– Here, drink.
Alondra handed him a glass of water. The boy drank it in two gulps. Alondra remained squatting against the wall next to the bedroom door, watching him fixedly. He was looking at her too. Alondra's picture was impressive. Her body was strong and firm, her skin like a stretched cloak of elephant skin. Her brown eyes were transparent and thick brows and black lashes surrounded them like bushy reeds to a mahogany lake. She had long, muscular hands, her lips full and dark. Her hair, which was brunette with copper highlights, was very thick and wavy, and was cut asymmetrically, forming a downward spiral around her neck. She was dressed rather extravagantly, in short pleated skirts patterned with squares, metallic-trimmed knee-high boots, and roomy, high-collared dark jackets full of puffs and mysterious embellishments. The skirts had arrived at the building in wartime, they must have been from an old school. She was thirty-five years old and looked exactly thirty-five years old. Going back to old clichés on the subject, prior to the war, it could be said that she was not a particularly beautiful person, but terribly attractive.
In any case, the boy was not looking at her establishing some kind of evaluation, but as if waiting for some answer. He sat up from the waist up. The outline of an expression of speech began to take shape on his face. His Adam's apple moved, he opened his mouth, it seemed that he was going to initiate a gesture with his hands. But then his eyes began to dance in their sockets, drifting to the center, and he brought his hands to his face as if feeling dizzy and needing to hold his head. Alondra's eyes widened and she stayed in exactly the same position. The child began to show nausea and disorientation. He got up frailly holding on to the wall. He started walking towards the bedroom door. He came out. Mustering what little coordination he had, he tried to run for the door, but he fell almost there.
– I already told you that the door only opens for me.
He began to breathe very hard. He crawled across the living room floor until he was leaning against the wall behind the bar in what had once been the kitchen, under the windows that looked out onto the building's inner courtyard. He began to palpate his body with an expression of terror. Alondra smiled and followed him slowly on his desperate tour of the room. The boy touched his face, his chest, he put both his hands towards his sex, he began to scream. Alondra squatted in front of him.
- Let me see.
– Arrête!!! – The boy yelled desperately, throwing his right arm forward to put it between Alondra and his body.
– Wow, you had almost convinced me that you were mute, and now it turns out that you are French.
Alondra grabbed his arm matter-of-factly, blocking both of his wrists and his back with both hands. The child burst into tears.
– Liuben, do you know French?
A neutral and very pleasant voice answered:
- I know a little. Not very well.
– Record all this. Tell him not to worry, the effect will wear off in a few hours.
The voice said:
– Ne vous inquiétez pas, l'effet disparaîtra dans quelques heures.
Hearing another voice, the boy, instead of calming down, became even more nervous. He began to tremble, and he no longer exerted any force against Alondra's hands, which were well trapped behind his back and against the ground. Alondra released one of his hands and slipped it under the boy's shirt, inspecting his torso from the navel up. The child sobbed and fell into apnea. Alondra touched his chest, where two small breasts had emerged. Then she took her hand to his belly button, tucked it under his pants, and felt between his legs, looking for what kind of meat was there. She checked that between the boy's legs there was a slit and some hair. She also touched his pelvis, which had grown several inches in width. She was satisfied. She stared at him, appreciating what other changes were noticeable in his face and skin. The boy, who now had the face and body of a teenage girl, was staring at the ground in horror and no longer crying. He was trying to breathe through his mouth as normally as possible. When he realized that Alondra would no longer touch him, he slowly went from horror back to confusion. Alondra released him and got up. She grabbed one of the high-top chairs from the kitchen bar and sat down, still watching him. She looked at the time on the screen.
– Another sleepless night…
Alondra entered the closed room for a moment and came out again, holding something in her hand. She went back behind the kitchen counter, where the boy was still panting in shock.
– I need you to take off your clothes. - “J'ai besoin de toi pour levever tes vêtements,” said Liuben.
– I'm going to stay here watching you until the end. And we need to document this.
– Je vais rester ici à te regarder jusqu'à la fin. Et nous devons documenter cela.
The boy did not answer and continued to gasp for breath, gasping for fear. He urinated on himself. Alondra pushed him aside and mopped up the urine. She knelt down and began to remove his clothes. By now, the boy was incapable of showing any resistance. He had entered a kind of trance. She totally undressed him. Next, she grabbed a clean towel, dipped it in water, and slowly began to wipe the urine between his legs. She stayed kneeling beside him, one hand resting on his pelvis and the other in his hair, watching him for a long time. When he had calmed down enough, she grabbed his jaw with one hand and turned his face up.
– Breathe. Breathe with me. Can you follow this finger?
– Respirer. Respire avec moi. Pouvez–vous suivre ce doigt?
The boy wasn't following the finger, and he was looking into Alondra's transparent brown eyes, searching for what was happening and why she was doing this to him. Alondra sighed. She felt the pulse at his wrist.
- I'm not going to do the lavage. I'll wait.
– I think you can. He's just scared - Liuben said. Are you sure he is French? He doesn't seem to understand me, does he?
– You already said that you don't speak it very well. He is scared. And what he said, it was in French, right?
- Yes I think so.
– What is clear is that he has come from afar.
Liuben and Alondra stared at the boy until well into dawn. In the early hours of the day, the effects of the drug began to wear off, and he gradually returned to his original body. He had been paralyzed behind the kitchen counter for hours, hugging himself and trembling. Only when his body fully returned to its previous state, Alondra lifted him off the floor, covered him with the blanket from the bedroom and carried him to the bed.
- Take it. This one is for real.
– Prise. C'est pour de vrai – said the voice of the home computer, Liuben.
The boy did not take the glass of water. He wrapped himself in the blanket and turned around. Alondra noticed that he felt betrayed. A kind of tingling rose from the center of her stomach branching into her lungs. She supposed it was remorse, though it could also be excitement.
Alondra stayed working all day with the resolution to go to bed at sunset and recover her usual rhythm. She prepared her meeting with the people on the east and west flanks, as she had met very competent women in the west on her outing in recent days, and she thought that the sooner she brought them all together, the sooner they could begin to articulate the periphery’s network. She was in a hurry. Something told her that it was necessary to act, not only with agility, but also with caution. She smelled some kind of danger. She entered the locked room and did not come out from it until the evening.
The sunset from Alondra's apartment was beautiful. At this time of the year, the orange rays of the spring sun streamed in diagonally from the left of the large picture window, forming vertical rectangles of different sizes on the ceiling and the screen wall, cut in the shape of the silhouette of the buildings in the front. The sun was shining hard on the windows of a building a little further east, and this translucent and ocher light was reflected in the form of dimmer rectangles projected on the side of the sofa and the bookcase, illuminating the old upholstery, the machines and the books. Between Alondra's building and the closest ones was a large open field, so that the horizon was wide. Puente was a low-lying neighborhood, so the silhouette of the city was drawn in the background, and beyond, the mountains were visible on clear days, which were more or less half. Behind many lines of buildings, the spire and crown of the great communications tower could be seen. At sunset, each of the northern ward lines looked like a step leading up to and protecting the great tower. The brown or gray in the mountains was its background throughout the year. Alondra considered herself immensely lucky to enjoy these views, since she had been allowed to have a distant horizon.
As she watched the rectangles go down the wall, stretched out on the sofa, with the slow fading of orange on the horizon and the farthest buildings fading into dark blue silhouettes, she felt the touch of the boy's skin in her hands. She felt her palms burn and a bunch of needles moved inside her waist. A chill went up her vertebrae and a bunch of sparks crackled on her scalp. She looked down the hallway. The boy had not left the room all day.
– Liuben, wake me up at dawn.
***
Le Merle a perdu son bec.
Comment pourra le Merle chanter,
S’il est vrai qu’il a perdu :
Son bec?
Le Merle a perdu :
Son bec, sa langue.
Comment pourra le Merle chanter,
S’il est vrai qu’il a perdu :
Sa langue, son bec?
[...]
The dawn was breaking up, cutting the silhouette of the mountains on the horizon, and a voice, clear and angelic woke up Alondra. The Moon and Venus set behind the mountains. It wasn't the sound of the music that Liuben used to play for her when she woke up. The voice was a thread of white silk trembling on a sigh. The notes wavered unsteadily up and down like a slow-motion carousel. It tinkled like a little human music box. It can only be the boy, Alondra thought. Although from the living room the articulation of the different phonemes was not understood, it could be distinguished that he was singing something with lyrics.
– Liuben, what is he singing?
– Something about a blackbird.
– A blackbird?