Paloma glared at him, as if he’d taken something very precious from her.
‘Felipe, that was his name,’ the guard said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his overalls. ‘The kid had lost someone called Felipe. I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying at first, but after a while I knew it had to be someone important,’ he went on, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag as if all the world’s air were contained in its filter. ‘Don’t think I ever saw a kid that desolate. He was reeling.’
The guard exhaled, hiding his face behind the cloud of smoke.
‘He said it had been a horrible death.’ (Drowned in the river, hanged from electrical cables, choked on ash.) ‘The poor kid was mumbling something about dying being horrible, horrible, and he told me to avoid it at all costs, that no way was he going to die, and that comment seemed a bit odd to me, but the worst thing was what he told me about some empty tombs and some sort of count, or countdown, subtraction, he called it, but then what do I know?’ (Nothing, he knew absolutely nothing.)
Paloma listened in silence, her eyes popping out of their sockets. I didn’t interrupt him either. A plane flew overhead, towards an imprecise point in the sky, and the guard filled the time it took for that din to fade by offering Paloma a cigarette.
‘It’s my last one, sorry,’ he said to me, striking a match to light it.
They smoked in sync, an excruciating break in the story’s action, a pause filled only by the blast of turbines. And then the guard picked up where he’d left off.
‘That’s why I left the hangar unlocked. I told the kid about those coffins and I told him he could find them in number seven,’ he said, pointing back to the doors. ‘Long story short, he was going to do me a favour in return. The thing is, those coffins have been left there for days. It looked like no one was coming to claim them, and us lot working here are stuck with the stench, this stench of shit, pardon the expression,’ he added to Paloma, flaring his nostrils. ‘It’s stomach-turning and I don’t know what to do. The powers that be don’t know what to do. No one seems to want to claim responsibility for them. I mean, what are we meant to do with all those bodies?’
The man dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out with his shoe and, without taking his eyes off the ground (the glowing tip now mere ash), he asked Paloma to forgive him.
‘It never occurred to me that it wasn’t the kid’s coffin. Who would go around like that, like a crazy person, looking for someone else’s corpse? Although, I suppose, what does it matter whose dead they are, right? That’s not the issue,’ he went on, frowning. ‘No, the issue is something else entirely,’ he added, now more sure of himself. ‘When it comes to the dead we’ve got to help each other out. There are just too many of them.’
The guard headed in the direction of the hangar, took the metal chain, locked the doors and reluctantly offered to drive us back into town. He said that in Mendoza we could rent a car to get back to Santiago and that with any luck we’d catch up with Felipe along the way; that’s all he could do for us, the rest fell outside his remit (or really, the remains did). Without consulting me, Paloma accepted his offer. I had nothing to add, in any case. I was distracted by another plane taking off and the invasive echo of my thoughts. Maybe we should do something about all those coffins; maybe each one of those piled-up caskets and the endless list of names and surnames – the whole hangar, even – was somehow also mine (like the ash and the unavoidable cordillera).
I gazed up at the setting sun, at a complete loss as to what to say. And there, standing before the runway, imagining that never-ending road, as drawn out as our search had been, I foresaw everything that was going to happen: just like before, the two trails of blood emblazoned on the pavement marking out the least painful route, the one Felipe had already cleared; just like before, my body collapsing to my knees and my mother’s disappointment boring into my back; and just like before, Felipe dragging himself towards her, his knees grazed and filthy like two bloody badges of honour.
I was sure that all I had to do to earn that look from her (that glinting knife-edge of a look, ‘now clean up your cuts with salt water’) was to get down on the ground and crawl on my hands and knees to the guard’s van, sit between him and Paloma and lead us home with the map.
As if something were forcing me to get to the end of that old memory, of that race lost from the starting line, or as if it were my duty to fill in the holes in it, each detail of my homecoming appeared then in crystal clear sequence, opening up a chasm into the past (a slip, a typo). I pictured myself going back along that mountain road, taking days, weeks to scale those peaks on my knees, making my way through all those mountain chains and the thick curtains of ash, determined to reach my goal. I pictured the leaden light dimming the skies, the curves and crags of Los Penitentes, the vineyards obliterated by all the grey, and the fields caked in dust. And I saw myself entering the city, back in my city at last, my eyes looking up at the ash which would still be falling, that terrible powder plastered over parks and homes, burying everything I’d ever known beneath its blanket of crushed stone (cities shrouded in white sheets). And once there, I would look for traces of Felipe in the horrendous stillness of the footprints. And following the deepest tracks, having wandered lost for hours, I would find him, the hearse parked sidelong across the Alameda, and inside, as still as a statue, Felipe lying face up, waiting. And I would walk over to talk to him and tell him to come with me, to forget about everything, absolutely everything, but something strange would hit me then. As if I’d never met him, as if that man lying on his back in the hearse were completely unrelated to Felipe, as if he were embodying another man altogether, Felipe would appear before me as a perfect stranger, as a vaguely familiar face accompanying a coffin, his meek hands lying across his chest (a chest covered in words like ‘hollow’, ‘niche’, ‘extinguished’). And only then, from the middle of the street, in the wake of that missed encounter, would I sit behind the wheel of the General and dare to look one last time at the watchful cordillera. And I would see words like that, like ‘watchful’, discarded along the mountain road. From there I would see each phrase abandoned along the way. Words like ‘decisive’ and ‘arsenal’ would be left up there at the summit; abandoned words like ‘rails’ and ‘scar’ (and ‘howl’ and ‘tear’ and ‘splinter’). Because only by ridding myself of it all would I be able to face going back; only by shaking off the ‘scars’, ‘grief’, ‘sorrows’, and repaying, syllable by syllable, that incalculable debt, a debt that would have rendered us mute. Exhausted and nervous, I would drive right up to those iron gates and find the lawn flooded in dirty water (the water rotting words and letters, a whole language drowned). I would park up the hearse in front of the door and right there, blocking the gate to the house (on our marks, under the threshold of our finish line) I would leave that black, rectangular offering in the front garden where my mother would be watering the plants. Because I’d find my mother there, always with that hose, and I’d look at her for a moment (her feet buried in that mire with its smell of old earth; old, but mine). And I would creep towards her without making a sound (‘because we mustn’t make a sound’), very carefully (‘because we’ve good reason to be afraid, my girl. Always prepare for the worst’). I’d walk towards my mother, gazing at her affectionately, carrying the weight of all the things she’d ever seen (carrying remains, debts, sorrows). And in an old voice – no less mine for being inherited – using frail and untranslatable syllables, final words which, once spoken, would leave me empty and alone in a desert full of new lines (to be spoken in a timeless language), I would say to her with a hint of sadness, ‘I’ve brought you Ingrid Aguirre, and here is Felipe Arrabal.’ And I would hold her (her skin so close to her bones and her bones so close to mine), and only then, from within that perfect parenthesis of our interwoven bodies, would I open my mouth to tell her:
‘Mother, I’ve done all this for you.’
I felt a wave of dizziness, as if all the air in my
body had suddenly left me and I were tumbling into the void. A horn honked a few metres away where the guard was waiting, waving at us from inside a van. Paloma was telling me to get a move on, they were waiting for us, there was no time to waste. And behind her, beyond the tarmac, lighting up the edges of an untouched landscape, a purple sun disappeared behind the mountains: not drowning in the sea, but tucking itself back down behind the cordillera where it came from.
Paloma made off towards the guard but then stopped, walked back, took my hand and said she wouldn’t know where to start looking on her own.
‘Iquela, come on, please.’
The horn fell silent and in that pause I heard a murmur in the red sky, the wind rustling the branches of a faraway forest. Paloma did her best to persuade me to go with her, to get in that van and together cross the mountains, to find the other two, wherever they were. She was growing increasingly exasperated. As she spoke (from afar, and moving further and further away) I noticed, in the near distance, dozens of birds preparing for flight, their wings blazing in the glow of the van headlights.
I shook my head from side to side, making my refusal clear as I calculated the distance between us and those birds. And I heard myself speaking calmly, decisively (a new voice, a newly born voice).
‘I’ll see you later,’ I told Paloma with a kiss. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ I added, pulling her in for a hug, remembering our first encounter (wondering if it was a new kind of longing beating inside of me, or if it was still the steady pulse of our parents’ nostalgia).
Paloma got into the van and waved me goodbye. And I watched as she drove away, leaving only those wings beating in steady unison before me, the perfect harmony of birds in flight, taking off to the sound of a strange lullaby, a murmur that burst suddenly into an uncontainable din.
0
And I step on it so I don’t get stuck in that squidgy tar, that grey mud, in that pus, that’s it, so I’m not swallowed up by the pus oozing out the mountains, the cordillera whispering at me to go on, put your foot down, get your motor runnin’, we sang, that time we sang our hearts out, Iquela and I, so that we didn’t have to listen, so that we couldn’t hear a word, the mountain goading me now to climb higher, to keep going, forget about the twenty, fifteen, ten kilometres per hour choking the General; but this isn’t proving so easy, no, it’s no joke getting him up the grey cordillera, but I keep driving anyway, we keep climbing, and I’m sweating so I open the windows to let a little air in, despite all the pus on the other side I wind down the hearse windows, and that damn pus rushes in like a wave, in and up my sleeves, yeah, and it sticks to my skin this poison, this virus that wants to infect my eyes, and that’s why I start crying grey tears, to wash clean my skin, and then the pus and my tears mix together and I’m completely drenched in ash, and something happens, the General shudders and shakes, shush, easy now, let’s see, nice and slow, back into neutral, but he chokes, come on now, let’s just roll down here, but he coughs, moans and refuses to go, no, the General won’t go up the hill, bloody hell, the hearse breaks down, there’s no persuading him, he kicks the bucket and I’m left with no choice but to get out, and only then, as I plant my feet on the ground, do I notice what a hole I’m in: it’s the summit to end all summits, the peak, the grey zenith, this is where the General came to die, he’s burnt out and silent now, shush, rest in peace, and I listen to his death rattle, one final howl, and there’s a thick fug of exhaust fumes surrounding him, drowning him, separating me from her too, because she, Ingrid Aguirre, Berlin-Smokepall, is also disappearing in the smoke, and then, as rigorous as ever with my calculations, I subtract her, that’s right, minus one, I write it down, minus one, I bawl, minus one, minus one, but it’s not enough! I subtract her but I don’t get to zero, bloody hell! the German’s mum can’t have been mine to subtract, just some generic stiff, an impostor, a fake, yeah, and that’s when I fall to my knees, defeated, and I look at it, a smoked-out mausoleum in the mountains, a cliff-edge coffin, a crypt-cum-cordillera, and I can’t believe this is happening, so I take another sip of that white liquid, a big gulp to erase myself, to numb the feeling of this sorrow spreading through me, forcing me to look down at my own skin, my new skin which isn’t dark like before, because when I look down I see my legs are no longer legs, my arms are no longer arms, and gone are the elbows, the fingers, the wrists, now I’m covered in scales, no, something else, my skin is shiny but dry, there are feathers tacked to my skin, feathers to protect me, to set me apart, to mark me out from the rest, and nor are my eyes my eyes, they’re dry and pale, broken shards of glass, yeah, and soon with my broken eyes I realise how light I am, with my shattered pupils I see my winged body and there below, the city, completely still, the city like a deep round nest, circular like navels, like night-time thoughts, that’s Santiago, a round nest, just like my flight home on this round trip, cos I think I’d better forget about the General now and fly back to the city, fly back home, return, that’s it, and that’s what gets me up on my feet, what makes me turn my back on that devious stiff in her fug, and I dust myself off and walk away from all that, from her, from myself, and I run, I run to see how these wings of mine work, I flap them with all my might to unfold them, to build up their strength, but I can’t, no, they’re so heavy these beginner’s wings, wings of stone, bloody good-for-nothing wings were all I needed, but all the same I run for hours, and evening falls, then night falls and I go on beating my wings in the dark, I keep trying all through the black night until the darkness lifts and the dawn meets me flapping my wings, and with the dawn I leave those mortuary mountains behind, descend the last of those eastern hills, and before I know it I’m in Santiago, a new Santiago, one which seems to be warning me, watching me, trapping me, yeah, and for a while I get lost among its narrow streets, but at last I come out on the Alameda, the broad Alameda, and I stop dead in my tracks, cos I’ve finally worked it out: this avenue is my clue, this concrete road is the way, not the airport, not Mendoza, but this deserted Alameda, and so I catch my breath, one, two, three seconds, I look over at the bridge, four, five, I drink what’s left of the white liquid, six, seven, I shudder and take a deep breath, eight, my chest swells, nine, I gather momentum, ten, and I run down the Alameda like I’ve never run in my life, like you only run for the last time, I pound down the middle of the road leaving buildings and monuments in my wake, leaving Saint Lucía, the Moneda and the waterless fountains behind me, I run through the centre like long-legged birds run, the ones who take off all slow and heavy, and my sad pups follow me, my orphans yowling their goodbyes, and I go on flapping my trembling wings, running till my feet come off the ground, till I take off, lift off, yeah! higher, higher, higher, and my wings are braced and the concrete comes away beneath my claws and my legs retract as if they knew, as if my legs remembered that they have to become more streamlined, and I feel my chest filling with the finest air, a light air that lifts me up like helium, and I catch a current and my claws retract and my spine extends and I’m so light, yeah, finally, with the dawn, my wings have woken up, that’s it, I’m flying, yeah, I’m flying with my wings outstretched, wings so wide I can’t see the edges of my own body, the edges of my arms which are beating so serenely, so beautifully, and the wind whistles against my body and I sigh a happy sigh as I soar, swerving gently with each puff of this air cocooning me, cos it’s swaddling me, Santiago’s air, the sky falls in on itself to touch me, it crumbles into ash and the ash sings to me, sings me a lullaby, and what I really want is to fly away forever, fly higher and higher until I disappear and I’m nothing but a shadow, that’s why I climb so high, far from the deserted Alameda, and my pups fade into the distance, and so too do the tree tops and the Pío Nono Bridge and the clock of stopped time and the meadowlarks, they fade with my pups, and with them the pigeons and the sad street rats, and my lonely flowers are left all on their own, like all the lonely parents and all the lonely children, because I keep climbing till I can’t see anything but the distant cou
rse of the Mapocho, that bend I know as if it were my own body, cos the basin is buried under my skin, in the lines on the palm of my hand; my blood runs through the city, this city which is my body, it’s my nest, my zero, yeah, and then, from all the way up in the sky’s shell I feel a tingling, a fever, an overwhelming sadness that makes me shut my eyes, because I can feel those black thoughts pulling me back down to earth, dragging me, calling me, and the vertigo sends me into a tailspin and I plummet down towards the sky; my body falls away from me and the pain falls away, the air tumbles out of me and my tired wings fall away too as I watch my shadow grow steadily bigger on the ground, a sharp shadow, which means there must also be a light, a light shining right through my face and dazzling the pupils in my pores and illuminating my descent, my blazing collapse, my very own fire, yeah, because I am the fire, a fire with the wings of a plummeting sun, that’s it, and in my fear and with this urgency I watch as the fire spills out of me and all over Santiago, spills onto that grey tarmac beneath my wasted body, and I sink my claws into my nest, into the very centre of this square, I curl up on the ground and bury myself in what’s left, among the remains, in the barren dryness of this ash, of these ashes, and with my last breath I open my eyes to face the lightning flash, to face the beam lighting up Santiago and the sky, this open, deep blue sky, blue-blue, yeah, the blue of the fire burning everything, because all the cobbles and the walls and the shops are ablaze, the buildings and the poplars are aflame, the petals and the sepals and the corollas are burning, each thing and all its parts are burning, the whole of Santiago is on fire and I shine in the light of those flames, because I am the fire and the ash, the most perfect, golden bird, that’s why I have to do it, like a circle must be perfect I have to say the words, to sing my furious song in my radiant voice, in a voice that dies and is reborn I have to scream as I blaze, as I give birth to myself, as the flames give life to me I have to scorch the air with my voice, with my final howl, my final sum, minus one, minus one, minus one.
The Remainder Page 16