Mouthful of Birds(24)
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The assistant was born in the country, in a family that made its living from crops and vineyards. They had an estate with a large main house surrounded by gardens, and a small fortune. The assistant liked fish, and her father, who was almost never home, used to send her enormous books with color illustrations of all the fish in the world. She learned their names and drew them in her notebook. Of all the fish, her favorite was one called the Olingiris. Its body was short and thin, it had a long, tube-shaped mouth, and it was turquoise and yellow. The books said it was a delicate fish, because it ate only coral polyps, and those weren’t found just anywhere. She asked for one, but it was explained to her that they couldn’t have a pet fish in the countryside. The assistant showed her mother a book that explained how to install and maintain a fish tank, but the mother told her that even if they got the tank and the right food, the fish would die of sadness. The assistant thought perhaps her father wouldn’t have the same opinion, that maybe she could show him the pictures and he would understand. But when he finally came home, she couldn’t find the book anywhere.
The assistant had many brothers, but they were older and worked with her father, so she spent most of the day alone. When she turned seven, she started attending a rural school. One of the men who worked for her father came to pick her up at seven-thirty, dropped her off at school at eight, and came back for her at twelve. It wasn’t easy for the assistant to adapt to that new rhythm. At first she didn’t do well. Then her mother hired a private tutor, and the assistant started to study in the mornings at school and at home in the afternoons. The private tutor knew of the assistant’s interest in fish, and she built her exercises around that subject. Sometimes she read poetry, and once when they were studying punctuation she proposed that the assistant write some verses. The assistant gave it a try, and the tutor seemed delighted with the result. As homework, she assigned the assistant to write a poem with the names of her favorite fish. The assistant cleared off her desk and set out just a few blank sheets of paper, a pencil, and an eraser. She wrote a poem about fish, but invented fish. She wrote about what she felt sometimes in the morning, when she was just waking up and sometimes didn’t fully know who she was or where. About the things that made her happy, about the things that didn’t, and about her father.
One afternoon the tutor told the assistant that she had a surprise for her, and she took a very large package from her bag, the size of a folder or bigger, and gift-wrapped. Before letting her open it, she made the assistant promise that it would be a secret, and that she would never tell anyone about the gift. The assistant agreed. She tore off the paper, and when she saw what it was, she thought her whole life wouldn’t be long enough to repay the tutor for this gift. It was the book about fish and fish tanks. Not the same one, but one just like it, new, identical.
By the time she turned twelve the assistant’s level had improved a lot, and her mother decided the private tutor was no longer necessary. For a while, the assistant drew her among the fish. She made some drawings of the tutor kissing the Olingiris, and another of the tutor pregnant with an Olingiris’s baby. She wrote some poems for her mother to send to the tutor, and her mother promised to mail them, but there was never a reply.
When the assistant finished high school, she started to manage her father’s finances and to oversee some things in the fields. She didn’t paint or write anymore, but on her desk she had a framed photo of the Olingiris, and sometimes, when she was taking a break, she picked it up to look at it closely, and she wondered what the private tutor was doing, and what it was like to live the way an Olingiris lived.
She didn’t get married or have children. She left the countryside when her mother started showing the first symptoms of illness, the same year the drought finished off the vineyards and the crops. It was decided the assistant would travel with her mother to the capital, and they would live in the apartment her father had bought there some years before. The assistant brought the book about fish and fish tanks that the tutor had given her. The apartment wasn’t very large, but it was enough for the two of them. It had a window that looked out onto a street and let in a bit of light. They bought a table and two beds made of pine, and the assistant tore some pages from the book and stuck them to the wall like framed pictures. The assistant learned to cook, to make the beds and wash the clothes. She found work in a dry cleaner’s. Once the clothes were clean, they had to be put into the steamer, making sure there were no wrinkles. Lower the lid, wait a few seconds, and repeat on the rest of the garment. She also had to fold and perfume it. Sometimes there were difficult stains, and she had to bring them to the sinks in the back and use a special product. When that happened, the assistant chose the first sink, and while she waited the ten seconds the product needed to work, she looked into her own eyes in the mirror.
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When the assistant’s mother died, she quit her job, and as she was reorganizing the apartment, she found the book about fish among her mother’s clothes. It was the original one, the one that had been lost. She cleared off the pine table and opened the two books to the first page. She reread them side by side, several times. She thought that perhaps she could find a difference, because at first glance they looked the same, but she remembered the first one differently. It was hard to explain; she was just sure that there had to be a difference, but she couldn’t find it. She closed the books and sat looking at them for a while. She wouldn’t need them anymore, she concluded, and she stored them away together under the bed.