sprays her ass, my mother holds her ass.

  “You know how they get if you take them out of their environment,” I say. “And outdoors . . .”

  Is it my mother who holds what my father sprays, or is it my father who sprays what my mother holds?

  “Uh-huh. So if I’m going to invite you to spend a few days with your children, whom, I might add, you haven’t seen in three months, I have to anticipate the level of your parents’ excitement.”

  My mother picks up Marga’s poodle and holds it over her head, spinning around. I try to keep my eyes trained on Marga to prevent her, at all costs, from turning toward them.

  “I want to leave all this madness behi
nd, Javier.”

  This madness, I think.

  “If that means you see the kids less . . . I can’t keep exposing them to this.”

  “They’re just naked, Marga.”

  She walks forward, and I follow. Behind us, the poodle is still spinning in the air. Before opening the front door Marga checks her hair in the windowpane and adjusts her dress. Charly is tall, strong, and brutish. He looks like the guy who announces the twelve o’clock news, only his body is swollen from exercise. My four-year-old daughter and my six-year-old son hang from his arms like two swim floaties. Charly delicately helps them fall, lowering his immense gorilla torso toward the ground and freeing himself to give Marga a kiss. Then he comes toward me, and for a moment I’m afraid he won’t be friendly. But he holds out his hand and he smiles.

  “Javier, this is Charly,” says Marga.

  I feel the kids crash into my legs and hug me. I squeeze Charly’s hand forcefully as he shakes my whole body. The kids pull away and run off.

  “What do you think of the house, Javi?” asks Charly, his eyes looking upward and beyond me, as if it were a real and true castle they’d rented.

  Javi, I think. This madness, I think.

  The poodle appears, whimpering softly with its tail between its legs. Marga picks it up, and while the dog licks her she wrinkles her nose and coos, “My-widdle-puppums-my-widdle-puppums.” Charly looks at her with his head cocked to one side, maybe just trying to understand. Then Marga turns abruptly toward him, alarmed, and says:

  “Where are the kids?”

  “They must be in the back,” says Charly, “in the yard.”

  “I don’t want them to see their grandparents like that.”

  All three of us turn from side to side, but we don’t see them.

  “See, Javier, this is precisely the kind of thing I want to avoid,” says Marga, taking a few steps away. “Kids!”

  She heads around the house toward the backyard. Charly and I follow.

  “How was the road?” asks Charly.

  He mimes the movement of turning a steering wheel with one hand, simulates changing gears to accelerate with the other. There is stupidity and eagerness in each one of his movements.

  “I don’t drive.”

  He bends down to pick up some toys on the path and sets them aside; now his brow is furrowed. I’m afraid of reaching the yard and finding my kids and my parents together. No, what I’m afraid of is Marga finding them together, and the great scene of recrimination that will follow. But Marga is alone in the middle of the yard, waiting for us with her fists on her hips. She heads back inside and we go into the house behind her. We are her most humble followers, and that means I have something in common with Charly, some kind of kinship. Could he really have enjoyed the highway on his drive?

  “Kids!” Marga shouts up the stairs. She’s furious but she contains herself, maybe because Charly still doesn’t know her very well. She comes back and sits on a stool in the kitchen. “We need something to drink, don’t we?”

  Charly takes a bottle of soda from the refrigerator and pours three glasses. Marga takes a couple sips and sits looking out into the yard for a moment.

  “This is really bad.” She stands up again. “This is really bad. I mean, they could be doing anything.” And now she does look at me.

  “Let’s check again,” I say, but by then she’s already headed out to the backyard.

  She comes back a few seconds later.

  “They’re not there,” she says. “My god, Javier, they’re not there.”

  “They are there, Marga, they have to be somewhere.”

  Charly goes out the front door, crosses the front yard, and follows the dirt tracks that lead to the road. Marga goes up the stairs and calls to the kids from the second floor. I go outside and circle the house. I pass the open garage full of toys, buckets, and plastic shovels. I look up into the trees and see that the kids’ inflatable dolphin has been hung, strangled, from one of the branches. The rope is made of my parents’ jogging suits. Marga peers out from one of the windows and our eyes meet for a second. Is she looking for my parents, too, or just for the kids? I go into the house through the kitchen door. Charly is coming in just then through the front door, and he tells me from the living room:

  “They’re not in front.”

  His face is no longer friendly. Now he has two lines between his eyebrows and he’s overdoing his movements as if Marga were controlling him: he goes quickly from stillness to action, crouching under the table, looking behind the china cabinet, peering under the stairs, as if he would be able to locate the kids only if he took them by surprise. I find myself unable to look away from his movements, and I can’t focus on my own search.

  “They’re not outside,” says Marga. “Could they have gone back to the car? The car, Charly, the car.”

  I wait, but there are no instructions for me. Charly goes back outside, and Marga climbs the stairs again to the bedrooms. I follow her. She enters the one that’s apparently Simon’s, so I check Lina’s. We change rooms and look again. When I’m peering under Simon’s bed, I hear her curse.

  “Motherfuckers,” she says, so I assume it’s not because she’s found the kids. Could she have found my parents?

  * * *

  We check the bathroom together, then the attic and the master bedroom. Marga opens the closets, pushes aside some clothes on hangers. There aren’t many things and they’re all very organized. It’s a summer house, I tell myself, but then I think about the real house where my wife and kids live, the house that used to be mine as well, and I realize it was always that way in this family—few things, well organized—and it had never done any good to push aside the clothes in search of something else. We hear Charly come back inside, and we meet him in the living room.

  “They’re not in the car,” he tells my wife.

  “This is your parents’ fault,” says Marga.

  She pushes me by the shoulder.

  “It’s your fault. Where the hell are my kids?” she shouts, and she goes running back out into the yard.

  She calls to them from one side of the house and the other.

  “What’s beyond the shrubs?” I ask Charly.

  He looks at me and then back at my wife, who is still shouting.

  “Simon! Lina!”

  “Are there neighbors on the other side of the bushes?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. There are estates. Parcels. The houses are really big.”

  He might be right to hesitate, but he seems like the stupidest man I’ve met in my life. Marga returns.

  “I’m going first,” she says, and she pushes between us. “Simon!”

  “Dad!” I shout, walking behind Marga. “Mom!”

  Marga is a few meters ahead of me when she stops and picks something up from the ground. It’s something blue, and she holds it with her fingertips, as if it were a dead animal. It’s Lina’s sweatshirt. She turns around to look at me. She’s about to say something, curse me up and down again, but then she sees that farther on there’s another piece of clothing and she goes toward it. I feel the looming shadow of Charly behind me. Marga picks up Lina’s fuchsia shirt, and farther on one of her sneakers, and farther still, Simon’s T-shirt.

  There are more clothes on the road, but Marga stops short and turns back to us.

  “Call the police, Charly. Call the police now.”

  “Sweetie, there’s no need for that . . .” says Charly.

  Sweetie, I think.

  “Call the police, Charly.”

  Charly turns around and hurries back toward the house. Marga picks up more clothing. I follow her. She picks up another piece and stops before the last one. It’s Simon’s little shorts. They’re yellow and a bit twisted up. Marga does nothing. Maybe she can’t bend down for the shorts, maybe she doesn’t have the str
ength. She has her back to me and her body seems to start to shake. I approach slowly, trying not to startle her. The shorts are tiny. They could fit on my hands, four fingers in one hole, my thumb in the other.

  “They’ll be here in a minute,” says Charly, coming out of the house. “They’re sending a patrol car.”

  “You and your family, I’m going to . . .” says Marga, coming toward me.

  “Marga . . .”

  I pick up the trunks and then Marga lunges at me. I try to stand firm, but I lose my balance. I shield my face from her slaps. Charly is already here and trying to separate us. The patrol car pulls up and sounds its siren once. Two policemen get quickly out and rush to help Charly.