During my two weeks at the farm I’d ventured to pat the blond horse through the fence several times, and I’d fed him two apples, which he’d received with a grateful whinny. And now his blood was fertilizing the soil beneath the maize. I studied Marco as he drank his glass of water and I tried to loathe him, him and the awful bloodstains that traced little designs on his clothes. But I couldn’t, and then I realized that Julia had been right, all those years ago.
In the afternoon, for example, if I was in my bedroom listening to music or reading some teen magazine, my father would poke his head in to tell me he was heading out, and after confirming that the sun was coming in through the bedroom window he’d ask me if I knew it was only the afternoon because we were orbiting a very bright star at sixteen hundred kilometers per hour, rotating all the while on our own axis. It’s not correct to say it’s the afternoon, he’d point out. It was nothing but a very bright star and a planetary body completing its elliptical circuit, the inhabitants of which, at some point, had invented the concept of post meridiem repose. And with that he’d blow me a kiss and leave, feeling satisfied with himself.
Of all the breads in the Heidelberg bakery, the best-selling ones were the rye and the poppy-seed rolls. Despite their proven popularity, they were always relegated to the hardest-to-reach shelves. There was no good reason for this: that much I understood immediately. I touched the label that read rye, I touched the label that read poppy seed. Neither was fixed in its place. I switched them with the labels that read sesame. Then I switched them back.
“Sunflower seed?” I asked, because the sunflower-seed rolls were the easiest to reach. “No, rye,” or “No, poppy seed,” the customers said, every time. And since there was no ladder I’d have to stand on top of an upturned basket and try not to lose my balance. One morning I saw the baker emerging from out the back, tall and wrapped up in his apron. He didn’t even look at me. He headed straight for the shelves and, barely stretching his arms, delivered the loaves of rye and poppy seed into the farthest corner. I could have said something, but my tongue had retreated into the back of my throat months ago.
The next day he discovered my existence, and began to order me around. Although I’d been assigned to front of house in the bakery, and sometimes the owner would even crown me with a white bonnet and ask me to serve in the adjoining patisserie, that morning the baker decided to use me to his advantage. He liked the word “use”—he used it all the time. He’d say, this is useful, this is not useful, and wave his utensils in the air, or loaves of bread that had turned out to be defective. He’d make some gesture at me, a silent nod of the head maybe, and take me into the back room where the ovens and other machinery were. The mixing machines fascinated me, like giant sea monsters. But I wasn’t allowed to linger, nor was I to examine the bread paddles, or the shiny buttons. I was there to carry the hot trays and take them out the front, I was there to powder the croissants and doughnuts with icing sugar. “The spatula!” the baker would yell from the corner. The spatula! The comb! The yeast! I didn’t know what those things were. I’d run from one side of the room to the other, never daring to touch any of the utensils or ingredients. Meanwhile, the baker’s apprentice was bored to death at the front counter, with his dry skin and his sunken eyes. But there I was running around in circles as the baker demanded the spatula, the flour, the apron. The baker mumbled, he moaned and nagged. He asked me for the paddle and the spatula, and he received neither. But not once did he attempt to teach me anything. He was very good at ensuring I remained ignorant, grumbling all the while in his mysterious language. He’d send me back out the front with a tray and then, knowing full well that I could hear him, yell: “She doesn’t even know what flour is!” Once he’d confirmed that I also didn’t know what yeast was, or a comb, or an apron, he’d gesture for me to leave, and the apprentice would return to his usual job. The scene repeated itself often, and after the baker had finally grown tired of me and sent me back to the front counter he’d re-emerge, a little while later, like the lanky animal he was, and walk through the bakery into the patisserie where they sold the cakes and pastries, and make a show of berating his small wife. She would invariably remain calm, and eventually he’d return grumbling to the back of the bakery. It was a slow war the baker had decided to wage against me, and against his wife, who was a firm believer in the benefits of employing foreigners. In the afternoons he’d come over with a very serious expression on his face and ask me for the money from the till. He’d force me to perform rapid-fire calculations as he dictated big numbers to me, numbers with zeros and commas, which rained down on my head like a stream of insects and were incomprehensible to me. He persisted anyway, of course, with his five-hundred-and-eighty-seven-euros-and-forty-three-cents, and all the rest. And I—I who had dreamed of mathematics back in Buenos Aires, when I grew tired of biology—was suddenly incapable of distinguishing thirty-two from twenty-three.
The fire was a signature. It wound its way up the side of the mountain like a slow footprint, feigning capriciousness. It was February. Marco had gone out very early that morning, on horseback, without a word. Such expeditions were not unusual, although he was careful to avoid them if the weather was too warm. But this morning already promised a high and solitary sun, harsh in its nakedness. At midday I went out to the patio to watch the fire, which I could only just make out in the distance. As afternoon descended, it became more visible. By evening, when Marco returned, it had transformed into a long bright flourish, eating up the patient pines and cypresses, along with a good chunk of the old fruit trees that belonged to our alcoholic neighbor—the one Marco had argued with about the water that time. Marco arrived covered in dirt, his clothes a little singed on the chest and legs. He told me they’d been fighting the fire and asked me to feed his horse, which smelled three times worse than usual. I saw him leaving the house later, and went over to him. His face was different, it belonged to someone else; those were not his eyes. He refused to look at me, didn’t say a word. I lay down in the house, alone. The rooms were barely beginning to cool down after an exhausting summer’s day. I thought: Marco didn’t go out to fight a fire that morning; he went out to start one.
If I stay, I stay. If I go, I go. This thought was soothing in the beginning, but then it wasn’t anymore. In the beginning I’d just think something logical, and it would calm me down. In the beginning I’d just say “it’s logical,” and I’d feel perfectly fine. I moved around logically, from one new city to the next, one new bedroom to the next. And it worked the other way, too: if I stayed, I stayed because it was rational to do so. But soon my reasons grew, like a big bouquet. In Berlin and Heilbronn I spent my time contemplating all those rational flowers, morning and night. I call them flowers, but I am suspicious of my own words; if I’d really had a bouquet of reasons, I would have wanted to count them and pull all their petals off. But my reasons had no petals, and no perfume.
“Camellia sinensis,” I said to Alexander the day I met him. Something unprecedented had occurred in the university café in Heidelberg, the one opposite the main square: they’d run out of coffee, and the disconcerted students—among whom Alexander, tall and brown-haired, wasn’t particularly eye-catching—milled about in confusion. I’d squandered my time so effectively since arriving in that city that I was incapable of the most basic communication; I didn’t even know that tea, in their language, was simply called “tea.” Or maybe I was just nervous, caught off guard by the crowds and the racket.
“Camellia sinensis,” I said the minute he sat down at the table beside me, when I noticed that his white cup bore tea instead of coffee. So began our first conversation. Alexander laughed and pointed to a flower printed at the top of the menu; it could have been a daisy, or perhaps some kind of marigold: “Calendula officinalis,” I ventured. Suddenly he was happy. He pointed at a ficus tree growing with difficulty against the window: “Ficus benjamina,” I replied. It took us a little while to realize we had Spanish in common; he, at least, seemed Ger
man, and I had always been hard to categorize, like a stray dog.
“Camellia?” he persevered. I played along one more time.
His expression changed as he sipped his camellia sinensis. He said hello to a couple of students who stopped as they passed by our table, pretending he didn’t know me, as if we hadn’t just been exchanging Latin words and smiles. When his friends left he went back to his tea and studied me with his eyes. For half an hour, three quarters, a full hour he didn’t say a word, submerged in a book that lay to one side of his teacup. He also looked out the window for a while. It was neither snowy nor sunny, but the Heidelberg summer was over and the encroaching autumn was anything but benign. I was afraid, as if from a distance, of the long nights winter was beginning to promise.
But with Marco, back in Argentina, in the house on the mountain, I didn’t need any of those words. From the very first, the orchards I worked in had left me mute. I no longer cared about Latin names or vegetable families or the nervation of leaves, or photosynthesis or mitochondria or covalent bonds. If I felt tired, I’d sit down on a tree stump and stretch out my legs; if I felt hungry, I’d steal a couple of strawberries, wash and eat a carrot; if I felt cold, I’d rug up; if I felt tired … et cetera. And with Marco it was the same, right from the beginning, right from that very first afternoon when I arrived at the Del Monje farm and followed the dirt trail through the gates and gave a little round of applause. The next day he let me work in the strawberry field with the other harvesters, and when the strawberries began to grow scarce we switched to collecting pods and separating peas. I never knew how the earth could provide such happiness, and perhaps I still don’t know, but that’s how it seems to me, and that’s what I believe. For once I wasn’t thinking about coleoptera or pollinating agents. Marco would give us orders and then disappear, on horseback or on foot, into the neighboring fields. He’d return without warning and wander around in silence. We’d see him again at the end of the day, inside the house, where he’d pay us our wages. The day I saw him farewelling the summer renters, I asked him if there were any rooms available. Just as the weather began to turn sour I moved into the little house. I’d been away from home for ten years, my father was dead. I had no family left, except for my brothers, both of whom, under the guise of their daily lives, were still striving in their own way for a melancholy kind of normality. When I’d arrived back in Buenos Aires the first thing they’d asked me was: what was that about, all those years abroad? And my father, most definitely dead. But Marco didn’t want to know any of this when I arrived at the Del Monje farm and moved into the little house, the one between his house and his mother’s house, with the walnut tree spilling over the patio. It would get cold in winter, he told me. And that had comforted me, like a happy promise.
Under a marquee in the bazaar, a man sells me a sweet in the shape of a green heart.
In Heidelberg, however, the cold was foreign and I didn’t like the snow, it became bland very quickly. Buried beneath pyramids of hats and scarves everybody seemed diseased, and suspicious of everyone else’s disease. I’d get up at three in the morning, sometimes two-thirty, and wash and moisturize my face, then head out into the darkness to arrive at IKEA at four. The Turk was always standing at the entrance smoking with his eyes half-closed, occasionally chewing his moustache. He’d ignore us all if we waved at him and never, no matter how bitter and wretched the cold, no matter how damp and gloomy, did he wear a hat or beanie. I’d made a lot of promises in my IKEA job that I was unable to keep: everyone else seemed to like their uniforms with the yellow logo, but I didn’t; everyone else was happy with the breakfast, but I wasn’t; nobody else complained about the music, but I did, silently. Sometimes I’d simply exclaim: “This music!” without using a verb, which would have been risky, and without committing to any particular intonation, because whenever I said this someone, usually one of the members of the lady cult or one of the younger employees, would reply: “What music?” And if I pointed it out they’d say, “Ah, yes, isn’t it lovely?” Every now and then the cult ladies would advise me that I should be afraid. Of a glass? Yes, a broken glass was something to be feared. The boss who was my boss, even though I’d never seen her, was coming just after breakfast, and even though I’d hidden the three broken glasses, and the plate, the cult ladies knew about them. During breakfast I’d smoked a cigarette with the mustachioed man. He hid his cigarette after each drag. I smoked openly, trembling, with a certain languor. But I wasn’t afraid of being afraid—not then, not since. The boss was a blonde, short-haired woman. She wore a scarf around her neck and a thick layer of makeup on her face, in a poor attempt at disguising her age. In her world I did not exist, but the Turk did. When the time came, he was called by his only name: “Turk! Come here!” The mustachioed man, hunched at that moment over a pile of blankets not far from where I stood, left his basket and walked placidly toward the kitchenware section. I’m not sure if they spoke about the broken glasses. My tongue, as we all know, was still asleep in its Spanish dream. I continued squashing cushions. When the Turk came back he said to me as he passed: “Modern slavery.” He suddenly seemed a thousand years old. The supervisor had started screaming because the customers would be entering the store in two minutes and we had to turn ourselves into ghosts before anyone saw us, we had to disappear immediately. “Let’s go, ghosts!” she screamed. The Turk helped me with the remaining cushions, which were many. “It’s already ten o’clock!” she persisted. We needed to vanish. “None of you exist!” sang the supervisor. And he resisted, he was the last one to disappear. I noticed this with pleasure, because by then I knew already that my heart was cut from bad cloth.
I said to Julia when I got the chance, posted there behind the espresso machine, where every so often a customer would come and interrupt me, that seven years had passed since I’d left Buenos Aires to live, first in Madrid, then in Almagro, Málaga, Heilbronn and Heidelberg, and now in Berlin. I told her I’d never managed to stay in any of those places, never even managed to stay in one room for very long, because the people, because the doors, the windows. When I said this she smiled at me very kindly and assured me from the other side of the espresso machine that in Berlin all of this wandering would come to an end, that with her help I’d find something worth staying for, a home with a street name and number.
“Come and visit us at home sometime,” she said. “You’ll love Kolya.”
I wanted to reply that the mere presence of a three-year-old child in any house was motive enough for me to avoid it entirely, even in my imagination, but who could say such a thing to a mother, standing there behind an espresso machine in the midst of all those interruptions; who could speak such a sentence, even if it were true? Not me. I lied to her and said I’d love to, so that she’d leave, with the intention of inventing some excuse later on, but Julia was inordinately pleased and started talking about Kolya with such compassion, telling me that he was a solitary child, a child who needed a lot of affection, that he’d been abandoned, that he was suffering, et cetera. Julia leaves and I am left to attend to other customers. Julia left a while ago and I am cleaning the coffee machine. The next day I make good on my promise and become acquainted with the house by the canal. I watch Kolya playing with a ball. I believe that I hate Kolya, that I hate Julia. But this is false.
It’s getting late and I see one last sun reflected in the steel of the axe, which has been left lying on its side, although the patio is clean. It’s strange to see it there. I wonder if I should put it away. But I suppose Marco knows what he’s doing. Everything he does is in accordance with his own personal set of procedures, of that I’m certain. To feed or to destroy, horse or tree. He silently passes judgment on the life and death of every paddock, every sheep left standing. Watching him cut wood or pull up a plant is the same as understanding a very complicated formula, or a long chemical reaction.
My father, who after my mother’s death dedicated himself to physics with ludicrous subservience, had a habit of reject
ing things. I did not have this habit, but then I learned it from him. So does that mean I also had a habit of rejecting things? I was in kindergarten when she died, and since that time, or perhaps even before, I’d received the occasional lecture on scientific negation from my father. These lectures were never scheduled, never announced in advance; like all early education they were mixed in with my food and drink, imparted incidentally and without a great deal of insistence. He simply enjoyed tainting with doubt everything I was beginning to believe. The blue of the sky? Just an effect of the Earth’s atmospheric gases and the light of the sun. And out there, in space, the temperature was two hundred and seventy degrees below zero. And if we looked at the sun we’d be burned alive. He didn’t do this to instill in me some kind of premature skepticism, nor to destroy the edifice of my child’s happiness with the crushing blows of his sarcasm. He was naive with his wisdom, a well-intentioned butcher of innocence. On the weekends we’d go canoeing on the river and get ice cream on Avenida Maipú. The cars we saw racing by were converting chemical energy into kinetic energy, and the trees were also using gravity to stay still because, even though they had roots, without gravity they would all be floating in the sky. At night I would dream, inevitably, of floating trees.
We unhung the curtains and washed them. It was Sunday, there was plenty of time and sunshine. Berlin looked like a mammal outstretched in the sun. And yet in my throat there was a stone.
All My Goodbyes Page 5