Blow-Up by Julio Cortázar Page B

little cinnamon, a shame) and the goodnight kisses before going up to bed, there was a tinkling in the telephone room and Isabel hung around until Inés came from answering it and said something into their mother’s ear. They looked at one another, then both of them looked at Isabel who was thinking about the broken birdcage and the long division problems and briefly of old lady Lucera being angry because she’d pushed her doorbell on the way back from school. She wasn’t all that worried, Inés and her mother were looking as if they were gazing past hersomewhere, almost taking her as an excuse; but they were looking at her.
    “I don’t like the idea of her going, believe you me,” Inés said. “Not so much because of the tiger, after all they’re very careful in that respect. But it’s such a depressing house and only that boy to play with her …”
    “I don’t like the idea either,” her mother said, and Isabel knew, as if she were on a toboggan, that they were going to send her to the Funes’ for the summer. She flung herself into the news, into the great green wave, the Funes’, the Funes’, sure they were going to send her. They didn’t like it, but it was convenient. Delicate lungs, Mar del Plata so very expensive, difficult to manage such a spoiled child, stupid, the way she always acted up with that wonderful Miss Tania, a restless sleeper, toys underfoot everyplace, questions, buttons to be sewn back on, filthy knees. She felt afraid, delighted, smell of the willow trees and the
u
in Funes was getting mixed in with the rice pudding, so late to be still up, and get up to bed, right now.
    Lying there, the light out, covered with kisses and rueful glances from Inés and their mother, not fully decided but already decided in spite of everything to send her. She was enjoying beforehand the drive up in the phaeton, the first breakfast, the happiness of Nino, hunter of cock-roaches, Nino the toad, Nino the fish (a memory of three years before, Nino showing her some small cutouts he’d glued in an album and telling her gravely, “This-is-a-toad, and THIS is-a-fish”). Now Nino in the park waiting for her with the butterfly net, and also Rema’s soft hands—she saw them coming out of the darkness, she had her eyes open and instead of Nino’s face—zap!—Rema’s hands, the Funes’ younger daughter. “Aunt Rema loves me a lot,” and Nino’s eyes got large and wet, she saw Nino again disjointedly floating in the dim light of the bedroom, looking at her contentedly. Nino the fish. Falling asleep wantingthe week to be over that same night, and the goodbyes, the train, the last half-mile in the phaeton, the gate, the eucalyptus trees along the road leading up to the house. Just before falling asleep, she had a moment of terror when she imagined that she was maybe dreaming. Stretching out all at once, her feet hit the brass bars at the foot of the bed, they hurt through the covers, and she heard her mother and Inés talking in the big dining room, baggage, see the doctor about those pimples, cod-liver oil and concentrate of witch hazel. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a dream.
    It wasn’t a dream. They took her down to Constitution Station one windy morning, small flags blowing from the pushcarts in the plaza, a piece of pie in the railroad station restaurant, and the enormous entrance to platform 14. Between Inés and her mother they kissed her so much that her face felt like it’d been walked on, soft and smelly, rouge and Coty powder, wet around the mouth, a squeamish feeling of filth that the wind eradicated with one large smack. She wasn’t afraid to travel alone because she was a big girl, with nothing less than twenty pesos in her pocketbook, Sansinena Co., Frozen Meats a sweetish stink seeping in the window, the railroad trestle over the yellow brook and Isabel already back to normal from having had to have that crying spell at the station, happy, dead with fear, active, using fully the seat