From the roof, she intervenes. The sound of her movement interrupts a conversation, interrupts sleep, interrupts a meal. It always produces that same chill that climbs up the spine.
I indulge in attributing to her all sorts of evil motivations about me, endowing her with a strategic imagination that endlessly plans the most subtle ways to drive me into bottomless madness.
For the moment, she is silent. But I know that she is there, waiting for me to forget about her existence in order to manifest herself again.
In my internal conversations, I tell myself that her presence does not matter to me. But these are just words. Within my days, within my hours, within my minutes, she has become the opponent.
Our relationship becomes more complex, more articulate. There are implicit threats, momentary truces, warnings from both sides. In the beginning, I trusted the possibility of a last resort of poison or the exterminator. But as I get to know the edge of her intelligence, I begin to understand that our interactions could never culminate in such a primitive maneuver.
Before, when I was barely comfortable in this hovel, I thought that the option of escape existed, to move to another of the city’s coordinates, to another gray life, neither better nor worse, but different, in the end everything being more or less the same. Only over time, seeing how my dreams and disappointments took root in this room, this kitchen, this bathroom, did I realize that living is a recalcitrant act, and that moving was no longer an available course of action.
Having her above me is like carrying a dream. Bitterness, depression, and madness eventually pour in from the roof like a leaking mist, like danger in the air.
Sometimes I dream that the ceiling is falling, that it crushes me and that it flattens everything that is mine. It is as if this dump never existed. I wake up and I hear that she is digging, she is growling. Could it be that the possum is trying to get into my house? Will the time come when she breaks through and then her babies begin climbing down in, bouncing across the floor in droves?
Other times I feel her saliva seeping through the holes in the ceiling and splashing on my face when I lie down in bed to sleep.
That hysterical grin of hers, like the fake smile of a concerned mother. She walks back and forth, nervous, exhausted, already too old to protect anyone. Not even herself. She is exposed. I am exposed. I need to call someone to come change the ceiling boards in the bedroom.
Fate falls from above, and burns like the bright rays of the sun. Another reason why I do not like going out. But the most important reason is that someone has to stay and watch over her. If I leave the battlefield, I will have to conquer it again when I return. And that is if I make it back, because I could easily be another animal tossed to the side of the road, after being run over by a random car. Those who just want to go unnoticed always end up being cannon fodder.
When will the day come when we can make peace and each of us live her own life? I know your anxiety is not about me. It is the cold, the hunger, it is being exposed to what may come. That is why she scares me. Because she has nothing to lose. I try to invent days when the rain stops and the clouds move away, days when the world is a giant nest for everyone and not a heap of disintegrating lifeless fauna. However, every hour another old woman slips on the stairs, or falls asleep in the sink from exhaustion, drowning without realizing it between little bubbles.
It is a good night when I do not remember what I dreamed. Only the hazy blur of the hours that have passed remains. When that happens, it is almost like starting to live again.
Other times I dream that something has happened and that now I am outside and she is the one inside. I see her flipping through her photo albums and crying. It is not fair! I do not remember anything about my life. I feel myself swell with anger. I spent the night screaming and now it is impossible to sleep. I smear my feces on the tiles so the fetid smell will descend and become trapped in her room. Suddenly, I wake up in my bed, suffocating.
When it is time to lock yourself up, living becomes a dark dream. Giving up on the thought of going out, it becomes important to secure the places where air and light might enter. Those spots are also where the noise gets in, and fills the hovel with agitation and other people’s fever. It is as if I had a bucketful of someone else’s sweat thrown at my face. To live, then, is to hide from contact.
The obstacle, the barrier that I am creating, I reinforce it with the chunks of my own fear. My screams have congealed, and it is with these masses that I increase the thickness of the membrane that isolates me from everything outside, struggling to create another obstruction beyond the wad of wax in each of my ears.
Yet that nightmare, that noise of machinery and voices, still fattens the outside air with its mumbled plots, as if the great mill could only be run by deadly crashes that crush souls and splinter bones.
Thus it coils and extends in the gloom of my hovel, like the tentacles of a giant animal in search of prey hidden in a cranny. I feel how the many whispers caress me with the vocabulary of a fear so prevalent that it filters through walls and identities.
That is why I am afraid of her, because she stands up to such a storm, she must have learned to crumble everything before her to bits, after breathing so much devastation for so long. Not even in my most poison moment could I be even the shadow of her rage. I am flat and abstract. She lives with the possibility that any owl, any cat will snatch her up and take her to her cold end.
My ruminations have no limits and I lose myself in time as in empty space. It is likely that she who digs and scratches up there, and with whom I celebrate all my anniversaries, is not the same opponent as in the beginning, but rather the daughter or even granddaughter of my original companion.
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About the Author
The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Under the name George Angel, he has published poetry, fiction, and essays in English. Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, authoring seven books of poetry, and three books of theater plays all in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He continues to write and publish in both English and Spanish. He is also a musician, a visual artist, and a theater director.
