Mammoth
“It was time. I spotted him on the terrace, made my approach, took away his glass, and stubbed out his cigarette.”
AUGUST 8, 2024
On the day I planned to get pregnant, I turned twenty-four and threw a birthday party that was actually a fertilization party in disguise. My flatmates helped. They called their friends and acquaintances, and I asked my friends to bring acquaintances of their own. The more the merrier. I needed bodies. To gather a crowd, the kind of horde where epic gestures go unnoticed. I wanted to be a single mother, for no father to claim his share. It was April, and the spring sun shattered the window with a strong gust of suspended life. That white-hot glow made me feel fertile. I downed it like medicine, trusting in it and its power to transform my womb into a chapel. After lunch I would lie on the futon in my bedroom, head against the window that faces the zoo, and surrender to the light that turned my skin golden, my arm hair the color of wheat, my legs dissolute and slack. I masturbated in the sun while longing for a child. The singing of caged birds lulled me to sleep, and I woke around sundown, when the smooth quiet formed a slope down which the lions’ ancient, roaring sorrows would soon roll.
At the time I was working in a research group at the university’s sociology department. Demography of Longevity, it was called. We were in the first and longest stage of our research: data collection. I spent whole mornings interviewing residents of adult day-care centers and nursing homes. The assignment felt unending and was often interrupted by coughing fits and phlegmy vomit. I almost never got them to answer the full survey in one session, which meant having to go back the following day. When I said goodbye, some of the seniors would keep me there, wringing my hands like they wanted to suck days out of my life – that slow sap that nourishes years. Twice, the next day was too late. It was a time of minor discoveries. The seniors died in their sleep, at night, shortly before dawn. Another thing: in nursing homes, they died in threes. A mystery but that’s how it went. No one is born alone. But when it comes to dying, bodies band together — like nations, or musketeers.
There’s something sacrilegious about Barcelona at daybreak. The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps.
Grant-funded jobs pay next to nothing, but I got on fine. In undergrad, I’d made friends with a PhD student, and we rented a flat near Parc de la Ciutadella with a couple of other girls. One of their fathers was the guarantor. All four of us moved in on the first day of our lease. We walked into the flat in silence, the way you might enter a crypt or visit the jeweler: with the incredulous smile of someone seeing generosity made concrete in walls. The rooms were assigned at random, and I got the smallest one. The plan was to swap every six months, but we never got around to it. We made ourselves at home in our respective rooms, rearranging the furniture, shedding strands of hair, and tempering our preferences, our skin. By the time I turned twenty-four, I was the only one left. I sublet the other rooms to exchange students and did all I could to avoid them. It made living with people more manageable. Outside those four walls, everything seemed to annoy me.
The first thing I did every day before getting out of bed was throw open the window and breathe in the morning air. Then I wrapped myself in the duvet and lay there a few minutes. There’s something sacrilegious about Barcelona at daybreak. The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps. It’s the hour of alarm clocks and stimulants, of haste, slammed doors, and headaches. A massive apparatus spits and starts, and language keeps it well oiled — a rude, dispassionate language that perverts language’s original meaning. I woke to an awareness of that profanity. Then I showered, put on some clean clothes, and ate processed food. Outside, before descending into the metro station, I glanced up at the mountain and pictured taller, emptier, vaster ranges. I turned into one of those captive animals that raise their muzzles only to fall deep in thought because they just breathed in the scent of little kid fingers and the hunger is still inside them.
The walls of certain nursing homes made me uneasy. I’d been to dozens of facilities, all across the city. The ones in more affluent neighborhoods were immaculate as museums. A quiet emptiness heavy with gradations of humanity. Here and there, in rooms and at the end of corridors, hung prints by Monet, Renoir, Degas. The walls were papered in smooth fabric. The seniors fit right in, like part of a window display. They dressed elegantly most of the time, in riding jackets, their pleated trousers just so. They were partial to neckerchiefs and maroon tones. Having gone through life with their heads held high, they were now learning to die the same way, manes brilliant white, ear and nose hair trimmed. Loneliness circled them like a vulture. They shrugged it off, never making excuses for their kids or showing off a single photo of a small grandchild. They adorned their golden age with Vivaldi concerts and Bach suites and yet seemed to be already dead, as if their hearts beat solely out of inertia. Most of them had aides, robust women with short hair and uniforms that hugged their bodies. The seniors leaned on them as they would on their mothers, wielding the dregs of their power: they sent the women on errands and insisted on being pushed down gravel garden paths in their wheelchairs. The women wheeled them this way and that, read them their correspondence, and rubbed oil on their diabetic feet. They tucked them in at night and parked their wheelchairs in the hallway before heading to the lobby to wait for the other women, scrubs poking out from their coats and imitation leather bags slung over their shoulders. I left with them sometimes. No matter how exhausted, they always kept talking. We rode the bus together and then each took a different metro line. The farther we got from the care home, the denser the neighborhoods. Far away from us, Degas’s ballerinas hung on the walls, silent witnesses to the moment when life plunged into death.
I sat down to smoke and wait. He slept like a sumptuous beast — a lion or cheetah. He was carnivorous, a fornicating male, and I was watching him regenerate.
Fertile window day one, midnight. There wasn’t room in the flat for anyone else, but the doorbell kept ringing. I stopped opening. Earlier that morning I’d been to the hardware store for a latch, which meant I could now lock my bedroom door from the inside. I’d masturbated with a dildo every day for the past week. Whenever I stop using it for a while, my vagina closes up as if I’d been born male and had just put one in surgically: without regular dilation it seals up, which makes penetration uncomfortable and requires care, lathering the dildo in lubricant and inserting it very slowly. And I didn’t want it to be that way; I had to get pregnant at the very first moan. There was music, food, drink, a lot of ashtrays, and a ton of people. I’d stashed my personal belongings in the closet. The flat was a stage, a public square, the agreeable waiting room of an experimental lab. I’d eaten peanuts and opened bottles but no presents. At 2 a.m. a second wave of people streamed in. The bathroom was filthy. It was time. I spotted him on the terrace, made my approach, took away his glass, and stubbed out his cigarette. We danced. He latched on to me. He said he was a master’s student and swimming instructor, and I pictured broad-shouldered sperms, glorious chairlifts, and felt confident about the situation. I kissed his ginny lips for a minute or longer, my first kiss with a man. He was a decent enough kisser, but I didn’t enjoy it. His clean-shaven face and full, womanly lips irritated me, as did my body, which quivered like a trolley wire as it bravely and single-handedly gave in to a body of the opposite sex in defiance of my mind. I pulled him to my bedroom, kicked five or six people out, and locked us in. The room was dark, the only light the glow that filtered through the blinds. We kissed again. I needed to keep him there and would have to act on instinct alone. I hitched up my dress. He took off his shirt. I undid his jeans and pushed him onto the bed. He took out a condom, and my heart sank. What was I supposed do? Tell him it was OK? That I liked it better without? He pulled on the condom with alarming dexterity, right there in front of me. Though it can be hard to think clearly when the body has control over the mind, I managed to come to a decision: I’d do it with him twice, first with a condom and then without. It was the only way forward. And this steeled my resolve. I looked at him for a second, or rather contemplated him; I felt implausible, unlike myself. His penis rose up before me like a flagpole, and I had the urge to cut loose. But as soon as I did, a pair of arms hoisted me up. I was the doll that falls on the grass on all fours before somebody fucks her, just for play.
It was a tedious, drawn-out, and turbulent event, like a stagecoach ride or a seizure. I wanted to make a run for it, I wanted to get pregnant, I also wasn’t prepared to go through the whole ordeal again, not ever. Just as he was getting dressed to leave, I held him back. The music dragged on. He slept. I grabbed a can of Red Bull from my backpack and drank the whole thing in three gulps.
I sat down to smoke and wait. He slept like a sumptuous beast — a lion or cheetah. He was carnivorous, a fornicating male, and I was watching him regenerate. I shoved the clock in the drawer, tossed the condom in the trash can, and sniffed myself. My whole body reeked of warm algae, of sweat and pond scum, of stagnant water in which tiny militias of egg were seething. I waited for the early birds with clipped wings to start chirping. The blinds suddenly glowed, like a pair of cat’s eyes surveying the room. It was time. I daubed my fingers with lubricant and slipped them inside. I thought of tar, of fat, of macerated oils. Then I got back in bed, grabbed his penis, and convinced him to go again. I mounted him gingerly, like a precious commodity. I let my body open wide — not only physically but with every nerve ending, every mental barrier, all the way down to the core, to the clandestine, sanctioned epicenter where I welcome all my female lovers. Right before finishing, I had him lie on top of me. I needed to be horizontal, a perfect habitat, to set off a wave, a swell powerful enough to pull in the seminal fog. Lying on me was a heat-driven animal, a beast with aquatic muscles come from the oldest kingdom in the universe: life, that intelligent force.
I got my period a couple weeks later. The bloodstain on my underwear was an insult. Who do you think you are? it seemed to be saying. The blood that flushes out dead ova knows it is mistress of the house; it’s the hostile reminder of the sovereignty of a body at the mercy of external hunger. One of my flatmates found me sitting on the floor. ‘Non è la fine del mondo,’ she said. I glanced at her, beautiful in her navy-blue ice-cream-parlor uniform, purple hair ringing her neck and spilling into her blouse. She was made of plums; I couldn’t look at her and not want her. Right then, I couldn’t have explained why I’d never made a pass. Maybe because we lived together, and physical proximity is a thin folding screen that stands timidly between two bodies. Or maybe when it came to personal relationships, real ones, I had a tendency to go with the flow; I wasn’t drawn to a challenge. I had the sense I never made a concerted effort with people and instead let them come to me. And this reinforced another sense, that I’d been raised to meet the needs and expectations of others. Is this how women are brought up? Now and then I pictured myself as a rodent dwelling on the forest floor, a tireless mammal designed to feed larger animals of all species.
I started having dinner on the balcony. A handkerchief for table linen, candles, and, in a bowl, cherries as fat and moist as eyeballs. On the other side of the street, the walls of the zoo fell quiet.
Friday morning. Blue, windswept sky. The sun, an oil spill. I arrived at the same care home in L’Eixample that I had been to the day before. I needed to finish up an interview before I could head back. A nurse I knew greeted me with a warning: ‘They’re a bit anxious today.’ I walked into the room where the seniors gathered to await the start of their day program and instantly saw what she meant. Most of them were standing, drifting around the armchairs as if through a cornfield, thumbing the leaves of suspended time and parting them to get their bearings. They wanted out. Their eyes, usually glassy, were now limpid and gleaming. They breathed and seemed ferret-like; they looked at me and my mind went straight to wolves. I slid my laptop into my backpack and left without a word. Outside, morning prevailed over the city and drew to its windows the bodies of children, dogs, the elderly.
My university job made me feel like an idiot. We’d finished the interviews, I’d transcribed them. Now it was time to comb through the data. Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hated my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years. In team meetings, when the director took the floor and went on about the positive impact our research would have on ‘such a vulnerable segment of the population’, I’d feel like a hand had plunged into my body — an institutional hand that spoke for me and earned a salary on my behalf. My colleagues were exhilarated. They believed in the software as in a spiritual guide, delivering to it the fruits of their labor and then waiting for it to perform a miracle. Even though I was there with them, I could never figure out how to be one of them. I parroted their gestures and arguments and tried my best to believe — until my brain and my spirit bled from the effort.
In late June, the whole city oozed with swelter. During the day the city ripened, self-corrupted, beginning in the marrow of every last resident; by night it was an exhausted organism collapsing at the sea. I started having dinner on the balcony. A handkerchief for table linen, candles, and, in a bowl, cherries as fat and moist as eyeballs. On the other side of the street, the walls of the zoo fell quiet. At that time of day, the barbed-wire fence made the place look like the border of an impoverished country. I focused my attention on the canopy above it and slowly ate dinner. The trees were soft and formed cushions padded with beaks and warbles. When the light dimmed, the birds died and the trees turned blue. They held that silence inside them and seemed to prop up the whole world. Even me — I didn’t know how, exactly, but there was no denying it. I gazed at them and the trees opened their eyes. I held out my hand and the trees reached for it — because somewhere, someone was waiting, and they had come to collect me. I talked to them. Said I was leaving my job. That I may never have a kid. I could feel the weight of them bearing witness, that everything I said was being recorded. I’d have cried after talking if I could. But I couldn’t even get myself to feel the pain of the tears caught in my chest. The night was ruthless. The streets, always vicious and never calm, sheltered legions of larvae who had all been coerced into the same enclosed life. A sterile, impenetrable life locked in ice. You could tell, even on a sultry summer night.
The body can hold a freezing ocean with depths of unseen abundance where everything sleeps in captivity. I learned this on my birthday.
I went job hunting every morning. I scrolled websites, checked bulletin boards at community and youth centers. No luck. I discovered that sociologists are experts in vacuity. When I was on the last of my savings, I took a job as a server at a chain café. The uniform was green and black, and I had to wear the polyester shirt buttoned all the way up. Eight hours a day of tensing my neck. If I was thirsty, I could help myself to coffee, and if I was hungry, polish off the food customers left on their plates. I couldn’t believe my ears when they told me. By the next day, it was old news. I learned my way around the espresso machine and grew to love it. I figured out how to make coffee without grounds so I could drink as much dirty water as I wanted and not have heart palpitations by the end of my shift. My boss was younger than me and slender as a cat. Even the smallest uniform looked baggy on her. Her hair was dyed the color of mustard, and she had a gem on each canine. She enjoyed ordering people around from a table in the back, where she spent hours chatting with friends and relatives. Her commands hit me like darts. When I handed in my notice, she refused to pay up. I threatened to plant myself at the entrance like a panhandler with a cardboard sign that read I worked here but ManageMent refuse to pay Me, scaring off the clientele. She laughed in my face, and I didn’t have the guts to go back. I’d been hired two days before.
I worked at a bakery and a grocery store stockroom, washed dishes at a hotel kitchen and was a sales associate at a shoe and handbag store. I lasted a few days at each job and left just as I was starting to get the hang of it, terrified I would become used to the exploitation. As far as I was concerned, the job market, the legal one anyway, was a scam. When I worked for someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious than my time or body, more precious even than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity. Every time I signed a contract or agreed to a trial period, I got the sense I was selling myself to an intermediary who confiscated my passport and got fat at my expense. As I rode the metro home one evening, tired after a long day of killing lice and picking nits from the heads of pre-schoolers, I felt nostalgic for my university days. It was a journey to weakness that made me keenly aware of the power of exhaustion. People can be persuaded to do just about anything when they’re exhausted. Eight, nine, ten straight hours of work for a lousy paycheck can reduce anyone to survival mode. You lose the ability to think of anything but the basics: hunkering down in one place for as long as it takes to eat and then, when the day is done, sheltering in some hole from the dark and the inclement weather. Thousands of years ago, we referred to these holes as caves. Now we call them leisure, exercise, social media. We retreat to our depressing cells and feel smug, convinced we are the lucky ones.
One rainy afternoon when I was home alone, I brewed some tea and sat down to drink it on the couch. The flat was in gloom. The reading lamp gave off a lonely glow that reminded me of a lighthouse. I was comfortable in that corner. Comfort was a web spun between all the things that kept me safe: the threadbare sweater I wore at home, the darkened crack on the inside of my teacup, my feet tucked under the blanket. Outside, it was still raining. I thought about the zoo catching the rain, the only unforecastable part of its daily routine. Every enclosure was a microcosm, a fake habitat with bamboo stalks, acacia trees and climate control. The animals didn’t live there, they rotted there — just like the visitors and no more nor less than the zookeepers. I downed the rest of my tea and went to the kitchen to make another cup. I wanted to put on a CD, but the stereo was broken. Back to the sofa. Quiet. My tongue, scalded. And the rain, every now and then, crying out. I thought back to my birthday party, when I had also cried out. At the first thrust. Just the once. Then came the shipwreck, splintering followed by sinking. Like an oil tanker rent in half. An amputated continent. The body can hold a freezing ocean with depths of unseen abundance where everything sleeps in captivity. I learned this on my birthday. The first time was like catching a tropical disease, so abrupt and alienating it turned my whole body purple and green, feverish and achingly heavy. But sex the next morning — after hours of waiting in the dusky room, standing watch over another person’s slumber, a profoundly biological, seminal slumber — that planned encounter, scheduled with criminal precision and executed with incredible care, had done something to me. I felt like that for weeks, both arrogant and out of sorts. Like when you wake after two weeks of high fever and look in the mirror to find that the woman staring back at you has grown old and lost her voice, but is still somehow triumphant — you can see it in her eyes. It wasn’t the desire to have a baby that took me hostage so much as the desire to gestate, to have life course through my body, to create. To do this, I’d have to break out of my cage. It was as though my only option were to flee. As if there were no such thing as salvation, only the woolen fossils of the past.
The first chapter from Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, appears with permission of And Other Stories, whose edition of the novel is published on August 6, 2024.
✺ Published in “Issue 19: Fiction” of The Dial
