by Iosi Havilio
I turned the dial from one end to the other a couple of times until I found a station playing old favourites, themes from the sixties, seventies and eighties. All-time classics, the programme was called. I wrapped myself in the throw that covered the armchair and ventured out under the newly darkened skies. I had forgotten that sensation of cosmic plenitude that you get when you walk to your own music. I circled the house, stopped next to the mill and counted the first stars. It was one of those nights that you get only in the countryside. I felt peaceful.
I was suddenly distracted by something, a white, restless light, coming from the stable. The stable lights were yellow. And since the fire, Jaime hadn’t even switched them on. I moved back a few metres. I looked away for a second and when I turned my head again, the light had disappeared. The same thing happened again twice, a strange light, meaningless, appearing and disappearing. I approached fearlessly. The stable door was ajar, the chain hanging from one of the handles. Too close now, the light surprised me again. A reflex made me hide behind one of the stalls. The ring of light was moving more and more frenetically. I climbed onto a bale of straw and leaned towards an opening halfway between the stall and the floor.
Boca was standing right in front of me, one hand holding a flashlight, which shook ceaselessly, the other clinging to a post. With her back to me, crouching down, Eloísa’s head was jerking away at the level of the old man’s prick. I couldn’t tell who was abusing whom.
I masturbated furiously, along with the two of them. After they left, I waited a few minutes before climbing off the bale. Only now did I realise that the Walkman was still on and I’d been listening to music all this time. Unaware.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aída’s ghost appeared to me in the middle of the night, right underneath the crucifix, her back against the wall, inoffensive. I didn’t attach any great importance to it, I put it down to tiredness, to the countryside and its inventions. She looked thin, not at her best, but underneath it all quite well.
It’s an incredible, sun-filled morning and all the colours are alive and vivid, it feels as though spring has taken a step forward. I return to the library to thank Brenda for the translation. It’s really just an excuse to see her again and try to unravel the intrigue that has begun to build around her. As soon as I open the door, I hear her voice. She’s speaking loquaciously and animatedly in a room at the side. I lean in and see her surrounded by three boys in school overalls, aged between eleven and thirteen, who are listening reasonably attentively. I spy on them. She’s talking to them about antiquity, about Athens, the Parthenon, the Roman Empire and she hands them a heavy, brown volume of an encyclopaedia, which they receive somewhat fearfully, warily. I retrace my steps to the entrance, I don’t want them to discover me. There are two books piled on Brenda’s desk, one in English, the other in Spanish: Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow and Gods and Heroes by Gustav Schwab. The former has all the appearance of a bestseller. When Brenda sees me, she greets me with a smile that erases whatever might have happened the last time. There are no traces of the wounds on her ears.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ she says and hands me a photocopy. ‘I thought you might be interested.’
I read it out loud, for both of us:
‘Today is a memorable day in the annals of public healthcare for the insane in our country, as we comply with the National Law of October 2nd, 1897, which orders the creation of an asylum for the mentally ill, according to the Scottish system known as open door, destined to fundamentally alter the care of these patients.
‘We pray, then, Señor Presidente, ladies and gentlemen, that this establishment, the first and most advanced in South America, might open its doors as soon as possible for the scientific treatment of patients from the entire Republic who currently lack this care, achieving as such a progression worthy of the social culture of our nation.’
Words of the inaugural speech of the National Colony for the Insane, spoken by Dr Domingo Cabred on May 21st, 1899.
Some way from the house, on the other side of the fence, Eloísa and little Martín, Boca’s nephew, pass by. They walk side-by-side; I can make them out clearly in spite of the distance. I wonder whether they’ll see me. Now they disappear behind the pampas grass, heading towards the lake.
TWENTY-NINE
There are nights when I flop on my back in the grass and the sky leaves me speechless. It’s a feeling that lasts for a few minutes and is then undone, either through distraction or sadness. In a second, I come and go from this state of almost pure amazement to a kind of complicated introspection. These things happen more in the country than in the city: this is what happens to town folk when they go into the countryside.
Jaime had gone to bed early, he wasn’t feeling very well. I was in the middle of my star-gazing when Eloísa took me by surprise, scaring me a bit. She said that she’d come to get me to go for a wander. Of course, I didn’t mention the episode in the stable, although I couldn’t get it out of my head, try as I might.
In spite of the rain over the last few days, an unexpected heat had arrived, with mosquitoes and everything. We were on the veranda and Eloísa tried to convince me to borrow the pick-up for a couple of hours.
‘He’ll never find out, if nobody tells him, he’s got no reason to find out,’ she says.
‘It’s lunacy,’ I reply, just to say something.
But she doesn’t give in, she annoys me, she plays the capricious teenager. It’s quarter to twelve and the air is still, stagnant, like a low storm cloud skimming the ground, crawling with fireflies and crickets, synchronised in a mathematical counterpoint, a precise second separating the sparks of some from the screeches of others. No, I tell her. No, and stop bugging me. I want to make her understand my reasons but it’s impossible:
‘He’ll have a fit if he hears the engine,’ I say.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s go and have fun for a while, then we’ll come back, there’s nothing wrong with that.’
Eloísa stays quiet, watching me, like an obedient dog, and her last words ricochet gently through my mind. Come on: her eyes repeat. And that gaze hypnotises me, makes me feel like a nail caught in a magnetic field, with those furious eyes of a perverse child. That’s it, an obedient dog with furious eyes. Everything changes in a fraction of a second with that short, simple sentence, ‘let’s go and have fun for a while,’ it runs through my body like a potent drug, it becomes a perfect logic, a duty. That’s the way it goes, it’s stupid, things reveal their other side, their imminent side. Like that brat, who appeared at just the right time, that uncouth little brat, beautiful and elemental, who I can only think about touching, touching and touching, and yes, we need to have fun, let’s go and have fun for a while and then we’ll come back.
‘Let’s go,’ I say and between us we come up with a brilliant idea to avoid waking Jaime. We need to push the truck as far as the gate and start the engine there.
Eloísa waits on the veranda rolling a joint while I enter the house on my tiptoes and slink with catlike movements towards the bedroom. I use two fingers to half open the door, keeping my breathing to a minimum, three short steps to the bedside table on Jaime’s side, I skim my hand across the surface with the greatest of delicacy, identify the bunch of keys, pick it up in three silent beats, and retrace my steps. Jaime snores softly with his trousers on, unconscious. I get dressed in the dark, using the doorframe for balance, I put on jeans, a white t-shirt and grab the two pairs of rubber boots that are always in the corner of the wardrobe. Now that I’m outside, as I wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, I peek through the keyhole: nothing, utter darkness, nothing to indicate that Jaime has found out. I feel like the perfect thief.
Outside, Eloísa has already smoked half the joint, but you can’t tell, she’s impervious to it, so she says. I put on Jaime’s yellow boots, Eloísa wears mine. Both of us find them too big.
Eloísa grabs the keys of the truck from me. I take a few moments to draw i
n what’s left of the joint and catch up with her. Eloísa releases the handbrake and moves the gear lever into neutral. She knows what she’s doing. Without closing the door, she clings onto the window frame and signals for me to push.
Reaching the gate is an odyssey full of mud, slips, falls and laughter, stifled to avoid waking Jaime. It’s madness, it’s pointless, I repeat in my head, laughing to myself a bit. The joint is certainly having an effect on me.
We can’t go on, we run out of strength a few metres from the gate. By mutual agreement we lie down in the back of the pick-up, facing the stars. The sky has cleared but the moon can’t be seen. Eloísa takes out another joint. We smoke in silence, two drags each until it’s finished. And now, I can’t move. I close my eyes, whatever happens, happens.
Eloísa finds energy from somewhere; she always has something left. I can’t see her, but I know that she gets up and starts jumping on the floor of the truck, making my head explode. Then she calms down, she moves about, she intrigues me.
A minute or an hour later, a cool breeze makes the hairs on my legs stand on end. I can’t remember the last time I shaved them, not to mention further up. I’m not wearing my trousers any more, or my knickers. I’m about to open my eyes, but Eloísa gives me no time, with her tongue she wets those hollows that hide between my cunt and the top of my legs, the right and the left, first one, then the other. She moves away slightly, pauses, and blows, filling me with her fiery breath, she moves away again: she’s becoming an expert. She has method. But then she loses herself and charges with everything she has, like an animal, licking me from my arsehole to the tip of my clitoris, hungry, disoriented, and she puts her fingers inside me, one, two, as many as she can fit. Another pause, and she asks me sarcastically: Do you want me to go on? And I turn into a single inarticulate plea, incapable of saying a word. We’re in the middle of the countryside. Then she continues, more frenetically than before, and there was I thinking there couldn’t be any more. She swallows me, eats me, tears me to pieces. I open my eyes and finish off howling like a madwoman.
At dawn, the rain returned and erased the tracks that the tyres had left between the house and the gate. Jaime tried to find a way to explain the truck’s mysterious journey.
‘Perhaps I’ve caught something with all those loonies around me, but I could have sworn that I left it right here,’ he said and we both laughed.
When I wake up, Boca is already doing the barbecue. He’s with a girl of around Eloísa’s age. But later, throughout the day, during the meal and as we chat afterwards, he treats her as if she were his wife. Where on earth does Boca find his teenage girlfriends?
THIRTY
I woke up vomiting. Jaime, being used to Boca who, when he overdoes the wine and meat, goes off somewhere into open country, puts two fingers down his throat and returns it all to the earth, didn’t make a big deal of it. Boca returns and explains, even though he doesn’t need to: I let it all out. And sometimes he adds: I’m good as new, or Nothing to see here. Jaime contains his laughter, pressing his lips together like a teenager. He’s his accomplice. Once they hit fifty, men are either too solitary or together too much, like adolescents. Sometimes self-absorbed and ill-tempered, sometimes extroverted and bloody annoying.
Every other Saturday, Jaime and Boca go hunting in the woods. At around two in the morning, after a long barbecue and lots of preparation, they load their rifles and ammunition into the back of the pick-up and disappear into the night. They hardly ever bring anything back. Sometimes they return straight away, other times dawn breaks and they still haven’t appeared. What do they do? Shoot? Get drunk? Have sex? Without witnesses, anything is possible.
Eloísa appears with Loti, leading him by the hand. She whistles from the gate, she doesn’t want to come in. I don’t feel like going but curiosity, jealousy and boredom impel me. With the gate between us, Eloísa makes the introductions. She says our names and smiles, her lips sparkling. Loti is tall, very slim, with delicate yet virile features. His eyes are such a deep blue that they almost seem fake, and his teeth are small, brown and small. But what makes Loti an unquestionable gypsy are his hands. They need no further description, they’re gypsy hands. Eloísa doesn’t know what to say. She came to show me her Romanian, as hunters show off their catch, proudly. He’s her new toy. Loti watches her, besotted, rather lost, either because he likes her a lot or because he doesn’t understand a word she says.
Aída, or her ghost, appears to me more and more often, at any time of day, under any pretext, usually in the kitchen. She even goes so far as to sit at the table, between Jaime and me, but I stay quiet, I act as if nothing’s happening, so as not to disturb Jaime. I get used to it.
THIRTY-ONE
‘Would you believe me if I said that there are no more than fifty people in Buenos Aires who know of Open Door?’ Domingo Cabred to Jules Huret.
Guido’s birthday party took place in the grocery storeroom, surrounded by bags of flour, packets of espadrilles, tools, bags of coal, bundles of wood, giant aluminium pans, all sorts of tins, toys, piles of gardening gloves and a multitude of dust-coated bottles of aguardiente. The same stuff I’d seen displayed on the shelves of the shop, but in bulk and with that nightmarish quality that things have when they are too many to count.
Eloísa came to get me at ten. I’m going, I said. At the same time, or a couple of seconds later, Jaime opened the tap and put a pan containing the remains of dinner underneath the jet of water just to make noise and not have to hear me. Eloísa had gone into the bedroom without asking permission, as if it belonged to her. I persisted. Jaime, I’m going. He answered with more noise, banging the plates and cutlery he had to hand, playing deaf like an offended child. I felt sorry for him.
Eloísa appeared on tiptoes in one of my dresses. What do you think? she said, extending her arms above her head, full of life. Jaime turned off the tap, looked round and raised his shoulders, nose and eyebrows, biting his tongue to hide his surprise. It was a skin-coloured dress, made of a very fine fabric, semi-transparent, and it definitely looked better on her than it did on me. Jaime opened the tap again and spoke with his back to us.
‘I’m going out too, take your keys,’ he said.
It’s a perfect night, said Eloísa and took out a fat joint that she’d already rolled, which we finished quickly, before we even passed the gate. The rest of the way, neither of us opened our mouths. We were in a hurry, anxious. She wasn’t the same Eloísa as in the early days. More grown up, or sadder, she kept things to herself.
The door of the storeroom was decorated with a garland and a string of flashing Christmas-tree lights that intertwined to form an arch. When we arrived, Guido was busy placing bottles of beer in some buckets of ice. It was early. People will start coming around twelve, he said.
The first to arrive was Armando, a pleasant, funny boy, with more pimples than face. Then the rest started piling in. The party started properly when a group of six girls arrived, among whom was Dani, a little blonde girl with short hair who Eloísa pointed out as Guido’s sort-of-girlfriend. The last to arrive was Moncho, who made us all go outside to admire the motocross bike he’d just been given. It’s the business, said Guido.
At about half one, some people started dancing to keep warm. Guido, Moncho, Eloísa and two other partygoers were having a ‘down in one’ contest, emptying their glasses with that unique speed possessed only by teenagers. Eloísa kept winning, it was obvious that they were letting her. She knew it and she liked it. I felt a bit left out, from another generation. Moncho took me up to dance, and I let myself be taken.
Later, the party extended into the shop itself, using the old wooden counter as a bar. The boys danced in a circle, and every so often one or other of them would step into the middle to play the fool. Eloísa started dancing alone, like a madwoman, attempting a sensual choreography, which to me, looking in from the outside, the effects of the marijuana having worn off, seemed pathetic. Disappointed, or frightened, the other girls, includi
ng the little blonde who had barely exchanged a word with Guido, were gradually starting to leave. I went outside as well, for some air. The night, moonless, was a dark cell.
When I returned to the shop, Eloísa was dancing in the middle of a circle of five or six boys, including Guido. When she saw me, she broke the ring, pulling me towards her into the centre of the circle. I resisted slightly and she didn’t insist. Eloísa returned to the bullring. An anonymous push planted Guido face-to-face with his sister, who at the least touch broke into a frenetic dance. Guido decided to pretend he was groping her, without actually touching her, like an aspiring mime artist. Eloísa raised her bum and stuck out her small tits to meet her brother’s indecisive hands. Guido was doing it for his friends, Eloísa for me, like two kids playing for their parents’ approval. Guido’s friends were cheering like degenerates, some giving high-pitched howls, like wolf cubs. One of them suggested: They should kiss. And immediately, the crowd roared its approval. That said it all. I joined the circle and the chorus: Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss. Since Guido was laughing without doing anything, the group resigned itself to something lesser and the chorus requested a peck instead. Eloísa took the initiative: she shook her brother by the shoulders – by this stage he looked like a scarecrow dazed by the fluttering of a flock of birds – and planted a wet kiss on his incredulous mouth. An animalistic, endless kiss. Guido went white, his friends stopped applauding, their eyes popping out of their heads.
