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CHAPTER 8
________
Gabriella Matos
“But how did she feel the pea?”
“It's a fairy tale[34], Raquel. Inexplicable things happen.” I try to convince my younger sister that the idea of a princess having felt a pea under two dozen mattresses is perfectly plausible.
“But this is inexplicable, Gabi. This is impossible!” Raquel rolls her eyes and crosses her arms in front of her chest, annoyed.
“You're ruining all the magic of the story.”
“This story has no magic, sister. To begin with, the prince was an idiot,” she accuses, and I can't contain myself, I throw my head back in a loud laugh.
Sitting on the only bed in our shack, Raquel watches me, not finding it funny, but that's just because my sister thinks I'm laughing at her, which isn't true. It's just that her impossible-to-bottle genius is sometimes too much to handle seriously.
The old, scarred wooden monstrosity I'm sitting on half ass holds only one child lying down, but I squeezed onto the edge to tell the story my sister asked to hear before bed. Now, the whole bed shakes as my body is moved by laughter.
The sultry heat of the early evening is even worse in here, as we have no windows. The smell of damp wood, a reminder of thestorm that hit yesterday morning, is not the best of smells either, but having my sister at home, regardless of how horrible the roof over our heads is, makes me give myself the right to laugh, at least today.
The laughter, however, turns into a deep inspiration when I remember what allowed me to be telling stories to Raquel under the light of a lit lamp.
Two days after my regrettable participation — and I mean this in any and every way that word can mean — in the bag swap scheme, the memories and sensations continue to torment me as if I were still standing, under the Rio's summer sun, on the sidewalk in the arrivals area of the International Airport.
How absurd is that? That I still feel the same sensations? That I can still breathe in the same smells? That I still have the same tastes on my tongue, and that my breath continues to be suspended in the air every time I allow it, that behind my closed eyes, the image of that man forms as clear as a freshly washed windowpane?
Not even the fear I felt when they told me I had the wrong bag compares to the feeling of imminent danger that refuses to leave me every time I think about that man. It's a crazy mix, really.
At the same time that I feel trapped by the fear of what he could do to me if he found me again, I also find myself lost in the sensations awakened by his striking scent that stuck to the walls of my nose and decided that it might never be a great time for it to go away.
How absurd is it that I can't avoid this strange feeling of danger? This kind of premonition that the police will break down the door of my house and take me out of here in handcuffs, or something worse, will happen at any moment? Maybe thebosses will regret letting me go unharmed despite the wrong bag?
I shake my head from side to side, pushing the thought away, trying hard to ignore the expectations buzzing through my veins like live electrical wires. I open my eyes, Raquel didn't even notice my absent mindedness, she continues talking about all the defects in the story she just heard. I was the one who had stopped listening.
“And that queen?” my sister questions, shaking her head. “The prince's mother looked more like a witch than anything else. And the geese?! Twenty goose feather mattresses? Serious? How many little animals had to die for the stupid prince to find a boring princess?”
“And how old are you? Eleven or one hundred and eleven? Couldn't you just be happy with a fairy tale, like most girls your age?”
“Fairy tales don't exist, Gabi,” she states, and I open my mouth to contradict her, but I don't dare.
How cruel would it be to do so? It would be unfair, very unfair to my sister. If you don't have expectations, they can't be broken. I always thought that this was really the best way to deal with their lack, seeing it as a strength rather than a weakness.
“But it doesn't mean we can't have fun with them,” I argue, instead of contradicting. Raquel wrinkles her nose, silently disagreeing. “You like Disney movies.”
“That's because they're colorful, the princes aren't idiots like that, and the drawings are pretty,” she adds. “Like yours.”
I roll my eyes, but proving that she believes what she's saying, Raquel reaches out and reaches, on an upside-down can thatserves as her bedside table, the welcome drawing she forced me to do two nights ago, after I picked her up at the hospital.
My sister looks at the flowers scratched in nothing but pencil on a piece of napkin, as if she is looking at the most valuable painting in the world, and my heart, in a rare moment, leaps in my chest with emotion. Its movements are almost always to let me know that it's a little more dead than before, except when it comes to Raquel.
People say that when a child is born, a mother is born. I've never given birth to anyone, for that I would need to have sex first, but I don't know if it's because of Raquel's level of dependence or if it's because I was the only person responsible for her, I feel that the moment I held my sister in my arms for first time, something in me was born.
I also don't know if this is the feeling that mothers feel about their children, I just know that I feel it. It's something that fills my chest, in fact, the only thing that keeps it from being a completely hollow hole. It's something that drives me, that makes me wish the world was hers, that anything and everything in this world could be placed within her reach.
It's an immense feeling, stronger than all the others. Many times, it is the one that saves me from others, but, so many times, it is also the feeling that buries me. Because I know that all my wishes for my sister will never come true.
She will never have a room of her own, decent medical treatment, my sister will never come home from school excited, because she learned something incredible and is eager to tell me about it. My sister will never, never have what I so desperately want her to have, what moves me, what took me to the sidewalk of that airport, two days ago, and made me act to begin with: possibilities.
