Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (5 page)

“
Did you learn anything
new?”

“
Nothing very
interesting.”

“
And what would have been
interesting for you?”

“
I don’t know. Something
that didn’t involve wrecking my fingers sewing, for
example.”

“
What kind of woman are
you if you complain about ever little thing that hurts?” she
answered as an affectionate scold.

“
But, Mama, it’s not that.
It’s … ugh.” She could not help herself from moaning due to the
pinch she felt below her navel.

“
Come on, it can’t be that
bad. Show me where it hurts.”

Charni took her mother’s
hand and guided it to the center of the pain.

“
Have you urinated yet?”
she asked with an unexpectedly serious tone while she felt
her.

“
I just did.”

“
And did you need to?” She
gently slid her hand between Charni’s legs. “You’re
wet.”

“
I cleaned myself with the
urinating cloth. I swear, Mama,” she said ashamedly.

But her mother did not seem to hear her. She
lowered her head, put her nose near her crotch and sniffed.

“
Honestly, Mama. I don’t
know what happened to me. I drank when it was time and calculated
the same amount. Don’t yell at me like I was a two-cycle-old girl,
please.”

“
No, Charni. You’re not a
girl anymore. Your internal time has arrived early.”

Her internal time had arrived early, but
according to her mother this was not bad. Unexpected, but not
unusual. It could even be a good sign.

Perhaps within a half a
cycle, when her body had adapted to the change, Charni could
incorporate a new unit of measure, the bleeding, a biological cycle
common to all women, but personal and unique. That is, although a
cycle could be divided into bleeds, the start of each one did not
have to coincide with the start of any other woman’s bleeding. It
was her internal time and no one else’s. Still, it should not be
taken as an exact time. Although a bleeding generally occurred
every twenty-eight terms, the same as times of abundance and
shortage, it could come earlier or later.

Earlier was not especially bad. Puzzling,
perhaps inconvenient, but not bad. To come later needed special
attention to the number of terms or alarms that had passed since a
man had spilled information.

Because Charni could no longer be called a
girl but a young woman. And after the rite of initiation took
place, she would earn the right to be considered a Ksatrya because
she would finally be a fully complete woman at the service of the
world and the women who inhabited it.

Although it was too soon for that. Her body
was not sufficiently developed for the ritual, so it could be fatal
for her. Yet her mother had great hope. She had produced her first
man when she was thirteen cycles old. If Charni did it when she was
only twelve cycles old, without a doubt that would be a clear,
almost indisputable sign that she deserved to succeed her as
queen.

That obsession again. An
invisible but tremendously heavy weight hung over her body. Why was
her mother so interested in her being queen? What was so good about
it, besides having a separate house and assistants to do tedious
tasks like cleaning, washing or cooking? Everything else was just
responsibilities and more responsibilities. A constant weight on
her shoulders and constant worries about other people’s problems on
her mind.

But Charni never said that to her mother.
Somehow she knew that it would disappoint her so much that her
heart would break. So, as always, she did what she was told and got
ready and tried to convince herself in the process that everything
was for her own good. It always had been.

So Charni attended extra classes with five
other young women like her whose internal time had also arrived
early.

Without a doubt it was a special class
where, to begin with, there were no chairs or desks. Instead they
sat or lay on small mattresses, sheets, or cushions on the floor.
The teacher, who always sat in the middle, spoke to them calmly and
in a soft, relaxing tone. She never became angry when a young woman
failed to understand something, and she had infinite patience,
which Charni admired. Because, according to the teacher, there was
no hurry even though their bodies were hurrying. What mattered was
that they understand the reason behind things.

So, during the first alarms, she spent
waters and waters explaining to them what it meant for them to have
an internal time, how to recognize the symptoms before a bleeding,
the troubles they could feel the first few days, the emotional
changes they could feel and how to face them, how to feel clean in
spite of the inconveniences, and she even managed to keep them from
worrying when she explained that their urinating could become
irregular.

In the most recent alarm they had begun to
combine theory with practice: how, for example, to know when to
change the blood cloth or what the holder for the cloths should be
made of to avoid bad odors, be comfortable around the waist, but
not make too much noise if it hit the container for urine.

For the next alarm, after they had each made
their holder, lessons about their own bodies would begin, teaching
them to explore them and to recognize changes and the especially
sensitive areas.

Oh! She was dying to tell all these things
to Deva, but the teacher had frequently insisted that it was not a
good idea to share this information with girls since their bodies
were not ready to receive the lessons, and in the long run it would
be even worse because when the moment came, it could cause
self-rejection and trauma. And although Charni did not understand
that last word very well, she perceived that its connotations were
not good, so she had no other choice but to be patient and
quiet.

It was hard, especially considering that
with all the time that the extra classes took, she and Deva had
hardly had any time to meet and share feelings. When they could,
they were so happy to be together again that they could not stop
talking and talking. Although she was a young lady and her friend
was a girl … she was still Deva, and until a few alarms ago she
could tell her anything.

And during the fourth hunger of that day,
when Latha blocked her path as she was returning home, Charni
missed terribly the comforting and … conclusive presence of
Deva.

“
Well, well, look
who’s here … it’s the
young woman
Charni.”

Charni, after the surprise of the encounter,
tried to relax her body so as not to appear as alert as she really
was.

Latha was dangerous and, above all, very
hurtful when she had more girls with her. Something that, in fact,
happened often enough. Although her following had been reduced
during the last cycle, she only needed to have one girl with her in
order to say whatever she wanted. And Latha always avoided
texturing her words whenever she could, in spite of the
difficulties that she had shown in learning new vocabulary sounds
over the passing of the cycles.

This time, however, it was confusing not to
feel the presence of other girls. What was happening? Was it
related to the fact that Charni was a young woman while Latha was
still a girl? Was it possible that, due to this difference, she did
not want to be perceived as harassing an older person? Interesting
…

“
What do you want,
Latha?”

“
What a tone of voice. Has
becoming a young woman so early gone to your head? Does it bother
you to talk to a girl? Or have you finally decided to texture
yourself as you really are? You can’t fool me. You’re as big a liar
as your mother.”

Charni sighed, tired. No,
she wasn’t going to get dragged into that game, although
…

“
Of course, Latha. Only a
master of deceit like you would be able to spot a novice like me. I
was foolish to try.”

“
Joke all you want now,
and I’ll let you because no one is perceiving us, but I’m going to
texture something to you very well. You might be a young woman, but
I’ll never let you be queen. You carry the information of insanity
in your blood and I won’t let you drag us all down with
it.”

“
What are you talking
about?”

“
Don’t act dumb. My mother
told me about your sister.”

“
What do you know about my
little sister if she hasn’t even left the house yet?”

“
Not that sister, stupid.
I mean your crazy sister. The one who was banished from this world
so that she would suffer the killing storms of the unlimited world
for betraying the Ksatrya women.”

“
I have no idea what
you’re talking about. I only have one sister.”

“
Really?”

She came so near that
Charni’s nose was flooded by Latha’s breath. Charni felt her so
close that she perceived the threat and disdain with a thoroughness
she had never noted before in her enemy.

“
Do you want me to believe
that you don’t know anything? That you believe you’re the first
girl your mother produced? Ha! Maybe she was the one who pronounced
the sentence that silenced all the protests, so that now women
don’t even talk about it in private, but I can’t believe that she
hasn’t warned you about the information that you carry inside. That
she didn’t tell you about your crazy sister, or that she took her
own life after she produced two aberrations. I told you, you aren’t
fooling me. You can’t fool me. You’ve been warned, Charni. Maybe I
won’t wind up being queen, but I won’t make it easy for you to
become queen, either. For the good of the Ksatrya women, I’ll do
everything in my power to stop it.”

Finally, Latha backed away
and left without another word. Charni, unable to move, was glad
that her now-declared enemy preferred sounds to textures or else
she would have noticed the tears that were running down Charni’s
cheeks.

But why had Latha’s lies
hurt so much? Why had her body reacted to Latha’s rage that way
instead of being like Deva and conclusively showing her rejection?
And, most importantly, why did she continue to feel so bothered and
confused even though she no longer perceived Latha’s
presence?

She cleaned her face, recovered her dignity,
and continued home while her head could not stop turning over all
those lies that somehow seemed more important than they were.
Impossible.

When she arrived at the
entrance to her house, she unexpectedly ran into the back of a man.
Because it could not possibly be a woman. Not only because of his
size, his smell, and the sound that his feet made as if he were
dragging them … above all, because she had
run into
him.

Women learned from when
they were small to walk in the world confidently —but also
delicately. As if they flowed through the vast space that
surrounded their existence.

Of course there were surprise encounters
from time to time and the occasional blow, but not as if they were
running into a wall, which was what bumping into a man resembled
most. Men stood still, stiff, with a firm foothold on the ground as
if their lives depended on it instead of giving way to the blow and
letting themselves move.

“
I’m sorry,” Charni
immediately said.

If there was one thing that her mother had
taught her, she should always, always be the first to excuse
herself when she ran into a man, and if necessary, take the blame.
Otherwise she might remind him that he had lost his sight and could
never return to the other world, and men did not like that.

Besides, men had a feeling called pride that
was fairly easily activated when they were made to feel stupid or
weak in some way, however absurd the reason seemed to women.

“
Are you entering or
leaving?” she asked next.

Of course the man meant to enter, but one
way to lessen his pride, for example after running into a man like
that, was to make them feel that she was at least as lost as they
were.

Charni sometimes wondered
why there was this sense of danger whenever she was told about
men’s pride, but something inside her said it was better to never
find out.

“
I’m going in, inside,” he
answered promptly.

From the sound that his feet made when he
walked and what little she could perceive when she touched his
skin, Charni was sure that he was one of those men called elderly.
This, together with his unique scent and the sound of his voice,
made him seem familiar.

“
Then,” Charni added to
finish off the strategy to calm this feeling called pride and at
the same time reinforce his confidence, “if it doesn’t bother you,
I’ll enter behind you.” She put her hand on the back of the elderly
man as if that were necessary to walk safely into her own
house.

“
I see that,” he said,
using that strange word that men liked so much. “Don’t let go of
me.”

Charni felt the back of the elderly man
become straight, tense, as if he were on guard, as if he were
protecting the most valuable thing in the world. And that, in spite
of the irony and the falsehood, filled her with happiness and a
strange sense of … security.

Maybe blind men were clumsy and useless in
that world, but when they were not upset over some foolish thing,
they could transmit pleasant sensations that only men knew how to
make. Emotions that not even her mother, as protective as she was
at times, could manage to create.