Imminence, page 3
I shouldn’t come down from the roof. As long as I stay up here, nothing can repeat itself.
I come down from the roof.
I recognise the stairs as I descend them. The hallway is filled with plants, and Ivan touches them from time to time. I don’t know the word for ‘hallway’ in Russian, or I can’t remember it, which is not the same thing. I linger in the doorway of the bedroom: the baby is making noises like a forest. I noticed this in the hospital too. ‘It’s because he wasn’t with you as soon as he was born,’ my sister explained earlier that evening. ‘It’s because you had that serious problem after the birth; if it weren’t for that everything would be perfect now.’
If the moon were out, and if the buildings were to open a passage for it, its light would fall directly onto the pile of nappies in this bedroom, each one decorated with cartoon images of some wild animal domesticated by bright colours. In the kitchen, too, a little earlier, when I got back from the hospital, I saw on the bench and the shelves and next to the sink other cartooned things, little cloths and bottles. The baby moves his feet; neither of them are silver now.
Someone touches my shoulder: it’s Ivan. Before I can say a word, he says:
‘The pants.’
The pants are part of the suit he came in. I didn’t dress him; my sister or some nurse must have done it. I ask Ivan to do it, and he takes off the baby’s pants. The legs are exposed; for a moment I can’t understand how they can be so short and crooked.
‘He’s a baby,’ Ivan explains. I must have stared for too long. He strokes the baby’s skin. Then, in triple time: the seguidilla of the removed nappy, the salves and ointments conscientiously applied between the legs, the new nappy (which is torn), the fresh pants, because we decide the other ones have been soiled. Now a cry rings out and fills our lungs. I sit down in a barely illuminated corner of the room and shake my arms, which have started to tremble. Ivan brings him to me, saying:
‘It’s easy.’
That night when I went swimming in the Paraná river, turning back seemed difficult. The water had gone black. A long time had passed since I emerged from among the reeds and sat down on the grassy slope. Behind the shrubs stood the house that belonged to the woman and the boy, and when the breeze blew from that direction I could hear voices. I approached the house with the aim of telling whoever was there that I planned to take the boat I’d seen on the other side of the hill, docked at a soft, almost decorative curve in the canal. It was hardly auspicious to emerge the way I did, from the shadows. I made my way towards a gazebo that had no doors to knock on; there were no dogs to announce my arrival, either.
The man standing at the barbecue grill pointed at me with the long metal prong he had been poking the meat with, a great sheet of meat that crackled in unison with the offal and the chorizos and a wholeaq white chicken alongside. The boy gestured at me with his arm, and the woman I’d spoken to earlier got up from her seat.
‘Is it a ghost?’ another boy asked, not much older than the first. I told them I wanted to take the boat.
‘Ah, no,’ replied a woman who was seated at the head of the table. There were wilted leaves on all the plates. A lemon, spinning like a planet, fell sideways. There seemed to be a whole collection of children and grandchildren present; a baby started hitting the table with a spoon, which prompted a high-pitched, passionate discussion on whether the baby should or should not be playing with a spoon, or with that specific spoon in that specific way, and whether his eyes, or his mouth, were or were not in danger. One determined woman seized the spoon from the baby’s hand, and the baby complained and was consoled. Several minutes passed before the woman at the head of the table, whose long earlobes were clinched by two pearl earrings like a footnote, informed me that I was not allowed to take the boat unless I promised to return it that same night.
‘I’ll return it,’ I said. I should have taken the promise a step further in order to gain her trust. I didn’t.
‘Who knows?’ she said.
A fresh scandal erupted: a beetle had fallen into a bowl of something creamy, which one of the diners had been using to slather pieces of bread.
‘Don’t you have something to put on?’ the woman complained, looking me up and down. The chorizos were ready to eat, it was the perfect moment to eat them; one minute longer and they would dry out, irreparably. They were promptly wrapped up in pieces of bread and passed around, leaving arabesques of oil on everyone’s shirtfronts. The baby started to cry again, sparking a new discussion on possible motives. The only one who didn’t participate was the woman I’d seen at the riverbank, an hour earlier.
The older children laughed at something and drank juice and Coca-Cola from glasses that were too big for their little hands, tracing ridiculous orange or yellow moustaches above their lips, where their future moustaches would one day sprout—although in reality they weren’t moustaches, they were second smiles, reserved for the youngest among us, those who pay attention, who obey orders for years on end and omit what needs omitting and imitate what invites imitation, all in the name of survival, so they can eat and communicate, but never forgetting their subtle advantage, which is what inspires those double smiles in the first place.
The men concluded that the baby was crying because he was hungry; the women thought he was cold. Some time before, an unusually shaggy dog (unusual in this part of the world) had smuggled himself under the table. I’d seen it all from my place on the grass outside the gazebo.
The baby was wrapped up in a blanket and put back in his seat; various forms of mush were presented to him, on a series of plates. The proffered water was not to his liking, and was tipped over. The women spoke about child-rearing and childhood, they told tales of pregnancy and hardship in short sentences loaded with innuendo and exclamations. The baby was confronted with a piece of fruit, which he spat out. It was the heat’s fault, it was the light in his eyes, the late hour, his age, his throat, his ears, this and that and the other. Ultimately, though, it was sex’s fault, it was women’s and men’s fault.
‘The dog has been licking his feet for a while now,’ I informed them, because it was true. They had all forgotten about me, and I had sat myself down on a tree stump that had been converted into a table, but which I was using as a chair.
They shooed away the dog and the baby stopped crying; this gave me some leverage, but it didn’t last long. The woman from the riverbank offered me a plate of food, which I turned down in case I had to swim back across the river. She had that beauty particular to women who have not yet discarded compassion and fear; she was nothing more nor less than herself, you could see it in her hands. Hers was not a beauty that could be idealised; it could never be painted or put into song.
‘We’ll lend you the boat,’ she promised.
Pedro and I also toyed around with names, on our final night together, playing at Adam and Eve with the cat he’d brought home.
‘Pupi, or Marx?’
At Celeste’s place there was a cousin season, in the same way there is a rainy season. Celeste’s home had been my home, too, ever since I came to the city from Las Flores. During the last stretch of my adolescence a bedroom door even bore my name—an austere insignia bereft of teenage embellishments. The cousins would come to stay whenever a child or a father was sent to Buenos Aires to be hospitalised, operated on, probed or studied in some big city hospital, which was invariably better than what they had in the provinces. Their sacrifice was a kind of consolation. ‘We had to come,’ they’d say with regret, and when yet another cousin arrived they would sit together in Celeste’s living room and report, as if to a comrade-in-arms: ‘I’ve been here for a month.’ If it wasn’t illness that brought them, it was marriage—usually someone from the more traditional branch of the family tree—or death. This time it was one of Celeste’s brothers who had died. He was ten years her junior, which meant, even though he’d gone out in the simplest manner possible—grasping at his chest in the middle of the night—his death was classified as tragic, a word that was repeated several times at the wake.
There he was, standing in a corner of the room. This time he wasn’t checking out all the women’s legs, the way he’d done at the wedding. He was holding a white, unlit cigarette in his mouth, as if he were musing on something. We hadn’t seen each other since the wedding. A blonde woman was attached to his arm, it might have been her head or her hand resting on his shoulder, or perhaps all of her, clinging to his elbow as she stood beside him. We didn’t even say hello. Celeste had cried her tears and decided it was time for us to leave. The next day was one of those hot, bright, breathless days, and we should have been following the coffin on foot through the Chacarita cemetery, Celeste shaded beneath an inappropriately pink hat with a big bow. But we stayed home instead, in front of the fan, until Celeste declared: ‘That’s enough,’ and shut herself in her room to take a siesta. My schoolbooks were crowded with beauty: x=2, a=3. And yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something remained unsolved, no matter how many pencilled calculations I made.
Later that afternoon some cousins arrived, spreading themselves throughout the kitchen, the living room and the bathroom, which was occupied for hours. They were the kind of cousins who removed cans from the pantry and butter from the fridge, without asking permission. Then Celeste, wrapped up in her dressing gown, insisted on preparing some ‘real’ food for them. He came in after the others had left, making no excuses for his tardiness, and accepted Celeste’s offer of a coffee. He smoked at the window so Celeste and I could watch him. That same night, maybe that same moment, he invited me to go out for a drive. ‘It’s hot,’ he offered, as an excuse. So we went out; the unsolved thing, the cataclysmic pull in my chest, which was little more than a response to my grieving thighs, to the agonies of the loins, demanded resolution.
In the car, the Cousin took my face and kissed it, which I appreciated. First he said what? then he said alright. After driving for about twenty blocks we stopped at a two-storey house with a sunken lounge and a non-existent kitchen, where a man in a bathing suit was fixing himself a drink. He immediately abandoned the drink in order to greet us with unwarranted ebullience, which for a moment I found flattering.
‘We haven’t met,’ I said, but this didn’t seem to matter to him. He must have been around forty-five, and I made an effort to avert my eyes from the ring of hair and flesh encircling his waist. The man didn’t return to the drink he’d poured, which was left sitting on the coffee table; he later spilled it as he got up to fetch the glasses of Coke we hadn’t asked him for. He was on a strict diet because of a trip he was taking, he explained; he had a few things to get through customs. He had a lively nose like a butterfly.
When the two of us were left alone, the Cousin told me about the rooms upstairs, which I agreed to take a look at. Before taking my clothes off I told him my full name, I told him I came from Las Flores, although he already knew that, and I talked about my mother and my sister, though not in much detail, omitting any florid or sentimental descriptions of the countryside or the draught horses, just enough for him to understand the face he was looking at; I also showed him the dog-like teeth crowded beneath my lips and the birthmark buried in my armpit. He didn’t interrupt me once. He made a spectacle of his politeness; he didn’t even touch his fringe, or make the little bow with his fingers. In my adolescence I’d acquired some small experience, mostly with boys my own age. But the Cousin was a man, and I had promised myself that afternoon, or at least that night, that I wanted to be a woman.
Drunk on forevers and nevers, Pedro would collapse into an armchair. He liked to have me close, at such times. Pedro was an intellectual athlete; thinking, for him, was like running. He would come into the bedroom all restless, coughing from so much thinking, and collapse into an armchair and close his eyes against a blanket. I’m sure he dreamed of strange kings and palaces; he was a man of monumental doubts, and no cathedrals.
After everything, and before Ivan: after Celeste, who was dead; after Ludmila, who was also dead; after Pedro, who had left, which is not the same but tastes similar: one day, framed in the doorway of my office, Mara appeared. She had duplicated her own face with makeup and fake eyelashes, removing the latter as she sat down. Every now and then she hugged a red bag to her chest, which was filled with outfits for a function. She had been gone for years, working in Caracas, she said; she’d forgotten about me for a time, and had enjoyed no longer having to think about me or Ludmila, who, as we knew, had had the gall to go and die on us. Then one day she asked herself: Why am I acting like such a coward? So she came home and opened or reopened the theatre, because—she now understood—deep down she had always been an actress. She shook her head as if she had a big curly mane, which she didn’t. She asked if I could still love her, the way I did in those early days, when we were barely twenty, a decade or more ago. No, she hadn’t counted the years; she wasn’t like me, she hated numbers. Could I still love her?
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
‘Have you had any children in the past ten years?’
But it was more than ten; at least fourteen years had passed since we’d last seen each other. I gave her the answer she was expecting.
‘I’m three months pregnant,’ she said. ‘I came to tell you, after ten years of not wanting to see you.’
‘It’s been fourteen years.’
I couldn’t not correct her.
It was clear she’d established herself as an actress in the interim. She sat across from me, at my desk. I grabbed her hand, but it disobeyed me.
‘You pity me. I can see it. I think it’s better if I go,’ she said.
But she stayed seated, and started saying all those things women say when they’re glued in the yellow amber of their hormones. But the moment she verged into romanticism she fought it, quickly, like a fencer. She was suspicious, lurching back and forth between joy and some other state.
She said we should go, and we left, although the real estate agency was still open and I wasn’t supposed to leave early. I lingered in the entrance because Mr Sirio was coming in, and I would have to give him an excuse. I told him the truth. He responded grudgingly. We walked out.
‘I’d forgotten what you were like!’ said Mara, throwing a heavy, happy arm around my shoulders, which she left there for some time.
Sitting opposite me, in the café-bar, she ate all manner of sweet and savoury dishes that were delivered to her one by one, on plates and in baskets. The table was good; not a dirty, black lifebuoy, swollen with seawater or tears, like the one those lovers (the ones we’d studied fourteen years ago) had sat around in silence, or in belittlement. There was no decay here, we didn’t lie to each other the way those lovers did, our silence was not a form of blackmail, our future could not be held to ransom with some promise, and we each had a little paper napkin that we could fold however we liked, because, once our glasses were empty, we would get up and leave the folded napkins sitting right there on the table.
It was evening. Celeste sat with her chin jammed against her chest. She was sitting in her usual armchair, leaning forward. The smell of her cologne masked something else in the air, a whiff of something rancid beneath the odours of her body.
I dragged her to the dinner table. When she managed to balance upright in her chair, she asked me to paint her nails. We sat face to face, beneath the dining-room cobwebs.
There’s a man, I told her, because I’d met Pedro.
There are a lot of men, Celeste said.
She’d asked me for the number 69, using her lottery numbers to communicate with me more easily. Her preferred vice wasn’t a sexual position; it was tobacco. She sat smoking, inhaling deeply. When she spoke the smoke curled slowly out her nose and mouth, like from an old steam appliance.
We talked about the shade of pink in the nail polish.
I’m useless, I explained to her, although she’d already figured that out.
She gestured with the tremulous end of her cigarette towards a nail I’d forgotten to paint.
Children scare me, I said.
That’s not true, she said.
I don’t understand families, I persisted.
And this one, Celeste said, indicating another nail. I’d painted her entire finger pink. I fixed it up with a ball of cotton wool dipped in nail polish remover.
‘When I die,’ Celeste said for the millionth time, and I knew what was coming next: we were not to bury her; we were to send three letters to three different addresses; we were to leave the apartment to Mr Sirio so the cousins could still come and stay, the good ones and the bad ones, the way they always had.
‘I don’t want any worms.’
I promised her we wouldn’t bury her. I got up from the table and arranged the little bottles of polish and remover behind the bathroom mirror.
Ah, I can breathe! Everything is so different, everything is better tonight. The baby is silent. The baby is not a cat. And the air doesn’t taste bad, the way it did at Pedro’s place that night.
Shortly before Celeste’s death, Mr Sirio, the owner of several real estate agencies and properties, began making use of me, the way any self-respecting employer would. If he found himself in possession of a dilapidated old house he would convert it, if only for a few months, into a function room, or a ball pit for children’s birthday parties, and I would have to dress accordingly, and act like a waiter or a babysitter amid the music and the roiling plastic balls.
One night Mr Sirio found himself in possession of a boat, which he rented out to a group for a social gathering. The boat had been tied up for years at a dock in Olivos, and its owner, who owed Mr Sirio money, had agreed to let him use it for the night.
People started filtering in; it looked to be a night of more or less phony euphoria, among friends or alleged friends. Pedro arrived with a tall woman. They sat at a table under one of the portholes, and the woman’s cleavage was like a perfect simulacrum of eternity. In honour of that magnificent vision of beauty, it seemed Pedro had made one too many promises; later on, as I served him a drink, I could see his pulse racing.
