Trafalgar

by Angélica Gorodischer

  “What garbage, old man.”

  “Garbage is putting it mildly. The girl left the temple the next day very coolly, she got together a few technicians and told them the gods had ordered an expedition to who knows where and that in less than a day a ship had to be ready, equipped for a single crewmember, with furniture, food, books, pictures—anyway, everything we saw there. And that night she had the port cleared, she climbed into the ship alone and she took off and went as far away as possible and got as far as she could and almost killed herself landing on Donteä-Doreä which, unfortunately for her, had been deserted for centuries.”

  “And had she been there a long time?”

  “Fairly long. More than a Marrennen year, that’s why she was afraid. She had left the brutes deprived three years running and then she had escaped. And her successor must have gone into the temple at least once by now, and the brutish gods combine pleasure and practicality, so they must have given the order to look for her.”

  “You got her out of there, I imagine.”

  “Now I see that, yes, you’re a romantic, too, like Side, and not only because you’ve written the Manifesto of a Romantic. But don’t you see that woman is a walking danger? And that if she once defied and defeated the brutes, gods or sleepers or demons or whatever they are, she’s quite capable of defying and defeating them as often as she cares to? For myself, I’d have left her on Donteä-Doreä so she could work out the dispute once and for all when the Marrennen folk arrived. Relax, Side is a mechanic, not a poet, but he succeeded in having us take her along. Which is to say, he took her, because as for me, even if she were the very, very best of her kind, I wouldn’t touch her with tongs.”

  “I can already see you being chased back and forth by the naked brutes.”

  “The naked brutes don’t trouble me a bit, one by one or all together. She is the one to be feared. I saw her. I looked her in the eyes when I made is if to hit her and she confronted me. Look, Jorge, ever since I returned from Sebdoepp, where I unloaded the two of them, ever since then I’ve been asking myself who the invisible gods of Marrennen are. Listen, Marcos, how much is it? Don’t do that to me, I’m the one who invited you. Yes, because either the other queens who were named Piedad or Templanza or Caridad were nitwits and never brought themselves to talk about what they undoubtedly must have realized happened to them when they were asleep in the temple, or there is on Marrennen, poor Side, a race of gods who are not the brutes, they’re the queens. And they are the ones who hold the annual orgy, not the poor unfortunates. Belonging to that race would explain her lies. Although yes, I already know what you’re going to say, those lies can be explained with a dozen innocent reasons. But if the invisible gods are the queens, then Constancia escaped because she betrayed them, I don’t care how but certainly for a single motive: in search of more power.”

  “I think you’re probably right.”

  “Let’s be going,” said Trafalgar.

  “I’d almost have preferred to have gone to the office and done all the things I’m behind on,” said Jorge as they left. “If you see a brunette, warn me so I can look the other way.”

  Strelitzias, Lagerstroemias, and Gypsophila

  It had been so long since I’d seen him! Me busy with my books, he travelling, we had talked on the phone a few times and had promised to see each other and it seemed the moment never came. And one fine day, with no previous phone call, we ran into each other on the pedestrian mall, big hug and how are you and you look very well and, very formal and proper, we went into the Burgundy to have a coffee. Marcos served us personally because, he says, none of those clumsy waiters when Trafalgar comes in, although his waiters are never clumsy.

  “Two coffees,” Trafalgar said after the greetings.

  “And a big glass of soda water,” I said.

  Just a few minutes and we had the coffees in front of us. I looked at him a little surprised.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Ummm . . . ,” I said, with a now what do I say face.

  “Yes,” he said, “I gave up smoking. So what?”

  “You-gave-up-smo-king,” I enunciated.

  “Yes. Eritrea doesn’t like me to smoke.”

  “Eritrea? What do you have, a cat or a dog or a canary allergic to smoke?”

  “My daughter. Eritrea is my daughter.”

  I think I fainted. Maybe not, but nearly: the world started spinning around like a top, of course the world is always spinning, but not so fast, and the most I could do was hold on tight to my chair and close my eyes.

  When I managed to open them, Trafalgar was fanning me with the Burgundy’s coffee menu and Marcos was patting my hand and telling me I was going to be just fine.

  Then Trafalgar began to tell me, little by little and detailing every encounter, because the thing had already been going on for years, but I swear it is all true.

  THE FIRST TIME

  “I can’t be responsible for her,” said Guinevera Lapis Lazuli or whatever her name was.

  “She” was a little girl not this high off the ground who played at jumping, talking to herself, and throwing a colored ball up in the air.

  “She’s yours,” said Guinevera, “so your alternatives are to take her with you or put her in an orphanage.”

  Trafalgar almost had an attack, one because he remembered his adventure with Lapis Lazuli and two because the girl was undoubtedly his, black eyes and impertinent jaw and a way of lifting her head; and then also because thinking of letting her go to an orphanage made him feel like a heartless swine. And Trafalgar is many things, but a heartless swine he is not.

  He called her: “We’re going on a trip,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”

  “My papa,” she said and won him over forever.

  Two words, only two words and she had achieved what no one else had, so far as I know—and, for the record, I know plenty about Trafalgar. The number of women who had tried not only to win him but to keep him by force of sweet nothings and those Barbie and Doris Day or whatever type things, and not one ever got anywhere save that little pipsqueak who said “my papa” and okay, all set. Cursed be those loudmouthed machistas who make themselves out to be supermen and a baby won’t make them cry because men don’t cry but they do turn to butter.

  “What’s her name?” he asked Guinevera because he couldn’t meet the child’s (black) eyes.

  “Eristemiádica Perlingheredisti.”

  Which sounds more like Greek but is Veroboariano.

  “You’re crazy,” Trafalgar said and he left with the girl and this is something: he brought her to Rosario.

  On the trip he told her: “Your name is Eritrea from now on, okay? Eritrea Perla Medrano.”

  She agreed and repeated it softly as if it were a Jabberwocky, Eritrea Perla Medrano, eritreaperla Medrano, eritreaperlamedrano, et cetera. And the thing is, he liked those names: they resembled the nonsense Lapis Lazuli had given him and they were, like his own, the names of battles, two instead of only one: the Italians marching to conquest and Pearl Harbor attacked by the Axis.

  CHILDHOOD

  They arrived home late but Crisóstoma was waiting for them with supper ready. That is, she was waiting for him and he showed up with the girl.

  “She’s hungry,” Trafalgar said without offering further explanations.

  Crisóstoma has the soul of a hen, she spread her wing and took her under it, soft and cozy. “But of course!” she scolded Trafalgar. “I’m sure you gave her nothing to eat, poor thing. What’s your name?”

  She didn’t know who the girl was or why she was there but she wasn’t going to let her go hungry for anything in the world.

  “Eritrea Perla Medrano.”

  And then Rogelio arrived, in robe and pajamas, thanks to which Crisóstoma didn’t faint like me in the Burgundy, and the pipsqueak had both of them in her pocket within a minute and a quarter. They gave her thin oatmeal, a chicken drumstick, sweet potato conserve, and Coca-Cola. Not because Trafalgar drinks C
oca-Cola, vade retro, but because Rogelio does and he always has a bottle in the refrigerator.

  That same night, while Eritrea sucked on a candy (Rogelio once again—a bon vivant), between the three of them they removed the stereo and the old armchair and the floor lamp from the room next to Trafalgar’s bedroom and they made up the bed and put feather pillows on it, a little bedside table with a lamp with an alabaster shade that had been in the living room, and a little bell so she could call if she wanted something, anything at all, water or more Coca-Cola or company or for someone to tell her a story or whatever occurred to her.

  The next day they went to the civil registry with Rogelio and Crisóstoma as witnesses.

  “I’ve come to register the girl,” said Trafalgar.

  “What?” said a fat lady with badly dyed ash-blonde hair and a doughy, underbaked face. “At that age and not registered yet?”

  “No.”

  After snorts and protests, the fat lady asked, “Name?”

  “Eritrea Perla Medrano.”

  “Daughter of?”

  “Trafalgar Medrano, here’s my identity card.”

  “Birth certificate?”

  “I don’t have it. It was lost in the fire.”

  The fat lady started to perspire.

  “Name of the mother.”

  “Mother unknown,” said Trafalgar.

  “What do you mean, unknown?” exploded the fat lady.

  “Well, see,” Trafalgar said and proceeded to tell the fat lady a whole novel about a frenzied orgy in which everyone with everyone—you follow me, right? And in which, well, when he got to the juicy details the fat lady, pale and sweaty, said good, that’s fine, unknown, yes, certainly, fire, what a shame, well, yes.

  At school, things went splendidly well. Little starched apron, little braids, black shoes with white ankle socks, clean hands, freshly brushed teeth, and twenty cents for a cocoa and five little cookies during the long recess, adorable.

  After about two months, they called him: “Señor Medrano, you must know that girls enter this institution before learning to read or, moreover, doing sums. Eritrea gets bored and of course, as she was previously taught that which it is the task of the school . . .”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Trafalgar, “but no one taught her anything. She learns on her own, just from watching. She’s a very intelligent girl,” and he restrained himself from adding, “like her father.”

  “There is no doubt of that,” said the vice principal, her lips tight.

  It seemed she did not like the girls of her school to be intelligent.

  “We will attempt, of course, to discipline her a little, because as she is quick to learn, she spends her time, I don’t know, for example in haranguing her classmates to, in a manner of speaking, avoid calligraphy class or scare Señora de Romero, who teaches mathematics.”

  “Look, better you not discipline her too much. I am of the opinion that children should be allowed to express themselves freely, ma’am.”

  “Miss.”

  “Miss. Discipline is very fine for barracks, but in school one has to be seeing what each student’s like and what she wants. Talk to the girls, see, and find out why they do what they do.”

  “Very modern,” said the vice principal, almost without separating her lips, which was quite the achievement.

  But, obviously, by fourth grade he could clearly see that it was impossible to keep Eritrea in school. Not only did she do all that the vice principal had told him, but she sweet-talked or led her classmates in trying to get the punishment reduced for a girl who had been rebellious or to protest because they didn’t let them play soccer (that’s not for girls!) or to go to school in costume (pirates, ghosts, Russian princesses and odalisques were the favorites).

  Trafalgar took her home, improvised a study room beside the library, brought in Juan Grela, who lived quite close by, once a week to teach her painting, and sent her to the Cosettinis’ school and everyone was happy.

  ADOLESCENCE

  I met her when she was already an adolescent, because all of the foregoing happened almost in secret (Trafalgar was embarrassed to have a daughter) and punctuated by his trips as he came and went, leaving the girl with Crisóstoma, who seemed like the grandmother and Rogelio, who was grandfather, chauffer, advisor, butler, and errand boy all at the same time.

  She was a beauty. She’s still a beauty but now she’s a woman, sensational. Sometimes I think the vice principal was right.

  At that moment, after the surprise, the fainting and so forth, she was tall and thin, with two enormous eyes like coals they were so, so black. Hair almost chestnut (like her mother, Trafalgar told me much later, on a day of modest confidences), a powerful nose, both straight and fine, large mouth, and a neck that allowed her to raise her head like a swan. Gorgeous. Trafalgar was crazy about her and just like Jorge, said he had already bought the shotgun and had it under the table ready to fill the first mother’s son ¡#%!!+°=¡!#~* grrr who might get close to his girl full of lead. She laughed.

  “You won’t even find out,” she said.

  “It’s a joke,” he told me, but he was plenty uneasy.

  She passed, Eritrea Perla, all her exams with perfect scores all the way through high school and then Trafalgar asked her what she wanted to study.

  “I want to be a gardener,” she said.

  “Kindergarten teacher?”

  “No! Gardener, gar-den-er, take care of gardens, cure trees that are sick, plant flowers, prune, cut the grass, grafting and layering, all that. Besides, I always liked playing with mud.”

  “Where did you get that silly idea?” asked the indignant father.

  “I read it in Kalpa Imperial, what of it? It says gardeners are wise people because they see the world from where one ought to, from below, in contact with the earth. And that they are always good humored. And the garden at this house is a mess and Atilio doesn’t even know how to water much less put each plant where it goes and I want strelitzias, lagerstroemias, and gypsophila.”

  There was a kind of family conflict, a generation gap and all the rest; arguments and tantrums, no, because Eritrea was never one for tantrums, but bribes and blackmail, yes. And, of course, the girl became a gardener. At the beginning, a little on her own, and later more seriously, taking the courses from the municipality with a doctorate offered at Juan’s place three times a week from nine to twelve. She worked in their own garden and in all the gardens in the neighborhood. Winter was especially cold that year.

  “Take me with you,” she said to him one horribly windy, cold day after having covered all the plants to protect them from frost.

  “Not even if I were crazy,” said Trafalgar.

  He took her.

  They went to Susakiiri-Do with a cargo of reels and reams and tons of paper of every kind, thickness, and color. Susakiiri-Do was a land of earthquakes and a few years back had had one of the strongest, so strong it almost finished off the world, and the aftermath had unleashed plagues and fires. The population had been recovering, but there were no libraries or bookstores left and there was nowhere to get wood to make paper, let alone rags. Memory had been preserved, because like a good, civilized people, that of Susakiiri-Do included some who knew the old books (and the new ones, too) word by word and sum by sum. But they had to be written down and for that reason Trafalgar went there punctually every six months taking the paper on which they could be reproduced.

  There the Maestre General, who was sort of like a president of the whole world, awaited them: Susakiiri-Do is a small and peaceful world. With one president, who is elected every I don’t remember how many years but it’s not very many, and a kind of Council of Elders and Notables, that’s enough. They housed Trafalgar and Eritrea in the presidential palace. He stayed at the clunker to supervise the unloading and she went sightseeing. They took her to see the parks, the narrow, peaceful river that crossed the city, the monuments to something or someone, the elegant streets, and the library-in-progress, which w
as in an enormous building but still had very few books, magazines, pamphlets, all those things a library has.

  In the evening, she was invited to dine with the Maestre and his wife. They ate agariostes with czor sauce (agariostes are a kind of rabbit smaller than ours and that like ours are a plague and so no one feels bad about eating them and they have a white, spicy, tender meat; the czor is like a carrot but green and much softer and with a flavor almost, almost like a leek) and for dessert cream of curí with zyminia seeds and they drank a rather sweet white wine that Eritrea didn’t like at all but she faked it as much as she could, which, it has to be said, is never much.

  In the middle of dessert, Eritrea jumped up and said, “Where is my father?”

  “There, there honey, he’ll come,” said the Maestre’s wife. “He must have been delayed with the unloading.”

  “He should have been here by now,” said Eritrea, and she ran out.

  The Maestre and his wife sat there astonished, their spoons in the air as if frozen and unable to go on eating.

  Without looking back and without caring a bit either what her hosts were doing or what they would think of her, Eritrea ran, ran, ran. She heard voices that she left behind her but she didn’t stop running.

  “Miss, listen miss!” someone shouted while she was running.

  But that someone was in a vehicle and caught up with her almost immediately.

  “Where are you going? It’s nighttime. This road doesn’t lead anywhere.”

  It was a great big man dressed in orange and green (on Susakiiri-Do everyone wears loud colors) and with a scarlet cap with black pompoms. Even as she kept running, she managed to see it was all very respectable.

  “Ah,” the man with the pompoms recognized her, “you’re the daughter of the merchant who sells us the paper. Come, climb in and I’ll take you.”