“Fucking fat-ass. I can’t drink coffee with milk.”
“It’s tea with milk.”
“Milk, I can’t drink milk.”
“If you don’t want it, don’t drink it, I’ll make you a cup of plain tea. Eat the toast. It’s got jam.”
With her free hand, the old woman shoved the plate away weakly, though hard enough for everything to fall to the floor and smash to pieces.
“Shitty fat-ass. You can stick your cookies up your ass, fucking fatty, homo.”
Danielito noticed that all three pieces of toast had fallen face-down, with the jam against the floor. He thought about the mathematical probability of that happening, and about the unpleasant feel of the sticky jam smeared on the plate shards; he felt infinitely lazy knowing he had to clean it up.
“Whatever.”
* * *
Duarte arrived, as he’d promised, at twelve. He was not happy.
“I was talking with that fucker of a son. It’s starting to seem to me that he’s trying to give us the runaround. I checked; the guy never even filed a report or talked to the police. But at the same time he talks in circles. Now he’s telling me it’s not easy to find buyers, that I should wait a couple of days… it’s strange.”
“Maybe we’re doing him a favor. The old lady’s pretty cranky.”
“Yeah, he he… Maybe we’re just a couple of idiots, take the mother off his hands and he ends up with everything, the guy gets crowned king… On top of everything, yeah, the son of a bitch has that crybaby tone when he talks. You can tell he’s not really feeling bad. In real life, you know. The old lady’s awake?”
“Not completely. But enough.”
“OK. Starting now you don’t talk to her or turn on the light, and take the TV away from her. And we’re going to change her pills.”
They went down to the basement and Danielito turned on the light. The old woman squinted her eyes at the sudden brilliance, and then she opened them little by little.
“And who’ve you got here, fucking fat-ass? Is this the one who wears out your tent pole for you, you fat homo?”
Duarte went over to the old lady and let fly with a mighty punch that twisted up her face. The woman absorbed the blow and, more than anything, the change in the situation. She looked first at Danielito and then, with a more fearful expression, at Duarte. Duarte hit her again.
“I’m the one who’s going to break your ass for you, if you don’t shape up.”
Chapter 26
By that point, the only time Cetarti wasn’t smoking marijuana was when he slept or bathed. He was paranoid that the neighbors would smell something and complain about him to the police, so he took pains to be noticed as little as possible: he only went out at night and only to take out the garbage from cleaning out his brother’s house, or to buy pizza and mineral water at a deli that was four blocks away (one pizza lasted him two days). He had already finished cleaning what would be the living room, and he’d made some progress with the first bedroom. He had collected some eight hundred kilos of paper—magazines, daily newspapers, flattened pizza boxes and cartons of milk and juice and wine—and taken thirty-six bags of trash out to the street. Although he still devoted a lot of time to watching TV and observing the movements of the axolotl, he entertained himself for a few hours every day by sorting the garbage: completely high, sitting on a little bench, lit by a hundred-watt bulb in a portable lamp, sorting and bagging things, surprised by the wide variety of junk that had been accumulated: old printed circuit boards, carcasses of PC monitors (even a couple of intact ones), flower pots with dried out dirt, kiosk gum displays, old bottles, plastic containers from yogurt and dulce de leche stacked one inside the other, bags with rubber doll’s heads, electrical appliances that didn’t work, canary cages without bottoms. Along with the encyclopedias in the first room he’d cleaned out, he had collected a box with pieces of the engine of a Citroën 3CV (labeled “gears/carburetor/axle shafts” in thick marker); a folding aluminum ladder in good condition; a matching sink, toilet, and bidet; a disassembled bicycle with no tires on the wheels; four bundles of complete extension cords; and twelve beer cases filled with empty bottles, which he later put out in the yard next to the paper; and almost fifty glass bottles that he thought he could sell by weight. Even with those things piled up against one of the walls, the clean room was like a bubble of air where he could go to breathe when the rest of the house was suffocating him. He had left a little pillow there, and when he got tired he would go and sit and look over the things he was saving.
* * *
One morning, as he was taking apart one of the shelves he had emptied, he heard the quick sound of… an animal? hooves? and then a tremendous blow against the front door of the house. He was paralyzed; the only thing that occurred to him was that the police were coming to get him, but then he heard mooing. Another tremendous blow and something like masonry falling. He jumped up and peered out between the blinds. An enormous zebu was doing battle on his sidewalk with several men in light blue overalls who were trying to rope it. None of them were police. The zebu, corralled in the fight, had butted against the front of the house, toppling one of the pillars and knocking out a section of the low porch wall. Every time it went backwards, it bumped against the remains of the wall. It did this several times, until finally they managed to hogtie its front legs and pull it to the ground. One man tried to tie its back legs, but the animal, kicking desperately, got him in the arm—the bone broke audibly. The man cried out and grabbed his arm, and when he doubled over in pain he got a kick right in his face. He fell like a sack of potatoes in the middle of the street and didn’t cry out again. The animal managed to escape the ropes, and it fled the scene at full speed. Two men stayed by the one who had fallen, and the others went running after the bull. Some neighbors came closer, an old man in short pajamas and slippers went into his house to call an ambulance. Cetarti opened the door and went out to see. The neighbors looked at him curiously, surreptitiously, or so it seemed to him. There was a sound of brakes at the next corner, a hundred meters away, and a crash, followed by more mooing. A delivery truck had hit the zebu. Cetarti went over to the collision. The animal had ended up on a sidewalk. It was alive, though seriously injured. It was trying to get up, but its back legs weren’t responding. It struggled uselessly, foam coming from its mouth; it was still mooing, though more quietly now. Two people, apparently from the truck (a soda delivery truck), and three men in overalls were standing next to it. Other people went over, and at first no one did much more than watch, without saying a word.
“Its spine is broken,” the old man said suddenly. It was the same old man in pajamas and slippers who had called the ambulance. “I have a shotgun in the house. If you’ll let me, I’ll put this animal out of its misery.”
One of the slaughterhouse employees had a phone in his hand. He consulted with someone and received an unintelligible answer.
“No. We’ll take it to the meat processing plant and kill it there, thanks.”
Minutes later a truck from the slaughterhouse arrived, and they loaded the animal on, amid a flurry of insults, not bothering to minimize its suffering. While they settled it in so they could shut the back doors, Cetarti looked into the bull’s face; the animal was panting like an old engine. He saw himself in the convex reflection of the animal’s eye. There was no fury now. One of the men from the delivery truck was looking at his own hands.
“I’m starting to shake, the adrenaline from the crash must be dying down.”
His hands, it was true, were trembling. The guy held them up, smiling.
The people from the meat processing plant got into the truck. The delivery men went back to their vehicle, checked the damage (minimal), and tried to start it. The one who was shaking got in on the passenger side. The truck started perfectly and the guys drove away, waving.
Chapter 27
Three days later he started to clean the garage. The discoveries of the first hours of the morning included a fou
r-volume dictionary, plus Jacques Cousteau’s Encyclopedia of Secrets of the Sea, complete (fifteen volumes with covers) but bagged in unbound bundles, a stack of six plastic chairs, and a TV table. He also found two hedge trimmers and a lawn mower. He tested them at an outlet: one of the hedge trimmers didn’t work, but the other two machines did. He decided to cut the grass in the yard. He went to look for the extension cords and put together a stretch that was long enough to move around most of the yard. The grass was very long and he cut it in two stages. First he went over the weeds, cutting their stalks with the trimmer. He discovered that at the back of the yard (ten meters away) there was a barbecue he hadn’t seen—it had been hidden by the overgrowth. When he finished mowing, he went over to inspect it. It looked like it hadn’t been used in years, and the cement table attached to the barbecue held something very unpleasant: a small pile of dead animals. Dried insects, rat cadavers, and birds in various states of decomposition, even little skeletons, some with skin stuck to them, some without. This must have been the source of the insects in the wardrobe drawer. He unplugged the trimmer and brought the machines to the front, with the other salable objects. He carried over a plastic bag and the shovel and collected eight shovelfuls of bodies. He took a rectangular sheet of galvanized metal from the pile of rubble to push the bodies he hadn’t been able move with the shovel into the bag. When he propped the sheet on the cement table, he was hit with a powerful electrical charge that lasted a couple of seconds until, due to the muscular contraction, he separated the sheet from the table. He stood there absorbing what had happened for a few seconds, his muscles trembling and his breath coming hard, direct consequences of the electrical shock. His hand loosened its grip and the metal fell to the ground. He felt like he was going to fall too, and he ran away from the table, just to be safe. He sat for a while on the recently cut grass while his breathing returned to normal and his body stopped trembling.
* * *
More toward afternoon, he had been flipping through channels for a couple of hours without thinking of anything in particular, when there was a knock at the door. With some difficulty he put on his shoes and went to look through the blinds. It was the old man who, dressed in short pajamas and slippers, had offered to kill the injured zebu with a shotgun. Now he was dressed a little better (plaid shirt and Ombu work pants, Cetarti couldn’t see his feet). He knocked at the door again. Not very energetically, as if the man knew he was there on the other side. Cetarti opened up. The old man greeted him, introducing himself as Gómez. He was wearing the same slippers as on the other afternoon, and he seemed to be a little uncomfortable. He said that he lived across the way and he’d seen Cetarti taking out the bags at night, and it seemed like he was cleaning out the house. Cetarti answered curtly that yes, he was cleaning.
“When I saw your face the day before yesterday, I said to myself, this must be a brother, or a cousin or something,” said the old man. “That’s why I wanted to come. You’re a relative of the man who lives here, right?”
“Used to live. Yes, I’m his brother.”
“Used to live? What happened to him?”
“He was murdered in Chaco.”
Fat tears started to fall down the old man’s cheeks. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped it over his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I had an ICS two years ago, and I cry at anything.”
“A 5CS?”
“An ICS. Ischemic cerebral stroke.”
Cetarti let him in. He took two plastic chairs from the stack and offered one to the old man. The man sat down but said he would only stay for a minute. Cetarti asked if he had known his brother. The old man said he did. That they talked sometimes. Cetarti asked what they would talk about.
“The weather and things like that. He wasn’t very much inclined. He had a serious way of speaking, as if he was occupied with something important.”
The old man told him a little more: his brother was not bothersome at all. He spent the day inside and went out at night, generally on the bicycle, and brought things back.
“He’d get in late, two or three in the morning, with bundles and things in the bike basket. I saw him a lot because I have insomnia, and when I’m not sleeping I look out the window. That’s how I saw you.”
Cetarti shifted, a little frighted to know that the old man, probably in underwear and T-shirt, had been watching him all those nights. He was especially frightened by the detail of the T-shirt and underwear.
“The only time I remember having seen him during the day was when he went out to throw bricks at some dogs that were fighting. You’ve seen that the neighborhood is generally quiet. The mooing from the slaughterhouse gets annoying sometimes. One Christmas, my wife sent me over with a little chicken with salad and potatoes, and Christmas bread. He thanked me a lot. And he showed me a drawer full of bugs…” The old man dried his tears again, his nose a little runny.
“And you? What are you doing here?”
Cetarti felt like all the sounds had gone quiet and the question had fallen on the ground, bouncing heavily on the tiles.
“I’m cleaning the house.”
“In case you don’t know, you shouldn’t get any ideas about selling it. None of these houses have titles, they can’t be sold.”
The old man asked him what his brother was doing in Chaco. Cetarti told him he didn’t know, that he’d only been called in to attend to the formalities after his brother was dead. The old man nodded his head, as though he was absorbing the concept. He got up from the chair, resting his hands on his knees as he moved. His knees crunched like broken ball bearings.
“Well then, I didn’t want to bother you, I just came by to see if your brother was all right. The thing is, I was talking with my wife and she told me to come find out. She was a little worried. When I tell her now she’s going to be upset.”
* * *
That night, when he took off his running shoes in the darkness in front of the TV, Cetarti noticed that the shifting light shone through a hole in the sole of his right shoe. His exposed skin had touched the electrified cement, that’s why he’d been shocked. He went to sleep early, and he dreamed that he wanted to ask Gómez if his brother had ever said anything about him. But the only thing that came out of his mouth were some scribbled words that fell to the ground. As if he were speaking a very foreign language, written with indecipherable letters.
Chapter 28
It is November 20th, 1917, the day of the Battle of Cambrai. The fleet of tanks commanded by General Douglas Haig faces its greatest obstacle: anti-tank trenches five meters wide. The advance halts. You are General Haig; how will you get past the trenches? Will you avoid them and look for another way to pass? Or will you fill them with dirt so you can cross? Or will you build bridges using trees? The answer is coming up on Command Decisions, by the History Channel.
Danielito was against filling them with earth because it was too complicated, but he wasn’t too sure about the other options. He went with the second choice, avoiding the trenches, but after the commercials he was informed of his error: The time lost by detouring blindly in search of another place to cross is a luxury that Haig cannot allow himself. Filling the trenches would prevent their later use by the British. Thus, the choice is the third option. Constructing bridges by lashing trees together is a fast and simple solution. Haig’s tanks cross relatively easily, and at eight in the morning the Hindenburg line is penetrated.
If it had been up to him, the English would have been left without trenches. In any case, the Germans quickly recaptured the territory that had been won from them, so it didn’t matter in the end. What’s more: if they had filled the trenches with dirt, he realized, in the long run it would have made them unusable for the Germans, too. He went down to the basement to get the lunch tray; the woman was asleep. Then he looked out the window into the yard: Torito was stretched out on the ground and the female dog, standing shakily, was sniffing at his bandaged eye. The phone rang, Danielito answered. It
was his mother. She told him that she had just eaten two boxes of Brumoline and she was about to explode. She told him to be careful with the dogs, they were evil animals.
Chapter 29
The report in the waiting room of the ICU was the same as it had been at four in the afternoon: his mother’s condition was stable but still touch and go; she was on artificial respiration, and for the moment it was impossible to evaluate the amount of neurological damage she was likely to have. They had pumped her stomach, but her nervous system had almost certainly been affected by the internal hemorrhaging (the anti-coagulant in the rat poison). She had received two and a half liters of blood in eight hours. Before he went into the room, they made him put on a light blue robe, cap, and mask (the robe was too small for him). At that time, his mother was the only patient in the room. Her face was hidden behind a green mask through which you could see the flexible tubing of the respirator going into her mouth. Her hands were tied with straps to the sides of the bed, and there was a needle stuck into each of her forearms. On top of all that there were cables with electrodes to monitor her vital signs. He sat down in a chair that was next to the bed and put his hands together so only the fingertips were touching. He spent a while looking at his hands. Every once in a while he moved them without separating them, and each new angle seemed to add something different. Then he looked at his mother again. He walked around the ward: there were nine empty beds. The temperature was pleasant because of the air conditioning. To see what it felt like, he lay down in one of the empty beds. He fell asleep instantly. A while later a nurse woke him up, telling him in a fairly nasty tone that he couldn’t be there. Danielito thought that he actually could very well stay there, maybe for a year or more, but he didn’t want to argue.
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