My aunt and uncle were the custodians of the memory of my mother, their favorite sister, killed in a stupid accident when I was seventeen. During the first months of mourning they offered to have me come live with them in the north. I said no. They came to visit me often. They gave me money, called me every day. My cousins stayed to keep me company on weekends. 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.
I decided to bring him to meet my aunt and uncle to see if other eyes could transform him in mine. One meal on the wide porch of their big house was enough to dispel that hope: Juan Martín squealed when a spider brushed his leg (“If they don’t have a pink cross, don’t worry,” my uncle Carlos told him, a cigarette between his lips. “Those are the only poisonous ones.”), drank too much beer, spoke with zero modesty about how well business was going, and commented several times on the “underdevelopment” that he saw in the province.
After we ate he sat with my uncle Carlos, drinking whiskey, and I helped my aunt in the kitchen.
“Well, child, it could be worse,” she told me when I started to cry. “He could be like Walter, who raised his hand to me.”
Yes, I nodded. Juan Martín wasn’t violent; he wasn’t even jealous. But he repelled me. How many years was I going to spend like that, 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 soap suds; they burned my eyes and I cried even harder. My aunt pushed my head under the faucet and let the water wash my eyes out for ten minutes. That’s how we were when Natalia came in. Natalia was my aunt’s oldest daughter and my favorite cousin. Natalia, tanned as always, wearing a very loose white dress, her hair long, dark, and disheveled. I saw her through the fog of my irritated eyes, which I couldn’t stop blinking; she was carrying a flowerpot and smoking. Everyone smokes in Corrientes. If anyone ever dared to hint that it wasn’t healthy, they’d stand looking at the heretic, confused, and then give a little laugh.
Natalia placed the flowerpot on the kitchen table, told my aunt, her mother, that she had planted the azalea, and she greeted me with a kiss on the head. My husband didn’t like Natalia. He didn’t find her physically attractive, which was practically insane on his part—I had never seen a woman as beautiful as her. But on top of that, he looked down on her because Natalia read cards, knew home remedies, and worst of all, communicated with spirits. “Your cousin is ignorant,” Juan Martín told me, and I hated him. I even thought about calling Natalia and asking her to give me a recipe for one of her potions, maybe a poison. But I let it go, like I let every petty little thing pass while a white stone grew in my stomach that left very little room for air or food.
“Tomorrow I’m going to Asunción,” Natalia told me. “I need to buy some ?andutí cloth.”
To earn money, Natalia had a small business selling crafts in the city’s main street, and she was famous for her exquisite taste in choosing the finest ?andutí, the traditional Paraguayan lace that the women weave on a frame, spiderwebs of delicate, colorful thread. In the back part of her shop she had a small table where she read cards, Spanish or tarot, according to the customer’s preference. They say she was very good. I couldn’t say for sure because I’d never wanted her to read cards for me.
“Why don’t you come with me? We can take your husband. Has he been to Asunción?”
“No—as if.”
Natalia flip-flopped her way to the patio and greeted Uncle Carlos and Juan Martín with kisses on the cheek. She poured a whiskey with a lot of ice and stretched her toes. I emerged from the kitchen with swollen eyes and Juan Martín asked how I could be so dumb. “If you’d injured your corneas we’d have to rush back to Buenos Aires by plane.”
“Why?” asked Natalia, and she shook the ice in her glass so it sounded like little bells in the afternoon heat. “The hospital here is very good.”
“It doesn’t compare.”
“Well, aren’t you a citified little prick.” And after she said that, she invited him to Asunción. “I’m driving,” she told him. “You can buy stuff if you have money, everything’s cheap. It’s three hundred kilometers; we can go and come back the same day if we leave early.”
He accepted. Then he went to take a nap and didn’t even suggest I join him. I was grateful. I stayed with my cousin out on the hot porch, she with her whiskey, me with a cold beer. I couldn’t drink anything stronger. She told me about her new boyfriend, the son of the owner of the province’s largest supermarket chain. She always had rich boyfriends. This one mattered to her as little as the others, emotionally speaking, but she was interested in him because he had a plane. He’d taken her up in it the week before. “Beautiful,” she told me, “except it shakes a little. The smaller the plane the more it shakes.”
“I didn’t know that,” I told her.
“Me either. Aren’t we dumb, cousin, because it makes sense.
“Something terrifying happened to me while I was up there,” she went on. “We were flying over fields to the north, and suddenly I saw a very big fire. A house was burning, bright orange flames and a black cloud of smoke, and you could see the house collapsing in on itself. I stared and stared at the fire until he turned the plane and I lost sight of it. But ten minutes later we passed over the spot again and the fire had disappeared.”
“You must have gotten the place wrong. It’s not like you’re up in planes all the time and you can recognize the terrain from above.”
“You don’t understand, there was a patch of burned earth and the ruins of the house.”
“It went out, then.”
“How? Did the firefighters get there in five minutes? We’re talking wilderness here, babe, and the flames were really high when I saw them, and it wasn’t raining or anything! It could never have been put out in ten minutes.”
“Did you tell your boyfriend?”
“Sure, but he says I’m crazy, he never saw any fire.”
Our eyes met. I almost always believed her. Once, Natalia had stopped me from going into my grandmother’s room because she was in there, smoking. Our grandmother had been dead for ten years. I listened to her: I didn’t go in, but I smelled the penetrating odor of the Havana cigarillos that were her favorites, though there was no smoke in the air.
“You have to find out, then, ask around.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know if the fire already happened, or if it’s going to happen.”