SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 117
She stood up slowly, manoeuvring her enormous body around the coffee table with
incredible grace, and said:
“Over the years, many have asked. Only a few have been granted the privilege. I’m
letting you see the contents because you remind me of myself, and how I was at your age.”
Looking back, and considering she’s dead now, and no family member ever mentioned
her on the newspaper condolences that I read to detail when she passed away two years later,
perhaps there were gender choices in Dr Rizzo that were subtly shaping her decisions that
afternoon.
She turned around as she grabbed the box, and holding it in mid-air, she said with her
storm face:
“But you’ll have to give me your word none of this will appear on your feminist article
on my research. Can you keep that promise?”
“I swear, Dr. Rizzo.”
“Call me Nina, like everyone else,” she said, and laid the box on the coffee table. For a
second it crossed my mind the dogs in the coffee cups were its guardians.
The lid was a bit dented in one corner, I remember. As she lifted it, five white perfect
snail shells shone over white cotton as if there was a snow blizzard kept in that box, or as if
the contents had a light of their own.
It suddenly struck me that these were exactly the same kind of snails I’d found in
Misiones since I was a child, with their horrible slug, wide bodies. They did not look any
different, or special.
“Is it because they’re not from Misiones that you’ve kept them away from the museum’s
collection?” I asked, perplexed.
She viewed me with suspicion, measuring if I was testing her, as I was.
“No, darling.”
In the silence before she disclosed the truth, I heard a distant train whistle, and I
remembered the dark entrance of the cave. The hair on my neck was slowly rising.
“Here, take one and place it to your ear,” she ordered.
And then the moment I placed the soft pink lips of that snail to my right ear, I looked
at her in complete surprise, as she assented with her head.
“But this is impossible,” was all I could say.
“It is,” she answered. “Try any other one.”
And I did. I tried each of them, one after the other, forgetting completely the flaccid slug
bodies of the snail’s inhabitants, or the fat expanse of Nina Rizzo’s anatomy.
I heard birds in one; I couldn’t quite distinguish them but I’d swear there was an urutaú’s
languid call. In the other, the rustling of leaves took me instantly to the trees beside the cave
and its waterfall; even the droplet’s regular tickling on the small black ponds that formed
next to it could be distinguished. The third one sounded of thunder and rain, and I’d could
have sworn there was, for an instant, a smell of wet earth, and a feeling of electricity in the
air around me. It also held crickets and frogs, like the ones I’d heard all my life in my junglesurrounded house before a down pour, or on a moony night. The fourth one curled my blood
with what could only be a jaguar’s growl, and then its roar. I had heard them once, on a spring
evening, during their mating season.
But the fifth one paralyzed me. With complete certainty I heard human voices. They
were speaking in Guaraní language. I, the descendant of Swedish settlers, was never taught
the language of the natives, who were considered unimportant ghosts of the lands conquered
by the white. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but it sounded like a call.
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