Carnality, page 10
“I’ll do it, Miranda,” she says.
She moves over to the sofa, gets hold of Santiago’s arm, and wraps it around her neck. Then she pulls him up with all the strength she can muster. He is a lot heavier than he looks, but she has learned how to compensate for his weight. She grips him around the waist and starts slowly guiding him forward. Only now he has just been woken up, he gets confused and struggles against her while yelling for Miranda.
“Miranda!” he shouts. “Miranda, help me!”
“No, I won’t,” Miranda calls from the kitchen. “It’ll be fine, you’ll see. I’m here, my darling. I’ll wake you when it’s time for lunch.”
“I want you to do it!” he yells again.
“This time we’re going to do what I say,” Miranda replies.
She pushes the bedroom door open behind them with one foot and continues to steer him toward the bed. Their progress is very slow and she can hear from his breathing that he is upset. She draws back the cover on the perfectly made bed and lowers him carefully onto it. But then he grabs her by the hair, yanks on it, and screams at her, “I don’t like you! I want Miranda!”
The rage takes hold of her so abruptly she has no time to think. She grasps his chin hard, raising his face toward her and stares into his eyes.
“So this is how it’s going to be, is it?” she says.
She squeezes so hard his mouth opens and his tongue is forced out. His face looks so distorted and grotesque she feels scared. She suddenly remembers this is a person with dementia and releases him immediately.
“Lie down, and I’ll pull the cover over you,” she says.
“You hurt me,” he says.
“Just lie down,” she repeats.
“I hate you and I’m going to kill you,” he says.
She sits down on the edge of the bed and squeezes his hands, so hard she can see the pain in his eyes.
Then she says in a soft voice: “So here’s the thing. I know someone who takes care of people like you. An evil monster, a tiny female one, who rips the hearts out of people who do not behave. So watch it. If you keep behaving like this, I may have to introduce you to her.”
While she is saying this, she can feel all her good intentions collapsing around her—like a rain of glass splinters. What am I doing? she thinks. Santiago is watching her calmly though, and asks without any anger in his voice: “Do you think she could help me…?”
“Help you with what?” she says and lets go of his hands.
“The female monster…If she could…”
He falls silent and looks over at the door. They are being observed. She turns around and sees Miranda standing there, looking shell-shocked.
“What are you doing?” she says softly.
“Let me explain,” she says.
“I’ve been watching and listening. Have you gone mad?”
“Sorry,” she says.
“Do you realize how much I had to trust you to leave him in your hands? Have you got any idea?”
Miranda comes over to her. She is wearing the shoes with the puffs on, the kindly shoes with the puffs, though that is deceptive, because there’s nothing kindly about Miranda now. She raises her index finger and her eyes are shining with rage.
“Sorry, Miranda,” she says again.
Miranda lowers her index finger and looks at Santiago, who is sitting on the bed with a smile plastered across his face. She leans over him and wipes away the drool, straightens the sheet, and caresses his head.
“Is everything okay?” Miranda asks.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m fine.”
“Sorry, Santiago,” she says. “Sorry, Miranda.”
“Never mind,” he says.
“I did tell you it was the illness,” Miranda says.
“I’m so ashamed. Please forgive me. It won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t, because you’re leaving.” Her voice is trembling with fury.
“What…,” she says, and shakes her head. “No, no, no. I want to help you.”
“Get out,” Miranda hisses.
“I got impatient,” she says. “You must be able to forgive me for that.”
“Out,” she says, pointing toward the door. “You’re leaving now, even if I have to go and fetch the cleaver from the kitchen.”
She cannot hold back tears. “You don’t understand,” she says. “I need this.”
“You need this? Why?”
“I don’t know, I just do. I feel better when I’m here. There’s a meaning to things and I don’t want to be without that meaning.”
Miranda clears her throat and her voice shakes with the effort of controlling herself as she says: “I’m the one to decide who’ll be here. And like I said, I no longer trust you at all. Get out.”
She looks at Santiago on the bed.
“She wants me to go,” she says to him in the hope he will oppose Miranda and say he needs her, she helps him, and he wants her to stay.
But he says nothing just smiles his demented smile and waves at her.
“Goodbye,” he says. “See you again maybe.”
She is still crying on the metro. People are staring but she doesn’t care. When she gets back to the apartment, even though Mercuro does his very best to console her, she feels she might just as well go home now. What did she imagine she was going to accomplish? Someone told her there is a saying in some language or other that if you are born square, you won’t die round. She might just as well forget the whole thing, and go on being the person she always has been until she eventually dies, and that will be that.
* * *
—
Mercuro lets her finish her story and cry herself out while plying her with alcohol. In some strange way her breaking down seems to have given him another boost, and he says maybe they should go somewhere, to one of the islands, one of the Balearics? It has been getting hotter and by noon the temperature in the apartment is unbearable. The idea of the sea is irresistible, and she is picturing it the way someone in the desert glimpses an oasis in the distance. Mercuro keeps on about the idea. There’s no point being in Madrid in the summer. It is almost forty degrees Celsius outside, and if they were older or weaker they could die. The situation is harmful to humans; it’s dangerous.
“Let’s just go,” he says. “Let’s just leave this hellhole behind us, come on.”
“But you’re so scared of going out. How are you going to cope with going on holiday?”
“All we’ve got to do is get to the airport, and then we’ll have left Lucia and Huei behind us along with this city and its infernal heat. We can manage that. Imagine being gone, let’s just get away from this place!”
She shrugs. “Fine by me.”
A few hours later he comes out of his room to tell her he has booked the flights. They leave the next morning.
* * *
—
Leaving Madrid and arriving on the island feels wonderful. She can see it from the plane as they come in for a landing, and though it looks small and bleak, it is surrounded by dark blue water. There are azure patches she thinks are swimming pools, but which the pilot tells them are salt marshes. She can see beaches, bays, islands, large rocks, and sailboats. She has been drinking steadily for the hour the journey lasts, and so has Mercuro. He is fast asleep with his head on her shoulder. A man traveling on his own is in the seat closest to the aisle. He ordered two small bottles of spirits that he has been cheerfully swigging. When the man becomes aware she is watching him, he turns toward her and introduces himself.
“Hello,” he says in English. “My name is Johnny. I’m from Sweden. What’s your name?”
Brusquely she tells him her name and says she’s from Sweden as well. She prefers not to meet other Swedes on her travels. This man is overweight, besides, and has a regional accent. He looks like he comes from some little village in the country. She decides to keep her distance.
She pretends to read the paper but keeps glancing furtively at Johnny out of the corner of her eye. She is wondering what it would be like to make love to a man like him. He seems like the sort of man you could fantasize about, even though you haven’t got the faintest idea how you would deal with him in real life. Like a large green piece of furniture you buy because you liked it in the shop but which looks out of place in the living room when you get it home. When it comes to comparing men to pieces of furniture, she has only had a single solid one her entire life. Martin, her ex-husband from Bjuv, was like one of those spindle-back chairs from IKEA. There were no refinements, and you couldn’t expect romantic indulgences like the luxurious dinners or underwear some of her friends were sometimes given by their husbands. On the other hand you were never in any doubt about what you had. Every evening when you came back from work, the wooden chair was there to receive you, and you could just let go and stop pretending because that was something the chair would never do. Her divorced friends, in contrast, are endlessly preoccupied with coordinating their lovely designer furniture, while competing with a horde of gorgeous twenty-five-year-olds at the same time. She would never have the energy for that. Better safe than sorry, they say in English, and there’s no denying there’s something to that.
She glances at Johnny again. If he was up for it, would she be as well? The idea is absurd. But a lot of ideas are absurd, and that doesn’t stop you thinking them.
A little while later they are taking the transfer bus to the hotel. Johnny is sitting a few seats away. His face is already red from the sun, and he has a ridiculous-looking cap on his head. She doesn’t tell Mercuro she has spoken to him and looks away the moment he glances in their direction, because she doesn’t want them saddled with some nutcase on this trip. There don’t appear to be any mufflers on the island’s mopeds. The architecture is gaudy and ugly. The houses have aluminum windows, and the inhabitants’ underwear has been hung out to dry on lines that have been strung up in makeshift fashion, with skin-colored panties and bras with large compressed cups fluttering in the wind. There are patches of grease and oil on the sidewalks.
* * *
—
Though the hotel apartment lacks charm, it is practical and comes with a balcony that overlooks the swimming pool. Mercuro and she each have a room of their own. This is the first time she has been on holiday with a man she is not in a relationship with, or who is not Martin. Although she tries to act naturally, she is aware the new place is making Mercuro tense. He tells her he saw a man at the airport who could easily have been Mr. Huei. She says he has to let go of Mr. Huei. He has to let go of Miss Pink and Lucia. The whole Carnality circus. He has blown it all out of proportion. He nods and says that’s bound to be the case. And though he may have blown it up to a quite extraordinary degree, he just can’t let it go. He asks if he can borrow her tablet to see if he can access Carnality from it. She tells him under no circumstances whatsoever. They haven’t come all the way here to get stuck rehashing old battles. If he logs on to Carnality, then she will ring Miranda. And if she rings Miranda and can hear that Miranda is still angry with her and still despises her while she can also hear the sounds of the apartment in the background, which will make her remember the smell of Miranda’s fabric conditioner and the purple bougainvillea on the balcony, then she will break down. So she won’t be doing that; she’s going to resist temptation. And in that case it’s not asking too much for him to have to do the same.
Just as she has said this she catches sight of Johnny walking past beneath the balcony. He sees her, stops, and then starts to wave and shout. She pretends not to notice, but Mercuro has seen him and tells her there’s someone down there calling to you; he looks like someone from your country, maybe you should find out what he wants?
Johnny asks in English if he can come up. He doesn’t know anyone here, and it’s not like you go on holiday to be on your own. Mercuro looks a question at her. She shakes her head but Johnny persists.
“Come on up,” Mercuro shouts back in English with a strong Spanish accent. “Come up and have a glass of wine with us.”
Johnny arrives and they get a couple of bottles out of the minibar. The whole thing feels stiff. She and Mercuro move rather awkwardly around an apartment which is not their own, opening cupboards on the hunt for knives and chopping boards, because Johnny has brought a melon with him. What are they going to talk about? They raise their glasses in a toast. The wine is sweet and sticks slightly to the corners of your mouth while laying down a film over your teeth, but it tastes good anyway and she keeps drinking it. They’re on holiday after all, and the more she drinks the more remote it makes Miranda and Santiago seem. They introduce themselves, and Mercuro tells him he is on sick leave for mental health problems. Johnny does not ask what kind of psychological issues; he just keeps looking at her instead. She says she works on a local newspaper. Johnny nods.
“So what do you do?” Mercuro asks.
He tells them he is due to start training in a few weeks to be a chaos pilot.
“A chaos pilot?” she asks.
“The people who get called in following an accident to find out what went wrong in the sort of setup where everything should have gone right.”
He provides a few examples of lifeboats after shipwrecks failing to right themselves and remaining upside down, even though the people in the water had struggled to turn them over.
“Some people have got it,” he says. “They know exactly what to do in a catastrophe situation. They’re the ones who can immediately take command, get to the heart of the matter and say you go here and you go there; they get it sorted, keep a cool head, and make sure things get done the best possible way.”
She gives a little laugh and says, “So are you someone like that?”
“I don’t know. Not the kind of thing you can know before you’ve been in a catastrophe situation for real. That’s when your real self comes to the fore.”
She nods slowly and lets the muscat wine go to her head while she looks out over the tops of the pine trees. The air is hot and carries the smell of resin. Mercuro goes into the kitchen to look for something in one of the drawers.
“Though there are other kinds of catastrophe as well,” Johnny says. “The catastrophes we carry inside us.”
“I see,” she says. “So what kind of catastrophe have you got inside you then?”
Johnny shrugs. “None, except I sometimes lose self-control. And do things I regret later.”
“Like what?”
“It’s come on as I’ve got older. When I was young I was completely different. Everyone respected me. I could beat anyone up. Anyone at all. Get it? It was like I had this power inside me. Only now…”
He gestures at his body. She wonders how old he is. Forty? Forty-two? You just wait, she wants to say.
“It’s like there’s a sense of disappointment inside me,” he says. “At myself. You feel you’re not up to it. You can’t get it together. The loser shows through. And then the dam just bursts…”
“Nothing fucks you harder than time,” she says. “Ser Davos. Game of Thrones.”
He nods.
“Ser Davos,” he says, “comes out with some fucking brilliant lines. Nothing fucks you harder than time. That’s it exactly. Fuck’s sake, ‘nuff said…”
“Right,” she says. “The thing is, though, it can get so much worse. Mercuro, for instance…”
Mercuro comes back onto the balcony and she stops herself.
“What?” Johnny asks.
“Nothing,” she says and looks down at the floor.
“Here’s the thing,” Johnny says, leaning forward toward her. “Catastrophes are like latent illnesses that get activated by a particular signal. They can be hidden inside you and then it’s like they’ve been switched on all of a sudden. Like a spot on your face, a tumor in your stomach. The kind of thing that drags you down all at once. Like a black hole in your mind.”
“I see,” she says.
“And that’s what you’ve got. You can feel it a mile off. Something’s going to happen. You need to be on the lookout.”
What does he mean? She doesn’t want to ask. There are splashing sounds from the pool below. A Spanish couple are walking past beneath the balcony, talking loudly and laughing. She leans over the edge and looks down. They are holding hands; they look happy. She gets a lump in her throat when she thinks that must have been exactly what Miranda and Santiago looked like when they were young. She wants to say something about them. That there are people who get it right. A few, the chosen few, sort of.
“The wind is picking up,” she says.
“No, it’s not,” Johnny replies. “The sea’s calm.”
You can hear it in the distance, the sea, and the sound of the waves is merging with the piano music from the hotel bar. Crickets can be heard from the hill just a bit behind them.
Eventually Johnny goes home. She remains on the balcony with Mercuro. He has put the television on inside, and a woman’s voice is talking. They stay like that. Night falls soon afterward and they go to bed.
* * *
—
She wakes in the night and cannot go back to sleep. Her head feels heavy from the alcohol, and her stomach is slightly upset. The hotel is completely silent around them, as if they were deep inside an enormous foam mattress. She knows she’s not supposed to start thinking when she wakes up at night. Once you let the flow of thoughts into your head there’s no stopping it, and hours can go by while you keep battling away on the unstoppable treadmill of that unending stream. She can’t remember when anything felt meaningful before Miranda and Santiago. The last time anything felt meaningful before them might have been at the outset of her marriage to Martin, or when she was young and studying Spanish in Madrid. It felt like the world was completely different then. As though it were made of different matter, spun from another dream. As though she was someone else, the people around her entirely different and even history was not the same. Is this what getting old is about? it suddenly occurs to her to wonder. Coming to terms with decay and accepting the pointlessness of it all? That notion fills her with a peculiar calm, and she finally falls asleep at dawn.
