“That imbecile never learns,” Ribkamatia said, and she ran her hand over my head.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“My husband,” she said.
I looked at her, so pretty and fresh, so pretty: “But aren’t you a widow? Isn’t your husband dead?”
“Of course he’s dead,” she said, “and I have already told him a thousand times I’m not a coward and no one’s going to keep ordering me around, not him or anyone.”
“Ribka,” I said to her, feeling suddenly perfectly calm, “I want you to explain to me how a dead man can be alive and come to fight with his widow’s lover.”
“He’s just like all of them,” she said, “he can’t help it, poor thing.”
“All of the dead are alive,” I said.
“They’re dead but it’s as if they were alive,” and she looked at me for a while without saying anything. “Then, you didn’t know?”
“No,” I said. “You thought I knew, but no. Who are the Wayward Youth? What are the dead? Zombies? Vampires? Why is there no electricity, no clocks? Are all of those walking around the streets dead? Why can’t I sell medicines?”
She laughed. She put her arms around me, she made me lie down again next to her and she told me. On González people died just as they do anywhere, but they didn’t stay deceased and quiet in the coffin like the polite departed. There weren’t even coffins. Or niches or pantheons or cemeteries or funeral parlors. What for? The dead got up just a little while after having died and devoted themselves to messing with the living. They died, no joking: their hearts stopped and their blood didn’t circulate and there were no more vital functions, but there they were, in the streets, in the plaza, in the countryside, moving into the family home from time to time or going off who knows where. Only they weren’t different solely physiologically. They were different due to anger or resentment, due to death: they wanted things to continue as they were when they were alive and for that reason they wanted the living to live like the dead. They didn’t allow anything to happen that might alter the life they had known. With their common ancestors always among them, like someone who has a deaf great-aunt living in their attic, it was logical that they all continued being part of the same family, and they were all cousins and they were all named González. Of course, as there were very ancient dead, the monkey faces wrapped up in skins, but there were also more recent dead, the new ones compromised on a few things that in their turn, when they were alive, they had managed to impose against the wishes or the orders of the dead they had had to put up with. That’s why there was running water, for example. But there weren’t doctors or hospitals or medicines, because the dead wanted the living to join the dead as soon as possible. And the less romance there was, the better; fewer marriages, although what romance has to do with marriage is something I haven’t managed to comprehend, unless it’s a risk one has to know how to avoid, but the dead have a very particular idea in that respect: fewer offspring, fewer of the living. In sum, González was on the path to being a world of the dead. I was getting to that: hundreds of thousands of years ago, a comet passed by and the tail grazed González and it seems it liked the neighborhood because it returns every five years. I don’t remember what the comet was called or if it had a name: probably not, because it didn’t have a name the first time it passed. Every five years it renews the phenomenon of the suppression of some of the characteristics of death—rotting decorously, for example, and not appearing again unless it’s at the three-legged table of some charlatan. At least that was the explanation Ribka gave me and that everyone accepted as valid. There doesn’t seem to be another: there must be something in the tail of that comet and I have no interest in finding out what it is. I can’t imagine God the Father decreeing that the dead of González have to keep on screwing over the living for all eternity. The Wayward Youth? The ones who talk back and disobey dad and mom, the rebels, the ones who conspire—and you will recognize that it’s not easy—against the dead. A clandestine organization, but not really, because you can’t do anything entirely hidden from so many dead among whom some were Wayward Youth when they were alive: an organization that made plans, favored study, resistance, research, and curiosity. They flew in balloons—remember?—for coordination and information from city to city, but in secret. Every time the dead found a balloon, they destroyed it. I had caught one they hadn’t managed to land before it got light and it had seemed to me as if it was camouflaged. It was camouflaged. No, of course not, the dead weren’t supermen, they didn’t have any other faculties than those they’d had when alive: they couldn’t prevent people arriving from elsewhere, but they could oblige some of the living, the wimps as Ribka called them, not to give them the time of day, or lodge them, or give them food or provide them with anything. Those who arrived left again as soon as possible. But the Wayward Youth managed to talk with them and have news of what there was on other worlds. Well, the dead threatened the living that they’d kill them if they didn’t obey. It seems, nonetheless, that they couldn’t do it, that a dead person had never killed one of the living, otherwise González would have been peopled with the dead centuries ago. It’s possible they couldn’t. But just in case, the living obeyed. Not all of them: observe Ribka and the Wayward Youth. And the living didn’t want to join the dead, one because nobody likes to die and two because they knew what they would become. You see, the perfect fear. Yes, those strange people in the street were dead and those I met in the lace girl’s garden were dead. The not-so-old woman was the great-great-grandmother who had died at thirty-seven and the oldest old guy was the grandfather who had died at seventy-six. Many of the living let themselves be controlled by the dead, like the mayor and the lace girl and Ribka’s neighbor. But others did not. They fought—so far as they were able, but they fought. And I, who as my friend Jorge says—he’s a poet but a good guy—I am a romantic and my chest throbs achingly at certain things; I, who had spent with Ribka the loveliest night of my life, I entered the bullring to fight, too. I sat up in bed and I said:
“Ribka, we are going to make love again, because I like to make love in the morning and I like to make love and I like it with you, and then we are going to bathe together and drink coffee together and we are going to get ourselves gussied up and we are going to go look for the Wayward Youth, but first we are going to go by the clunker.”
I liked the way she laughed. Is there a bit more coffee? Thank you. This, too, may be an imposition but the occasion requires it, telling these things. When we went out to the street, cousin González was in the doorway of his house and I went up to him, I gave him my hand and I said hello, how are you, nice morning, don’t you think? And he looked at me as if I had gone crazy and Ribka and I walked off together. I don’t only carry merchandise on my trips. I take some of everything—if I tell you, I’ll never finish. I opened the clunker and we went in and started to rummage around. I gave her two clocks, a wristwatch for her to wear and a clock for her home, and I wrapped up a big clock for the municipality because the government, even if it’s municipal, has to provide an example. She wasn’t afraid and she was going to use them, but I told her to put the big one away, she wouldn’t have to keep it hidden very long. I gave her a short, yellow silk dress, very low cut and sleeveless, which I had asked a friend from Sinderastie to buy for me so as to give it to the daughter of a businessman on Dosirdoo IX to whom I owe attentions. I gave her an electric mixer, promising her she would be able to use it. No, I wasn’t sure yet, but it was reasonable to think so and, above all, I wanted to believe it. And I gave her a diamond from Quitiloe. Maybe she has sold it by now as I advised her and has gone on a luxury vacation cruise to Edessbuss and Naijale II and Ossawo. Or maybe she has kept it because I gave it to her. I like both possibilities. Then, loaded down with the packages, we went, in the most roundabout way, to a house on the outskirts of the city, where the Wayward Youth were meeting that day. She was in contact with them. She wasn’t part of the organization, because she was too independent a
nd didn’t accept directives from the dead or from the living, but she knew all the places they met, which, as a precaution, changed every day. From time to time the dead found them, but in general they managed quite well. Good people, a few of them desperate but all of them hardheaded and fighters. Ribka told them about me and it turned out that very morning they had been looking for me in the city. I told them I needed to talk to them, the more of them the better, and that for once not to worry about the dead. They arranged to call all those they could and by midday there was a significant group, it almost looked like a demonstration. I climbed up on a table and said—quickly, because the lookouts told us the dead were already approaching—what had occurred to me. They got the idea right away and soon there was an infernal din. I tried to calm them but it was very difficult and then I thought, what do I care, it’s the first time they’ve been happy. And I hoped it wouldn’t be the last. The dead arrived and started to snoop around and make threats, but the atmosphere had changed. No one paid them much attention except for a few kids who yelled things at them, not exactly compliments. What hope can do, my God. They had become, I won’t say brave because that they had always been, but spirited and even happy. Ribka went home, I kissed her and told her good-bye, and I went to the clunker with a delegation of the Wayward Youth. I took off toward Edessbuss. And there we arrived, in full Carnival celebration. Those who were finishing their work shift in the port, put on their masks and their Zorro or Invincible Buccaneer costumes, grabbed the streamers and the perfume-sprayers and went to dance. It was a hassle trying to locate The Crazy Minstrel of the Still Waters but after traipsing through a dozen parties, we bet on his house and we waited for him there. He arrived with an odalisque and a Hungarian ballerina, very pretty, very heavily made-up, but no comparison to Ribka. Yes, he was surprised to see me, but he received me as friends are received on Edessbuss. Right there I told him I was going to make him pay for the nasty joke about selling medicines on González. To start, he had to put me in contact with the people in charge of the Roof. The poor thing, completely canned, dressed as a robot, didn’t understand much, but I introduced him to the Wayward Youth and told him they needed a few reports. Urgently, I said. We went in. He dressed, he changed, the two girls flopped down to sleep on a sofa and we left. For the Superior Institute of Technology and Environmental Protection. There, in front of a number of very agreeable individuals who were not in costume but who, I’d bet my life on it, had been until midnight at least, we laid out the case of González, which all of them knew, some of them well, others better or worse. And I proposed the solution, trembling—what if they told me it couldn’t be done? But they said yes. They not only said yes but they got excited about it and began to ring bells calling engineers, project designers, calculators, ecologists, and I don’t know who all else and an hour later they were drawing and making calculations like crazy. I won’t take up more of your time: the next day we returned to González, and behind my clunker—the poor thing looked like a rickety guide fish leading three giant sharks—came three heavy cruisers full of technicians, workmen, and building material. On González I went to Ribka’s house and I washed my hands of the affair. I made love with her that morning, that afternoon, and that night, and all the following nights, but after the first night, I had to convince her to take off the wristwatch because my back was covered in scratches. No, the husband didn’t appear. Not because he was afraid of me: the dead of González have no fear or anything; he must have been busy with the other dead trying to prevent the technicians from Edessbuss from doing their work. My friend, you can imagine that if the Edessbussianos have placed a cover over their own world, it’s easy enough for them to extend another around their camps and their men if they don’t want anyone to bother them. And I had the Aqüivanida brake, don’t forget. With the brake I neutralized half a dozen attempts, that would have come to nothing anyway, by the González dead against the González living and from then on the worthy forebears stayed in their place and resigned themselves to being like the dead on other worlds. The brake also worked on the dead for just that reason, the lack of metabolism. A week. Yes, it took them no more than a week to wrap González in an anti-comet tail, not anti-energy, Roof. After the week they left, leaving everything ready, and González sang and danced for the first time in a million years. I left, too. It would be two years before the comet passed again. If the tail didn’t touch González, and it wasn’t going to touch because the Edessbussianos swore that any comet’s tail was a joke next to the energy of Edess-Pálida, the dead were going to die for real and along with those who would die later, they would feed the worms and geraniums like any self-respecting dead person, in nice and orderly cemeteries full of cypress trees and ostentatious plaques and healthy sobbing. Before I lifted off, I saw the first sparkle of the Roof that was already functioning. I imagine it’s still working. I imagine the dead will have gradually disappeared. I imagine Ribka has an electric sewing machine and a twelve-bulb chandelier in the dining room, that she uses the mixer and the watch, the clocks. I imagine the great-great-grandmother is no longer there to guard the virginity of the lace girl. I imagine there are airplanes and aspirin. I imagine that Ribka remembers me. Yes, thank you, I never say no to such good coffee.
Interval with my Aunts
Trafalgar and Josefina
to the memory of my aunts
Paula, Rosario, Elisa
and Carmencita.
and to my aunts Laura, Manena,
Virginia and Pilar.
My Aunt Josefina came to visit me. He who has never met my Aunt Josefina doesn’t know what he’s missing, as Trafalgar Medrano says. Trafalgar also says that she is one of the most beautiful and charming women he has met and that if he had been born in 1893 he would not have married her for anything in the world. My aunt came in, she looked the house over and asked after the children, she wanted to know if I was ever going to decide to move to an apartment downtown, and when I said no, never, she hesitated over whether or not to leave her jacket somewhere and decided to take it with her because there might be a little breeze in the garden later. She’s eighty-four years old; wavy hair the color of steel, a couple of tireless chestnut eyes as bright as they say my criolla great-grandmother’s were, and an enviable figure: if she wanted to, if she went so far as to admit that those coarse and disagreeable things should be used as items of clothing, she could wear Cecilia’s jeans. She said the garden was lovely and that it would look much better when we had the ash trees pruned and the tea was delicious and she loved scones but they turned out better with only one egg.
“I drank a very good tea the other day. Yes, I am going to have a little more but half a cup, that’s good, don’t get carried away. Isn’t it a little strong? Just one little drop of milk. That’s it. And they served me some very good toast, with butter and not that rancid margarine they give you now everywhere, I don’t know how you can like it. In the Burgundy. And I was with a friend of yours.”
“I already know,” I said. “Trafalgar.”
“Yes, the son of Juan José Medrano and poor Merceditas. I don’t understand how she allowed her only son to be given that outlandish name. Well, I always suspected Medrano was a Mason.”
“But Josefina, what does Freemasonry have to do with the Battle of Trafalgar?”
“Ah, I don’t know, sweetie, but you can’t deny that the Masons purposely gave their children names that didn’t appear in the calendar of saints.”
“Doctor Medrano was probably an admirer of Nelson,” I said, pinning all my hopes on Trafalgar’s old man’s interest in the great events of history.
Trafalgar Page 13