MIRRORS

The ambulance alarmed the neighborhood. A torrent of metallic clinks echoed through the lightwell, sounding the alarm. Even those who didn’t know her gathered at the foot of the entrance stairs. The orange siren had shattered the peace of a quiet neighborhood. The elderly inhabited the iron-and-wood benches daily as an extension of their living rooms. Their faces, resting on canes, soaked up the sunrays, just like the children did on the swings before nightfall. Carmela Galindo paraded her old fur coats with the bearing of a once-great actress fallen from grace. Which, in fact, she was.

The paramedics carried her body, wrapped in the shimmer of a thermal blanket; her eyes held that lost expression left by uncertainty and sedatives.

Since she was a little girl, she had stared into the mirror in the dressing room of the theater where her mother worked, flirting with feather boas and stiletto heels. In secret, she’d steal cigarettes from a golden cigarette case a grateful lover had once forgotten. One day I’ll be a great actress and have a dressing room all to myself, with a huge mirror surrounded by lights, she thought.

And so it was. Success followed her for years. So did the mirrors she filled her house with—until she turned it into a glass box. She had them in every size and shape: oval, round, rectangular. Beveled like diamonds, with large rococo frames gilded in gold leaf, some in bronze, and the smallest ones embossed in silver. Not to mention the cornucopias in the dining room, which looked ready to topple over anyone, and the one in her handbag, always handy to touch up her lipstick.She had them cleaned so they’d shine like Bohemian crystal—no speck was allowed to dull their gleam. There wasn’t a corner in the house where she couldn’t see her reflection: from the side, full-body, in profile or glancing sideways, she could catch every angle of herself. She rehearsed her roles before them. Sometimes she languished as The Lady of the Camellias, sometimes she sang songs from The Merry Widow. She laughed and cried. Then she applauded, and they returned her ovations in silence.– You’re a demanding audience, but grateful, she would say, smiling.

Her bond with them grew so intimate that she even named a few. Like Fernández, the large mirror in the foyer, by far the most honest one. How do I look? Tell me the truth, there’s still time to change… although Benigno (referring to the mirror on the dresser) thinks it’s fine… but he lies more than he talks, she’d say, giving herself one last glance.

When her eyesight and success began to fade, she blamed the mirrors for her failures. They no longer did their job as they used to; they had grown lazy.– You’re nothing but grateful stomachs, dulled by the warmth of a secure roof, she scolded them when her memory failed to recall the lines of her latest role.– You’ve gotten fat from standing still, she snapped, when her wasp waist disappeared and the seam on her stockings could no longer stay straight.

One night, walking down the hallway to the kitchen in search of an ever-scarcer sleep, she heard them whisper behind her back: “Carmeliiiiiita…” She turned around, hoping to catch them red-handed, but the dim light only returned colored shadows.Then she rummaged through the sewing box for the sharpest needle her seamstress kept to fix stitches and stray sequins, and with a smile curling on her lips, she slid its tip across their surface until they let out a screech of pain.

Clinging to the edge of her world, Carmela cornered her old travel companions and bought new mirrors—curved, concave, convex—and on her vanity, one of those that lets you count every eyelash.– These ones won’t speak behind my back, she declared.But without realizing it, she had pulled the wrong thread—the one that ultimately unraveled her life. Wherever she looked, she could now only see a distorted, grotesque image of herself.

Now, in the milky whiteness of a padded room, from time to time, the sound of shattered glass rains through her mind.