Inside the house the lights had come back on and the radio was on full blast, drowning out our conversation. Paloma’s dad was going ballistic, yelling and wagging his finger at my father.
‘Fucking grass. Squealer. Don’t you dare raise your glass to them, you son of a bitch.’
My mother walked into the living room just then, and on finding Hans ranting at my father she picked up the first glass she saw, refilled it, and went over to him, holding it in front of herself as if it were a shield, putting a translucent distance between them, begging him with that pink wine to calm down.
‘Please, it’s not worth it, Hans. Let’s have a drink, eh? Let’s celebrate the good news. What good will it do now, after everything? Today’s a special day, Hans,’ she said, forcing the wine on him and managing to tame his irate finger. ‘Some things are better left unsaid.’
Paloma’s mother was watching the scene unfold from an armchair, nodding her head and wearing what seemed to me a strange expression, as if only now, amid all the shouting and votes, from inside the eye of all that rage, did she truly recognise my mother (Claudia? Consuelo? not even she knew). My father, on the other hand, was crestfallen and mute. He looked as if he wanted to say something, smoke a cigarette, listen to music till he fell asleep (the ends of his feet poking out of a blanket, the gentle whirr of the TV), but the German was on the attack again – ‘Fucking snitch!’ – and my father’s voice seemed to be trapped. I wanted to hug him, to protect him from it all. A new kind of silence had grown between Paloma and me, which I broke when I couldn’t stand the shouting any more.
‘I want to smoke, too,’ I said, 93 per cent of the votes counted. ‘I’m going to get out of here with you,’ I added, unaware that this promise would go unfulfilled for so many years.
Paloma turned her back to the sliding door, took out the little box of matches, lit one and held it up to my mouth.
‘We will just smoke,’ she said (‘Cigarette?’ she would learn to say in time). ‘It’s important,’ she added, jiggling the cigarette between her lips.
I nodded, wanting to ask her how to do it, if my chest would hurt, if the smoke would burn, if I would suffocate on the inside. But the flame was going out before my eyes and there was no time for questions.
I inhaled deeply and without another thought.
I inhaled and my throat clamped shut like a fist.
I inhaled just as my mother came out of the sliding door, looking for me.
Paloma jumped and drew away.
I hid the cigarette behind my back and for a second, as my mother approached, I managed to hold in both the smoke and my coughing fit. My mother crouched down and looked me in the eyes. The smoke in my chest was desperately looking for an exit. She hugged me and held on tight, and I heard thousands of votes being counted, I felt the cigarette burning between my fingers, I saw Paloma’s giant of a father striding towards mine, and felt the smoke pushing and pushing. My mother held me by the shoulders, dug her nails into my skin and spoke to me between sniffles, her voice cracking like the branches of a dead tree.
‘Iquela, my girl, don’t ever forget this day.’ (Because I mustn’t forget anything, ever.) ‘Don’t ever forget,’ she repeated, and the dry cough finally burst out of me. It rose up and shook me till I was completely hollowed out.
The air had cooled and it felt like the taste of wine, like berries, like Paloma’s Rs. A thick, harsh air, a closed sky. As soon as my mother left, Paloma came back over to me. She rubbed my back, patted it a few times and then placed three pills in the palm of my hand (a bright white ellipsis). Then she took out another three, which immediately disappeared into her mouth.
‘Take them,’ she said, as if inviting me to be part of a secret ritual. ‘Take them, quick,’ she insisted, and I took them without thinking while Paloma held my face in her hands.
I swallowed the pills, despite how bitter they were, despite how afraid I was, as she leant in towards me and closed her eyes (hundreds of eyes that couldn’t see me). I closed mine, wanting to play Night-time, Blackout, to play at disappearing. I closed my eyes and tried to picture those endless pale-green forests shrouded in the haze flowing from her mouth. I wasn’t expecting the kiss. It lasted barely a few seconds, neither rushed nor lingering, just long enough for Paloma and I to catch the exact moment her father punched mine, for my coughing fit to return and drown out the final count of votes, and for me to watch as my mother hugged someone else, so that they, too, would never forget that day.
10
It’s someone’s turn to croak and it’s my job to find them, body after body, ever since that first, unforgettable Sunday cadaver, that trailblazing corpse who changed everything, yeah, cos he was waiting for me to subtract him, staring up from the ground with his big brown eyes, and I stared right back and it was love at first sight: I knew that corpse in the Plaza de Armas belonged to me, of course, but that’s not to say I go around looking for bodies, hell no, they find me, no matter what others might think, my Gran Elsa, for example, who would always say people see what they want to see, Felipito, and by the looks of things I want to see corpses, because from that day on they’ve kept cropping up, always uninvited, be it a weekday, holiday or even New Year’s, because at first it was Sundays, that’s true, but now they crop up whenever they like, one after the other, so I’m strolling through Yungay minding my own business, stumbling along in the heat, when I spot a guy doubled up like a contortionist on the curb, head slumped between his knees, neck twisted, and looking like that anyone would assume he’s a drunk, the dregs of that weekend’s party, or just one more soul who’s had enough of this godawful heat, but no, it’s a corpse, and then I only have to get on the bus to spot that the man sitting at the back, the one with his cheek pressed against the window, isn’t leaving any breath on the glass, no, he’s dead too; I only have to focus my gaze a little, be hawk-eyed, cow-eyed, owl-eyed, to see them everywhere, it’s just a matter of dilating the pupils I have all over my body, to see that the man waiting at the bus stop sure is going to be late, yeah, he’s kicked the bucket too, because that’s how they make themselves known: no warning, no fuss, and I make a note in my pad, in fives I subtract them, and have been doing since day one, since that first one appeared as I was roaming around the Plaza de Armas watching the rats eat discarded peanuts as the sun went down, that’s what I was doing, sniffing black flowers in the blackest of nights, trying to shake off the day’s thoughts, when suddenly I spotted something strange in the middle of the square, there where the gallows used to be, where they used to hang the non-believers, the thieves, the traitors, I noticed something odd there and I moved in, yeah, and for a moment I thought it was a stray dog having a nap and I sidled up to say hello, but once I reached it I realised it was something else, a man or a woman, or maybe a man and a woman in one, that’s what I thought, and I noticed that the poor soul was sprawled out on his back like only a dead soul would be, dislocated, stiff, silent as the grave that tall dead man in a thick chequered skirt, argyle socks, a pair of blue rubber flip-flops and with a red handkerchief tied around his head, there he was with that wide face of his, and yet he had no face, his eyes had shrunk back under his skin, had gone into hiding, yeah, and I stood staring at him and at those pigeons, because there were twelve pigeons holding a vigil for him, cooing dirges in unison, and there were also fleas all over his socks, and rats and stray dogs sniffing around him and whimpering, and I was scared but not too scared because at least it was night-time and not the middle of the day: everyone knows we think differently at night, and I was thinking about how that square wasn’t a bad place to die, the place where it all begins and ends, that’s what I was thinking, but then I got distracted remembering how, when I was a kid, at least they warned you on TV if a dead body was coming on the screen, when the blonde on Channel 7 would say ‘the following images are not suitable for sensitive people or minors’, that’s what the skinny blonde would say, and my Gran Elsa must have been pretty sensiti
ve because she would cover her eyes with her wrinkly hands, cover her entire face with those tree trunk hands and rock herself back and forth until the horridness had gone away, but she didn’t say a word to me, no, and I would sit there crouched in front of the TV staring at dead people in the ground, or rather at their bones, a layer cake of bones at the bottom of a hole, hundreds of skeletons keeping each other company, keeping each other warm, rubbing up against each other, and me with my big eyes, I thought they were lovely those beautiful white bones, because I loved the colour white, osso buco-white, of course, because I loved osso buco, with its greyish-white gelatinous marrow, exactly the white of our bath in Chinquihue, the filthy tub I would climb into after the news to turn myself white and disappear, opening the cold water full blast, stripping and slipping in butt naked to study my feet as I waited for my toenails to go white, but they never went white, no, they went blue: my toes blue under the icy water, my skin goose pimply and, after a while, wrinkly like dates, like elephants, like old tomatoes, my own shell about to shed itself, my skin trying to peel away, and that’s exactly what I wanted under that cold water there in Chinquihue, I wanted to peel away from myself, but I couldn’t, because my Gran Elsa would turn up just in time to say, what in God’s name are you doing in there, give me strength, you’re growing more feral by the day, and then she’d pull me, trembling and numb from the water and with cold needles stabbing me all over, and my gran would squeeze me and rub me down with a white towel, them bones, them bones, them dancing bones, all the while warning me that if I didn’t stop misbehaving she’d take me to Iquela’s in Santiago, and in Santiago the sticky heat and stench of sadness were waiting for me, as were those sourpusses Consuelo and Rodolfo, Rodolfo with that scar across his middle, and then, despite the whiteness of the towel, those night-time thoughts would come flooding back, mad ants all over my scalp, yeah, and my gran would thrash the black thoughts with the towel, shoo them away saying, you feral child, that’s what my Gran Elsa would say as she rubbed me down, smoothing out my skin, ironing out the skin rolled up over my bones, my skinny bones, which were obvious even from beneath my clothes, just like the bones jutting out of those graves in the ground, the bones that were always on TV, yeah, but with prior warning at least, not like now when they pop out of nowhere, one after the other they appear, the dead of Santiago, this mortuary city which I’m sure as hell is neither sensitive nor a minor.
( )
The phone caught me off guard. I was in the middle of translating an untranslatable sentence into Spanish, stiff from several hours spent sitting in the same armchair, when that dreadful ringing began. If it had been nine fifteen in the morning I would have known who it was. She had an unwavering timetable: the stroke of nine fifteen, every day. But at three in the afternoon, it simply couldn’t be my mother. I stopped what I was doing but went on thinking about how the translation had me cornered. There was a mistake in the original English and I was debating whether to translate the sentence as it stood or correct it: to translate the error faithfully, reproducing it in the Spanish, or inaccurately, adapting the original. So, still struggling with this dilemma, and with pins and needles beginning to creep up my leg, I picked up the phone.
She spoke very slowly, calculating precise pauses between each breath and her words. No niceties or remarks on the weather, the godawful heat: nothing to cushion the bad news. She used that urgent voice which came so naturally to her, hammering home each syllable, driving the message right into the back of my head.
‘She’s-dead,’ (and a sinking sensation: a stream of pets, friends, family, all dead). ‘In-grid-is-dead.’
I said nothing while I tried to put a face to that name, to put a face to the profile: Ingrid, Ingrid. Of course I remembered her: one of the tall, slim giants ringing our doorbell all those years ago. Breaking the long, tense silence, I finally told my mother that I didn’t have the first idea who Ingrid was. I’d managed to wind her up in record time and she snapped that the daughter was landing in Santiago the following day, and I was to use her car to go and collect her from the airport. My mother couldn’t be expected to leave the house in this heat.
‘Her name’s Paloma,’ she said to herself. ‘You and your memory. Like a sieve.’
I sweated all the way to the airport. Really, I hadn’t stopped sweating for the last few weeks, but now cooped up in my mother’s car, the heat was unbearable. And it wasn’t just the air inside the car. Through the windows a dense, warm breeze slipped in: breath from the mouths of strangers swimming towards mine. I closed the windows and dabbed the beads gathering on my forehead and neck. It was hellish. There hadn’t been a drop of rain in months and the heat had dug its claws into Santiago with no apparent intention of yielding. At least, when it had begun, the papers had honoured it with headlines. ‘HEATWAVE DEVASTATES CROPS’, ‘AGRICULTURAL CATASTROPHE IN CENTRAL CHILE’. But, by mid-autumn, the thirty-six point six, point seven, point eight degrees creeping up the thermometers was no longer news. Everyone seemed to have grown used to the eternal summer. Everyone except me. I still made a point of chasing the shade if I had to go out, snaking my way along pavements, dashing from trees to awnings despite knowing full well that the problem wasn’t the sun. The source of the heat, that malign heat, came from somewhere else. It was subterranean. It pushed and peeled the crust off pavements. It smothered you from your feet upwards. That heat was a warning that the ash was on its way. But I couldn’t have cared less about the ash. In fact, I quite liked the grey rinse over the parks and gardens, the grey settling on the roofs and houses. I found it soothing, even. The tough part was the build-up, the wait. The heat was my real nightmare. Or worse: it was a sign of the nightmare to come.
The airport arrivals hall filled and emptied several times as I waited, listening to music, reliving my first encounter with Paloma and idly watching what was going on around me: the looks of anticipation whenever the doors slid open, the bureaucratic smiles of the hostesses, the mechanical, penguin-like shuffle people made as they leant on one leg and then the other. All those friends-and-relatives stuck in that hall, tired from standing and from all that nervous anticipation, but also, somehow, savouring the sweet wait. They were men and women used to waiting (in airports, hospitals, courtrooms, at bus stops).
It really made no sense for me to stand there going over that old promise, the promise of getting out, of myself leaving some day, which hadn’t waned since Paloma’s first visit. The illusions I’d entertained over the subsequent years were no more than hazy fantasies involving some mode of transport or another: the last seat in a train carriage; my outstretched thumb on a long empty highway. I’d planned that journey like you’d plan an escape: the destination had never mattered. The bottom line was to get out. To get out of Santiago at all costs. I had enough savings to travel a thousand or so kilometres in any direction, but still the only road I’d ever taken in my life was the eight and a half blocks to my mother’s house.
I peered through the sliding doors one last time to try to see beyond them, already anticipating the earful I’d get from my mother – my indolence, my impatience – when I dropped her car back without Paloma. I didn’t expect to see anything through those doors. I told myself that, having failed to recognise me among the crowd, she must have decided to make her own way to the house. And then, there she was.
A group of taxi drivers pounced on her with boards and questions she seemed not to hear. There was Paloma, a small suitcase in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Her blonde hair was scraped up in a messy bun and she was in shorts and a white T-shirt, which she fanned up and down in an effort to cool down. She was smoking right in front of a policeman, who seemed not to believe his eyes and to be debating whether to fine her or let her do as she pleased. And she just puffed away, as though it were nothing. Her features had lost the roundness of youth, but her forehead was still covered in tiny freckles (several faces faded in and out on the same skin: Paloma as a little girl, Paloma the adu
lt, the little girl again, and now her dead mother). Her eyebrows were darker than her hair, and a lick of mascara accentuated the contours of those eyes, which I’d imagined would be tired and bloodshot. Instead, she seemed calm. Too calm. As if nobody had died, or as if she were still on the plane looking out over the city nestled between the mountains, Paloma took hold of her camera, an old device suspended from her neck, and photographed an advert on the wall. She seemed rested, relaxed even, as she stared at that bottle of pisco – red, orange, green, purple: it changed colour depending on where you stood. Paloma raised herself on tiptoes, crouched down and then stood up straight again, and she repeated this several times trying to find the best possible angle. One of the taxi drivers, a fat, sweaty fellow, couldn’t take his eyes off her strange little ritual. I made my way over to intervene, and as I approached – walking gradually faster and with more resolve – I was surprised by how clearly I remembered that furrowed brow, the dimples at the edge of her mouth, the grace with which she moved from one action to the next: fanning herself, taking a photo, smoking a cigarette.
The taxi driver pretended to receive an incoming call and disappeared among all the other people waiting in the arrivals hall. Paloma finally peeled her eyes from the bottle of pisco. She was sweating. A loose blonde lock had swept across her forehead and lent her a scruffy, unsettled sort of air, which she wouldn’t lose over the days to come. She took a drag on her cigarette and shot me a vacant look: total indifference. And it was that gesture, that look, that pushed me to take the last few steps and throw myself at her. Paloma put out an arm just in time. Leaning back in a subtle but unmistakable recoil, she patted me on the shoulder, gracefully dodging my overenthusiastic hug.
The Remainder Page 2