Nest in the Bones

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  She says yes.

  Cataldo squeezes his eyelids together and says:

  “Suspiros, your niece, she’s blue.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t count. You got that from her name,” she says, Suspiros being the name for the morning glories that grow nearby.

  “No, I swear to you,” Cataldo argues, taking the moment to open his eyes. “I didn’t even remember what color those flowers were.”

  He puts as much distance as he can between himself and the game:

  “What do we take her today?”

  Because every day, the two dimwits take her something: a crab with red pincers, a long stalk of Pampas grass in flower, a bay sparrow with big yellow jaws, fallen from the nest…

  Amaya is letting the afternoon slip past.

  “Mama, the puppy.”

  “Later.”

  She’s out back, facing the fields.

  Ramírez, a day laborer, makes meticulous furrows for the lettuces. The chickens cluck low and twangy, drowsy before the sunset.

  “Mama, the puppy.”

  “Play a while, honey. Tell Ramírez to give you a white fig to eat.”

  The dog she’s mentioning doesn’t exist, but who cares? Didn’t he use the dog to get closer to her? Is her own life free of lies? Sure, she understands all that, but what is it that has recoiled within her? She couldn’t go to the house again, she couldn’t look for him. That was what she was doing: looking for him. But what’s happening with her, why this need for another person? And what kind of person should it be? A veterinarian? Really, a veterinarian from the slaughterhouse?

  She makes a connection: she tries to imagine José Luis…to imagine José Luis as if he were…

  “Mama, I ate the honey fig.”

  “Yes, good. Let me be.”

  “What about the puppy, Mama?”

  “There’s more stray dogs than you can shake a stick at! Tomorrow I’ll fill the yard up with dogs! Leave me be!”

  The girl turns to the prudence of silence. When she notices her mother has forgotten her, she strays and grasps the polished wire of the chicken coop in her hands and in her teeth. She gnaws at it with the tenacity of bitterness.

  José Luis. Veterinarian. No, doctor in veterinary science. He must heal the wings of those fallen birds and cure the rich people’s sick dogs and cats, for a living, but also from compassion. He must have a house with courtyards and palm trees, full of cages with sick animals, all of them tame, all clean, even if they were sad…All of them entrusted to his hands.

  Her husband. Amaya hears him arrive.

  “Here it is,” he says, and sets a little goat on the floor. It has long, straight hair, well kept, which shimmers like tiny sparks.

  It can’t be the gift the veterinarian offered. The girl seems swallowed by the same doubt, until her father calls her over: “Come here, it’s for you,” and she accepts it, running and not stopping until she has it in her arms.

  Amaya is suspicious:

  “Did you get it yourself?”

  Her husband turns to her with his voice, not his gaze, which is fixed on his daughter’s enthusiasm:

  “No. He brought it, the veterinarian. He said you all went there, this morning…”

  Amaya suddenly stands up straight.

  “He’s there?”

  “No. He left.”

  He looks at her. He’s turned serious, he knows why she’s asking.

  “Do you care?”

  “No.”

  Her no is haughty, but also defensive. Then, humbly – he knows why – she justifies herself:

  “We should go thank him.”

  “I already did.”

  Far out in the field, the two dimwitted ones appear. They’re bringing fresh-cut willow branches. They come over cautiously, seeing the whole family gathered.

  When they’re a few steps away, they stop, looking at the new little goat. Suspiros picks him up so Colorada can see him better.

  Suspiros’s father asks, “Do you like the goat, Colorada?” and Cataldo answers, “Yeah, it’s a gentle, pretty little goat.”

  The veterinarian bursts in. He’s a voluminous man.

  “Did the girl like it?”

  Of course she liked it. There was no need to ask. Suspiros’s father is upset, but the other man doesn’t notice.

  “You have to take care of it. It was just taken from its mother. Can I see it? Where are you keeping it? Did you make it a bed of straw?”

  The father defends himself by letting the man pass. He leads him out back.

  Suspiros tries, the way they taught her, to keep the little goat from getting into the garden. But he has a different urge, and is pressing his lips against anything that resembles a teat.

  Amaya saw them pass by in the yard near the pergola. She comes out silently and keeps her distance, observing the veterinarian, who gives verbose instructions and speaks frenetically and without resting, as if busy putting the whole world in order.

  Amaya feels serene, in possession of all the time imaginable. She waits.

  Her husband sees she is there and goes over to rouse her from her enchantment, her absorption, in that man.

  “My wife…”

  “I know her,” he says, and he stretches out his hand to her. “She went to my house. I wasn’t there. We’ve never spoken. I’ve only lived here a short while.”

  And he turns back to the husband and the goat.

  The clerk from the shop appears. He stands aside, waiting for them to give him the chance to speak.

  “What is it? Do you need something?” her master asks.

  “Yes, they’re looking for you.”

  “Tell them I’m coming.”

  “If you’re worried about me,” the veterinarian says, “just go. I’ll wait for you. Nice garden. I’ll stay here and look it over.”

  He’s left there with Amaya. He stifles his elation. He doesn’t look at the garden.

  “You’re a teacher?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without a school. Same as me.”

  “You’re a teacher? You’re not a vet?”

  “I’m a teacher first. But I can’t teach. It’s not enough to live on. Did you hear Orgaz? No, you weren’t there.”

  “Orgaz?”

  “Arturo Orgaz, he came from Córdoba. He talked about us in the Escuela Patricias. I wanted to cry right there in the classroom. Or else beat on everything, break it. I went mad, I wanted to be a teacher so bad, I wanted to sing or scream my lessons.”

  He lights up, swipes at the air with his arms.

  Amaya draws back, admiring his unexpected fervor.

  “Why are you here? Why are you working as a veterinarian?”

  “They cheated me! I came with the federal intervention. I worked for the party in Sante Fe. They promised me everything and they gave me nothing: I’m a veterinarian in a county slaughterhouse. Have you ever seen it? Are you familiar with the place?”

  “No.” Amaya stumbles back as though she’s been rammed.

  “It’s on the banks of the canal, in Luján. The blood and offal get dumped in the water. Miles and miles downstream, the people drink that same water.”

  He stops talking.

  He says, “I’m leaving. Good afternoon.”

  Amaya says, “I’ll walk you out,” and he thanks her, “I know the way.”

  He leaves, and Amaya stays there watching him, depressed, but serene. Though he’s said goodbye, he turns and asks:

  “Have you ever seen a real live monkey?”

  “Sure, at the zoo, at the circus…”

  He’s discouraged, he wanted to offer something new. But he keeps trying:

  “Yesterday I brought home two. You can bring the girl over.”

  He stops and then, headstrong, unsure, he continues:

  “If you have another kid, you can bring them both.”

  Amaya remains calm:

  “I don’t have another kid.”

  He nods, blinking, taking time to let it si
nk in, because he had wanted to get to know Amaya, and he has a welter of things inside him. Amaya knows that.

  Then he goes.

  “A ferret. A person like that, you’d be best off shutting the door in his face,” her husband says.

  Amaya muses ironically: What do you mean, shut the door to a shop? How will the customers get in? She doesn’t try to defend the man, but she does declare:

  “He’s harmless.”

  “Sure, he’s harmless all right,” her husband says. “He’s eaten up with rage, but he doesn’t let it out on anyone, because the person he’s furious with is himself. He’s desperate.”

  That sums it up, Amaya thinks: desperate. She no longer hears her husband’s words while he talks with his mouth full, lifting his fork whenever he raises his voice.

  Amaya weighs her options with the desperate man: how not to tame him, how not to do as the others have. How to keep him from giving in. And how to bundle herself in his impassioned desperation, how to make it envelop her. To burn, to burn up. But…does he deserve it? Does he notice her?

  “Can we, Papa?”

  Suspiros has made use of a break in the adults’ dialogue to return to the previous subject: if they can go see the monkeys.

  Yes, they can. Colorada, too.

  “And Cataldo?” Colorada pleads.

  They don’t pay her any attention.

  At the gate, the veterinarian is calm. Still, Amaya suspects something: she already knows how easily he can lose his cool. She’s not afraid, so long as he doesn’t turn his agitation against her. She feels like a spectator, someone watching a fire, toasted and seduced by the warmth and the fascination of the flames.

  She looks, as she passes, for the wounded gladiolus stalk. She can’t make it out. It doesn’t weigh on her: now she has, or will be able to have, something more than that sign, that symbol, that memory. She has an uncertainty laden with promises.

  “This is my father.”

  The old man is scraping the soil of the garden with a two-pronged spading fork.

  He laughs good-humoredly and with feigned resignation:

  “It’s thanks to him everyone calls me by my last name: just plain Romano. When I sign my name, it’s G.G. Romano. Go figure: a fanatical admirer of the Teutons goes and saddles his son with two names that you can’t just come out and use every day…”

  Amaya gives him a curious look.

  “You want to know what they are? Gandolfo Gildas. Gildas! Can you believe it? You know what it means? Ready for sacrifice.”

  Romano explains that Gandolfo, also of Teutonic origin, means warrior, a brave warrior…As he does so, Amaya repeats to herself: Ready for sacrifice. Ready for sacrifice…And she’s not thinking of Gildas anymore, or of Romano, she says to herself gently: Ready for sacrifice, José Luis, ready for sacrifice…

  Romano walks on, leaves his father behind, and Amaya observes him against the light filtered through the trees, gesturing frantically, euphoric, and yet so near to falling, to collapse, even to crying like a frightened child. And again, compassionate thoughts flow toward him: maybe he doesn’t know, maybe he has no sense of what he’s fated for, even if he knows what his name means…Maybe José Luis doesn’t know…

  Romano encourages Suspiros and Colorada to go on without him, pointing them toward the right, behind the wall, where a little door hangs halfway off its hinges.

  Amaya can tell he wants to talk to her. She slows her step. He stops her, brusquely. He’s no longer the festive man of before. He points over to where his father goes on poking at the unearthed roots.

  “You know what else is his fault?” he says bitterly. “Me living here.”

  “The lung,” he says, and points at his own body. But there’s no room for doubt: his father is the one who is sick. “The slaughterhouse, the cows, tuberculosis. So here…well, you get it.”

  Amaya says to herself: Something else that’s wrong, something else that’s happened to him. Listening, always listening. But all I care about is my own story. The words she uses are different:

  “That’s nothing strange around here. Lots of people are sick. They cover it up. They come from all over. They say the air is good. Those who don’t know better say the air is getting contaminated now.”

  Romano’s disenchantment is evident. Without affection, without courtesy, he reproaches her:

  “Yeah, but that’s not what we’re talking about. You don’t care what I said about myself. You don’t care about my dependency, my exile.”

  Amaya defends herself again with what seems like a commonplace:

  “No one understands his neighbor, no one.”

  Really, what she’s saying is: No one understands me either, no one. But all Romano grasps is, No one understands his neighbor, and he replies:

  “No one listens. Everybody’s deaf, that’s why you end up alone.”

  He turns his back and heads inside, leaving Amaya to follow him as if it were a simple matter of fate.

  The animals are behind the wall. Not one, not just the two monkeys. Amaya finds herself before all the crates and cages she had imagined in José Luis’s courtyard. No one had warned her about this, and in her chest, something is pounding feverishly for Romano.

  It’s not exactly the same, no, not at all. This was a garden, that’s clear, but someone let it dry up and the ground is hard and almost level. There’s nothing green but the two trees that rise up behind the brick wall, and the sun seems to shine down not to give life, but to deplete it.

  The dog, leashed to a cable run stretched from one end of the enclosure to the other, barks, upsetting the silence that has settled over their curt dialogue. She barks affectionately, seeing her master, and leaps up at him, posted on her back legs, slobbering from pleasure, her tongue hanging from one side of her mouth. Romano lets her stay a moment, then pushes her away. The dog follows him, doting.

  Suspiros and Colorada have found the monkeys’ cages and are keeping their distance, looking while the monkeys look back at them.

  The veterinarian grabs one of them by the scruff of its neck, the way you pick up a puppy, and the creature struggles.

  “You’ll have to tame him. After that, they’re really good. By the time this one’s six months old, I’ll be walking down the street with him on my shoulder.”

  He tries to get Suspiros to touch the coarse yellow coat. Suspiros refuses. Then Colorada. She won’t do it either.

  “What about you, Amaya? Are you up for it?”

  He called her Amaya. She looks him in the eyes.

  Yes, she’s up for it. She pets the monkey’s flanks, he nestles in her human hands, and as she pets him, she looks into Romano’s eyes, which have come to rest on her again, intense, anxious, with an adolescent allure.

  In the other cages, dark birds, quiet, glum.

  “What are they for?”

  “They’re laying birds. I use their eggs to feed the vipers.”

  “Vipers?”

  Brick, mortar, and glass: something further off that didn’t call Amaya’s attention. They coil up inside, press one against the other.

  “My idea is to make an antivenin and sell it to the Department of Health.”

  Immediately, Romano starts mocking himself, but somberly, with a glimmer of his previous ardor.

  “My idea. I’ve got a lot of ideas. Look.”

  He leads Amaya to another cage, of thin, octagonal wire. Shifting, climbing, immune to the laws of equilibrium, they run a few inches, pause, look, sniff: six or seven white mice.

  “I’m thinking of raising them and then selling them. It’s easy here, and it’s cheap: but who would buy them? There’s no medical school, no one does experiments. I’d have to send them to Buenos Aires, to La Plata, to Rosario, to Córdoba, I guess, and come to find out, you need special packaging. You believe that? I know how to raise them. There’s no point, though. I could do the experiments myself. But I’d need a researcher to guide me. Get it? So what can I do?”

  He interrupts himsel
f abruptly. He looks up, as if to let the light shine in his face. He smiles, bitterly, but he smiles.

  “Come on.”

  He takes her hand and tugs.

  Amaya obeys and at the same time looks around for her sister and daughter, to see if they’re watching. They are walking from cage to cage, rapt, oblivious to everything that isn’t the animals.

  Against the far wall is a ruin. Bricks, straw, a thick pole sunk in the ground, and chained to it, a small fox, undeveloped, trying to huddle, to avoid being seen, cowering into the earth, but knowing from experience there is no escape, that his captivity offers no hiding place.

  “I caught him, without hurting him. He tried to get away from me. I got him by the scruff of the neck, with both hands, and he must have thought I would kill him. He gave up kicking until I put him in the sack.”

  Amaya looks at the man’s hands. They don’t frighten her. They could choke her to death. In certain circumstances, perhaps, she would let them.

  Romano baits the animal. He takes a stick and pricks him in the side. The fox gets angry and bites, stripping off the bark. He leaves his hollow in the straw and gets to his feet, not valiantly, but in a half-crouch, barking like a dog, with the same voice, but shriller, more ridiculous, more terrible and poignant.

  Romano is amused.

  Amaya feels her daughter and sister close by, there to witness the derision, which they do not join in, but suffer through.

  “Why don’t you let him go?” Amaya asks.

  Romano’s amusement comes to an end.

  “Let him go. Sure, maybe. I hadn’t thought of that. I could sell him to a zoo, but he’s worthless, and he’d probably tear off my hand if I tried.”

  His whole broad body retreats toward the unhinged door next to the cages. As if he were announcing: the visit’s over.

  Amaya takes her child’s hand, and the girl turns back to take leave of the captured animals.

  In a green dress, the dimwit trots along behind them.

  Where there’s shade and you can breathe, between the porch and the tall plants overlooking the garden, Romano stops the woman, grabbing her bare arm.

  “I want to see a plaster figure with you.”

  “Where? Come on, there’s still time.”

  As though to say: I’m not gruff, I’m not offended.