Butterflies on the Wall

by Yanina Rosenberg, translated from Spanish by Ezra E. Fitz

Alex Dadukin

Lena flips through the pages of her planner until she reaches the telephone directory. The letter F. Still in her negligee and with cheeks wet from so much crying, she examines the number which—though she knows it by heart—she hasn’t dialed in nearly two months. What if he doesn’t answer? What if he doesn’t want to speak to her? What if he never wants to speak to her again? If you don’t want to talk to me, fine, fuck you, it doesn’t even matter because I’m fine taking care of everything myself. If I have to get the materials together, I’ll get them together. If I have to forge your signature, I’ll forge it. No, it can’t go on like this. I can’t, she thinks, while dialing the number and listening to the phone ring on the other end. He probably won’t answer, he never wants to, anyway, and she’ll have to call again. No, today he’ll answer me, Lena says to herself, her eyes fixed on a glistening butterfly on the wall… today he’ll listen to me, more than he ever did during the past eight years. Yes, today he’ll hear what I have to say… no, she tilts her head from one side to the other, it’s not a butterfly, it’s just another damp spot.

Nobody answers. Lena hangs up and redials the ten-digit number which, after a brief wait, leads her directly to his voice.

“Fabián?”

“Lena?” He sounds surprised, as if it’s an old classmate with whom he hasn’t spoken in ages. “Is that you? Did something happen?”

With a triumphant expression on her face, Lena looks back at the butterfly on the wall.

“We need to talk.”

A moment of silence, followed by a long sigh, drags Lena into a dark corner shuttered long ago, a theater where memories dance across the screen: Saturdays at the abandoned hotel, the smell of weed, the smoke, the tufted armchair, the warm fingers digging through the popcorn, the Evatest that came back positive, the apples at midnight, Maya’s warm little body, her first words, her first steps.

“Not now, I’m driving. Call me back a little later.”

I don’t want to call you back a little later, Lena thinks, I’m tired of calling you later, why do we always have to talk later? Why does everything happen at your pace, why does the world have to revolve around you?

“No, wait, don’t hang up…” An awkward silence opens up between them, a crack that neither of them dares to fill in. “It’s about Maya…”

“What about her?”

“I know what to do with her.”

“Do with her?”

Lena slides a chair out from the table and sits down.

“There’s a clinic in Cinco Saltos, they’ll take care of it all, the previous studies, paperwork, everything… we don’t have to do anything, just sign and then… then nothing. We wait.”

“Clinic? Paperwork? What are you talking about, Lena? Did something happen to Maya?”

“The same old things, Fabián.”

A horn honking in the background; a histrionic squeal of rubber breaking on the asphalt.

“Lena, let’s talk later, I have to…”

“No, don’t hang up on me.”

Something in Lena’s voice sounds weak, as if here words were loose screws trapped in the wall even though they don’t completely fit.

“Wait, let me pull over and I’ll call you back.”

“No.” Lena gets up from her chair. You’re going to listen to me now, she thinks. “Listen, it’s important. I… look, I think it’s for the best. She doesn’t… she goes and goes and there just comes a time when, I swear, Fabián, I swear I try, but she… it looks like she doesn’t…”

“Did something happen? What’s going on?”

“…I can’t take it anymore, I swear, I just don’t know, look, I try so hard…”

In the background, another concert of blasting horns, and a shout of use your hazard lights, asshole.

“Will you let me park and call you back?”

“You know what she did to me the other day? I was boiling some rice and she shows up with your soldering iron. I don’t know where she got it from, or why it’s even still here, and when I told her to go put it away, to leave it alone, because we don’t touch things that don’t belong to us, she told me she didn’t want to and she wasn’t going to put it down just because I…”

“Is that why you called me, Lena? I’m driving, can’t you deal with this on your own?”

Lena, who is walking in circles around the kitchen table, now stops suddenly. She turns her head to look again at the butterfly; gradually, something about it catches her attention. She walks towards it and begins to trace its wings with her index finger, caressing them as if wanting to lend them a sense of color.

“Look, Fabián, I know that we… that you and I… all of that is over and done with… but with her it’s different, she’s our daughter, I have to try, don’t you get it?”

“Yes, I get it, I get that you’re still crazy as ever.” Fabián utters an unusual sound: some sort of blend between a sigh and a chuckle.

Lena thinks back to that summer in Cariló, the two of them alone, playing card games like spades and truco at parties, rolling around in the sand, in the dunes, the sea foam slinking back from the shore, bubbles from the clams popping up between the toes, and the sun, the sun that bored through the skin, and she, only she, when she took off her bikini top and ran across the entire beach.

“Fabián, I… seriously, I just want to do the right thing, that’s all. There’s something, something we must have done wrong, I just don’t get how she… I can’t understand how a daughter could hate her mother like that, it just doesn’t make sense…” Lena pulls her hand from the wall to squeeze her forehead and cry. “But I want to try, to start over, to do things…”

“Lena…”

“…if instead of a bottle, I don’t know, if I hadn’t taken the pacifier away at six, or if I had let her cry longer at night, I don’t know, if we fed her too much, gave her too many toys, too many birthday presents… If she’s such a saint at school, and with you before she was… Why is she do different with you? With my mom? With everyone else… but with me?”

“Why don’t you just talk with her, Lena? People understand each other better when they talk; I’m sure she’ll understand you.”

“She? Understand me? I’m the one who has to understand her! If she won’t even look at me, what is there for me to understand? That she doesn’t love me? That she can hide in a closet for hours at a time and make me think that she’s run away or fallen off the balcony? That she doesn’t want me to be seen at school events, that she’d rather take pictures with her classmates’ moms? Or like that time she told the music teacher she was pretty as a princess and wanted to move in with her because all she had at home was a witch who locked her in the oven and never fed her… is that what I’m supposed to understand? Is that what it is?”

A horn blast followed by a long snort of resignation.

“Do you want me to talk to her?”

“I want your signature, that’s all, and then I’ll take care of the rest. It’s simple, Fabián, really. They’ll handle everything at the clinic. They take the nucleus out of an ovum and replace it with the nucleus from one of Maya’s cells, and… a cell, Fabián, it’s nothing, a cell, from a hair, part of a nail, a baby tooth, plus… you talk to her? Don’t even think about it.”

“Let me drop off some paperwork at the office and I’ll go to your house.”

Your house, Lena thinks, turning to get a panoramic view of the kitchen before pausing once again to focus on the butterfly on the wall. When did our house become just mine? So now it turns out that all this shit just belongs to me?

“No, you know what? It’d be better if you didn’t come. Let me take care of everything.”

Lena brings her nose right up to the butterfly before gently resting her lips up against the wall, taking its temperature with a mother’s precision.

“What are you going to take care of, Lena? I don’t understand…”

Lena removes her lips from the wall and begins to scrape at the swollen bubbles of paint with her nails.

“It’s just that there aren’t any other options. It’s either this, or you know what. Do you want to go with you know what?”

“Lena, please, I’m asking you… what are you talking about?”

“Please, don’t, Fabián. What would you tell me anyway, that she’ll grow out of it, that she’ll change? No, Fabián, that’s just it, don’t you understand? If she’s treating me like this at this age, how will she be acting when she grows up? It’s like milk… when it curdles, it curdles; when it goes bad, it’s done.”

“What are you saying, Lena…”

“I swear I won’t bother you, I won’t ask you for anything at all. I don’t want anything… not your help, not your money, nothing, that’s it, I’ll start from scratch, alone, and I’m sure that…”

“Don’t do anything, Lena. Listen to me, don’t do anything until I get there, do you hear me?”

“…everything will be the same as now, only better, because with the experience of already knowing, and…”

“I’m getting close, Lena, I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“No, forget it, Fabián, forget what I told you, forget I ever called.”

“Lena, please…”

“Just let it go, Fabián, I’ll take care of everything, like always, go, bye, get on with your life.”

“Wait, Lena, don’t hang up…”

Lena hangs up and takes a few steps back. She looks at the wall and thinks about how a nice butterfly-print wallpaper would look for her new Maya.

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Yanina Rosenberg (Buenos Aires, 1980) is the author of INTRUSIVE SKIN (La piel intrusa, Páginas de Espuma, 2019), a delicate, uncanny story collection, which won second prize at the Concurso Fundación El Libro award. Her bold, poetic stories have extensively been published by international media such as Granta Magazine, Diario Perfil, Revista Ñ/Clarín, Iowa Literaria, winning several literary prizes in Argentina, Perú and Spain. Her debut novel, STOCKHOLM MOMENT, was awarded in 2016 by the Argentinian prestigious Fondo Nacional de las Artes fund.