Under This Terrible Sun

by Under This Terrible Sun (retail) (epub)

  “Seems like we could go to jail for that.”

  Duarte laughed.

  “No, that’d never happen. If we see they aren’t going for it, we’ll call it off; I know the people over there. But I don’t think that’ll happen. I say we give it a try. Hey, you aren’t handicapped or anything, are you?”

  Cetarti handed the joint back to Duarte.

  “No.”

  “OK, well, I’ll get to work at the NCO in Resistencia and I’ll let you know. And how’re you feeling now, you doing better?”

  “Yeah, I’m almost OK. This weed is really good.”

  “Ha, ha, yeah, Paraguayan black label. It’s got that aroma, you know. If you ever want to buy some, I’m almost always holding.”

  “You’re a military man who sells marijuana?”

  “I’m retired. I didn’t smoke before. I started smoking for my glaucoma—they told me it’d be good for me. And I don’t sell it: I smoke, and I have some friends who bring it to me from Paraguay. I was just offering to be nice, cause you seem like a nice guy.”

  They smoked a while longer without talking, listening to chamamé. After a while, from someplace slow and far away, Duarte’s voice told him they should go eat. Cetarti answered that he couldn’t drive. Duarte offered to take the wheel, if he preferred.

  * * *

  They stopped at a barbeque joint for truckers, close to the highway. An old device for killing flies and mosquitoes, consisting of two violet fluorescent lights inside a kind of cage made of metal strips, was hanging from the roof. The base of the cage was transparent acrylic, and the bodies of generations of dead flies and mosquitoes were piled up on it. They ordered barbeque and French fries to eat; to drink Duarte ordered house wine, and Cetarti asked for a soda and a glass of ice. They ate voraciously, without talking much. Duarte got caught up in a rebroadcast of a Boca vs. Banfield match on TV, and Cetarti entertained himself by reading the classifieds in the local paper. He was a little disappointed, the money didn’t seem to be a sure thing. He finished eating first, and he put down the newspaper to focus on the fly-killing device. He didn’t understand what the mechanism was, and he started watching it, waiting for a bug to fall into the trap so he could figure it out. Several minutes passed in vain—there were no flies, the contraption must have been pretty effective. Duarte went on eating. Without taking his eyes from the fly-killer, Cetarti told him in passing that he wouldn’t mind going through his mother’s things, if it were possible to go to the house. Duarte told him it was, he had the key, and when they finished he’d take him over.

  “The only thing is, we might run into Molina’s wife.”

  “What do you mean, his wife.”

  Duarte told him that Molina had had a first marriage, a wife and a son.

  “They hate him. Or they did. Now he’s dead, I mean.”

  Thinking of his mother’s history, Cetarti said he imagined this Molina must have been a difficult person.

  “He was an alcoholic, you know. People bring some shit down on themselves… he wasn’t a guy you’d want to have kids or live with. Now, since I told you one thing I’ll tell you the other: He never had any problems with me. He was a guy with certain codes, a certain elegance.”

  A praying mantis, not very large, came flying in from somewhere, and Cetarti followed its trajectory until it crashed against the cage. He heard a soft electric crackle, and the mantis fell to the ground and stayed there, waving its legs but unable to right itself.

  “And how was it that you found me?”

  “Your information was in a notebook of Molina’s. Your mother must have given it to him.”

  That was impossible, but just in case, Cetarti didn’t ask anything more.

  Chapter 4

  “I have a key, but first, let’s just see…” said Duarte, and he rang the doorbell. Moments later, the door opened a crack and a large woman peeked out, her face wrinkled but with a strong, tense expression.

  “What’re you doing here, Duarte?”

  “Hi, Marta. I’m here with the son of, how’s it… ahem, the deceased. He’s here to see some of his mother’s things.”

  The woman let them in. Duarte introduced them; the woman was Molina’s ex-wife. She was wearing a black, short-sleeved dress, her face was flecked with sweat, and her hands were wet to the forearms with soapy, bloody foam.

  “I was just cleaning up the mess.”

  To get to what could properly be called the house, they had to walk a few meters down a hallway. The house was small and felt suffocating; the smells of dampness and dirty clothes permeated with alcoholic sweat entered through the nose and seemed to invade all the other senses. The woman showed him the bedroom and told him to focus his efforts there, that she was going to clean around the closets in the living room so he could look through those next. Duarte left him alone and went into the living room with the woman. Cetarti sat down on the bed, which was unmade. The woman talked to Duarte in a low voice while she went back to her cleaning; you could hear the sounds as she dunked something into a bucket and then scrubbed the wall. He went through the bedside table that was closest to him. It evidently wasn’t his mother’s: there were replacement razor blades, a Ballester Molina pistol with the army stamp, and a box of ammunition. There was a packet of condoms, and Cetarti almost threw up again. He looked through the lower part of the bedside table: there were shoes and a pile of old comic books—El Tony, D’Artagnan. He got up and went through the other nightstand, he found his mother’s ID and twenty-five pesos that he put in his pocket. He went to the closet and looked in all the dresses and coats (he couldn’t bring himself to root around in the underwear) without finding anything. He returned to his mother’s night table, to the lower part. He found a shoebox with stamps, pension receipts, doctor referrals from the air force’s insurance, and a childhood photograph of him and his brother: the two of them in a plaza, standing next to a slide. They were wearing short pants, sweaters, white socks, and shoes. They must have been around three and five years old. The photo had come out a little dark, as if the day was cloudy. They both looked serious, and they were holding hands. At the back of the box there was an envelope; he opened it and found seven hundred pesos. He put the photo in with the money and put the envelope in another pocket. He sat down on the bed again. Then he lay down and pulled the sheets up to his chin.

  * * *

  Duarte woke him up a while later. It took him a minute to realize where he was. He felt bad, his clothes were damp with sweat.

  “She’s finishing up with the living room.”

  Molina’s ex-wife was swabbing the water from the floor with a mop, next to her was a bucket full of foamy water with a brush floating in it. The walls had been washed, but they weren’t completely clean—there were traces of blood that showed the movements of the brush. The woman finished drying the floor in front of the sideboards with a rag and told him he could come in; Cetarti went through them but didn’t find anything interesting.

  “Can you hand me the bag, Marta?” asked Duarte.

  The woman pushed aside the sofa, which was partly covered with a towel (Cetarti recognized the upholstery from the police photo of his mother’s body), and she picked up a yellow bag from the floor. Duarte took it and handed it to Cetarti.

  “This is your brother’s.”

  Cetarti accepted the bag. He took out the things he had found in his mother’s room and put them in the bag without looking through it. He caught a glimpse of clothes, a pair of running shoes, and he heard the muted jingle of keys. He said thank you.

  * * *

  They went outside; the woman murmured a goodbye and closed the door. Duarte asked Cetarti what he planned to do. Cetarti felt like a diver who had just come up after working for a year at the bottom of a swamp. He told Duarte he hoped to find a hotel because he needed to take a shower and a nap.

  “There’s a little hotel a block from the plaza, it’s pretty good.”

  He parked in front of the hotel (the sign said Lapachit
o House) and they got out. Duarte told Cetarti to go ahead, he was going to make a few calls about the insurance, and he’d get in touch later. He locked the door and handed Cetarti the keys. Cetarti went into the hotel and asked the concierge if they had cable television. The man said yes, the rooms had cable and fans. Cetarti asked for a room. He showered, lit a joint, and stretched out on the bed with an ashtray on his chest. He turned on the TV and flipped through the channels with the remote control. There was a fly circling around the room, and every once in a while it would land on the screen or bump into it. He remembered the fly-trap at the barbeque joint where he had eaten lunch, and he thought it was possible the electrical field that formed in front of the screen attracted it somehow. He started to follow the fly’s trajectory, trying to find some pattern. There were long cycles of flight that ended with the fly landing on the screen, and short cycles that ended with a ricochet. The cycles more or less alternated short-ricochet-short-land-long-land-short. Then the fly went out an open transom window, and Cetarti followed it in his thoughts. The fly flew through the hallways until it reached the concierge and landed on the counter. Instead of the concierge who had checked him in, the guy from the cemetery was there, dressed in the same T-shirt that said Chaco for Ever, the same boots. He was writing something on Cetarti’s registration card. The fly started flying again, so it could see what he was writing: under his name and the date he checked in, the employee had written: “Cremate and deliver at two in the afternoon.” Cetarti was already asleep.

  Chapter 5

  Danielito had lowered the volume so he could pay attention to his mother’s voice coming through the telephone, but his bloodshot eyes remained fixed on the TV. He was watching a documentary on the Allied aerial incursions against the heart of the Third Reich’s industrial power in the final part of the Second World War. The documentary was narrated in English, but he could follow it with the subtitles.

  “You’re not listening to me,” said his mother.

  “Yes, Mom, I’m listening to you.”

  “All right, what was the last thing I said to you?”

  “The furniture needs to be brought out to the yard.”

  “OK, and what else.”

  Many of the planes had cameramen on board who had filmed the battles, and much of the documentary consisted of that footage. Bombers in flames plummeted into the abyss, sometimes trailing little white dots of parachuting crew-members. Without putting the phone down, he brought his face close to the screen to see if he could find one that was falling without a parachute, but, between the graininess of the original 8mm film and the pixelation of the TV seen from up close, it was impossible.

  “Fine, I’ll call you back later,” his mother said, after waiting several seconds for a reply. “Is there any time of day when you’re not high? I don’t want to bother you.”

  “I’m not high,” he lied. “I just got up from my nap, you woke me up.”

  They exchanged a couple more words and hung up, his mother first. Danielito turned the volume on the TV back up. He would call her later. But for the moment he was flying over Berlin, taking intense aerial fire.

  * * *

  At six he went downstairs to the little room in the basement, carrying an alfajor cookie and a carton of chocolate milk. In bed with the covers up almost over his head, the boy was awake, shifting nervously and whining in discomfort. Danielito pulled the covers down, and like every time since he started taking care of him, the boy’s horrible face, sloppily stuck on to a head that was two sizes too large, looked at him with wide-open eyes. He was damp, and smelled of sweat. Danielito wiped a towel over his face, neck, and arms and turned on the fan. Without untying him, he adjusted the boy until he was in a stable seated position. He turned on the little TV facing the bed and changed channels until he found one with Japanese cartoons. That calmed the boy down. Danielito unwrapped the alfajor and brought it to the boy’s face. He helped him eat it, pounding his back when he choked on the crumbs. When he finished, he stuck a straw into the carton of milk and held it for the boy until he finished drinking.

  “Do you like this, or should I change it?” he asked, indicating the TV. The boy, who looked like a crumpled walrus, looked at him for two milliseconds and turned back to the screen without answering. Danielito balled up the two containers and threw them in a plastic bag that was in a corner. He went upstairs, got out the little jar of marijuana, rolled a joint, and smoked it while he watched Animal Planet, a program about killer elephants. Usually thought of as calm and passive animals, domesticated Indian elephants occasionally read a gesture wrong, or got a toothache, or sensed danger. “Or they just get sick of humans,” explained the owner of a North American circus whose elephant had killed his trainer with one giant tusk and then trampled him in the middle of a performance. The animal had escaped and killed two more people, in addition to causing considerable damage to both public and private property, before police shot it full of holes and killed it. Even the most docile elephants, like the ones worshipped in Indian temples, have an attack every once in a while and kill their mahout. Being a mahout, or elephant keeper, is one of the most stressful jobs in the world, and almost every mahout is an alcoholic. People are also afraid of the jungle elephants: in Mal Bazaar, East Bengal, there are some that have over thirty deaths to their credit, and the natives have named them individually. They know the elephants’ habits and the areas they frequent, and they avoid coming into contact with them. Even so, the killer elephants sometimes go down into the villages. Several witnesses testify that “they are very silent animals, and they approach without making any noise.” They knock on the door, and when it opens, they hit the unsuspecting victim with their trunks. A trunk propelled by three thousand muscles and five tons of elephant.

  * * *

  At twenty minutes to eight, Duarte arrived. He greeted Danielito with a pat on the face.

  “Some eyes you got there. You look like a Chinaman with a fever.”

  They exchanged news, and Duarte went down to “check on things.” Danielito kept watching TV. He heard the door to the basement close, footsteps on the stairs, and the boy’s cries when he recognized Duarte. First they sounded shrill, like a frightened pig’s. Then they muted a bit, as if the pig’s head had been wrapped in a towel. He turned up the volume on the TV.

  Chapter 6

  Cetarti’s sleep was simultaneously deep and restless, populated with rubbery images that never quite turned into nightmares. He slept straight through, until five fifteen in the morning. He woke up hungry and with a headache. On the TV, which had stayed on all night, a group of people were extolling the virtues of an electronic vacuum cleaner with a water filter. Uncomfortable, he shifted in bed a couple times. He decided to go out for a walk to clear his head and to see if he could buy something to eat. The shops would still be closed, but maybe the service station would have something. He took a shower, and before going out he smoked what was left of the joint he had started the previous afternoon. In the lobby they told him that they had tried to put a call through to him the evening before, but he hadn’t answered. The concierge gave him a paper with a number and a message written on it: “Mr. Duarte. Call him at this number in the morning.” The number was the one Cetarti already had. At the service station he bought a packet of salted crackers and a Coca-Cola, and he ate as he walked.

  * * *

  Ten blocks from the plaza, the pavement ended and the buildings began to look more precarious, and fifteen blocks past that he reached a kind of reservoir where some boys were fishing. They weren’t casting with a rod, but were using a line rolled around a peach can. He approached, and the boys looked at him suspiciously. He asked them if they had caught anything. They pointed to a bucket that had a sucker fish and two fish with whiskers that he didn’t recognize.

  “And what are these?”

  “Little catfish.”

  The fish inspired a feeling of disquiet, as if they were sick.

  “And you eat them? The sucker fish
too?”

  The boys nodded.

  “How do you cook it?”

  “You open it up and take out what’s inside and throw it away. Then you take out what’s further inside and you make soup. And then the fish is empty and you throw the skin away.”

  “And what other fish are there?”

  “That’s it. And bluegill, too. Some tiger fish.”

  He walked two blocks further and came to the road. He didn’t cross it, but headed back instead. At nine thirty he called Duarte. Duarte told him the insurance deal was smooth sailing, but there were a couple things that needed to be written up first, and he told Cetarti to come by the house so they could finish it on the computer. He gave him directions and said he would expect him at eleven.

  Duarte’s house was far from the center, in a more elevated part of town that didn’t have water in the streets. It had a little yard in front, separated from the sidewalk by a fence. Cetarti got out of the car and rang the bell. Duarte came to the door in Bermuda shorts, shirt, and sandals and let him in. It was cool, clean, and neat inside, the nicest house Cetarti had seen since he’d arrived in Lapachito. They went through a vestibule and into a large room—two of the walls were taken up by display cases full of scale models of planes. An antique desk with a file cabinet and a surprisingly modern computer on it. Next to it, a little table with a 29-inch TV and a VCR, both connected to the computer by red and black cables. The VCR was on, and the display showed that it was forty-eight minutes into the movie. The TV was dark, with the red “standby” light flashing. The remaining space next to the machines was filled with piles of videos. On another table, closer to the only window, there were several partially constructed pieces of a model plane that Cetarti recognized from the illustration on the box.