When the Family – Federica Bordaberry

May 10, 2026

Something must be believed about me, though surely nothing is believed about me either. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because what is believed depends on me. To a certain extent it is, yes, perhaps, the base of creation, of the stimulus, of the beginning, of the image of what must be believed about me. That much does depend on me, but it is not under my control. Tons of things I do go unnoticed and no one believes those things of me. A few others, the ones some people see, are the ones believed about me, and they have no name, because they are as numerous as those who believe something about me. But it is true, something about me must be believed.
The wait for the table was a torture. They took five days, during which I could distract myself very little, almost not at all. I only managed it when I started to eat or when I started to cook. In the technical moments. When that became automatic, I would go back to thinking and my patience would vanish.

I called the company where I bought the table and chairs several times a day, throughout the days, and they always said the same thing. To wait. It was a torture. The only thing that isn’t true is that it wasn’t.

***

My first neighborhood, where I lived with my family, was surrounded by green trees. Cherry trees, which is the reason I read the Russians. There was no smell of cherries; on the contrary, there was more of a smell of leaves, of chlorophyll, of sap. The sidewalks, which were gray, turned golden with the reflection of the fruit on spring afternoons. When that hour arrived, the little birds chirped—I think they are sparrows—and they would go silent before a car passed so as not to clutter the sounds of the street.

In my new neighborhood, where I live now and where the table I ordered is, everything is excessively desolate. Nothing chirps. Nothing lights up. Nothing smells of anything and nothing grows. Everything maintains that grayish color that blurs the horizons, that melts the cement in summer, that breaks the eyes when it’s sunny and that, when there is fog or it is cloudy, makes everything equal. The family will have to light a cigarette when they come to visit me, because of the house and because of the neighborhood. They won’t like any of it.

My body and I have already adapted. We like it. We have inhaled enough.

***

Our house was the most unstable one in the coast. When we went there with the family, usually in January and February, the floor tiles would move when we stepped on them. The family tried to talk about it with a neighbor, but they didn’t understand and it seemed it didn’t happen to them. It happened, apparently, only within our square meters. And it happened, specifically, under the legs of the tables.

The one in the dining room was the worst. Every time I leaned back on it, I felt them move—the tiles—and everything was ruined by the fear it gave us. To me and the family.

***

After a while during the sessions at the table, the twin becomes unbearable. He flares his nostrils every time he looks at me, as if he were a bull about to get angry and gore me. The twin becomes unbearable because he walks beside me and says nothing; he just looks at me and flares his nostrils. The family seems not to see it or find anything strange in it, but after the moments at the table, the twin does all of that.

There are times he looks at me in silence. He looks, and looks. Not like a falling drop, but like one held in mid-air, though the air is cut because, after looking for so long, almost everything is cut. Even breath. The twin does all those unbearable things and I would like to get him off my back, but I can’t because the family seems not to understand, or not to know, or not to care.
He snorts at me from a distance, and until the family puts on music or turns on the radio, I find him unbearable.

***

When I used to lie back on the table, at first, the family ignored me. I would beg with my eyes for them to come closer, to play with me, to touch me. Although it was hard for them to approach, they did it very slowly, as if afraid. They would stand near the main door, as if distracted, but looking toward the long dining table.

By that point, I wasn’t naked yet, but I was beginning to be, little by little, looking at the family, who returned the gaze out of the corner of their eye. When I had almost everything removed, the family would cross the living room almost at a run and approach the doorframe that led into the sitting room.

The family would begin to smile looking at me and I would finish stripping naked, laughing out loud, massaging my legs, my whole torso, my face. The family’s eyes would shine uncontrollably, like the sun on fire during afternoons at the resort. And they would draw near.

Finally, they drew near.

***

She preferred to lie on round tables rather than rectangular ones. That’s how she liked to wait: leaning back with her arms behind her, her legs stretched out to the knee, letting the rest hang. With her torso quite diagonal, quite angular, wide open. Her legs, also, open and expectant. Waiting for the family. She had decided she liked it that way.

They had grown used to the other thing, she and the family. When they didn’t pay attention to her, she would go mad with screaming, and since that drove the family further away, she chose to turn toward other habits. Before, she waited for the family with open legs on the rectangular table. Her head was near the end where her father sat and her legs near where her mother sat.

Then, when she wasn’t screaming for attention, the family would approach her feet and caress them. Then, the family would continue walking up her legs with their mouth, with kisses and caresses with the tongue, sweet ones. She would transition to leaning on her elbows and opened her legs even further. When they reached the sensitive area, which became wetter every time, which flooded more every time, they began to hear her. Little by little, she moaned progressively saying no, laughing and saying no, salivating and saying no.

Until her body, that whole body, began to tremble and became an ocean. That is when the family found the optimal moment to insert themselves inside her, into all that falling liquid, and gripped her by the hips. They inserted what was theirs, all that belonged to the family. It ended with speed, very fast, the way animals or some families do.

***

When she moved, tired of the family giving her attention only when they felt like it, she left on foot with a suitcase toward that house a friend, who lived in another country, had lent her. She knew she would have to get another type of table as soon as she arrived, and she did.

When she looked at it, she remembered her neighbor. While she was walking with an angry stride toward the street, he asked her if she wasn’t the one who had had a child. And she replied no, as if it were impossible for her body to carry the child of the family, of an entire family.

***

She had told them she had something to show them. She hadn’t chosen randomly; instead, she had dedicated herself to gathering symbols that were transcendent to her, that were transcendent to them.

She brought to her house, then, a round table with chairs, all made of iron, and put them outside to wait for the family.

They arrived at six in the evening, poorly dressed. The family arrived, moving like a single being that smokes, insults, detests. They walked in at a slow pace, looking around with gestures of disgust. The grimace was this: the side of the lip raised and a part of the nose swollen. Appalled.

That was the face she was waiting for, the usual one, and the one that arrived.

Suddenly, the wind began to blow and the family’s strands of hair, which had been tucked behind the ear, came loose.

With their stride, the family began to grow fatter. They began to bloat. It was as if the wind was entering through their nostrils and swelling them up. In front of the table, with the gesture of disgust accentuated, the family took a cigarette from the pack, pulled up their jacket to shield the lighter, and lit it. In doing so, they managed to dye all their hair the color of ash. Slowly, they began to become morbid. They seemed to realize what was happening.

She watched the transformation of the family, her family, into something that was about to burst. “The family is fat with silences, with things left unsaid,” she commented. The family told her to shut up, while moving on to the second half of the cigarette. Inhaling a lit carrot.

***

Something must be believed about me, though surely nothing is believed about me either. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because what is believed depends on me. To a certain extent it is, yes, perhaps, the base of creation, of the stimulus, of the beginning, of the image of what must be believed about me. That much does depend on me, but it is not under my control. Tons of things I do go unnoticed and no one believes those things of me. A few others, the ones some people see, are the ones believed about me, and they have no name, because they are as numerous as those who believe something about me. But, it is true, something about me must be believed.

Waiting for the table was a torture.