Teresa would have liked to feel comfortable at home. She’d have liked not to feel responsible for her younger siblings, not to have to set an example. Teresa would have enjoyed the opportunity to follow her feelings: she fantasized about personal growth and becoming independent, she felt a need to learn about the world, travel and discover new things, her body yearned to love someone.   

If she’d been able to realize her desires, indulge her curiosity, intelligence and people skills, she would have been happier, more productive and, maybe, stood out from the crowd.   

Her parents, María and Israel, did not love each other. They saw the home as an enemy, something repulsive, a place where they didn’t want to be. To survive it, so as not to think of the blind alley they’d ended up in through no one’s fault but their own, they established routines. With rules both tacit and explicit that applied to upkeep of the house and ensuring there was distance between them, the children and their relationships with the outside world. Politics and current affairs were seen from the perspective of how they thought ‘things should be’ and they preferred routine to potential happiness for themselves or others, although the latter was something they had no conception of, certain in the knowledge that the years to come, which would be many, would bring nothing but sadness. The house was like the sober periods of an alcoholic.  

Teresa would have liked for her home to be a refuge. But that wasn’t going to happen. Her childish logic told her that if she followed all the rules, it might be transformed into a happy place. Even though deep down she knew it wasn’t true, this conviction became the leit motiv of her life until it got so ingrained that she forgot why she was following the rules and just went on doing so automatically with no hope of reward.   

The rules defined her youth even while her body cried out for something that her parents couldn’t give her, something forbidden by the society of the time.  

When she turned nineteen, she moved to Buenos Aires to live with one of her aunts. She took two brief courses in Bookkeeping and Nursing. The big city suited her. The allure of cinemas, cafés and restaurants helped her to get over her initial fear of concrete and public transport. She studied, worked and went out with her cousins and acquaintances.  

But she never dared to examine the melancholy home of her youth or the yearning of her adolescent body and in her mind they merged together. They kept her up at night and helped her to come to a realization, albeit not a very profound one. She knew, although the feeling didn’t seem quite real, that she wanted to be with a man, even one as mean as her father. Shocked by the notion, she decided to bury both her sad childhood and her urges deep inside of her.  

The impossible attempt to lie to herself led her into a spiral of falsehoods, denial and poor decision-making (in her choice of husband, to have children) that would affect her for the rest of her life.  

The deepest truth, which Teresa refused to admit to herself even after years of therapy, was that she wasn’t wanted before she was born, or loved afterwards.  

Copyright David Mibashan

Translated from Spanish by Kit Maude