The Natashas Read online

  The voice fogged the mouth of the woman in the mirror.

  This was a familiar voice. The jazz voice that she knew to be her own.

  Béatrice separated herself from the woman in the mirror and pulled her face back in line with her spine. She lifted her hands to her breasts and held their weight.

  Her fingers spread and became firmer. She pressed into the cushion of her breasts. It felt like a rolling pin was sliding up her chest. She pressed further. Her eyelids started to droop.

  Her breath rolled up her throat, pushing for an exit. She couldn’t tell if she was floating upwards or on the verge of falling down. Static laced around her scalp. The scratch in her throat started to break. It charged out of her mouth. It sprang and unfolded. A word.

  “Polina”, Béatrice gasped on to the mirror, then dropped her head.

  She grabbed the sides of the sink and spat. The cold saliva slid down the sink’s edge towards the drain, as if into a large porcelain ear.

  In the mirror, the warm breath disappeared into its own reflection.

  10

  Béatrice felt calm for a moment, as if she had just thrown up. Then she remembered the name she had just pronounced.

  “Polina.”

  She did not know any Polinas. She could not even remember hearing such a name. But Béatrice was more alarmed by the sense of loss she felt than by the word itself. She must have absorbed the name unconsciously, she assured herself. From the radio, for example. Or from a book. Or a song. Or a passerby speaking on the phone. These are names without faces.

  She turned off the faucet and stepped into the warmth of the water.

  “Polina,” she said again.

  She took her foot out and stepped back.

  “Polina … Polina … Polina …” she hiccuped, as she left the bathroom and hurried up the stairs to her room.

  11

  The telephone was ringing downstairs. Béatrice’s mother was in the garden. Emmanuelle was awake and in the bathroom now. Her father had gone out to buy bread. Béatrice stood in her room, dry and dressed, breathing normally now, with no names scratching through her. She listened to the ringing, thinking it would run out at any moment, but another ring surfaced through every interval of silence. She opened her door and went down the stairs. The ring continued, as if building a stairway towards her. She went down to the first floor, turned to the hallway table where the phone was sitting and picked up the receiver. Before she could even say “Hello” a man’s voice raced at her in Spanish:

  “Hola Señora, estoy llamando en nombre de , que está llevando a cabo esta encuesta sobre satisfacción del cliente con la calidad de la formación proporcionada por este Organismo de Capacitación Registrada.”

  Béatrice tried to cut in several times, but the man’s words were chinked together like a metal chain. And yet, somehow, his tone remained pleasant and polite.

  “La encuesta se llevó a cabo para conocer la opinión de los clientes sobre su producto . utiliza la información que usted nos da como parte de sus procesos de mejora continua para asegurar que ofrece productos de calidad a sus clientes.”

  Just as Béatrice was about to hang up, the voice stopped, like an animal sensing her movement. She held the receiver in midair. The man’s voice came out of its hiding place, softened. It spoke with the tone of an earlobe.

  “Esto sólo tomará un momento de su tiempo.”

  Béatrice kept the receiver away from her face, neither placing it on the stand nor bringing it back to her ear.

  “Who is this?” she said.

  She could tell that the man was still there, his mouth touching his receiver, but he was not saying one word. Béatrice waited. Her elbow was stiff.

  Then, the man’s voice pounced through the phone.

  “Señora Monroe!”

  Béatrice dropped the phone. It bounced on its side, then again on its face, emitting the overlapping beeps of several buttons pressed. It rocked up, then back down on its side and became still. Béatrice picked up the receiver and put it to her ear. It was beeping nervously, having hung itself up during the fall. She placed it back on the stand, then walked up to her room.

  With the door closed, she brushed her hair slowly, then pinned it up into a tight chignon.

  12

  Béatrice went outside. Her mother was in the garden, knees damp with soil.

  “Where are you going, Miss M …?” said her mother in tone with the tulips.

  Béatrice knew the answer to the question but couldn’t find its beginning. “… A dress. For Friday …” she mumbled.

  “I thought we were going to go together?” The mother gave a playful frown.

  Béatrice knew it was her turn to speak. She saw her father’s car drive up the road. He parked and hopped out, holding a baguette and a paper bag of pastries.

  “Hello, ladies!” he said looking only at Béatrice.

  “Miss M ’s on her way out …” the mother chimed.

  “Oh, is she? Where to, Miss Monroe …?” the father said.

  “… My concert. I need a dress,” Béatrice repeated.

  “Don’t you want to stay for breakfast?” the father said, “I got you a chausson-aux-pommes.”

  Béatrice thought about his question. It felt like a room full of empty shoes. Her father waited. Words formed in her head, then melted like ice into puddles on the floor of that room. There was one shoe floating across a puddle on its sole. She remembered what it was she could say.

  “No.” She told her father.

  “All right,” the father said and backed up. “You want me to take you into town and drop you off?”

  Béatrice paused. She held the feeling of the floating, solitary shoe. It reminded her of the word at her disposal.

  “No,” Béatrice said firmly.

  The wind blew. A strand of hair worked its way out of her chignon. The father lifted his hand to fix it. As his hand approached her temple it changed its mind and laid itself down like a spoon upon Béatrice’s shoulder.

  “Goodbye then … Miss Monroe.”

  III

  The Head Natasha of the Natashas

  1

  “You smell like a car engine!” a round-faced Natasha says to the nail-painting Natasha.

  She has been trying to sleep. She’s got white crust in the creases of her lips. It looks like dried milk, but she hasn’t had milk for a long time. Not since her grandma asked her to go out and buy a bottle.

  “Would you paint your paws in the other corner, Bozhé moy!”

  Just as the Mercedes Red Natasha tries to find a sufficient path of foot-holes to move to the other side of the room, a metal rummaging is heard. It’s coming from the keyhole of the only door in the room. Click and clang and a chain drops like a brass necklace. The door opens and a woman enters.

  Her age no one knows. They say she is twice-over a long life in this room.

  This is why she is the Head Natasha of the Natashas.

  2

  The Head Natasha of the Natashas says, “Ok girls, who here has ever had a papaya?”

  All the Natashas perk up, even the wilting one on the floor.

  “I’ve had … a baby …” the sunflower Natasha says unsteadily.

  Another Natasha closes her journal and says, “Oh yeah, I remember. What a shit-hole situation that was.”

  For a while afterward, anytime a breeze would blow underneath Sunflower Natasha’s loose T-shirt, she would shout, “Baby’s coming back!!” Now she knows better than to make such a scene. Although, in private, when the rest of the girls are asleep, and she feels a coolness float across her skin, she’ll tuck her chin and say very quietly to herself, “Hello, baby …”

  The redhead budges forth.

  “None of you know what a pa-pa-ya is,” she says.

  “I do,” Baby-blue jumps in. “It’s like …a German guy who has the thing where he insists you play along. Like he’s your father.”

  “Papa—ya?”

  “Ich bin
dein kleines Mädchen …”

  “I’m your little girl,” the Natashas chatter in repetition.

  The redhead swipes the air with her stiff hands, “You wish. Blood’s thicker than water.”

  “Ha ha!”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean the Papa-yas all got their own daughters, they don’t need you.”

  “She can be his blood daughter and I’ll be his water daughter …”

  “No, no, no, that’s not it.” A Natasha from the corner walks forth as if carrying the complete truth in her cheeks. “A PAPAYA is when you make a FUSS and you get your eye PAAP’D.”

  “You mean popped.”

  (This Natasha is just showing off her English accent. She makes her r’s into wide a’s, so it looks like she’s about to yawn every time she says a word with an r in it. Otherwise, her cheekbones are sharp and her eyes deep-set like a post-war country.)

  3

  As you can see, the Natashas get easily excited. The Head Natasha has to raise her hand and jingle the set of heavy keys on the chain for the girls to quieten down.

  “Now, now, ladies, PA-PA-YA is a fruit.”

  The Natashas freeze where there are. They try as hard as they can to understand what the Head Natasha has just said.

  “It’s smooth and creamy like a mango. But a different shape. Like this.” The Head Natasha forms an oval in the air in front of all the other Natashas. “See …” Then she takes the invisible oval with both hands and pries it open in front of the girls. “And inside the seeds are black, like caviar.” The Natashas all stare at the empty space between her hands.

  The Head Natasha explains to them what a papaya tastes like. It turns out that none of the Natashas have ever tasted a papaya. They listen with great interest. When she’s done, the girl with the freshly-painted nails taps the Head Natasha on the ankle.

  “Pa-pa-ya?” she whispers.

  The Head Natasha gently smoothes back the girl’s hair.

  All the Natashas repeat in unison.

  “Pa … Pa … Ya …”

  “PA … PA … YA.”

  “PA PA YA.”

  Their chanting grows and grows as the Head Natasha places her hand on the doorknob, squeezing the handle and turning. The door opens. In the darkness of the frame is a figure of a waiting man.

  At first it is hard to tell that it is a man and not just pure darkness. This is because the man is wearing all black, black gloves, black shoes, and a black woollen mask on his head. There are two holes cut out from which his eyes peer. This is how we know it is a man.

  The Head Natasha moves to the side, letting the man in. She closes her fingers over the keys she is holding in her palm. The other Natashas are all suddenly upright, facing forward, mutely attentive.

  All the girls’ shoulders rise as their hands graze up their waists, catching the hems of their shirts and trailing them upward. They peel off the top layer of what they are wearing, and let the garments fall to the floor.

  Next, their hands twist behind them. These hands slide up their backs to the clasp of their bras. With a drowsy ease the clasps are undone and the bras flinch and fall off. Their breasts stare out at the man.

  Next, the girls’ hands drool down to their hip bones. Their fingertips dig under the elastic of their underwear. They push at their waistbands until they are nudged off the hips, down, also to the floor.

  The girls stand naked now in front of the man. Their skin tones are all faded and blend in with the cement of the walls. Just their nipples stand out like floating eyes, and their pubic hair like illegibly scribbled notes.

  The woollen mask on the man’s head stretches between the chin and the nose. He is trying to smile. A hot breath exits where his smile is forming.

  Listen, listen, listen …

  IV

  César the actor

  1

  César hadn’t heard this song since he had left Mexico. It was his mother’s favourite. She couldn’t help but sing along whenever it was playing. Usually, she restrained her desire to sing. She was well aware that her own voice had the eerie passion of an epileptic. Let the singers do the singing, that’s God’s order. But on the rare occasions that she heard this song, she would let herself go, and César and his brothers would squirm with embarrassment at the strange, desperate sounds coming out of their mother. Their father would turn to his boys and say calmly, Some songs pull the sound right out of you, make your voice twist in pain …

  2

  The song was about gratitude, actually. “Gracias a la vida …” It belonged to Violeta Parra, a Chilean folk singer, a legend of the melancholic melody. She lived and sang as many female legends before her. The type of women who survive famine, and violence, and humiliation, who push themselves forward when abandoned by justice. To all those listening across the radios of Latin America, she was their unbreakable grandmother. And, as such a woman, she sang to their weak spirits, to their thin hope, to their desperate scepticism. Slowly and generously, she testified to the grace of living things.

  “Gracias a la vida …

  …you have given me so much

  You gave me two eyes, which when I open them,

  I can distinguish perfectly between black and white,

  And the starry depths of the sky above,

  And amongst the masses, the man that I love.”

  And so you can imagine it was quite a shock to her fan base that, less than a year after she wrote it, Violeta shot herself in the head. Not everybody had known that she composed the song at the end of her turbulent relationship with the famous Swiss flautist Gilbert Favre.

  It was then that the radio listeners began to ask, So who’s this flute-playing boyfriend, and Wait, was living a painful activity for her?

  But that was in February of 1967. Nowadays, when the song plays, if it plays, it sings the words as they are. Some know of her story. Others don’t. But any given listener may find themselves thinking, Whoever she was and however she lived, now at least, nothing hurts.

  3

  César had no idea what this song from his childhood was now doing on the radio in Paris. It came as it had come in those years to his mother, strange and generous. But now, his mother was not singing along in torment, and his brothers were not making faces behind him, and his father did not lean in and tell them about pain.

  Here, the song was filtering through an old stereo system in the corner of the bare office of his telemarketing job. The sound seemed to change the temperature in the room. The air was no longer sourish, but velvety and humid. And as the song finished, he had one clear urge: to sing it to himself, again and again. And so he did, over and over in his head as he worked anxiously to finish the rest of his calls. When his shift was done, he hurried home to his tiny maid’s room apartment and found the song on YouTube. It was a fan-made video consisting of a slide-show of photos of Violeta Parra as the audio track played. All the photos which slid across the screen were so different from one another, it seemed like a montage of at least thirty unrelated women. One, gently smiling to herself. Another, with a gaping, strong mouth. Another glancing up suspiciously. Another joking. Another anguished. Another, simply unwashed.

  At first, he sang the lines of the songs quietly, his voice careful to stay hidden under the guitar’s strum. But soon, his heart took hold of these lyrics like a bullfighter. His voice followed the juts of passion, and swung back with a borrowed old pain. He played the song over and over again and sang and sang and sang. Then he closed his computer and sat in silence.

  4

  César the actor was named after César the boxer, Julio César Chàvez, a six-time world champion from a city not too far away from where César was born in Mexico. The now legendary fighter had what one could call a modest childhood, growing up in an abandoned railway car with nine sisters and brothers, and a father who worked for the railway. As a child, the future legend watched his mother wash and iron other people’s clothes and decided that his fists would give her hands a break in
this world. Just before he turned seventeen, Julio César moved to Tijuana and began his professional boxing career.

  At twenty-two, Chàvez won his first championship and delivered on his promise. He made his mother’s eyes glimmer and her hands rub in circles one over the other, and a voice came out of her that he had never heard before, singing, “DIOS, DIOS, DIOS!”

  The boxer’s story was the old tale every poor family in Mexico prayed would become their own. César’s family took part in such prayers. They owned a restaurant where his father cooked, his mother cleaned, and he and his brothers took the orders and served the food. César had grown up in this restaurant, in front of a small TV in the corner, whose talk shows and soap operas perforated the sound of the sizzling kitchen and the chewing of the customers.

  His father and brothers loved sports, especially boxing and soccer. The older boy, Raul, and the middle, Alonzo, were both meaty. Raul’s weight stretched into a thick and firm woven work of muscle, whereas Alonzo’s expanded around him, abiding to gravity and the heat. Raul should have been the one named Julio César because he was a fighter. Alonzo was the wall, absorbent, pudgy, he could take hits. Raul was the rattlesnake, he’d whip his knuckles so quick your ear would ring all day like a church bell.

  César was not very muscular like Raul, nor very meaty like Alonzo, but finely built for strength. He was agile and strong-lunged, which made him a quick runner and a clear speaker. His eyes were thin, wide and peering, lustrous in their gaze. His eyebrows bracketed his eyes frankly. His fine, triangular face was balanced by the weight of those two sleek eyes, and held in place by a nose, which one could not call large, but gave the sense of disproportion due to its wide nostrils. His lips were thin and bland and tended to disappear in the configuration of his face. This earned him the nickname of “the gecko”.