‘Ingrid …’ I said, surprised at my block, my blank, which Paloma took no time to fill.
‘Ingrid Aguirre,’ she said leaning out of the hearse window.
Aguirre.
Until that moment she hadn’t had a surname. All those stories were either about Rodolfo, Consuelo, Ingrid, Hans or all those other names: Víctor, Claudia, those doubles of our parents from back before they were parents. Rootless names with no antecedents or surnames, which made them feel fictional, lent them a certain lightness that allowed me to believe, if only for a second, that the whole thing had been one big lie. Only characters from novels had just a first name. A Víctor or a Claudia alone couldn’t exist. Ingrid Aguirre, on the other hand, really had died.
The security guard’s face was scaring me. I was afraid he would tell us where she was, or that he would point to a coffin in the middle of the runway (an errant coffin doing the rounds in the empty hangars). I was afraid of finding her and having to go back to Chile, where I’d tell my mother that I had her friend, her comrade, her Ingrid Aguirre. The man raised his right arm (and I thought his finger was pointing somewhere, to the end of our search).
‘Papers,’ he said, holding out his palm to Paloma, who was leaning half her body over Felipe. ‘Did you bring the form?’
And then I remembered the established procedure, the normal channels, the rules about repatriating the mortal remains of a deceased person. We didn’t have any papers, and no papers meant no body.
‘I can’t give you any information,’ the man said before closing his open hand and the barrier that would have given us access.
‘Oh, that’s all I needed,’ Felipe snapped, before hitting the steering wheel.
‘Scheiße,’ Paloma said.
I did my best to hide my relief and suggested we return to the city as soon as possible. It made no sense to harass the guard, who by now was shooing us away with his hand, telling us to clear the entrance.
We drove back to the centre of town and wandered around Mendoza, unsure what to do next. People were out walking their dogs, walking their children, walking their dogs and their children (with no ash or dead mothers or mothers who wouldn’t answer the phone). Everything appeared suspiciously normal, though Felipe still wasn’t talking to me and Paloma had that doleful look again. She seemed dejected, wrapped in the grief that kept swinging her back and forth between disbelief and despair. Perhaps by this point she was regretting having travelled to Chile instead of burying Ingrid in Berlin, in a cemetery where her surname was unique, where it would be easy to spot her tombstone among the others. Or perhaps she was regretting not having cremated her and brought her ashes back to Chile on the plane. Who knows. Ash on top of ashes would have been too much.
I seemed to be the only one capable of enjoying that stroll. We would spend at least one more day in Mendoza (one more day with no phones, no pouring ash, no eight and a half blocks to cover), so I moved cheerfully from one street to the next, marvelling aloud at the width of the pavements, so wide for such a small city, and commenting on the buses, the turtle doves, the poplars, the shops. But there was no distracting Paloma. Even when I went in to give her a hug I got nothing more than a discouraging stiff smile in return.
We were entering San Martín Park, through two huge monumental doors, when I decided to give it one last shot. Moving right next to Paloma, I told her in a concerned voice that maybe her mother had been mislaid, that maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t be able to bury her in Santiago after all and that we should wait for the bad weather to pass before carrying on the search. Paloma picked up her step, leaving me trailing metres behind (and I counted three sparrows taking flight from a gnarled old cypress). Only as evening began to fall, after more than an hour spent wandering around the park, did Felipe break his ridiculous vow of silence from the night before to suggest that we find a bar.
‘No time to waste, I say,’ he said, ‘And besides, the air here is weird. Can’t you feel it?’ and he flapped away some non-existent insects with his hand.
‘There’s too much of it,’ I replied, and he nodded.
‘Too much air, that’s it,’ and he walked off in the direction of a woman who was smoking near the park’s exit. Her lips were painted dark red and appeared almost black in the darkness, making her look sullen, and her mouth seemed to come unstuck from her face with every puff on her cigarette (and her lips remained imprinted on the filter: woman with mouth, woman without mouth). Felipe asked her for a cigarette, but not even his winning smile could do the trick. She refused and pointed towards a door where, she said, ‘we could buy anything we could possibly want’.
The wooden door led us to a second door, this time made of tin, which was dented at foot level, clearly having received its fair share of kicks. On the other side, tucked away, was a dingy underground bar that reeked of sweet and sour, beer-soaked floor, and where it felt like three in the morning.
The barman bombarded us with questions as he made our drinks. He took a bottle off the half-empty shelf behind him and, without even looking at the glass, he poured out perfect measures of whisky by heart and asked us if we were Chilean, what we were doing, where our boyfriends and girlfriends were, such a good-looking bunch, what a waste.
Paloma was quick to point out that she was German and didn’t add much else. Instead, she wandered off in the direction of a pool table and gestured at me to follow her. We drank our first whisky there while deciding whether to play a game or simply watch Felipe, who had now draped half his body over the bar and was in deep conversation with the barman. They had to shout to hear one another, and they laughed as the man passed Felipe an array of bottles, which he sniffed suspiciously. At one point they shook hands and the man handed him a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of aguardiente. Felipe served himself a glass, refilled it twice more and then made a beeline for Paloma, offering her the bottle directly to her mouth.
‘This tune’s dedicated to you,’ he said, removing the camera, which I hadn’t even noticed, from around her neck.
I recognised the drums, and I noticed a woman was watching us from afar. I remembered her black nails, which she now was tapping on the bar, and I waved at her and smiled. She was looking through me, at something behind me: a very pale and thoughtful Felipe was over-egging his drunken state and crooning, or rather wailing, along to the song and playing with the zoom on Paloma’s camera. He came over to me and bellowed in my ear as if all the voices in his head had woken up and he was trying, unsuccessfully, to impose his own. I don’t remember what he said, just his hands holding my face, drawing it in towards his, pulling me towards him and the blaring music drowning out his words despite his mouth moving right in front me. I guessed he was talking about our argument, but that didn’t matter any more.
‘Forget it, Felipe,’ I shouted, recoiling from his cold hands and taking two swigs of aguardiente. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, and I watched as the woman with the black nails approached us and draped her body all over Felipe, rubbing up against him and then taking Paloma’s hand to whisper a word in her ear. Paloma was dancing with her eyes closed in the middle of the bar, her arms raised high and her hips swaying. I went up to her with more enthusiasm than I felt, trying to get into it by following her lead, but it was useless. She was dancing out of time, following a secret, internal rhythm completely at odds with the music. The woman went back to the bar and I felt Paloma’s hand grab my wrist and watched her take Felipe’s arm, pulling us both towards her. We left the main room and headed down a corridor. Paloma locked the door behind us and switched on the bright lights (interrogation lights).
The song faded into the background and we found ourselves huddled together in a cramped toilet, the smell thick and bodily, paper spilling over the bin, wallpaper plastered in graffiti, shit marks in a toilet with no seat and a maddening dripping sound. Paloma said she had a surprise for us (‘just a little one,’ she said, making light of it) and with a wicked glint in her eyes she opened her rucksack slowly and pull
ed out a round wad: a navy ball of thick socks. Felipe and I exchanged glances. Paloma was lapping up the attention, a wide smile spreading across her face to reveal some tiny teeth, as well as the silver barbell in the middle of her tongue.
She took that blue ball and unpeeled it very carefully, ceremoniously, standing before us as if we were about to behold the miracle of the five thousand. Finally, deep down in the centre of the ball, a silvery object appeared: a tiny, doll-sized bottle.
‘Well, what do we have here?’ Felipe asked, snatching the bottle from her hands and swilling it around so that its contents formed a vortex like an enormous tornado.
‘One of my mum’s potions, for her cancer,’ Paloma replied, but I heard something else. I didn’t hear ‘potions’, I heard ‘poisons’, ‘one of my mum’s poisons’, and the bottle remained firmly in Felipe’s hand, the liquid a mad whirlpool.
Felipe asked Paloma what kind of potion it was, what kind of drug, what did it do. He was trying to decipher the German on the label, with its red circle crossed out, its health warning. Paloma didn’t answer. She looked at me smugly, squinting her eyes as she had done all those years earlier, and then took the bottle back off Felipe, held it up, toasted the air and without even pulling a face, she drank more than a third of the liquid.
‘Prost,’ she said.
One of her mum’s potions. A poison she’d brought with her in an attempt to get rid of everything, to make sure she was left with no trace of her mother. Or maybe she’d stolen it before Ingrid died, to drink a toast, to cure herself. Felipe snatched the little bottle back out of her hands, closed his eyes, took two sips and passed it to me. The liquid inside the bottle was still whirling around. I held it to my nose (an innocuous smell), and without a second thought I downed what was left. The dregs, the remains, that’s what I took: the sweet remains with a bitter aftertaste, so bitter it stripped the inside of my mouth and made me clench my eyes together.
Nothing for the first few seconds. Everything existed in perfect balance. I asked Paloma what kind of cancer her mum had died of.
‘You’re about to find out,’ she replied, but now another person entirely was speaking, a voice wrapped in cotton wool. ‘Hold on a minute and you’ll see what kind of cancer it was.’
A second went by, and another, and another. I read the scribbles on the wall. Pequi, I luv you. What r u lookin at? Get the fuck outta here. I wanted to know the exact illness in order to guess at the remedy: what did you take to cure confused, upset cells? I wanted to know what Paloma wanted to cure us from. Get the fuck outta here. What did you take to offset those invasive cells? What r u looking at? Then, all of a sudden, something happened to the walls, to the smell, to the brightness of the light.
The tips of my fingers. The same sensation as those mornings when certain parts of my body don’t want to wake up and stay numb. My fingertips, hands, wrists, all numb. A faint dizziness. My arms, then my neck and chest. My entire body was withdrawing, coming away from me, or perhaps I was the one abandoning my body in order to float a few centimetres above it.
‘Nice, eh?’
A warm current heating me up, erasing me.
‘Oh you’ve really outdone yourself, blondie.’
My blood slower and thicker, the colours brighter. The colours.
‘Take a look at those colours, Fräulein. She must have had cancer of the everything.’
(Cancer of the eyelids, the eardrums, the nails.)
I told Paloma I wasn’t feeling anything, but when I spoke I heard another voice coming out of me. She remained silent, her freckles blue, her yellow eyes saying incomprehensible things, letters hanging on the walls, hanging from the threads of a language I wasn’t taking in, or rather couldn’t, because I didn’t understand it. Nor could I read all the messages being shouted by the walls. Everything was a blur; those walls were spying on me and I myself was as light as vapour. I couldn’t count the objects around me. My thoughts were slipping away from me. Not feeling a thing: the remedy for that illness.
Felipe went to turn out the light but Paloma stopped him. I thought I heard her say, ‘Let’s watch the fire’, but I couldn’t be sure. She came over to me, took my hand, held it up to her face and slipped two of my fingers in her mouth. I should have felt her soft tongue, the slippery steel of the barbell buried there, but what I felt was the opposite: her fingers inside my mouth, that screw driving into my tongue. She moved in slow motion, touching my arms and hands that seemed no longer to belong to me, all the while staring at me with a neutral expression, freckles dotted all over her forehead. Felipe was muttering unintelligible commentaries, something about how good the water was, the dry water, he said before falling quiet again, also coming over to me, where he took me by the back of my neck and kissed me. I thought I felt the graze of his moustache, the tension of his lips against mine, or maybe it was something else. Maybe he kissed Paloma and that kiss landed on my lips, or it was the swirling lights that kissed me, kissed and obliterated me (swirls of lights that lit me up, that set me alight).
‘Look at me,’ Felipe said then and I looked up and saw his arms and hands shaking, about to shatter into a million splinters. ‘Look at me,’ he repeated, out of himself and shaking. He wasn’t speaking to me or Paloma. ‘Look at me,’ he screamed, and I realised he was talking to the mirror. ‘Look at me, for fuck’s sake. Written all over my face, is it?’
Paloma went over to him as if the order had been directed at her. She appeared in the reflection, but without her eyes; she aimed and pushed the button on the camera, the only solid object now in that toilet, making the same sound over and over. Click. Click. Click. (Three wasted seconds.) Click. Click. Click. And Felipe went on spitting the same order at his own reflection.
‘Look at me.’
I floated towards that mirror until his face appeared. His two eyes weren’t quite in line, his eyebrows were arched and black, and his dark skin was flaky around the nose, that aquiline nose that was ever so slightly too big for his face. His pupils were dilated, couched within his glassy, slanting eyes, and his skin was incredibly firm and soft, with no beard or moustache. That’s what I saw. Not a trace of that new moustache on his face. Because it wasn’t Felipe’s adult face that I saw looking back at him from the mirror; it was his pinker, rounder face, his childhood face. That’s what I saw and I was scared. I couldn’t feel it in my stomach, but I could sense my fear. Nonetheless, I put it to one side and carried on moving in, desperate to see myself, convinced that I would find myself locked inside that mirror: my taut black mane, my drowsy eyes, my sad eyes observing me from the other side of the mirror. And, despite my fear, I moved in closer still. I moved in until I was standing directly in front of the mirror. I stopped right next to Felipe and with my heart pounding in my chest, with my mouth dry and hands clenched, I opened my eyes (I longed to count myself, take stock of myself, to reinvent myself).
But I wasn’t there.
There was nobody looking back at me.
2
Dipping my tongue into a delicious juice and feeling it turn to scalding water, sandpaper water, lava water, bad water blazing in my mouth, and it chafes like a stubbly beard, like a thousand thorns, a rough mouth which my tongue glides across, my tongue bleeding as I burn up, set myself on fire with the liquid that looks cold but it burns; you can’t tell, but it burns as it runs down my throat, my windpipe, as harsh as the lights in here, as the splintered rays pricking my eyes, poking my eyes with their long needles, following me out of the bathroom: piss off, leave me alone, and I look at Iquela but she doesn’t see me, she doesn’t see me cos her eyes have dropped to the sky and from there I can’t pin them to their sockets, eyes popped out of their sockets with no pins to hold them in place and so they float and I float, I levitate with the white liquid and rise up towards the light, yeah, the square of light shining above the bar, the light showing ash over Santiago, would you look at Plaza Italia, what a mess, and the lens is dirty and the zoom goes in and o
ut and in again and turns black, because someone switches off the TV, and I switch off too and then the music starts, a shrill song, harsh on the ears, harsh as angles, shrill as those howling dogs, shrill and harsh like the wailing of the ambulance and all those midday thoughts, and the big day is approaching because that dead man was thirty-one, yeah, but there are no dead here and I’m thirsty, that’s the only thing I do have, a reddish thirst, which is why I want more of that bitter liquid, that healing elixir, give me more, Paloma, where are you? don’t be a drag, but the German isn’t here, the German who wanted to cure us has gone again and left me without a drop of antidote, just the little bottle, round and empty, which held the remedy that swirled in a whirlpool, the kind of whirlpool I like because they don’t stop, I hate things that stop, I like the never-ending stories, the enduring stories, yeah, like the rubber trees and weeping figs and the whirlpools of the Mapocho, though in fact the Mapocho doesn’t have any whirlpools, because you can’t even make out the banks or the start of the water, and cos no one wants to take that river seriously, no one except me, I want to stir it up till I’ve made a tornado to twizzle and twirl above a giant cup, all the water in the Mapocho falling in a waterfall I swirl around and around and then drink, boom, I drink the liquid with the corollas and the puppy-eyed mongrels, their dark watery eyes looking up at me and their paws scratching my face, eh, Chileno, you alright there? and I can’t feel my skin or my osso buco bones, just splinters and my chapped lips, hey, give that kid a glass of water, he’s as pale as a ghost, and my throat disappears, and then my windpipe then my stomach and I can’t feel my balls or my thighs, and then my black thoughts and my calculations vanish too, tell that Chileno kid to come over to the bar, here, come on, come on, take a seat, cos I’m drowning in the whirl of dirty water and I’m cured, yeah, and my thoughts turn soft like pink bubblegum, my thoughts stretch and mould to my skull, which is tingling, there’s ants all over the place, bloody hell, everything’s crawling, the whole planet’s shaking because I can’t feel a thing, not the whole or the parts, I can’t feel what’s real or what’s fake, I can’t feel anything and I’m off my head, yeah, cos the German’s potion has taken me to a higher plane and my eyelids are curtains, and inside my black ideas light up, but I want to hide them cos there’s a man at the bar, yeah, a man with ants crawling over his arms and on his top lip, and those black black ants are freaking me out, you OK, Chileno?, and the ants dance and the voices are splinters and the words are buried deep inside my pupils where they clash with my black thoughts sending sparks flying, and I cover my eyes with my hands to hide them and to hide myself and then they explode, yeah, my eyes explode into hundreds and thousands of skies, take a deep breath, that’s it, breathe, Chileno, but I don’t want to breathe, I want to scream, howl as loudly as I can, but my voice has gone, I can’t find it, it’s hiding in the shadow of my tonsils, and it’s blended in with those stupid black night thoughts, fuck, what’s up, I can’t see, I’m off my head, and the water in the glass they bring me is thick and dry and the man touches me, he touches my shoulder and it reappears, deep breath, that’s it, my shoulder is back, it exists, and so do the other parts of my body, and the air is a saw cleaving me, opening me up, thaaat’s it, keep drinking water, Chileno, and the guy looks at me and I draw back the curtains of the hundreds of eyes all over me and I know him, I know I’ve seen this man, yeah, and I take a deep breath and the water is sweet now, sweet and dry and the man is smiling, better, Chileno? you’ve lost that dead-man-walking look you had going there for a while, and his teeth are glow-worms that have gone out, and everything in me goes out, looks like they’ve left you on your lonesome, and it’s true, they’ve left me lonelier than a ghost, cos Iquela isn’t here and the German’s on another planet, she’s lucky to have made it to Santiago at all, how’d you get along with that cargo you were after? and the Argentinian is asking me about some kind of cargo and I don’t know what he means, you know, don’t play dumb, and I shrug my shoulders, cos I’ve got shoulders again, and I furrow my brow, cos I have a brow, and behind it there are thoughts and those thoughts are orange, orange thoughts, orange, orange, orange overalls man from the airport, yeah! I see him and I know it’s him, it’s the guard in front of me, the guard from the barrier, yeah, and the black ants go crazy cos I recognise them, I see them under that hooked nose, I’ve identified them and they no longer scare me, and he asks if I found what I was looking for in the airport and now I know he’s referring to the stiff, to the fugitive, to that stubborn corpse, another round? and this new liquid is made of gold and the dead lady isn’t here, the deceased isn’t here and I have to subtract her, I listen, and I know I’m the one talking, it’s my voice speaking, it’s had enough of playing hide-and-seek, it’s rebelling against the potion, the cure, it comes back to say subtract her, subtract her, I repeat, and the man is talking fast but I don’t hear him, cos it’s his eyelashes and his nostrils speaking to me, he’s speaking from his orange overalls, from his skin and red bones, he’s speaking to me because the ants are scrambling all over his lips, they’re saying sure, Chileno, go and look, people should be buried where they belong, he says, and the glass of gold liquid is suddenly full of black ants, and we sure have our fair share of dead here, he says, too-too-ma-ny, but I can’t be sure if he says this or nothing at all, if he’s telling me to look for her tomorrow, early in the morning, hangar number seven, Chileno, will you remember? and I repeat seven, seven, seven, hangar number seven, yeah, but I say it in my head because it’s gone again, my voice has gone walkabout, crouching in among the hundreds of eyes on my skin and the millions of black ideas, my voice hiding inside my bones and I feel a terrible chill run through me, like a rock-hard river rushing up me from the soles of my feet, a surge of cement rising up from my heels, a tidal wave that numbs my calves and knees and thighs and balls, and the cement climbs up to my stomach and freezes my chest and turns my neck stiff and makes me clench my teeth to stop myself from vomiting, you feeling alright, Chileno?, and I just vomit, yeah, vomit till there’s nothing left, till there’s no thirty-year-old dead man left, no body, no corpse, no stiff, yeah, till there’s no whisky or wine or water, till there are no potions or white liquids, no saliva, no bile or blood, till there are no more corpses or ash, or bars with razor-sharp saws floating around; throw up and purge myself of days as red as my vomit, red like lava should be, the lava that isn’t here, that’s never been here, because we don’t know where it comes from, this bitter, hot liquid, this sharp liquid rising, climbing and crashing against the white bowl of the toilet, or how the hell I got to the toilet or where the hell I am, shit, I just want to sleep, yeah, sleep and wake up without any dead without any rivers without eyes without voices without.
The Remainder Page 13