Becoming Marta Read online

  Praise for Becoming Marta

  “One of the best books of 2011. Tremendously entertaining, this novel captivates from the first line to the last; the happy discovery of an authentic writer . . . [Becoming Marta] expands upon the idea of literary entertainment.”

  —Sergio González Rodríguez, El Ángel magazine

  “Great book! I read it in one sitting. I love the clean prose, so seemingly simple yet hiding many hours of intense work.”

  —Juan Luis Cebrián, author of Red Doll and other novels, CEO of PRISA, journalist, novelist, and member of the Royal Spanish Academy

  “[Lorea Canales offers a] female voice who seeks her identity, exposes her distress, and shows her power through a character who thinks and acts within the realm of social privilege. It is this wealthy family that the novel deconstructs, showing its flaws and tics, the way people present themselves to the outside world and the conflicts that destroy them from the inside. Canales makes a bold and assured debut, with effective use of dialogue, contributing stories that will form the future.”

  —Diamela Eltit, author of E. Luminata and other novels, winner of the José Donoso Prize for lifetime achievement

  “[Becoming Marta is] well worth reading. I felt trapped. Lorea Canales has the talent to invent three-dimensional characters who become flesh and blood. The reader ends up believing in them. They are fictional characters so well crafted that each has a unique voice.”

  —José Manuel Prieto, author of Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia and Rex: A Novel

  “With rare subtlety, Lorea Canales’s debut novel connects the current Mexican narrative with great literature.”

  —Mario Bellatín, author of Beauty Salon and other novels

  “An intelligent and enjoyable novel.”

  —Voy y Vengo magazine

  “The start of a great literary career. [Lorea Canales] finds a way to enter many worlds. Canales engages in psychological explorations. She is a humanist, searching to comprehend the environment, to understand the world.”

  —Jesús Silva Herzog-Márquez, author of La idiotez de lo perfecto and other essays, columnist for Reforma newspaper

  “Lorea Canales succeeds with her first novel. Marta has all the makings of a universally loved soap opera character, but readers of Becoming Marta will discover someone much more complex: a protagonist who is emblematic of a new generation of young urban adults in Latin America and the United States.”

  —Arturo Conde, Univision News

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2011 Lorea Canales

  Translation copyright © 2016 Gabriel Amor

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Apenas Marta in Mexico in 2011 by Plaza Janes. Translated from Spanish by Gabriel Amor. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503952614

  ISBN-10: 1503952614

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For Ana and Julia in their becoming

  Contents

  Spring Blossom

  1 The House

  2 The Mother

  3 The Search

  4 The Sale

  5 The Party

  6 The Trust Fund

  7 The New Wife

  8 The Artist

  9 The Surgery

  10 The Door

  11 The Brunch

  12 The Wedding

  13 Table Talk

  14 The Boat

  15 The Siesta

  16 The Mountain

  17 The First Marriage (of the New Wife)

  18 The Dandy

  19 The Whore

  20 The Hostess

  21 The Scribes

  22 The Traffic

  23 The Diet

  24 The Laugh

  25 Morelianas

  26 The Sheep

  27 The Donkey

  28 The Gallery

  29 The Ring

  30 The Store

  31 The Bed

  32 The Art Show

  33 Death

  34 Las Mañanitas

  35 The Gringo

  36 The Mural

  37 The Park

  38 Insomnia

  39 The Honeymoon

  40 The Desert

  41 Exhaustion

  42 Her Lips

  43 The Marriage

  44 The Business

  45 The Laboratory

  46 The Pregnancy

  47 Sex

  48 The Moon

  49 The Pictures

  50 The Gallery Owner

  51 The Check

  52 The Tub

  53 The Dinner

  54 Fortune

  55 The Suitcase

  56 The Lottery

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Spring Blossom

  Ser

  Devenir

  Become

  What kind of woman

  are you?

  What will you be when you grow up?

  Wait . . . aren’t you already?

  Yes, yes . . . I am

  and yet

  I do not know

  what I will become.

  Do flowers find becoming hard

  or do they bloom effortlessly?

  Maybe I already bloomed,

  it was a great day.

  The problem, then, consists in decay

  or is it decaying?

  1

  The House

  It is not easy to enter a party. The heat outside was deadly; the sun had set, darkness settled, but the heat remained. Marta climbed the stairs to the main palapa. She stood watching, her hair wet and feet bare, the straps of her sandals held by two fingers of her left hand. The guests had already gathered; all but three of them were familiar. She sat down on the limestone steps, put on her heels, and walked toward the grand palapa, where they were mingling. She scanned the strangers invited by Gaby, her father’s new wife. She took in their stares, transforming them into a loathing that she exhaled like cigarette smoke.

  She stopped in front of the pool, which was shining in the dark night, aware that the light passing between her legs made her silhouette visible to everyone. Most of them had already seen her in a bikini—some had even seen her naked—so what did it matter? Her mother would’ve said, “Close your legs, move out of the light, sit properly.”

  “Bring me a Paloma Blanca,” she said to the air, certain that a waiter would hear her. Sure enough, a glass of white tequila and Sprite was placed in her hand. She pursed her lips against the ice-filled glass as memories filled her. She gulped down the drink to quiet her thirst and the heat. The silk clung to her body.

  Marta turned to the guests. There was Juan Estrada. She remembered the last time she’d been with him. He’d called her when his wife had gone to Valle de Bravo. They’d gone out to dinner and then back to his place. He’d started kissing her, undressing her; suddenly, he’d stopped, sat on the bed with his underwear between his knees, covered his face, and started crying. The pathetic reality of having his impotence exposed had turned into fury. “Get out!” he’d screamed at her in a hoarse voice that seemed to rise from the depths of his gut. “Don’t you see? There’s nothing to be done here.”

  Marta had c
onsidered holding him, getting closer. After all, that’s why she’d gone home with him—for a fleeting moment of comfort, a moment of feeling cared for or maybe even loved. But Marta had managed to control this impulse. She grabbed her things and slammed the door on the way out. You’re pathetic, she thought, uncertain if she was referring to him or to herself.

  Marta took another sip of her drink. The sea and sky, everything was black—a funereal darkness. A cliff above the sea, a hill above the cliff, and a house above the hill. To build the house, they’d had to destroy the hill. Trees and tons of red clay were removed, rearranged, and flattened. One night a powerful storm washed half the hillside into the sea. For days a huge brown stain was visible below the cliff. The contractor took note of this process, calculating costs and savings. From then on, instead of carting the dirt miles away, he dumped it in the ocean.

  The architect was all too familiar with his clients’ contradictions. They wanted an extraordinary house, something palatial with no expense spared. But they also sought simplicity and discretion. This was not the time for ostentation. For that reason he’d concealed the house behind leafy gardens with fully grown trees transplanted from what little jungle remained. He also planted many palm tree saplings, knowing that everything sprouted and grew quickly here. At first the royal palms that bordered the driveway had barely been three feet tall. Now they were tall and wide, leafy with smooth, elegant trunks.

  Marta recalled a time when she still liked the house and praised its virtues. She had even been proud of it. It had featured prominently on the cover of a coffee-table book about beach houses. Now it weighed on her. Seeing her father and Gaby there disgusted her. It made her ill to think that they slept on the same sheets her mother had bought, that they used the same dishes. The house had to go.

  2

  The Mother

  Marta’s image of her mother before they operated on her: an eggshell underneath a threadbare cotton robe; a green, faded robe that provided no comfort; her mother anesthetized, distant. Was it really her or just her body? Where was her mother behind that veil of medications? Somewhere else—she was already somewhere else.

  The scars on her breasts and, after he’d mutilated her, the doctor’s verdict: “There is nothing to be done; it has spread.” The amputation was useless, too late.

  “Do you remember Saint Agatha? She didn’t have anesthesia,” her mother had said, still holding on to her sense of humor.

  Paintings of the saint and martyr with her breasts on a silver tray immortalized in the galleries of the Uffizi and the Prado: obligatory sights on European tours that had made such an impression on Marta as a child and whose happy memories had faded. There remained only the image of her mother’s severed breasts, full of blood and displayed like objects, as though they’d never belonged to a body. They resembled mountains more than flesh, or clay mounds like the volcanoes children make in science class that erupt by mixing vinegar and baking soda.

  Then there was her father’s stupidity. Ignoring both Marta’s and her mother’s wishes, and taking advantage of their momentary weakness, he had decided that she should remain in Houston. He’d left his wife in the hospital to endure treatments—more torture, more senselessness, more suffering—rather than letting her come home where she belonged, and where Marta could have employed several English ladies experienced with hospice care, who managed the process of dying by administering doses of morphine. But no. Instead of linen sheets and pale-peach curtains that filtered sunlight on the vase always filled with white roses, instead of the fine nightdress and cashmere robe—vain comforts, but comforts nonetheless—there was the inhospitable hospital, loathsome in its fake cheeriness and the nurses’ bad manners. The scrawny robe and the experimental treatments were nothing more than absurd, costly torture. Then there was death. Marta was left hanging, waiting for a final conversation with her mom. Waiting to discuss things they’d never discussed. Was it true what they said? Was it true? But her mother was not there to answer.

  She was a corpse that needed to be repatriated. She was a process the imbecile consul had not expedited. He was an inexperienced bureaucrat from the new administration, lacking any concept of class, who sought to democratize her mother’s corpse. The corpse of Señora Tordella de la Vega, whose surname all of Mexico recognized. The imbecile tried to treat it like the corpse of any old immigrant. They said he resigned when his boss, alerted from Mexico, ordered the consul to provide the corpse with special treatment. “The bastard turned out to have integrity,” her father had said.

  In the end, and despite the family’s official silence on the matter, the gossip magazines covered the funeral. People attended in order to see and be seen, to make others believe that they were part, or had been part, of her mother’s life. “Poor Marti. She was always so cheerful . . . It came on so suddenly . . . What a shock. Oh! You never know, it hits when you least expect it . . . We’re so sorry . . . You can’t know how much I loved your mother . . . My most sincere condolences.” Empty phrases repeated ad infinitum. The cards, flowers, and even framed photographs that arrived at the house with ridiculous notes: “I found this picture of your mother. It’s a fantastic photo and I thought you’d like to have it.” Do they think we don’t have our own photographs?

  3

  The Search

  “Take me to see her,” said Marta, getting in the car after her dance class.

  After school Marta’s chauffeur—sometimes still accompanied by a nanny, depending on the day of the week—took her to classes in dance, tennis, golf, swimming, and French.

  “Miss Marta, this is becoming a habit,” said Baltasar, the chauffeur. “I took you there just last week.”

  “That’s why I want to go, because I know she’ll be there this time of day.”

  Baltasar drove to a gated house near Virreyes. The tall, ivy-covered wall made it impossible to see inside. The only thing visible was a large wooden gate blocking the driveway and a smaller pedestrian door next to it that had a narrow screen for a security guard to peep through. They waited outside.

  “Baltasar, can I bum a cigarette?”

  The chauffeur offered her the pack, and they both smoked. Marta was impatient. She wanted to see her. Last week she had been picked up at exactly this time.

  “The Maxima isn’t here,” she said anxiously.

  “No,” answered the chauffeur without missing a beat; he was used to waiting.

  After thirteen years of searching, she couldn’t hide her disappointment. No, it couldn’t be thirteen; she herself had just turned thirteen a few months back. When had she begun the search for her birth mother? At five years of age? Six? No, thought Marta, it began at the beginning. As soon as it entered the world, the child blindly sought her mother, guided by her sense of smell. Yes, the search began nearly at the beginning. Hence it had taken Marta thirteen years to find her, and she wasn’t about to lose her.

  The wind blew, sweeping the leaves on the sidewalk. Clouds in the blue sky hinted at nighttime showers. The street was empty. There was no sound.

  A car turned the corner. It was the Maxima. Marta began nervously snapping her long fingers. She would come out.

  The car parked in front of the house. Marta waited, her eyes fixed on the home’s gate. But this time it happened in reverse: a woman dressed in a gray wool pants suit emerged from the car. She was short and curvy. The pants fit snuggly on her hips, and her straight black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. With efficient strides propelled by low heels, the woman walked through the gate on out of their sight.

  How can my mother be like that? thought Marta.

  When Marta was thirteen years old, their physical differences were not what most impressed her. Some years later she would ask herself why she was tall and her mother short. Why blond? How could they be so different? Were their personalities also different? But back then Marta, still more girl than woman, did not compare her body to women’s; she was not even a particularly tall teenager. It was not until she turn
ed seventeen that she went through a growth spurt. What profoundly affected Marta was how removed she felt from this woman. She asked herself the same question as always: Why did she give me away?

  “Ready to leave?”

  “No,” said Marta. “I’m sure she’ll come out again. Remember how last time she went to her office. Why don’t you get out and chum up the other chauffeur and get him to spill the beans? C’mon, Baltasar, please?”

  “Not here,” said Baltasar. Chauffeurs had their rules; they didn’t gossip with just any old chauffeur, much less on an empty street. They had to be in a group, waiting for their employers, and then, with three or four hours to kill, they would chat with one another and share information. That’s how Baltasar had discovered where this lady lived. He’d told Marta because he thought it only fair that the girl knew who her real mother was. Now he regretted it. He had not taken into account that when the girl got an idea in her head, nothing else in the world mattered to her.

  “That one,” Marta would cry out upon seeing a lady driving a white minivan. “She looks like a good person.”

  “That one,” her nanny would say, pointing to a toothless vagrant, and they’d both crack up.

  It took Baltasar a while to figure out the game. But bit by bit he noticed that the girl pointed to women who were undeniably blond, rich, and good-looking, while those chosen by the nanny were quite the opposite.

  “She’s searching for her real mother,” said the nanny when finally he had felt comfortable enough to ask about the game’s objective. “The problem is that she always imagines it’s someone even better than our lady. I make my choices hoping the little ingrate might consider that it could be someone worse, so she realizes how fortunate she is.”

  From the quiet of the front seat, Baltasar began filling in the story’s gaps. When he finally found her, the real mother, in a city of twenty-three million people, he couldn’t resist sharing his discovery. That had been a mistake.

  A few minutes later the lady came out again. This time Marta caught sight of her face before the woman ducked into her waiting car. Marta immediately made a mental note of the facial features, knowing now she’d recognize her real mother anywhere. It did not escape Marta’s notice that the woman was rather ordinary.