We’re alone together, for the first time. I have to touch him now. I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder. But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest they way they said it would.
A new mother holds her month-old son for the first time, but her body betrays her with an absence of feeling. Disoriented, she wanders with her partner around their plant-filled Buenos Aires apartment. Little by little, her world begins to unravel.
Taking place over the course of an evening, and a lifetime, Mariana Dimópulos’s mesmerising novella shifts seamlessly between the present and the past. In this dreamlike space, composed of overlapping vignettes, she retraces the mirrored paths of a life filled with images that swell and recede: cats, babies, mathematical formulae, distant wars, flooded deltas, hopeless deserts.
The narrator finds herself torn between four male figures – the bookish Pedro, the terse and competent Ivan, a sinister, domineering cousin, and her bewildering infant son Isaac.Feeling herself caught in a web of obligations, she insists time and again: ‘I’m not a woman.’