( )
It took me a while to sit up, but the vibrations on the floor helped bring me around, back to my naked body, to the plastic cups littered around the hearse and an annoying noise at the back of my head.
‘Iquela.’
Open eyes, a grey ceiling and the sound of knuckles being cracked. ‘Wake up, Iquela, we’ve left Chile,’ Paloma was saying, having appeared suddenly from behind a pane of glass that only moments ago hadn’t existed.
I sat up, avoiding the rails, put on my jumper and turned to face forward. The road was a grey scar between the mountains. Felipe, perfectly mute, was pushing the engine to its limit. I could only see part of his face in the rear-view mirror: one bulging bag under his eye, a single eyebrow, the faintest trace of a moustache, which disappeared as the hearse entered an enormous warehouse.
The border was simply this, a huge, dingy warehouse, though it easily could have been something else: an impassable checkpoint, a barbed wire fence, thumbprints on a page. Or even a sky-high wall (a vast cordillera) that would prevent us from crossing in one piece, that would force us to leave parts of ourselves behind. The posters warned us not to carry raw food across and I would have to give up certain words too, leave them behind.
But that is only what the border could have been. In reality, the official state line was marked by a rudimentary, derelict warehouse. Felipe stopped the car so I could climb up front and sit between them on the cushion.
‘Got your little tantrum out of your system yet?’ Felipe asked. ‘Looked like you two had a good time last night.’
Paloma pretended not to have heard and I didn’t bother replying. I was looking on, lost in the chaos of that warehouse: papers piled up on the tables, open cases in empty booths (interrupted actions, like my mother’s solemn toasts and the words we’d left behind). Because the border, after all, was a place to leave things behind.
A few kilometres later, with the mountains now lower, Paloma moved to the edge of her seat and stuck her head out of the window. She asked Felipe to stop, but he just accelerated harder.
‘Some of us have got things to do, blondie. Hold it in.’
Paloma insisted. She was gazing up at the sky, alarmed or scared. She took my hand and pulled me in towards her so that I too could see what was going on outside. I budged over, taking up half of her seat, and lent across her. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the ash was vanishing before my eyes. A mirage. A big lie. The sky, which had been black, was bursting open, and very slowly I could make out white, then pale blue and then deep blue, followed by a blaze of light which would transform that day and the ones to follow. The landscape burst into colour: acacia yellow, the earthy red of the mountainsides, and green from the lush tree canopies. Felipe sat back in his seat and put his foot down, as if to flee from the reality clearly revealing itself to us: a bright, perfect sun. A terrible sun.
Paloma picked up her camera and took two or three photos: of the mountain peaks, now white again, of a poster announcing our arrival in Mendoza. She asked Felipe to slow down; it was dangerous driving like that and she couldn’t get a single tree in focus. But he only accelerated harder.
‘Weren’t you in a hurry?’ he asked her, gripping the steering wheel with all his might (red, pink, white knuckles). That glut of beautiful, peaceful views unfolding before gave me a hint of Felipe’s anxiety: I didn’t know how to look at that place either.
We parked the General right in front of Mendoza’s main square and opted – without talking it over first, merely following the flow of cars and people – to walk around for a while first. As if we’d left another version of ourselves up in the mountains, we wandered those overly wide pavements without a care in the world: there was a hardware store, there a chemist, a sweet shop, a greengrocer, another hardware store. Felipe chased what little shade the sun afforded us (the only legible map), while Paloma, already a few metres ahead, tried to buoy us up, pointing out possible lunch spots and hotels and running her fingers through her hair to shake out the last vestiges of dust.
Having wandered aimlessly for a few blocks, we finally entered a restaurant and ordered some sandwiches and beers. As we waited I was distracted by the TV, an unwieldy old thing perched in a frame screwed to the ceiling. The international news was on, a shot of the corner of Avenida Providencia and Avenida Salvador plastered in ash.
I stood up to go to the toilet. At the end of the hallway a twisted cable, an earpiece slick with grease and a dog-eared phone directory were enticing me like buried treasure. I vacillated, hoping fate would decide whether I should make the call or just use the toilet. The sound of the flush made me opt for the phone and I asked the waitress for a few coins. She had two arms full of dirty plates, but was well-practised enough to point to two lonely coins in the tip jar. I returned to the phone without daring to look back (the TV screen, the ash, the disapproving looks), and as I listened to the dial tone I pictured the action unfolding in my mother’s house: (dial tone), a jump, (dial tone), hesitation, and then the seconds she would take to get up, leave her room, contemplating the phone in dread yet wanting to pick up, like someone considering whether to throw themselves into the river or carry on across the bridge. And afterwards I pictured her answering and listening carefully, and I imagined that every word I said, each sentence that ran through that restaurant, across the streets and the cordillera, would remain there, forever on the other side, unpronounceable to me. Every line that slipped into my mother’s house would be extinguished in there. I imagined what she was going to say (dial tone), and tried to come up with ways to explain myself (dial tone), but I couldn’t think of a single excuse and, since there was no answer, I put the phone down.
I went back to the table and slipped into a trance, hypnotised by the television, enveloped in that sense of foreboding that stories of earthquakes or torrential rains always produce. Paloma and Felipe were in the middle of a heated debate, and I noticed there were two beers fewer on the table. As soon as I sat down she wanted us to cook up a plan (‘cook up,’ she said, imitating a Spanish she’d heard in cartoons).
‘Let’s get this over with,’ she added, throwing me a complicit look I didn’t know how to return. ‘Let’s just find her and then we can chill out here for a few days.’
Felipe took a colossal bite of his sandwich.
‘So now you’re in a rush, eh, Fräulein? Well I’ve got it all sorted out,’ he said, downing the dregs of his beer.
Paloma wanted to go to the Chilean consulate.
‘Right now, we’re paying up and leaving right now,’ she said.
She hadn’t been this insistent on the way to Mendoza. Paloma had travelled calmly in the hearse as if the journey had somehow allowed her thoughts to flow freely (lost, directionless thoughts), and only now, once we were there, had her sense of urgency returned.
‘It seems unlikely that anyone’s going to forfeit their siesta because you’ve lost a coffin,’ I said, surprised at how annoying I was being and longing to explain to her that, for me, merely the idea of the trip had been the trip itself, and now I had no idea what to do with all those hours ahead of us (all those hours to waste). She gave the slightest of smirks and I realised I’d lost the argument before it had even begun.
A huge house, well past its prime, with a dirty façade and a limp flag flying at half-mast (the star visible then invisible, a white hole in the middle of a fake blue sky), tallied exactly with my idea of a provincial consulate. A gate, official-looking and army green, barred access to the only entrance, and in front of the doors a guard was staving off a baying crowd, dozens strong. All lines of communication with Chile were down and they had been waiting day and night for news from their relatives from Limache, their cousins in the Andes, their nephews from Talagante and their children in Maipú. They wanted to know what had happened to their brothers in Río Bueno, in Temuco, in San Bernardo.
‘This is torture,’ a woman wielding a tissue said. ‘Have you no heart, young man?’
The guard pointed to a sign on his right: ‘To the relatives of people affected by the situation in Chile,’ (that’s what it said: the situation) ‘please return to the consulate during working hours. We appreciate your understanding, thank you.’
But nobody was moving from there. All those women and men stood waiting in front of the building. Waiting, once again (and for a second I thought the ash would start to fall on it): a throng of people sharing sandwiches, camomile teas, sharing their never-ending sorrows. There were fathers looking thin and waving their fists, some steeped in a thick air of resignation, others at the end of their tether. And the mothers, the majority mothers, those stoical mothers who defied the guard with their deep cries, almost howls; thin-lipped mothers, women with their nails bitten right down, keeping one another company, linked at the arm, desperate, willing to sacrifice it all (and in my head I heard the telephone blaring: ‘I do all this for you, Iquela’).
I convinced Paloma there was no point in staying: the consulate wasn’t open and our only option was to go back the following day (‘the normal channels, Paloma, the forms’). I spoke with conviction, but really all I could think about was the sign, the phone lines that were down, my mother drenching the garden with her hose. I imagined her dialling my mobile number over and over again only to hear an out-of-service message, and I wanted to call her again and tell her, once and for all, ‘Consuelo, it’s me, I’m not going to bring her to you. I don’t know where Ingrid is, please forgive me. I don’t know where to look for all those things of yours, Mum, all those things from back then.’ And then I thought about telling Paloma to stay on in Mendoza with me a few days, to spend nights, weeks, our whole lives there, to forget about everything. Absolutely everything. At the same time, though, I longed for the opposite: to go home (to return to Chile, to repatriate myself).
We spent the rest of the evening tramping the same streets. Paloma seemed resigned to wait and Felipe walked up ahead with her to avoid having to be alone with me, as if our argument from the night before was lingering there and might spark up again with just one small slip. I was deep in my own thoughts. It was no longer the ash that seemed make-believe now but the absence of it: the clean streets, the blue sky and the blasted sun like a scab rooted right in its centre.
Just before night fell, close to the Plaza del Castillo, we decided to try our luck with a hotel. Clearly an elegant building not so long ago, the only remnants of its former glory were the two marble plant pots by the entrance and a faded carpeted staircase. It was called Mendoza In (like that, one n) and on first sight it seemed half-empty. The reception consisted of a large salon and a woman sitting behind the desk, inspecting her nails. Her hair was cut short, shaved on one side, and her nails were bitten down and painted black. Behind her stood a cabinet with about twenty pigeonholes, each one with a room key hanging from a hook. Felipe and I stood in front of her and waited.
‘We’ve got triples, doubles, twins and singles,’ the woman said without looking up from her nails. Her voice sounded familiar to me.
‘Can I help you then?’ she asked, and that slow, deep drawl carried me far away, to the deep voice of another who smoked a lot and shouted too much. It took me back to when I had braces and a flat chest, to the day I came home to find the white van parked up in front of the house, went in with my jumper dirty with wet patches under my arms and found Felipe’s grandma sitting in an armchair next to my mother, saying, while looking at me up and down, her wrinkly old hands cupping a mug of tea: ‘Is that Iquela all grown up?’ (her voice and then the longest silence, a parenthesis that held no words). Yes, I told her, of course it was me. She went on inspecting me and told my mother that I still looked like a boy. And I stood there blushing but with a smile painted across my face, waiting for instructions, for a sign, for my mother to protect me with some words of solidarity. But without looking at me my mother just nodded. Consuelo clenched fists and through gritted teeth just replied that I was still a child.
‘They’re such naïve children, Elsa.’
‘Two months or so,’ his Grandma Elsa had said, but now, in Mendoza, it was Felipe who spoke.
‘Two nights, thank you very much,’ and he booked two rooms and clipped me around the head. ‘Snap out of it, Iquela.’ I must have had my pensive face on, or my counting face, or my thinking-about-bullshit face, all of them amounting to the same thing.
Paloma wanted to know what had happened between us. She came over pulling her case, all ready to go up to the room, and then stood, waiting for the reason behind Felipe’s mocking smirk. He was quick to answer on my behalf.
‘Nothing’s wrong with her,’ he said, ‘she’s just stuck in the past.’
The Remainder Page 11