The Accidentals, page 3
Then, from the corner of the park where the café is, I saw an ambulance pull up. Its siren wasn’t going, which meant I almost didn’t notice its arrival. Two nurses got out and headed in the direction of the park. One of them was carrying a medical bag. Almost immediately, an older woman appeared in a Mercedes-Benz. Without moving from the table, I saw how the men took hold of Manu as his eyes grew clouded with worry once more. I said to myself that, although he had a mother, his expression was exactly the same as that of all the orphans. Without putting up a fight, without even struggling with the men, he let them lead him over to the ambulance they had arrived in and shut him up inside it. The woman, however, did not get out of the car.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
‘The devil can be a cloud, a shadow, a gust of wind that shakes the leaves. He can be the nightjar flying across the sky or a reflection on the surface of the river.’
— Liliana Colanzi
Things had started falling apart a month or two ago. Although it was no longer mandatory, the lockdown was driving us all mad. What’s more, at around that time, a few unsettling events had taken place in our building. One morning, as I was about to take out the rubbish, I saw that someone had defaced our corridor with threatening, vulgar pictures. To call them ‘graffiti’ would be to confer too much value on them. They were ugly drawings, pretty rudimentary, made with chalk, permanent marker, even lipstick, but there was something violent about them, something that went beyond the crudeness of a pair of tits or some hairy genitals; probably the rage with which they had been executed. This rage entered my body and mingled with the indignation the incident triggered in me. I immediately went to find a cloth and a bottle of detergent and asked my sons to help me scrub them off. Two days later, the images appeared again, this time on our own front door.
‘It has to be one of our neighbours,’ said my husband. ‘People doing actual graffiti use aerosols and that kind of thing; and anyway, no one’s going out onto the street at the moment.’
But this explanation scared me even more. The fact that some highly-strung neighbour had taken against us was just as or even more frightening.
Days later, all the windows in our apartment became jammed, as if someone had locked them from the outside, and then miraculously started working again. One night, the kitchen tap turned itself on while we were sleeping and flooded the dining room floor. The next day, as I dragged a dishcloth over the tiles, I thought about my maternal grandmother, who used to interpret dreams where water and floods appeared as an unequivocal omen of death. Luckily this wasn’t a dream but reality, a reality so inexplicable there was something dreamlike about it. Meanwhile, my husband kept trying to reassure me. He talked about crumbling window frames or neighbours with too much time on their hands, but I couldn’t see any of these as random events with no connection between them. Whether it was in our apartment building, or in this infected world we almost never went out into, something pernicious seemed to be taking over our lives. This is what I told my husband as he looked at me with concern, at times even with pity.
‘You’re getting in your own way, Gabriela. You can’t let these fears keep controlling you. Take a look back at history: there’ve been pandemics before. The drawings on the walls are being done by someone, and I don’t think they’re aimed at us.’
His words would calm me down for a few hours, but then later I would remember the drawings or hear sounds in the kitchen again, and my disquiet would return, stronger than ever.
The boys weren’t doing so well, either. Bruno had started secondary school in the middle of the pandemic and had spent almost a year studying online, not mixing with any other children his age. The isolation combined with his hormonal changes were making him feel almost constantly impatient, something which was on occasion very tricky to manage. In order to protect himself from his older brother, Lucas adopted a low profile, behaving as discreetly as possible. Although neither boy had ever liked board games, my husband would propose games of Risk and Scrabble in the hope of luring them away from their screens. The idea for the trip was his.
‘You’ll see,’ he assured me. ‘A weekend of breathing clean air will be enough to make us all feel sane again. You’ll come back feeling like a new woman.’
‘Can we take our bikes?’ asked Lucas, who hardly ever opened his mouth at this point, and this sudden burst of enthusiasm from him seemed like a good sign.
We bought a large rack to transport the bikes on the back of the car so we wouldn’t have to dismantle them. Bruno, however, didn’t seem too excited about the idea of spending a weekend in the woods. He has always been scared of insects and is disgusted by the thought of his hands getting muddy.
‘You know I don’t like the countryside,’ he protested when we described our plan to him. ‘Can’t we go somewhere else?’
My husband was born in a village surrounded by mountains and his family owns a large nursery for flowering plants that we visit quite regularly. The fact that his first-born son rejects his rural roots is a personal affront to him, but this time he didn’t say anything.
Two weeks later, we made our journey to Santa Elena, which in photos looks idyllic – an ancient forest surrounded by mountains – but turned out to be far less so than we would have wished.
The cabin we were staying in was small and functional, although not attractive. There was a large bed in the downstairs room, and a wooden mezzanine that was far too close to the ceiling. The kitchen and dining area were outside, and to get there you had to cross a little garden. All this drew new complaints from Bruno. We, however, thought the accommodation adequate for three nights. In any case, the plan wasn’t to be shut up inside for the whole day, but rather to go cycling through the forest or around the lake.
On the Friday morning we got onto our bikes, each carrying one element of the picnic in our rucksacks. It was hot in Santa Elena. It was the last week of April; the sun was at its peak in the sky, and the trees so dry they looked as if they were made of sand. As they moved along the dirt track, our wheels lifted up great clouds of dust. Shortly before we reached the start of the trail, we came across the lake. We stopped for a moment to get a good look at it. Bruno insisted we stay there for the remainder of the day, but the rest of us were keen to keep going and follow the route we’d found on the map, a relatively easy trail known as the Wizard of Oz.
‘You go on ahead, then,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll stay here and read until you get back. Just leave me my food.’
‘We came here to spend time together and get some exercise,’ his father replied. ‘Aren’t you bored of sitting around every day? Stop being so dramatic and pick up your bike.’
‘I don’t want to!’ Bruno said. ‘I hate the countryside. It’s made for animals like you.’
His reaction surprised me. My husband’s only response was to grab the book Bruno had in his hands and put it into his rucksack. Then he took him by the arm and pulled him up from the tree trunk where he’d been sitting. The poor boy could do nothing but obey and get back onto his bike.
‘They really picked the right name for it!’ Lucas exclaimed as soon as we reached the circuit. ‘The path is completely yellow!’
Despite his good mood, I felt ill at ease. As well as believing in the symbolic power of dreams, my grandmother was convinced that natural spaces have invisible but powerful guardians, and that in the forest it is possible to spot them. You must be respectful towards them, she would warn me. If you ignore them, they can turn against you. I had never sensed these spirits, but as we cycled onto this trail it seemed to me that the ground, the rocks, the trees and the sky formed the extremities of a being whose consciousness was observing us.
We spent the next few minutes in silence, pedalling along the curves of a dirt track, a carpet of dry leaves and, on either side, endless lines of trees. Lucas and my husband were in front and I followed them watchfully, trying not to lose sight of Bruno who was several feet behind us, still moaning and going deliberately slowly. Having children is to always be waiting for someone.
Annoyed at his brother’s behaviour, Lucas pedalled furiously off into the distance, not caring if anyone went with him or not. As in so many other instances, I felt torn between the demands of my two sons.
‘You go with him if you like,’ suggested my husband. ‘I’ll wait for Bruno.’
I had no choice but to pick up my pace and chase after Lucas, who was speeding ahead through the trees.
I had the dizzying impression that I was retracing my steps, not simply as if we had already gone around the same trail several times – which we most certainly had – but as if before, in a dream or a previous life, we had passed several times through this forest. This was what I was thinking when we came face to face with Bruno. He was walking along pushing his bike grumpily, as if it were an encumbrance.
‘Where did you go?’ I asked him. ‘Your dad was waiting for you. Didn’t you see him?’
But Bruno didn’t answer me. He kept walking, his mouth fixed in a pout. His eyes, darker than ever, were ringed with emerging bags.
‘This place is full of creepy crawlies. Can we go home today?’
‘We’ve rented the cabin for three nights, remember?’
‘So? No one’s going to stop us from leaving, are they?’
I knew that when he was in a bad mood it was best not to argue with him and instead to wait until he cheered up a bit. He was clearly tired and hungry, so I said nothing more.
It was difficult to decide which way to go. Bruno insisted that the way out of the forest was in the opposite direction to where his brother and I claimed. Less out of conviction and more so as not to antagonize him, Lucas and I decided to turn around and pedal back the way we had come. Ten minutes later, we found the main path and, sitting at the edge of it, my husband, with a hostile expression identical to the one Bruno wore. Although I adored my son, I thought it unfair that his bad mood should ruin our trip.
‘I think we should just have lunch now,’ said my husband, resignedly, taking a red and white picnic blanket out of his rucksack.
The place was utterly uninspiring and didn’t seem like the best spot to have a picnic at all – nothing compared to the lake, the hills or the panoramic vista the viewpoint promised, but once again I chose not to say anything. I sat down on the ground, looked up at the sky, and let myself be mesmerized by the treetops.
Bruno went over to the rucksack, rummaged around in it impatiently until he found the flask of water and started taking frenzied gulps from it.
‘Hey, you brute!’ shouted my husband. ‘Don’t drink all the water! It’s for everyone.’
Then, without anyone seeing it coming, Bruno spat his mouthful of water into his father’s face, as if to justify the insult. Without even taking a minute to dry himself off, my husband began to run after him, one hand raised in the air. I carried on watching the dance of the trees for a little while longer, as Bruno’s cries floated towards me from a distance.
‘Help me, Mum! Don’t let Dad hit me.’
I smiled with the same far-off feeling I had been experiencing up until then, certain that my husband would never dare do anything of the sort.
There was a long silence. I turned, intrigued to see what was happening, and saw that my husband was raining smacks down on our eldest son’s behind. When he finished, he shook his hand as if trying to get the feeling back in it, and I realized he had hit him really hard. I gave him an incredulous, reproachful look, which he immediately dodged. Then, still frowning, but pretending everything was fine, he took the things from the rucksack and laid out our food on the picnic blanket. Bruno moved away from us, tears streaming down his face. Every two or three steps he kicked the dry leaves angrily.
When I saw the food, I felt myself retch in disgust. My stomach was a stone weighing heavily in the middle of my body.
‘Why did you do that?’ I asked, livid.
‘The boy has no manners. Don’t you get it?’ my husband replied, his mouth full of bread. ‘He needed to be punished.’
‘You’re the one who doesn’t get it,’ I protested. ‘He’s growing up. Can’t you see his hormones are all over the place? If the pandemic has made us anxious, he’s suffering three times as much. And the only thing you can think of is to humiliate him?’
My husband didn’t reply. I breathed deeply, trying to calm myself down.
‘Listen,’ I said after a while. ‘I think Bruno has lots of things he wants to tell us, and he doesn’t know how.’
‘Well instead of winding us up, perhaps he could write us a letter.’
‘I’ve got lots of things to tell you, too,’ Lucas piped up.
I stroked his head fondly and stood up, trying to figure out which direction his brother had gone in.
My boots sunk into the dry leaves as if into quicksand, but no matter how far I walked I could find no trace of my son. The trees all looked exactly the same, and so it was very hard to orientate yourself. All that was certain was that I’d moved quite far away from my family, because I could no longer hear the voices of Lucas and my husband, but nor could I hear Bruno’s tears. I felt my chest contract with anguish once again. Something bad is going to happen to him, I remember thinking. As I walked, I asked the spirit of the forest to protect Bruno and to lead me to him. In exchange, I was prepared to pay any price, whether a part of my body or even my own life. I announced this clearly, with the voice in my mind, pretty sure that spirits tend to hold you to these kinds of rashly made promises.
It was then that I saw him, sitting a few feet away, sobbing. I crouched down beside him and encircled him with my arms, just as I have always done, ever since he was a little boy.
‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’
‘I hate Dad.’ His guttural voice was almost unrecognizable. ‘I don’t understand why you’re still with him.’
As if my son were a tree oozing resin, I could feel the rage and sadness his body was emanating. I saw him as a being halfway between the boy he had been and the adult he was becoming.
‘You’re just going through a difficult period with him. You’ll soon make up, you’ll see.’
Bruno wiped his tears away and looked at me doubtfully.
‘Now come on, let’s go. You need to eat something. I brought your favourite chocolate bar.’
He resisted a little at first, but then in the end gave in, and we walked back together, very slowly, to where the other two were finishing off dessert. My husband’s head was still bowed, and it seemed to me as if the bald spot on the crown of his head had grown a few inches in diameter. All four of us were silent. Because of this I was able to hear the wind whispering above us in a different language to our own, but one which didn’t sound foreign at all. I put my hand in my rucksack and took out my packet of cigarettes. Then I moved off to smoke without bothering the others. I let the astringent taste of the tobacco flood every one of my taste buds, avoiding the disapproving glances my husband threw me every now and then.
Eating did Bruno good – I’ve always picked up on how his mood changes hugely depending on his blood sugar levels. His body was suppurating a little less unhappiness, and his scent returned to how it always was.
Lucas and my husband put the picnic leftovers in the rucksack and when they were finished, got back onto their bikes, but Bruno refused to cycle any more. I had to promise that I would walk back to the campsite with him so he would pick his bike up off the floor and agree to take it back to the cabin. The wind was no longer singing, and the sun beat down with less force.
When we got back, I took a shower and, when I’d finished, asked the boys to do the same. When we had all washed the dust from the trail from ourselves, we went out to play Scrabble at the picnic table in the garden. I remember that I drew the tile that meant I could go first, and that I felt a chill run down my spine when I saw the seven letters laid out on the little plastic rack: they formed the word S A T A N I C. I swallowed hard and the saliva got stuck in my throat. I moved the tiles around and spelled out S A I N T on the board, like someone throwing a few grains over their left shoulder after they have spilled salt, a move that gave me a lower score. Straight away I thought about my husband saying You’re getting in your own way. You can’t let these fears keep controlling you. Bruno has always been very good with words – he’s top of his class in language and literature – and in Scrabble it’s as if the letters obey him. The first word he put down was J O K E R, then he waited a couple of turns and added B A S T A R D, then B U L L Y, putting his tiles down on a part of the board that gave him a triple word score. At first we didn’t notice, but then it started to become obvious that all these insults were aimed at his father. I know my husband and, although this time he said nothing, I could tell he was furious again. He must have felt trapped by this game, which he always loses, not because he doesn’t have the vocabulary but because he’s bad at spelling.
As soon as it grew dark, we went up to the area for making fires. In our rucksacks we had a barbecue and some food. Bruno collected firewood as instructed by his father, and then sat down on a rock to watch how his father and brother arranged the branches in a pyramid, leaving gaps around the bottom so the air could circulate. No one asked him to get involved and nor, as was to be expected, did he do so voluntarily. Perfectly in sync with his father, Lucas tended the fire the whole night, making me feel not just safe but proud, too, of his caution. At least one of us has a measured character, I remember thinking. After we’d eaten, Bruno and I gathered everything up and washed the dishes, humming Beatles songs as we did so. We all went to bed before ten, exhausted by the events of the day, but I was awoken in the middle of the night by someone tugging at my sleeve.
