Four by Four

by Sara Mesa

  He looks up. His voice is changing.

  “The silence, you know. Some handle it better than others. It depends on what one gets in exchange. Peace of mind, or a deal.”

  Now I know what he means by “deal.” Those transactions created to paper over each new disaster. The cancer that spreads through the colich. To know and not say, to speak without words.

  The best way to avoid chaos is to build a channel where it can flow in secret.

  “An underground channel,” he concludes.

  Ledesma is taciturn, his eyes roam the room. He’s losing steam. Maybe he regrets revealing so much. He hesitates, blanching, an ironic smile playing on his lips. Martínez had been more agile, less talkative. Everything had been summed up by his question: “You want to join in? You?”

  Tracia’s laments have finished playing and we hear only the murmur of our own breathing: the others must already be at dinner; we’ve missed the start.

  I stand to go, but Ledesma stops me.

  “Do you remember what I told you about García Medrano?”

  I give a distracted nod. He wraps his arms around his body.

  “He killed himself, too. Your predecessor. This is also a secret, supposedly. They won’t acknowledge the suicides, but there have been several. Enough to paint this place in a bad light.”

  “How do you know this?” I ask.

  “Gabriela saw him. She told me. Ask her. But be very careful. Knowledge can drive you straight to madness.”

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22ND

  Today, the students received their first trimester grades and prepared to go home for the holiday break.

  Christmas Eve is the day after tomorrow. Their cheeks are rosy and their movements hurried. Parents began arriving at midday to collect their children. The administration turned out to greet them. From my window, I saw Señor J.: arrogant, posh, shaking hands left and right. The assistant headmaster, still battered from the death of his cat, all saccharine smiles, hunched, pliant, submissive; Marieta, both distant and close, hot and cold. Attractive. Hateful.

  The students pour out of the hall pulling expensive suitcases behind them, in their long dress coats and plaid scarves. They look like little executives, embryos of future commanders, presumptuous, fatuous. They look straight ahead; they don’t even squint in the sunlight. Even Ignacio holds himself elegantly today; he has turned his limp into something distinctive, a more authoritative way to step on the world. His mother looks surprised when she sees him, gives him an unpracticed embrace. She embarrasses him and he rebuffs her, looking for complicity in his classmates.

  They leave and only the few scholarship students remain. They picked up their grades with the neutrality of their station, neither ashamed nor resigned, biting their lips with pride.

  There was a girl crying today, a girl named Marcela, hairy and gypsy-looking, with close-set eyes. I think she’s the youngest daughter of one of the drivers. Why was she crying? It was whispered that she had to leave the colich. Her marks had been abysmal. I myself had given her a failing grade. Her classmates didn’t even bother trying to console her. By a wide margin, Marcela is the worst student in her year.

  A thought flitted across my mind, settling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to erase it, but there it remained, lodged. It can’t be, I tell myself, it can’t be.

  Marcela is fifteen years old.

  (…)

  The hours pass and I’m still watching out the window at the parade of fathers, mothers, hellos, smiles, Señor J., the assistant headmaster, Marieta, the kids, the setting sun, manners, and artifice, shaking hands with such elegance.

  I feel a bit unwell. I don’t know what to do with myself.

  My colleagues will all go somewhere for the holidays. No one is expected to spend Christmas Eve here except the workers, who have to stay on to look after the facilities. I haven’t been told that I’m obliged to leave. Neither has anyone asked where I plan to go. There is a kind of tacit agreement not to pry in such affairs, which suddenly seem banal, almost obscene. Who knows, maybe Martínez is staying at the colich and doesn’t want to admit it; maybe Ledesma will hole up in a roadside motel; maybe Sacra is desperately calling all of her city friends who have already decamped for holiday resorts, changed their numbers, invented excuses not to invite her.

  Time, ineluctable, ticks by. Our lives are nothing more than a succession of lies and appearances.

  We all play a role and it’s only the nuances in our performance that define us.

  The trouble is, I still don’t know whom I will play.

  For the time being, I’m in my room. Vulnerable. The recent days seem like a dream, a bad dream, all the turbidity of a nightmare.

  I face the mirror and am met with the very image of fatigue: a face tinged green, unshaven, sunken eyes, shadows marking my cheekbones, defeated shoulders, despondent.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 26TH

  I wander the halls of the colich, my footsteps echoing on the tiled floor even when I walk slowly. There are shadows, ghosts, desolation here. It’s cold. The wind lashes the trees: the storm ripped down several branches. No one has bothered to remove them from the paths.

  But still, it’s quiet. In contrast with where I’ve just been, which is ruled by chaos and noise.

  I wasn’t brave enough to stay at the colich by myself, obviously. I gave in and called my sister, the poor thing. Having her is like having no one, in the end.

  I went to her apartment. We were alone, the two of us, feeling more besieged than celebratory. She had gone to great lengths to prepare a nice meal, the typical Christmas Eve roast, plus shellfish, candied fruit, turrón, champagne. I think she’d even gone to the salon. Her hair was soft and spongy, and she patted it constantly.

  We ate with barely a word, the television on, trying to pretend everything was normal, reminiscing sporadically over idealized childhood memories.

  My sister asked how my novel was coming along. I briefly considered my answer.

  “Fine,” I said. “It’s about a mystery.”

  “What mystery?”

  “A mystery about rules that are established but never completely defined. The stranger doesn’t know them. He can’t come to terms with them, even if he wanted to. But he can’t fight them, either. The rules exist. They’re strong, unquestionable, but they’re not written anywhere. Therefore, they can’t be obeyed or disobeyed.”

  She wrinkled her forehead as if she understood, but she was obviously confused. She stood and plugged in the lights on a plastic wreath. Then she sat back down.

  “And what are these rules about?”

  “I’m not sure yet. That’s why it’s a mystery novel. I’m finding out as I write.”

  “Are there murders?”

  “Yes, there are,” I concluded. “One decapitation, at least.” She shuddered. She seemed satisfied.

  (…)

  The ruckus in the street was deranged and didn’t even end with the dawn. It was more than just laughter and singing drunks—there were shouts, too, and cries for help that went unanswered. I slept—tried to sleep—on the pull-out couch. Headlights from passing cars projected beams of light on the walls, passing from one side of the living room to the other.

  I barely slept.

  In the morning, still half asleep, I called Crazy Lola. I still don’t know why. Maybe I couldn’t stand the thought of staying longer at my sister’s house, of having lunch together and all the rest. But Lola didn’t pick up, not then and not the five or six times I tried again over the course of the day. Anguish stabbed me in the gut with each unanswered call.

  (…)

  Our Christmas lunch was comprised of leftovers from the night before and two bottles of wine that we drank slowly and which put me to sleep for the whole afternoon. Calmer now, the street below pulsed with a dampened din, a slow boil.

  We looked at old photos. My sister always brings out the photo album on these occasions. I have it memorized. She does, too, but it doesn’t seem to matter. She
points to the pictures with her bony finger and makes unsubstantial comments.

  I see her as a little girl, I see myself as a little boy, I see my parents when they were children, I see people who have died, people I knew, people I only think of when I see them in the album and invariably forget once it’s closed.

  From the corner of one photograph, an adolescent looks out at me sadly. He isn’t the subject of the photo; his presence is a mistake but there he is with his astonished eyes and bony little body. For an instant, I focus on the image and scrutinize the picture, looking for myself.

  Is it me?

  (…)

  I was able to sleep a bit the second night, despite the fact that there was an even greater commotion outside, if that’s possible. Someone was throwing a party down at street level. A group of beggars had set up their pieces of cardboard and rags to spend the night. Dance music ricocheted off the walls. I think things ended badly. I heard a police car, broken glass, an ambulance. I also heard my sister snoring. She must be used to this.

  When morning came, I left her a note on the kitchen table and drove the deserted highway back to Wybrany. I experienced a sharp sense of homecoming upon reaching the little road that runs through the woods.

  I passed the darkened fields. At the end of the road the colich buildings rose in a final flourish. The flags crowning the lecture building waved weakly. The silence was soothing after so much noise and I breathed it in like it was fresh air.

  No one was expecting me. I stood at the gate, shivering with cold and ringing the bell until Brito, one of the scholarship boys, came to open up. Brito is mulish and stocky. He has a wide jaw and lovely, distrustful eyes.

  I asked him, blushing, who was around.

  “Just us, sir.”

  I didn’t know who he meant by us, whether or not us also included me. Is us a category reserved for the scholarship students and their parents; for colich workers and their children? Do I count as us? Us clearly doesn’t include Señor J., the assistant headmaster, or Marieta. So where can we find ourselves, those in the middle, in neither camp? The upstarts, loners, imposters like me?

  In any case, we must have been few. I didn’t come across anyone in the hall, though I did hear muffled voices behind a few doors. The dining room was closed. I peeked into the kitchen. Gabriela and another woman were going to great lengths to deep clean the fume hoods. They showed no surprise at seeing me. Gabriela might have looked slightly uncomfortable, but not surprised.

  “We can bring your meals to your room, sir,” they told me. “If you let us know in advance.”

  Yes, I would let them know. And maybe if I was lucky and Gabriela brought me my food, I could ask her about García Medrano and the girls. I already knew. Ledesma had told me. She only had to give me her opinion. She had no reason to feel forced into revealing anything. She shouldn’t be afraid.

  I holed up in my room after an afternoon walk. Night soon fell. Unfortunately, it was Merche who brought me dinner.

  The wind rattles the shutters. It’s cold out. Inside, the heat adds a soft, sickly quality to the air.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27TH

  When I was returning from my walk today, I thought I saw a man pulling a crying girl by the hand.

  It was getting dark and my eyesight has worsened, but one thing is clear: whoever the man was (by his height and shape it could have been the assistant headmaster, though his gait was different, and he wasn’t dressed like himself) and whoever the girl was (a girl who was just starting to grow into something else), the pair made their way unevenly, jerking along without speaking. They disappeared around the corner in a hurry.

  I was curious and wanted to follow them, but I quickly decided against it.

  Then, from outside, I saw a light in the hallway of one of the warehouses, illuminating the branches of the tree at the entrance. A dark bird, maybe a blackbird, flew away. The light went out. After a few minutes, it came on again. I heard the sound of a door abruptly slamming shut.

  I got out of there before I could be accused of spying.

  The buildings are hushed, now. There are hardly any lights on and the only sound is a motor running, maybe the heat or the kitchen exhaust.

  Merche told me in the dining hall that she and Gabriela are taking turns at lunch, but apart from Merche herself, the boy who opened the gate, and Tato, the concierge, I haven’t met anyone else in two days.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 28TH

  I wake with a fever and aching bones and almost faint when I sit up in bed. The room is cold, but my body burns.

  I’m still experiencing certain sensations from my dream, which I vainly try to piece together. I only remember that it had been tender and sensual, someone lightly stroking my crotch. The tingling I felt went far beyond the purely sexual; it was something spiritual, or metaphysical.

  And yet, all I have at this moment is a persistent—almost insolent—erection.

  Accumulating blood that only adds to my dizziness.

  I touch my forehead. It’s on fire. I feel my way for a glass of water. As I drink, I notice my lips are very swollen, ready to burst.

  My brain swirls with meaningless words. I think I hear a voice calling me by my name—my real name. It’s my imagination. I try to calm down.

  I get back in bed and enter a state of drowsiness, a not at all pleasant semi-consciousness which lasts almost the entire morning.

  I think that I’m going to die like this, completely alone in this isolated room. I don’t care. No one is waiting for me. I don’t have children, I don’t have parents. My responsibility to my sister is purely functional.

  (…)

  In the afternoon, I remember I have a bottle of aspirin in the closet. I go to get it, using the wall for support. I take two and then pee. My urine is dark and smells of infection. I fall immediately back to sleep.

  I have another dream. This time Marcela, with her brown, fuzzy little face, whines and asks me for water. I don’t have any water, Marcela, I answer, I’m really thirsty too and there isn’t even any water for me. She keeps complaining, her face grows thin, suddenly she’s old and turns into something closer to my sister than a young girl.

  As in my dream, I need to drink something when I wake up. I take little sips so I don’t vomit. I also take two more aspirin. I think they help. My fever has gone down a bit.

  I look out the window. It’s night already. Stars twinkle in the clear sky. After many windy days, the air is calm and the moonlight shines gently on the stone façades. I must have slept for eight hours straight and I haven’t eaten anything all day. The very thought of food makes me indescribably nauseous.

  In any case, even if I wanted to call down to the dining hall, dinner is over.

  I am utterly alone.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30TH

  I’ve been very sick. I still am, three days later, but I’m now starting to recover.

  I slump at my desk, my body heavier than usual, and focus on scrawling in my notebook.

  I spent all of yesterday in bed, basically unconscious. I only dragged myself up to use the bathroom. I lost all sense of time. I was cold, and hot. My teeth chattered. I sweat. I ran out of aspirin. I didn’t even drink any water.

  My mind flipped through a series of images. One after another, those slides projecting on a screen. I observed them, unfazed. A new image would emerge only when the previous one had faded away. Crazy Lola. My ex-brother-in-law. My signature forged on his papers. My parents. The factory line where I worked for so many years. The assistant headmaster, his cat in his arms. The cat, without its head. The assistant headmaster’s hands on Marieta’s ass. Marieta sipping tea. The mastiff running in the woods. The photograph of the puny adolescent I had been once. Ignacio with a furrowed brow. Irene licking her lips. A girl pulled along by an unknown man. Gabriela with García Medrano’s papers under her arm. Gabriela peering through the crack in my door.

  This last image had been real, I found out, although it had the same pale, confused text
ure of dreams.

  Having knocked several times to no avail, Gabriela grew concerned and decided to open the door to see if I was okay.

  She found me in bed, wet and reeking, a prisoner of hallucinations and fever dreams.

  “Sir! What’s wrong?”

  Her words were sweetness itself. If that voice was coming from my unconscious, I didn’t want to wake.

  But Gabriela shook me gently, touched my forehead, her eyes wide with shock. She ran from the room, then returned with medicine and covered me with cool rags.

  The memories that flood me have a strange consistency: Gabriela’s touch, her smell and her voice, are still absolutely clear, hyperreal, while the passage of time, space, and other physical shapes dissipate completely. I had entered a purely sensorial fetal-like state, overcome by fever and the relief of being cared for, stripped of intelligence and reason.

  I fell in love with Gabriela.

  I know she managed to lift me from the bed: I remember the squeak of a wheelchair. I know she bathed me: I remember the bubbles, the penetrating smell of soap. I know she fed me: I remember the glint on the approaching spoon, the tepid concoction sliding down my throat.

  I don’t remember any doctor coming to see me.

  Nor do I remember the night or the dawn. I don’t remember the arrival of morning with its light and sound.

  I do remember Gabriela at my side, making coffee. Dissolving a little packet in a glass of water.

  (…)

  I’m awake after a long nap. Conscious at last.

  There’s no one here now. Gabriela will bring me dinner, I hope, and I’ll able to thank her properly.

  My heart is beating in anticipation. I feel entirely changed. I struggle to get up and look at myself in the mirror. A pale, thin face looks back in surprise. I’ve aged.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31ST

  My sister just called. She couldn’t wait any longer, she says. I left so suddenly without telling her, and too many days had passed since she’d heard from me.