I saw it as I was about to cross the street. It was lying in a pile of garbage, abandoned among the roots of a tree. Dentistry students, I thought, those soulless and stupid people, ignoramuses who think only about money and are steeped in bad taste and sadism. I picked it up with both hands in case it fell apart. The skull was missing its jaw and every one of its teeth, a mutilation that confirmed it was indeed the work of the proto-dentists. I looked around the tree and went through all the garbage. I couldn’t find the teeth. What a shame, I thought, and I walked to my apartment just two hundred meters away, holding the skull in my hands like I was processing toward a pagan forest ceremony.
I put it on the living room table. It was small. The skull of a child? I’m ignorant of all things anatomical and osseous. For example, I don’t understand why skulls don’t have noses. When I touch my face, I feel my nose stuck to my skull. Maybe the nose is cartilage? I don’t think so, although it’s true they say it doesn’t hurt when it breaks and that it breaks easily, like a weak bone. I examined the skull more closely and found it had a name written on it. And a number. Tati, 1975. So many possibilities. Could be its name, Tati, born in 1975. Or its owner could be a Tati, who came into existence in 1975. Or maybe the number wasn’t a date but had to do with some kind of classification. Out of respect I decided to baptize it with the generic name Calavera, which means “skull” in Spanish. By the time my boyfriend came home from work that night, she was already just Vera.
He, my boyfriend, didn’t see her until he took off his jacket and sat down on the sofa. He is a very unobservant man.
When he saw her, he gave a startled jump but didn’t get up. He is also lazy, and he’s getting fat. I don’t like fat men.
“What is that? Is it real?”
“Of course it’s real,” I told him. “I found it in the street. It’s a skull.”
He yelled at me then. “Why would you bring it here?” he shouted at me in a somewhat exaggerated manner. “Where did you get it?” It struck me that he was making a scene, and I ordered him to lower his voice. I tried to explain to him calmly that I had found her discarded in the street, abandoned under a tree, and that it would have been totally indecent on my part to act with indifference and just leave her there.
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe so,” I told him, and I brought Vera into my room.
He waited a while then, in case I came out to make him dinner. He doesn’t need to eat anything else; he’s getting fat. His thighs already rub against each other and if he wore a woman’s skirt he would always be chafed between his legs. After an hour I heard him curse me and call to order a pizza. How lazy. He’d rather get delivery than walk downtown and eat in a restaurant. It costs almost the same.
“Vera, I don’t know what I’m doing with him.”
If she could talk, I know she would tell me to leave him. It’s common sense. Before I go to sleep I spray my favorite perfume over the bed, and I put a little on Vera, under her eyes and along her sides.
Tomorrow I’ll buy her a little wig. To keep my boyfriend out of the room, I turn the key in the lock.
My boyfriend says he’s afraid and other nonsense like that. He sleeps in the living room, but it’s not a sacrifice because the futon I bought with my money—he doesn’t make much—is of excellent quality. “What are you afraid of?” I ask him. He sputters inanities about how I spend all my time locked in with Vera, how he hears me talking to her.
I ask him to move out, to pack his things and leave the apartment, to leave me. His expression is one of profound pain; I don’t believe it and I almost push him into the bedroom so he can pack his suitcases. He screams again, but this time it’s a scream of fear. He’s seen my pretty Vera, who is wearing her pricey blond wig made of natural hair, fine and yellow, surely cut in some ex-Soviet village in Ukraine or the steppes (are Siberian women blond?), the braids of some girl who still hasn’t found anyone to take her away from her miserable village. I find it very strange that poor blondes exist, which is why I bought her that one. I also bought her some necklaces with colored beads, very festive. And she’s surrounded by aromatic candles, the kind that women who aren’t like me put in the bathroom or the bedroom while they wait for some man among flames and rose petals.
He threatened to call my mother. I told him he could do what he wanted. He looked fatter than ever, with his cheeks hanging down like a Neapolitan mastiff’s, and that night, after he left carrying his suitcase and with a bag slung over his shoulder, I decided to stop eating much, to eat very little. I thought about beautiful bodies like Vera’s, if she were whole: white bones that shine under the light in forgotten graves, thin bones that sound like little party bells when they hit against each other, frolicking in the fields, doing dances of death. He has nothing to do with the ethereal beauty of those naked bones: his are covered with layers of fat and boredom. Vera and I will be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthy; beautiful, the crusts of earth enfolding us. Hollow, dancing skeletons. Vera and I—no flesh over our bones.
A week after giving up food, my body changes. If I raise my arms my ribs show through, although not much. I dream: someday, when I sit on this wooden floor, instead of buttocks I’ll have bones, and the bones will poke through the flesh and leave bloodstains on the floor, they’ll slice through the skin from inside.
—
I bought Vera some fairy lights, the kind people use to decorate Christmas trees. I couldn’t keep seeing her there without eyes, or rather, with dead eyes, so I decided that in her empty sockets some little lamps would shine. Since they’re colored I can alternate them, and one day Vera can have red eyes, another day green, and another day blue. While I was lying on the bed and contemplating the effect of Vera with eyes, I heard some keys opening my apartment door. My mother, the only person who had a key, because I’d made my obese ex give his back. I got up to let her in. I made tea and sat down to drink it with her. “You’re thinner,” she said to me. “It’s the stress of the separation,” I replied. We fell silent. Finally she spoke:
“Patricio told me you’re into something strange.”
“Into what? Please, Mom, he’s making things up because I kicked him out.”
“He says you’re obsessed with a skull.”
I laughed.
“He’s crazy. With some of my girlfriends we’re making costumes and scary decorations for Halloween; it’s just for fun. I didn’t have time to buy a costume, so I put together a voodoo tableau and I’m going to buy some other things: black candles, a crystal ball, to set the scene, you know? Because we’re having the party here at my house.”