* * *
In the afternoon he took the car out and visited used car dealerships, looking for the best price. In one place they offered him 11,500 pesos cash. By that point he was fed up, and he left the car there. He got four thousand cash right away and arranged to get the rest the next morning, when the car’s documents had been verified and the transfer papers had been signed. On foot now, he went through the center of town, and in an aquarium shop he found out about the fish in his brother’s tank. It wasn’t technically a fish, it was a Mexican species of salamander called an axolotl, and they weren’t rare, they were sold in almost any pet store. They told him that you could feed them strips of meat or worms, putting them right in front of the animal—axolotls don’t see very well. The other option was to buy food for aquatic turtles and give them that, because the meat and worms would rot and get the water dirty. You had to feed them every three or four days, but they could fast for a week or more. Cetarti guessed that his brother’s axolotl was used to eating worms. He bought two cans of turtle food. While he was paying, he realized he hadn’t taken the ashes of his mother and brother out of the trunk of the car.
Chapter 13
The entrance of the Gancedo Cemetery was a skeletal cement archway crowned with a cross made of iron bars. There was a sign painted in capital but childish letters that said: IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO BERY, REMOVE, OR EXUME HUMAN REMAINS WITHOUT MUNICIPAL AUTHORIZATION. OFFENDERS WILL BE PUNISHED ACCORDING TO MUNICIPAL LAWS IN FORCE. THANKS. Uncomfortable, Danielito scraped the ground with his shovel. He looked at his mother, who had her hands stuck through the iron bars of the gate, trying to move the bolt. She seemed to guess his thoughts.
“It’s Monday, no one’s going to be here. Especially at this hour.”
She struggled for a bit, but then gave up.
“It’s really stuck in there. What can I say, who knows how long it’s been since someone was here. You’re going to have to jump over and open it from the other side.”
Danielito leaned his shovel against the little wall and jumped over without much effort.
* * *
It was four in the afternoon. The silence was almost total; there wasn’t the slightest breeze. Only a blend of muted sounds: clods of dry dirt breaking up under their shoes, rats or lizards scurrying to hide as they approached. Halfway down the main walkway there was a statue of Christ in a gesture of happy welcome. The statue was ugly, out of proportion (the legs short, torso almost like a boxer’s, long arms, big hands, a gaucho’s poncho over his shoulder), and it gave off a certain desolation, like those badly drawn Disney characters on the neighborhood carousel. With shovel in hand he followed his mother to the furthest corner of the cemetery. After a couple of wrong turns, the woman finally stopped in front of a small grave, sunken and bare of flowers, marked only by a wooden cross that had been punished by the years and the weather. In the center of the cross there was a tin cut-out in the shape of a slender heart, black with a faint but still legible inscription in white. She left the bag to one side on the ground.
“This is it. Hand me the shovel.”
“As if you’re going to dig. You’ll hurt yourself.”
He couldn’t avoid a shudder when he read, painted on the tin heart: DANIEL MOLINA 2-12-1972/10-4-1973. He looked at his mother. She was staring at the sunken earth.
“Poor thing, all these years under this terrible sun.”
He dug apprehensively. The earth was soft, but he felt no urge to speed up. He was soaked in sweat. Around the cemetery there was an island of empty land, and after a hundred meters the bush-covered mountain. He remembered the documentary about the elephants of Mal Bazaar. He imagined one of those elephants emerging from the forest. He imagined it coming towards them. A complex and powerful body that shook the earth at each step. But the elephant wouldn’t attack them, he thought. It would approach them calmly and with a certain curiosity. It would stop beside them, touching them gently with its trunk. And then it would fall to the ground. Or disappear into thin air. Or something, anything else. But it wouldn’t hurt them. “Almost every mahout is an alcoholic,” he remembered. How nice to be an alcoholic, he thought, how nice to be murdered by an elephant. Something, anything else.
Chapter 14
“Good. Very good…”
Duarte’s face took on an expression that was a mixture of surprise and ironic approval. He had been listening to Danielito’s story while painting the tires on the landing gear a matte black. Danielito watched him do it, interested in the precision with which Duarte’s enormous paws maneuvered the little plastic pieces.
“Your old lady is a strange one, huh. She makes you go to Gancedo to rob a grave and then asks you to cross half the province with a dead body in the car.”
“Well, it’s not a dead body, it’s her son… plus it’s a little coffin, with bones. It doesn’t smell or anything.”
“It’s a dead body, kid. You know, when you were born and your old man told me your mom had given you the same name, I said that chick is whacko, she’s sick in the head…”
“You knew?”
“Yes. Your dad told me.”
“And what did he say?”
“Um, he just told me, didn’t give much of an opinion. That whole time, he and your mom didn’t see each other very much, mostly they just wrote letters, this was right after we were reinstated and they’d sent us to do a survival course in Tucumán. She was already pregnant. Your dad only saw the kid once, two or three months after he was born. After that, he pretty much avoided seeing him again. We were halfway up a mountain, but we weren’t in prison, y’know? They gave your old man leave to go visit his kid several times, but he didn’t go. I guess he couldn’t face it.”
“Face what?”
“Uh, seeing your, ahem, brother. It’s not easy to watch when things go bad, I guess. After coming back from seeing the kid, he was drunk for days. I covered a lot of his shifts for him during that time—it would’ve been dangerous otherwise. I remember it well. I’m not saying it was easy for your old lady, either. She did what she did for a reason; it wasn’t right but maybe she just couldn’t do anything else.”
“And when my dad found out, he didn’t say anything?”
“No. Not that I know of, anyway, but I wasn’t their marriage counselor, I didn’t know everything. To be honest, I think at that point he didn’t much care.”
Duarte put the lid on the little can of black paint and cleaned the brush with solvent and a little cotton.
“In any case, it seems cruel on her part to have brought you there. If she didn’t tell you before, why complicate things now?”
“She couldn’t go alone, and she didn’t have anyone else to ask.”
On a corner of the table was a volume from the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aviation (“Profiles, Characteristics, Performance”). Duarte opened it to the chapter dedicated to the B-36 and checked the color of the axles on the landing gear against the photos of the version he was putting together. He put the book back in its place, took the lid off the can of silver, and started to paint.
“Still, I don’t know. It’s not right, seems to me. Well, here I am blathering on and you could give three shits about it, right? You’ve been back for three days and not a peep from you, what’ve you been doing?”
Danielito’s mind went back over the swampy memory of the previous days: high all day, showering constantly, looking at himself in the mirror, eating exaggeratedly and vomiting. Urinating on himself in bed.
“Nothing. Just hanging around,” he said.
Duarte looked at his gaunt face and dark-ringed eyes.
“Yeah, I thought you looked a little tan,” he said. “Lots of fresh air. Lay off the healthy life a little, it’s going to take its toll on you. And what’s your mother going to do? Is she going to bury him here?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me anything.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“No.”
“She’d be liable to k
eep him in with your dad’s ashes.”
“Yeah, very likely.”
“Doesn’t it bother you a little that your mother would bring a coffin into her house?”
“It’s her business. I don’t live there.”
Duarte let out a yellowish cackle.
“Ha ha, very good, that’s the way to talk. But you do go there pretty often.”
Chapter 15
During the weeks that followed, Cetarti slept a lot. When he was awake he was high, and he spent almost all of his time (along with the wreckage of his attention) moving between the television and the fish tank. In that condition, the axolotl was ideal for observing: almost always motionless, every once in a while it swam lazily upward to get some air and a mouthful of the flakes of food floating on the surface. Cetarti went on eating little or nothing, but he trusted that his low metabolism would compensate for the decrease in calories. He often had nightmares in which, with some variation from dream to dream, he was shot to death with a shotgun. Sometimes his mother was with him, sometimes he was alone. But he always saw the shadow of an enormous man (sometimes the guy wasn’t completely human, but had some kind of tentacles that came out of his face) with a shotgun he fired at Cetarti’s skull. His head would go flying, but he didn’t die immediately, he got to live long enough to see the splinters of his bones and the bloody mucus that stuck to the upholstery of a chair and some curtains. He dreamed other things too, but he didn’t remember them.
* * *
One day the electricity was shut off. He woke up early and realized what had happened from the new silence of the freezer. Then he went through the house trying all the light switches, as if one of them might still hold some electricity. That day he showered (he hadn’t bathed in several days) and went outside to have breakfast in a bar on the avenue. After so much time eating badly, and only cold food, the café con leche and warm croissants were like an injection of life. Afterwards he walked a bit, looking at things and the people in the street as if they were the landscape of an unknown planet he had just landed on. Breakfast, the open air, and the sun pulled him out of his lethargy. He went back to the house and tried the phone; it still worked. He called Duarte and asked him if he knew anything about the insurance money. Duarte said he hadn’t heard anything, but that he would find out and let him know. He stood in front of the fish tank and sprinkled a little food on the water’s surface. The axolotl didn’t move. Cetarti spent half an hour sitting face to face with the animal, observing the most minimal movements of its feet or its external gills. The phone rang; he answered, thinking it was Duarte calling about the insurance, but it was the real estate agency calling to let him know he was two days late with the rent. He apologized and explained that he had just gotten back from an unforeseen trip, and he would be there in an hour to pay. On the way to the agency it occurred to him that it didn’t make sense to go on paying rent. When he got there, he told them that the month he was paying for would be the last one he would spend in the apartment.
Chapter 16
A multitude of little shells was piled up on the beach, shaking like bottle caps in an earthquake. For three nights in spring, horseshoe crabs in the Moluccas emerge from the depths where they live and reach the coasts. In three days of full moon and high tide, they cover the sands along the Atlantic coast of North America for hundreds of miles…
Danielito’s mother was slicing tomatoes and peppers in rounds on a cutting board before adding them to the onions and meat that were starting to brown in a saucepan.
These living fossils are distant relatives of spiders and scorpions. Along with millipedes, arachnids were among the first organisms to emerge from the sea. Scorpions, already present in the Silurian period, are among the most ancient arachnids.
“In the freezer there’s a can of peas, could you hand it to me? And if you want us to keep talking, turn off that TV.”
Danielito obeyed. He turned off the TV and took the peas out of the freezer. His fingertips stuck to the can’s surface.
“This is frozen.”
“Put it under the tap for a while. Just so I can get them out, then they’ll finish thawing on the stove.”
Danielito turned the can under the stream of water for a couple minutes, then opened it and dumped the irregular green cylinder into the pot with the peppers and tomatoes.
“Duarte says it was cruel of you to bring me to the cemetery. That it wasn’t necessary.”
“And since when is that son of a bitch Chancho Duarte one to talk about cruelty? I asked you because you’re the only person I had. If I’d had someone else I wouldn’t have asked you.”
“He says you were sick in the head when you named me. That Dad told him things, that you were in bad shape.”
“Your father could hardly have told him anything, because he wasn’t here. He only saw the boy once, didn’t even come to his funeral. His firstborn son. And yes, I was sick. Of course I was sick. And all alone. Those were horrible months—he’d been born small, with a big head, circles around his eyes. He cried all day; we had to give him a lot of injections, he was always in pain and bad-tempered. My first son. Someone else might have been relieved when he died. Your father, for example. But for me it was like someone was yanking out my liver with their bare hands. I was alone, standing in the sun while they buried him. I don’t know how anyone could judge me. And I was all alone when you were born, too. Your father sent me letters from Tucumán, telling me about… just shit, his asthma and the mosquitoes.”
“And why did you give me the same name?”
The doorbell rang. His mother dried her hands on her apron and went to open the door. He heard the conversation at the front door: they were Jehovah’s Witnesses or something similar. Very politely, they asked if she believed in God, if she’d read the scriptures. His mother said yes. They asked if she regularly attended a church.
“Look, Miss, in this house we are Catholic and we are happy that way. Thank you,” she said, and closed the door.
Danielito was a little sorry his mother hadn’t let them in. He would have liked for those innocent people to come into the house. He would have liked to listen to them talk about salvation, to thumb through those brochures with drawings of smiling people eating fruit, children petting lions, sunbeams coming down from the clouds. It seemed like a thousand years since he’d eaten any fruit.
“The onions are starting to stick; you have to stir it a little, is that so hard?” his mother reproached him. She poured in a little water from the kettle and stirred.
“We named you together. It’s normal for the first son to have the father’s name.”
“But I wasn’t the first son. Your first son was dead.”
“In practice, you were the first.”
“Maybe if you’d named me something else, I’d be different.”
“You’d be the same. A person is who he is, and not because of his name. The name is no justification.”
“Maybe if he’d lived he would have been like me.”
His mother added rice and water to the pot.
“Danielito died pure. Without sin.”
It took Danielito a few seconds to attach his name to the coffin of bones, but when he did, he shuddered.
“Children who die go to limbo, right?”
“No. After how much your brother suffered, he’s in heaven. Children are born into sin, but with all that he suffered, he paid for his sin.”
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