“My world was tiny.”
—Isaac Babel, “The Story of My Dovecote”
to Ofelia Slomianski
It is two days before the mother will die. The son is sitting next to her in the living room of her spacious Mexico City apartment, right across from the Perisur shopping center. It is scorching hot: the windows are wide open. He is holding her skeletal hand as she looks unforgivingly into the empty space. What does Irma see? Does she register any sound? With the disease devouring her memory, her extraordinarily varied world is being reduced to a bare minimum.
A few months ago, in a sudden resurgence of intellectual stamina, Irma asked the nurse to phone her son.
“Irma has questions,” the nurse said. “She wants to know why she isn’t at home.”
“But she is at home,” the son replied.
“She doesn’t think so,” the nurse said. “Irma also wants to know when Isidoro will be released from prison.”
“Lemme talk to her.”
The son listened to the mother complain. “Isidoro is coming back. The police released him this morning.”
“Why?”
“He served his sentence. Estuvo en la cárcel. I will finally see him.”
“¿Dónde está papá?” she said when the son did not respond.
“Ma, he died three years ago.”
Irma changed the subject: “Why am I not in the right place?”
“What is the right place? You are in your house.”
“This isn’t mine. I don’t recognize any of my things …”
“Are you talking about the house in Copilco? That’s probably it. You haven’t been in that house for 30 years. You and Pa sold it. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t.”
This conversation took place while the son was still almost 3,000 miles away. Prior to it, Irma was barely able to enunciate half a dozen words: “sí,” “por qué,” “te amo” … All of them appeared anodyne to him, since the mother was always the owner of a rich memory and a superb vocabulary. She spoke many languages, he forgets exactly how many: Yiddish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, and Spanish. Maybe Russian and Ukrainian. During her university years, she learned Kiliwa, Mazatec, Nahuatl, Totonac, and Tzotzil. Once her husband died, though, all of them vanished, were erased, wiped out. And Irma lost a reason to live.
Then, just as magically, the mother falls back into a deep silence, and the phone appears dead.
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