The Fallen

THE SON

I call my mother on the phone to see if she’s had a fall and she says no. We are silent for a moment. I know how things are at this time of day. She’ll be worried that she still has to put the lid on the simmering frijoles, frustrated that the trash can is full and no-one’s taken the trouble to empty it, sad because the old wooden window frames in the bedroom will carry on rotting for all eternity.

I’m fine, hijo, honestly, she says. She doesn’t feel ill, she hasn’t had a dizzy spell and she remembered to take her pills on time. From the ceiling hangs the yellow light of an incandescent bulb. The glare melts us, the soldiers, dissolves the broken concrete columns, the stone benches, the rusty railings and the roof gutter, sending us eddying, for a moment, into the gullet of night. I say goodbye, hang up the phone, leave the sentry officer’s post and walk back to the dormitory dragging my feet, with my boots unlaced. My shirt’s untucked, the shoulder strap of my zambrán belt digging into my neck.

They came looking for me at home a few months ago. Military service is obligatory at eighteen, but there are ways of getting out of it. In the barrio where I live, some guys dodge it with the help of their families, who fake medical certificates for them with I don’t know what congenital disease, or bribe the admissions board. If I had a father who was reasonable, I could have got out of this shit too, but no-one in my house dares to talk about bribes or circumventing the law. Armando told me he was proud that I was doing my duty, just like he did back in the day. I kept my mouth shut and gave him a contemptuous sneer. Armando didn’t even notice. My mother did.

I can’t get that moment out of my head – in fact it seems I don’t want to. It’s like a fly you shoo away that comes back and lands again and again. I don’t have much time to rest now before my sentry duty. The stupid notion that my mother might have had a fall has cost me thirty, maybe forty minutes, who knows. It’s not just the time it takes to walk from the barracks to the sentry post. There’s also the time between the moment when the thought first occurs to you and when you decide to act on it.

You want to go back to sleep but you know you won’t be able to; the raveled threads of sleep are like reeds you’re trying to cling to. Wakefulness is pulling at you, sweeping you downstream. Your eyes are still closed, the other soldiers are still sleeping, and you refuse to believe that you’re already awake – for a moment you try to convince yourself that you’re still asleep and simply dreaming that you’re waking up. And yet, something beyond your control has rattled into life.

You open the wooden dormitory door as cautiously as possible so that the hinges do not creak. You have no desire to wake anyone, to have boots thrown at you, you’ve already had your share of fights. The dorm is a room of four or five square meters in which everyone is both friend and enemy to each other, and friend and enemy to himself.

At 10.30 p.m. insects are fluttering around the bare yellow bulb on the quad, a background hum that grows louder as the night wears on. Anything that breaks the silence clearly benefits the soldier and his mental health. You walk along the hall, your gaze sliding off things, seeing nothing in particular, as though the objects, forms and concepts that make up the world refuse to be observed. You come to the sentry post, reach through the double window behind the rusty iron railing and pick up the desk phone.

The officer of the watch is asleep, a big-hearted captain who has come down in the world, like all the lieutenants or captains or lieutenant-colonels that make up this military unit, filled with alcoholics who wasted their lives hoping for and preparing for a war that never came, or that came in a different form, crawled inside them and gnawed away at them from the inside.

You dial the number of your house, recognize your mother’s voice, decide to speak in a normal tone, and you mother answers normally. Then you fall silent for a moment and go back to your dormitory. Your shirt untucked, your boots unlaced, your zambrán belt digging into your neck. It is going to take you twice as long to get to sleep again. You don’t know why your mother sometimes talks as if she were mentally retarded.

You tell yourself it’s the disease, but what does that mean? You tolerate this woman who sometimes takes over the body of the mother you know and who you go on calling mother even when there is nothing left of her that bears the slightest resemblance to the mother you knew, except, maybe, certain physical traits, and not even that, because, from what they say, in the ugliness that follows the falls, your mother’s lucid gaze is replaced by a vague, trancelike stare; her mouth, usually filled with comments and remarks becomes dry and twisted, the lips curl into a strange rictus; the skin, warm and pulsating like the skin of all mothers, becomes a pale, withered hide, and her lithe, hyperkinetic body becomes a slow, misshapen mass, flat, motionless, affording no shelter.

There is a little less than an hour before your watch. You hear the limping beat of your heart just below your ear, as though your heart were in the pillow, a toad hiding in the pillowcase. It is an uncomfortable throbbing, but it is the first sign that you are falling back to sleep: the ear turns and begins to listen inwardly. Then you notice something vague, like the pain in your joints becoming a pleasant ache.

You do not try to cling to anything, you simply let yourself be carried by the current, like a broken body, until you get caught in a clump of reeds, or some whirlpool sucks you under, or you wash up on some sandbank, and then your last thought is that now you are going to sleep and that this, the fact that you are going to sleep now, is the last thought that you will have for now, that afterwards there will be nothing left inside your head, and afterwards there is nothing.

(…)