by Iosi Havilio
We stopped at the service station to fill up with diesel. Jaime greeted everyone again, as usual. I got out to buy some gum at the kiosk. Two guys wearing the company uniform, waiting on tiny benches for their turn to serve the next client, were giving me sidelong glances. They weren’t watching me: they were keeping me under surveillance. It was the best remedy for boredom in this circular village, which already knew everything about me and what it didn’t, it invented. Before we left, through some half-paranoid instinct, which sooner or later makes us utterly paranoid, I turned my head, just slightly, just for a second, just long enough to see how the third man, the one who had exchanged a few words with Jaime as he watched the numbers run up on the pump, approached the other two, adding his conspiratorial laugh, loaded with innuendo that secretly named me.
For the rest of the journey to the shopping centre, Jaime stayed silent. A silence that I almost filled with words that I chewed over in my head several times and then aborted without ever opening my mouth.
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be, I have to send the fax, then get that man, the what d’you call him, the administrator, to confirm that it arrived safely. Why don’t you take a walk?’
Jaime had stepped out of the pick-up and was speaking with his hand on the door. Since I don’t reply, not out of meanness but because I don’t know what I want, he gives me the keys so that I can feel free.
‘Here,’ he says, ‘if you go, lock up, I’ll be over here.’
In giving me the keys, Jaime behaves as a father would, and I’m like a teenage daughter. So, to follow to the letter the logic of this bad-tempered girl I’ve become, as soon as he can no longer see me, I get out of the pick-up and start strolling, as he suggested, but without his knowing.
It’s half twelve, the daylight is as hazy as it was a few hours ago and it’s going to stay like this until it gets dark. It’s the middle of autumn, any old day, forgettable. I leave the shopping centre behind me and wander along an unpaved street at right angles to the main avenue, with my back to the school building. Most of the trees are already bare and the privet hedges forming the boundaries between houses are quite stunted. I’m distracted by noises that come from close by or far away, some continuous and subtle, like the humming of an insect that doesn’t let itself be seen, others more violent, appearing suddenly and cutting out just as abruptly. I’m never going to get used to country noises. There aren’t many of them, and yet they are so precise. They always reveal something. And hide the rest.
Right at that moment, as I was beginning to get bored of the empty village streets, a different, complex sound surprises me, one that I wasn’t expecting to hear. There are several voices, all talking at once, rapidly, on top of one another, in rather high-pitched tones. Voices that sound very near but which don’t show their faces. There isn’t a soul to either side, no one behind, no one up ahead, and yet they’re so close. I walk on a couple of metres, focused on the murmuring, which is growing in intensity. I even manage to trap a few words in the air, like ‘evening’, ‘wearing’, ‘damn’, ‘Friday’, and I’m the closest thing to a lunatic who hears voices. The madness doesn’t last long. I don’t even have time to react: in less than a second I become a mess of nerves. Some four or five girls, all in the same school uniform, white blouse and kilt, come out of the garage of the house on the corner, five metres from where I’m standing. And the first thing I see, as if there were nothing else, before I see the uniforms, the garage, is Eloísa, so wrapped up in the conversation that she doesn’t register I’m here, so close, by pure coincidence. It’s best she doesn’t see me, I’d better turn round, without a sound. Yes, that’s the best way.
But anxiety gets the better of me and I follow a narrow dirt alley so that I can go round and meet her at the crossroads. I have to be surprised, it has to be natural, as if by chance.
There’s no one in the other street. Not a voice or a sound to be heard. The house from which Eloísa and the other girls came has an entrance on this street too, at the end. I don’t understand. I take a new street, then another, and I’m lost.
I turn on my heel and find myself on the first street again. From there I go out onto the main avenue, I’m three blocks from the shopping centre. I bend down to tie my shoelace and without warning, the girls appear. Eloísa’s at the front, I smile at her, but she keeps going. She completely ignores me. I catch a flying sentence suspended in the air as they move away.
‘She’s such a maggot,’ says one them who isn’t Eloísa. I wonder who they’re talking about. I stare after the little group, which forms a kind of arrow with Eloísa at the tip. I don’t know whether to follow them, I don’t know whether to join in, I don’t know what to do. At the corner, before turning, Eloísa looks back and waves her hand, laughing from a distance. I feel stupid.
I return to the shopping centre without lifting my eyes from the ground, like a fool, feeling put out. Jaime is waiting for me at the foot of the pick-up, the keys in his hand.
‘You left the keys in the ignition,’ he says and adds with an unbearable smile: ‘It’s not a good idea.’
I don’t answer, grabbing the keys from him and getting into the truck. I switch on the radio. I’m beginning to tire of his moroseness, his persistent nothingness. Jaime looks up at me, his hands now busy with tobacco and rolling papers. He looks at me, intrigued, with the subtle estrangement that used to make him that bit different. He watches me with the expression of an old man who’s seen it all before.
The next day, by the bare fig tree, Eloísa strokes my hair:
‘See over there?’
‘Where?’
‘There, between the shop and the mill.’
‘What is it?’
‘That ranch, see? Some gypsies are occupying it.’
‘And who does it belong to?’
‘Nobody. They say that they’re Romanians. I don’t know how they ended up here.’
‘Who can have tipped them off about it?’ I say, and the question floats in the air.
TWENTY
Jaime brought home a television. He must see that I’m bored. He spent all afternoon trying to install the antenna. All we see is roughly equally spaced lines on every channel. The only thing that is occasionally clear is the sound. We hear parts of dialogues, distorted adverts, distant presenters. He eventually gave in, returned the set to its box and put it in the stable, rather embarrassed.
On Tuesday morning I returned to the library to pick up my translation. I opened the door but Brenda wasn’t in her usual place. She couldn’t have been far away, however, because there were a couple of books open on the desk, in use: a Spanish-Latin dictionary, a volume of an encyclopaedia and a writing pad with fresh notes on it. I went into the reading room, but there was no one there either. I said hello twice and even called her name.
‘Brenda,’ I threw the word into the air, in no particular direction, but Brenda didn’t appear.
Now that I looked closely, in the far corner of the room, in a straight line with the desk, there was a small door slightly ajar, camouflaged against the wall. I knocked gently and the door opened by itself. It led to a back patio covered with a dry vine. An iron table with four matching chairs stood in the centre of the patio. Further on there were two more doors. I went forward a few metres. One of the doors led to a spacious kitchen, the other to a bedroom with two identical beds, perfectly made, each watched over by a crucifix on the headboard. Without meaning to, surreptitiously, I had entered Brenda’s house, I had looked into its privacy. Curiosity grabbed me: Which came first, the house or the library? What had been turned into what?
As I wondered about that, standing in the middle of the patio, I almost fell when a sharp cry returned me to reality in the cruellest way. I leant on the back of one of the chairs, which I now realised wasn’t made of iron like the others but was the wheelchair that Brenda used to get about. I looked all around me until I saw a fourth door, made of tin, halfway between the house and the library.
‘Br
enda, are you there?’ I said, this time almost whispering, with a certain amount of fear.
The door opened in slow motion, creaking every millimetre of the way until finally I could see Brenda sitting on the toilet with her knickers down, her face covered in drops of sweat or tears, I don’t know which. But what caught my eye the most were her ears, the lobes slashed with fine cuts, recently made.
With gestures, Brenda asked me to bring over her chair and help her to change seats. Of course I didn’t inquire about any of the strange things I’d just observed, nor did it occur to me to question the unusual distance between her wheelchair and the bathroom door. Could someone have played a trick on her, or had the chair simply rolled towards the others?
When Brenda had regained her composure and taken her place behind the desk once more, all I managed to ask her was whether she was all right. In fact, I was about to leave without mentioning the translation, it didn’t seem the best time for it. But my silence was seemingly eloquent because Brenda immediately opened a drawer, handed me the book by Huret and tore five or six leaves, neatly handwritten in black pencil, from the pad.
‘It’s the best I could do,’ she said in a slightly hoarse voice. I left without saying anything, full of doubts.
On the way back to the farm, my thoughts occupied with Brenda’s wounded ears, I took a rest and skimmed the first few paragraphs of the translation:
A model establishment, of which very few still exist in Europe, operates in Luján, one hour away from Buenos Aires, in the middle of the flourishing countryside. Founded by the State, on the whim of an extraordinary man, blessed with a pleasant and smiling vitality, to whom it is impossible to deny anything, this work is wholly prosperous and produces surprising results.
Dr Cabred is the driving force behind this movement. President of the national hospitals commission, he promotes, with his vigorous activity and contagious enthusiasm, the creation of modern colonies for the insane throughout the Republic. He knows France and Paris perfectly, as he does the hospitals in which he studied under the guidance of our masters. But the models for his establishment he took from Scotland and Germany, where the ‘open door’ system has been successfully practised for many years, as it has in Russia and the United States. He was particularly inspired, in respect of the plans and details of the facility, by the Alt-Scherbitz asylum, near Dresden in Saxony. The open door method is not yet widely applied in France, where progress is slow. Dr Cabred is extremely passionate. He claims that lunatics are made furious by precisely the coercion that is exercised on their liberty, the liberty to come and go, to move about.
‘Now there are no furious lunatics, except in cases of acute crisis,’ Dr Cabred explains to me. ‘It is the old method of treatment that made them mad. Instead of being on top of each other, getting worked up, over-excited, here they are free to come and go, to be alone, to work, to walk about; they don’t think about escaping (we have only one breakout per hundred patients), nor rebelling, nor shouting, nor fighting: they are free!’
TWENTY-ONE
At first Boca’s shouts are in my dream, but they don’t say anything, nor do they belong to Boca. They are deformed shouts, filled with fury, the cries of someone running out of air and on the point of suffocating. The voice becomes flesh, too close. Boca shouts as hard as his throat will allow, from the other side of the wall: Fire, fire, fire. Jaime gives a start, elbowing me in the stomach. I half open my eyes. Boca’s shadow is moving like a madman from one side of the veranda to the other and he howls fire three times again. Jaime gets up as best he can without switching on the light and heads for the kitchen. I’m trembling. Without moving from the bed, in the dark, I hear the sound of the bolt being drawn back and the door opening. A long silence follows, Boca’s face must say it all. Jaime comes back into the room, sits on the edge of the bed and hesitates for a few seconds before putting on his trousers and boots, just in case someone comes to tell him not to bother, to lie down again, that it’s not true. He speaks in the dark, in a low voice so as not to wake me:
‘He says the stable’s on fire.’
Eloísa came to see me with a bunch of gigantic hydrangeas and a discoloured rose, a wild bouquet, gathered on her way.
‘I picked them for you,’ she says. ‘Do you like them? Let’s put them in some water.’
We have lunch together, without Jaime, and we stay in the kitchen playing cards for a long time.
Later it began to rain and we had to close the shutters because water was coming in all over the place. At the kitchen table, clutching a maté gourd, Eloísa doesn’t stop talking, she tells me everything. Is this your room, she asks and by the time I catch up with her she’s already going through the wardrobe. I sit on the edge of the bed, while Eloísa takes down as many hangers as she can hold and embraces my few clothes, which are mixed up with a suede bag belonging to Jaime. She examines them, enthusing over some, criticising others, making a thousand gestures with her eyebrows and lips, until she chooses one, letting the rest fall to the floor.
‘Can I try it on?’
I smile. Eloísa undresses. She wants to impress me.
TWENTY-TWO
It must be the coldest day of the year, everyone has a scarf tied round their neck. Some are wearing hats, even gloves. The morgue looks different in the winter, it becomes less drastic. This is the third time I’ve been here in less than three months. I hope this will be the end of it. Yasky summonsed me at short notice because Monday is a bank holiday, which complicates everything as far as the police are concerned, he explained on the phone. Jaime wanted to give me a lift, but a small job came up, so he said, at the last minute.
The procedure is quicker than usual because the administration office has already closed for the weekend, which speeds up the bureaucracy. I had come mentally prepared to continue the game with the ginger man and to see how far it would go but it will have to wait for next time, although perhaps there won’t be a next time, yeah, I hope not.
The man on duty uncovers the body and I can’t help spitting out a laugh which is more like a sneeze: the corpse has a beard and a moustache. Yasky releases a shout that disconcerts the poor man.
‘What is this?’ says Yasky in a voice louder than I thought him capable. The man hurries to cover the body and Yasky grabs him by the arm, leading him out of the room. They leave me alone with a collection of corpses, which must be signalling to me in silence. I’m not needed here, I leave before one of them decides to talk to me.
Coffee in hand, standing by the counter in a student bar where a radio is blaring rock music at full blast, Yasky attempts to explain the inexplicable.
‘There was a mix-up,’ he says biting the rim of the plastic cup, between sips of coffee. ‘Someone put a cross in the wrong place, they marked f instead of m, it’s outrageous. I don’t understand how no one realised. The weekend comes around and their heads are all over the place. I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire career, I’m going to open an investigation first thing on Tuesday. I don’t know what to tell you.’
I tell him not to worry about me, that all this business has made me immune. Yasky relaxes, his mood changes and he asks me if I wouldn’t like to go for a drink in another bar, somewhere less noisy. He asks me in the negative, as many men do. OK, I say, let’s go. On the way there it hits me: Yasky wanted me to come just to be able to see me again. He fancies me, or worse, he’s fallen in love with me. He summonsed me because that way I couldn’t refuse to come, I’m duty bound, and because this is our place, the place where we meet. I humour him.
In the second bar, we sit at a table at the back and order a beer. After exchanging a few comments about this winter, which arrived without warning, overnight, Yasky leaves a long pause, takes a slug of beer, tipping up his pint until it’s empty, and starts speaking about his brother Julio. He talks as though he owes me an explanation about that as well. His eyes are glistening.
‘Sometimes I think that it could just as easily have been me, these things
don’t depend on the individual, it’s pure chance. I’ve often wondered what the reasons were, whether there was a trigger, some episode that I missed, but it doesn’t change anything, I always just end up tying myself in knots. And don’t forget that Julio and I are the same age.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘you look like twins.’
‘Not just twins, we’re identical twins, but it makes no difference, we go through the same things.’
With Yasky, time passes very slowly. Even so, night falls and I don’t want to return to the countryside. I’m scared of running into Eloísa.
‘It’s late’ says Yasky. ‘Can I take you anywhere?’
‘Is your place far?’ is the first thing to come out of my mouth and Yasky is eager.
It’s a two-room flat, facing away from the street, decorated without enthusiasm, a pastiche of furniture and tasteless objects, lots of glass and lots of wicker. Yasky asks me where I want to sleep. It’s your house, I say.
‘My room’s a disaster, I’d better not even show it to you. A bachelor pad,’ he says, and laughs. We laugh. In the living room, there’s a polka-dot sofa-bed. Yasky unfolds it and starts to extol its virtues: the cushions are built in, the mattress is queen-size, more comfortable than a lot of beds. It’s as though he wants to sell it to me. I wonder when he’s going to jump on me.
Next to the head of the sofa-bed there’s a black telephone with keys that light up when I unhook the receiver. I call Jaime and tell him that I’m staying in Buenos Aires, at a girlfriend’s house.
