My little girl behind the mirror
Jorge Armando Ibarra Ricalde
Grandmothers know. It is easy to consider their advice outdated when they recommend teas instead of medicine. Blowing out knots when there’s no connection between doing that and undoing them, or using a rubber band to open a jar. And yes, despite arthritis, my grandma can open the jars that I can’t, undo the knots no one else can, and heal colds as well as aches and pains. But we are at rest, confident that it is always possible to replace her knowledge with some modern gadget, some useful gizmo designed specifically for that purpose. That’s how I lived and became an adult, ignoring grandma’s tricks and relying on Wikipedia, until the day my daughter was born. With her blessing, grandma Fernanda gave me a piece of advice: don’t put the child in front of the mirror.
I remember that of all the superstitions I had heard, that was the one that kept fluttering around in my head for the longest time. The science of babies which are the most fragile specimens of humanity is complicated, and yet it resists the fact that no one is born knowing how to be a parent.
So, between a nod here or a lapsus brutus there, you can rely on a thousand-year-old instinct to react for your child’s sake in a split second. And yes, it can fail. But baby science has made great strides in knowing that you shouldn’t give them strawberries or honey, and that contrary to popular belief: babies feel pain. They also don’t need everything that they sell you for them, and it’s not a good idea to give them tequila to put them to sleep. But nowhere, nowhere, has science ever explained why you can’t put your baby in front of the mirror.
What could happen: that the baby’s psyche would explode as it discovers that its being is limited in its reality? That it would confuse its existence with that of the reflection? That it would discover before its time that it is a being dependent on others? There were no answers, and most of the “functioning” adults I know have not yet realised most of these assumptions, so it seems no one has ever asked the question, they just take their grandmother’s word for it and leave it at that, away from the mirror.
And of course, I am both a rebel and an adventurer and as I am not superstitious, I can only rely on what I can observe. So, every time I cooed at my daughter walking back and forth in the living room, I wondered; what would happen if I left her in front of the mirror?
Despite many days passing, I simply lacked the courage to find out. Because while I was a man of facts, the fact was that the jar would be uncorked with the rubber band, and the knot would crumble as it was blown. So, it was too much responsibility to leave the space-time continuum in my hands, as it already held my baby who was barely moving her neck. Nights came and went as she adapted to our schedules. And not infrequently I lay awake, waiting for her bottle to run out. Or at least the battery to run out. And as every parent knows, I was often overcome by sleep. And so, with my eyes closed, the child learned to roll and crawl. Until one day, as I dozed weak and fatigued, she challenged the mirror.
It was a day like any other. A night in fact. But exhaustion had set in, so I saw everything that happened only in my half-awake state and thought it a dream. My girl first rolled across the bed and then crawled to the side where there wasn´t an edge, so with no immediate danger. I couldn’t react immediately when with all of her strength, she peeled her body off the mattress to meet her mirrored clone that was right on the other side of the mirror.
They looked at each other for a moment, making those pure sounds that don’t fall into any category of the emotional spectrum, smiled at each other, called to each other, and without warning touched each other. Nothing extraordinary. So much so that I was able to continue dozing off. At least until my smiling daughter banged the glass three times. And although she didn’t have the strength to hold her bottle, with both babies banging on the mirror, it cracked.
I remember the sound so clearly. I can still feel my stomach grow small as I reflexively grabbed my daughter before I even woke up. It was instinctive, primal. I just grabbed her and pulled her to keep her from getting lost, when the danger was the falling glass. I took her in my arms in alarm, checking that she hadn’t hurt herself. Pleasantly surprised that this wasn’t the case, finally realising that the glass didn’t break and that it was just a hallucination of sleep deprivation. So, surviving the exhaustive examination of the mother who woke up, the child, with not a hair out of place, went to sleep as usual. Except for something extra: a long smile that showed no teeth.
The morning, barely hours apart, found us exhausted. But I couldn’t stay lying down, because my daughter, with boundless energy, woke me with a jolt. Unwillingly, but with attitude, the day began as usual, with the child being the centre of our world. Though this time doing all the things she was used to with that long toothless smile.
I suppose I should have paid attention to the signs more closely. The speed with which she went from crawling to wobbling, then walking and then running at high speed, the hysterical laughter she let out without motivation, the fleeting and uncontrollable tantrums she threw when she got angry, or at least the total lack of respect for authority. But the truth is that the long and mysterious toothless smile was short-lived because after a few months, she was still smiling but she did it with those sharp teeth that resembled fangs, transforming her face into that of a little devil.
In retrospect, I should at least have noticed the mysterious language she spoke while painting the walls of the house with pagan markings, or while “accidentally” messing up the housework or delicate appliances in the house. The moment that I will remember for certain, however, was when the time came for the christening, as both our grandmothers collectively insisted that married or not it was our responsibility to present her before God to keep her away from the devil. A noble idea, which the parish priest did not enjoy because baptising the little devil proved to be his hell. But although his lasted a few moments, ours was just beginning.
While we were getting weaker, our little devil was getting stronger every day. Life is that thing that happens when you hope that expenses will go down, but after a few years, you accept that not only will they not go down, but they will always be more than you can generate. So, you do what you can with what you have while everyone around you tells you what you should do. Not knowing that you already did it, you just failed to do it, as they would fail to do it if they tried instead of just saying it with malicious aforethought.
At the age of two, my little devil was already showing all the signs of diabolical possession. She bit at everything, screamed at everything, and did mischief to anyone who neglected her, being able to make better the biggest anger with a blackmailing hug and a manipulative kiss. The medical consensus, because every paediatrician has a salesman´s soul, was that she had Syndrome IA, a situation treatable with non-dangerous but expensive drugs. But while her mother was looking for answers among the experts to see what we could buy that would solve everything, I knew the truth. I had put her in front of the mirror as a baby.
Exhausted and in debt, we began to look for new options. Not being able to turn to my grandmother, I went to Lucia’s grandmother. When I confessed to her that when Lucia was a baby, I had put her in front of the mirror, she sighed and provided me with a few remedies based on red thread, garlic, and a lot of determination. The girl wriggled untameably as I was administering medicine, and then, when her mother found the girl with a red thread on her forehead and a smell of mint with garlic, I had to confess to her the truth, that when she was a baby, she saw herself in the mirror. She looked at me with the dark circles under her eyes that I had grown accustomed to and despite lacking the energy to live she smiled and laughed, believing me to be crazy and superstitious. Then she explained to me that everything we were going through was not a possession, but the SdIA, Sindrome de Infantitis Aguda, which is what they call childhood according to the period, but which is expressed in all the unwelcome symptoms of being a child in an adult world. That we were tired, that the girl was not a monster but our daughter, and that everything would get better. I left it at that. I adopted the little devil as if she were mine, and not a spawn of Satan. Because for some reason, she had come into my life.
Sometimes when I am alone, I look in the mirror. If the little devil has turned out to be so good at life, I can only imagine what my daughter who went through the mirror is doing. But knowing the character of her mother and her grandmother for whom we baptised her, I am sure that Lucia Fernanda already rules in hell.
Jorge Armando Ibarra Ricalde (Mexico), a.k.a El Master, is a writer, chronicler, professional master and role-playing game researcher as well as a designer of the game processes, specialized in direct cultural transmission through orality. Most of his work focuses on exploiting narrative biases to produce immersion and exchange of experiences as a front for defending leisure, while harnessing the intrinsic components of narrative construction to generate transformative experiences either through storytelling or ergodic literature.
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