One Out of Two by Daniel Sada Page A

the future. Aren’t you sick of hearing about his restaurant? You know, he seems like a little kid who wants to fly like a bird … I think he wants to convince himself little by little of his love for his sweetheart and that’s how he’ll summon the courage.”
    “Well, according to what you’re saying, the date is fast approaching when he’ll tell one of us that he wants to get married and that he’s already saved enough to cover the cost of the wedding, including the wedding dress; and so, if that happens, what’ll we say?”
    “We’ll tell him the truth.”
    “Oh, no, he’ll be so disappointed. He’ll feel like he’s been tricked in the worst possible way. He’ll tell us to get lost, if not something worse. Because: he couldn’t face society or his parents, or himself, if he agreed to marry both of us, and the law wouldn’t allow it, and even if we forget about marriage, because that’s a lot to ask for, even just if he lived with two who are the same. No, we’ll be sunk if we tell him the truth.”
    “So, what do you propose?”
    Herein lies the drama, the underbelly of the plot. The real girlfriend finally lowered her eyes, feeling sly as a fox for having guided the conversation to this convenient (for her) juncture; because this was her chance to reveal her plan: plotted out in her most recent dreams, and here it is: their chitter-chatter had reached a point where their certainties had to be divided in two, because there’s nothing else to do. That said, if the solution is within reach, some kind of order must be established, and the silence that fell—the conceit—suggested a possibly favorable outcome … After a brief pause, Gloria looked up, revealing an almost diabolical expression: without blinking: intense, so shimmery it was spooky, and that look evoked empathy, attentive inquiry, and:
    “I’ve been thinking about what I’m about to say since we were little, and now we’ll see what you think … Look, the fact that we’re identical twins to the n th and highest degree fills me with joy on the one hand, and on the other, it doesn’t, and this ‘doesn’t’ worries me. Once we said that our likeness was a curse, and I think that God has been punishing us ever since our parents died, it can’t be just a fluke that after so many years, we still don’t look any different, not even a tiny little bit! I remember when Aunt Soledad brought us the news back in Lamadrid, and I also remember that we were starving to death. She rescued us, comforted us, but she also told us that our parents had been buried in a common grave somewhere near Múzquiz along with the others who’d died in that accident, and the families were supposed to go there one day and claim their bodies. We didn’t do that, who knows why, well—naturally! we were just kids, and it would have been too difficult for us, but our aunt never bothered and neither did her husband. But none of that matters. In the end, we’re to blame, and that’s why the Devil has cursed us, spit on us, our entire lives, yes, the curse is this sameness that now, because of love, is making us suffer.”
    “Is that really what you think?”
    “Yes, it is, so I’m proposing we go to the cemetery in Múzquiz as soon as possible, and we dig up their bodies, or, rather, we go to the authorities in charge to claim them. Though, come to think of it, I imagine that by now their bodies would be almost unrecognizable.”
    “Are you nuts? How can we ever prove that we’re really the daughters of a couple of dead people buried along with a bunch of other dead people? Who’s going to believe us after thirty years? More likely, if we do what you suggest, they’ll send us straight to the loony bin in Piedras Negras.”
    “But it’s our right, they’re our flesh and blood! What if we say that we didn’t know till now where they’d been buried?”
    “Even so, we’d still need the necessary papers: our birth certificates or something like that, and