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Flying ObjectsAbdón Ubidia, from

El palacio de los espejos

(1996)Translated by Nathan Horowitz

They were a perfect pair, the mother thirty-four and the son fourteen.In those days the father was a barely recollected dream, a gentlebreeze dissolving in the air: he had died in his plane on a night lost inhis son’s earliest memories. The mother had elected to remain faithfulto him, so that his death wouldn’t be the end of him, and so that hewould survive somehow as a soft voice whispering advice in her earduring her evenings of sadness. The mother was strong and wise. She organized her life in such a waythat hunger, cold and uncertainty stayed as far from her as the menwho wanted her for themselves, as far from her as romance, which shehad to deny herself until her son was grown and didn’t need herprotection anymore. That way her loyalty to her husband evolved intoloyalty to her son. And that way her husband lived on in him. Their apartment, on the fourteenth floor of a fifteen-story building, waslike a castle that could never be taken by siege. On the cold nights of the rainy season, when vapor fogged the windowpanes, the motherand son would open two circles with their hands on the glass and peerout through them to watch the cars fleeing through the rain and thestreet people taking shelter under trees in the park. The mother andson felt sorry for them, and they regarded each other in silence andcelebrated the strange luck that kept them safe from the troubles of the world in a warm, secret place designed for life and happiness. Thenthe apartment seemed a hot air balloon suspended in the chilly night,with a hidden crew of two accomplices who could see without beingseen and judge without being judged.On other nights, when the moon shone, they would sit in the livingroom with the lights turned off, looking at the splendid intensity that litup the carpet as if it came from a fantastic floodlight. The motherwould talk about the vanished father and quote his favorite sayingsfrom the Bible and

The

Complete Works of William Shakespeare

. Oneof them resonated in the son’s mind with mysterious echoes: “Thereare more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in yourphilosophy.”When the noise of the city died down, before he went to sleep,wrapped in his blankets, he would recall his mother’s eternal story, hervoice echoing in his ears like the murmur of tender branches stirred by

the summer breeze in a happy valley. “One morning,” she would say,“a swift flew in the living room window. And although I never figuredout what the connection was, I suddenly knew then that I was pregnantand I was going to have a baby boy.”From time to time, she would call the son “my swift.” There were almost no secrets between the mother and the son. Evensex they discussed with a respectful system of questions, answers andtacit understandings that would flow into other subjects, whetherphilosophical or trivial. Within their custom of talking about everythingfrom the economic situation to the teachers in his school (who werealways seen as rather limited and sinister beings by this “League of Two,” as they called themselves), there was only room for two secrets,admitted as rights of exception. One was the mother’s and the otherwas the son’s. The mother’s secret was simple and complex at the same time. In herlong abstinence she had come to fear the idea of falling in love likedeath itself. Perhaps so many years of aloneness had cooled down herbody so much that the simple idea of accepting a husband when herson left her side became unbearable. She believed she had closeddown and dried up forever. The son’s secret was also simultaneously simple and complex. Whenhe grew up, he wanted to be the one thing his mother could neverstand him to be, a pilot. As he understood it, his father had flown off tothe skies of heaven, leaving him the mission of taking his place in theworld, continuing where he had left off; even, somehow,

being

thefather himself, with a second chance at life. That secret, the only real one he had, swelled up and multiplied until itbecame its own autonomous world requiring an endless series of lies tomaintain.For example, the mother didn’t know that the son flew in a classmate’shang glider. To do this, he had to invent nonexistant mountain bikingtrips. While he was flinging himself into the void from one of the peaksof the volcano that dominated the city, she believed he was safely tiedto the earth, absorbing its compact power, its weight, feeding himself with its grass like a young colt that no evil wind can ever bring down. The mother did know about his close friendship with Hugo Fernando,the classmate in question. And unlike the other mothers of their school,she didn’t forbid it, when the father of that sullen, taciturn boy fell intodisgrace and was put in prison, and the scandal of his life in the

shadows occupied the front pages of the newspapers.It was another sign of her wisdom and goodness. The son was filledwith gratitude and guilt, and tried to mitigate his lies with half-truthsand unnecessary precisions. He supplied her with a wealth of detailsabout Hugo Fernando’s eccentric family and their extravagant andopulent way of life. Hugo Fernando’s mother was obsessed with caringfor her skin and body. His sister, Evelyn, was twelve years old;mutinous, coppery hair crowned her round face. Her eyes were greenand lively, her skin smooth and pure. But she was always deeplyimmersed in her own thoughts. She was a nervous girl, and people saidshe was crazy, because all she ever talked about were the UFOs andaliens that visited her. To complete the family, a number of “uncles”came and went all the time.Even after the scandal, the family lived in an enormous house in avalley near the city, with two swimming pools, two tennis courts and asoccer field equipped with electronic scoreboards, so that HugoFernando’s expensive toys—motorcycles and so on—and the uncles’flashy cars, seemed as appropriate to the scene as flowers to a garden.Apart from certain particular details (among which had to be includedthe fact that Evelyn had once nonchalantly kissed him on the mouthand then fled to hide in the woods), the son thought that after hisfather’s death, nothing very important would alter the exact, naturaland eternal form of his life: a smooth movement of time flowing, tameand forseeable, like a river whose course was well known. The mother thought the same way. Or nearly the same way. For her,life was like a drum with a tight cellophane head that would remainshiny and transparent unless an excessively hard blow came to breakit. To keep the cellophane intact, to keep her life smooth andunchanged, without surprises or misfortunes, it was necessary to avoidfire and strong blows, nothing more.One day without warning the cellophane broke.Like an avalanche, like a volcanic eruption, like an earthquake, like thecrash of a young summer wind through the trees in the heights of theAndes, love came to the mother’s frozen heart.In vain she looked at herself again and again in the mirror, trying torecover the cautious and lucid woman she had been just a few weeksbefore. In vain she appealed to the emotional balance that had beenher heritage and her strength and was now gone. In vain she tried torid herself of the feelings of irritation that her son would sometimes

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Flying Objects

A short story about a single mother and her teenage son by prizewinning Ecuadorian author Abdón Ubidia, from his 1996 collection El palacio de los espejos (The Palace of Mirrors... (More)

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Category:	Creative Writing > Short Stories
Rating:	(2 Ratings)
Upload Date:	07/25/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	spirituality suicide parenting friendship Fiction Spanish rebellion ecuador (more tags) spirituality suicide parenting friendship Fiction Spanish rebellion ecuador translation teenager UFOs Quito Short Story growing up single mother abdon ubidia (fewer)