by Iosi Havilio
At lunchtime, Boca took over the barbecue again. I stayed with him for a while as he prepared the fire. A boy of about twelve or thirteen, with curly hair and a big mole at the base of his nose, was loitering around us. He kicked at broken pieces of brick with a grumpy face. He was entertaining himself in his own way. Later on I found out that his name was Martín and that he was Boca’s nephew.
Although it was autumn the midday sun still warmed the skin. Boca was talking about the different cuts of beef, his hands smudged with charcoal, his eyes red as usual.
‘Are you a believer?’ he asked suddenly. Since I didn’t know how to reply, he hunched his shoulders, pursed his lips and arched his eyebrows, all at the same time, but he didn’t say anything else.
After eating, I started raking the path that leads from the house to the stable. When I opened the stable door I had a bad premonition. A short-lived premonition. The other Jaime was sprawled out, his head crushed against the back wall, his gums on view, tail mingling with the straw. The horse’s eyes said it all: death had arrived suddenly.
Jaime didn’t react immediately. He spent the rest of the afternoon and a good part of the night playing cards with Boca. They emptied a whole bottle of gin between them. I came and went, from the bedroom to the kitchen, I slept a bit and played a few hands when one or other of them went to the bathroom or needed a rest. A couple of times, Jaime left the house to go and see his horse. The first time he went alone, the second, Boca and I accompanied him. We dragged the animal outside, pulling him by a rope tied to his back legs. We took him as far as the mill. Jaime didn’t seem to have taken it in, he was talking about buying a new scythe and about a loony who hid amongst the bushes at the plant nursery and made Jaime almost crap himself with fear when he appeared. Boca listened to him, drunker than ever. I watched them in silence, thinking that there’s no such thing as miracles.
At one point, Jaime mentioned something about the stable, he said it was going to be left empty now, but he didn’t make any direct reference to the animal. And that was the other Jaime’s wake: in the open air and with lots of alcohol.
My eyes open in the middle of the night and, with less of a shock than the first few times, I find the bronze crucifix suspended in the air. A dusty, yellowish light forms its outline. It no longer seems as sordid to me, nor as suffocating as it used to. Now that I know it, it’s inoffensive, necessary, in keeping with this rickety iron bedstead that squeaks when I try to make myself comfortable, and with all the rest, the vast doors, the cold floors, the marbled kitchen table, the broken bathroom tiles, every corner of the house frozen in time, the splintered shelves in the wardrobe, the earthenware pots, the bordered tablecloths, all the old stuff, Jaime, snoring at my side, and the mosquito nets. All of which brings me a new and unfamiliar peace.
The following morning, Boca and Jaime are talking in the kitchen. It doesn’t look like they’ve been to bed at all. Boca says that the best thing would be to burn him, then bury the ashes somewhere. Cremate him, corrects Jaime. It sounds logical; a normal burial would be a colossal effort. Jaime doesn’t seem convinced but he eventually accepts the solution and they decide to organise the bonfire for that same night. For the ceremony, Jaime invites his brother Héctor, who lives in Luján.
I spend the whole afternoon in bed, facing the ceiling. On the wardrobe, under some thick, moth-eaten blankets, there are two identical boxes, flat and round. I climb onto a chair to find out what’s in them. The first one is empty, or practically empty. When I lift it up, a couple of mothballs rattle about inside. In the other, there are two books, a bundle of handwritten sheets of paper, a couple of faded photos and some loose locks of dark brown hair.
Later that day, I ask Jaime about the boxes.
‘They’ve always been there,’ he says and I can see that he’s never had any reason to move them.
As the afternoon light was dying, Héctor arrived in his old pick-up, with his wife Marta and their twin sons. Nobody really asked what I was doing there, I was just another one of the family. Boca dug a groove around the horse to contain the fire. The boys accompanied me to the woods to collect dry logs and branches. Marta stayed in the house preparing the meal. Jaime and Héctor took charge of arranging the wood, creating a kind of primitive shack that caged the animal. At around ten we reconvened to start the bonfire. Jaime seemed to prepare himself to say a few words but he swallowed them and, without preamble, lit the fire at its four cardinal points, starting at the south and finishing in the west. At first, the fire didn’t take properly, so Boca tried to revive it by dousing the wood with spurts of kerosene.
When we had eaten, the flames were still very high and the other Jaime was invisible. The twins played with the embers using lit branches as sparklers. Afterwards, they fell asleep, shoulder-to-shoulder. Boca drank all the wine again. Héctor told Jaime all about his projects, country stuff. I bored myself talking to Marta until she got bored of me.
There was much more left of the horse than we expected. Instead of ashes we found a heavy jumble of long bones, not entirely bare, which filled a pit the size of a small child behind the stable.
FOURTEEN
Skirting the fence, I spend the afternoon kicking pine cones. Behind the row of poplars, so that Jaime can’t see me. I told him I was going shopping in Luján.
‘And what do you need to get?’ he asked.
‘Women’s stuff,’ I answered in jest, but he didn’t laugh. He was wondering what kind of stuff that might be.
The sky splits into almost perfectly equal bands, over where the sun is going to disappear. A whole spectrum of pastel colours. I’m beginning to lose count of all the afternoons I’ve already spent here.
I’m walking with my head down, in search of new pine cones to kick, so I jump when I hear a timid hello close by. It’s Eloísa, the girl from the shop. Hi, I say and her eyes dart all over the place. Under her arm, she’s carrying a rolled-up burlap bag. She’s wearing a buttoned blouse patterned with tiny bunches of flowers, yellow, red and white, rococo style, and a black bra, which is very see-through, making her diminutive tits more pronounced.
‘I’m going mulberry picking. Want to come?’ she says. ‘They’re the last of the season, after these there won’t be any more until October.’
We walk next to each other, my legs shrouded in denim, hers covered to the knee by a kilt, school uniform, I assume.
‘Once, when I was little, I ate so many that I had a fever for at least a week,’ says Eloísa and laughs, deliberately dragging her trainers. A cloud of dust follows us.
At the end of the road, Eloísa ducks and slips through a tiny gap between the strands of barbed wire that separate Jaime’s land from the polo field. I catch a glimpse of her knickers. I squeeze through, with a bit of a struggle. Eloísa laughs again.
On the left, between two trees interlacing at their crowns, a narrow path begins, plunging to a practically dry stream. Momentum sends us flying down. It’s outright forest. Eloísa runs in front of me, raising the burlap bag above her head as if it were a mini parachute.
‘We need to go higher, the branches down here have already been picked, they’re the easiest to reach. Are you game?’
We climbed the tree, and it felt a bit as though we’d always been doing this. We ate red mulberries, those that were left, which weren’t many.
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And where does he live?’
‘There,’ I say, pointing at the farm. Eloísa laughs at Jaime and at me. She imagines us together.
‘But he’s an old man,’ she says and I don’t know how to respond. I cough. Eloísa doesn’t insist but she asks me lots of other questions, whatever comes into her head. I answer some, others, most of them, she answers herself.
Where are you from? Do you like it here? Aren’t you bored? What about your friends? Do you smoke? How long are you going to stay? You’re joking about the old man, aren’t you? Have you ever eaten whit
e mulberries? What about medlars? Would you like to try them?
She speaks rapidly, all at once, while she destroys a rotten mulberry between her finger tips. Her nails are bitten, painted a long time ago with a child’s varnish. Now she falls silent and without meaning to, in trying to reach some difficult mulberries, she shows me her knickers again. I can’t help it, I want to touch her.
We said goodbye a few steps from the gate, with the night on top of us. First, we tried to cross the stream to pick some little wild tomatoes that were visible from the other side. But Eloísa slipped and fell in the water. She was drenched.
‘If you like, another day we could go and see if there are any figs left on the other side of the polo field,’ she said to me in the almost darkness.
FIFTEEN
Jaime wakes up feverish again. He stays in bed all day, against his will. I make him drink lots of water and wrap him up well so that he sweats. He says he must have something because he’s not the kind to fall ill easily. I tell him it could be a virus, that nowadays they’re very resistant and that he’ll have to be patient. He looks at me distrustfully.
Amongst the books that I found in the round boxes on top of the wardrobe was one in French: En Argentine, De Buenos Aires au Grand Chaco, written by a certain Jules Huret, and published in Paris in 1911. On the second page, in smudged black ink, I can just about make out a dedication in Spanish: To Dr Domingo Cabred, great visionary and Creole. It is signed Jules Huret, Paris, Oct ’11.
At first glance it seems to be a kind of travelogue by a Frenchman who visited Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century. The contents page lists several chapters devoted to Buenos Aires, its various neighbourhoods, its institutions and, of course, its people, los porteños. Further on, it talks about the countryside. What follows is an excursion in caravan to the north of the country, stopping at Tucumán, Jujuy, Salta, the Chaco Austral, the forest of El Impenetrable, Corrientes, the upper Paraná, Misiones, the Iguazú Falls, the Jesuit ruins and the Israeli colonies in Entre Ríos. I read the topics listed on the contents page several times and imagine a strange fascination in the eyes of this European confronted by so many things so far from home. In one of the initial chapters, entitled ‘Les criminaux et les fous’, I discover a section on Open Door and Cabred. I look for the page but I needn’t have bothered, I can barely understand it at all.
That same afternoon I make a trip to the Open Door library with Huret’s book under my arm.
It must be about thirty blocks, half of them unpaved, half of them tarmacked. The village is at its best, full of life. A man carrying a pair of spurs shows me how to get there. Just before the level crossing, I turn right, pass the bar with the pool tables where they were selling beer on the day of the carnival, I walk a few more metres and there I am.
Behind the desk, Brenda, the librarian, attends to me, a village girl with hair down to her waist. I tell her that I’m looking for a French translator and she freezes as though I’ve insulted her. I tell her what it’s about. She pinches her lips and finally brings herself to speak. She tells me that she has quite passable French. A foreign language was obligatory at school and she never liked English much. But she’s never translated anything, she adds with a touch of panic. I show her Huret’s book, in particular the part devoted to Open Door.
She took an immediate interest. She examined the book with great delicacy, treating each page as if it were about to break. She ran her eyes along the lines, murmuring slightly to herself, nodding her head from time to time. She stayed like that for about five minutes, without saying a word to me. In the meantime, I entertained myself by leafing through a magazine that was on her desk. It was published locally, handmade and distributed free. The main article was about the history of Open Door, it was the second instalment. There were some photographs, the first villagers, the arrival of the train, a fiesta in the barn, all black and white.
‘This is a very valuable book,’ Brenda said finally and showed me the last page, which stated that only ten unique numbered copies had been printed, on Japanese paper. I was impressed.
‘And why do you want to get it translated?’ she wanted to know.
‘Out of curiosity,’ I replied and Brenda wasn’t entirely satisfied with my answer. ‘Do you fancy doing it?’
Brenda raised her shoulders, smiled and I saw that she did, that she would give it a try. I left the book with her. As we said goodbye, because she came with me to the door, I saw that her right leg ended in a stump and that she was in a wheelchair. I hid my surprise and thanked her. We agreed that I would call the following week.
By night-time Jaime’s fever had dropped a bit but he was still under the weather. I made him some broth and took it to him in bed. To distract him, I tell him about my trip to the library, about Brenda, and about what I learned of the history of Open Door. Jaime drinks his soup and, with every sip, produces a terrifying sound like broken turbines. I ask him how it was that Huret’s book, with its dedication to Cabred, had ended up in his possession. He tells me that it’s not his book. That he doesn’t read books.
Very early, we are woken by the telephone. We leave it ringing, but it persists and I have to get up to answer it. It’s Yasky, from the court. He says that today, as soon as possible, I have to attend the morgue again.
I don’t tell him this, but the truth is that I’m starting to forget about Aída. I don’t know whether to feel guilty. The appointment is for three in the afternoon. I wonder whether this time it will be her. Before hanging up, Yasky apologises.
I tell Jaime, who is slightly annoyed. He doesn’t understand how it can be so difficult to find a body. A body, he repeats.
Eloísa is gesturing to me from the gate. I gesture back for her to come in, but she stays where she is, waving her hand. I go over to her. I want to talk to you, she says and takes me along a path I’ve never been on, through the woods, as far as a fig tree, full to bursting, which we relieve of its fruit until we’re sated. Eloísa holds the figs by the base and with her tongue licks the sweet, sticky milk, before opening and devouring them. Her lips shine. She tells me that the other day a boy asked her to take her clothes off, after school one afternoon, near here.
‘And I got naked, I was bad,’ I don’t know if she’s expecting me to comment. She stares at me, her eyes wide, it seems as though she’s going to touch me, but she changes her mind.
‘Was I bad?’ This time she’s definitely asking me.
It’s almost two o’clock, I’ve got to go. Jaime is waiting to take me to the morgue. He insisted on coming with me, even though he isn’t completely better. But Eloísa keeps me, she ensnares my eyes. She says that I have very white skin. She says it so that she can touch me, to see if it really is that white. She strokes my legs. Are you ticklish? I don’t answer. She continues, and I laugh. And then, taking advantage of my distraction, she moves her face close to mine and gives me a dry kiss at the edge of my mouth, almost without meaning to, innocent. Then she becomes serious, she remembers something:
‘What about you? Have you taken your clothes off in front of many boys?’
In the city, Jaime drives the same way he does in the country. We are repeatedly hurried on by blasting horns. I get out at the door of the morgue and Jaime goes to look for somewhere to park. This time Yasky is punctual. He seems impatient. We say hello quickly and take the same route as before. It’s strange, I’m starting to feel secure in this place, fearless. We come across new faces, but there is still the same hubbub, subdued because of the proximity of dead bodies. Again, the Irish-looking man receives us. Yasky leaves us alone for a moment, he’s forgotten to make an urgent call. The man shows me into his office. He offers me coffee. I accept. On the back wall, behind the desk, there is a poster of a snowy volcano reflected in a lake. The man picks a subject just to strike up a conversation. He’s different, more amicable, he looks at me differently. He wants to know what I do, what my job is. I find it hard to believe, but he’s trying to seduce me. I wonder w
hether it would occur to him to fuck me right here, surrounded by all those corpses. It sounds ridiculous, yet so natural, he’s a womaniser like any other. Necrophilia is something else altogether. What must that be like, getting turned on by dead bodies?
Yasky opens the door just in time. He purses his lips, he can sense something. We repeat the same ritual as before but it’s quicker this time. We take our places. We’re a team. The body is uncovered for three seconds. I shake my head.
‘This isn’t her either,’ I say, thinking that at least she’s more like her than the first one was. Yasky is embarrassed, the other man almost laughs.
SIXTEEN
Not everyone says Open Door in the same way. Some say Open Door, others Open Door. Eloísa says Open Door, Boca and Jaime say Open Door. I haven’t decided yet. It depends on the moment and who I’m with. In general I say Open Door, but to tell the truth I don’t know which of the two I prefer.
The calendar hanging on the handle of the larder door is showing the wrong date. Nobody has pulled off the leaves since the second of March and we’re up to the twentieth, or is it the nineteenth of April, I don’t even know any more. I don’t have anyone to ask. It’s the middle of the night, there can only be a few hours until dawn. Jaime is snoring in the bedroom: it’s not a strong snore, but it is persistent. It never switches off. At times it builds, moves from high-pitched to low, becomes angry, then abates before immediately catching breath and accelerating. When it’s not a snore, it’s a whistle, and when it’s not whistling, it blows. In a certain way it talks, it says things in that fundamental, universal language, difficult things, fragments of something that Jaime carries deep inside, in his guts, and releases at night without realising it, so that I can hear it and understand him a bit better, or so that I can start to despise him. I’m wide awake and more inclined to hatred than to understanding.
