There were dozens of them. No. Many more than that. Hundreds of coffins waiting, one on top of the other and stacked together in endless rows, in coffin-lined aisles: an immense labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling plastic coffins, coffins protected in cardboard, small wooden coffins, big wooden coffins, wide and slim, dark and pale. Dozens of perfectly parallel aisles. Hundreds of dead men and women wanting to return, to go back for good, to be repatriated (and I tried to make a quick list, an improvised inventory of corpses: fifteen in pine coffins, twenty boxed in chipboard, eight in their poorly varnished caskets).
‘Incredible,’ Felipe whispered after a long silence. ‘Just incredible,’ he repeated, and his voice seemed to claw its way up from the deepest part of him, from faraway, from before, from an imprecise and dark place, a dusty voice that had waited patiently to come back and had been kept especially for that moment. A voice identical to the one I’d heard years before.
‘Incredible,’ he’d said that day as we hid in the blackberry bushes in Chinquihue, on the one and only trip my mother and I made down south, when his Grandma Elsa asked us to go and collect him so he could stay with us that winter; all of a sudden the grief had become too much for her.
‘Come quickly and get him.’
He and I were kneeling behind the branches and from there, from down on the ground, we spied on them. His grandma was looking at my mother with her tiny eyes, her eyelids thick like bandages. My mother, on the other hand, wasn’t looking at his Grandma Elsa; she was staring towards the sky, as we were. Because what was suspended up there in the air was beyond belief: a little lamb hanging upside down from the branch of an oak tree. A soft, squidgy fruit, just about to break away and fall. Felipe and I looked on, shielded by the blackberries. We watched the blade of the knife slice through the neck of that animal. We watched the blood fall in a sticky stream and then gradually slow into a trickle of thick, shiny drops.
‘Incredible,’ Felipe said agog, while that mucky white cloud spilt its innards, spewing out a pitcher’s worth of red, which filled a saucepan containing coriander and merquén.
‘Patience,’ his Grandma Elsa said to my mother, shaking the pan to spread out the liquid. ‘Patience, Consuelo, you have to wait for the blood to congeal, wait a second.’
Because the blood then congealed and changed. It transformed into a different, darker substance, a new material which his grandma cut into soft slices to dissolve in their red mouths.
‘Incredible,’ Felipe repeated as if he were presiding over a miracle, while I looked at that little animal and then at him, wanting to cover his eyes, to hug him and tell him to close them tight. Felipe, don’t look, don’t listen, don’t say a word, just shut everything, I’m going to be your great-great-great-grandmother and your grandma; I’m going to be your dad. But I found I couldn’t promise him anything. All I could do was listen to that word which had returned now, in the hangar.
‘Incredible.’
Paloma didn’t or perhaps couldn’t say a word, but she walked off with intent, as if she’d given herself an order: move. She took a deep breath, held in the air and made off towards the first row of coffins, as methodical as ever. Felipe started from the second row.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They’re so tidy, so ordered, Iquela. And there are so, so many of them.’ His voice faded into a distant hum and soon they both disappeared.
I drifted in and out of the aisles muttering the same two words, ‘Ingrid Aguirre, Ingrid Aguirre,’ as if with that name I could fix something irredeemably broken: my father’s mistake (Rodolfo’s, Víctor’s), Ingrid’s death (or Elsa’s or Claudia’s or the deaths of their doubles or aliases), delivering that corpse as if it were an offering that would finally set me free. I inspected every single row keenly, convinced that this was it, my chance to find her and do something important, something vital, something key. Something I could own. As if I myself had designed that maze and only I knew how to get out of it, I combed those coffins with extraordinary calm.
I paced up and down those rows like you might browse aisles of books in a vast library, trying to extricate some kind of logic: alphabetical, chronological, thematic (the dead organised by cause of death, ideology, height; corpses classified according to their eagerness to return, or their degree of nostalgia). I wandered among dozens of numbers and names, familiar surnames and unknown origins: Caterina Antonia Baeza Ramos, 1945, Stockholm-Panitao, Jorge Alberto Reyes Astorga, 1951, Montreal-Andacollo, María Belén Sáez Valenzuela, 1939, Caracas-Castro, Juan Camilo García García, 1946, Managua-Valdivia, Miguel, Federica, Elisa, 1963, 1948, 1960, Til-Til, Arica, San Antonio, Curicó, Santiago, Santiago, Santiago.
By the sixth or seventh row, having covered what felt like a hundred countries and every province of Chile, right in the middle of a very long aisle, with two coffins on the bottom row and one propped on top, her name appeared to me: Ingrid Aguirre Azocar, 1953, Berlin-Santiago. I stopped in front of her. The label was written in blue ink and with a careful hand (words that were identical in Spanish and German: mirror-words). The label was stuck carefully to the plastic, and that plastic covered the wood, which held the body which didn’t hold anything (or perhaps grief, resentment, boundless nostalgia).
I touched the paper and reread each one of those words (until they dissolved into syllables, and the syllables into letters, and the letters into indecipherable dashes; a blue stain, merely a doodle). I stood there before that piece of paper, a simple label, easily peeled off and slipped inside my pocket, a note that I could erase just like that, prolonging Paloma’s search for years, for the rest of her days, in that way offering her a cause. She would never have to go looking for anything else because her fate would be tied to the story of her lost mother (and our parents and all the things they had ever lost). I considered removing that piece of paper and replacing it with another one: any old name and surname, a code name, perhaps (Víctor, Claudia, an arsenal of embodied names). And then I imagined how I would lie to Paloma’s face; she would have to go on searching for her mother for the rest of her days, I was so, so sorry. I could effectively bring Paloma’s life to a standstill right there and then, erase Ingrid and pick up the telephone straight away, call my mother and tell her that she’d lost her friend for a second time, that I wasn’t even capable of doing something as simple as finding her.
I felt a fresh wave of deep unease, as if everything were burning, as if I could no longer sit comfortably in my own skin, as if there were nothing but voices and static and emptiness. Everything that followed was a blur. Not even aware of what I was doing, I withdrew my hand from the label and retreated until my back was resting against the opposite wall of coffins. My two hands formed fists and my nails dug into my palms, and there I stood for a moment, paralysed, unable to piece together a single thought. All the letters of my alphabet were frayed on the floor. Heavy, broken words abandoning me, leaving me terribly alone; alone and with a stupid urge to cry. But instead of crying I took a deep breath, held in that thick air (thick and spent, expired, used up) and let my voice burst out, breaking something inside of me.
‘I’ve found her.’
And I repeated those words lest I start to regret them.
‘I’ve found her.’
1
He might have told me, the man in the orange overalls, because it’s one thing to find a dead body and another to be met by a mountain of stiffs, all in little oblong houses, cos they don’t come in graves in the ground any more, they don’t store them in cold, clinical boxes, oh no, gone are the dead slung out on pavements and in parks, now they’re well and truly bourgeois, and that’s better, of course; far better for the dead to be in order, all set to cross the cordillera in their troops and have me take them away in handfuls, minus three, minus six, minus nine dead, first to subtract them and then to count each of their bones, yeah, though this number of bones is enough to make my head spin, there are just too many, and it’s annoying how many dead have come from Lis
bon and Catalonia, and even from Leningrad and Stalingrad, cos they’ve travelled all the way from the past, but they didn’t make it to Chile, no, that’s why I’d better slow down and take a deep breath, inhale and hold in the smell and the stillness, embalm the stillness in formaldehyde and only then return over the cordillera, with the Grim Reaper himself in tow, that’s it, and then, once back in Santiago, in the heart of the ash, I’ll pause for a moment, arch my back and exhale all that embalmed stillness, and with each exhalation I’ll sink my hands into a hole, a pit that I’m going to dig with my hard nails, cos I’m going to dig till the black earth hides the half-moons on my lunulae, my cuticles, my dog-claw nails, yeah, and with my four hairy paws and my pointy muzzle I’m going to dig, with my filthy claws I’m going to scrape away the ash until I’ve drawn a horizontal line, a long line that reads ‘minus’, yeah, and there, in that minus, I’m going to bury them, inter them, lower them carefully down into that bone-dry earth, my bone-dry earth, plant those bones and throw earth over them, cover them in dust and then watch them with my eyes, my hundreds of eyes rapt on seeing that mound of fertile earth, and then, when each one of my dead is in the ground, I’m going to re-dig the same hole and remove the earth to disinter them, exhume them one by one, lick them and hold a vigil for them again, every day and every night for the rest of my life, until there’s no ground left unstirred, until even the deserts, the ghost towns, the dirty beaches and apple groves have been ploughed, until I’ve made up for each one of those missing funerals, that’s what I should do, take all those bodies and bury them so at last the figures add up, the bodies and the tombs, the births and the burials, yeah, that’s my plan, but then I get distracted, Iquela’s talking to me, Iquela’s shouting that she’s found her, that’s what she says, I’ve found her, and I go over and I can’t believe it, cos no one ever finds anything unless they’re really looking and Iquela never actually wanted to find dead Ingrid, but all the same she’s shouting that she’s found her, and only then do I see her; there’s a coffin with a little sheet of paper with her name on it, and I close my eyes in horror and touch the wood with my sweaty palm, cos it was meant to be me who found her, Iquela, me, bloody hell, stop sticking your nose in where it’s not wanted, because dead Ingrid is mine, mine to subtract, for fuck’s sake, and her wood is smoother than all the rest, so smooth it makes me sick, yeah, because smooth things make me sick and the nausea knocks me for six and I back away and hide to hack up my disgust, I have to get rid of that rancid smell, that revolting smell of death, so I shrink behind the other coffins, I slip away to hide from the German and take out the secret sock, cos I kept this liquid for me, yeah, to erase me, to dissolve me, and so I shake it, raise a solitary toast and drink from the little bottle, I take two wet sips and the liquid slowly kills me, it kills the smell and the smoothness, it kills the fear and the numbers, the hate and the envy, and I take another swig and I feel myself levitating over my body and the German nabs me, though I can’t quite be sure if she’s seen me, because I’m disappearing piece by piece, slipping away and I go back to Iquela, standing with the famous Ingrid, I walk towards her, invisible, and I see her pushing the coffin, help me, Felipe, and I can’t understand a word of what she’s saying and I’m dizzy and cold and I don’t want warm vomit in my throat and that’s why I stop and hold it in, Felipe I’m talking to you, help me pull it over to the hearse, and I go over and rest my hands on the wood and the wood is smooth and I push it, that’s it, with all my animal might I push it but it doesn’t move, no, fuck she’s heavy that Ingrid, but I’m strong, yeah, I push the pain and the wood and the disgust too, I push it and the coffin at last starts to shift, yeah, and we pull and I use all my animal strength and I’m grunting and sweating and hundreds of eyes are watching me, thousands of them watching me through their wooden boxes, yeah, and you have your father’s eyes, my Gran Elsa says, just like your father, and it takes all I have to say, no, that’s a lie, and it’s my voice speaking and I don’t want to hear my damned voice any more, not one more bloody word from my mouth and that’s why I go quiet, cos I’ve got cow eyes, for fuck’s sake, I’ve got salty squidgy eyes and I don’t have the eyes of any father, my eyes are mine, mine, mine, I’m the son of the petals and of my great-great-great-grandmother, and of me, that’s what I am, my own son, and with my canine strength at last I drag her along, as if I were trying to cut through the earth, to plough a trench, yeah, and then the coffin falls to the ground with a bang and I catch my breath and push, further and further, and I push her up the ramp on the back of the hearse, all the way onto the rails, the General’s rails which should be cold, cos I’m cold and dead Ingrid must be cold though she’s now snug in the General, this hearse which has been filled as last, yeah, and I catch my breath and then I watch everything split in two, the whole warehouse splits down the middle, all thanks to the magical curing potion, and Iquela also splits in two, I see her in two pieces and I kiss my hand and blow her a loud, broken kiss, a great-great-great-grandson kiss, that’s it, ciao great-great-great-grandma, I call out silently, ciao, I tell her, I love you so much, so so much, and I dash into the hearse and start her up, and the General splutters and shudders, and I can see the German taking photos of all the dead, all these dead I leave behind without a second glance, cos the engine’s running and I step on it, I put my foot down because this body, dead Ingrid, she’s mine, and they can’t take that away from me, no, oh no, they can’t take that body away from me.
( )
It took a while for me to work out what had happened. The metal doors to the hangar were still lashing against the lintel and the hearse was speeding away across the airport tarmac when Paloma took me by the wrist, demanding an explanation.
‘I don’t believe this,’ she said. ‘She’s mine.’
The General disappeared into the horizon and it didn’t take long for Paloma’s surprise to turn to rage. It had to be a bad joke, or we were just trying to put the wind up her, or maybe Felipe and I had planned this whole sick game. Her voice sounded strange, childish, like she couldn’t control it, and I did my best to explain to her that I understood even less than she did what had just happened. Felipe had gone and this was merely his way of forcing me to catch up with him as soon as possible (to be his witness, his shadow).
An old image of Felipe (a dusty, almost obsolete image) suddenly came back to me, as if I’d buried it years earlier and it had now been dredged up to force me to think about it again: Felipe a few yards from me in the front garden, crouched down in front of the thick bars of the gate that separated us from the road, waving at me to get on my knees next to him, on our marks.
‘Ready, Iquela?’ he asks in his increasingly hostile voice, a voice that I had tried to forget so as to erase the whole memory (or at least not waste it).
‘You ready, Ique?’ he asks, slapping me on the back, daring me, goading me for the last time to see if I had it in me, if I was strong enough, if I was sure that I could do it. And I nodded mutely from the ground, my mouth dry, my saliva tangy, my teeth chattering away the fear, anticipating the pain, waiting for the instruction that would launch us into our race.
‘On your marks, get set, go! No cheating, Ique! No hands and no standing up. Only on your knees!’ Felipe cried, trying to gain ground and already through the gate, ahead of me. Only our knees were allowed to bear the brunt of that trail of rocks he himself had laid out along our race course. Because a few minutes earlier, Felipe had walked the length of the street with his pockets bursting with rocks, scattering them.
‘An assault course,’ he’d said, while I’d looked on in horror at the little stones strewn along the pavement; tiny shards of glass that glinted in the sun before digging into my skin, step by excruciating step, over and over again. Until finally I was forced to give in, stop and let Felipe speed ahead on his sacrificial race, his pilgrimage, the winner’s trophy encrusted in his knees. One lap around the block and then his triumphant return to our finishing line, the door to
my mother’s house, the woman herself peering down on us from the garden where she was watering the plants, making secret bets with herself as to who would win the race (drowning the lawn, the path, flooding my memory). Felipe arrived back to the house teetering on the edge of laughter and tears, panting, coughing, his nostrils flared and his face dripping with sweat, driven in a terrible state of agitation that only my mother could ease.
‘Go inside, Felipe. Dust off that dirt, clean your cuts with salt water, change your clothes and smarten up. It’s your turn to choose dinner, whatever you like.’ (Felipe had returned, repatriated himself on his knees.)
I’d let myself be carried away by that memory and was surprised to see it was getting dark as we left the hangar. The guard from the security cabin approached us inquisitively, looking for the hearse and trying to gauge with his eyes something he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Paloma stormed right up to him and bombarded him with questions. He seemed genuinely upset. Biting his lower lip, he shook his head and, after a long pause in which his eyebrows knitted together in one bushy line, he said he hadn’t known. He’d never imagined that the coffin belonged to her mother. He’d assumed that the relative (the child, the bereaved) was the young man. He explained, apologetically, that he’d bumped into Felipe at the bar the night before.
‘I was just having a few drinks when this kid staggers out of the bathroom, off his head drunk or high, what do I know, and he comes over looking for a fight. Obviously I thought he was a pain in the arse, but a piss-up beats a bust-up any day, so I offered him a drink.’ (A sip, two, the liquid swirling madly.) ‘And that’s what we were doing when the kid flips out, starts to shake and goes as pale as a ghost telling me that he’s lost someone important.’
The Remainder Page 15