She stood up and went to her room to get her purse and the bags with yesterday’s purchases.
“You look spooked, babe.”
It was true. I was disconcerted. I went back to the room where Juan Martín should have slept, and I didn’t see his bag or his toothbrush that he always placed meticulously in the bathroom when we traveled. The shower was dry. The still-damp towels were the ones I had used the night before.
—
“It’s going to rain,” said the front-desk girl as she waved good-bye. “That’s what the radio says, but it sure doesn’t look like it, the sky’s all clear.”
“I hope it does. This sticky heat is something awful,” answered Natalia.
“What about your friend’s husband?” she asked as if I weren’t right there.
“Oh, there was a misunderstanding.”
I settled into the passenger seat. Before leaving Clorinda we stopped at the service station. Natalia needed cigarettes and I needed another grapefruit Fanta. One of the truckers from the night before, the one who’d been sleepy and barely listened to the others’ stories, was gassing up. He waved to us, asked how we were, and looked into the backseat. He was probably looking for Juan Martín, but he didn’t ask about him. We smiled and waved good-bye, and headed out to the highway. On the horizon along the river, you could already see the black clouds of the gathering storm.
End of Term
We’d never really paid her much attention. She was one of those girls who don’t talk much, who don’t stand out for being too smart or too dumb and who have those forgettable faces. Faces you see every day in the same place, but that you might not even recognize if you ever saw them out of context, much less be able to put a name to them. The only striking thing about her was how badly she dressed. Ugly clothes, but something else, too; it looked like she deliberately chose clothes that would hide her body. Two or three sizes too big, shirts buttoned up to the very top button, jeans so loose you couldn’t guess at the figure beneath them. Only her clothes caught our attention, and only long enough for us to comment on her bad taste or declare that she dressed like an old lady. Her name was Marcela. She could have been a Mónica, a Laura, a María Jose, or a Patricia, any one of those interchangeable names that the girls no one notices tend to have. She was a bad student, but her teachers rarely failed her. She missed school a lot, but no one mentioned her absence. We didn’t know if she had money, what her parents did for a living, what neighborhood she lived in.
We didn’t care about her.
Until one day in history class, one of the girls let out a little shriek of disgust. Was it Guada? It sounded like Guada’s voice, and she sat near Marcela. While the teacher was explaining the Battle of Caseros, Marcela was pulling the fingernails off her left hand. With her teeth. As if they were press-on nails. Her fingers were bleeding, but she didn’t seem to feel any pain. Some girls threw up. The history teacher called in the principal, who took Marcela away; she was absent for a week and no one explained anything to us. When she came back, she wasn’t the girl we ignored anymore—she was famous. Some girls were afraid of her, others wanted to be her friend. What she had done was the strangest thing we’d ever seen. Some girls’ parents wanted to call a meeting to address the case, because they weren’t sure it was a good idea for us to be around an “unbalanced” girl. But they found a compromise. There wasn’t much time left in the year, and then we’d be out of high school. Marcela’s parents assured everyone she would be OK, that she was taking medication, going to therapy, that she was under control. The other parents believed them. Mine barely paid any attention; they only cared about my grades, and I was still the best student in the class, just like every other year.
Marcela was fine for a while. She came back to school with her fingers bandaged, first with white gauze and later with Band-Aids. She didn’t seem to remember the episode of the torn-off fingernails. She didn’t make friends with the girls who tried to get close to her. In the bathroom, the ones who’d wanted to be Marcela’s friends told us it was impossible because she didn’t talk. She listened to them but never answered, and she stared at them so intently that it scared them.
It was also in the bathroom that everything really got started. Marcela was looking at herself in the mirror, in the only part of it where you could really see anything, since the rest was all peeling, dirty, or covered in marker or lipstick graffiti: declarations of love or obscenities scrawled after some fight between two furious girls. I was with my friend Agustina; we were trying to resolve an argument we’d had earlier. It had seemed like an important discussion, until Marcela took a razor from who knows where (her pocket, I guess). With exacting speed, she sliced a neat cut into her cheek. It took a second for the blood to come, but when it did it practically gushed out, drenching her neck and her shirt that was buttoned all the way up, like a nun’s or a dapper man’s.
Neither of us moved. Marcela went on looking at herself in the mirror, studying the wound, showing no sign of pain. That was what most impressed me: it clearly didn’t hurt her—she hadn’t even flinched or closed her eyes. We reacted only when a girl who’d been peeing in a stall opened the door and cried out, “What happened?!” and tried to use her scarf to stop the blood. Agustina looked like she was about to start crying. My knees were trembling. Marcela’s smile, as she looked at herself and pressed the scarf to her face, was beautiful. Her face was beautiful. I offered to go with her to her house or to a doctor so they could stitch her up or disinfect the wound. She finally seemed to react then, shaking her head and saying she’d take a taxi. We asked her if she had money. She said yes and smiled again. A smile that could make anyone fall in love. She was absent again for a week. The entire school knew about the incident; no one talked about anything else. When she came back, we all tried not to look at the bandage covering half her face, but no one could help it.