Three Messages and a Warning (8 page)

When I started elementary school and learned that there was another student named Paz (Spanish for peace) in my class, I decided to make friends with her and invite her to my home, so that my mother could have what she wanted most in life: and what she sometimes found in the tiny sleeping pills in a bottle which she desperately withdrew from her bureau drawer.

“My mom would like you to come over for dinner,” I said to Paz at recess. It was the first time we spoke.

She agreed.

“One of my friends wants to meet you. She’s seen you when you come to pick me up,” I said to my mother, who smiled gratifyingly.

This is how a long-lasting friendship was initiated not only between Paz and me but also between her and my mother. To compensate Paz for the benefits she bestowed on my mother, I gave her own mother hugs full of love. Her mother’s plumpness, which provoked so much ridicule in school, was a haven for me—a warm, comfortable pillow upon which I could lay my head.

Sometimes I suspected that Paz and I had been switched at birth: that her mother was biologically mine and mine was hers. Paz’s mother seemed to treat me with greater tenderness than Paz, and mine seemed to treat Paz with more intimacy than she treated me; we never could figure out if it this was out of common courtesy or an expression of their true allegiances. I learned about Paz’s father because of the pictures in the house, through the stories expressed in them. As it happens, her father was Ángel Márquez, a judo instructor. The martial arts and the lessons of the Toyama were unknown to me then. Its practitioners seemed like latent criminals: why else would they fight so violently? In time, I learned that the very night before the newspapers exposed the world to the first pictures of Mars from deep space, a mugging obstructed my father’s presence at my birth. The image of a band of brutal men in white uniforms with black belts kicking my dad in the face entered my mind when I viewed the photograph of Paz’s father, which probably explained why I disliked him without ever having met him; but the fact that he abandoned his family without warning one day, and Paz’s mother never smiled again, also shaped my scornful opinion of the man.

NASA launched the
Viking 1
on a mission to Mars, inserting into the planet’s orbit in 1976. Talk of Martians occupied the center of our discussions then, being of personal and collective significance to us. It was of interest to me, personally, because it was rumored that an expedition of aliens would visit the Earth when peace reigned on our planet, and my mother needed this kind of peace even more than she needed my friend Paz.

“If the Martians come, I hope they take me with them,” my mother said in an unforgettably solemn tone.

“You’d really take off, just like that, and leave me behind?” I asked anxiously.

Her response mingled tenderness, disillusionment, lethargy, and curiosity. It was then that I learned of the coincidence between my birth and the first photographs from deep space of the planet Mars, which she showed me.

“I’ve always wondered what’s up there in the sky, what the worlds beyond ours are like. But no, honey, I wouldn’t leave you.”

Her answer calmed me, partially, but deep down I knew that her desire to leave this world was not fleeting, and that she really wanted to know if the peace she so desired might be found in another world.

I met Ángel Márquez in person at Paz’s mother’s funeral. Paz and I were in college by then, and her mother’s plumpness had escalated into morbid obesity. Her coffin had to be special-ordered, triple the size of the average one, to fit her entire body. Her husband, the judo instructor, looked much the same as in the photos in their family home, only smaller and thinner. I laughed at my childish presumption that Ángel Márquez, in reality so little, could have beaten up my father, big and tough both in my eyes and in reality. But my parents were already divorced by then. My mother had stopped taking pills, and it seemed that part of her inner turmoil had subsided. Apparently much of her battle was fought against my father and on his account: the love that was supposed to bring her happiness left her with two daughters and the agitation of a man who was habitually unfaithful.

Outer space and its inhabitants came back to my attention the day I heard my mother, an elder woman but not yet senile, say that she had dreamed of and believed that she had seen Martians. People eventually find what they want if they are persistent, and my mother had spoken about extraterrestrials all her life: or it was just the beginning of the decline of her mental capacities; or had life finally given her what she had wished for so long? My older sister, we were both older by then, grimaced when I told her what our mother had said. Neither of us knew what to think; but Paz, who knew her almost as well as we did and had the advantage of not being bound to her by blood, talked about the possibility that my mother’s visions were real: real to her, at least. Fortunately, my mother showed no other signs of madness at that stage.

1999 came around and talk revolved around the new millennium and the possibility of the end of the world. Theories emerged from everywhere: in some there was extreme fear, in others extreme hope. The minority professed that the world would continue as it always had, while growing increasingly sophisticated. When the new millennium came with more of a whimper than a bang, the more radical theories vanished without a trace. My mother never made another comment to her daughters about the Martians, but Paz and she had long conversations about it. I neglected to mention that Paz was an avid believer in life on other worlds and in the exchange of information between them. She gleaned this from her readings rather than from experience.

It seemed normal that Paz sought out my mother more often in the wake of her mother’s death; we shared the privilege of receiving my mother’s love and in some ways the responsibility of caring for her as she aged. In fact, Paz probably would have moved in with her had my mother lived out the full course of her life. But what happened then, years after the new millennium, has no logical explanation; neither the police nor detectives nor clairvoyants have been able to give a reasonable account of it. One day I tried to call Paz, but she did not answer her home or cell phone. When I contacted my mother about it, she explained that Paz was going through a very hard time and had gone to her for solace. She had not mentioned anything because she did not want to alarm me. When I got there I expected to see my friend distraught and in tears, but she seemed in perfect mental health. There were books and magazines on UFOs strewn about and I arrived when they were about to watch a video on the topic. The documentary was intriguing, but I watched it with some trepidation because I was more concerned about what was happening between the two of them rather than those creatures with the huge eyes and heads. But there were no apparent clues.

“We’re fine,” Paz said when we embraced as I left.

I telephoned my older sister, who was beginning to act like my younger one.

“You handle it; she’s your friend.” And she hung up.

There was nothing wrong with them spending some quality time together, I told myself; perhaps my worrisome mind was overreacting. As a matter of fact, it was refreshing to know that my mother had someone to keep her company during the day. That is what I told myself, at least, until one afternoon no one answered the phone, no one came to the door, and when I went inside I found everything in perfect order with a letter addressed to my sister and me on the living-room table. I did not dared open it until my sister arrived. In brief, they wrote that with mutually reinforced courage they managed to communicate with the aliens, who had agreed to take them along so long as they agreed never to return to Earth. They expressed their love to everyone in their farewell statement, and with morbid humor they pointed out that at least they had saved us the expense and strain of a funeral. In the letter, Paz requested that her father be informed of her whereabouts, as if that were within the realm of possibility. We called my father and Ángel Márquez and together we examined the letter, raising questions and venturing conjectures. We called the police, a detective, and a clairvoyant, in that order, following their disappearance. No one could proffer an answer, and a full three years later we still have no explanation other than the contents of the letter. That document has driven a wedge between my sister and me and we never even see each other anymore unless it is to meet my father for dinner.

Sometimes I believe that my mother finally found peace in a world beyond our own; other times I fear that she and Paz were kidnapped and are being kept as slaves: that is, if they were not already tortured, raped, and murdered. The other morning, when I stepped out to pick up the newspaper, I noticed that the headlines referred to Mars with full-color photographs accompanying the feature story. New lenses and more precise instruments revealed figural patterns reminiscent of a human face on the surface of the planet. Some maintain that they are artifacts of an ancient civilization, but I find a striking resemblance to my mother in them.

“You look pathetic,” I said to myself. I couldn’t take any more. I started to really cry, and answered me. “Yes.” And then I fell to the floor. And then, against all expectations, I knelt and hugged myself, hugged myself and consoled myself and told myself that everything was going to be okay, that if I didn’t help myself then who was going to help me . . . or so I told myself.

“We’re going to need to hang up,” I added after a moment, and laughed. I laughed too, sucking up the tears and thinking how unworthy our pose was. Then it occurred to me that I’d gotten negligent, because my telephone from a year ago was in better shape than the one I have now.