Land of Smoke

by Sara Gallardo

  He had never insured his life. He didn’t think it fair for his sister and brother-in-law to benefit from his death. But if a clause about a similar situation did exist, when he returned, he would…

  Return!

  Would he return?

  He covered his ears with his hands and yelled for a long time.

  To calm himself he made a plan of action. First of all, he would have to fish through the window. Then, he would write down his story. Good, but he lacked white paper. He looked around the house. Brown paper lined the cupboard drawers and shelves. That was something. With tiny handwriting… After all, all this might end one day… No. Illusions do harm.

  He sat down to write. He wrote the date. ‘An impeccable employee, Category J4, in the General Direction of Automotive Personnel and Statistics at the Ministry of Internal Revenue between the years 1928 and 1962, with only two absences for family grief in all my years of service, I retired on 24 March of…’

  A voice spoke hoarsely behind his back.

  His pencil fell onto the paper. A stiffness immobilised him from the back of his neck to his heels.

  He heard it again, panting, a splash. It said, ‘My refuge…’

  He forced himself to turn around. Clinging to the brick border of the raised part of the garden was a man dripping with water, his face transfigured by hope, his hat squashed. His eyes were fixed on the name of the house, written with cursive letters on a sign on the roof. All of a sudden the pensioner remembered it: My Refuge.

  Standing on his doorstep unmoving, not a sound in his throat, he looked at him.

  The man saw him. His happiness grew. He panted, as if he had arrived swimming. Grabbing hold of the bricks, he hoisted himself up.

  With a crunch of putrefaction, the garden yielded under his weight like a moist biscuit. The brick part went down first, dragging the man along with it. Half the garden followed, tipping vertically as it capsized, disappearing into the vortex.

  The pensioner sat down on his doorstep. He pulled his knees to his chest, pressed his face against his fists. He sobbed. As he himself defined it afterwards, it was a nervous breakdown. Once it was over, he opened his eyes little by little. The garden ended in the middle of what had once been a circle of lawn. Maybe because the brick part was gone, it no longer held water. It emerged sloping towards the house.

  That man… There was no land, no ship, no lifeboat or log in sight. Where had he come from?

  For days and nights, that face transformed by hope, the crunch of the garden as it broke, the disappearance into bubbles remained before his eyes.

  He couldn’t eat, fish or move. He spent his time lying in bed, staring at the roof that mirrored the reflections of the sea.

  And the thirst began. He held it off for a time thanks to the melted ice cubes in the refrigerator. He followed these with the toilet water tank. Later he found himself licking the inside of the refrigerator. Later he found himself licking the toilet bowl.

  Later, like a madman, dry tongue hanging out like a hide, he found himself running in circles, sticking his lips to a humid bar of iron covered in salt, wiping them with horror, trying to drink seawater and vomiting, slashing an arm to suck his own blood.

  Not a single memory or dream or idea in him except that of fresh water to drink. He looked at the clouds like a calf looks at an udder for the morning milking, something set aside for another purpose. What about him? Oh, clouds.

  At last it rained. It was night. He burned with fever on the floor of his bedroom. He heard the drops. He thought he was delirious but he crawled outside.

  It was raining! Crying, laughing, naked, he let himself get soaked, mouth open. Water ran over his ears, filled his eyes. He licked himself; he squeezed his beard into his mouth. He brought out jars, pans, pots, cans, bottles.

  When morning came it was raining, and it carried on raining. The sloping garden let a bittersweet cascade run towards the house, which he didn’t take for granted either. Oh, water. Oh, rain.

  There followed a period during which he tried to write down his experiences. It wasn’t easy, but a kind of serenity filled him as he gave those events form. In the beginning he struggled with the words. No sea, serpent, wind, red crag or thirst had ever appeared in the writings he had read or written in his life.

  That word, life, stopped him. Was he alive?

  Or dead?

  He tried to remember ideas he had heard heard about death. Nothing similar to this. Whereas concerning life… It’s true that some days, for instance when he had caught a beautiful fleshy fish after waiting seven or ten hours, he had felt more alive than he had ever been. And when the rain running into his eyes and mouth ended his long thirst, didn’t that feel different from the glass of mineral water a clerk brought to his office every day at 11.10?

  Yes, but enough. Enough. Alive or dead, he demanded an explanation. He wanted peace. He needed certainty. Silence. Rest.

  The sea in those days was the colour of mustard. He had heard about plankton. He hoped it wasn’t plankton, since many said it’s what whales eat.

  The colour of mustard. A roasted turkey on a white tablecloth. Sauce steaming in the sauceboat. Chestnuts and plums and pine nuts in the filling. Walnuts and almonds in a plate. A cake with a silk ribbon. Cider. It was Christmas. Who, at that table? A woman in a long dress, a girl with braids. In the courtyard the neighbours toasted. He had the right to eat. He reached out his hand, pushing the girl. Something hit his fingers. He had collided against the fibreglass panel that had once sheltered his ant poisons, which had fallen after the great wind.

  So they are hallucinations, he told himself. Let’s write.

  ‘Between the years 1928 and 1962, only two absences for family mourning, that is, in thirty-four years. The first period of mourning was motivated by the passing of my mother, and the second by that of my wife, fifteen months after our marriage, which had been celebrated during the days of leave in 1935 when the building was closed to clear out rats.’

  Looked at attentively, it was the only mistake in his life. A life of order. She… to be honest, he didn’t remember her face. On the other side, committing suicide is an infraction of the marital contract. No one had known, luckily.

  He went outside to clear his mind.

  A line like a streak of tar divided sky from sea on the horizon. It was like the lines that cross accounting books, but with a slight inclination.

  Tripping on everything, he thought about turning on the television. No image. But a voice, perhaps female, interrupted by electrical discharges, said incomprehensible things.

  ‘Land!’ he yelled for the second time on his trip. ‘Land!’

  His own yelp frightened him. He waited, eyes fixed on the line. It managed to turn into a stripe; the inclination began to seem like a mountain range. He didn’t like the mass of material, shiny as lacquer. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  He took a bed sheet and alcohol, went to the roof, and waved a fiery flag until the flames singed his beard. He let it go. A breeze carried it spinning into the sea. He lost his balance and fell in the water. Several tiles fell near him.

  He came up, gasping. He couldn’t swim. He paddled madly towards the house. He remembered the man. ‘My Refuge’, he read between two splashes.

  He managed to get a grip, climb up, stretch himself on the pavement. He allowed no time to rest. On his knees, he looked towards the coast.

  It was moving away.

  It was them moving away. The house. The garden. Himself.

  He roared, hitting the walls, cursed, stamped his feet.

  The coast disappeared.

  Decisions surface in the morning.

  Sitting on a chair in front of the garden, his heart stripped of illusions, he whistled an old tango. He would navigate until the end of time. Without getting upset.

  But the flesh is weak. ‘End of time’ made him think, hopeful, of the bad news of the days previous to his voyage. Each country had its own atomic bomb now. It was therefore possible
the planet would explode. Oh, let it explode!

  But – was he even on the planet? If not, where was he? If so, on which part of it?

  He would not get upset now. He went into the house. He picked up the television. He threw it into the sea.

  For a moment he could make it out, recognisable.

  Big decisions. During his fall in the water he had seen the house from the outside. He should have imagined it, but never thought about it. A heavy moustache of molluscs and algae surrounded it. Little fish and worms stirred underneath. If that kept growing it would end up sinking him. He got his pruning shears but understood the task was impossible. To prune the edges he would have to get in the water. The lower part was beyond reach anyway. And he didn’t dare to step on the garden, in case it detached.

  Very well then. He put the pruning shears away.

  Fishing and biography, he decided.

  Fishing and Navigation, he smiled bitterly. It was the name of a club at Lake Chascomús. He had gone with other bosses in the company to eat silverside fish there in ’52. He didn’t like silverside, he had said. He didn’t like silverside! He was a vegetarian. A vegetarian! The only thing worse would have been to say he didn’t like fishing or navigation.

  So, here we are, for now. He drummed his fingers on the table, as was his habit at the office. Profession: navigator. He smiled, the corners of his mouth pointing down behind the beard. He had got used to running his hands through it, like a patriarch. It was a highly agreeable sensation. He had untangled it, a task difficult to forget, and now combed it every day. Whereas he trimmed the hair on the back of his neck.

  He didn’t smell very good, it has to be said. What smell could surprise in that house where washing was abolished from the first day, where fish entered through the window and jumped on the floor, leaving scales? No smell or colour could come as a surprise now. Nothing could.

  One invigorating exercise for the navigator’s imagination is to mentally paint the abyss below, the depths sheltering mountain ranges; black surroundings, eternal cold. Compared to them, the splashing, the transparency and the light of the surface become pleasant. The precariousness of our suspension is underlined. The disparity of fate becomes obvious when you think of the many bones resting on the sea floor. You begin to meditate on providence, chance, fate.

  When watering his garden, how many times had he enjoyed watching the ants struggling in the currents from his hose? Now he thought of them differently. Supposing for a moment a sea god actually existed, the Neptune of the ancients the boy joked about on television, wouldn’t he get the same pleasure directing men and their boats as he had spinning the insects, occasionally saving some because of their beauty or harmlessness, in a momentary good mood? Harmless or beautiful from whose point of view? The gardener’s. But doubtless there were others.

  Philosophy germinates from loneliness. And from fear.

  Another habit born of solitude is picking one’s nose. He had been prevented from doing it during the years he called normal by the height of the fence, too low to isolate him, and by the fact that his office had been open to anyone with a question. The truly isolated man has all the acts of privacy at his disposal. That is why he elicits mistrust. Since what acts cannot be imagined by fantasy?

  They are always the same. Maybe that employee who had broken the onyx inkwell on his desk, hurling the lid to the ceiling – the mark had stayed there forever – or the one who had sent him to hell, apoplectic, and wanted to crush a stamp on his face – luckily there was a bell – or that man thrown out on the street with four children to take care of – et cetera – well, maybe when calm in his house he picked his nose every day. Or the young lady who’d called him a worm, a very nervous young lady it’s true, maybe when she was at home she studied her navel just like he did, now that he lived naked… Maybe she also counted her toes, individual entities if ever there were any.

  While fishing he once saw something like the shadow of a cloud. The sky was clear. What giant had glided through the waters?

  Leaving his fishing, he went out to the pavement. He gazed at the caps of foam repeating like meringues on a confectioner’s sheet. He raised his arms and praised the god of the sea.

  Thinking about it, he told himself his mother’s God might also allow a god of the sea. A delegate, to express it in trade union terms. Be it what it may, he praised it.

  So many things were taken for granted when he lived in West Lanús. So many. Everything, that is.

  When the cold comes, water moves to the category of minor things.

  Which sea was this he was entering now?

  First the fog. Moving across in puffs that made one feel nostalgia for the horizon. It left behind shapes that the wind twirled.

  The clouds came down to the water, soup-coloured bellies joined to the sea by the falling snow. Snowflakes, snowflakes.

  Then ice covered the whole garden. It shone, reflecting the rusty front of the house in its slope.

  Hugged by blankets wrapped around his neck, waist and legs, looking for warmth in the bed, stretching his hands towards the fire of his chairs burning on the pavement, he saw his reserves of water turn to ice. Since tiles were missing after he went up on the roof, it was impossible for him to make a shelter. He lined his body with the Salvation Army magazines and adjusted the blankets above him.

  He looked like a chrysalis, waiting in its dark shroud to wake as a butterfly in a neighbour’s garden.

  When he slept he certainly didn’t count on waking up as a butterfly. If you can call that sleeping.

  He had stuck his head inside a cover his sister had crocheted for a cushion. His breath gave him the illusion of heat. He saw through the pattern of colours.

  The worst began with the ice floes. Animals floated by, frozen like cherries in aspic, watching him from inside the crags that slowly cruised near him, colliding with one another, sometimes with a sound.

  He sensed he would not last much longer if nothing changed. The idea of rest seemed appropriate. Even welcome.

  He noticed that the water outside now reached up to just beneath the windows. It must be the weight of the ice, he reckoned. The house creaked.

  With a noise stranger than any other, the remains of the garden broke off, maybe because of the weight of the ice. The pensioner felt the vertigo of the whirlpools before his feet as the garden sunk, floated up again and between two waters went away rocking, like a flat floe.

  From then on the door was separated from the sea by the mere pavement.

  Countless screeches disturbed him one day. Nose blue with cold, he abandoned himself to what he believed was his final illusion. He lifted the crochet cover. It was a flight of swallows. They were exhausted. They covered the roof. He went out to look at them.

  A blow on his shoulder almost knocked him out. The rusty letters had not held the weight of the birds. ‘My Refuge’ bounced over the pavement, could be read one last time between two waves, then disappeared.

  The pain, the hanging arm almost dragged him to the bathroom. Something in his shoulder had broken. The clavicle? He knew little about this. He tied his shoulder in strips of pyjama.

  The swallows had followed him in. Screeching with relief, eyes closed with pleasure, they settled on the wardrobe, on the headboard, in the kitchen.

  Only one fish was left. Holding the knife with his left hand, he minced two fillets and placed them on a newspaper. The swallows jumped on it.

  He melted ice. They drank.

  ‘Eat. Drink,’ he told them. ‘You are the owners of the house now.’

  It brought him joy to see their feathers, their beaks, their little eyes. To save them the unpleasantness of travelling with a corpse, he went outside to die on the pavement.

  A wall like a cliff seemed to block the light. A ship next to his house. A battleship with no windows.

  Rather, it had windows. A row of portholes as high up as the third floor of a building.

  Well, he said. If they want to find me they will.


  Standing up, he had no more chairs. Stroking his beard, he contemplated the panorama. The ice floes drifted away in flocks. The water had turned light blue. His arm in a sling was numb.

  When the swallows woke up, one group fluttered around the house with pirouettes of happiness, went back in again and busied themselves pecking at what was left of the food in the kitchen and in the pots.

  The pensioner lifted his eyes to the wall. It irritated him to see it there. Why didn’t it go away? He remembered the flowerpots where he kept the pebbles. He took aim at one of the portholes. At that height, with his left arm and in such pain, impossible.

  He got carried away. The pebbles, white as popcorn, bounced off the metal and fell in the water or on the roof of his house. He forgot his concern about the glass in his windows. He squinted. His aim improved.

  He laughed. He remembered a day in his early years when, helped by his father, he hit the bull’s eye at an amusement park.

  Bull’s eye. He had hit the centre of a porthole. It was a special noise.

  A face appeared.

  *

  He returned. He did not look back at the house handed over to the passing swallows.

  He slept. For hours. He opened his eyes, changed his position, closed his eyes again. They brought him a plate of soup and a spoon. The soup was black, the spoon heavy. Steam would get into his nose. The soup would get down. He worked on his reconstruction.

  Wrapped in his beard, he dreamt. Sometimes he dreamt that his house creaked in the ice. Sometimes that his garden brimmed over with gardenias and daisies, and that a neighbour was coming to make him sign a petition addressed to the mayor. Sometimes that the rocking rolled him from door to table.

  Then he would open his eyes and notice the sea was moving more than usual. But he was in a cabin with a small lamp in one corner. He closed his eyes again. He went back to sleep.

  Later on, curled up on the deck, he looked at the stars. Once he made out the Southern Cross. He cried.