“A B-36,” he said, after going over to look. “The Big Stick, the Peacemaker.”
The other man made a gesture of approval.
“Do you like planes?”
“No. But day before yesterday I saw a documentary about US nuclear deterrence in the Cold War, and they talked about this plane. The biggest bomber ever built. Four tons of nuclear cargo dispatched to anywhere in the world. Six piston engines.”
“Ah ha, very good,” said Duarte. “This version I’m building has ten engines, actually. They added four jet engines to the last one so it would fly a little faster, but all the same they were tortoises.”
“It’s going to be gigantic; what’s the scale.”
“1:72. I don’t think this plane comes in a larger scale. It’ll have a wingspan of almost a meter. I’ve already spent a couple of weeks putting the separate subcomponents together. And after I assemble those, I’ll still have to paint almost everything, so I have at least another couple of weeks still to go.”
There were several low buzzing sounds, and Duarte took his cell phone from a pocket. He pushed a button and greeted someone at the other end. He motioned for Cetarti to wait a moment, and he disappeared into the inner part of the house. Cetarti killed time looking through the titles of the videos piled up next to the TV: Monsters Of She Male Cock, Asses Wide Open 11, Anal Cum Swappers #14, Squirtin’ Vixens #3, Enema Nurses, Anal Grannies 25, Blowjob Ninjas, Transsexual Babysitters 02, Large Pussy Bonanza, Anal Slavery Cumpilation, Some Bitches Drink It All Up, Fetish Island #37, Extreme German Tortures 5.
Duarte came back after a couple minutes, apologizing for the interruption.
“So, I was talking to the people from the Air Force Group Insurance, and there won’t be any problems. But we’ll have to set aside part of the money to grease some palms, you know how it is.”
The thing was working out, but it would go like this: it was thirty-two thousand pesos—twelve for Duarte, twelve for Cetarti, and eight for the people who were managing the bureaucratic part with the group insurance and the air force. It sounded good to Cetarti; it was money that a day before he hadn’t planned to have, he couldn’t raise any objection.
“All set, then. But we have to write up a couple of documents first. They already gave me a sample. We’ll do them here on this machine.”
He pulled up a chair to the desk.
“Have a seat. I’m drinking tereré. Want some?”
Cetarti told him no, thanks, and asked him if he had any soda. Duarte brought him a glass and sat down at the computer. When he moved the mouse, the TV came to life, showing a close-up that it took Cetarti a second to recognize: the first thing he saw was a wristwatch moving rhythmically. Tenths of a second later he realized that the watch was around the wrist of a hand that was disappearing into a woman’s vagina. The hand would reappear every once in a while and then sink in again, as if looking for something it had lost.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Duarte, turning off the TV. “I’m digitizing my videos and I left the TV on.”
“No worries. It must be much more practical.”
“What must?”
“The digital format.”
“Of course, yes. Totally.”
Duarte opened a Word document.
“Look, the thing is, we’re going to claim that you have a disability, so they’ll give you the money, because otherwise it pretty much doesn’t belong to you. So we’ll claim that you’re hemiplegic or something like that, how’s that sound?”
“Are you sure nothing will happen?”
“These jokers do eleven of these things a year, don’t worry. They give you the medical certificates, everything.”
Duarte took down some personal information and they put together the two documents. Along with them, he printed out four forms he had downloaded from the group insurance website and had Cetarti fill them out. Cetarti signed everything.
“Well, that’s all for now, I guess it’ll take a couple of weeks, minimum. I’ll let you know how it’s going.”
Duarte put all the papers into an envelope and left it on the desk.
“Done. At two we have to go pick up the ashes. It’s twelve fifteen.”
He opened one of the drawers and took out big bag of weed. He rolled a joint and handed it to Cetarti for him to light.
“And all those videos are yours?”
“Yes, I’ve been collecting them over the years, and now I’m digitizing them because with this,” he pointed at the computer, “you get into bad habits, you know, and then it’s a pain in the ass to fast forward the videos. And what you can see or download from the internet is good, but these kinds of things here, you don’t see so much.”
“Yeah, I was looking at the titles.”
“Mind you, you can see some terrible things these days, sometimes much worse than what I have here. But there’s a certain way of doing things that’s fading away, that’s harder to find these days… It’s all getting more and more, I don’t know how to put it, cleaner, more professional. And that butts up against a certain other thing, the reason why a person watches porn, sometimes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s some pornography you don’t watch to jerk off, you watch it more out of curiosity about how far the human species will go.”
“…”
“Look at this one, for example. It’s from my collection, one I’ve digitized.”
He minimized the other windows and opened a video player to full screen.
“We’ll speed it up so you don’t get bored.”
The movie opened with an austere title card that read “Granny Anal Adventures—#14: Ilsa” and then it started to fade from black on to a room where the sofa and carpet were covered with protective sheets of plastic. In the middle of the room was a plastic pool. Then some eight or nine guys came in with an old woman, with white hair and saggy skin. All naked, they held the woman by a leash attached to collar around her neck. First they made her kneel down in the pool and they urinated copiously on her. The lighting was dim, like in old wedding videos, and it contrasted darkly with the comical appearance of the sped-up movements. First the woman was beaten, and then they brutally raped her anally. Then they all masturbated and ejaculated on her face, with her kneeling in the little pool with her mouth open. Close-ups of the woman’s mouth, full of empty sockets and dentures.
“This is too much, it’s disgusting,” said Cetarti.
“No, it’s not that at all. Now we’re getting to the part I was talking about.”
Duarte put the movie at normal speed. The guys shouted something at the old woman and she got onto her hands and knees. They started to massage her asshole with oil and little by little they stuck their fingers in. One of them put his whole fist in.
“It gets worse and worse. Poor woman.”
“Ah ha,” said Duarte. “And there’s still a bit more to come.”
The guy who had his fist inside the old woman’s ass took it out and showed it triumphantly to the camera. Her ass was open and devoid of the slightest bit of grace, an enormous hollow of meat with a view of the end of the digestive tract. Some of the other guys held the hollow open, separating it with their fingers, and they spit inside it.
“Enough, please. Turn it off. You can see the woman’s guts.”
“The elasticity of the human organism is a tremendous, tremendous thing.”
Duarte was smiling mischievously, yellowly. His eyes were very red, and Cetarti started to feel a little afraid.
“It’s almost over, only the end is left.”
“No, no, enough. Enough.”
“There’s only two minutes left.”
The wrist guy came back into the frame holding a baseball bat, and with the help of his companions he inserted some fifteen centimeters into the woman’s ass. The woman ended up on all fours with the bat sticking out of her. The guys gathered around her and applauded. The camera withdrew, and then faded to black. Duarte pressed “stop.”
/> “So, what do you think?”
“I think it’s terrible.”
“Ha, ha, that speaks well of you.”
“Great, glad to hear it.”
“This is what I was telling you is interesting, to see the limits of what a person is capable of doing or letting others do to them. That old woman, I picture her getting dressed with her ass all destroyed, taking the subway, buying chocolates for her grandchildren with the money she just earned by letting them do that to her…”
“That one doesn’t have any grandchildren. That’s an old woman who lives on the street, and they tossed her a couple coins to get her to do that.”
“Well, it’s still interesting. Then I imagine the old woman taking a bath after all that, thinking about the good luck she’s had, to get to be in that apartment and get a little hot water. Eating afterwards in one of those charity kitchens for beggars, chatting about who knows what with the other old people, talking about whatever silliness while she thinks about what they were doing to her…”
* * *
By two thirty Cetarti was already behind the wheel of the car, with the ashes of his mother and brother in the trunk, in individual plywood boxes. He drove unhurriedly though the town’s muddy streets, not looking for anything specific, but undecided about heading out on the highway. He felt like his head was several times larger than normal, and he was very hot. It took a lot of effort to stop and fill up on gas. The trip he had in front of him didn’t seem so bad, since it only meant sitting in a relatively static position, moving only to press the pedals, turn the steering wheel, at most to change the radio station. But getting out of the car, talking, making himself understood, paying, etc., it all seemed like an unworkable task that broke down into an almost endless series of muscular contractions, small positional decisions, mental operations of word choice and response analysis that exhausted him in advance. He stopped at a service station above the highway, at the exit to the town. He had to wait a couple minutes for the attendant to come over from a tire repair shop across the road. He was wearing rubber boots. Cetarti thought with disgust about the stench that must be brewing in those boots. While the tank was being filled, his attention was caught by a rock that was moving across the fine pillow of mud, about ten meters away. He walked over to it: it wasn’t a rock, it was a dun-colored beetle the size of a large mandarin, with a horn that looked like it belonged on a miniature rhinoceros. In the strange day and a half he’d had to spend in that place, it was the first thing that struck him as being real. He stretched out his hand to lift it up and look at it more closely.
“It’s poisonous, sir, don’t touch it,” said the attendant, and he squashed it with one stomp of his boot. He wiped the guts off the sole by dragging his foot over the ground.
“But there are no poisonous beetles,” Cetarti protested.
“Tell that to the guy over at the tire repair shop. He got bit by one smaller than this, and they had to amputate two fingers—they turned black on him in a matter of hours. By the time he went to the hospital there was nothing they could do. And you know what two fingers mean for a tire man…”
“I bet. First time I’ve heard of it.”
“Ugh, there’s an infestation of those bugs now, they’re everywhere, I don’t know where they come from. At least they’re big, so they’re easy to see, and they’re slow.”
“Could be they come down from the north.”
“Could be they’re Brazilian.”
He paid and got into the car. He switched on the radio and turned the car onto the highway, and for forty minutes he learned about the price of grains and oilseeds, emergency credits for agriculture, and veterinary problems. Then he changed it to the National Radio station, which was playing classical music. He started to feel better. His muscles relaxed a little and his face stopped burning. As the afternoon grew darker, the visual field shrunk down to the twin cones lit up by the car’s headlights, that is, the continuous succession of white stripes, and every once in a while some wild animal crossing the road. The soft music was accompanied by the arrhythmic litany of small explosions as insects hit the windshield. Cetarti analyzed those tenths of seconds between when the insect entered the cone of light and when it smashed against the glass. He noticed that the trajectory of the insects as they came closer was visible in the air, an irregular curve of diffuse light.
He got to his house around two in the morning. The only change he noticed, after a brief inspection, was that the orange-colored Carassius fish were floating belly up in the fish tank.
Chapter 7
In the afternoon, Danielito met up with his mother at his father’s house to help her carry the furniture out to the yard. They took the sofa and curtains, both covered in blood and hair, out of the living room. Danielito thought that would be it, but then his mother told him to carry out the dining room set and the two sideboards. In the yard, she soaked the sofa and the curtains with kerosene and then she asked Danielito to help her put the sideboards on top. Danielito told her that if she was going to burn everything, it would be better to put the sideboards on the bottom, the sofa in the middle and the table on top, so the sofa would have kindling both above and below. They built the basic structure of the pyre like that. His mother doused it all with plenty of kerosene, and lit it with a wick made out of newspaper. The flames quickly overtook the furniture.
“Bring out the things from the bedroom,” said his mother, illuminated by the bonfire.
“What things.”
“The bed, the night tables, the clothes, everything. I’ll keep watch so the fire doesn’t go down.”
She emptied the can of kerosene onto the flames and went to get another one. Danielito saw that next to the wall there were three more cans.
“I wanted to keep the grey overcoat.”
His mother shook her head.
“We’re going to burn everything.”
Danielito went to the bedroom. First he took the night table, from which his father’s shoes were protruding. He went through the drawer. There were the gun and ammunition. He checked the clip; it was full. There was no bullet in the chamber. He put the pistol in his belt and left the box of ammunition on the floor. He shuffled some papers, found a civilian pilot’s brevet, and put it in his pocket. He saw a condom wrapper and his stomach turned. He closed the drawer and carried the table out to the yard. He did the same with the nightstand that had belonged to his father’s final lover, but he didn’t go through it. He took the bed apart, which was easy because it was assembled with joints instead of screws. As he came and went, his mother stayed next to the fire, staring into the flames.
“The bedroom’s done.”
“Bring the table and chairs from the kitchen, too.”
That finished off all the furniture in the house.
“Should I bring the freezer and the TV, too?”
“No, I’ll sell those with the house, so I can charge a little more for it.”
Night was beginning to fall and they were still burning furniture. At eight thirty he got a text message from Duarte’s phone:
WAITING FOR YOU T HOUSE WHAT TIME YOU COMING
Danielito answered that he figured it would be eleven thirty. Duarte responded:
OK GOTTA MOVE I’M ON MY WAY
Danielito got to the house at a quarter to ten. The TV was on Animal Planet, a program about intelligence in cephalopods that he had already seen (he read the subtitles: “An octopus can learn to go through a maze surprisingly quickly.”) and the volume was turned up very loud, but no one was watching. He went to the basement door, which was open. Without making any noise he went down a couple of steps into the room, and from there he could see Duarte, who was taking photos of the boy. He had untied the boy’s hands so he could put handcuffs on them, and he had left his legs free so he could open them. Danielito closed the door to the basement and went to bathe. His face was burning from being close to the fire. He changed his clothes, put on Bermuda shorts, sandals, and a loose-fitting shirt
. He brewed some tereré and sat down in front of the TV. He lowered the volume until it was bearable and changed it to a fishing and hunting show. Five minutes later Duarte appeared, surprised at seeing Danielito.
“We finished early.”
“And how was the family reunion?”
Danielito told him it was fine. Duarte went to the kitchen and brought back a shopping bag filled with rolls of bills. He took out six fat rolls of fifties and eight of hundreds and put them on the sofa next to Danielito. Danielito took five fifties, put them in his shirt pocket, and took the rest to his room.
“I’ll get the kid ready and we’ll leave in a bit,” said Duarte.
* * *
Duarte stuck his head in again twenty minutes later and told him everything was ready. First they brought the wheelchair and unfolded it next to the basement door. Then they went down to get the boy. Duarte had cleaned him with the towels and dressed him. Since he was drugged the boy didn’t resist, but he was still a dead weight that was difficult to maneuver, and there was a lot of swearing as they brought him upstairs. Duarte tied him to the chair with packing tape to keep him stable: he affixed each extremity separately, and he also wrapped tape around his chest so the boy would stay upright. They pushed the chair to the garage and lifted it into a van that had been fitted out as an ambulance. Once it was inside, they stabilized the chair with wooden wedges.
“Seems unbelievable the parents would pay to get this back in their house,” said Duarte. “It’s biologically inexplicable. In Sparta, they’d throw kids like this off a cliff as soon as they were born. And that was better. They didn’t suffer. Did you smoke just now?”
“No.”
“Then I’m going to ask you to drive. I’m kinda tired, I drove a ton today.”
Danielito told him that was fine.
Under This Terrible Sun Page 3
