The House in Smyrna by Tatiana Salem Levy

into the world on the last day of an atypically harsh winter in Rio de Janeiro. But he was terribly weak, with underdeveloped lungs, and lived only three days. He never saw the family home and barely spent any time in his mother’s arms. My grandfather raged in the corridors, talked to himself, saying mazel bajo — it can only be God’s punishment. He felt deeply guilty, although he was guilty of nothing. It must have been a divine curse for some sin of his own. But why the boy? he repeated, unafraid and unashamed that his daughters might hear him.
    Four years passed, and silence and mourning reigned in the house. The boy’s ghost lurked in every room and, like the past, no one was allowed to talk about him. If someone mentioned him, even if only briefly, it would bring on a fit of paternal fury. As if it was disrespectful of his pain. Until, on another winter’s day, Hilda revealed that she was pregnant again. They would have another boy, it was certain.
    Wary of a second divine punishment, he curbed his urge to shout at the heavens when he walked into the hospital room and saw another girl in his wife’s arms. After a dead boy, a girl. There she was, fragile, trying to suck a little of her mother’s milk, and she could never have imagined how strong she would have to be in life. It was as if her body contained a secret that would only be revealed years later. Even as an adult, when she had to face the dictatorship and, later, cancer, she never lost the fragility that was evident in her tiny baby’s body.
    Her father thought he didn’t love her, because she reminded him of his dead son. Only when she was taken prisoner by the dictatorship and he feared he might lose her did he finally understand that his love was old, and that the ties that united them had been established at the hospital, the same day he had almost cursed fate for having brought him another girl.
    When you leaned over to whisper sweetly in my ear, I knew you were going to ask me to do something: Think of a woman. I closed my eyes and sought in my memory for a female body that excited me. Have you thought of someone?
    Wait, I said, and was immediately surprised by your face between my legs. With my eyes closed, I thought of the most beautiful breasts I had ever seen, ever wanted to touch. Small, round nipples. Maybe you, certain I was thinking about a woman, were thinking about her too. The same one or another one. And we made love untiringly, all over the flat. Then we lay on the bed and you asked who I had thought about, if she was real, what she looked like. Blonde? Brunette? If I’d ever made love with a woman, if I was attracted to women. Then we started all over again, you, excited by my answers, and I, excited to be telling you my stories, to invent stories.
    It was the first time I had prayed. I didn’t know what to do, how to do it, but I prayed. I asked God, if he existed, not to let the phone ring. I prayed quietly, whispering, with my hands clasped together in front of my chest. I prayed for the phone never to ring so I wouldn’t have to pick up, hear the person on the other end telling me what had happened. I prayed: don’t ring don’t ring don’t ring. I prayed: please God, if you exist, don’t take her away from me. Please don’t let the phone ring, never ever. But it did: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve times, I counted, telling myself: it’s not ringing, I can’t hear it, it’s not ringing. Then it stopped, and for a few seconds I believed it hadn’t rung. Until I heard a voice inside the flat, a roar, a cry of despair, and thought: He doesn’t exist, God doesn’t exist. It had been the phone, it had rung, there was no avoiding it. I hadn’t been the one to pick up, I hadn’t heard the voice on the other end, but it had all happened. My body buckled, my torso bent over my legs, I felt like I was going