August

by Romina Paula

  The Counting Crows CD showed up. I mean, I guess it must have been there the whole time, but I just found it. It must have fallen behind something or whatever, because I’d already looked through your CD collection and hadn’t spotted it, and then suddenly, out of the blue, there it just was. Your mom must have been tidying up in here the other day, and then what do you know but I’m looking for something to listen to, and there I spot it, spot its yellow spine, just as though it always had been sitting there. I play “Round Here.” I can’t believe it, from all the way back then. I remember that woman from the video, walking with a suitcase, in a city at first and then on this esplanade, I remember that the best, that esplanade like a desert. I don’t remember exactly if that was where this girl was, I think so, she had this dress on, and then at some point she was falling someplace. Falling into water? I don’t fully remember, I do know the overall sense of it was of total desolation. She was devastated, she was a lunatic, you had to love her for it. Was there a guy there too? I don’t know why I feel like I remember a guy wearing a suit, I think it was a brown suit, but honestly I really couldn’t say if he was there or not, wearing a suit, in any case the song takes me back to this desolate sensation of a man in a brown suit in a vacant lot or on a salt flat, and he was so inadequate, uncomfortable, and out of place. I listened to it a few times in a row, Ali watching me cry like a moron, poor thing, until finally she came and sat on my lap. Then it got worse. I pet her very vehemently; at the third drop that plopped onto her back she decided to move on to a safer place. Her indifference did me good, it sort of snapped me out of my melancholy. You would have snapped at me if you had been here, told me that the Counting Crows are lame and that you’d stopped listening to them in nineteen ninety-five. Which is fine/fair. All I can say to that is that it’s easy to refuse to be sad when you’re only planning on living for such a short amount of time.

  12.

  Families that eat some of their members. Every so often there’s a case like that: some family that eats one of its members. This time it’s in Britain. In some suburb. So like a functional family with everything set up/all settled, perhaps a tad over-numerous: mother, father, and eleven children. One of them, the twenty-one-year-old, is married to a twenty-year-old, Rachel, who had just given birth to their second child. Their last name was Huchon. At some point she vanishes, from the world, from her family. The Huchons say she ran away, that she just left their household. But that’s not true, they keep her locked up there. They torture her. They beat her with a baseball bat, they burn her with cigarettes, and who knows how many other things we’ll never know because although her body will divulge some information, it is scant, and she herself can’t talk now. This happens in March. They find her, or more precisely, they find a body, some time later on the grounds of an abbey. At first not only can they not tell that it’s Rachel but also they can’t even tell that it was female, such was the degree of decomposition. Oh, and it was wrapped up in a carpet. And then the series of cover-ups one would expect given it’s a family and how blood runs thicker. This slows down the investigation, which nonetheless arrives at its conclusion, verdicts being reached. The most severely punished are to be the parents, her parents-in-law. Her husband, too, some of her brothers-in-law, and, a little lighter, some of the other wives, too, for covering up or slowing down the investigation, I can’t remember all the details. But think of all the things Rachel won’t ever be able to tell us. Of the teeny-tiny amount her decomposed body was able to tell and everything else it kept quiet. Why had the family chosen her, her and her alone, as their martyr, after she’d given them two children. Had they all been equally sadistic? Had her husband protected her or been the overseer of her torments? Could she have run away or gotten help before the final absolute imprisonment? Was she, in fact, absolutely imprisoned? Or just unable to escape? What in her made her succumb to that family and not be able to save herself? The story of those who carry these things out, who perform these acts, who take things all that way. Eat another person to keep going. And so as not to have to eat the meat of their own flesh and blood, they go for the next best thing. Poor Rachel, rotting away while still alive, poor Rachel. Like hamsters, like hamsters eating their own offspring, that same thing, eating your own flesh, feeding off oneself, being/becoming one’s own sustenance.

  13.

  Ceremony, barbecue, so it went. First the ceremony, then the meal.

  On the bridge it was cold like you wouldn’t believe. I didn’t mind that, though, that factor, the wind. Because it kept everything short and to the point, making the longer thing the meal. Which was nice. Your dad didn’t grill this time, we went out to a grill so that nobody would have to work, that’s what they said, so that your mom wouldn’t have to wash any dishes. So we went to the one on the boulevard, which wasn’t that good, apparently they have a new owner now, but that didn’t really matter. Your sister was there, although as soon as she was finished—she didn’t eat much—she went ahead and left; and my dad came too, but by himself. I didn’t know he was going to be there, apparently your mom had invited him, a surprise of sorts, I’m not quite sure for whom. Me, I guess. I got sort of slammed from all sides today, although none of it could take me down. I didn’t shed a single tear, even if I would have liked to. It did affect me, I won’t deny that, especially there on the bridge, since the launch thing was my doing, scattering you into a free fall, and I had that image in my head of that Chinese girl falling in among the clouds, I couldn’t help but feel things, but I guess I felt so much I didn’t cry. I guess it would have been cheesy to cry, or like, redundant. Or like I suggest the ceremony and then collapse, around your parents—it wouldn’t have looked right. It was more of an internal commotion, being moved inside, as though something, your ashes, was plunging down while falling, as though falling inside me, as well, as though I had fallen backwards into my own depths, or something, with no gravity. That persisted awhile, that sensation, that of falling inside myself and continuing to fall, while the thing with the ashes couldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds, that’s what I mean, your vanishing act, which just took a couple of seconds to complete. One two three and they were gone, and you couldn’t distinguish a single particle of anything, of that, that matter, you. No one said anything, we didn’t move during the descent or the evaporation or I guess I don’t know what to call it, during the thing, and then we stayed a little longer just like that, the wind was awful, sharp, it sliced into your neck, but I was wearing a hood. Until your sister said we had to go, that she was freezing to death, and we got into the car, the four of us and your grandma, who didn’t say anything at any point. I don’t think she fully understood what all was going on. Can’t blame her. And from there we went to the restaurant. My dad was dressed up, with a few days’ worth of facial hair, but very well-groomed. Clothes ironed and painstakingly coordinated, a senior ladies’ man. The Carmen factor. He barely drank any wine and talked a lot with your parents, about various things, other things. I didn’t have much to say, I really didn’t, and nobody asked me much of anything either. I was such a kid in that context, with all those grown-ups. Which allowed me to be quiet, to not have an opinion about anything awhile, I probably could have even fallen asleep with my head on the table or sprawled out over some chairs and nobody would have even batted an eyelash. As a matter of fact I was on the verge of doing so, that’s how much I was feeling the kid thing. Then we took your grandma to her nursing home, and she kept on wanting to know where she was going, poor thing, that was a difficult part of the day, with her wanting to know if we were going back to her house or where, and your dad saying, no, Mom, don’t you remember, you’re living in a home now, with Flavia, the nurse, who’s eagerly expecting you, remember the nurse you like so much, who makes you laugh, and your grandmother saying nothing, very absorbed, not understanding what she was being told, sticking her hand in her purse to fish around for the keys to the house she no longer has. I stayed silent on the drive back too, all of us we
re silent, we dropped my dad at his house, and I lay down to sleep awhile, still fully dressed, here in your bed, I couldn’t take any more, I didn’t want to think, I really just didn’t want to keep thinking. I had very turbulent dreams, the kind you have during a nap sometimes. I was awakened by nightfall.

  When I got up I felt an overwhelming anguish, unbearable, so bad I couldn’t see straight. Sunday nights are sufficiently intolerable in themselves, even when you sense them coming, as night approaches; but having the bad luck to wake up in the middle of a Sunday evening that’s already in full swing, already going on, with night just there—there’s nothing that compares with that. I stayed seated on the edge of the bed for a few seconds or minutes, not comprehending what time it was. I saw that the clock said seven thirty, but I didn’t know if it was morning or night, I couldn’t figure out when I’d fallen asleep in the end. The light from outside didn’t really help me either, the semidarkness could have corresponded to the beginning of the day just as much as to its end. What settled it was Ali: Ali wasn’t there, and then she came in, just then, coming right into the middle of my mental fog and rubbing up against me, very awake, very alert. In the mornings she wakes up with me, so I figured it must be night. So it was still—ugh—the same day. Still the twenty-eighth of August. I went to the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, verified that I was overheated and that I had a big crease from the blanket running down my left cheek. My hair was matted and sticking straight up. I tried to flatten it with a little water, brushed my teeth, put my jacket on, and went out to Vanina’s bar.

  My life is not what one would term heroic.

  14.

  Disgusting, he tells me. That as early as the afternoon he’d smelled this dog smell coming from the kitchen, this wet-dog smell, but that he’d been doing something and for some bizarre reason he hadn’t wanted to look into it. But it turns out dog smells don’t just disappear. And it also wasn’t just an issue of humidity, of humidity in the room. So later, at night, it offends again. He’s washing the dishes, and now the stench becomes unbearable, out of the question that it’s in his head. So he works up the necessary courage and gets going on it finally. He opens up the little doors to look under the sink; the smell gets stronger. It reeks, there’s no getting around that. He sees the rag we use to wipe the floor off, which we had left there to plug a leak. He lifts it up. First grim finding: under the cloth there’s a tiny cemetery plot of mouse poop. Clearly the mouse taking advantage of the warmth and darkness of the rag, like it’s a burrow. There’s something that’s around here, then. So: he starts to take containers and platters and what have you out from under the sink, and lo and behold, grim finding number two: the rim of one of the serving dishes—it’s a blue one, made of glass, I know exactly which—offers up this sticky mess comprised essentially of hair and something similar to skin. Belonging to a mouse. A hodgepodge of hair stuck to the glass with something that looked a little bit like fishing bait. My stomach turns. But there’s no going back now, the dog smell has completely taken over. Now is the time to face the music. So: the entire lower part of the cabinet is clear (if we prefer not to think about the poop, of course, and let’s just say we do prefer that), and the coast seems to be clear, at least to the naked eye. He takes the broom and sweeps under the base or whatever, a place unreachable by the eye aforementioned, and that’s when he feels something. It reaches him through the plastic bristles, the wooden handle, and from there to his hands, the sense of a mass, the contact of the broom with something that isn’t dust or dirt, something with a weight, that budges. He pushes/sweeps his find up and out from under the sink, all the way out to where he can see it, and there it is, in this order: first a tail, then a disintegrated body (he describes this disintegration in some detail), and finally a disgusting, disgusting little mouse head. I’m the one who says disgusting here, it’s just I can imagine it. Ramiro, for his part, and as repulsive as he also found it, did seem happy to have bested the mouse in their little battle, to have regained his jurisdiction over his kitchen, our kitchen, to have conquered once again the rodent’s space. The state of the creature according to its executioner was (I’m sorry to be so exhaustive, but I needed to know, needed to know what fate had met that being I’d shared my living quarters with for this indeterminate amount of time): ruptured. Apparently the poison, that toxic fuchsia fluid, so/too reminiscent of little anise candies, had caused an implosion in the small stomach of the animal, and detonated its organism from outside in. Apparently it wasn’t quite a rat, but nor did it have the skimpiness of a vesper mouse: it was exactly a mouse, somewhere between brown and green, according to Ramiro; a standard mouse, I add, and Ramiro says yes, triumphant. Disgusting. Now I learn, because your mother tells me, that apparently there are other poisons less aggressive to the beholder and that—instead of rupturing the animal—they dry it out, literally, from the inside, leaving it stiff, as though desiccated. So, even if it takes you a while to find it, it doesn’t rot on you, and you won’t find out about it based on smell. This mouse, our mouse, was generous and let itself be found in a very early phase of its decomposition process. Fortunately I was far away from that death, from the grim finale of that inhabitant of our apartment. Meanwhile Corso, the cat, has fully settled in at this point. It goes without saying that it refused until the very end to get its paws dirty, not to mention its claws, its nose, choosing to keep its distance, the greatest distance possible from the little interloper. And yet Corso has his own theme song now, recounting his comings and goings (the chorus of which goes, Corso, Corso, / come up onto my torso. / Come up and let your hair down. / Come on and then you get down. / And don’t you bite me, / don’t you bite me. / Please will you let me simply play guitar, / Corso, Corso. / Come up onto my torso), an ode to the pacifist/draft-dodging cat. Such is Corso. Come up onto my torso.

  15.

  I go to Vani’s bar, the bar she set up with her fancy new boyfriend. Your mom offered me your sister’s bike when I left, but I didn’t want it because I didn’t want to get there quickly, that was the whole point. Besides, I was half-asleep and kind of numb and afraid of falling over. It’s freezing out, of course, but it does me good, right now it does me good. I walk quickly, hiding my face clear up to my nose in the high neck of your jacket. I put my hands in the pockets and find a bus ticket. It must be yours, it’s from nineteen ninety-six. A ticket from a trip to Trevelin. I get so depressed with these very short days, fourteen fucking hours of darkness, so much, so much night. With this much darkness you’d have to be Swedish or Canadian or something in order to get anything done, to want to do anything regardless, to feel like going out. All I want to do in this type of cold with this eternal nighttime is sleep or drink wine. Sleep and drink wine. But nothing else. Sleep during the day and drink wine at night. Or the other way around. That’s all I’d do. That and snuggling up with someone, of course, which pairs well with both wine and being in bed. Drinking, sleep, and procreation, on with the human race.

  From the corner I see a lit-up sign for a beer brand with this orangish reflection on the sidewalk. There are a couple of bikes at the door. Anybody in Esquel who’s still awake—and alive—is here. I walk in, and the first thing that hits me is they’re playing the Police. The Police, can you believe that? I mean, come on. I unzip your jacket, and the warmth of the bar unfreezes my face. It feels hot, I must be bright red. The Police. I glance around quickly, but I don’t see him, don’t detect him, and there aren’t that many people after all. There is a group of kids playing pool in the back. They’re younger, I’d probably know who they were if they told me their last names, they must all be younger siblings of people I know, kids I stopped seeing when they were still in elementary school and that are now adults, the boys among them even casting meaningful looks in my direction. So funny. Then there are a few couples and several drunks falling asleep on their barstools. Based on that I assume they must have been here for a while. The bar’s not bad, is my impression. And there, serving as waitress
and bartender, is Vanina. She’s happy to see me and she comes out from behind the bar and comes up to give me a hug. I think she must be a little drunk, she must take Sundays to relax, since they don’t open again until Thursday. She kind of crushes me with her hug and then says, almost shouting, as though the volume of the music required it, even though it’s really not that loud, but she more or less yells and enunciates very clearly how awesome it is I came, how she’s going to introduce me to her husband and that—here the level of expression in her face rises, while the volume goes down—she gesticulates, as though my hearing is impaired, he’s here, she says, and I say, who, who’s here. Julián, he’s in the bathroom. On his own, she says. I knew it, I knew this place was bad news/did not bode well, did I not? I didn’t even get to say if it was a big deal for me or not because she did it for me, investing the news with such significance that I couldn’t help but get nervous, very nervous. I have to go to the bathroom, my bathroom, the women’s restroom. I wrest my arm away from her and tell her I’ll be back, I’ll be right back, I tell her, and I torpedo towards the ladies’ room. Fortunately—this had not gone unnoticed by me when I came in, and hence my strategy—the different bathrooms are at opposite ends of the bar. I don’t want to be too scatological, I’ll just say my nerves had done their damage, although I wouldn’t want to blame it all on Julián, I was also coming up on the end of an incredibly long day, so I presume my body’s rather aggressive reaction just then was provoked by the whole thing. I thought I was going to faint, I thought I wasn’t going to overcome the bathroom/toilet incident. But I did, after a while, of course, and not before a worried Vanina came in to ask me if I was okay, if I needed anything, and I told her no, that everything was fine, that I guessed I had just eaten something that hadn’t agreed with me, and then I added the thing about the long day, kind of to distract her, saying, too, how—on top of everything—I’d also just gotten my period. Which is true, as if the rest were not enough, I got my period, despite the fact that it was about a week too soon, and I’m normally pretty regular. Or I used to be.