Analena

Analena
by Fiona Picard
Copyright © 2016 by Fiona Picard
(This is the start of a magical realist novel
written for National Novel Writing Month, November, 2016.)

Libros + Jirafas

Analena’s bobby pin body stands erect while her neck bends down to see between the pages. No features stand out on Analena’s face except for her eyes, nose, and mouth: muddled green, pointed, full and pink and slack. Her eyes run around the room, not holding on to anything or anyone. They sweep across the poreteños and the books, and land on a sentence. Her dark brown bangs momentarily blind her and she mindlessly wipes them away with one hand; in the other hand she holds a small white clock. A man comes up and asks, “Necesitas ayuda con algo?” Analena looks at him for a moment. She nods yes, then no.

Straining to read the title of the book, I see that it is a collection of Sartre’s work. Analena looks up at nothing and her fingers brush the other book jackets. Her gaze is unfocused, as if she is trying to blur her vision. Her feet drag themselves one in front of the other out of the book shop, and into the street. She walks without regard to the uneven cobblestones, her shoulder sockets, elbows and finger joints loose.

I can not see her eyes because she does not have a pair behind her head. My attention on Analena wavers and I see the zoo she is passing. It is strange to see a zoo surrounded by city sidewalks, colectivos, women in 4-inch platform sandals languidly strolling by. The zoo makes the apartments above smell like manure and grass clippings. Weary landlords hold open houses in the mornings between 10am and 1pm, while the air is still cool and crisp and free of wet stink. From the top pisos, the elite can see a mass of pink flamingos congregating outside of the Byzantine ruins, supposedly brought to the zoo from Trieste long ago.

Analena stops and turns to look at a tall and gentle jirafa, and writes a big L in the space in front of her. Maybe it was an L, or an outline of the jirafa’s neck, or something else. I do not know. She shrugs her delicate shoulders and the jirafa shrugs back. Analena doesn’t laugh, but her muscles retract to form a millisecond movement that, if given more time to develop, could become a smile.

La mañana Blue

Sunlight grips both sides of Analena’s eyelids and forces them apart with her otherworldly strength. Analena does not have the strength to fight her today; her fight is drained and lies in a puddle on the floor. She rolls over to the other side of the bed and looks down at the scene floating on her drained insides. There are gondolas with tax-collectors rowing, yelling up to her, “¡Analena, tenés que pagar tus impuestos!” Placing her pinky finger on the bow of the boat, black liquid floods the gondola and the man and the boat sink, sink into the depths of the sticky tar. Analena sighs and frost freezes the rest of the little men yelling at her from their boats.

The blanket does not block out sunlight. “Por favor, déjame.” Déjame déjame begins to form a beat, and soon it bounces around the room and off the ceiling to the rhythm of old-timey tango music. Déjame déjame. Déjame déjame. Analena, though music is no longer the color of sunset, sits up. The walls are blue this morning, and déjames are stamping angrily around las medianeras. After 46 minutes of listening to them, she grows tired and lies back down.

Shoes fidget in the closet, hungry for chewed bubblegum, cigarette stubs, and crumpled colectivo tickets. They have not been fed for days, and soon they will die. Analena hears them whimpering, and reminds them that patience is a virtue. Good things come to those who wait. A pair of black stilettos clack together in defiance, and another pair warns them that if they clack too hard, their heels will crack because they have grown too thin. The closet falls silent and Analena lies back down on her exhausted pillow. Closing her eyes, she drifts into a sea of velvety navy. Navy wraps her up tightly and does not let her move. Analena feels safe and warmed in that maternal swaddle. Who would ever want to leave this velvet grip? she thinks as her body relaxes.

RELOJ! RELOJ! RELOJ!

The alarm clock slides over the blankets and into Analena’s ears. “Mierda alarma, déjame, por favor.” He leans forward so she can pet his head, and he is quieted. He slides back out to the living room to his post on the windowsill next to the ashtray.

RELOJ! RELOJ! RELOJ!

He jumps over the blankets and into Analena’s lap. “Pero como estás demasiado exigente, Dios mio,” she whispers as she pats his steely forehead.

RELOJ! RELOJ! RELOJ! RELOJ! RELOJ!

Alarma will only be appeased once he goes for a walk around the block. Analena leans forward to grab both of her feet and slides them down to the floor. Her toes wiggle and the floorboard wiggles back. Buenos dias, y a que le debo el milagro?

The creaky floorboards ripple her to the refrigerator where she is greeted by a white carton of Chinese leftovers, expired yogurt, jam de fresas, and three individually wrapped alfajores. She reaches for an alfajor but it falls through to the next level. She reaches again, and he jumps back up. She puts both hands in the fridge to try and catch him but he’s too fast. He makes the demand that he not seen café in six days, and refuses to come out until café comes home.

Analena slams the door shut and goes without breakfast. Alarma hops into her arms and she opens her thrice locked door once. The pile of mail politely moves out of the way as she lumbers out.

Café + El Tiempo

I sit drinking a flat white at a cafe in Palermo Viejo with my friend, Álvaro del Este. “Che boludo, porque no viniste a fútbol? Era super copado, man.” I shrug my shoulders and change topics to the upcoming election. I spend time with Álvaro because he is a typical Argentinian man, and I am not. I am a man, and I am Argentinian, but I am not typical. I am learning the ways of normality through osmosis.

Analena walks by the cafe as I drink the last sip. Her bangs are now chopped off up to the base of her forehead and stick out like a camel’s tuft. I have not seen her since my outing on Thames. Today she lifts her feet up a little higher when she walks. Her eyes are still downcast and distracted, but her steps are more determined to hit the pavement. As she turns the corner to walk into the side entrance of cafe, I spot the outline of the clock in the back pocket of her jeans. I find it ironic, as I am sitting below a sign for the neighboring restaurant that reads, “Las Horas, Parrilla y Restó.” Time has always captivated me. “El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego.” Our national hero, Borges, knows that we are all made out of time, that time creates who we are and who we become. Maybe I ought to carry around a clock in my back pocket too, to remind me of my temporal substance. I feel as if I have lived for many years, sometimes too many years.

“Dime, si o no?” Álvaro looks at me expectantly. I have not been listening to him, and I go with the positive option, “Si, obvio boludo.” He smiles, pleased with my answer. I turn around, cracking my back, hoping to see Analena. I can see her profile. Her legs are crossed, a scratched leather boot dangles in mid-air. She has a look of consternation on her face as she leans into her book. How can she reads that close to the page? “La verdad es que, me enamoré con Luisa.” My attention reverts to the man across the table. “No te creas! Dime más.”

He met Luisa, a Swedish exchange student, in a boliche on Friday night. They danced the night away, and she went home with him. He fell into the soft curves of her body, the openness of her eyes and the warmth of her heart. She held him closely and he fell asleep between her breasts. Upon waking, he declared that he needed to spend the rest of his life with her. She squealed with delight, with that Swedish sing-song lilt, and they have a date to go to a parilla tonight. Tonight, I will work on my novel.

Sentirse Amado

Coffee rushes down the esophagus, hops into the stomach, and slides out the small intestines. He knocks, knocks, knocks. He wants out of the bladder and into the real world where the traffic bustles and the dogs shit on sidewalks.

Analena gets up and knocks on the door. “Alguien está?” No one answers and her hands wiggle the heavy handle. Inside, a little someone elated, exaltado, pounds. He soon lands in a pool of lukewarm water and his stomach drops; no one will love diluted coffee. Suddenly his world spinspinspins, and his heightened state plunges into the recesses of acidic copper tubes and into the underworld. Sweet freedom tastes awfully bitter.

Analena buttons up her grieving zipper and quickly slinks out of the bathroom. The sink drips tears of loss, the toilet sits shiva, and the lights go black in mourning.

While their beholder relieves herself, words congregate and reassemble. Words can feel that they are losing their beholder’s interest again, and have to act fast. Quilombo, que quilombo! Placidly slams into trees, which back up trickery and affair and him. Words grow frustrated. Why does she not pay us the attention we deserve? We are doing everything in our power to please, to excite, to surprise. It is 3:48 in the the afternoon and they have already reassembled 67 times. Analena comes back and picks up their home, shakes them into place once more.

Two slender furry caterpillars meet to kiss. They would love to call it a French kiss; however, they are not French and they do not meet long enough to embrace lips. They “peck” before they are flung back to their respective places. Again they come closer, closer. Fly back. Closer, closer… Oooh even closer! Fly back. The tease of the furrow has never been more painful for these love caterpillars who would one day like to become butterflies, and fly far away from their birth face.

Reading never came normally to Analena. Her nose wants to be a part of the process that educates the elite, and she demands to play a part. Her nose sniffs out the words first and decides if it is safe for Analena’s retinas to have contact with them. Her nose leans in to the new arrangements and is thrown off guard. She senses a red-herring and her hairy defenses stand erect. Trickery and affair and him are awfully close together; they smell fishy. Nose thinks about transmitting rotten sardines. Nose then thinks that she has already sent that signal twice today, and she does not want Analena to lose faith in her. She is a faithful and a loyal nose and that is all she has; without a duty she is useless. After ten minutes of deliberation, she grants Analena’s retinas permission to absorb.

While her nose pre-inspects the reading, Analena observes the barista. On the counter is a super-sized turntable with a gargantuan speaker, and the coffee beans are poured into the opening. With nimble fingers, a small child winds the record player and fine, ground coffee pours out of the sound. The barista catches it with a butterfly net and dunks it into rose-coloured water. He waits for 12 seconds, then pours a cup of steaming joe for Alexander who just ordered a “regular coffee” in a strong American accent. “Yankee,” the barista and the child humorously confide in each other’s eyes. Analena feels the brevity and the weight of their knowing glance.

Alfajores + Ketchup

I did not end up writing last night. My lightbulb started to flicker, so I went out to la tienda to buy a new one. On the way I stopped at the supermercado to pick up milanesa and potatoes, and ran into an old highschool teacher. He is retired and working in the grocery store to “get inspiration.” I did not ask him what he was going to use the inspiration for, as an ex-biology teacher.

“¿Nico, estás tu? ¿Como anda, che?” He hollers to me, Gastón, over the bananas.

“¡Professor! ¿Diez anos o algo asi, no? Bien bien, todo tranquilo. ¿Usted/Vos?”

“Ah, soy lo más feliz en mi vida. Necesité más inspiración, las paredes de un clase son restrigidas, el supermercado tiene viva. La gente de este barrio son locas, me encanta.”

He laughed and his eyes twinkled with an oblivious, senile charm. Maybe I would like to grow old and forgetful. Lose all of the pain and the pleasure and lose myself in an ocean of presence.

The potatoes, like the apples and the aubergine, are mealy and give under my firm grip. The true flavor of a milanesa, a flattened and deep fried chicken breast, is brought out by crisp papas fritas. Crisp, being the operational word. If the papa is crisp, the milanesa is crisp. If the potato is mealy, the sugars prevent it from crisping, and the milanesa is in turn soggy, undesirable. Friends argue that the two are unrelated; I vehemently disagree. To base my conviction on scientific evidence, I ran a series of four variations of soggy and crisp, milanesa and potatoes. I used blindfolded disbelievers as my treatment. Much to my chagrin, I have selected palate-numbing friends with insensitive taste-buds, and their amateur tongues could not tell the difference between the milanesas. Though the experiment failed to prove my belief to others, it informed me that I must find better friends.

I grabbed six of the potatoes and realized that if I have female guests over, they will ask for sugar. Sugar after sex seems to be wired into the female brain. Deep sleep is wired into ours. Walking down the yogurt aisle, I spot a tuft of camel hair through the white metal shelves. Could it be- a spotting two days in a row? I strain to see through the small white peep holes, and follow her to the sugar aisle. What does she reach for? Where do her eyes still- if they still at all? In Libros del pasaje, her eyes held on to nothing at all. Analena reaches for a box of Terrabusi alfajores. She puts them back on the shelf, and reaches for sugar-free ginger cookies. Her fingers linger an inch from the package, then (nervously?) strum their way down the shelf siding to X alfajores. She glances around the aisle and I step back from the shelf peephole. Eyes are the window to the soul, but I would rather she see my strong nose too during our first actual encounter.

Leaning in, I watch as she quickly slides her finger under the packaging and tear open an alfajor wrapper. She takes a bite and closes her eyes. Her jaw muscles clench but do not move up and down; she lets the chocolate melt on her tongue. I feel as if 12 minutes pass, as I gaze through the peephole at a holy moment. As her lady Adams apple swallowed, she threw the box under arm and turned on her heel to check out. Turned on her heel is too aggressive a description; she circled her right foot over her left and loped to the checkout line.

“Puedo ayudarte con algo, señor?”

A squat, squinty-eyed Nona glowers at me from a foot and a half below. I grab the can of tomato paste directly in front of my lookout post and smiled.

“Todo bien, señora. Gracias.”

“Hmmfff.” She grunts and waddles away to restock el yogur.

I reach for the box of alfajores just behind the box Analena grabbed, and feel as if the close distance our boxes of sugar once shared connects us in some strange way. There is a theory that everyone is separated by six degrees; we are separated by one now. I look down and notice a small puddle; I must inform the Nona so that no one slips and hurts himself.

It is now 10:34am on Saturday morning and I am standing in my kitchen in front of a bottle of white vinegar, a cup of sugar, a handful of spices, and a can of tomato paste. Ketchup is surprisingly easy to make, and I am hoping that it will mask the mealiness of my papas fritas.

ShakyWakyWoop

Water molecules dive down together in unison; then ricochet in 539 different directions. The tenant below has become increasingly sensitive to scalpel sensory stimulus as his hair continues to fall off of him. Shloeep! Sweat splashes into his eye and he yelps at the salty sting. She hears the sharp cry below and wonders when that man will get his cat declawed, and then climbs to a higher and drier part of the bed.

The bedposts rattle, and the windowpanes shudder. Analena has the shakes.

At dawn it was beads, and now at midday a river of sweat pours from her liberal pores. Liquid floods the bedroom. Shakeshakes make the sweat swirl around and around, and she is soon sitting in a delirious Jacuzzi. “Alarma, viene!” She is itchy all over and Alarma can roll over hard to reach places. RING! RING! RING! “Ya! Ya! Basta, por favor, basta!” She begs him to stop. She slams his head into the floor and there is silence for 3 seconds, a 3 second constricted inhale. SSSS! SSSS! “Cayate tetera, no quiero té!” The tea kettle calls back in a dry, scratchy voice, “I have been cold for three months, and soon I will lose my ability to sing.” The screaming SSSS continues and Analena cannot take it anymore. Her legs quiver and collapse into the whirling hot tub of her room, and she attempts to swim to the kitchen. She lies on her back and wriggles her body in S waves to the door. She floats, exhausted, and catches gulps of air. She feels the hot water under her noodly spine, then sinks deeper and deeper until her face, her breasts, her matted hair and her toenails are totally submerged. The water is kind and still. He says, stay here. Analena’s body is tired and the water offers a nice rest. She opens her eyes and the biting sting of salinity pulls her up and out of the warm abyss. Cold and wet and shaking, Analena is reprimanded by the cruel floor tiles. “Get up and get your fix, you snivelling weakling.” Her wimbleingquimbling legs reach up towards her hands reaching for the knob. It melts in her hands and coats her body in a phosphorous metallic sheen.

The barstool, peaved by the tile’s cold inhumanity, wraps Analena’s legs and torso around his legs and shimmies her up to sitting. Slowly, carefully, he tilts his seat down so that one foot, and then the other, gently touch the ground. He gives her a little push and she is standing. Noodle arms grasp the counter, and noodle legs practice taking steps. Analena coos and stumbles; steadies herself. Smiles. Her small intestines start to tighten their grip and her smile drops. The uncontrollable shakes overtake her again and she rattles to the door, down the stairs, and into the supermarket.

Shelves collapse as she zig zaggy bee lines to her cure. Nothing else will calm her quivering limbs and relax her roiling insides. She can taste it, the salve cooling her burning rash with every step she takes. She stops in front of her sweet salvation and cement begins to fill her body. Which one is it? Excited neurons fire and trigger actions as she thinks. X. Stiffening fingers wriggle the box open.

Inside, cacao eagerly awaits his chance to shine. Sugar always stole the show and prided himself on his influence. Analena, however, wants him and only him. She could give two shits about pompous señor sugar. Ha! Cacao ruffles the nibs of his feathers as Analena tears open the transparent wrapper. Hitting her tongue, he speeds through the inner-workings of her body at light-speed. Analena closes her eyes and tilts her head back as she feels the liquid gold rush through her, penetrating and calming her soul. If only I could live in this moment, the moment before I swallow, forever. Her shoulders relax, her hips realign, and her feet stand solidly. She is in control of her body again, and her eyelids open and close with a languid laziness known only to those who feel the magnitude of attachment.

In the checkout line, a very smarmy sugar congratulates cacao on his reunion, his victory.