The Lover My Mother Found in That Store

I never knew how much damage a book could do until I saw my mother close that novel with trembling hands, as if something inside her had awakened without asking permission.

It was called The Thirst of the Desert, by some man named Eduardo Salinas, and it told the story of a European woman who let herself be bent to the will of a man from the other side of the sea. My mother, Beatriz, read it three times that winter. Each time she closed it more slowly.

I do not blame the writer entirely, although for years I said his name with rancor. He only put the words there. It was my mother who chose to read them as if they were speaking to her.

I have to explain something about Beatriz so what came after will make sense. She was the most devout woman in the Pinar neighborhood. Mass every Sunday, rosary on Tuesdays, the first to volunteer whenever Saint Christopher’s parish organized anything. My father, Joaquín, adored her with that quiet devotion of men who don’t know how to say I love you and say it by fixing the kitchen tap instead.

And she was beautiful. I say it without shame because it was a fact of the neighborhood, something everyone knew and no one named. A blond mane that didn’t come from any bottle, large blue eyes, a way of walking that pulled the fabric of her dresses taut without her seeming to notice. Men turned to look. She lowered her gaze and quickened her step.

***

The foreigner arrived in the neighborhood one spring, with only the clothes on his back and a worn duffel bag over his shoulder. Darian, his name was, though almost nobody used it. To everyone, he was “the bazaar man.”

In less than two months, the man who had shown up with nothing rented the large corner shop on Avenida de los Tilos and opened The Leather Bazaar: handbags, suitcases, belts, wallets that smelled of animal and dye. The women in the neighborhood would go in to look at the season’s bag and come out with flushed faces, not quite sure why.

I knew why, or I was beginning to. Darian treated them all with the same calm arrogance, as if he were doing them a favor by looking at them. He didn’t flatter. He didn’t smile too much. He said what he thought with a confidence that in anyone else would have sounded rude and in him sounded like a verdict. And for some reason I didn’t understand then, that attracted them.

He was a big man. Six foot three, broad shoulders, huge hands. He wasn’t handsome in the neighborhood sense, but he took up space in a way that made people look at him. Like an animal that doesn’t need to prove it’s dangerous, I thought once, and I was frightened that I had thought it.

My coworker Tomás hated him without having exchanged more than three sentences with him. He said people like that came to take everything. I nodded to avoid an argument, but inside I suspected that what Tomás truly hated was the ease with which a stranger got what he had spent half his life begging for: to be looked at.

***

The first time I understood that Darian had noticed my mother was one Sunday, on the way back from mass. Beatriz was walking a couple of steps ahead of my father, and I brought up the rear, lagging behind as always.

He was at the bazaar doorway with two acquaintances. When my mother passed by, the three of them fell silent, and that silence was more obscene than any whistle. Beatriz noticed. She edged toward the curb, uneasy, and that small gesture was enough for my father to step up, take her by the waist, and keep walking without looking back.

As I passed by him, I heard Darian say to them, in slow, deliberate Spanish:

—That woman is going to walk into my shop one day. And she’s going to come in alone.

One of the others laughed.

—You’re dreaming, friend.

—I’m not dreaming —he said, without raising his voice—. I’m waiting.

I was left with those words stuck in me. Far from horrifying me, they woke a sick curiosity in me, a kind of vertigo in my stomach every time I imagined my mother beyond my father’s reach, beyond the reach of everything that kept her upright.

***

The confrontation came weeks later. Again we were all coming back from the same place when Darian came out of the bazaar and planted himself in front of my mother. He said something in her ear, so close his lips almost brushed her temple. Beatriz went rigid.

My father arrived just as the foreigner stepped aside.

—What did he say to you? —he asked.

She shook her head, shaken, unable to repeat it. My father pressed, and it was Darian who answered for her, amused.

—If she won’t tell you, maybe it’s because she liked hearing it.

My father lunged at him. He grabbed his shirt with his left hand and raised the other. He never got to throw the punch. The foreigner drove a knee into his stomach with terrible calm, like moving a chair out of the way, and Joaquín doubled over and fell to the ground, airless.

What happened next is burned into me and I still don’t know how to arrange it. My mother threw herself at Darian to keep him from going further. And he, instead of pushing her away, used her. While pretending to let himself be held back, he ran his hands over her waist, over her hips, over her back, slowly, as if he had every right in the world. Beatriz looked him in the eyes and begged him to stop, but he didn’t let go.

—Please —she said, barely above a whisper—. Stop.

And he stopped. But before letting her go, he brought his mouth to her ear and whispered one last thing. I saw my mother’s breath catch. I saw how, for a fraction of a second, she stopped pushing and simply stood there, held against that enormous body, her eyes closed.

Between my father, still on the ground, and me, we pulled her away and took her into the building lobby. She kept looking toward the bazaar until the door closed.

From that day on, my father never spoke to the foreigner again. And my mother began taking longer than necessary to come back from shopping.

***

I learned to read her. On the days she passed in front of the bazaar, she would put on a little lipstick she didn’t wear to church. She would undo the top button of her blouse at the corner and button it again when she got home, thinking no one saw. I saw everything.

For weeks I watched her fight a silent war. She prayed more. She cleaned the house with a fury that made no sense. One night I found her sitting in the dark kitchen, Salinas’s novel closed on the table and her fingers resting on the cover as if it burned. She didn’t see me. I backed away before she did.

One afternoon in June, my father stayed late at work and my mother said she was going out to buy thread. She left in a blue dress I didn’t remember, her hair loose, and turned toward Avenida de los Tilos. I followed her half a block behind, my heart pounding as if I were the unfaithful one.

I saw her stop in front of the bazaar window. I saw her hesitate. And I saw her push open the door and go in. The sign in the entrance turned to “closed.”

***

I went around the building. There was a narrow alley that led to the back room, and a high, filthy window left open a crack for air. I dragged over a plastic crate, climbed up, and looked in.

Darian had her against the back counter, between rolls of leather and unopened boxes. He wasn’t forcing her. That was the part that left me speechless: my mother, the woman of Tuesday rosaries, had her hands gripping his forearms and was pulling him toward her.

—We shouldn’t —I heard her say through the glass—. This is wrong.

—I know —he answered—. That’s why you want it.

He lowered the straps of her dress without hurry, like someone unwrapping something that already belonged to him. The fabric slid down to her waist. My mother did not cover herself. She closed her eyes and threw her head back when his huge hands covered her breasts, and from her mouth came a sound I had never heard from her, hoarse, defeated.

He turned her and bent her over the counter with one firm hand between her shoulder blades. He hiked her skirt up over her hips. Beatriz let herself be positioned, palms open on the wood, her ragged breathing fogging the varnish. When he moved her underwear aside and entered her in one thrust, she bit the back of her own hand so she wouldn’t scream.

He was not gentle. He held her by the waist with both hands and moved her at his rhythm, without asking, and every thrust tore a moan from her that she tried to swallow and couldn’t. He yanked her hair to lift her face to the stained mirror on the wall, and forced her to watch herself as he took her.

—Look —he told her in her ear—. Look at what you are when no one can see you.

And she looked. What I saw in her reflected face was not shame. It was something else, something with no name in the parish vocabulary: the face of someone who had finally stopped fighting with herself.

He finished with his forehead pressed to the counter glass, trembling, her legs barely holding her up. He kept her like that for a moment, one open hand on her damp back, marking a possession my father had never known how to claim. Then he stepped away, straightened his clothes, and said something I couldn’t hear. My mother nodded without looking at him, gathering her dress from the floor.

I climbed down from the crate before she came out. I went home the long way, my legs weak and the certainty that I had just watched something I thought was stone begin to crumble.

***

Beatriz came home half an hour after I did, with a spool of blue thread in her hand in case anyone asked. No one asked. She went into the kitchen and started making dinner, humming, and that was the first time in years I heard her hum.

She went back to the bazaar many more afternoons. She learned to invent errands, to loosen the button at the corner, to come home with flushed cheeks and a faraway look. My father kept fixing taps and saying I love you with his hands, oblivious to the fact that his wife had found, behind a leather counter, a version of herself the house had never allowed her to be.

I never said a word. Sometimes I wonder whether I stayed silent to protect her, to protect my father, or to protect that secret which, whether I wanted it or not, had also become a little mine. I never knew how much damage a book could do, I still think. But I no longer know whether it was damage. I only know that my mother, after that, stopped closing books slowly. She would slam them shut and go out into the street.