August

by Romina Paula

  30.

  A sadness dream, without ambitions, that’s what it is: a dream with no ambitions. A recurring dream, then, strange, because it has continuity. In time. Like a kind of recurrence that nonetheless advances in time. At some point, in some other unconscious moment, I cut a boy into pieces, it didn’t matter that much who, some kid from school, from a lab, something along those lines. At some point in a previous dream, another—I remember neither how nor why at this point—I killed him and cut him up into pieces. Now and since that time—here we have the sense of continuity—I carry him in a bag. In a sack. Like a burlap sack, one like that. At this point it reeks, that’s the primary problem. I need urgently to get rid of it. I’m not worried about the death of the boy, I’m not upset about the crime in itself, there is no guilt. What does terrify me is having in my hands the element of the crime, the cadaver. In the dream, then, and constantly, I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of it. I do think the best option would be to burn it, but I can’t find a way to do that. So I think of sinking it somewhere, but I also can’t think where, and I also am afraid it will float back up again somehow. On this occasion I’m traveling by car with the bag, someone is driving me, it’s odd, my sense is that the driver is death itself. But they’re not. I’m afraid the smell will be noticed. I get dropped off at school, it’s a different building, of course, more rural, the dream one. I get dropped off. There are a lot of people around. All carrying things. I’m very upset. What deeply terrifies me is that I’ll get found out and taken to jail. That’s what scares me: losing my liberty, that above all, losing my liberty. Having perpetrated a crime doesn’t strike me as all that problematic, being found out and put in prison does. I deeply fear this; I fear that on the bag and on the pieces of the dead boy they’ll find my fingerprints. I leave the bag in the hallway along with others, other bags of other students, bags, things, and I move away. When I go back, later, the bag isn’t there. None of the others are, either. I’m afraid. I can’t figure out if the other students took it or if the trash people came by. I’m afraid. I think how if anyone came across the remains the path to me would be very direct.

  I wake up.

  Babasónicos are playing, it is what it is. I can’t connect much with that now, not as much as I’d like. Around here, a little ways up, there’s a place with a tree, a tree by itself, very odd. Let’s eat there, he says. I say okay, he asks if I’m okay. Are you okay? he asks, I lie and say I am. The sun is very intense over our heads, on the roof of the truck. I took off your jacket some time ago. I like this heat, the heat of the sun. I see, then, a few feet ahead of us, that tree. Julián points there, to our right. He slows down, and we get a few feet off the highway, on the side of the road, because there isn’t any shoulder. We roll up in the truck to the tree, which is, or at least at this moment, rather scrawny. But it’s also really quite pretty, quite nice to see, kind of curvy on one side and with strange foliage on the other, as though split in two. A little like the baobabs from The Little Prince. A little bit like that. I don’t know if the image I have in my head is from the book’s illustrations, from what I imagined, or from the movie, but what I know about baobabs, what I recollect of them, resembles this. Juli tells me he doesn’t remember at all. I say, did you not read The Little Prince? and he says yes, but I can’t remember everything, hon. Hon, he says, how sweet, how anachronistic. That nevertheless he does remember very well the elephant that gets inside the boa constrictor, that the rest, the adults, saw as a hat while in reality it was something else: a snake that had gobbled up an elephant, a boa constrictor with an elephant inside it. Oh, yeah, I loved that part too, but even more, the thing that I loved even more than that or anything was the part where the boy asks the aviator to draw him a little lamb, or a little sheep, and the aviator tried but kept failing, the Prince wasn’t satisfied until the guy sucked it up and drew him a box, a cardboard box, with holes in it and told him how inside that box was his sheep, and then the boy was happy because he could imagine it however he felt like. And this spot, our picnic spot, was something in between the baobabs and the aviator’s desert, that place with dunes, where the aviator drew the boy the little box. So we eat beside the truck/plane. It’s cold here, even though the sun is beating down. In the air there’s something cutting, a cold, in wind form, not that strong, because it’s noonish, but persistent, meaning I zip up your jacket and everything. And the sun is very welcome. I think that the dryness of our surroundings, the sharpness, the inclemency of the sun, and, of course, the sandwiches do away with my melancholy. The steppe, in a couple of seconds, dissipates my sadness, evaporates it, as though it had dried it out, like a raisin, me a raisin girl of sorts. We eat standing up next to the truck, we move around as we eat, standing still would be freezing. I like this place, I compliment my traveling companion on his choice. Good, he mutters at the end of a big bite of sandwich, I always saw it from the road, one time I stopped to take a picture, of the tree, but it was late, and I couldn’t take the wind. So really this is the first time I’ve stopped. How’d the picture turn out? I ask him. I don’t know, I haven’t developed it yet, he says, that’s right, I say, you never develop anything, what do you take them for, it’s amazing you still feel like taking pictures. These sandwiches are good, he says. Thanks, I say. There’s something déjà vu, he explains, about this place, it always gave me that impression, since I discovered the tree, since the first time I saw it: it gave me this sense that it was a place I had already been to, that I had already encountered. But do you always go by here? I interrupt him. Yeah, he says, but he’d never paid attention before, and then one day he saw it, as though for the first time, and he could have sworn he’d never seen it before, that this tree hadn’t been here. There. So it was that, that going by there, by here, ever since that time, had given him the strangest sensation, of belonging, in a strange way, of this being his. I say that maybe it’s what I’ve been saying, that it’s a place that resembles others, that makes you think back to other places and that perhaps because of that he thinks he recognizes something he doesn’t really. Because, besides, even if he thinks he hasn’t seen it before he always used to go by here, so he probably already had that tree in his retina, even if it hadn’t made it to his consciousness or if he hadn’t seen it voluntarily. I don’t know, that could be, is what he says to me, but that he prefers to think it’s something mystical, more his, more personal; that maybe that, this place, has a special energy or something, some significance. Yes, that could be, too. In fact it’s already quite odd that the two of us are here in this moment, no? Don’t you think? I guess so, he says, although I imagined it a thousand times. Are you for real? I ask him, as a figure of speech, and he says yes, and doesn’t look at me. He’s absorbed, he’s looking ahead and chewing another sandwich. That’s cool, I say, because I don’t know what to say and then right away I realize it isn’t clear whether I mean the fact that he imagined me in this place we’re calling mystical or just the sandwich, so I try to clarify a little bit: I like this place, I say, it brings to mind all good things; the things, the images it evokes are good, as desolate as it is, this place.

  31.

  We’ve got water, plenty. We drink. The landscape makes us thirsty. The idea that there’s no water here, that there isn’t, that there might not be. It’s really hard for me to picture how I’ll be supposed to feel when I get back to Buenos Aires, when I’m there again. Back in the desert, by the side of the truck, I felt, in reality, so far from everything. Because we were, because we are. From here, the city’s major streets like Callao and Corrientes seem somewhat unreal, in fact impossible, a hallucination. I don’t want to go home, even if I don’t know what my home is, or maybe precisely because of this. Communicating in words, trying, attempting to communicate in words, by means of them. My stomach is a little upset, probably from all the mate. And the car. Being on the road this long makes me carsick, even if it’s in a truck. Even if I’m enjoying it. Even still, it makes me carsick. Meaning there isn�
��t even any question of reading. I can’t read in a car. I wouldn’t want to. I’d rather look out the window; there’s nothing in the world that could make me want to miss what’s happening out there. I hate not being able to read in motion. To read you have to be still, which is what I don’t like about it. Or is reading in a vehicle reading in motion? I, for example, would love to be able to ride a bicycle and read or walk and read, but you can’t. That’s the whole thing: you read or you look, you can’t do both. It’s different if someone’s reading to you. Traveling by car and having someone read to you . . . Although not that either, it’s too much information, sooner or later I’d get distracted, I couldn’t pay attention to what was being read to me, try to imagine it, and, at the same time, settle on the landscape or whatever it was that was out there, on the other side of the glass.

  Today, after we ate, I fell asleep for quite a while, against the window. That, on the other hand, is something I can do without the slightest difficulty: fall asleep wherever. Like cats, like Ali. Some might say I’m a narcoleptic. Or that I’m depressed. It seemed a shame to me that that picnic had to end, but at a certain point the wind really picked up, and you couldn’t be outside anymore, and besides, we had to keep going to make it to Trelew before nightfall, and so Juli could make his delivery. I feel a little scammed, I don’t know why in my head the trip was going to be so much longer, probably because I made the same trip as a kid, and by bus, a pretty beat-up bus at that. I say we should keep going and spend the night in Madryn. Juli doesn’t want to do that, he says that in Trelew there are more options, and they’re cheaper, and that he doesn’t have much interest in driving anymore, that he wants to have a real meal and a shower as soon as possible. That we can go to Madryn tomorrow, that he’ll take me. We drive around the city for a little while until Juli comes across the exact address. I didn’t remember that Trelew was like this. From the highway you access the city via a hill with dirt roads and little tiny houses, roads with puddles and stray dogs. Then, at some point, a few blocks in, the asphalt starts, and the city, the stores, little by little. Little businesses, very specific, very precise, staffed by their owners, or just about. We go around the square, there are quite a few people, quite a few people everywhere, in cars, on foot, on bikes, a lot of people. The plaza is pretty, Independencia I think I make out on a sign as we drive by, and then he turns right, we go two blocks further, and he stops in front of a shed/office. Juli gets out, I decide to wait for him in the car or next to the car. I put on your jacket and get out. It’s really, really cold. The sun is very low, and there’s nothing left now of its warmth. Nothing. I jump up and down a couple of times to warm myself up, to loosen up. I walk a little, exhale, release a white vapor. I clap, can’t feel my hands, and a little dog comes up and snaps at me, from behind some bars, shrill, and it scares me. I walk down to the end of the block. The little houses are low, fairly similar to one another, except for the odd huge ranch-style here and there, super new and super ugly, those stand out. Or the ranch-style duplexes, there are also a few of those, brick facades, reflective glass, and tall bars painted black. Against what are they entrenching themselves, from what are they excluding themselves? It doesn’t look like a particularly Patagonian set, with those bars, and those bricks, and those square houses that can do nothing to evade the wind. Why, in Patagonia, don’t they build oval houses, or even round ones, invincible ones? No, ranch-style or tiny squares, in the Spanish style, circa eighteen ten, with railings and all, sheer nonsense; ranch-style houses with brick facades that—where do they even fire them? And why? With all the rock around. It is at the very least odd. I start back for the truck, the dog starts barking at me again, Julián isn’t coming yet. I walk the other way, I can’t stand still, and the cabin of the truck smells gross, like food, like breathing, like us. On the opposite corner, on a rectangle of grass, there’s a small altar, a monolith of—once more—brick facade and concrete, painted white. It has two little glass doors and inside, a virgin. The typical image of the virgin, with a blue coat over a white dress, a tiara, hands together, smiling. The neighborhood altar is very tidy: a wreath of artificial flowers in colors faded by the sun, some candles, extinguished, and nothing more, no little medals or cards or coins or clothes, nothing. A tidy, cleared-off virgin. I spin around: a two-story house sits on the corner and on its wall graffiti saying Guido genius, Condo Rock, too, and a few more things, but in that skater-style writing I can’t read. I wonder if the owner of the house with these scrawlings is at the same time the altar’s caretaker. I find it funny, the coexistence of the little virgin, so tidy, with the graffiti. I keep looking at her awhile. It makes me feel something, generates something: it’s so strange the place she ended up in. And nobody ever broke the glass that encases her, even though it’d be so easy. There she is, so smug, so erect, so healthy, placid; I look at this Mary, and I like her now, I like the way she looks back, her tranquility, her blue hood, and her beauty on this little corner, so far from everything, so near. I put my hands together in an arch, look into her eyes and lower my head, one, two, three times, like a Japanese salutation while I think something, ask her for or transmit something, I’m not sure what. I go back towards the truck.

  Does spring start tomorrow? I don’t think so, not quite yet.

  32.

  Let’s go to Madryn, he says. He says he got us a good place to stay where they’ll give us a discount, a family member of one of his friends. That he called and they’ll be expecting us. I’m glad. And that it’s just off the highway that runs along the coast, that’s another nice thing, he says. That’s fantastic, I say, I’m so glad, because I really am glad. I ask him if he doesn’t mind driving more. No, no, he says, it’s just another hour, and we’ll be better off there, it’s nicer. I’m glad, I’m happy, but I don’t let it show too much. We go back towards the highway, I don’t recognize the route. Trelew is very frenetic, there are a lot of people circulating, very fast, since it’s the time of day when people get off work, they’re all migrating, all going. Meanwhile something about the night ahead of us has activated me, excited me, not sexually, just excitement. Or perhaps sexually, too. I feel like having a very, very big cold beer in Madryn and getting dumb and tongue-tied, slowing myself down with alcohol and wanting everything very much, everything so much. And that appetite, from the cold, from the drive, is highly reminiscent of sexual appetite, so much so. The yearning is what is similar, so similar, too. I want to drink, I want to kiss, I want to dance, I want to see. I’ll put on some music. Can I put on some music? I’d rather not, I want to listen to the night. I don’t say that, I don’t say the part about the night because he’d laugh at me, Julián would laugh. I roll down the window a little as we’re driving towards the highway, so the cold will hit my face, and to smell the fragrance of Trelew. Right now the city doesn’t smell that much, it just smells like cold, but once we’re out where it’s a little emptier it smells a little bit like grass, like trash, like dust, like night. I like night, like the ruckus. I like brushing up against a thing and not understanding it, feeling a fabric and being confused, a warmth in a fabric, a fragrance, an odor, something. And saliva and weight, the weight of the body, of someone else, against your clothing when it’s cold, all that trapped there in a fabric, that thing of someone else’s, that thing of someone else, that thing that makes everything so hypnotic. Seeing people in the darkness, seeing in the dark that so alters your perception, bundling up in darkness, against someone, against something, a back, a chest, something that envelops you/enfolds you, whispering, a little, between kisses and kisses, going back to someone’s mouth like a stab, a new one, a renovated one, throwing yourself at the other, onto, getting it back, that mouth, a mouth, again, and starting everything over, everything over, tongue, the smell of the mouth and of its contours, of the contours of that mouth, not all salivas dry the same. No, not at all, an omen, a portent, losing track of the other person’s components of where they are, of how they’re distributed, which feature of the fa
ce is which, which part of the mouth is which, difference in sizes, distortion of sizes, of proportions and space, distortion of a cheek against another, near/far/in, how rough it is, what it isn’t. Nocturnal places filled with smoke and bodies and possibilities, even though not always, but proximity and that dragging yourself, dragging yourself towards, against those other bodies, and at times, and at moments, going in, going into it, into that, into everything, going. Stealing a little bit of themselves when they’re not looking, carefully, so they don’t notice, or so they do, so they do notice and even so can’t accuse you of anything, of anything you can’t defend yourself against.