I could feel my face flushing, the skin responding to Felipe that he was the obsessive one, that running away was pathetic. But my words were caught somewhere between my chest and my throat, a rough ball of words, an intractable barrier, as if the woman with the black nails had lodged them there with her eyes, the same eyes that were now staring at us, either out of bemusement or curiosity, from the other side of the desk, watching as Felipe put on a squeaky high voice to say, ‘she’ll be thinking about her mum, her mummy, her mummywummy, her mummikins’.
I didn’t mean to say the raw words that came streaming out then, the ones I should have left on the other side of the border. They simply burst out of me, flooding everything. I just didn’t care any more; or at least, I thought I didn’t.
‘Look who’s talking,’ I said to Felipe, moulding each syllable out of my rage. ‘Mr Light and Breezy, so at peace with the past.’
And Felipe, with his black eyes, with a squinting gaze just like his grandma’s, my mother’s, and perhaps like that of his own parents, snapped back:
‘And what exactly does the prodigal daughter mean by that?’
Lines poured out of me like an oil spill, like grease, like lava that did burn, that did hurt.
‘I mean that you don’t even have to open your mouth: it’s written all over your face.’ That’s what I said to him. ‘It’s written all over your face, Felipe.’
And just like that the rest of my words withdrew, repentant (black nails galloping against the marble: dead petals falling from the fingers). Paloma edged in nervously, the previous night’s disbelief now gone. She tried to come between us, to separate us with cold, liquid words, safe words that only cut deeper.
‘What’s written all over his face?’
I looked down at the floor. We never spoke about that. It was a childhood pact, from way back, when he and I had been sitting on the woollen rug pretending to play, pretending that we couldn’t hear, that nothing was going on in the living room while my mother and his gran yelled at one another and we couldn’t help but listen in, couldn’t help but find out my mother had to look after him, as a debt:
‘It’s the least you can do for me,’ his Grandma Elsa had said. ‘This is your fault, Consuelo, all your fault. If you lot hadn’t gone off playing war this never would have happened to my Felipe. It must have been something you did. That’s right, all of you lot who are still alive, you did something.’ And my mother tried to explain that it wasn’t her fault.
‘You don’t understand, Elsa. It was terrible. It was a mistake.’
And the mistake was not even hers. The mistake had been my father’s (Rodolfo’s, Victor’s: Victor had made a mistake), for muttering two little words when they captured him, two words that, like a mistranslation, a slip of the tongue, changed everything. He’d said ‘Felipe Arrabal’: name and surname, two words to erase a body. But Felipe didn’t know that and supposedly nor did I, and maybe it didn’t even matter, or at least that’s what we wanted to believe and we made a promise not to talk about it; we swore that we would forget all about it, unremember anything to do with that past we hadn’t even lived through but remembered in too perfect detail for it to be made up.
And there we were, Felipe and I, in that hotel lobby, and my words had betrayed me and I couldn’t take them back (names, surnames, razor-sharp vowels that spill out and get stuck to your feet).
‘What’s written all over his face?’ I heard again.
Felipe walked right up to Paloma, leaving no more than a centimetre between his nose and hers.
‘That we’re all dead, Fräulein. Dead-dead,’ he said, and he took one of the keys on the reception desk and bounded up the stairs, two, even three at a time, laughing loudly, the laugh he used to stop himself from crying. Or maybe not: maybe he really was laughing and I was the one who wanted to cry.
(I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you I do all this for you.)
3
Written all over my face or not, since when was she so opinionated? now those two are fooling around they’ve got all big for their boots, dishing out opinions like they’re paid per word, when really the only thing they’re doing is getting in the way of my calculations because this isn’t a honeymoon, no sir, I’m working here, working out if there are any more dead to subtract, but with all this fresh air I get muddled, my mind clouds over, which is why I bring all my eyes into focus, to cut through the mental fog and see if there are any more mislaid stiffs lying around, cos they could be anywhere: in the pollen of the hydrangeas, in the spikes on the cacti, in the salt crystals in the desert, and that’s why I head out into Mendoza, to see if I can air all these black thoughts: written all over my face or not, what difference does it make when the one who’s really hung up is her, Iquela, while I, on the other hand, just keep on moving, walking and looking round me, cos time is a traitor, like Iquela, hell-bent on making sure they can’t tell, that it’s not written all over her face, when really the rage pours out of her eyes, yeah, that’s why I told her when we were kids to walk with her eyes to the ground, to avoid the gaze of her living-dead dad, to listen less to her mummy, to talk always to stray dogs and meadowlarks, cos I learnt to read the lies in corneas, not mouths, and, well, mouths are silky and smooth and I don’t like smooth things, no, that’s why I trained myself to make out the rage in the pupils of dogs and cows, those southern cows with their grey eyes, because they weren’t white and smooth those eyes, no, they were a pair of slippery, greyish sclera, the whites of the eye, only, in this case, they were grey, identical to the eye they brought me in Biology once, an eye that smelt bad but whose look gave away everything, it was written all over that eye: the choroids, the fovea and the blind spot, yeah, that wondrous eye our teacher brought one morning, one each, she told me and Iquela, the Iquela from our childhood, not so cool then, no, a total loner, just one friend, that other girl, the weirdo who’d follow her round school like a shadow, that little mouse of a thing who was always digging her nail into Iquela’s hand, her friend the scratcher, while now Iquela walks around with her chest puffed up thinking she’s the bee’s knees; it wasn’t like that before, which is why I’d sit with her, cos I’d promised and promises are debts and you always pay your debts, I sat right next to her in that classroom, each of us waiting for our own eye, but at the last minute the teacher told us he was sorry, very sorry, but there weren’t enough eyes, there are never enough eyes, and so I had to share, an eye per pair the teacher told us, and I was really mad but I swallowed my rage because there it was, there it was in the middle of that enormous classroom, lying on the lino table, so whole and big and beautiful, there was the eye, it was staring at me, and I edged nervously towards it, but straight away I knew that it was mine, that eye was fixed on me, because it looked like a hamster, a street rat, a burnt-out star on the table, and Iquela and I were sitting right next to each other, Iquela, the eye and me, and then I cupped it in my hands and held it like a rabbit, I held it up and brought it in close to inspect it, without blinking, eye to eye, and in its dilated pupil I saw half of everything that cow had ever seen: I saw black patches on white coats, I saw the blazing red iron bearing down, I saw placenta and blood and a squidgy mass coming out of its entrails, I saw thick, yellowy milk and rusty machines sucking on its udders, and I saw the creamy top, that creamy skin, and white aprons splattered with red, and I also saw lovely things like the mud encrusted in its hooves and the dew dusting its ears, and the clouds rolling over his back, stroking it, and stroking mine too, stroking me, all this I saw split in two while my hands took the vitreous humour and squeezed it, disgusted, cos I find smooth things disgusting, yeah, but I went on looking anyway, because the cow had imagined lovely thing
s: it had dreamt of tall, wild meadows and flies rubbing their legs together against their neck, and it had seen sad things, things that had saddened it like the parched fields and dried-up well, and at the end of all this I saw a long line of other cows, tail to mouth, that’s how they were, perfectly in line, and at the end of the passage I saw a light, the gleaming flash of blades, knives lit under halogen, slicing against one another, a terrible shrill ringing, yeah, and you couldn’t see it in the round eyes of any of those cows, their sorrow and their fear weren’t written all over their faces, which is why I went on looking, and then the parts appeared: the hunks hanging upside down, legs, necks, flayed feet, the horrible hunks of this cow, ribs, hooves, and I kept looking in spite of it all, in spite of the disgust and the fear I kept observing that eye, cos the cow and I had seen similar things, that’s what I thought as I touched the white-grey sclera and its reddish constellations, its skeletal veins and iris scored with scars, and then I raised my eyes and saw Iquela sort of hypnotised, clutching the scalpel and carefully extracting the lens, telling me to touch the optic nerve, see what it feels like, she was saying, and then, first making sure no one could see her, she removed her gloves to touch the soft part and sniff her fingers, Iquela did that, I saw her, she sniffed her fingers and then sucked them one after the other while I looked around and removed the cornea and I took it, I did that and nobody saw me, and the teacher gave us a four out of ten for being messy, and that night, when Consuelo and the living-dead man had gone to sleep, I slipped into Iquela’s room and showed her the cornea, look what I’ve brought you, Ique, it’s ours, for both of us, so we always see the same things, even if we’re far away, half for you and half for me, I said holding it out like treasure in my hand, but she said, no way, José, that’s gross, because Iquela only has one set of brown eyes, eyes made for seeing her mum, her mummy, her mummakins, and she says that it’s written all over my face, ha! I’m the only one who does anything useful around here, indispensable things like finding dead people and subtracting them, how can my sorrow be written all over my face with all these eyes, because everyone knows that you grieve through the eyes and I’ve got hundreds, millions of them, cos even though Iquela didn’t want her share of the cornea, I didn’t care and I trundled off to the bathroom alone, locked the door, took out the cornea and placed that soft mulch on the tip of my tongue, that’s what I did, because I wanted to see what was inside me, because I couldn’t feel anything, no, and you keep your feelings on the inside, which is why I stuck out my tongue with the cornea and I looked at myself for a while in the mirror, and from the tip of my tongue I saw half my face and half of everything I’d ever seen: stray, hungry pups and every one of my decapitated flowers, the petals, the sepals and the stamens strewn on the ground, the chickens coming back to life, and hundreds of bones at the bottoms of black pits; I saw long-tailed meadowlarks, giant crunchy nalcas, and all my unfinished subtractions, and my Gran Elsa and Don Francisco and my mother dying again, and also my dad, but not whole, no, there were his parts, parts, parts, and I’ve never liked the parts, which is why in the end I swallowed it, just like that, without so much as a swig of water, and the cornea was salty and as it slipped down my throat I saw all those new landscapes inside me; I saw the soft walls I was made up of as the thing made its way sadly along the thick wet bends of my body, travelling through my pink waters, and I saw poo and blood clots and tattered muscles, and I also saw lost ideas, night-time ideas cowering from the day; and then came the black and everything dissolved, because the cornea was pulverised and turned into millions of particles floating in my blood, and each of those particles snuck into my pores and that’s how the eyes in my skin came about, and that’s why I see them, cos I have a completely different perspective, in each pore a minuscule eye born of that cornea, and given how many there are I can spot dead bodies wherever they are, and here in this town there are none, no, the only thing here in Mendoza is air, so much air that I’m choking, so much air that all I want to do is smoke, smoke a spliff and for its fumes to make me disappear, to take a drag and vanish whole, to breathe in and not feel the oxygen, because there’s way too much oxygen here, yeah, way too much air.
( )
It happened not long after we buried my father, back when I would spend entire afternoons glued to my bedroom window telling people, perfectly calmly, that I felt fine, absolutely fine. Felipe and I went to the same school that winter and at the end of one break time, a few minutes before the bell called us back to class, he froze on the spot in silence, his eyes fixed on some kids playing a few metres away from us. It was his idea and he wouldn’t shut up about it.
‘Let’s collect scabs, Ique. We need to give the other pain a break. Choose one of them, Ique, any one,’ he said, pointing to a group of girls skipping together. ‘Choose one and sock it to her,’ he went on, aiming his hand like a gun at a fat, red-headed kid who was in goal and sweating profusely. ‘Smash her nose in, Ique. Pull her eyes out of her sockets. Stick pins under her nails. Clench your fist, close your mind and just punch. And don’t worry,’ he whispered in my ear, hammering home each syllable, ‘self-defence is a reflex and they’re definitely going to hit you harder.’
I told him I wasn’t interested in fighting. I didn’t know how to punch, and besides, I felt fine (nothing, I felt nothing). But there was no dissuading him. Felipe looked straight through me as if seeing me for the first and last time, like a stranger, and he didn’t utter another word. Gathering himself and shutting those eyes (shutting his mouth, shutting himself off entirely) he shoved me with all his weight, and the next thing I felt was the ground under my body. My head hit the concrete and my hands scraped the gritty asphalt. I heard the dull thump of my back against the ground. I opened my eyes. The excited faces of dozens of children were arranged in a circle around me: the redhead was crying with laughter; three older kids were pointing at me. I saw lots of tiny teeth, some stained, and heard shouts that sounded like they were coming from a fight near me, no, over me, across my body, because Felipe had thrown himself on top of me and, still staring through me with those blank eyes of his, he hit me like nobody has ever hit me before. He pulled my hair with all his might. He kneed me in the stomach. He drove his fist right into my chest. Only after a few seconds did my instincts start to kick in. I struggled desperately to free myself, to make him unclench his fists and release his knee lock, and when at last I was able to wriggle out from beneath him, I took a deep breath (dirt, snot, fear), I took a deep, deep breath, turned around and using every ounce of strength I had (a dangerous strength I hadn’t known I had), I hauled myself on top of him, pinned him down and with my eyes open, not thinking about what I was doing but moving exactly as he’d told me, swiftly and sharply, I hit him as you could only hit someone you really love. Now I was pulling his hair and scratching his arms. I sunk my nails into his face, buried my knees into his groin and my teeth into his shoulder. I hit him until I felt nothing but a sharp pain and a sticky dampness on the palms of my hands and all over my hot, mucky face. He didn’t move once. It wasn’t true what he’d told me: self-defence isn’t a reflex. Felipe remained still with his eyes open, enjoying it, as if by receiving my punches and spits he felt less alone. Cradled in my rage, covered in dirt and blood and breathing very slowly, Felipe just smiled. Nobody separated us. It was purely the exhaustion, after so much, that forced me to stop and slump down at his side. My knuckles were burning and I felt an uncontainable burst of sadness. We never spoke of our fight, but something was sealed in that moment, in the long pause in which he and I caught our breath as the other kids moved away, disappointed, and the branches of some reddish trees swayed in the breeze above us.
And there, cooped up in the hearse, in that hearse that had become our roving home, on that simulacrum of a search that had brought us together again, one last time, lying in wait for that dead woman, accelerating to escape the terrible blue sky and listening to the distant rustle of leaves, I was struck down by a very
similar feeling of vertigo.
As we approached the cargo area at the airport, after a morning spent in silence, feigning a truce, I spotted a man guarding the entry to the runway. He was wearing orange high-vis overalls, a black beanie hat and enormous headphones to protect him from the noise of the turbines. He was waiting in a cabin next to a metal barrier, which he raised to let through a tanker and then closed again the moment he saw us heading that way. A sign warned us that it wouldn’t be an easy job persuading him: RESTRICTED AREA. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. Felipe stopped the car and Paloma asked me to speak to the man; she was too wound up, and, after all, it had been my idea to come to the airport.
The man looked me up and down, a look that forced me to search for some kind of sign (a raw word stuck to my mouth), and he didn’t bother greeting me. Acting as naturally as I could, albeit with a forced grin, I asked him where we could find the cargo from the cancelled flights (it seemed better to say ‘cargo’ than ‘remains’, ‘cadaver’, ‘dead woman’, ‘Ingrid’). He didn’t say anything for a long time and I kept talking to fill the awkward silence, telling him that this situation with the ash demanded an urgent response and that the daughter had travelled from Germany, no less. He rubbed his chin and frowned.
‘What situation?’ he shouted over the roar of nearby engines.
‘The ash in Chile,’ I replied, raising my voice (an inaudible voice).
‘Say again?’ And from the pocket of his overalls he removed a packet of cigarettes, lit one and let himself be engulfed in a large cloud of smoke, which was nothing for those of us who’d come from the other side of the cordillera. I insisted we’d travelled all that way precisely for this reason, to pick up the remains of a woman.
The Remainder Page 12