Eyes without Edges

(Carole’s’ story and dilemma: entry into the Loro Machaco Cartel)



I


When she looked at him, Carlos, it appeared to his mind, she had eyes without edges, hair intertwined, as if it was unkempt wool, she had been ill for along while now, and he took care other, when the nurse was not around, she was incapable of walking, yet she could move her hands, and if need be, when Carlos and the nurse was gone, crawl to the bath room, across from her bed.
She had been ill since 1965, five years to date. Her bedroom was on the third floor, top floor of the mansion, her face today rosy and hands rosy from the heath, on the left side of the bedroom. She was inattentive to his mindset, and his will, conspiratorial to keep him in her home and life until she died; it was almost like a mission, her last mission in life. She tried her best and succeeded, in chasing all his women guests out of his life, once they found out how unaccommodating she was, rude and indifferent, they left Carols, knowing he’d never leave her, and she’d never release him.

“Good night!” Carlos, told his mother.
“Yes,” she affirmed at once, her expression on her face told him, even at forty, which he’d be next month, or at fifty, or at sixty, she had no intentions of letting him go, it was a healthy look, as if she’d live to see ninety.
He couldn’t leave her though; her pupils were like needles to his inners, as he looked at her and turned about, and walked out the door, his face ferocious for allowing himself to be as he was.
There was an immobile moment then, Carlos could feel her eyes looking right though his back at him, she had lost her breath, and said through her silent weeping, choked the words out, a low but surrounding voice, “Are you going to ever leave me?” adding, “Oh Carlos, answer me truthfully?”
She still stared at her back with a curiously rigid face:
“No mother, I will not leave you until you are dead!” answered Carlos.

●

—Now reflecting in each others pupils (he had turned around and walked back to her bedside), he stared at her dirty white hair, she at his blank look, and sheepish-colored face—a crucified quality encircled the room, the mother’s mascara streaked her face, she looked at her photograph of him and her, on a dressing-table, she once used, before she was bedridden, it was in a silver frame, he was three-years old, the best year, and years to her was those when formal reasoning was developing in him.
There she laid in the bed, he thought, the very bed she’d lay in until she died: there she lay unless dead.



II


The window to her bedroom being on the third floor was open, he walked over by it, in a dresser-draw she kept a bottle of whiskey, he opened it, took a drank, a large gulp, then two and then three…(she sometime needed two shots of the whiskey to help her sleep).
He stood there musing, thoughtfully musing there was a pistol in the drawer he looked at it, he looked abut, it was all within a glance, a millisecond, he put his had on the windowsill, she said something, her voice was muffled to his mind, something that sounded like, “What are you up to…!” during that muffled state, those words not quite seeping completely into his mind, his mother pushing her body up against the two pillows to see what he was up to, propping herself, he, Carlos leaped out of the window, like a giant grasshopper (in an attempted vigor of suicide).
Then he heard nothing, but she heard his body thump on the sidewalk below, cold and impotent, she knew she could not live without him, and she fell from her bedside, purposely, and crawled to the dresser-drawer where the gun was, and pulled out some cotton socks along with the gun, put the socks to her forehead, and the muzzle of the pistol, and pulled the trigger.

●

The ambulance came and two aids, picked up Carlos, moving him swiftly to the hospital before he suffocated because of a punctured lung, he would survive (to join the ‘Lore Machaco,’ cartel).


At the Hospital

“Why?” asked the doctor to Carlos, after he had spent a week in the hospital—and after he was well enough to speak and listen, “did you try to commit suicide?”
The doctor standing at the side of his bed looking down at the recovering patient, it was an April morning in 1970.
Carlos hesitated to answer, not because he didn’t know the answer, or have the answer readily available, he knew quite well what it would be, why he did what he did, he know it all too well, but he hesitated because he was unsure why the doctor wanted to know, I mean, he was a stranger to him, yes a doctor, but was it out of curiosity, or concern, and that mattered.
“Why do you ask?” asked Carlos.
“We get many suicides here, the young because of confusion and perhaps high expectations from their parents, and the older folks seem to have had to tolerate the impact of being neglected too long, bored with life, and little family to assist them, and they end up eating dog food or cat food, and shame comes and devours them, and then suicide prevails. And still there are some because of mental illness, depression, not able to function very well, work a job as they’d like to, and you, I just can’t figure you out, I mean, you have a rich mother—had (he repeated, he had explained the day before she also had committed suicide), and you have freedom, food, youth, education, everything none of these others had. How can I help people like you?”
“Because,” he said, “I felt like Abel, you know the one in the Bible, the one man damned to be alone on the face of the earth, be it his own fault, by his own makings, it doesn’t matter, likened to me, like to like. I no longer heard the beautiful sounds of the birds, only the imperious sounds of my mother’s voice, her will; I seemed to have been trapped in a world of unhappiness, that is why—and when you put a tiger in a cage, it dies little by little, and if it has a chance to escape, it takes it, and this was my only way of escaping, unless I killed my mother, and I couldn’t directly do so, and I knew—I suppose I knew, she’d kill herself, if I did, and I didn’t care, I mean I am happy I survived, and I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance to survive, but if I didn’t it was better than being a fixture in her home.”

Written December 10, 2008, in the morning, at my apartment in El Tambo, Huancayo, Peru