(But nothing’s blazing. Nothing’s collapsing. Nothing’s burning.)
( )
When I finally managed to haul myself out of bed all the images from the night before became jumbled in my mind: Felipe closing the front door behind him; Paloma saying she was drunk, that she wanted to sleep, her chest pressed against the window in my room, and her startled voice.
‘It looks like it’s snowing out there, Iquela. Get up, come and look.’ ‘Impossible,’ I’d muttered from my tangle of sheets, where I’d collapsed from too much booze and too little sleep and was drifting into a delicious slumber.
I got dressed very slowly and wandered into the living room. Despite being half-asleep, I had a strong sense that the city outside had changed. Before the ash came the heat, and with it the sweat and humidity that made everything stick to your skin: clothes, sheets, seats. That heat even found its way into landfills and hospitals, filling the city with a stench of everything stirred together, of a molten us. But now the air in the apartment was dry, a sign that soon we would be back to the usual desert of separate things, things in isolation.
Felipe was draped across an armchair. His especially pale skin, dark bags and the first hint of a stubbly moustache made him look shabby and older. He was listening to music with his eyes closed, bobbing his head along to the drumbeat blasting from his headphones. The skin on his face seemed papery, very similar to my mother’s: the texture of it, the muscles and blood somehow retreating towards the bone, made for a striking resemblance.
I didn’t want to startle him so I went to the bathroom and used the tap in there for some drinking water. The cold from the tiles soaked into the soles of my feet. My hangover was clawing its way up my head and I had a bitter taste on the roof of my mouth. Undeterred by the closed door and the drums I knew were pounding away in Felipe’s ears, I called out to ask where Paloma was. It felt like only seconds ago she was urging me to ‘Get up, come and look’, but now she’d left. When? And where had the heat gone? It was only then that I noticed the measly dribble of water filling my cupped hands. The lines on my palms disappeared. The water was grey, murky. I closed my eyes. Felipe’s voice came back, hoarse with the effort of shouting so I could hear him from the bathroom. I splashed my face with the water. Icy cool.
‘Bit of a hitch,’ he said. ‘So, the phone rings first thing this morning and you’ll never guess who it was. Are you listening to me or what, Iquela? Go on, Watson, guess who it was, as laid-back as ever?’
My mother had interrogated Felipe the same way she used to when he was a boy: without waiting for his answers.
‘And would you believe it, Ique …’
Ingrid hadn’t arrived. Paloma’s dead mother was out there somewhere, living it up.
I left the bathroom and stood right in front of his chair. Felipe was fiddling with his headphone cable; a black snake wound around his forefinger from the base to the tip of his nail. Consuelo had called at the crack of dawn (‘Consuelo,’ he said, not ‘your mum’: perhaps Consuelo picked up the phone and dialled my number from another time, from back then).
‘She was upset, seemed in a real state, which is why I didn’t wait to wake up Paloma. I had to tell her that her old lady, dead Ingrid, wasn’t, it turned out, on her way, that she’d have to ride out her hangover at the consulate.’ (The snake all the while suffocating its trapped prey.) ‘Can’t get into Chile,’ he said. ‘The country’s in isolation. Incommunicado. Interned. A right fucking mess, and you just slept through it like a log, half-dead, even with me shaking you. But don’t sweat it, Ique. This is the German’s fault, not yours,’ he said, unwinding the cable and releasing his choked finger. ‘Who told her to bring the whole body here, coffin and all? And on a separate plane. I mean, what was she thinking?’
A sharp pain exploded in my head like an electric shock, timed to perfection with the ringing of the telephone. It would be my mother, or rather Consuelo, who knew the difference. I had to answer it, and then I’d have to schlep the eight and a half blocks to her house, buy the papers, pick her up some food. I’d have to go straight there, where I’d listen to her without really listening, and look at her without really looking, because it was impossible to hold that gaze. I’d be forced to hear her out: I should take extra care, double-lock the door and wrap up against the cold. ‘This bitter cold, you’re pale, Iquela.’ I’d have to nod along, retrace my steps and then do it all over again the next day. After all, she did all this, whatever this was, for me.
The phone, however, went unanswered. I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up (and I counted three dirty glasses in the living room and not one ray of sunshine through the window). I went to the kitchen, turned on the tap and took two aspirin from the cutlery drawer. I opened the tap some more, as far as it would go, the cold and then the hot, but the water refused to run clear. It refused to come out in anything more than a trickle. It seemed to be blocked, clogged up with mud and grime from the drains. The glass finally filled up enough for one sip. Dust and sediment. I put the glass back under the tap and waited. After two more sips I gave up: it was undrinkable. I rooted through the fridge for the dregs of a carton of juice, milk, anything, but there wasn’t a drop to drink. Finally, I threw on some shoes and a jumper and I left the flat.
As soon as I set foot in the hallway I noticed my blurry shadow on the floor tiles. I walked down the four flights trying to convince myself that it was just a cloudy day, or already evening perhaps, but the moment I was outside, with both feet planted on the pavement and the weight settling on my shoulders, all other explanations went out the window.
Outside it was raining ash. Once again, Santiago had been stained grey.
With my feet buried in that powder, I stood rooted to the spot and stared at the ash coating the pavement and the news stand at Avenida Chile-España, caked all over the table on the corner of my street where the olive vendor sat trying to work out the correct change from his latest sale. The ash had settled in infinitesimal flakes on the roofs of the cars, in the nooks of wing mirrors and on windscreens, nestled in the hair of pedestrians taking a leisurely walk, their heads appropriately bowed.
I decided to keep walking for a few more blocks. I needed to clear my head, to stretch my legs. The ash had formed a thick carpet that absorbed every sound, and the silence only exacerbated the throbbing pain in my head. I was sure I’d need just a minute to get used to it, three or four blocks to notice some improvement, and, almost unconsciously, I began to feel better. Black and white suited Santiago. The city seemed at home with itself; all those impassive faces and dogs darting about in the ash. My mother would be happy for a couple of days: for once, she and I would see the same thing on the other side of the window. And Felipe, once he made up his mind to actually leave the house, would say the same thing he always did in the ash. ‘The cocks will be all over the place in this light. They’ll be crowing from dawn till dusk!’
A bus heading to the west of the city stopped on Avenida Irarrázaval, right beside me, and without thinking I got on, ushered by the driver who flapped at me to stop blocking the door. I sat at the back, in the one free seat, next to a woman who was so engrossed in her book she didn’t even move her knees aside as I squeezed in next to the window. Outside, a man was sweeping the pavement, spreading the ash around, and an elderly lady was selling broad beans and onion at a table she seemed determined to keep clean, wiping it with the back of her hand.
I followed the woman off the bus at Santa Lucía Hill but soon lost sight of her when her footprints began to merge with everyone else’s; there were footsteps leading in all directions, hundreds of identical prints mashing into mine until they became one big mark. There wasn’t a single square of untrodden space on the pavement, not a centimetre of ground that hadn’t been stepped on, the footprint erased, and then stepped on again. I searched for the woman’s face in the crowd, for a fixed point to return to after spinning on the spot, but she had gone.
&n
bsp; Still hung-over, I approached a newsvendor and used all my strength to ask him for a bottle of water and if, by chance, he knew where the German consulate was (a grey voice on grey, a trace of calm). The man took his time replying and I glanced at the papers on his stand: ‘FIRE DESTROYS POLICE HEADQUARTERS IN BÍO BÍO REGION’ … ‘ANOTHER STEEP INCREASE IN PARLIAMENTARY EXPENSES’ … ‘DRAW IN THE COPA LIBERTADORES’ …
Only the evening paper, freshly displayed, thought the story newsworthy. In jarring red letters, the headline read ‘ONCE AGAIN’ above an image, half a page in size, of the Plaza Italia completely coated in ash. It could have been Santiago from another time, a framed, black-and-white photo on the wall, but in fact it was my city, photographed that very morning. Once again.
The consulate was a mere three blocks away according to the newsvendor, who handed me a tepid bottle of water, clearly unimpressed by having been interrupted in the middle of a heated debate about whether or not Cobreloa would be relegated to the second division. I guzzled the water gratefully but it didn’t quench my thirst. All around me people were heading to work, calmly going about their business. I headed north, walking at their pace, mingling with the rest of them – with what remained of them – imagining that at any moment I’d bump into Paloma, her head up, scanning the sky for a coffin suspended from the clouds.
I didn’t even have to enter the consulate. Paloma was outside talking to Felipe, who was ankle-deep in ash but had not a single footprint around him (shadows leave no shadow). She was shifting her weight from one leg to another, the classic tell of a person waiting for something or someone, but instead of speaking to my face she focused on the wall in front of her (I can still see it now).
‘You’re pale,’ she said, before muttering something else in a mash-up of Spanish and German.
Her nerves had got to her Spanish, which was caught somewhere in her throat, and her teeth were gnawing ruthlessly at her fingernails. Felipe was mimicking this tic, his hand bent in an awkward position, his teeth tearing at the cuticles on his little finger. I wanted to reply that she was the pale one, ashen in fact, but instead I chose to interrogate Felipe.
‘How did you get here so fast?’ I asked, throwing him a gentle punch that he dodged, jumping back. ‘Weren’t you literally just at home listening to music?’
‘And what about you?’ Felipe replied with a smile and raised eyebrows, looking at Paloma, not me. ‘I thought you were watering your old dear’s garden,’ he said (and the sound of the telephone grew louder and louder).
I thought about leaving them and getting on with my day, with my routine, making up some excuse for being late, going over the previous night’s meal with my mother, but Paloma pulled a cigarette from her bag and, exhaling a cloud of smoke into the air between us to demarcate clearly her space from mine, she remarked that the ash looked like desiccated hailstones.
Her blasé reaction to the ash threw me, and it occurred to me that perhaps even she knew this wasn’t a one-off. I thought about how learning Spanish meant picking up other pieces of information with it: like how, once in a blue moon, the Chilean skies open and it rains in monochrome. Or perhaps she’d barely given a thought to the ash. The matter of having lost her mother’s coffin was considerably more pressing than seeing Santiago buried in dust.
We walked away from the building down that grey hill, and Paloma and Felipe, unsure of what to do, began to squabble. They were saying something about where we would spend the night, what the best route was. Watching them prod and shove one other, it was as if they had known each other for years. They were weighing up whether or not to fill in the form, whether it was worth going through the official rigmarole. The civil servant at the consulate had explained to Paloma that she had to follow some procedure or other, some or other normal channel, she had to fill in a form to restart the repatriation process, this time by land: voluntary repatriation of the mortal remains of the deceased (the decedent, the corpse, the cadaver, the carcass, the remains, Ingrid). The lady had explained that it wasn’t her problem. It wasn’t the embassy’s problem either, or Immigration’s, or the weatherman’s, or the state’s. This problem had no name. The flight simply hadn’t been able to land before the ash started falling. That’s what Paloma was told. Her mother had been redirected to Argentina and was stranded in some far-flung corner of Mendoza.
6
Ash? again? now that’s in poor taste! though, with the city all grimy like this, there’ll probably be more bodies, a day of remains, and of remainders of course, our German expatriate, for instance, our lady of Mendoza, what am I meant to do with her? stay focused and subtract her, that’s right, a drop of weird rain won’t distract me from the task at hand, no sir, I have to work out why the births and burials don’t match up; why so many empty niches while the land brims with bodies like one giant cemetery? that’s what I’m thinking as I stroll down the Alameda and watch everyone around me in a daze, crazy over a bit of powder, and you never know, maybe it’s good shit, maybe if I snort some I’ll stop coming out with all this crap, just a pinch, that’s all, a bit of ground rock never did hurt anyone, a little line off the back of my hand, yeah, delicious, no wonder everyone’s walking round like statues, their thoughts like stone, like the German, who didn’t so much as say hello before she started prattling on about Mendoza, as if there weren’t enough stiffs here in Santiago, now we’re importing them! what a fucking mess, it’s anyone’s guess if her mum was included on the death register, and if she’s included then I should certainly subtract her, but if she’s not it means she’s been subtracted already so if I do it again, I’ll get a negative number, and how am I meant to reach zero then? by knocking off more people? exhuming her? and what do I do with the ones who came back to Chile, after all that time, came back for good? I could never have imagined so many problems, the maths is flawed, I knew it, and that’s why I was always so bad in class, always something not quite right about those examples with apples and pears, let’s subtract bodies, sir! let’s see how you solve this little conundrum! but the German isn’t interested in my problems and that’s why, when she spotted me, she fixed those eyes of hers on me, sky-blue eyes like no other pair in the whole of Santiago, her pupils asking, how far to Mendoza? and at first I didn’t get it, but then I realised the power in those eyes, as if they’d been born to see beautiful things and everything ugly faded in her presence, that’s why I thought I’d melt on the spot, because I’m no Adonis, but she stared at me and I knew why that German was going to go, because her mum would have wanted to be buried here, that’s what she said, bah, what do I care where people want to be buried? at least in this respect my mum was considerate, didn’t even trouble us with a funeral, just dropped dead one day; a cancer of the heart, of woe, and then, see you later, alligator! and I couldn’t even subtract her because I was a kid and I didn’t notice them plant all that sadness in her heart, all those woes that did away with my mum, that’s what they say happened, and the German wanting to cross the sierra today, today!, what would a pair of eyes like those want to cross the Andes chasing a corpse for? when all she’ll see along the way is ash, ash instead of tulips and candyfloss stalls, but then, light people tend to see the lighter things in life and Paloma weighs less than a pack of popcorn, not for nothing did they name her Paloma, the dove of peace, though really she could just as well have been Victoria or Liberty or Fraternity, ‘Frate’ for short, so creative! it’s alright for some, I inherited my name and my surname, like the joke that dies on a second telling, but Felipe isn’t so bad when you consider that I could have come down the line of Vladimirs, Ernestos or Fidels; the point is that the German floats above things, even now, walking through the powdered city, her grief floats above her, yeah, like the pigeons and the condors and the moths soaring over the ash, that’s what I’m thinking when our German giant suddenly gets all het up and fixated on the idea of finding Ingrid, dead Ingrid, and before I know it, it’s a done deal! even Iquela agrees! and I suppose it’s
true that another dead person without a body is the last thing I need, and a few days away never did hurt anyone, what the heck, Fräulein, I’m in, but you’re paying, and don’t forget that I’m only coming out of mathematical curiosity, and the German seems happy, albeit with a wicked glint in her eye, because the truth is she’s enjoying all this fugitive business, like people who’ve never had anything happen to them their whole lives and then boom!, something incredible happens, it rains ash on them and they feel like the star of their own movie, not realising that they’re not the star of anything, we’re extras, Fräulein, every one of us, not even bit parts, just look around you at those faces staring at the ground, look at them, look at me, but I didn’t say that to her, I chose to keep schtum and let her have her little fantasies, the stories she’d tell her German friends, about, say, the arse end of nowhere covered in ash and how her mother was on some rickety old plane and that’s why it couldn’t land in Chile and why she set off for Mendoza, what a Saviour! our heroine! and all those other German giants will stare at her, their eyes like plates, and she’ll nod along solemnly, with the solemnness of an orphan she’ll nod and lap up the attention, yeah, she’ll revel in it as if she were someone important, though who knows, maybe the poor German really is feeling down, her mother has died, after all, and maybe underneath she’s upset and she’s frightened, cos why play mister tough guy? it is a little frightening, the ash falling so hard, hammering down, thick and fast, over the city.
The Remainder Page 7