THE STORY OF RAFA AND DANI 7

Depression. A clean word for a dirty disease. Because your mother's depression wasn't the kind shown in antidepressant commercials where a middle-class woman looks out the window with a sad face and then takes a pill and goes for a walk with her golden retriever. No. Your mother's depression was the other kind. The real kind. The kind that doesn't sell, so it's not shown in commercials. The kind that smells like an ashtray and unwashed clothes and dishes piled up in the sink for days. The kind that manifests as not showering, not opening the curtains, not remembering the last time you hugged your child. The kind that involves staring at the wall for hours without seeing it, as if there's something more interesting behind the wallpaper, and probably there is, because your mother's life wasn't interesting. Your mother's life was a monument to inertia. A body that kept functioning out of pure biological habit, because the heart beats and the lungs breathe and the digestive system processes the crusts of bread and the cubata, but behind those mechanical processes, there was no will. No project. No tomorrow. Just the couch, the TV, the pills, the smoke, and an eighteen-year-old son who came and went from the apartment like a ghost she had stopped seeing years ago.

"Mom."

She didn't move. Her mouth was slightly open. A dry thread of saliva on the corner of her mouth. Her chest rose and fell with the heavy breathing of someone who sleeps with the help of Orfidal and existential exhaustion.

"Mom."

Louder this time. Carmen stirred. One eyelid opened, then the other. She looked at you like you look at a piece of furniture you've been seeing for so long you no longer notice it. Without surprise. Without relief. Without the slightest spark of maternal emotion that would indicate the woman who gave birth to you was happy to see you.

"What time is it?" Her voice was like sandpaper, a dry throat, a thousand cigarettes.

"Eleven thirty."

"Eleven thirty in the morning?"

"Yes, mom. In the morning."

The question wasn't stupid. Or maybe it was, but it made sense in the context of a woman for whom day and night had stopped being relevant categories. Carmen slept when her body turned off and woke up when her body turned on, and the cycle had no relation to the Earth's rotation or the schedules of the outside world. Sometimes she slept for fourteen hours, sometimes three, sometimes she stayed in a state that was neither sleep nor wakefulness, a kind of pharmacological limbo where the TV kept playing and she was there but not there, like an appliance on standby.

She sat up, or tried to. Her body weighed her down as if it were filled with wet sand. She managed to sit up, her back against the sunken back of the couch, her legs curled up, her bare feet on the carpet that wasn't a carpet but an old blanket put on the floor because the semi-basement's tile floor was always cold, even in ...