by Alan Pauls
How those last few days of January drag. At times, as a very young boy, intrigued by the way in which fifteen minutes on the clock can pass in slow motion or in the blink of an eye according to the time of day, the situation, the people he happens to be with, the weather, the light, his mood, the activities to come or just past, it occurs to him that maybe time isn’t universal at all but rather supremely subjective, a sort of local good that each family and each house and even each person produces in their own way, with their own methods and instruments, and in the most literal sense of producing, investing physical strength, labor, raw materials, everything that the evanescent consistency of time would seem to make irrelevant, as if it were more a domestic craft than the elusive passage that everyone insists it is.
As soon as the last week of January begins, the world gets heavier, and the hours begin to crawl along, gasping, as though climbing an endless hill. Rather than bringing the next one along, each day is an obstacle that delays and conceals it. Eventually time stops altogether—real time, whose passage he notices only for the way it draws in the only thing he wants in the world, to leave Mar del Plata once and for all, and with it the crackling of the crostini in the dead man’s mouth, the mansion, the requirement to be silent during siestas, the boredom of those lunches and dinners at which he invariably stays mute and almost stationary, intimidated by the rules of an etiquette he doesn’t understand and by the extravagant variety of cutlery laid out beside his plate, which he has no idea how or when to use, even though more than once, at the height of his torpor, shaken by the impulse to do something, anything, to dispel the clouds of drowsiness, he suddenly begins to classify them, reordering them by size, color, and shine, or uses them to draw lines in the white-linen tablecloth, until someone—never his mother, who took the decision from the word go to turn a blind eye when it comes to family-law disputes, but rather some member of his so-called stepfamily, a step-grandmother, step-uncle, or even the step-cousin who, though hardly a year or two older than him, speaks to him with incontestable authority, like a lieutenant to a private—scolds him from the other end of the table. Because the other time, the one that’s marked by the clock, the succession of meals and outfits, the sun’s work on skin, the bodies bathed, or the tiredness on people’s faces, the time that seems to advance, dragged along by the more or less regular meter of the days, has been reduced to a mere formality, a fiction intended to hide the paralysis of things.
The only relief comes from the safe-conduct that will get him out of there. The two bus tickets, his and his father’s, which he keeps himself, in his own hands. He can’t wait. He won’t even allow his father to buy them and bring them when he comes to fetch him at the gate of the mansion in Mar del Plata every February 1, as dictated by the equitable summer schedule—January for her, February for him—his parents draw up a few months after they separate, by common agreement, as they say, if it’s fair to call common an agreement orchestrated by the lawyer of just one of the parties, hers, under which his mother, making a show of a fortitude and conviction that she doesn’t possess, sets the agenda, and his father complies without objection, cowed by the same mixture of weariness, incompetence, and guilt with which he left the family home, renouncing his right to a lawyer, to his share of the blue 1957 Auto Unión, and to his percentage of the second-floor walk-up where they have lived together for a little more than two nightmarish years—both wedding gifts from his father-in-law—but not to the money with which his father-in-law entices him to leave the family home, which it would seem he needs to pay a backlog of debts.
He’s overcome by impatience. As the day of the journey draws near—it’s the middle of the month, and a new set of holidaymakers is arriving—he worries that they’ll run out of tickets and the trip will have to be postponed. And so he goes to buy them himself, in person, much too far in advance, from the bus station in Mar del Plata. The first few times, his mother goes with him. He’s old enough to understand the whole process perfectly, and the order it comes in—father, leave, travel, bus, ticket, buy—but he’s still so small that even on tiptoe he can’t maneuver his head into the ticket vendor’s line of vision. Later he goes by himself, on his bicycle, happy because this way—without witnesses—the idea of escaping Mar del Plata gains an invigorating dose of illegitimacy, even though it’s his mother who pays for the tickets and chooses which bus they’ll take; but also with his heart in his mouth, steering the bicycle with one hand and using the other, shoved as deep as it’ll go into his pocket, to count the bills two or three times per block to reassure himself that he hasn’t lost one.
Those newly bought tickets are guarded, kept like a secret. He takes them everywhere with him, into town, to the cinema, on bike rides and expeditions to abandoned lots, even to the restaurants by the port that he sometimes goes to with his stepfamily, proto–theme parks in which a couple of anchors, a few miserable buoys, some fishing rods hanging from the ceiling, and two or three drunk-looking papier-mâché sailors watching over the dining rooms are intended to capture the maritime world to which their menus—always limited to the same handful of options: mussels Provençal, sole meunière, langoustine—are also an insult, and where the dead man gets up to his old tricks, rebuking the waiters before he’s even sat down for the scandal of a breadbasket that’s overflowing with buns, kaiser rolls, bread sticks, and water biscuits, but that still lacks his favorite crostini, an oversight he takes personally, like a direct provocation, and which is sufficient cause for him to add the establishment to his ever-longer blacklist of restaurants. He disregards his mother, who tells him there’s no better place to lose them, and takes them to the beach, even though they force him to forgo his bathing suit—in whose pockets he might put them and then, at any moment, succumb to distraction, forget that he has them, and take them into the sea with him, with predictably horrendous consequences—and to roast in his pants at ninety-five degrees in the shade, condemned to contemplate the water from afar. He even keeps them with him while he sleeps, but not in his pajama pockets, where they’d be liable to fall out or be stolen by some stealthy person during the night. He keeps them clutched in his fist like a lucky charm, so that when the day finally comes, they’ve been folded and unfolded so many times, stuffed so deeply in his pockets, subjected to so much grazing and fondling, hidden in so many impregnable refuges, that the departure date and time and the seat numbers and even the name of the bus company are barely legible. This is the sorry state they’re in the afternoon he finally walks out the door of the mansion in Mar del Plata carrying his little navy-blue suitcase—alone, as he always insists to his mother, less out of a desire to be independent than to deny her those last twenty meters, which he’s convinced she would use to try to dissuade him from going, something she is very far from wanting to do, so thrilled is she by the prospect of a whole month off the job of being a mother—and then walks the long gravel path that leads to the street, clambers up onto the stone wall that extends from the front gate, and, still holding his suitcase, settles down to wait for his father to arrive.
It’s one of those radiant, perfectly idyllic days with no clouds or wind that are the reason summer exists, and nobody wants to waste it. Apart from him, and he’s not sorry. A blind joy swells his chest, leaving him breathless. He watches the procession of families passing by on their way to the beach, umbrellas, deck chairs, and polystyrene coolers in tow, delighted at the prospect of hours of sun, and notes the sorrowful look they all give him when they see him waiting by the gate, dressed from head to toe in street clothes and carrying a suitcase, like an orphan or some kind of invalid who’s forbidden to go to the beach. He scorns them silently. He compares his happiness at the thought that in just half an hour he will be with his father, on board the bus to Villa Gesell, with the banal enthusiasm on those faces that will return in two or three hours charred by the sun, and he feels like the luckiest person on earth. But fifteen minutes go by, and then twenty, and then another twenty-five, and he realizes with a faint
shudder that he has exhausted the games he’d been using to distract himself from his impatience. He’s already massacred the trail of ants that had managed to scale his bare thigh and carry their cargo of leaves to the other side. He’s messed with the leaves of the privet that crowns the stone wall so much he’s practically pruned it. He’s sung, he’s counted—cars with even and odd license plates, bicycles, stray dogs, seconds—and he’s been wiping the snot from his nose and expertly, without even looking, sticking it all on the wall, sealing the slight indent that separates the blocks of stone. Half an hour passes: no sign of his father.
At one point he turns and looks behind him, toward the house, and, after making sure that his mother isn’t stationed at a window, watching him, he gets down from the wall, still clutching his suitcase, and approaches the edge of the sidewalk, then looks as far as he can down the sloping street his father appears on every summer, always little by little, like a survivor emerging disheveled but proud from some abyss, head first, bald, roasted, gleaming, with its two strips of curly hair growing carelessly at the sides, then shoulders, then his torso in a freshly laundered shirt. But he peers down a whole scorched block of heat haze, and all he can make out is an intimate congress of two ice cream vendors who have crossed the trunks of their tricycles in the afternoon sun and are counting the money they’ve made over the course of this magnificent day, and perhaps lamenting the fact that they’ve already run out of merchandise, at barely five past four, with at least two or three good hours of selling left.
With a pang of desperation, never taking his eyes from the deserted street, because there’s nothing he fears more than what he might find if he turned back toward the house now (his mother’s sympathy, the merciful, nunnish solidarity with which she opens her arms to offer him asylum, and the sequence of hurdles awaiting him a little later on: the gate, and the gravel path, and the house, and his private room on the first floor, whose papered walls covered with life preservers and anchors, nautical knots, an ape dressed as a sailor—childish, pastel versions of the motifs that decorate the restaurants by the port—he knows and hates from memory), he searches for the tickets, unfolds them on his thigh, and tries to find the departure time in the puzzle of dates and numbers that the tickets have always been, but which he’s only noticing now, precisely when he most needs them to be clean and legible, and for a moment he only has eyes for the one thing that would relieve him, any number higher than four, whether it’s the date or the bus number or the company’s phone number or the arrival time. But eventually he finds the departure time, he finds the words departure time and reads four and he feels as though he’s dying.
He feels as though he’s dying. Everything stops moving around him, like a liquid losing its fizz and falling into a solid, permanent repose. He’s still facing the sloping road, down which a ball spat out of a neighboring garden starts to bounce, so he can’t see the house, but he can feel it, he can sense the shape of the porch, the slightly jagged outline of the façade. He considers running away. Anything, he thinks, but go back. Then he hears his mother’s voice calling to him from the other side of the gate: “There must have been some problem,” she says dismissively, as though trying to play it down: “He’ll be here soon. Come here, let’s wait for him inside.” He turns around and starts to go back. His mother opens the gate for him, and to his ears the creaking of the rusty hinges sounds like the steps that lead to the gallows. When he reaches the familiar, shifting surface of the gravel, he can’t take any more, and he bursts into tears. His mother puts a hand on his shoulder, a light hand that’s intended to go unnoticed. She’s tactful enough not to hug him. She knows he couldn’t bear it. But even so, he shakes off her arm and walks on, crying. And when he sees the huge bulk of the mansion in front of him, almost falling on top of him, he hears an unmistakable voice behind him, shouting his name.
He turns around and looks at his father, stunned. He doesn’t recognize him. He doesn’t know who he is, why he’s smiling at him like that, what could compel him to put that leather bag on the ground and open his arms and stretch them out toward him, inviting him to run up and hug him. It’s past four in the afternoon, and there’s no reason for his father to exist anymore. They’ve missed the bus, the trip’s a lost cause, and his father—along with everything associated with him in the possible world that’s just been obliterated by his lateness: the sand dunes on the north beach; the Croatian guesthouse; pancakes after the beach; mighty defecations in the pine forests; nocturnal pinball, table football, and go-karting marathons in the Combo Park on Avenida Tres—must have vanished too, irretrievably. The idea that once one possibility has been lost and another might spring up and replace it is a late conquest of the imagination. He hasn’t crossed that threshold yet. For him, a possibility is always just one possibility: if it ceases to exist as a possibility, the world that accompanied it must also cease to exist, entirely and forever.
So he no longer has a father. He won’t have one until thirty seconds later, an interval he spends imagining and getting used to the idea of his life from that moment on; not only his immediate life, in which he’ll no doubt be condemned once more to the four walls of the mansion in Mar del Plata, but also everything that will follow, going back to school and seeing his classmates again, all exactly the same while he’s a hundred percent different, and the moment during one recess, which he’s already glimpsing with an almost painful excitement, when he allows himself the pleasure of delivering the bombshell: I don’t have a father anymore. But in spite of all this, thirty seconds later that man is still there, standing with his arms open and smiling for some invisible photographer, still claiming the rights he’s just lost, above all the right to look at him and make direct contact with him, as if there were nothing separating them, not air, nor the shadows of trees, nor the blinding reflections of the sun, nor the dust that’s sometimes raised by the wind when it swirls around the entrance to the house, and of course not his mother, with whom he hasn’t exchanged a look or even a word since he arrived, not even to agree to the essential technical details—the date of their return, sun protection, food, his toothbrush, the benefits of bathing with some degree of regularity—which his father can usually only bring himself to consider at the last minute, with one foot on the bus, and always reluctantly, as though by considering them he were ceding to the will of a woman who, even though she can’t bear him, even though she refuses to say his name and forbids him to come upstairs when he comes to fetch him from the apartment on Ortega y Gasset, insists on keeping him and delaying his departure every February 1. And not only is he still there, he’s also smiling and telling him in his most peremptory tone not to be like that, that there’s no need to “get worked up.” That yes, they have indeed missed the four o’clock bus, but that they can miss the next one, at four thirty, too, and the next, and five, twenty, a hundred more buses, they can miss every bus in the terminal at Mar del Plata and in every bus terminal in the world. Because they, he—he points to him with his index finger, the same finger that one Saturday morning a few years earlier took a line of foam from his own face and put it on the end of his nose while he stood beside him, looking up at him shaving—and he—and he points to his own chest with the same finger, to the very center of the V formed by the two panels of his unbuttoned shirt—they can go to Villa Gesell when they like, whenever they feel like it, whenever it suits them. Right now, if they want to: all they have to do is put one foot on the street and that’s it, they’re already on their way. Because they, he says, aren’t taking the bus to Villa Gesell. They’re taking a taxi.
It’s 103 kilometers away. He doesn’t know that, of course. Not in those terms, anyway. But whatever he lacks in the way of conventional measurements he makes up for with a certain awareness of proportion, and he knows that any journey that’s usually taken by long-distance bus, no matter how decrepit and slow the bus is, or how many times it stops en route, cannot be translated to any other form of wheeled transport—apart from your own car,
and, as far as he knows, his father doesn’t have his own car, he hasn’t had one since he relinquished the blue Auto Unión, whose congested motor he still seems to hear sometimes in his dreams, and he isn’t considering getting another, as he frequently promises, always in a loud voice and with the emphatic conviction of a militant, confident that this snub will be enough to bring down the entire automotive industry; and in fact he doesn’t have another until two or three years later, when the need to please a girlfriend who can’t stand going on vacation on public transport compels him to buy a cream-colored secondhand Fiat 600. A bus’s relation to a taxi, or more to the point its lack of relation, its striking incommensurability, seems to him the same as that of a plane to a bicycle, for example, or an ocean liner to one of the inflatable mattresses on which he likes to travel very slowly from one end of swimming pools to the other with his eyes half closed.
In a fraction of a second, everything shifts backward and speeds up. He goes to his mother, takes back his case with a yank while giving her a quick kiss, runs to his father and takes his hand (the hug is saved for later, for when his father is really his father again), and they step down into the street together. Walking backward, in the same direction as the advancing cars but facing them, as though he’s not prepared to lose a second more, his father stretches out an arm, stops the first taxi (which brakes with customary precision, delivering the back door’s handle directly to him), pushes his son into the backseat, and, after piling up their luggage on the front seat, sits beside him. Then, agitated and rapidly rolling down his window, he gives the order, “To Villa Gesell.”