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The scream echoed through the hallway and pinned me to the cold tiles, as if I were a criminal caught in the act, my heart galloping in my old chest.
My name is Francisca. I’m 68 years old and I’ve fed half the neighborhood with my own hands, but here I seem to be in the way. My son-in-law thinks I’m a stinking burden, but he forgot to read my name on the deed to this house.
I’ve always been a light sleeper, one of those who wakes up when the wind changes or when a cat meows three blocks away. I suppose it’s just part of the job.
I spent 40 years running the kitchen at La Olla de Cobre, my small restaurant downtown. There, if you let your guard down, the rice would burn or your suppliers would steal. I learned to be alert, to be efficient, to never let anything slip by, but old age is treacherous. It slowly erodes your confidence in your own body, like the sea that eats away the sand on the beach, without you even noticing until there’s nowhere left to lay your towel.
That night my stomach played a trick on me. Maybe it was the beans for dinner, or maybe my gut just doesn’t have the patience it used to. I woke up with that dull, urgent ache that we old folks know so well, dragging my slippers down the hall so as not to make a sound. I tried to be as stealthy as a ghost in my own house—and I mean my own house intentionally—although sometimes, judging by the way people look at me, it seems like I’m an unwelcome guest who’s overstayed her welcome.
The bathroom in this apartment has terrible acoustics, and the pipes creak like old bones. I did what I had to do, grappling with the embarrassment that my body no longer functioned like clockwork. I flushed, or at least tried to. The lever was loose, a fix Roberto, my son-in-law, had promised to do three weeks ago and, of course, hadn’t. The water trickled timidly, weakly, bearing witness to my nightly urgency.
That’s when the hallway light came on, blinding me completely. Roberto was there, standing in his doorway, his eyes puffy with sleep and a look of disgust on his face that broke my heart more than any blow. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his crossed arms formed an insurmountable barrier between his arrogant youth and my vulnerable old age.
“For God’s sake, Francisca!” he roared, not caring that it was 3 a.m. “You useless old woman! Don’t you even know how to use the toilet? The whole house stinks!”
His words weren’t just sound, they were lashes. I froze, my hand still on the faulty toilet handle, trembling not from cold, but from a hot humiliation that rose up my throat. The smell, it’s true, wasn’t of roses, but it was the smell of humanity, of sickness, of old age.
“Roberto, the lever won’t…”, I tried to explain with a broken voice, feeling small, tiny, like a scolded child.
“Excuses,” she interrupted, pinching her nose with a theatricality that hurt more than the insult. “You always have an excuse. You smell like death, Francisca, like pure rot. Close that door and spray some deodorant. I have to work tomorrow, and you’re keeping me awake with your filth.”
He slammed the door so hard the paintings on the walls rattled, those paintings that I bought, those walls that I painted.
I stood alone in the harsh light of the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror smeared with toothpaste they never clean. The woman looking back at me had disheveled gray hair and watery eyes. But beneath that layer of sadness, I saw something more. I saw Francisca, who built a business from scratch after her husband died. I saw the woman who paid for her daughter Lucía’s university education by selling thousands of empanadas and stews.
“Old, useless,” she had said. “She stinks.”
I cleaned the bathroom. I cleaned it with a silent fury. At 3:30 in the morning, I poured bleach. I scrubbed the porcelain until my knuckles turned white. I sprayed lavender air freshener until the air became unbreathable with the chemical scent. I didn’t do it for him; I did it because I’m not slovenly. I’m a decent woman.
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