* * *
“You did good,” Duarte told him hours later, in the darkness of the truck’s cabin, with his face barely lit by the shine from the dashboard lights. If you had buried them or kept the ashes, they’d be there forever. It’s very healthy, seems to me. They’re gone, they’re not here anymore.”
“I didn’t burn the dogs,” said Danielito. “I just buried them.”
“Well, but they’re dogs, what do they matter to you. They weren’t even yours.”
Duarte was right, the dogs didn’t matter. The remains of his family were now circulating through the depths of the Lapachito sewers.
“Where does the sewer water end up?”
“No idea,” said Duarte. Danielito had once seen a documentary on the water recycling process in sewer systems, and he shuddered to think that they did the same thing in Lapachito, and someday he might end up drinking a glass of water with traces of ash. He had to stop drinking tap water, at least for a while. It was twelve at night, and they had long since left Chaco behind and entered Santiago del Estero. They had driven a long time through Quimilí, and there were many kilometers to go before Suncho Corral. They drove on side roads that were much less travelled.
“And how are you.”
“Fine,” said Danielito.
Duarte sat for a moment in silence and then spoke again.
“You know what you need to do now? Take a vacation. Lord knows you’ve got the money, you bastard, you don’t spend a dime. Plus you’re going to get a nice cut now, with that money alone you’ve got more than enough. Go to, I don’t know, Mar del Plata. Why Mar del Plata. Get yourself to Brazil. Set yourself up for a month in some swanky hotel, eating pineapple on the beach, girls sucking on your cock…”
Danielito liked the idea of eating pineapple; he imagined the fresh, sweet juice flowing over his teeth as he bit into the yellow pulp. The rest of the things, it was like Duarte was reading him the headlines of a newspaper from another planet.
“Seriously, kid, life isn’t just staying shut up all day watching TV. A change of air’ll do you good, especially now.”
Danielito made a vague gesture as if to answer, but he didn’t say anything. Duarte put a Jorge Corona cassette in the stereo, and for forty-five minutes they listened to jokes about gauchos who fucked their pigs and Mexicans who shouted “Long live menstruation!” and others along those lines. They stopped at a service station past Brea Pozo; Duarte got out to fill up on diesel, and he gave fifty pesos to Danielito so he could buy sandwiches and sodas at the bar.
“In half an hour we’ll be in the salt desert and there won’t be anything. Buy a couple bottles of mineral water too, just in case.”
While he was waiting to pay, he saw Duarte get into the back of the ambulance, surely to make sure everything was all right. A few kilometers into the salt desert, Duarte turned on the National Radio and told Danielito to roll one. There was a full moon; the light reflected off the salt surface and there was perfect visibility, so Duarte turned off the truck’s headlights. They smoked without talking, listening to provincial news programs set to folk music from different regions as they watched the desert landscape go by, lit up as though with a black light.
* * *
They reached Córdoba at a quarter to ten in the morning. Duarte drove, avoiding the main exits, until he reached a very depressing neighborhood. He parked outside of a ruined house; it had an abandoned garden in front, a scrubland of dried plants. He told Danielito to wait a bit. He got out, crossed the scrub to reach the door, and knocked.
Chapter 36
Cetarti closed the garage door and locked it from inside. The guy who was driving, a massive man who was a little taller than Duarte, turned off the motor and got out of the ambulance. He was more or less the same age as Cetarti; he was wearing overalls and had an army or police-style haircut. Duarte introduced them as “Danielito, Javier.” There were a few seconds of slightly uncomfortable silence, which Duarte broke by saying that he had to go and buy some things and that he couldn’t go with the ambulance loaded up. He asked the other man for help, and between the two of them they unloaded a cot with collapsible wheels, on which there was a woman in an apparent state of unconsciousness. Duarte had explained to Cetarti that the woman had Alzheimer’s and she could hurt herself, that was why she was tied up and sedated. They set her up in the room furthest from the street. From the ambulance, the giant unloaded an oxygen tank, which they connected to a mask they put over the woman’s face, and a big bag that he left next to the cot. Duarte said that was all, they should leave her in peace, and when he came back he would tend to her. They left the room and closed the door. Duarte asked Cetarti if by chance he had the key to the room. Cetarti didn’t know. He went to look for the ring of keys and they tried them until they found one that fit; they separated it after locking the door. Duarte said he was going to bring back breakfast, if anyone wanted anything in particular. Cetarti said no, nothing for him. The other man asked for café con leche and pastries with membrillo. He had gotten a small bag out of the ambulance and was standing in the middle of the empty living room, clearly uncomfortable. Cetarti offered them the bathroom, explaining that there were no clean towels and the water was cold. Both of them said that was no problem.
“You go ahead, Daniel, I’ll shower when I get back.”
After directing the other man to the bathroom, Cetarti went with Duarte to open the garage door again. Before getting in, Duarte looked under the front seat of the truck and took out some money and a package wrapped in plastic bags that had been folded over on themselves. He handed the bag to Cetarti, who unwrapped the package and found a brick of marijuana the size of two bars of laundry soap.
“It’s almost half a kilo. Is that all right?”
Cetarti told him yes, it was more than all right.
“On the street this’ll get you around seven hundred bucks. And here,” he handed him the money “is twenty-three hundred. The rest I’ll give you there; you’re going to have to come with us. Then we’ll drop you off at the terminal.”
* * *
After closing the garage door, Cetarti rolled a fat one to sample, and he stored the brick and the money in one of the bags with his clothes. He took out his brother’s mattress, so the other two could have a place to sit, and he stretched out on his own to smoke and watch TV. Duarte’s big friend came into the kitchen. His hair was wet, he had changed clothes, and he was holding the bag in his hand and a big towel in the other. He asked if there was someplace to hang up the towel. Cetarti showed him how to get out to the yard and told him there was a line and clothespins out there. He left the TV on the Discovery Channel—a special on the lost tomb of Jesus Christ, which he had seen part of before, was just starting. The other man came back in and stopped beside the counter, to look at the fish tank with the axolotl; he kneeled down to get a good look. Then he stood there, following what was on the TV. Cetarti indicated the other end of the mattress and told him to have a seat. The other said no, he was fine. Cetarti offered him a smoke, and he accepted with a gesture. They watched TV in silence for over an hour. The idea of the documentary was to try to establish whether a family tomb that had been discovered close to Jerusalem in 1980—during an excavation, with dynamite—was Jesus’s tomb. Most of the images were of bearded archaeologists looking at stone ossuaries and deciphering the names, among them Yoshua bar Yosef (Jesus son of Joseph), Mary Magdalene, and others, in “inscriptions” that looked to Cetarti like random scratches in the rock. The weed was excellent. After a while Duarte returned with several grocery bags, filled with a dozen membrillo pastries and a thermos full of café con leche, among other things. Just as he had said he wouldn’t, Cetarti didn’t eat anything. The other two finished off the pastries and the entire thermos of coffee. To eat, Duarte sat down on the unoccupied end of the mattress, and the big guy ate standing up, half interested in the documentary and half reading the article about giant squids on the wall. When the documentary finished (ultimately poi
ntless, the famous “tomb of Christ” could belong to any family, those names could be found in twenty percent of the family tombs from the period), Cetarti switched over to the local news. Duarte washed his hands in the kitchen sink and picked up one of the bags he had brought. He said he was going to clean the woman and feed her. The big man asked Duarte if he could go out for a while. Duarte said yes and asked Cetarti to tell him where he could get a taxi to go downtown.
* * *
While Duarte was cleaning the woman, Cetarti turned up the volume on the TV, so he wouldn’t have to be exposed to the images brought to his mind by the watery sounds coming from the bathroom. For a while he watched a movie on the Catholic channel, the story of an Italian priest who had stigmas and made apocalyptic prophesies: balls of fire would fall onto the earth, hunger and plagues, etc. Then Duarte came in and sat down on the mattress. He had showered and smelled of deodorant. Out of courtesy, Cetarti changed channels and left it on a documentary about planes on the History Channel. The other man recognized it immediately; he must have seen it already.
“Oh, this is good,” he said, “the destroyers of the Ruhr dams. Terrible sons of bitches, they drowned a lot of people that night, flooded entire towns. I put together an Avro Lancaster. 1:72 scale.” He separated his hands some thirty-five centimeters to indicate the dimension of the model. “You saw it at my house, I showed it to you.”
Cetarti told him he didn’t remember. He asked if Duarte had finished the B-36. Duarte said yes, that it had turned out very well.
“I painted it with the colors of the Alaskan bases, red on the ends of the wings and tail, so they could be found in the snow if they crashed.”
He took a joint from his pocket, lit it a couple of times, and offered it to Cetarti.
“It’s impressive how this place changed without all the garbage. It seems bigger. What did you do with all that stuff?”
“Some things I threw out, others I sold. I forgot, I saved something for you.”
He got up and brought the bag with the videos.
“This was in with all the stuff. I was going to sell them, but when I found out you were coming, I saved them for you.”
Duarte looked over the titles.
“Hmm, almost all Vivid and Private, the things I like the least. But thanks, we’ll give them a look-see in case there’s something good.”
After taking a couple more drags, Cetarti was flying especially high. Duarte went on talking to him. Cetarti listened as though the voice was coming to him from somewhere very far away. Every once in a while he even heard himself respond. At some point, Duarte disappeared from his visual field and then came back in after a while with something in his hand, showing him and asking a question. Cetarti looked at what the other man had in his hand: it was the giant beetle from the collection of dead insects.
“That was my brother’s,” he said, and with some effort, he explained about the electrified wall at the back. Duarte asked to see it. They went out to the yard and Cetarti led him to the barbecue. He was glad to get outside—a little wind was blowing, and it cleared his head a bit. Duarte studied the pile of dead animals and picked up a stick, with the apparent intention of stirring about in the pile of little bodies.
“Don’t touch them, when I went to clean them up the wall gave me a shock that almost killed me.”
Duarte threw the stick to the ground. He said it all seemed a little sinister. Cetarti answered that it was.
“It’s funny, seeing one of those beetles here. Over in Lapachito now, there are some that are this big, they’re poisonous.”
“Yeah,” said Cetarti, “I saw one at the service station on the highway, on the way out of Lapachito. But I wonder, as far as I know there aren’t any poisonous beetles.”
“These are poisonous. They kill animals and eat them. One of them killed a dog of mine. A little dog I used to have. It bit him on the foot, and first it rotted all around the wound, then the whole foot, then his hindquarters, and by night he was dead and giving off a horrible smell.”
“Yeah, at the station they told me about a man who lost two fingers in a matter of hours. And how did you know it was the beetle.”
“Because when I found him dead in the yard, the thing was eating him. It had started in the place that was most rotten.”
“But it could have died from something else, then.”
“No, it was the beetle. I picked it up and put it in a jar, and later Danielito and I conducted an experiment. We put it in an old fish tank and threw a rat in with it. And it was the same. It even took a while, because the rat would always stay on the opposite end of the fish tank, and these things move slowly. But then at some point it caught the rat and bit it. And the rat, same as the dog. It rotted immediately. The beetle hunkered down in a corner of the fish tank and waited, as if it was dead too. And when the rat finished dying, it was like the thing woke up, and it ate it completely. It took a day and a half to eat it, it didn’t stop. It picked those little bones clean.”
Cetarti imagined Duarte’s and Danielito’s faces observing the scene through the glass of the fish tank.
“It made me feel like I was watching something prehistoric.”
“And then what did you do with the beetle.”
“We stomped on it and killed it, of course. It was scary. Good thing they move slowly.”
“So maybe it isn’t poison, but something like bacteria. The Komodo dragon hunts like that. It has saliva that’s full of bacteria, it bites an animal and then follows it around, waiting for sepsis to set in.”
“Could be.”
They went back inside. There was banging on the door from inside the room where they had put the old woman. The handle was moving too, but the door was locked. Duarte opened the door. The woman said she wanted to go to the bathroom. She was wearing a pink jogging suit and had evidently vomited all over herself. Her chin, the front of the sweatshirt, and part of the pants were all spotted with vomit.
“Oh, sweetie pie,” said Duarte, “you gave us back your whole breakfast.”
Chapter 37
The house was pretty depressing, empty, the walls peeling. It was clean, smelled of weed and floor disinfectant. The owner of the house was a guy who slept in the kitchen, with almost no furniture besides a mattress, a TV, and a couple of bags with clothes. He was a little under forty, and he didn’t seem to be doing too well. With dark-ringed eyes and a wayward gaze, he helped them get set up in one of the empty bedrooms. On the kitchen counter there was a fish tank with an axolotl, and Danielito entertained himself for a while watching the animal’s minute movements. Next to the fish tank there was some kind of drawer from a wardrobe or narrow dresser with piles of dried insect bodies, including a big beetle like the ones in Lapachito. Duarte saw what he was looking at and made a face at him, arching his eyebrows and biting his lower lip.
While Duarte went shopping, Danielito smoked with the owner of the house while they watched a documentary about a supposed tomb of Christ that had been found under the garden of some condominiums in the suburbs of Jerusalem. A long time later, Duarte returned with pastries and café con leche. While they ate breakfast, he watched the documentary and distracted himself by looking at the things that were hanging on one of the kitchen walls: a little picture with an elephant and some pages from Muy Interesante, stuck on with tape on the back, with the news of a Spanish expedition that was going out to try to film a live giant squid.
* * *
After eating, Duarte announced that he was going to wash the woman. Danielito asked him if he could go out for a while.
* * *
He walked the way they’d told him to get to the big avenue, and after waiting a while he got a taxi and asked the driver to take him downtown. Compared to Lapachito, Córdoba was a very big city, and Danielito wandered around the center for a couple of hours, walking along pedestrian streets and looking at the stores and shop windows. In one shopping center he discovered that there were several cinemas (there wasn’t even
one in Lapachito), and he checked the schedules. Past noon he went into the first showing of a horror movie that turned out to be fairly boring, but he enjoyed the darkness, the air conditioning, the clean smell and the comfort—basically, the feeling of not being anywhere at all. When he came out of the theater it was three in the afternoon. He ate lunch at a McDonald’s, reading the local newspaper. Under the comic strips there was a series of advertisements for travel agencies with sales during the low season. Búzios, Recife, Salvador, Angra Dos Reis. The photos showed vegetal exuberance, beaches, and hotels with shiny floors and tables laden with fruit. He looked at the prices and made some calculations; Duarte was right: even with just the money he was going to get now, he could spend six or seven months in Brazil, stay in a good hotel with cable TV in the room. He put off his return to the house as long as possible, and he managed to stretch the time out until six in the evening. When he got back, Duarte and the owner of the house were sitting, one on each mattress, and watching TV. Their eyes were very red. Duarte asked him how it had gone, Danielito told him it had gone well, but that he was dead and was going to sleep for a while. He went to the back of the ambulance, put down a mattress pad over the place where the cot had been, and stretched out to sleep. He had a fairly stupid dream: he was reading the pages of Muy Interesante that were stuck to the kitchen wall. He read them several times. Then he told the owner of the house, who was sitting against the wall: “The Japanese found one, they cut off its arm.”
Under This Terrible Sun Page 11