José Ovejero

Mom Chose the Morning of December 24th to Kill Herself

Translated by Samantha Schnee

Mom chose the morning of December 24th to kill herself; she didn’t choose any old day—Friday March 9th, or Tuesday June 6th—it had to be an important day; she’s always had a predilection for carefully staging things and there’s nothing she likes less than having her productions go unnoticed.

The first thing that caught my eye when I entered the house was the turkey in the hallway; I don’t know whether she had left it there on purpose or whether it had fallen and she couldn’t be bothered to pick it up, but there it was, obscene, like an old prostitute, with its white skin and the perverse aperture in its rear, lying there so everyone would see it in passing. I didn’t touch it. Raw flesh absolutely disgusts me; even my children’s—when I had to change their diapers—gave me the chills.

I found my mother kneeling in the kitchen, her head in the oven; I thought she was making some domestic repairs; she’s pretty handy and it’s not unusual to find her with a screwdriver or a monkey wrench in her hands. It also didn’t surprise me that she didn’t respond to my greeting, so I headed to my old bedroom, left my bag and my gifts on the bed, and went to the bathroom, where I sat down on the edge of the tub. The bathroom is my favorite place in any home. I like the coolness of the tiles and especially metal tubs—plastic tubs less so. I had some fun poking around in mom’s creams and lotions; I put some moisturizer on my face, washed it off with warm water, and put on another anti-aging one, before tweezing a hair that keeps springing up on the tip of my chin.

“But didn’t you notice? Didn’t you smell the gas?”

The policeman was suspicious. How exciting, to be a suspect! He was blond and handsome and had broad shoulders, but I didn’t like how he licked his lower lip between each question, rather inappropriate for a policeman. A man in power ought to be virile and impassive if possible, without boyish tics.

“Ma’am, It could have been a disaster. If you had lit a cigarette, ma’am…”

“Thanks, I don’t smoke. But you don’t need to be so formal, I’m not thatold. I do have a drink once in a while. Do you?”

The policeman was speechless for a moment, I think he even forgot about me for a second, and he licked his lips several times in a row. I was just a tiny bit disgusted. I imagined him licking my mouth with that thick, soft tongue and I shivered.

“So, you didn’t smell anything.”

I explained that after the birth of my daughter I lost my sense of smell. And that’s not such a bad thing, because the world smells pretty revolting. The downside is that sometimes I burn stuff when I’m cooking.

“It’s very strange,” the policeman said, poking his ear with his pen. “She had prepared the sauce in the pan. And the cookbook is open to a recipe for roasting turkey. Someone who’s planning to commit suicide doesn’t cook for their guests. Certainly not a turkey.”

“You don’t know my mother, sir.” I decided that I would address him formally, too, because you have to treat a guardian of the law with respect, even if he has pimples on his face and sticks his cow’s tongue out every time he stops speaking. “She was very detail-oriented. She would have been insulted to be invited to a Christmas Eve dinner where the hostess had forgotten to make a turkey. She would have accepted no excuses.”

“But she didn’t finish. She killed herself before roasting it.”

“You’re very observant. That’ll get you far,” and it seemed like I was inviting him to make a move on me, but, truly, that wasn’t my intention.

When he left, along with the orderlies or the nurses or the doctors, whoever they were, I put on latex gloves, put the turkey in the pan, tossed a few spoonfuls of sauce on top and a few into its posterior cavity and turned on the oven. It worked perfectly.

My sister and her husband were the first to arrive.

I had spent a long time considering how to announce these events. In the version I liked best I placed my hands together over my stomach and bowed my head, a little like I was praying, and began to speak, but with a dramatic pause: “Mom… committed suicide.” No interruptions, straight-up, just like that. But when I opened the door my sister pounced on me, kissing me on both cheeks so loudly you would have thought she had slapped me, and when she was already halfway down the hall, laden with gifts and self-importance, I blurted out, “Mom tried to kill herself!” Then I smiled at my brother-in-law, who was still standing in the doorway, waiting to greet me.

My sister bounded through the house, not the least bit ladylike—she’s always been a bit butch, like Mom, and returned to where her husband and I were standing and staring at each other.

“She tried to kill herself or she did?”

It was then that I realized I wasn’t sure. I hate it when my sister one-ups me! But the nurses or doctors or whatever they were had whisked her away so quickly that I didn't have time to ask. They hadn’t covered her with a sheet like they do in the movies, nor had they zipped her into one of those bags from the movies, closing it over her face in a close-up—what a devastating image, because that zipping sound means there’s no more hope and the relatives begin to sob uncontrollably, that’s the moment I like best. And, since I was speaking to the policeman, I didn’t notice whether they had put a mask on her or given her an injection or the other things they do in the movies to the wounded hero who has demolished three or four buildings and eliminated dozens of criminals. Hadn’t the policeman said that he’d call me later to let me know if there were any new developments? A dead woman can’t produce new developments, so she must have been alive. That would be typical of her: coming home in the middle of dinner to a chorus of oohs and ahs and we would all stand up, peppering her with questions, and she would say, Do I believe my eyes? How could you forget the napkin rings? If you don’t do it yourself… but she’d have to bite the insides of her cheeks to hide her satisfaction about being the center of attention once again. Committing suicide, especially on Christmas Eve, isn’t something just anyone can do, not to mention living to tell your dinner guests about it. I would have liked to ask her right then whether you can really see a light at the end of a tunnel; it must be so lovely, to feel so peaceful there in the darkness and see a shining light in the distance.

But I had seen her with my own eyes—so still, so dead! When they removed her from the oven she was soft and floppy like an inanimate object. I had started to come to terms with the idea of her death and even felt sorry for a few minutes; I would have felt cheated having to act happy to see her and kiss her enthusiastically and ask her what the hospital was like and how the food was. Why had I told my sister that she had tried to kill herself instead of saying that she had killed herself?

“It’s serious. She may die at any moment.”

I thought that putting it that way would prevent me from having to tell my sister that I had no idea whether Mom was alive or dead; my sister loves correcting people. She acts all superior and really gets on my nerves. Having a dentist for a husband doesn’t give you the right to look down on everybody.

Then everyone else started arriving: Dad, who comes over to Mom’s only for Christmas Eve and birthdays; my youngest daughter, who had donned trousers that were even more tattered than usual, and who had pierced an eyebrow with a number of black rings; a neighbor who always comes to our parties with a coconut flan, which no one ever touches and which we throw out hoping she’ll notice, though she pretends not to care and even says, “I was never very good at baking; next year I’ll bring soup.”

My sister and I argued about who would break the news to guests as they arrived; we cut each other off mid-sentence and when they asked questions we—especially she—invented details that we didn’t know. Dad didn’t want to know anything. He sniffed the scent of the turkey greedily while my sister made up things like how my mother had seemed sadder than usual of late, how she had remarked that life seemed like a burden; and that she hadn’t been the same since the divorce. I told him that Mom had mentioned the word inheritance a few times, a word she had always eschewed. My sister elbowed me and patted Dad’s bald head.

“Life’s a pile of shit,” Dad said and went to sit down at the table. My daughter turned on the television but muted it because she wouldn’t have been able to hear anything anyway: she had headphones glued to her ears and was nodding like she was in constant agreement when actually she was just keeping the beat. That’s unnecessary to add, isn’t it? She never agrees with anything. To annoy me, more than anything else.

We decided to eat before exchanging gifts. The turkey turned out to be dry and had an aftertaste of gasoline. The dentist swore it was delicious and tasted just like my mother had roasted it. Then he spit a few feathers onto his plate.

“Your mother,” Dad said to my sister, as if she weren’t my mother, too, “doesn’t do anything with conviction anymore. It used to be that housewives took pride in their work. They’d spend hours preparing béchamel sauce or making mayonnaise. Today they buy everything off the shelf. There are no real women left.”

“Granny never could cook,” my daughter said.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” my dad replied.

“Well, here’s to celebrating another year together,” my brother-in-law said, and no one corrected him. We raised our glasses. My brother-in-law insisted upon kissing me again, this time on the lips, and no one said anything about that either, not even my daughter. I thought of the policeman and his thick tongue.

“Next year I’m not coming,” my daughter said. “I hate Christmas.”

My daughter thinks it makes her interesting to dislike Christmas. 

Everyone who thinks of themselves as interesting claims to hate it, as if it were proof of intellectual superiority or of having a vivid internal life. When someone says they don’t like Christmas I think they’re an arrogant imbecile—except my daughter, who just says it to be annoying. Because I love Christmas, when the whole family gathers together, the tree lights twinkling, the wreaths and the presents. And even the toasts—when my brother-in-law doesn’t kiss me on the lips, because his kisses are sloppy and other people’s saliva disgusts me.

After dinner we opened gifts and the neighbor went home crying; I can’t remember if we forgot to get her a gift or if the fact that we remembered to get her something made her cry. My daughter called her boyfriend or her girlfriend; I like her girlfriend better because she says hello to me and asks me questions about what I’m doing and when I was younger. My daughter’s girlfriend’s lips are dry and quite appealing.

My father and I did the washing up; he always does the glasses. He thinks the rest of us don’t do them carefully enough because they have spots if you hold them up to the light.

“Your mother never could clean glasses properly. A glass has to be spotless. A dirty glass ruins a nice dinner. In the olden days there were butlers who would check the glasses and the cutlery to make sure they were pristine. In the olden days life wasn’t a pile of shit.”

“You think Mom’s coming back?”

“Your mother does whatever she wants, without taking other people’s feelings into account. She’s always been that way. She can kill herself or come back to life whenever she likes without thinking twice about it. Did I tell you that when we separated she licked the glue off all of my stamps? Something like that has to give you pause.”

When the dishes were done I didn’t know what to do so I went to the bathroom; when I passed Mom’s bedroom I saw my sister trying on a pair of shoes in the wardrobe mirror.

“How do they look?” she asked without looking at me. They were too big for her; one of the few ways she doesn’t take after Mom is that she has small feet.

Dresses were scattered across the bed. That’s when I realized she was wearing one of Mom’s. I pretended to shed a few tears but no one noticed. So I shut myself in the bathroom. I applied a seaweed mask from the Dead Sea or the Red Sea and an exfoliant made with hazelnut shells. I laid down in the empty tub and it was like being in a sarcophagus. I’ve never told anyone, but sometimes I’m an Egyptian princess who died two thousand years ago. When I came out again my dad and my daughter were watching TV and holding hands.

“This girl watches too much TV,” my father said when he heard me coming and then he changed the channel. My brother-in-law was digging around in the liquor cabinet. He was wearing lipstick and had put blush on his cheeks. But I still didn’t find him attractive. Despite the fact he’s a dentist. My sister came in, shouting that she didn’t want a single thing, that no one should lay a finger on anything, because the house was going to stay exactly as it was until Mom returned, and if she never came back then we’d turn the apartment into a museum. We’d display her stuff in glass cases and come over every Christmas Eve to eat dinner and admire the exhibit. We’d hang photographs of each of us, arranged in chronological order, and write letters that we’d pre-date to make it look like we’d written them years earlier. But the most important thing, the only thing she really wanted, was for Mom to come home, despite the fact that if she did we wouldn’t be able to turn the apartment into a museum. Then she pretended to cry—she always copies me, though she insists that all her ideas are her own—and I tried to comfort her. When I got close I saw that she was wearing a pair of jade earrings that belonged to Mom. Her husband smiled at me. He does have nice teeth, that’s why he smiles so much. My daughter smiled at me, too, though I’m not sure why. I blew her a kiss, which my father thought was intended for him so he blew a kiss back to me with a look of confusion on his face; my sister was touched and ran over to hug him but stopped in front of the TV screen, where a lot of things were happening very quickly. Then the doorbell rang. My sister clapped her hand to her mouth and I went to open the door. I tried to affect an expression of surprise and happiness. The doorbell rang again. I opened the door energetically, as if I were about to dash out on an important errand.

It was the neighbor.

Samantha Schnee’s translation of Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN America Translation Prize. She won the 2015 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation for her excerpt of Boullosa’s The Conspiracy of the Romantics, and her translation of Boullosa’s novel The Book of Anna was published by Coffee House Press in 2020.