The Inheritance

I was seven years old when my great-grandmother passed away. I used to emulate my mom and call her Nonna too. The country had just finished breaking apart: banks had frozen accounts, thousands had lost their jobs, and the president had fled in a helicopter. My mom would sit and watch me have some soup while pretending not to be hungry. I didn’t really understand what “default” meant, but I did understood that. It was also the first year I didn’t celebrate my birthday: there was neither money nor space in our studio apartment; there was no strength either. I had always invited all the children in the neighborhood, so I thought I was going to have a surprise party. I waited until midnight, but the party never happened. I felt empty. I also felt a bit guilty: my mother was making an effort by baking me a sponge cake and putting together a Pokémon garland. Nevertheless, it was not enough for my selfish, childish self. The Pikachu had been made of craft foam sheet and was completely shapeless. The more I look at it, hanging on the wall by a thin thread and some tape, the more deformed it appeared. One of the eyes, significantly bigger than the other, stood out horribly. Tears ran down my cheeks as my mother tried to console me by offering me a cup of tea and some sponge cake, by picking me up and caressing my hair. I kept weeping, exaggeratedly, desperately, and making gestures of anguish -disproportionate gestures, just like Pikachu’s mouth compared to its body. She kept trying to calm me down, murmuring “There, there…”, but all I could think of were those crooked eyes.

‘It’s deformed, mom!’ I yelled. She got instantly mad. She dropped me with rage; I stumbled and fell to the floor. The crying grew louder, higher in pitch. She grabbed her jacket and her keys. A door slam later, and she was no longer with me. She used to do that, oscillate between affection and being fed up with me, between pampering and the threat of abandoning me. I ran to my bed, hugged my pillow and started to pray. I prayed so, so hard. I talked to God and to my Nonna. I begged her to come back, to adopt me, to take me far away from my mother. I also prayed for Pokémons to be real. On TV, they kept showing angry people and politicians shouting over each other. Someone said “¡Qué se vayan todos!” and I thought: I wish I could go too.

Year after year, the economy was hard on us. In consequence, that garland was reused several times. However, for its last use, my mother managed to buy some yellow balloons and a Pikachu-shaped piñata to go with it. I kept the giant Pikachu in my room, waiting for the perfect moment. Once every one of my friends had finished eating the hot dogs, I went to fetch it. My mother had given me a knife to break it. I hid the piñata and the knife behind my back and ran toward them. Before I could even ask them to guess what I was hiding, one girl shouted, “A piñata! A piñata!” I felt humiliated: she had ruined my surprise. I let the piñata fall to the floor and raised the knife over her head. She started to run, and so did I. I had barely covered a few meters when my mom grabbed me by my hair and locked me in my bedroom.

‘I need you to calm down. NOW,” she said in a dead voice, and closed the door behind her. After a while, her boyfriend came in. He said I was crazy and slapped me in the face. I didn’t feel it. I was focused on the great hole in my chest.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fill that space, the emptiness where my crazy genes nest. I inherited them from my mother, who had inherited them from her mother. A chain of madness. Generations of deranged women, starting when my Nonna arrived in this country. I don’t think she was that crazy, but she was cruel. On her deathbed, she told her daughter she had never wanted to have her. As if kicking someone already lying on the ground, she added that she hated her, that she had hated bearing and raising her. My grandma didn’t know what to say, so she pretended not to hear it and told herself it was the dementia talking. However, deep down, she knew that everything her mother said was real, she had felt it all her life.

My mother also told me she regretted having me; I was fourteen. I didn’t know what to say either. I threw myself on the bed and lay there, stiff. I decided that moving her things around, subtly, discreetly, and secretly, was a good way to drive her crazy without stirring things up. My revenge lasted a while, until I started to feel guilty: after all, she was an unwanted child too, a little fetus some people regretted too late. My grandma, following the family tradition, made sure she knew that with microscopic but constant acts of violence.

We pass things down like recipes: fear, resentment, survival strategies. I’m terrified of having children, especially girls. I wish to be barren. I am afraid of following the heritage of regret. I used to think our madness was ours alone, but maybe Argentina breeds a special kind of sadness: loud, chaotic, like our kind of heirlooms. So I hug my dog and tell her how much I love her, how happy she makes me, and how deeply I’ve wanted her. She does not understand and slips through my embrace. I swallow a couple of painkillers, lay next to my Pikachu plush, and go to sleep.