* * *
He called Duarte on the phone and told him he was going to be a while. That he was going to go for a spin. He drove close to downtown. He parked and smoked half a joint inside the car and then got out to walk. He took a couple of turns through the two shops in Lapachito that sold electronic games, to entertain himself by looking at the lights.
* * *
He got back to his house at nine thirty at night. Duarte’s eyes were extremely red as he greeted him with a movement of his head. He was talking on the phone.
“Oh, no, of course, that’s not enough… OK look, you work it out to get the money, we’ll be patient with you, but see how this is, these situations can’t be dragged out indefinitely… We’re taking care of your mother, but she’s a big girl, she’s going to be better off in her house than here, and it’ll be less worry for all of us.”
Duarte listened to a reply from the other end.
“It’s OK, like I’m saying, you work it out. What I’m also saying is that the longer this thing takes, the more likely it is that we get to a place where things are out of our hands. We’re taking care of your mother because that’s the best thing for all of us and because we know you haven’t done anything foolish, but if the dough doesn’t turn up, this poor woman’s going to end up in a ditch with her ass torn up and a bullet in her head, do we understand each other? And it’ll be your fault, because you’re the one with the key to everything. Get your act together. Your mother is fine, we’re not monsters, but get on it.”
Duarte hung up and greeted Danielito.
“For sure, he’s stalling on purpose. We should have talked to the old woman first, it would have saved us time.”
“Why’s that?”
“Aside from the country house and the one in Makallé, these sons of bitches have two hundred hectares close to Villa María, in Córdoba. Plus a safety deposit box with four hundred grand in the Providencia Bank there. In the old lady’s name only. She even told me she’d go with me to get it. You should see her, she’s soft as silk now.”
Danielito said nothing.
“Yeah, of course, it’s not that easy…” said Duarte, who had read his face. “But I think it could be done. I’m going to make some calls. How’s your old lady doing?”
“She’s still on a respirator. They say she probably has neurological damage. She could die in half an hour or next year. Or she could wake up without one or more of her brain functions. Or even wake up in perfect shape.”
“And what did she take?”
“Two boxes of Brumoline.”
“What kind of pills are those?”
“They’re not pills, it’s rat poison.”
“Ah, silly me. It sounded like some kind of pill. So it’s rat poison. She’s amazing, huh, attacked by a mastiff and she ends up beating the shit out of it, she downs two boxes of poison and doesn’t die… Your old lady’s like Chuck Norris, only meaner. You shouldn’t have saved her. Now she’s going to end up paralyzed, and you’re going to have to feed her with a spoon and wash her asshole every time she takes a shit. You should have let her croak.”
* * *
When Danielito went down to bring dinner (hamburgers with mashed potatoes), the stagnant air was thick and smelled of a mixture of weed, sperm, and soap, traces of Duarte’s visit. Duarte had cleaned her up, but you could see the blows and small cuts on her mouth and her eyebrows. He had punished the rest of her body too, and some parts were starting to swell.
Chapter 30
The day he finished cleaning out the garage, Cetarti added to the thirty or so objects he had gathered in the living room: a large bag with VHS tapes of porn movies (titles: Cream Rinse, Cum Scouts, Fire Hole, Flesh Mountain, and others. A dozen of the videos had the same design: a black box and the title Private in gold.), two working infrared heaters, two complete car wheels (rims, inner-tubes, and somewhat worn-out tires), a small bookshelf, and two pairs of crutches. Then he swept meticulously and mopped the floors of the whole house with bleach and disinfectant, including the porch where the paper and cardboard was piled up: he swept up everything except the pile of mandarin peels. He also put the modest kitchen furnishings in order. He showered and put on a clean change of clothes that had been washed with a bar of bath soap. He turned on the TV and smoked a joint while watching a documentary about the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979. He fell asleep in the middle of a description of the physical and chemical reactions that had taken place inside the reactor, which he wasn’t understanding very well. He woke up forty-five minutes later, hungry. It was six thirty in the evening. He didn’t want to go out for fear of meeting Gómez on the sidewalk. He ate two pieces of pizza, leftovers from the night before, along with the lukewarm dregs of a bottle of Coca-Cola. He wet his face and hair and went out to the yard. He felt somehow relieved. He stared at the mandarin peels: he thought about the number of chewing hours represented by that pile of peels. It was a number that held flexible possibilities: one could chew thoughtfully, staring into space, or with purposeful speed. It could be six hours chewing mandarins. Or twenty.
* * *
That night, with the fifth joint of the day half-smoked, he took out the last eleven large bags of garbage. For dinner he bought a whole pizza (anchovy special) and a liter of beer at the same deli as always. For dessert he bought homemade flan. He ate almost everything, three-fourths of the pizza, all the flan, and he drank the whole jug of beer. It was the first time in a long time he had eaten so much, and it made him sleep badly; he had several variations on the same slow nightmare, in which his head was blown off with a shotgun blast. At dawn he woke up with a bout of vomiting that finished off with painful dry heaves and spit-up bile. He felt better, but he couldn’t fall back asleep. Smoking, he read the two pages from Muy Interesante for the umpteenth time and gave the axolotl some food. He watched the little salamander—or larval salamander—make slight movements in its environment that was so much denser than air. He imagined giant cephalopods floating in the freezing black depths, moving slowly. He went to find the encyclopedia by Jacques Cousteau and thumbed through fifty bundles before finding one about deep sea fauna. They dedicated a page to the giant squid that had more pictures than text. The photos showed squid cadavers on large lab tables, with men in coveralls leaning over them, separating tissues with scalpels and dissection tools. He learned about anatomical details (the Architeuthis possesses the longest nervous cells and the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. It has three hearts and two brains, two arms and eight tentacles), but nothing more: it wasn’t what he was looking for.
* * *
After falling back asleep, he dreamed he was in a boat in the middle of the ocean. It was completely dark, but he could feel the contact of the swaying boat and hear the sound of water licking the wood. A faint light approached from below. It was his brother, who was coming up from the bottom. He emerged from the water’s surface and swam around the boat. He moved stealthily, touching the boat with cautious movements, as if he were exploring an object that had come from another world. He circled a couple of times and then left the same way he had come, sinking down into the depths in a way that Cetarti understood as definitive.
Chapter 31
Another patient had been added to the ICU, but Danielito couldn’t see him because he was on the other side of the room and hidden by a curtain. There was someone with the patient, and they were speaking in whispers. Danielito devoted a fair amount of the time he spent next to his mother’s bed to trying to decipher what they were talking about, but he couldn’t pick up very much. He left the hospital with very little desire to go back home. He got into the car and drove away from downtown. When he got to the dirt roads, he parked and got out to walk, heading in the direction where the houses became more sparse. He came to a small reservoir; the sight of the water seemed relaxing, and he walked along the shore until he found a comfortable place to sit. There was no one there, except for some boys fishing a hundred meters awa
y, on the opposite shore. He took a joint from his pocket and lit it. For a while he concentrated on the boys’ progress. One was casting a lure and the other was fishing with a hook and bobber, more toward the deep part. He was using a line wrapped around an empty peach can. They were having luck: the boy with the lure kept pulling out fish, and the other’s bobber was leaping. Every once in a while the boy reeled in the empty hook to put on more bait. He always cast to the same spot, and it was very likely that at any moment he would hook something. After a while, and half of the joint, landscape and thoughts faded pleasantly away and he entered a soft contemplative stupor that was broken by the sound of his cell phone. They were calling from the hospital, to let him know his mother had died. He told them he was on his way. He hung up the phone and lit the joint again.
“Could we share, sir?”
It was the boys who had been fishing on the opposite shore; at some point they had gathered their things and come over. They must have been twelve or thirteen years old. Danielito took a hit and handed the joint to the bigger one, the boy smoked and handed it to his companion.
“What’d you catch?”
The boys had a plastic bucket without water, with some thirty dead bluegill stuck to the bottom and sides, and a fairly large catfish that was still breathing, but in its death throes. Its gills opened slowly and then would shut all at once.
“That’s torture, poor thing. Give it some water.”
“It’s going to die anyway,” answered the bigger boy. He was right. Plus, the fish was dying from lack of oxygen, without suffering. The smaller boy took another hit and handed the joint to the other; the bigger boy puffed again and passed it to Danielito. Danielito took one more hit and gave them what was left. The boys thanked him.
* * *
Towards nighttime, he was in the yard of his house with Duarte. Duarte had finished salting some ribs and was cleaning the grease from the barbeque, it had been melted by a fire that was almost ready. He was using a portable light, 120 watts, around which some dozen insects (including a pair of large water cockroaches) were flying in irregular orbits. His eyes were very red from the weed and from looking at the fire up close. Duarte went to the kitchen and brought out a tray with beer and two glasses, a piece of cheese, half a salami, and bread. He cut the cheese into pieces and sliced the salami at forty-five degrees. He assembled a small sandwich and handed it to Danielito.
“And what will you do with the ashes.”
In the afternoon, Danielito had seen to the formalities, first at the hospital and then at the funeral parlor, fixing it so that they would take care of everything. They had agreed he would pick up the ashes from the cemetery the next day, after two in the afternoon, and the truth is he hadn’t thought more about the subject.
“I’m going to leave them at her house.”
“Very good. I was afraid you’d want to bring them to your house.”
A powerful shudder went through Danielito’s body. Duarte saw him shake and he smiled. He grabbed the rack of meat, a couple of chorizos, and a large blood sausage and arranged them on the grill. Then he wiped his hands with a rag.
“Man, and she didn’t leave anything?”
“What do you mean anything.”
“I don’t know, a note, something like that.”
“No, nothing.”
“What a noxious woman. With all due respect, it strikes me as a positive thing for you that she’s dead.”
“She didn’t care too much for you, either. She said my father was good, before.”
“Before what.”
“Before meeting you.”
“I knew your father since we were at Petty Officers School together, that’s crazy talk. She met him, I don’t know, almost fifteen years later. What is she, psychic. What does she know about how he was before.”
“She says you ruined him because he did all the things that made him bad with you.”
Duarte laughed.
“Sure, that’s it, your poor dad, who was a saint before he met me. Because she was a real positive influence. You know, I was imagining that one day you would go see her in the ICU and you’d find her standing up and choking the artificial respirator. Strangling it, like, with her hands.”
They laughed tepidly. Duarte uncapped the beer with the thick side of the grill knife and poured two glasses. He handed one to Danielito and they clinked glasses in a silent toast. An enormous water cockroach landed close to the grill. It hit hard against the ground and lay with its legs up. It levered itself against the cement with its pinchers and legs and righted itself. It walked awkwardly, coming closer to Duarte’s feet. He looked at it with interest, the insect was over eight centimeters long and could have weighed more than thirty grams.
“These bugs look prehistoric.”
He stomped the insect with one foot, but he was wearing sandals with soft rubber soles that couldn’t quite break the Jurassic chitin plates. A bit battered, the water cockroach walked off.
“Sure, look, I didn’t hurt it at all. You know, in Fontana, in Formosa, your dad and I saw giant water bugs, bigger than this one, this big,” he said, separating the thumb and index finger of his left paw to indicate a length of twelve or thirteen centimeters. “Once we were taking a siesta on the mountain, at the edge of the river, and we saw one that was eating a bluegill. A small bluegill, right? But still, it was impressive. That night I even dreamed a water roach was eating my hand. The thing is, up there it’s almost tropical.”
“My dad told me that on the mountain there were spiders that ate birds.”
“I never saw that, but I heard about it somewhere. In Central America there are spiders that eat rats, so it could be. What your dad and I did see was a huge boa constrictor, I don’t know, like ten meters long it must’ve been. It had eaten a piglet.”
“And how did you know.”
“Know what.”
“What it had eaten.”
“Because we opened it up. I’ve got photos.”
The water cockroach had walked half a meter away. Duarte grabbed the iron poker and went over to it. He immobilized it by stepping on the back part of its body with his sandal and put the end of the poker at the back of its head. He pushed down hard until the insect’s body became a kind of angle with the vertex at the poker tip: the side with the head very short and the other disproportionately long. He withdrew the poker, and the body kept that shape, still moving its legs as if waving to something that was a few meters beneath it. Or at least that’s how it seemed to Danielito, who was chemically predisposed to strange interpretations at the moment.
“It’s odd, right?”
“What.”
“That there are water roaches this time of year. And it’s hot, too. It should be getting cooler, even if only a little.”
Chapter 32
In the yard, standing naked next to the pile of mandarin peels, Cetarti was looking at the sky. He was thinking that it shouldn’t be so hot at this time of year, that it should be starting to get cooler. This sudden perception of the passage of time was somewhat related to the realization that he had very little marijuana left (at the rate he was going, enough for less than ten days), but also to a strange sense of disquiet that had started to invade him in the morning: he had woken up anxious and stood in front of the mountain of objects and stayed there looking at them for a long time, as if taken together they formed a coded message that could suddenly take on meaning before his eyes, in recognition of his effort. Now, past three in the morning, he was looking at the sky in almost the same way, and he was thinking about his brother. He could picture the two ends of his life quite clearly: the photo of the two of them standing in the plaza and the police photos of his corpse. Between those extremes there was a cloudy existence to which Cetarti had gotten closer in those days: he could imagine his brother pedaling slowly on the bicycle, rummaging through trash containers and bags at night. Or walking through the narrow passages between the piles of garbage in his house, adding or removing things
. Looking at the axolotl in the tank, or the dead insects in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. Or throwing bricks at the dogs. All these images appeared in Cetarti’s mind with the mysterious blurriness of those photographs of Big Foot, always taken from far away, that tend to show a hairy creature with his back turned as he heads off into a forest.
* * *
He spent the whole next day making fruitless phone calls and walking around neighborhoods (Bella Vista, Cardenal Aramburu, Villa Páez), trying to buy weed without luck. He collected different reasons for the shortage: there was a flood in Paraguay, or a drought, the police were out in force, people were holding but not selling in order to raise the price. Everyone agreed that there was nothing, and that they didn’t know when there would be, but it certainly wouldn’t be tomorrow or the next day. At five thirty in the afternoon, with the sun setting as he came out of an alley of Villa Libertador, he decided it wasn’t worth continuing. He went back to the center of town in a collective taxi, and from there on foot to the Hugo Wast neighborhood. A few blocks before reaching it, he saw a secondhand store, and he went in to inquire: he described more or less the things he had in his house. They asked him if he would bring them in. He said no, it was a lot and he didn’t have any way to transport it all. They agreed to come by the next day to take a look.
* * *
When he reached his house he felt a huge relief after removing his shoes; his hands and feet were swollen. He showered with cold water and stretched out to watch TV: first he spent a while watching a documentary about the giant scorpions of the Silurian Period, but then he started changing channels, not because he was bored but rather because he was thinking of something else and couldn’t concentrate on anything. And that “something else” was not easy to identify. After a significant amount of time had passed, he got up and sprinkled some food into the axolotl’s tank. He rolled a joint and sat down in the yard to count his money and make some calculations. It had already gotten dark. He had 14,700 pesos and change. He bound the money with rubber bands. He missed his car. At that moment, he would have liked to get on the highway with no specific plan. Cruise along the national highway system smoking the marijuana he had left, only stopping in service stations to fill up on gas, shower, and eat. He had a pleasant memory of the insects smashing against the windshield seconds after being illuminated by the car’s headlights. Sleep on the side of the road. Go with the flow. Smash into something on the road, in the final hours of an afternoon. He went back into the kitchen, turned off the TV, and sat in the dark, lighting the fish tank with the portable lamp and looking at the axolotl. After a while he opted for a middle option, and he looked at the time: 10:20 at night. He searched among his papers for Duarte’s number, put on his shoes, and went out onto the avenue to look for a phone booth.
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