Abyss


 PART ONE
 
 
 THERE WERE SO many plants in the apartment that we called it the jungle.
 
 The building looked like something out of an old futurist movie. Flat lines, overhangs, lots of gray, wide open spaces, huge windows. Our apartment was two stories, and the living-room window went all the way from the bottom of the first floor to the top of the second. Downstairs, the floor tiles were black granite with white veins. Upstairs, white granite with black veins. The staircase had black steel tubes and polished slabs for steps. A naked staircase, full of holes. The upstairs hall overlooked the living room, like a balcony, and had the same tube railing as the stairs. From there you could gaze down at the jungle below, sprawling in all directions.
 
 There were plants on the floor and on tables, on top of the hi-fi and the buffet, between pieces of furniture, on wrought iron stands and in ceramic pots, hanging from the walls and ceiling on the staircase’s lowest steps, and in places you couldn’t see from the upstairs: the kitchen, the laundry room, the guest bathroom. All kinds of plants. Sun, shade, water. A few, like red anthurium and white egret, had flowers. The rest were green. Ferns both smooth and curly, shrubs with striped leaves, spotted leaves, colorful leaves, palms, bushes, huge trees that grew well in planters, and delicate herbs that fit into my small hand.
 
 Sometimes, walking through the apartment, I had the feeling the plants were reaching out with their finger-leaves, trying to touch me; and that the biggest ones, in a forest behind the three-seater sofa, liked to envelop the people sitting there or brush up against them and cause a fright.
 
 Out on the street, two guayacanes obstructed the view from the balcony and living room. In the rainy season, their leaves fell off and the trees became covered in pink flowers. Birds would hop from the guayacanes onto the balcony. Hummingbirds and tropical kingbirds—the most intrepid—would pop in to nose around. Butterflies would flutter fearlessly from the dining room to the living room. Sometimes, at night, a bat would get in and fly around, low to the ground, looking lost. Mamá and I would scream. Papá would grab a broom and stand, motionless, in the middle of the jungle until the bat flew out the way it had come in.
 
 In the afternoons a cool wind came down from the hills and swept over Cali. It stirred the guayacanes, blew in through the open windows, and rustled the indoor plants too. The racket it made sounded like people at a concert. In the afternoons, mamá watered. Water overflowed pots, filtered down through the dirt, seeped out the holes, and dripped onto the ceramic plates, trickling like a little stream.
 
 I loved running through the jungle, letting the plants caress me, stopping in their midst, closing my eyes and listening to their sounds. The tinkle of water, the whisper of air, the nervous, agitated branches. I loved running up the stairs and looking down from the second floor, as if at the edge of a cliff, the stairs a fractured ravine. Our jungle, lush and savage, down below.
 
 Mamá was always home. She didn’t want to be like my grandmother. She spent her whole life telling me so.
 
 My grandmother slept till midmorning, so my mother had to go to school without seeing her. In the afternoons, my grandmother played lulo with her friends, meaning that four days out of five, when mamá got home from school her mother wasn’t there. The one day she was, it was because it was her turn to host the card game. Eight ladies at the dining room table, smoking, laughing, tossing down cards and eating pandebono cheese bread. My grandmother didn’t even look at mamá.
 
 One time, at the club, mamá heard a woman ask my grandmother why she hadn’t had more children.
 
 “Ay, mija,” my grandmother said, “if I could have avoided it, I wouldn’t even have had this one.”
 
 The two of them burst out laughing. My mother had just gotten out of the pool and was standing there dripping water. It felt, she said, like they’d ripped open her chest and reached in to tear out her heart.
 
 My grandfather got back from work in the evening. He’d hug mamá, tickle her, ask about her day. But apart from that, she grew up in the care of maids, who came and went, one after the other, since my grandmother never liked any of them.
 
 Maids didn’t last long at our house.
 
 Yesenia was from the Amazon jungle. She was nineteen, with straight hair down to her waist and the rough-hewn features of the stone sculptures at San Agustín. We hit it off from the first day.
 
 My school was a few blocks from our apartment building. Yesenia would walk me there in the mornings and be waiting for me when I got out in the afternoons. On the way, she’d tell me about where she was from. The fruits, the animals, the rivers wider than an avenue.
 
 “That,” she said, pointing to Cali River, “is not a river; it’s a creek.”
 
 One afternoon we went straight to her bedroom. A small room off the kitchen, with a bathroom and a tiny window. We sat facing each other on her bed. We’d discovered that she didn’t know any songs or hand games, and I was teaching her my favorite one, about dolls from Paris. She was getting it all wrong, and we were laughing our heads off. My mother appeared in the doorway.
 
 “Claudia, come upstairs.”
 
 She looked super serious.
 
 “What’s wrong?”
 
 “I said: come.”
 
 “We were just playing.”
 
 “Do not make me repeat myself.”
 
 I looked at Yesenia. With her eyes, she told me to obey.