I see Ana first, and in the seconds before she sees me her face looks older than it is, the story of her own past printed deep in the lines around her mouth and between her eyes, but then she sees me and the smile takes over. An obvious reality dawns on me for the first time: she doesn’t know my real name is Pippa. I was vague about leaving Argentina and she was sensitive and respectful, understanding that part of my story was to do with the death of my sister, but not knowing that I had somehow tried to become her, to bring her back to me by living in her name. I will explain, I think, blinking stupidly, and then we are hugging and emotion is spilling out in choked half- sentences with no superficial meaning, which only accentuates the joy of seeing each other again. She marches us swiftly out of the airport, and within minutes we are driving through the familiar sprawl of concrete into the heart of Buenos Aires.
‘So, the one you were never going to have a relationship with has persuaded you to come back!’ she says, her eyes fixed ahead and her laughter playing in the words.
‘It’s not exactly like that,’ I flounder.
‘Well, you two do like to be the centre of speculation. What a lot of mystery! Ignacio wouldn’t tell us anything. Even Daniel couldn’t get him to speak, but it’s not as if we were trying to get him to give away secrets about a patient, for God’s sake. He just said that it was something vital, something that you would find out for yourself and that you needed to find out for yourself. Sounds to me like a psychotherapist’s way of justifying a wedding proposal!’
‘We’re not getting back together again, you know.’ I feel totally out of my depth all of a sudden, unable to fall back into the easy fictions that Jenny could draw on, uncertain how to respond to this woman who knows so little about me.
‘Hey,’ she fills the pause, looking at me sideways for a split second. ‘Relax. You are to stay at our place tonight and then you will meet up with Ignacio tomorrow!’
Does she know more than she is letting on, I wonder? What is this all about? What do I want it to be about?
‘Ana, I’m sorry I left in such a hurry. I just felt so powerless and empty after that trip to Iguazu, as if my sister’s death was truly real for the very first time.’ The words come out unbidden and I am surprised, but Ana’s response surprises me more.
‘Don’t be sorry, these are things that have to happen. Six months after my sister disappeared, I woke up one morning and hated Silvina. It just happened. It made no sense. Poor Silvina, she had done nothing wrong, but there it was: I suddenly couldn’t bear the sight of her little face. I hated myself for it and the more I hated myself, the more I hated the eyes that reminded me of her mother. The nightmares got worse, the nightmares about what had happened to my sister. I tried not to learn about it, I tried to hide. It should have been easy, everyone was trying to pretend that nothing had happened, people still pretend they know nothing about it, but people did know. People cowered behind locked doors and pretended not to know; pretended not to hear when a vehicle pulled up next door in the dead of night and a band of men beat the door down; pretended not to hear the screams which would subside suddenly, smothered into forgetfulness.’
There is a pause as she brakes suddenly, too close to the vehicle in front. Then she is talking again, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘That was when I first met Ignacio. He had just qualified and he got me!’ Her laughter is hollow and I realise, through the shock of her words, just how much a mask it is.
‘He helped me understand that it was not Silvina I hated, it was the universe and, when it all got overwhelming, Silvina was just too close to what had happened, Silvina was the living shadow of a life that I had to assume had been cruelly taken away. They used to cut the women with scissors, you know. At first I just focused on Silvina and protecting her from the loss of her mother. At first I thought we would find my sister. How can someone just disappear? There was no record anywhere of her death, and we believed she was alive somewhere. We believed we would find her. And then one day I woke up and knew we never would – and that was the day that I thought I hated Silvina.’
There is a long pause now and words swim inside me, wanting to go and meet her pain, but none are adequate.
‘Oh Ana,’ I start, but she interrupts.
‘You see, the point is it takes time, and the journey of time has twists and turns that you cannot foresee. I never really hated Silvina, it was just a temporary state of mind, and she became a source of enormous comfort and joy in my life. You’ve already seen that. So don’t be too hard on yourself and don’t expect everything to mean what it seems to mean at first sight.’
‘God, Ana,’ I say, powerless, but she just reaches over, touches my hand quickly, and then smiles and turns off the main road towards Palermo.
‘Lecture over. Now it’s time to concentrate on eating!’
Chapter 71
In the drift of an afternoon that feels timeless and vaguely surreal, after a lazy lunch with cold beer on Ana and Daniel’s roof terrace, the girls skipping in and out of our orbit and Ana shushing her husband each time he starts to push too hard with his questions, I do a quick time calculation and decide to call my ‘ex-father’. We have been in irregular email contact since I left, but have not actually spoken to each other. I have his home number and, uncertainly, I prepare to call. He has never told me not to ring him there and yet I know it is a risk. I don’t know how he will react. I decide that if anyone else answers I will hang up, but it is him and through his surprise I hear pleasure in his voice. He answers my questions and then I stumble through an attempt to explain where I am to the Greek man on the other end of the line. I don’t tell him of the mystery. I tell him only that Argentina is not yet a closed chapter and the lion is happy enough with that. Thank you.
I send Nick a text and then lie back on the soft, white cushions of my guest room bed, determined to process what I am feeling, preparing to order the butterflies, languid now, into neat little rows. But I do no conscious filing as sleep overtakes me, the unanchored sleep of jet lag after a night flight, that forgiving space where the body simply surrenders.
When I wake up I am confused, a submerged sense of panic rising out of some forgotten dream, wondering in that first split second of wakefulness where I am and what time it is, consciously taking in the superficial details of the room and the clock and yet still feeling vaguely dazed. There is a quiet knock at the door and Ana comes in with the bitter tea they call maté to ease me back into the world.
‘You have slept for four hours,’ she tells me. ‘I think that is enough!’
‘I admire you, Ana,’ I say, rubbing my eyes and continuing before I wake up enough to stop speaking my mind. ‘You’ve done something so amazing, bringing up Silvina as your daughter, dealing with the trauma you went through, you seem so . . .’ I hesitate, already starting to feel too awake for this conversation, ‘so normal!’
She laughs then. ‘After everything I told you this morning – normal! You are a funny one, Jenny!’
‘My name isn’t Jenny, though. I lied to you, Jenny was my sister. Pippa is my real name.’
‘What did I tell you this morning?’ She is smiling very gently now, ever maternal. ‘Don’t expect everything to be what you think it is at first sight. There are lots of twists and turns on this journey called life and they normally spring out of nowhere.’ She does not probe or blame or even try to understand, and I am grateful for the simplicity of her acceptance.
She is thoughtful suddenly. ‘Does Ignacio know your real name?’
I blush. I feel red-hot, as if I have just been microwaved from the inside out. I have been so focused on the decision of whether to come or not that I have not even thought through the consequences. I am going to have to explain myself to Ignacio – of all people. I feel cornered. ‘No,’ is all I say, bleakly.
‘I think you are going to have to trust him very deeply to go through with this, you know.’
I bristle slightly. ‘What is “this”? Do you know what this is abo
ut, Ana?’
She pauses long enough to make me think she does, and then undoes the impression. ‘No, honestly, I don’t, but I know Ignacio and he would not ask you to come here lightly, and I know, from my experience of him professionally, that sometimes he can help you get to places you cannot get to on your own.’
I think of my own professional experience of him and it feels as superficial as a postcard. I cannot relate to anything real in it and then I think of his first orgasm and how I still wish I had been able to save it, to turn it into something real – and shared.
She breaks into my thoughts and says, gently again, ‘He is here, you know.’
‘What?’ I am completely in the present now, and angry. He’s changing the rules. He’s not allowed to change the rules. Why did he make them if he was just going to change them all over again?
‘Look,’ Ana reads the anger, ‘he’s not going to stay, he said he just thought it might be a bit less loaded if you at least made contact, and. . . and he said he couldn’t wait until tomorrow.’
I feel like crying and I don’t know why, and I am also embarrassed by the raw response that Ana has just seen. ‘I’m not ready.’
‘Look,’ she decides to take me literally, ‘I will tell him to go and wait in the bar on the corner and you can go and join him for a drink and then come back to us – with or without him – for supper. OK? You can do this.’
No one has spoken to me like that since my big twin sister died. I pull myself together, on one level still in awe of Ana. ‘OK, tell him twenty minutes.’
As Ana leaves I search my reflection in the mirror for guidance, but all I see is a face drenched in afternoon sleep that looks a little lost.
Chapter 72
There are echoes in my head as I step carefully into view of the pavement café. The meeting with my father who wasn’t my father, the first time I met Ignacio unprofessionally, both times I had tried to be the one there first, coolly waiting, not wanting to be watched, not wanting to worry that I might forget how to walk. I have another surge of feeling cornered, as if I have been lured here. It is a disconcertingly familiar echo of the first time we met at the restaurant and yet, I remind myself, coach myself, this is me now, not Jenny. I can let her anger go.
When I see Ignacio his eyes drop momentarily, giving me space. Then he is standing and fidgeting, and I feel bizarrely comforted. I manage to greet him in a voice that does not falter and I feel the soft brush of him as we kiss each other on the cheek. With a jolt of familiarity I take in his smell, a particular brand of aftershave, mixed with something else that is always there. I wonder obscurely if I smell the same as I did when I was Jenny.
‘Have a seat, Jenny. What would you like to drink?’
We have not even bothered with hellos and how are yous.
‘I’ll join you,’ I say, pointing at the open bottle of Rincón Famoso.
‘It’s a bit difficult to know where to start,’ he says slowly. ‘It is nice to see you again, though.’
Well, we could start with why you brought me all the way here. Or you could stop playing games and tell me whether it’s the doctor or the ex-lover who’s sitting opposite me. But I say nothing, and a small, withered part of me doesn’t care if this looks like a challenge.
‘Have you given up smoking?’ he asks, pouring me a glass of red wine.
‘I’ve never really smoked, actually. I hate smoking.’ I can feel the intensity of our momentary eye contact as the words jar with what he knows about me.
‘Ignacio – or should I still call you Doctor?’ I put the irony out there on the table between us, trying not to turn it into a genuine question. ‘There is something I need to tell you before we go any further.’ I dry up.
‘Really?’ He looks perplexed, awkward, and the observer in me realises that he must have thought he was the one holding all the cards.
‘I lied to you about my name.’
There is the flicker of a smile on his face that I cannot fathom.
‘It was Jenny who died. I am the other sister, Pippa.’ And suddenly, viciously, I have an urge to light up a cigarette for the first time since I left Argentina. ‘You’re the psychotherapist, you tell me why.’ And I cannot hold back the note of sourness, and then I feel my eyes welling up, and I want to run away and hide. ‘It just felt like the right thing to do. Maybe I thought it would bring her closer to me, but the whole thing was all a farce, wasn’t it?’
His hand reaches out towards me, and then changes course and picks up the wine bottle. He speaks away from me, looking at the wine he is pouring. ‘I don’t think the whole thing was a farce, no.’
I want to read his eyes, but he keeps them from me and I no longer have Jenny’s brazenness to search them out.
He seems unsure of himself, his professional confidence missing. ‘Do you remember a conversation we had once about compartmentalising different parts of our lives?’ I nod. ‘Well, you asked just now if you should call me Ignacio or Doctor –’
‘I was only joking.’ I try to soften the crust that is forming between us.
‘No, but you are right in a way. There is an overlap here for me, because it is both the man and the professional who wanted you back. Don’t worry, I’m not setting out an agenda here –’
‘But you are. This is all your agenda. When are you going to tell me what this is all about?’ In my own ears I sound like a street cat with no fight.
‘I’m not.’
His words bring me up sharp and I laugh then. ‘Is this revenge, Doctor Ignacio?’
‘No, not revenge. No, definitely not.’
‘He who protesteth most –’
‘No, trust me, it’s not.’
He doesn’t look away when he says this. I want to disappear inside his eyes – I had forgotten the deep, deep green behind the brown – but then I feel Pippa’s blush, and it is me who blinks and reaches for the wine again.
‘OK, we have a conundrum here and we’re going to have to decide how to deal with it.’ He has moved into his professional voice, and with it I sense the pupils of his eyes distancing themselves, shrivelling into safety. ‘Rules are an anathema to you, I know that already, but we do need to agree some boundaries. You have proved you trust me by being here and I am going to ask you – I know part of you will hate me for this – but I am going to ask you to take that trust one step further. We are going back to Iguazu, Jenny – sorry, I mean Pippa. Don’t worry, we’re not actually staying there, but do you remember what you said to me at the beginning of the journey we made there last time? No questions, I would find out in good time, you said. Well, that is what I’m going to do with you now. And no, this is not about revenge, this is about you, not me. Well, mostly, anyway.’ He smiles with a question mark in his eyes, and reaches for my hands across the table. I feel the shock of physical contact with him. His grip is strong and professional, but all I feel is confusion.
‘OK,’ I say, a sense of resolution slowly masking the turmoil beneath. ‘I have come this far. I might as well go a bit further on your terms.’ I pause, and he drops my hands. ‘Let’s talk about something else for a bit, shall we?’ I say, trying to smile.
We try. We skate around what Ignacio has done in the months since I last saw him and he is animated when he speaks of an international conference he was asked to speak at in Buenos Aires, but fails to give any real insight into his personal world outside work. We skim over the surface of the sea in Greece and I fail to tell him about the meeting with my father, until finally he breaks through into the murky water below.
‘Do you want me to come back for supper at Ana’s or shall we call it a day for today?’
Yes . . . No . . . Yes . . . I don’t know. ‘Let’s meet again tomorrow.’
I want the white cushions of Ana’s guest room. I want to be swallowed up in white cushions like cotton wool clouds.
Chapter 73
The last time we took this flight my mind was a dictionary of synonyms for emptiness, as Ignacio sat be
side me, the quiet witness to a drama he knew nothing about. He sits beside me now, quiet again, and yet this time I am following him. This time my mind is like a junk shop, crammed with incoherent pieces of history that just happen to have landed in the same place. Is there anything of value, I wonder, lurking beneath the dust? Perhaps Ignacio will know how to find it. Maybe Jenny will come back. She is still silent; slowly, deliberately, endlessly turning herself into a memory, like the waters that run and run into the Devil’s Throat of Iguazu Falls. I remember the vicious beauty of the Falls, and a part of me is sorry that we are not stopping there. We will see them from the air and then we will land, get in a car and drive somewhere.
It is only once we are on the road that Ignacio points to a place on a map. He has been difficult to read, knowing better than to make idle conversation with me, comfortable in our silence, sensitive to my confusion and yet earnest through it all. There must be a burden of responsibility there, I think.
‘Hey, Ignacio, relax. I forgive you,’ I say teasingly as our road begins its path into the jungle.
‘Promise?’ He smiles.
‘I don’t do promises.’ I try to laugh. I sound like Nick – or Jenny.
‘Do you want to know where we’re going to spend tonight?’
I want to be Jenny again, I want to tease him and ask brazenly if we will be in the same bed, but I am too afraid to go there, shy of what his answer might be.
‘Tell me,’ I say simply.
He pulls over and opens a map across the steering wheel and I lean into where he is pointing and see a name in print: Eldorado. It means nothing to me apart from connotations of a mythical city and, quite literally in Spanish, the dorado fish. I look quizzically at Ignacio.
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