‘Iquela,’ she said, as if speaking my name were part of a ritual, or as if the very word evoked another kind of ghostlike presence. I felt as if I’d taken a non-existent step on the stairs. Paloma, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eyelid. She stubbed out her cigarette and thanked me for picking her up.
‘I thought Consuelo was coming,’ she said with a cordial smile, her eyes (those false eyes, lying eyes) resting on a fixed spot beyond my face, beyond the airport, beyond the city where she still hadn’t quite touched down.
Paloma sounded strange to me when she spoke. Perhaps I was waiting for the voice she’d had as a little girl, that grating tone that still lurked in my memory but was nothing like the accent she now answered my questions with. I thought she would still speak her clumsy Spanish from ’88. But she had learnt to swallow whole consonants and syllables, to inhale her ‘S’s as if it hurt to say them, to fill gaps in the conversation with remarks on the heat or smog, to try to avoid silences just as I did: unsuccessfully. Because as soon as the obligatory hellos and questions were over with, a great long pause opened up between us, the ideal opportunity for me to bring up her mother and return her cold pat on the shoulder. I can’t imagine what you must be going through. My condolences. I’m so sorry for your loss. Each commiseration I thought of sounded worse than the one before – cold and way too formal, like a poor translation.
I got through the silence by compiling a mental list of all the objects around us. This way, my eyes wouldn’t give away how uncomfortable I felt (and I counted twelve suitcases being pulled along by exhausted figures, one pearl necklace holding up a double chin, two cardboard signs announcing foreign-sounding surnames, and three flights: one delayed, one diverted, one cancelled).
My list was left half-finished. Paloma tapped my shoulder and asked what I was thinking about. It was the kind of question my mother would have asked; the kind of question people might have asked Paloma when she zoned out or fell silent. You couldn’t just land, say hello and expect to know what somebody was thinking. I didn’t answer. Answering her wasn’t on my mental list, which was already collapsing inside my head. But then again, my question about where they kept the coffin on the plane, which was the only thing I wanted to know, the only thing I could think of saying upon seeing that small suitcase at her feet, didn’t feel like the most appropriate conversation starter.
Instead, I told her we’d have dinner at my mother’s house at eight. If she preferred, we could go and drop her things off first so she didn’t have to lug them around for the rest of the day. Paloma just pointed at her neat little trolley and told me not to go to any trouble, but she repeated that she thought it strange that Consuelo hadn’t come to the airport.
‘On the phone she told me she would come personally to pick me up,’ she said, lisping a little, as if her ‘S’s were obstructed by something in her tongue (a screw, an arrow, a rusty nail). ‘She promised me,’ she went on, and now I couldn’t stop staring at that shiny barbell and how it plunged right into her tongue. ‘Has something happened to Consuelo? Is she OK?’
I finally managed to peel my eyes from her tongue (and I counted three cigarette butts on the floor). I nodded without looking up. Of course my mother was OK. That wasn’t the issue. The reason she hadn’t come herself had more to do with who exactly was included in her version of ‘personally’, in the ‘I’ of her ‘I’ll pick you up’. But I didn’t say any of this to Paloma. Instead, I suggested we take a drive around Santiago before eating. We had bags of time before dinner, which was sure to be excruciating.
My routine visits to my mother’s house were always brief, as if we’d just bumped into each other on the corner and I had something terribly important to do a few blocks away. Nine fifteen a.m.: the telephone rings. Nine twenty: buy the paper, buy some fresh bread, buy a little more time. Nine forty: walk the eight and a half blocks to find her, without fail, drenching the lawn, the flagstones, the chipped wicker furniture in the front garden. And then our series of false starts would begin: we would be talking and my mother would start cooking or doing her make-up; we would be talking and my mother would water the plants or put away the shopping; we would be talking and my mother would start reminiscing, forcing me to stay another twenty minutes, half an hour, forty minutes, which would drag painfully slowly as she repeated the same old stories, her emphases and regrets always unchanged. We rarely spoke facing each other, and even more rarely over dinner. My eyes were the problem; I didn’t know how to hold that gaze, how to bear the weight of all those things she’d seen. Instead, I focused on her thin lips and the picture-hook scars on the wall. And if I made myself look her in the eye, if I took a deep breath and managed to hold that gaze for even a second, my mother never missed her chance: ‘You have my eyes, Iquela. Every day you look more and more like me.’ (And my eyes would plummet back down to the floor from the sheer weight of it all.)
As if she could already sense the tension of our approaching dinner, or her body were steeling itself for it, the moment we got into the car Paloma began to jiggle one of her legs madly. I made no attempt to placate her. Next, she set about tuning the radio, flicking from station to station, and finally she wound the window up and down, all the while chain-smoking: cigarette after cigarette, the next one lit with the glowing tip of the last. She only loosened up when she remembered her phone and managed to hook it up to the radio. A slow, sad song seemed to soothe her (a woman, a guitar, a wordless melody). I drove, paying more attention to what she was up to than taking the best route, the least congested one. Then, perhaps hoping to delay that impending meal, to get lost and turn up late maybe, or to boycott it altogether, I changed direction suddenly and suggested that we drive to see the city from above.
‘You get the best of Santiago from outside Santiago,’ I said, putting my foot down and not waiting for a response.
9
No matter how many people are around, or who passes through the same place, it’s always me who finds them, my hundreds of eyes opening wide to spot them, not like Iquela, who never catches a thing, who just drifts about commenting on the dappled sunlight through the plum trees or the way the shadows of the buildings stretch out across the ground, and I just nod, aha, I say, hmm, wow, would you look at that, Ique, but I never notice those things myself, I never see pretty or bright or ordinary things, just as she never sees anything ugly or rare or important; she doesn’t see the dead, for instance, or that old fellow over there on Avenida 10 de Julio, the one pissing into a bottle of ginger ale and telling the world that his piss has come out all fizzy, no, Iquela just prattles on about the golden earth at dusk, and I mean, give me a break! but I don’t say that to her, no, cos if we fall out, who’s going to lend me their sofa when I’m broke in Santiago? and so I go along with it and I say, hmm, yeah, beautiful Ique, and we take our strolls through the city, me stomping on the crispest, brownest leaves, and Iquela telling me shush, stop that Felipe! because the little princess wants silence, shut up, she says, as if that precious golden floor can only be fully appreciated by our little Buddha, and the problem is Iquela always goes around like that, as serious as a heart attack, whereas I, I flit about, cos too much silence makes me jumpy, ever since I was a little boy I’ve always preferred noise, yeah, a real racket to muffle the chatter in my head, and that’s why I listen to music, I just pop my headphones on and voila, a miracle cure, but after two or three hours the batteries die so then what I do is crunch brown crispy leaves, and as I crunch them I think of crisp, crunchy things to see if the sound of those thoughts drown out the ones already in my head, and this leads me straight back to my gran sitting in the kitchen in Chinquihue, Granny Elsa and the sound of eggshells being crushed between her fingers, because you had to mix the crushed shells with the milk, one dash of milk to one generous handful of shells to feed the emaciated mutt, to keep up his calcium, she would say, and the shell would go crunch and she’d mix it with the milk and give it to the lonesome little pup, to the half-starv
ed mongrel who had turned up at our door one morning, all floppy-eared and wet-nosed, trembling because the mummy-pup didn’t want him any more, the mummy-pup had gone, and the daddy-pup, well, that was anyone’s guess, my gran said, cradling him in her hands, and I knew right away that she was going to love him, because my Gran Elsa loved everyone like a son: the dog, the hens, Evaristo the parrot, and me, of course, she even told me to call her Mum, Mamushka, Mummakins, but I was too feral to call her anything, so all I did was silently watch my brother-pup as he lapped up his milk, how he dipped his spongy tongue into the curd, yeah, and I loved watching that wet tongue, I loved watching it lap up the milk as it poured with rain, and the rain sank down into the mud, into the tiles, into me, and the mongrel’s nails sank into the rug, and my eyes sank into his furry coat, and the little pup spluttered as he lapped up his milk, yeah, and I spluttered too so that he and I were alike, we spluttered together in a chorus of animal splutters, and then my gran would try and convince me to eat, because I didn’t like hard-boiled eggs, man, how I hated those eggs! and there it was, once again, the perennial egg on my plate, that’s disgusting, Gran! especially the white, so smooth, so soft, and I don’t like smooth things, but if my brother-pup could get even the shells down him, then I could eat my egg too, that’s how Granny Elsa would persuade me and it’s her I think about whenever I walk along crunching the dry leaves of Santiago; I think about noisy things like the rain in Chinquihue and the stems of nalcas being chomped between my teeth, the strings of dried piure banging against the wall and logs collapsing in firesides, and I think about Evaristo the parrot locked up in his cage in the kitchen, noisy on the outside and silent on the inside, Shut that parrot up! Granny Elsa would say, and in the end it was he who showed me the true key to maths, how it all has an order, cos the order changes the product, the parts and the whole are two different things, and Evaristo would watch me with his tiny dilated eye, and if I moved he’d follow me, if I hid he’d trap me, my reflection locked up in that eye, and to be perfectly honest I loved it, I enjoyed seeing myself uprooted in there, I liked it so much that I wanted to see from closer up, to see myself from his point of view, and that’s why, one day, I put my hand in the cage, just a little at first, then a little bit more, and Evaristo retreated, just a little, then a little bit more, until he was backed right up against the cold bars, the rigid grey bars of his tiny cage, at which point I grabbed him and felt his warm little body, his soft feathers and his panic-stricken flapping, because the poor parrot didn’t want to leave, no, but I had no choice, I had to either prove or disprove my hypothesis, that’s what Iquela’s teachers at school would tell us, hypotheses must be proved or disproved, boys and girls, so I grabbed him tight, and he clamped his wings to his body and began to screech, naturally, which is why, when I think noisy thoughts, Evaristo comes to mind, that rowdy little thing, screeching and shrieking as I carried him to my room in Chinquihue, far enough away from my gran so that she couldn’t hear, and there we were, Evaristo and I, and I spent a long time staring at him, finally getting to know him, because it didn’t matter what people looked like on the outside, that’s all superficial stuff, my boy, Gran would say, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, son, and so I began to pluck Evaristo; slowly I plucked each one of his feathers, his soft and green and superficial feathers, yeah, I stripped him little by little, placing them one by one on the table, and he was warm and silent as the grave, cos it turns out that Evaristo was quiet on the inside, that’s what I thought as I arranged the feathers in a fan that was big and green and mine, I thought about how there was a lot more on the inside than I’d imagined, things like his screeching voice, his thoughts, and each and every one of his bones, yeah, that’s what I wanted to see the most, his bones, so I sank the tip of a sharp fork into the nape of his neck and a stream of blood came gushing out, blood that was red and bright and beautiful, and right at the bottom I saw his tiny bones, and his bones were also red, because it’s not true that bones are white, no, they’re red, bright red, and that’s why nobody ever finds what they’re looking for, because they don’t even know what that is, and nor do they know that it’s futile trying to reveal the whole, yeah, it’s the parts that count, that’s what I thought as I stared at the feathers splayed out like a green, circular fan, and at the reddish puddle and wrinkly skin on my table, I wondered what I might need to put the parts back together, to reassemble the whole and return Evaristo to his cage; what was missing? what was missing? … what was missing was his voice, that’s it, Pretty Polly!, because he was so quiet there, and I’m not really one for silence, and only then did I realise that I didn’t know where it was, I’d lost Evaristo’s voice, and there’s no such thing as a bird without a voice, no, I couldn’t put him back together again, so I mopped up all the feathers and skin and that lovely, crystalline blood, I put it in a shoebox and left the house, I went outside and wandered aimlessly in the middle of nowhere, I carried him in his cardboard box to where the cows were grazing, that’s what I did, with my brother-pup hot on my heels, almost clipping my heels, and together we chose a lovely spot, a perfect spot, and we collapsed to the ground, yeah, and the mutt and I dug a big hole, he with his paws and I with my hands, on our knees we dug a deep hole, as deep as the one I’d seen on TV, a huge grave among the wild basil and mint, and there, at the bottom, we lay Evaristo’s parts before covering them with dirt and moss and leaves, a big mound of wet earth, and only then did I feel a pang of sadness, a black, sticky pain that forced me to shut my eyes and feel the whiteness in my head, the whiteness bursting behind my eyes, the white pain of the lines in my mind’s eye, random horizontal lines, dashes that read minus, minus, minus, yeah, and my brother-pup started to get restless and to howl at my side, and that lingering howl, that piercing cry was his first word, a pretty, pained howl which I echoed as loudly as I could, cos I wanted to howl too, and the howling made my eyes well up with salty tears, tears at the sad fact that the whole wasn’t the same as the parts, because it turned out you can be red and silent on the inside even if you’re green and shrill on the outside, and because, if I really think about it, Evaristo was my first dead; it was Evaristo, not that stranger in the Plaza de Armas, because, man or beast, dead means dead, and when we come across the dead we have to howl, that’s right, howl until we have no voice left, until there’s nothing left.
( )
Stale, muggy air. That was the first thing I noticed on entering my mother’s house. The windows were closed with the curtains drawn, the hallway was plunged in darkness and in the dining room a lone lamp shining on a wilted bunch of flowers completed the grim effect of studied dilapidation.
Paloma followed me to the table, sat down at my usual place and began to talk easily, as if the only thing that had been making her feel uncomfortable was the warm hug my mother had just given her. Paloma had gone in for a stony pat on the back, a reserved and formal ‘Hello, Consuelo’, but my mother had clutched her in a tight embrace the moment we’d walked in the front garden (tensed shoulders, tart berries, feet tapping against the floor). Only after a minute had my mother pulled away from a half-irritated, half-dumbfounded Paloma to peer at her with the same disappointed look she had so often given me; as if I were a hopelessly broken thing.
‘Identical,’ she declared, releasing Paloma’s chin from her grip. ‘Apart from the eyes, you’re identical to Ingrid,’ (and by ‘eyes’ she meant ‘hollow, vacant eyes’).
Now having recovered from this greeting, with a glass of wine on the table in front of her and my mother a few blessed metres away, Paloma seemed cheerier, perhaps even glad to be able to use her Spanish, which was becoming less rusty by the minute. She reeled off a list of cities where she’d lived as a child: Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin (and I hated her for all those adventures, for having left so many times). She spoke about Ingrid, about their numerous relocations, about what life out there had been like (out where? I wasn’t sure).
‘Her dream was always to c
ome back to Chile,’ Paloma told my mother, who shuffled back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room with water and wine, feigning indifference. ‘And I don’t know why she didn’t, because she never stopped going on about you all,’ she went on, inspecting the palms of her hands as if a belated and heartfelt apology might be hiding there.
I sat down opposite her, in Felipe’s place from back when we were kids, and it was from this new vantage point that I noticed a change in the room. The dozens of tiny nails in the wall were no longer there, nails that used to remind me of the pictures my mother had taken down because of the tremors, the earthquakes. ‘Who knows when the next one’s going to hit, Iquela. Take them all down, I’m begging you,’ she’d said, and all the walls had been left riddled with scars, which to me had become a kind of blueprint for the house. Now, in their place, hung unfamiliar landscapes: a bird glowing against a grey sky, a forest in the foothills of a mountain range.
My mother left the house more often than she was prepared to admit, and she let me know by leaving little clues like these new paintings, or those drooping roses on the table: foreign flowers from out there, roses that my mother had got without my help. So much for her declaration that she would never leave the house again: ‘I’m only safe indoors,’ she’d said, gnawing the skin around her nails. She no longer went to parties or invited anyone over. Except me, and I visited her three or four times a week, like clockwork, to appease her, to tell her ‘nothing’s going to happen out there, Mother’ (although accidents happened, mistakes happened, and time passed).
The Remainder Page 3