Under This Terrible Sun

by Under This Terrible Sun (retail) (epub)

  “And what sin is a baby born with?”

  “That of the parents. I sullied myself to have you two. I had to fornicate to give you life.”

  Danielito thought about his parents “fornicating.” His mother must have been, in those moments, maybe a little more lukewarm than the can of peas he had just taken from the freezer. He looked at the tap, which he hadn’t turned off. He watched the water falling. He imagined himself going down first through the drain and then toward the happy depths of the earth.

  Chapter 17

  “I really don’t know how they can stick something so far up her ass and still have it come out clean. That dick is, minimum, thirty centimeters. Twenty-eight, at least.”

  “Maybe they get enemas,” said Danielito. “With an enema everything comes out clean.”

  “Maybe… It’s impressive. But OK: if someone’s going to stick something like that in their ass, I don’t think they’re all that worried about getting an enema first. It’s almost a minor detail.”

  Danielito looked at the actress’s face; she was closing her eyes and shrieking. The camera went back to a close-up: the penis withdrew completely, explored the entrance, and went back in with the speed and precision of a stiff snake entering its den.

  “All the way in, huh,” said Duarte. “The elasticity of the human body is really something. The truth is that an enema is a joke next to the thing they’re sticking in her now, maybe you’re right.”

  “If I change the channel does it stop recording?”

  “No, the recorder is connected to the video, not the TV.”

  “Can I change it?”

  “Sure, go ahead, I wasn’t watching, I just have it on for background noise.”

  Danielito picked up the remote and changed channels. On CNN, some Japanese people had managed to take pictures of a live giant squid for the first time. The animal had attacked a lure that was attached to a camera at a thousand meters deep. The attack was so powerful that the camera, suspended from a buoy on the surface, was pulled six hundred meters further down. The squid had gotten hooked on the cable, and after struggling for almost an hour and a half, it managed to free itself, sacrificing a tentacle. The images showed a scarcely illuminated blue darkness, and the ghostlike creature never appeared entirely: some white tentacles came into the frame from one side, but the body they belonged to was never captured on film. On the Catholic channel, a priest and a professional-looking woman were sitting on either side of a desk. On a big television that was part of the set there was a sign: I HAVE A FAMILY MEMBER WITH BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER.

  “And what is the prevalent emotion the sufferer feels?” asked the priest.

  “Generally, they hate themselves. I try to make them understand that they have a good soul that’s just stuck inside a defective biological computer.”

  “Ha, ha, divine, what a bitch, just great,” laughed Duarte. He was sitting in front of his completely assembled and fully painted B-36. He had gone with the arctic color scheme of the US Strategic Air Command at the end of the fifties: aluminum grey, large red surface areas on the tail and wing tips, matte black around the engine exhaust pipes, and an anti-reflective green on the nose, in front of the pilot’s cabin. The model gave a pretty good idea of how large the original plane had been, and set on its powerful landing gear, it conveyed the somber unease of the thermonuclear destruction for which such a machine had been conceived. Or at least that’s how it seemed to Danielito; he had seen a documentary the month before, about the first years of the Cold War, and he had been fascinated by images of the B-36 patrols—they would fly along the borders of Russian and Chinese air space for up to twenty hours—and the runs to practice releasing the H-bomb, which was also dropped from these planes. In one hand Duarte held the sheet of self-adhesive insignias, he was studying the blueprints for information about the placement of the stickers and comparing it to the photos in the aviation encyclopedia. Danielito left the TV on the Catholic channel, and he asked Duarte if he had any Coca-Cola.

  “There’s a bottle in the fridge,” he said without lifting his eyes. “Bring me some too, with ice. And bring the jar of weed while you’re at it.”

  Danielito poured the sodas and rolled a joint, lit it, and handed it to Duarte, who took a couple of deep puffs with his eyes on the TV. He handed the joint to Danielito and got up. He went into the kitchen and came back with a half-full bowl of water. He started to cut out the stickers with a pair of scissors. Danielito changed to the movie channel and left it on Beverly Hills Cop II, which was about twenty minutes in. Duarte applied the stickers carefully, so that the thin plastic film would mold over the rivets and gaskets. Eddie Murphy was rescuing two children who were hanging from a kind of stopped Ferris wheel, when the phone rang. Duarte asked Danielito to answer. Danielito picked up the phone and exchanged a few phrases. He covered the mouthpiece and said to Duarte:

  “It’s for you. From Resistencia, it’s the NCO Club.”

  Duarte carefully put the plane down on the table and got up to answer. He spoke in a low voice; Danielito couldn’t understand what about, nor did he try very hard to hear.

  Chapter 18

  After giving notice at the real estate company that he was leaving the apartment, Cetarti called to cancel the cable, and to ask them to install service at his brother’s house. It was Tuesday, and they agreed to install it on Wednesday of the following week. The next day he got up at eleven, turned on the TV, and evaluated the things he was going to bring with him: the mattress, the TV. The refrigerator, no. The tank with the axolotl, yes. The wardrobe wouldn’t fit into his brother’s kitchen. He was going to put his clothes in a bag; the other things would fit in two or three cardboard boxes and a couple of black plastic bags. At noon Duarte called to let him know that the insurance money was ready.

  “The bad news is that the palm-greasing ended up taking ten grand, that leaves eleven each.”

  Cetarti said you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and asked him how the transfer would work.

  “Since you put your residence down as Córdoba, they’re going to send it to a National Bank there. Day after tomorrow. The thing is, obviously, they’re going to give it all to you, including my share and the gravy.”

  “Uh, and what do I do with the other money, should I transfer it to you?”

  Duarte laughed.

  “No, kid, I’m going to go with you to get it. I’ll come by car, and I’ll let you know when I’m there—it’ll be before noon, I’m sure.”

  After a few rote phrases, Cetarti hung up. He sat in a chair and stared at the ceiling. The silence made his ears ring. He thought how the next few days, until he got cable installed at his brother’s house, were going to be interminable.

  Chapter 19

  On Thursday at a quarter past eleven in the morning, Duarte called from a phone booth downtown to announce his arrival. They agreed to meet an hour later at the National Bank branch across from the Plaza San Martín. Cetarti arrived showered and wearing clean clothes (he knew that ten thousand pesos didn’t take up much space, so he brought a sack to carry the money in his inside pocket), smelling of soap and weed, and with very red eyes.

  “Oh ho, looks like we had a healthy breakfast,” said Duarte after shaking Cetarti’s hand in both his paws. “Did you bring the document?”

  They went into the bank, Duarte sat down in a chair to wait, and Cetarti, after waiting in line for half an hour in front of the cashier’s counter, got the money without any problems. Duarte suggested they go to the parking lot where his car was, five or six blocks away, to divide up the money. That was fine with Cetarti. The vehicle was a medium-sized van that had been fitted out like an ambulance, siren and all. Sitting in the front seat, they divided it: for Cetarti, two rolls of fifty hundred-peso bills, four for Duarte. The remaining roll Duarte separated into equal stacks of twenty-five bills, and then he bound them with rubber bands from the car’s glove box. He handed one of the halves to Cetarti. Cetarti put away his share
in the pocket of the bag he’d brought, and Duarte put his money in a supermarket bag that he stored away under the driver’s seat in a kind of false bottom.

  “You eaten?”

  “No.”

  “I’m hungry, I’m heading out in a while but I want to get something light to eat first. Lunch is on me.”

  Duarte ordered hake a la romana with mixed pureed vegetables and a Coca-Cola. The blend of food smells was doubly powerful for Cetarti since he had been eating sandwiches from kiosks for a long time, and it took him a while to decide. Finally he also ordered hake with pureed vegetables, because he thought that eating something heavy all of a sudden might affect him badly. When he picked up the knife to spread butter on a piece of bread, he noticed his hands were trembling a little. Duarte told him he looked a little worse for the wear. Cetarti told him he was on a diet. A strict diet, he emphasized.

  “That must be it,” said Duarte.

  They ate watching the TV, which had the volume turned down. For dessert they ordered cheese and membrillo, and after paying, Duarte asked if he’d come by car. Cetarti said he was on foot, that he’d sold his car. Duarte offered to bring him home, or wherever he was going. On the way out to the parking lot, and after thinking about it a little, Cetarti asked Duarte if he could ask for a favor.

  * * *

  Forty minutes later, they were on the way to the Hugo Wast neighborhood, with the mattress and TV in the back seat and the fish tank with the axolotl on Cetarti’s lap. Duarte drove slowly and avoided making any sudden moves, so the little salamander wouldn’t hit the glass walls. He had liked it upon seeing it; he’d stood looking at it for a while with a great deal of interest, and he was telling Cetarti that he had once read an article about axolotls in Reader’s Digest.

  “It’s not a salamander-salamander. It’s more like a salamander larva that doesn’t develop unless you force it to. Like a tadpole that lives its whole life without turning into a frog.”

  “The place where we’re going, there’s a bunch of old Reader’s Digests.”

  “Ah, Reader’s Digest is great. You find out about a lot of things, it’s a way to pick up general culture.”

  “When we get there you should go through them and take the ones you want. There are a lot, seriously.”

  They carried the things to the entrance. Cetarti opened the door and turned on the light, and Duarte whistled at the copious piles.

  “Whew. What’s all this.”

  “It’s all my brother’s.”

  Cetarti brought his things inside and carried them to the kitchen. Duarte nosed about among the mountains of stuff.

  “Looks like King Tut’s tomb, only with junk instead of treasure. And what was he, a vagrant pack rat?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t seen him in years. I didn’t even know he lived here.”

  “And how do you have the keys.”

  “You gave them to me. They were in the bag you gave me in Lapachito.”

  “And the whole house is like this?”

  “Yes, it’s this living room and two full bedrooms. And a garage, too, all like this.”

  “And where did he live?”

  “Here,” said Cetarti, turning on the kitchen light.

  Duarte looked with some interest at the furnishings, and he stopped in front of the little picture of the elephant.

  “Elephas maximus,” he read, nodding his head. “They’re really mean, these animals.”

  “No, the ones in India are tame. The mean ones are in Africa.”

  “In India there are elephants with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and they kill people. They knock at the door, and when someone opens, they hit them with their heads and kill them. I saw it on Animal Planet.”

  Cetarti didn’t believe that people would open the door for an elephant (How could they not realize it was an elephant knocking at the door? How could they not hear it?), but he didn’t want to argue.

  “Why post-traumatic stress?”

  “They suffered violence at the hands of humans. Their mothers were killed in front of them, things like that. Or they escaped from those farms where they’re trained to work. They end up sick in the head, and they’ll attack humans.”

  “In the zoo here there’s an elephant that was beaten a lot. They even electrocuted it.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah, it was donated to the zoo a few days ago. A circus left it with them because they couldn’t keep it, it was dying.”

  “And why did they electrocute it.”

  “To teach it to dance. In the circus, it was the dancing elephant. And to teach it to dance, they stood it on some sheets of metal and ran electricity through them.”

  “Ha ha, what sons of bitches. You gonna dance or you not gonna dance, fucking animal.”

  “And, well, they did it so much that finally the elephant never stopped moving its feet. I remembered when you said that about post-traumatic stress, because this animal can’t stop moving its feet.”

  “That’s rich.”

  Cetarti had left the fish tank on the counter. Duarte leaned over to look at the axolotl.

  “Man, why are you bringing it here? If you don’t want it, give it to me.”

  “I’m not going to abandon it, I’ll keep it. I’m leaving that apartment and moving here. I’ll save on rent.”

  “Ah, you’re moving. And this house belongs to your brother?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think he was renting it.”

  “Maybe he was squatting.”

  “Maybe. Or someone gave it to him.”

  “Could be. Man, this would be cheap, but it’s a little depressing, with all this junk. Can’t you afford something better? You’ve got dough now.”

  “I lost my job. I’m not going to spend that money on rent.”

  They spent a couple seconds in silence.

  “I’ll show you the magazines,” said Cetarti. He headed for the bathroom and turned on the light.

  “Here they are. You can have half of them, if you want.”

  “Great. I’ll take them.”

  He helped Duarte load the magazines into the car, which took several trips. Afterwards Duarte offered to bring him back to his house, but Cetarti declined, saying he would walk back. On the sidewalk, Duarte sniffed the air and asked what the disgusting smell was. Cetarti told him about the nearby slaughterhouse. He said it didn’t always smell, only when the wind was blowing; the other man laughed and said good thing.

  * * *

  After Duarte had gone, Cetarti lit a joint and nosed around in the piles. He found a box full of Muy Interesante magazines and the Spanish edition of Scientific American. On one of the covers of Muy Interesante there was a headline that caught his attention: CANTABRIAN TRENCHES: ON THE HUNT FOR GIANT SQUID! He separated that one, and some twenty more magazines. He put them into a plastic bag and brought them to his house, so he would have something to look at while he didn’t have TV.

  Chapter 20

  Wednesday at noon, while the technicians were installing service at his brother’s house, Cetarti taped two pages from Muy Interesante to the kitchen wall, beside the picture of the elephant.

  When the cable men left, he walked a couple of blocks to a corner shop. He ordered a hundred grams of ham and a hundred of salami and two hundred grams of cheese, and he also bought a bag of potato chips, a loaf of sliced bread, and a 1.5-liter bottle of Coca-Cola. He turned on the TV and ate lunch sitting on the mattress, which he had placed on top of his brother’s. He ate a ham and cheese sandwich, two salami and cheese sandwiches, all of the potato chips, and drank half the bottle of Coca-Cola. Then he watched a documentary on Australian crocodiles, which he didn’t even see half of because he fell asleep.

  He woke up at a quarter past two in the morning, with a slight headache. On TV there were some herons migrating over some African lakes. He took an aspirin, ate the rest of the cold cuts, and drank what was left of the Coca-Cola. Then he walked among the boxes and bags in the rooms, lit onl
y by the glow of the changing light from the TV in the kitchen, and he felt a slight sense of dread. He decided that the next day he would start cleaning.

  The pages that Cetarti taped to the kitchen wall.

  * * *

  Article text

  CANTABRIAN TRENCHES: ON THE HUNT FOR GIANT SQUID!

  An immature specimen of Architeuthis Dux beached in Kyoto. In spite of efforts to keep it alive, the animal died of anoxia a few hours later. It measured 6.20 meters long and weighed 220 kg.

  On October 20th the “Kraken Expedition” from Castro Urdiales will weigh anchor with a team of scientists from the National Oceanographic Institute and technicians from the TV production company Gaia Films. The expedition will set sail for the Carrandi trenches in the Cantabrian Sea, situated a few miles off the Spanish coast. They will remain there for two weeks, exploring the depths of the abyss, a habitat almost as unknown to man as the surface of Mars. They hope to be able to film the creature for the first time in its natural habitat, a creature that until now has never been seen alive: the largest invertebrate in the animal kingdom, known as the giant squid or Architeuthis Dux (its scientific name, meaning “prince of the old squids”). Little is known about the lives of these colossal cephalopods, which were already known to Norwegian fisherman in the 16th Century, when they were called Kraken. This is not the first attempt to catch them alive on film: two years ago, National Geographic fruitlessly spent millions of Euros trying to capture images of the mysterious giant. In that attempt, they placed harnesses with cameras on the backs of sperm whales (the only natural predators of the Architeuthis). The endeavor failed in part due to the impenetrable darkness of the abyss, and in part because the cetaceans freed themselves from the annoyance of the cameras by rubbing their backs together. This time, the deed will be attempted by placing three buoys that delimit a triangular area of the ocean. A camera will be suspended at a depth of between five and eight hundred meters. Fiber optic cables will connect the cameras to a machine in the buoy that will store the continuous images of the surroundings and, send them to on to the ship. A fourth camera, this one a video camera, will hang from the ship, as well as two remote-controlled submarines, similar to the ones that were used to explore the wreck of the Titanic. A living adult specimen of this species has never been captured. The largest specimen that has been preserved up to now measured ten meters long and weighed 492 kilos. However, the beaks that have been found in the vomit of dying sperm whales, and from the diameter of the suckers found on the skin of some cetaceans, it is speculated that they can reach up to thirty meters long and weigh over a ton.