The Accidentals, page 4
‘Mum, can I stay here with you?’
I opened my eyes in surprise. It had been several years since Bruno had wanted to get into our bed.
‘Is something wrong, sweetheart? Why aren’t you asleep?’
‘I’m scared. I don’t feel right here.’
I turned to look at my husband, who was facing the stone wall of the cabin and snoring on the other side of the bed. I shunted gingerly over towards him, letting our son take up the space on the opposite edge of the mattress. Bruno curled up next to me and almost immediately fell asleep. A little while later, I was woken by my husband’s indignant voice.
‘Don’t think you’re going to stay here,’ he said in a tone of voice that to me sounded unnecessarily strict.
‘He had a nightmare,’ I replied, defending the boy.
‘Well, he can comfort himself. He’s too old to be sleeping with his mummy.’
I didn’t want to argue in front of the children, so there was nothing I could do but swallow down my anger. Bruno got out from under the covers without a word. I did the same and went with him up to the mezzanine. I lay down at his side and waited for him to fall asleep. When I went back to my bed, I wasn’t sleepy any more. I spent a good while watching my husband’s breathing as revealed by the movement of his back. Meanwhile, the images from the previous day came back to my mind like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: the arguments, Bruno spitting the water, his bottom being spanked, and finally the letters I had seen on the Scrabble board. I wondered who the forest spirit really was, who exactly I had asked for protection for my son. I got up and left the cabin and went to light a cigarette. There was no moon, but the stars weren’t visible either. The sky was as dark as could be. I had only been outside for a minute or two when I heard Lucas’ footsteps, careful and unmistakable, coming towards me.
‘Mum? What are you doing?’ he asked, in his sleepy little voice.
‘Nothing, my love. I’m just out here, thinking.’
‘About what?’
‘About how sometimes I feel like destroying everything.’
Unlike his brother, who always tells me off whenever he sees me smoking, Lucas said nothing about the cigarette. He simply gave me a sweet, silent hug, and went back to bed without being told to.
In the morning, Bruno got up much later than usual. He appeared in the kitchen when breakfast was already ready.
‘You’ve got a good radar,’ I joked. ‘I was about to serve yours up. The Nutella’s over there, look.’
I indicated the jar as I placed a steaming pancake in front of him.
‘How do you feel? Did you manage to sleep a bit more?’
He didn’t reply. Just as his father was doing, Bruno stared fixedly at his plate. The two ate in silence while Lucas and I tried in vain to lighten things up by talking about football, one of the few interests the four of us shared.
‘You boys need to clear the table and wash up,’ said my husband when we’d finished eating. ‘Today we’re going to do a slightly longer route than the one we did yesterday. Don’t forget to fill up your flasks with water.’
This time, not even Lucas looked keen. I imagined myself cycling along beside Bruno, doing everything I could to convince him to keep going a little longer. But my husband was not interested in our opinions. He took a roll of toilet paper from the cupboard and walked back towards the cabin, his steps resolute. As soon as they saw him go through the door, the boys ran off in the direction of the garden, indifferent to the order they had just been given. I must admit I was cheered by their apparent closeness. Quickly, I began washing the plates so their father wouldn’t tell them off, until I heard Bruno’s cries.
‘Get away from there now!’ he was saying desperately to Lucas. ‘Can’t you see it’s burning?’
I came out of the kitchen and confirmed what I already feared: a fire was approaching my sons, one bush already blazing and, on the ground, dozens of tiny but incredibly fast flames, which seemed to be leaping all over the place. Instead of heeding his brother’s words, Lucas was staring at them intently, almost enjoying it, as if he were watching a video online and not the first signs of a blaze, at the fleeting moment when it is still possible to put it out.
In the email we’d been sent with the site rules, we had been warned that the vegetation was very dry and thus highly flammable: When putting out your fires, use water, not earth. If you do not do this, they can start up again. I ran to the kitchen in search of the large jug we had brought with us to the campsite and started tipping water all over the burning bush, but it was too late. The flames had already reached the surrounding plants and the straw-like grass that covered the ground. The water vanished as soon as it touched this cracked earth like a thirsty tongue. Please, please, please, I repeated over and over again in a low voice to who knows whom, probably the guardians of the forest, so they would prevent what was about to happen. But instead of getting better, the situation spiralled into something much worse, and eventually I lost my cool.
‘Help! Fire!’ I called to alert people. ‘The forest is burning!’
I called my husband’s name, too, hoping that the distress in my voice would bring him running out of the bathroom, regardless of what he was doing in there. Two forest wardens appeared in the outdoor kitchen and ordered us to scrape together as much earth as we could, while one of the women who ran the site called for help on her radio. A few seconds later I saw that the flames had reached the tops of the huge tree outside the cabin and were leaping up the trunk of another that was even taller, filling the air with thick black smoke and making it very difficult to breathe. All the surrounding plants were burning, and the flames licking around the tops of the trees reached up to the sky. I took my sons by the hands and made them run to the car with me. Just at that moment, my husband appeared.
‘The forest is on fire!’ I told him. ‘We have to get out of here.’
He took his precious time to understand what was happening, but eventually he reacted.
‘You guys go if you want.’ he said. ‘I’m staying!’
Five men answered the radio call. In surprisingly organized fashion, as if this were a dance they had already practised several times, they formed a line while one of the forest wardens went along and handed each of them some kind of tool. As soon as they’d taken it, they entered the disaster zone, where the air was so dense it was impossible to follow their trail. My husband joined them without saying goodbye to us, disappearing into the pall of smoke like a zombie. I started the car’s engine and prayed he would get out of there alive. I had nothing with me except for my two sons, my bag and my phone. A few feet off, I saw our bicycles carefully parked up against the cabin, the new helmets hanging from the handlebars. Everything else had been left inside.
In the back seat of the car, Bruno cried. I breathed deeply and put the car into reverse to get to the path that led out to the highway, but once on it couldn’t help trying to spot my husband in the rearview mirror. The fire had reached the offices, and it wouldn’t be long before it got to the cabin with all our things in it. A huge black cloud was spreading over the forest. The men who before had been running around hauling tools had disappeared into the smoke, and you could no longer make out a single human being.
‘What’s going to happen to Dad?’ asked Lucas. His question moved me.
‘I don’t know, my love. Let’s hope he doesn’t put himself into too much danger.’
For the first time since seeing that burning bush, I asked myself how it had happened, and if they were in some way responsible. Or was it I who, when I asked for protection, had sacrificed the life of my husband in an utterly irresponsible manner? To banish this thought, I interrogated my sons. I did so bluntly and without hiding my annoyance, but they just sat there in silence.
‘It was him,’ wailed Bruno, eventually.
I thought that, yet again, he was trying to blame his brother for something he had done. It was practically a habit, but this time Lucas did not protest. He simply ignored us and turned his head to look back at Santa Elena. His attitude enraged me. More than ever, I needed certainties, not childish or pre-teen insolence, and so I stopped the car in the middle of the road to talk to them.
‘Lucas, I want you to look at me. Is it true what your brother’s saying?’
‘Yes Mum, it was me,’ he replied with that calm so typical of his; it seemed incongruent with everything that was happening. ‘I set the bush on fire.’
‘And look at this, too!’ Bruno commanded me, grabbing his brother’s arm roughly. On my youngest son’s skin, I saw something drawn in pen, identical to the images that had appeared in our apartment building.
‘He jammed the windows shut, too.’
I turned to face my eldest son in astonishment.
‘You knew from the start Lucas was doing this and you didn’t say anything?’
‘I’m not the one you should be getting angry with!’ he retorted.
I needed a break to think, so I got out of the car intending to light a cigarette, but no matter how much I rummaged around in my bag I couldn’t find the packet. I locked the car doors to stop the boys from leaving and walked a few feet off. A group of local farmers rode past me on horseback. They must have been heading towards the blaze, towards the red and black clouds that had eclipsed the horizon. As I walked, I asked myself if I really knew these two boys whom I had given birth to and raised so carefully for years. I thought too about how unjust allegiances can be – how while I was capable of renouncing any aspect of my life for my children, they had pacts of solidarity that excluded me. Their father, meanwhile, had chosen to help the farmers and the trees rather than come with us. I felt no resentment towards him; on the contrary, I hoped he was safe and that this decision had earned him the goodwill of the spirits. Although my fears were screaming out to me to get back in the car and carry on driving towards the highway, this time I decided not to listen to them.
We returned to the campsite a couple of hours later, and the atmosphere we found was very different by then. The farmers had managed to make a firewall by sacrificing an extensive wall of trees around the blaze to control the situation, while the rescuers formed two human chains going in opposite directions to bring buckets of water to the edges of the forest and stop the hot embers from catching alight again.
My husband was one of the links in the chain. I struggled to recognize him since his legs, arms and face had turned the same colour as the trees. His features betrayed the exhaustion that had accumulated in his body; even his Crocs, warped by the heat, were now invested with a new and unwonted dignity. I went to greet him with a loving hug that surprised even me. Then I looked around for my sons and saw Lucas staring, a satisfied look on his face, at the wreckage of our bicycles and our weekend. The cabin, however, had remained untouched.
‘Look, Mum,’ exclaimed Lucas, pointing towards the doorway. ‘Your cigarettes are still there.’
And it was true. All the things we had left out on the porch remained intact, as we had left them the previous night, but none of us were the same any longer.
THE PINK DOOR
In my sixty-three years of life, it has never occurred to me to hire the services of a prostitute. If anything, I was the one who, as a young man, exchanged sex for favours – such as a good meal and a warm bed – when I went backpacking around Europe. You might say that it was Lili, my wife, who planted the seed in my brain with a passing comment that triggered a long chain of thoughts and actions. One afternoon, as we were walking through our neighbourhood down one of the deserted little streets adjoining our own, Lili pointed out a new business, although in fact all that was there was a very narrow door the colour of pink bubble gum, with little blue and green hearts painted on it in pastel tones. It looked like the door of a teenage girl’s bedroom. The afternoon was fading, illuminating the cobbled ground of the alley and its grey walls with a violet light, and making the colour of the door stand out with an unusual glow. I suppose it was this light that made us notice it.
‘Have you seen what’s over there?’ remarked my wife, excited as a child. She had stood up on her tip toes to get a better look.
High up in the wall, two coquettish little windows were pushed open like sleepy eyelids. Rather than designed to allow someone to see the outside, their function seemed to be to provide ventilation while preventing passers-by from looking in. If you made an effort, however, it was possible to make out a few decorative objects that rendered the place even more perplexing. My wife pointed out the candelabra with beads of orange glass – or were they plastic? – hanging from the ceiling. On the wall, a long red balloon with a metallic sheen formed the word Love in English.
‘What a strange little space!’ remarked Lili, awakening in me the same curiosity she felt. ‘Have you seen it before?’
‘Never.’
‘You’re the one who always walks home down this street. I can’t believe you’ve never noticed it before.’
‘Well yeah, but it wasn’t here before. It’s appeared overnight. Maybe they only painted it yesterday,’ I replied, prickling a little.
‘If that was the case it would smell of fresh paint, no? Most likely it’s been here for weeks and we just didn’t notice.’
‘Maybe it’s the room of a girl who’s just left home for the first time,’ I hazarded, and I would have been content with that explanation if my wife hadn’t counterattacked.
‘I’ve never known any woman old enough to leave home who still has balloons in her bedroom,’ she replied, very sure of herself. ‘Isn’t it more likely to belong to a prostitute, or her pimp?’
I, in contrast, am convinced that bad taste has no upper age limit, but I was tired and wanted to get home as quickly as possible, so I chose to agree.
‘Don’t you even think about showing your face here!’ my wife said, half serious and half teasing, pointing her finger at me.
I pretended to have lost all interest in the matter, but in fact, quite the opposite occurred. Over that same week I thought about the place again on several occasions. When I least expected it, the little door would appear in my mind’s eye, except that now it was ajar, as if inviting me to enter. One night I imagined that I poked my head around it, allowing me to glimpse the owner of that room: a female student, with soft, brown skin, who was sitting in her underwear touching up the nail varnish on her toes. The image produced a movement between my legs so unusual in recent times that I couldn’t help but feel surprised; the most potent erection I had had in years. By my side, her head buried in a pile of pillows, my wife snored on. I looked at my watch: it was twenty-five past midnight. I thought about sneaking out of the house and walking to Calle Mariposa, but almost immediately recalled Lili’s voice categorically forbidding me to go near the premises. I wondered when the last time was that she and I had had sex and, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember.
I would be lying if I said that Lili wasn’t a controlling wife. Even since before we had got married, she always took charge of deciding each and every one of the important things related to our family life. She was the one who chose the suit and shoes I purchased for my wedding, the name of our daughter, and the houses we rented for the first few decades we were together. Once we had saved enough money to buy some land, she chose this neighbourhood and breezily directed the entire construction process. I’m not complaining – her tastes and mine were almost always compatible, and I must admit that for years, her decisive character saved me many a headache, but it’s also true that it frequently made me feel a little steamrollered. My survival strategy consisted of occupying the grey areas, those interstices which escaped my wife’s tentacles due to their insignificance. Things like choosing the brand of coffee we drank or how we separated the rubbish allowed me to preserve my dignity but weren’t enough to amass sufficient quantities of enthusiasm for life, nor to diminish the resentment I felt for decades of not being master of my own destiny. Perhaps this is why, when I discovered the effect that place produced in me, I decided to ignore the ban on going near it and to push my rebellion as far as possible. It wasn’t easy to maintain this conviction. Several times I walked down Calle Mariposa hoping to step across the threshold of that little door, but it was always closed. The windows, too, were also closed most of the time and the frosting made it impossible to make out what was happening inside. Nothing on that external wall stood out. The stones seemed sunk into their characteristic deep and lethargic sleep. Even the colour of the wood, I fancied, was duller, as if diluted.
It was on Thursday, 24 September – I remember it exactly because on that day Clara, our daughter, was going to turn thirty-one – when the first anomaly occurred. Clara was due to come round that evening to celebrate with us. I had called her first thing to say happy birthday, and we chatted casually for a few minutes. Then I spent several hours trying to focus on an insurance forecast I had to deliver to one of my clients. The work bored me, so I decided to get up from my desk. In the kitchen, I found my wife, who had started making the cake she baked for our daughter every year. She had run out of vanilla extract and asked me to go to the supermarket to get some. I made a face as usual to avoid her suspicion but, deep down, I was pleased to have a pretext to go out at that time of day.
The sun had begun to set, and Calle Mariposa had been painted violet once again. A man and a woman were chatting in front of the now open door. The woman had her back to me, so it was impossible to tell that much about her, except that she was slim and broad-hipped. She had straight black hair, gathered up under a red cap exactly the same colour as her blouse. The man was dressed in a similar fashion. They looked like they worked at a cinema or a chain of fast-food restaurants. From where I stood it was possible to get a glimpse of the room beyond: the orange candelabra was still dark, and next to the brick wall I thought I could make out the bed, which supported my wife’s theory about the nature of the business. The man opened the boot of a car and began to unload several cardboard boxes, small ones, like the ones used for transporting books, although I thought it rather unlikely that this was what they contained. I didn’t want them to see me loitering around, and so I turned and headed straight to the supermarket. I bought the vanilla extract and walked back as fast as I could. The man and the woman were no longer there, but the door was still half open. The light had been switched on in the room, and the metallic balloon hanging from the wall reflected those same glimmers of light I had seen the first time. The bed, meanwhile, had vanished. In its place was a sofa, and in front of this, a little coffee table.
