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Aurora broke her hip in a completely unspectacular way. Getting out of the bathtub, she lifted her leg over the edge and suddenly heard a small crunch. She felt a slight shiver and her legs turned rubbery. She fell slowly, with time to brush the tips of her fingers along the wall tiles and prepare for the impact. Her elbow hit the fixtures causing a cold pain and a second later she was lying down, naked and overcome, on the still-damp bottom of the bathtub. Papá, she wanted to shout, but her voice came out weak. She tried to raise her voice, but the best she could do was emit a repetitive, well spaced out lament.
Papá…Papá…Papá.
The murmur reaches the little back room, where Leandro is reading the
newspaper. His first reaction is to think that his wife is calling him for another
one of her ridiculous requests, for him to get down a jar of spices that’s on too
high a shelf, to ask him something silly. So he answers with an apathetic what?
that gets no reply. He leisurely closes the newspaper and stands up. Later he will
be ashamed of the irritation he feels at having to stop reading. It’s always the
same, he sits down to read and she talks to him over the radio or the ringing
telephone. Or the doorbell sounds and she asks, can you get it? when he
already has the intercom receiver in his hand. He goes down the hallway until
he identifies where the monotonous call is coming from. There is no urgency in
Aurora’s voice. Perhaps fatalism. When he opens the bathroom door and finds
his fallen wife he thinks that she’s sick, dizzy. He looks for blood, vomit, but all
he sees is the white of the bathtub and her naked skin like a glaze.