46 - by Ana Duffy
ISLAND | ISSUE 157
Llevate agua y sombrero, says my mother, as she does every time. The couch relaxes under her weight as she sits, and, stretching her legs on the foot stool one at a time, she groans.
Llevate agua y sombrero, she says, her eyes on a book I recommended. It’s one of many I’ve recommended. She frowns on them, but she reads them anyway. Her beautiful, tired eyes jump from word to word, grasping their meaning to stay in touch with the story. Or with everything else but the story.
Obedient, I take my hat and a water bottle, then walk down the stairs and into the thickness of summer. A typical January early-afternoon in Puerto Blanco. Hot and windy, hot-wind windy. A hot, northerly wind that glues your hair to your face, melts your skin onto your skull and numbs your spirits for most of the summer. The wind can last for hours. Or days. Or weeks.
By the time I get to the line, every one of the survivors of the last three weeks of hot, windy days has a number. A scrunched-up, clammy, fading number.
“By the time I get to the line, every one of the survivors of the last three weeks of hot, windy days has a number. A scrunched-up, clammy, fading number.”
Mine is 46. A nice angular 4 and a curled-up 6. It is good to focus on 3 centimetres by 3 centimetres of blue paper when your mind wanders too much. My mind wanders. It goes to places where queues don’t exist. Where people and northerly winds do not occupy each other. Where you do not need to focus on a 3 by 3 centimetre piece of blue paper, which you have to hold with many fingers or it will be blown away by the exasperating northerly wind. Places where standing again and again and again in a line of tamed minds would be a pointless act.
Each of us came earlier to line up and collect our numbers so that we could line up again and wait. Only a few came at dawn to get the lucky one-digit numbers. Now the one-digits are in the front of the line, and they look at us, the two-digits, with disdain.
I am last in the line. I fidget with the pompoms on my blue top. I refocus my wandering mind from the blue 3 by 3 centimetres of my 46 to a red, woolly pompom. Every second pompom is red, and every other is green. Red. Green. Red. Green. I count them.
¿Por qué número van? I ask the man ahead of me when I finish counting my pompoms. He is sweating under a polyester-rich, fake Club Atlético River Plate football jersey. He sweats real sweat, so solid that the wind blows past, surrounding it. He doesn’t know which number was called last, either. The question stumbles along from one person to the next, to establish the precise line-waiting pecking order.
The sweating man turns towards me. Yo soy el 42, he says, taking his number out of his back pocket.
Yo soy el 46, I say, not quite knowing where to go next with this small talk that stumbles, scorched under the sun. I know only that I will be four numbers after him, after his sweat has dried into chemicals from the periodic table of my high school years.
A woman lines up behind me. She looks like she’s in her thirties, and she seems uncomfortable in a black dress that stretches to exhaustion around her. ¿Por qué número van? she asks, spurting all four words together in a glossy chain. Over and under and into the hot wind her question travels, unanswered.
Nadie sabe, I say. And it is true – no one seems to know if or when any numbers will be called. We are just here waiting in a line that existed long before any of us and will outlive us all. We are just cogs, with 3 by 3 centimetre numbers, hoping to be called.
Soy, the woman in the black dress says as she reaches down into her cleavage for her number, el 52. I look at my 46, pressed into my purse. She smooths her 52 against the wall, flattening its rolled-up corners. I am captivated by her thumbs, cloaked under bright green nail polish; they seem terribly self-conscious. Next to us, number 42’s gaze is rollercoastering down the woman’s cleavage while he scrunches his number into a pulp of hormones, sweat and paper.
“Next to us, number 42’s gaze is rollercoastering down the woman’s cleavage while he scrunches his number into a pulp of hormones, sweat and paper.”
The door at the front of the queue opens. A man in a blueish uniform says cincuenta y dos, and number 52 walks past us, all chinned-up. The man at the door wears a name tag. Two letters are missing and it reads M-xi-o. Máximo, I think, a loaded name, but a trimmed name. I wonder how comfortably the man fits into his name, if he fits at all. And where the a and the m could have gone. And where accent on top of the a is, if he ever even had it. I wonder if his cut-back identity bothers him.
I see him take the number from 52. He assesses both with a look of contempt and, expectedly, a brief glance into the depths of 52’s cleavage.
A small, red-haired man with a motorbike helmet hanging from his left arm leans towards the very old woman in front of him. The woman is all skin and bones. Her grey hair pours down her pale forehead and she fans her face with a gossip magazine read too many times. She looks grey all over. The wind must have blown her colours away. The small, red-haired man with the helmet asks how she is feeling, and she replies in short, broken stanzas, struggling to finish each one. I hear that she has the number 9 and that she hopes it shouldn’t be too long.
The man’s helmet is black and covered in stickers. I desperately want to dig my nails under them, and peel them off one after the other, the same as I do with sunburnt skin, with old wallpaper, with price tags and beer bottle labels. But I resist, and focus on the grey woman, number 9, who seems to levitate on the heat.
The helmet man offers to hold the place of the grey woman while she takes a seat on his bike. The grey woman looks at her 9, and then at him. She looks both angry and afraid. No. Ni loca, she says, all in the same breath, and then lowers her voice, which comes out a lighter shade of grey. I guess she is saying something about the tits woman, and how she has jumped in front of all of us, and how we would be best to stay on guard. No sitting on bikes. No distractions.
“I guess she is saying something about the tits woman, and how she has jumped in front of all of us, and how we would be best to stay on guard. No sitting on bikes. No distractions.”
No, gracias, she says again, and now we can all hear.
The door opens again and M-xi-o calls out, diez y seis. We all look at each other. The grey woman seems to want to shout something, but only a few fading lines deflate in front of her and coil in a gust of the northerly wind. Number 16 has been nice to her. Number 16 is the helmet man. He looks mortified, because 9 comes before 16 and he does not understand why, without big tits and without a thin grey color that frightens, he is the one they call.
Number 16 gathers all his red-haired shame and passes the M-xi-o man. The door closes, and perhaps they lock it from the inside, or perhaps they block the door with a heavy chair. Anything to keep us out, and waiting in the line. All marinating in the hot breath of a Puerto Blanco summer.
The grey woman makes me think of my mother. Of her grey joints and bones. Of the deep grey of her sitting afternoons. Of the hole she makes where she sits on the couch, the couch that sighs as it receives her. I wonder if the couch is really grey at all.
The door opens. The man with the trimmed name looks at us and mumbles something. The grey woman manages a few ashen words. Like birds in flight, her words form an agonising V, reaching towards the man. Soy el 9, she says, and the rest of the sentence fades away. I barely manage to hear her say that she came at dawn, but no one seems to care about muffled speeches from grey women. The man’s gaze scans the woman, and he seems unconvinced. Perhaps he is contemplating if she exists on a blurry line, somewhere between flesh and smoke. Or if she even exists at all.
Nueve, he says, finally. The woman gathers up most of the greyness around her, and disappears behind the man. Behind the door.
“Nueve, he says, finally. The woman gathers up most of the greyness around her, and disappears behind the man. Behind the door.”
I drink most of my remaining water. Number 42 has taken his polyester football jersey off and thrown it over his shoulder. An uncommitted supporter. He leans against the wall, his eyelids drooping like melting candles.
Number 42 tries to talk to me. Los números (he stops, lingering on his own unformed or unfinished thoughts) están malditos. I don’t really want to know about cursed numbers, and I certainly do not enjoy the closeness of his tattooed skull and the damp, matted hair on his chest. He whispers something to me, but I return to the comfort of my pompoms and the funny shadows they make.
There are at least five more heat-flattened people in the queue now. They seem angry at us, and 42 rolls his eyes. Algo saben, he says. But I do not know what there is to know, or what it is that they know and we do not.
¿Por qué número van? says a woman so hygienic and starched that it’s like she’s just emerged from a zip-lock bag taken out of a freezer. There is something martial about her: the way her hair is swept back in a perfect ponytail; the stiffness of her mouth, as if about to pronounce a death sentence or a foreign name. Her eyes brush us as if we are not quite human. In the heat her eyes appear pixelated, and the dark rings beneath them seem those of a night watch. But she looks so neat. So disturbingly neat.
“In the heat her eyes appear pixelated, and the dark rings beneath them seem those of a night watch. But she looks so neat. So disturbingly neat.”
Nadie sabe, says the sweating man as he looks at her. Soy el 42, he adds. His dishevelled self is an almost blasphemous contrast.
Soy el 2, says the woman, and digs into her leather bag with its compartments and zippers and leather straps going lengthways and crossways. Inside is a little green purse, with a small plastic sleeve holding a perfectly kept 2. She pulls it out with a superior air. ¿Ves? she says, and she puffs as she puts it back in its sleeve, into the green purse and into the bag. Number 42 shrugs his shoulders and sniffs his armpits. Number 2 straightens her back and fixes her bag into the fold of her right arm.
The door opens. Cuarenta y dos, says the blueish M-xi-o man, softly. Number 42 shivers as he reaches for his scrunched-up jersey and his crumpled-up number. He looks at me and the starched woman and the long line of people waiting behind her. He looks at the door and at the man and the motorbike still parked in the shade, and at the man again, and the door again. The hot wind brushes past us and I feel relieved, somehow. His last look is for me, the look of a lamb in that very last minute before its slaughter.
“The hot wind brushes past us and I feel relieved, somehow. His last look is for me, the look of a lamb in that very last minute before its slaughter.”
I am next in line. I have no water left. Number 2 is walking to the door with high-heeled determination.
No, shouts someone behind me. No golpee.
Number 2 stops, stiffens, and, collected, turns her martial head towards us. She does not question why she shouldn’t knock, she just doesn’t. El 2, she says, opening the zippers and untying the leather straps and unclipping the green purse. El 2, es tuyo. And she hands me her 2.
Yo soy el 46, I say, embarrassed for not having come at dawn. I am fixated with her hair. Its neatness. The way it gathers in a hair battalion, solid and unfathomable. The way it converges in a ponytail and falls, like missiles plummeting down on a war-trodden Puerto Blanco.
She seems determined that I have it. Her well-groomed 2.
Gracias, I say. And I put her 2 underneath my 46, into my purse, and into the front pocket of my blue jeans. She leaves, or she rather retreats. Defeated, empty-handed, she marches into the heat. Starch bleeds onto the boiling pavement, leaving a trail of expired arrogance behind her.
I’m left brooding over my 46. Her 2. My 2.
It’s getting dark by the time the door opens. They come out: the tits woman first, then the helmet man and the grey lady, and last, the River Plate fan who sweats. They look content and fresh. They are all chatting.
¿Y?, I ask, craving news from behind the door.
The sweating man says the wait was worth it, that they could sit, that they had electric fans and cold water. He says he hopes I will be in soon. Before dinner.
“The sweating man says the wait was worth it, that they could sit, that they had electric fans and cold water. He says he hopes I will be in soon. Before dinner.”
Hasta mañana, he says as he walks past me. He seems thrilled as he waves the 7 they gave him in my direction.
When the man at the door finally calls me, the streets are empty and fully dark, and the wind has stopped. A small miracle.
*
I am home. My mother has fallen asleep, but on the dinner table she has left a ham sandwich, a glass of water that is still cold, the craft glue and my album, neat in its plastic bag.
Next to the five others, I glue the 21 they gave me today. Perhaps the long wait was worth it. Two of the 21s are pink, one is green, and today’s is my third blue one.
The 2 is a bit borderline. It is not mine-mine. But I glue it in anyway, with six other 2s. All 3 by 3 centimetres. All blue. ▼
This story appeared in Island 157 in 2019. Order a print issue here.
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