Open Door

by Iosi Havilio

  Now, in the kitchen, I take sips of gin to help me sleep. Then I see this calendar that I’ve never noticed until today and whose leaves nobody has removed for a long time. I pull them off one by one, from the second of March to the nineteenth of April. I’m about screw all the days into a ball and throw it in the rubbish bin but a discovery stops me. On the back of each leaf is a phrase in quotation marks. They are signed by celebrities, writers, artists, philosophers, statesmen, men and women of note, at first glance a lot more men than women. Each is something along the lines of a motto with which to face the new day. Some are confused or badly translated, most suggest impractical behaviour, there are Chinese proverbs, Creole phrases, Bible verses, fragments of universal literature. One of the most frequently recurring themes is avarice. Another is the relationship between body and soul.

  I keep two quotes, one for its ingenuity, the other because it made me think. The first is by Schopenhauer, or at least the calendar attributes it to him, and it says: ‘Woman is an animal with long hair and short ideas.’ Horace puts his name to the other: ‘Not to bring smoke from fire, but light from smoke.’ I love it, I don’t know why.

  SEVENTEEN

  Jaime finally felt better and went back to work. He leaves at seven, returns for lunch, we sleep a siesta together and every now and then we make love. At around half four, he goes out again, not returning until eight. In the morning he does building work with Boca on one of the small farms or estates in the area. He plans the refurbishments, buys the materials and deals with clients, while Boca provides the manpower. After our siesta, he goes to the hospital.

  My routine is much more sedentary. I sleep late, eat breakfast alone, do a bit of tidying, listen to the radio, have a bath and kill time until half twelve when I start cooking. I’ve started to live like a housewife, without quite realising it, instinctively. In the afternoons, I walk in the woods or go into town for a bit of distraction. On the way there or back, I often bump into Eloísa on the road. Yesterday she invited me to watch television.

  ‘Do you want to come to mine to watch telly for a bit? My brother and my folks aren’t in, they went away for a few days,’ she said.

  Eloísa’s house is attached to the shop, it’s a kind of annex, accessed through a separate door. Straight away it’s clear that it’s a makeshift construction, the proportions are unusual and there are lots of spaces without any obvious use. There’s a hole for the window, but the window isn’t there: in its place is a wooden board that can be removed and replaced. The only glimpse of the outside world comes through the skylight in the bathroom. There are two bedrooms and a multi-purpose room that includes the kitchen. The television occupies the centre of the house; all the furniture is arranged around it. One of the walls, the first I see when I go in, is papered with an enormous map of the world that, judging from the darts stuck in some countries, also serves as a target board.

  We are sitting on the sofa-bed, it must be about six in the evening. Eloísa tells me they have sixty-six channels, as she runs through them all from one end to the other, over and over. She doesn’t seem to tire of it. She asks the same question repeatedly: Shall I stick with this one? She asks me, but answers herself because she immediately skips to the next channel. And suddenly, without explanation, she switches off the set, throwing the remote control onto the floor. She crosses her legs, hugging a cushion, and looks at me face-on with an anxious smile.

  ‘Do you want a smoke?’ she asks and, from a little wooden box painted with a cat, she removes a fat joint. ‘Here, you light it. My brother has, like, six plants hidden behind the henhouse, so it’s free here. He takes care of them like they’re made of gold, but if you ask him, he’ll give you all you want.’

  Two drags each, the joint passes back and forth. Eloísa stretches out her legs and kicks off her trainers, spinning them through the air. I look at her sidelong, my head lolling against the back of the sofa. She looks me straight in the eye.

  ‘Will you show me your tits?’ she asks quietly and laughs loudly. She says it completely naturally, with impunity, she doesn’t give me time to react. ‘Go on, just for a second.’

  I say nothing, neither no nor yes. I laugh along with her, I close my eyes for an instant and when I open them, Eloísa has her t-shirt rolled up with her tiny tits on show, upturned like two drops of water. Ready for me to examine her. She shrugs. She wants to know if I like them.

  ‘They’re very nice,’ I say. Eloísa stretches out her legs, stroking my knees with the soles of her feet.

  ‘Don’t you want to touch them?’ she asks but gives me no time to respond and touches them herself.

  The rain began suddenly, with hail and everything. First, two claps of thunder made the walls of the house vibrate and immediately water began to pour down in torrents. The corrugated iron roof made a terrible noise, like bursts of machine gun fire.

  ‘Youcan’t even think aboutgoing out in this,’ says Eloísa, frenetically changing channels again. ‘You’ve got no chance in this rain, the road must be a river,’ she insists. She’s right. It’s almost eight and Jaime must be about to get home.

  ‘I’ve got to let him know,’ I say.

  The phone is in the shop so I have no choice but to go outside and walk round. I’ve barely crossed the threshold and I’m soaked from head to toe. I follow Eloísa’s instructions to get into the shop but I struggle so much that I almost give up. There are three padlocks, each tougher than the last. I eventually manage to gain entry. I pick up the receiver and I might have known: the phone is dead.

  When I returned to the house, Eloísa was out of sight. She called me from her bedroom and found me a towel to dry myself.

  ‘I’d better lend you some clothes, or you’ll catch cold straight away,’ she said and undertook to undress me herself. First my boots, then my trousers, blouse and the rest.

  ‘Are you cold?’ asked Eloísa and, again, didn’t let me answer. She wrapped me in the towel and stared at me. Then, first with one hand, then with both, she began to touch my breasts, without asking my permission. Making circles, squeezing them, pinching my nipples, she played, she enjoyed herself.

  Then Eloísa turned on the television again and we ate an enormous bag of crisps, watching a quiz show. The rain continued to fall hard. There was no sense in thinking about going back.

  Night fell and tiredness pushed us into bed. Without meaning to we embraced. Eloísa fell asleep immediately. I took a bit longer. On my back, with Eloísa’s hair covering half my face, my head fills with green things that skim past quickly, green flashes of lightning, images, abstractions. They are strange yet agreeable shapes. Eloísa smells so good.

  I open my eyes at some point in the early hours. Somewhere between surprised and scared. After the rain, it has become intensely cold. I have to go back. Before I leave, Eloísa, pretending to be asleep, gives me a long kiss on the mouth.

  I arrived at the house with my trousers muddied up to the knees. From the gate, I could see more lights than usual and I knew that Jaime was waiting up for me. He was in the kitchen, his arms folded, his eyes beginning to close. He didn’t even have the strength to ask me what had happened, but I told him anyway. I told him that I’d been trapped by the rain. Jaime couldn’t accept that Eloísa’s phone didn’t work when his functioned perfectly.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ he was saying. ‘You should have let me know somehow. I was thinking about calling the police.’ He was exaggerating.

  EIGHTEEN

  How do I know that guy sitting on a bench next to the pergola with sunglasses and a can of Coke in his hand? I can’t remember. He’s a normal-looking guy, the kind you see everywhere. I know him from somewhere though.

  Jaime parks the pick-up to one side of the kiosk.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘I’m going to show you something.’

  Jaime gives me a brief tour of the hospital facilities: the bakery, the power plant, the various workshops for shoes, textiles and carpentry, but the thing that Jaime really
wants to show me is the road that leads to the nursery, his place of work. It’s incredible, I say, quite sincerely. At night, explains Jaime, it’s pitch black. He also shows me the houses for permanent staff and the play park. It’s a little village inside another.

  Now Jaime hurries because he has some business to discuss in the office and it’s nearly one o’clock, lunch hour. I follow him. We circle the pergola again and that man, who continues to intrigue me, is still there, his back to me. He doesn’t see me; there’s no way to find out who he is.

  Jaime heads towards the door where I dropped off his papers the last time, but he carries on and raps his knuckles against a glass window at the side. A head appears immediately, the same girl whose style had confused me before, but with an unexpected addition: a ring in her nose. Jaime introduces us and she no longer disconcerts me once I find out that her name is Laica. Jaime tells Laica about my interest in the history of Open Door. It’s an idle comment, unnecessary. Laica smiles without saying anything. I feel uncomfortable.

  The midday sun hits my forehead, stunning me. I descend the stairs, facing the pergola. The loony bin is at my feet and I’m a bit like a tourist fresh off the train, who leaves the station and begins to discover a new city whose buildings, trees and streets convey the illusion of time stood still: the historic centre, the main square, the town hall, the church, the houses, and its people. I get a bit lost. I’m a new arrival. I skirt the roundabout and head down an endless road with a crowd of ancient eucalyptus on either side. I’m taking a bit of a chance. In the distance, two silhouettes are advancing rapidly towards me. They get bigger. I retrace my steps.

  I take some more turns and come out at the back of the sports courts, where the inmates play pelota paleta. All these trees are making me dizzy, I need a rest.

  I buy cigarettes at the kiosk next to the office, I smoke and feel calmer. Jaime must be about to come by to look for me, he said two o’ clock. Despite being a rural type, he’s quite punctual.

  Suddenly I get the feeling that someone is speaking to me, it must be him. No, it’s the man with the sunglasses and Coke. Yes, now I recognise him, but it makes no sense. It’s Yasky, the court clerk, in flesh and blood, a mere five metres from where I’m standing, masked by those old-fashioned motorcycle sunglasses, too bulky for the size of his face, which make him look ridiculous, a cross between a fly and a premature baby. Without his suit, he’s unrecognisable. But what’s he doing here? Why didn’t he summons me if he wanted to see me? I don’t understand. The first thing that springs to mind is that there must be some outstanding legal matter, that I didn’t tell the whole truth and a single word clouds my eyes: perjury. Then my memory clears, of giving the statement in the police station, the pitted face of the obese, gum-chewing officer who spoke into his walkie-talkie as he typed at the computer, and my statement at the court with Yasky’s legs kicking me under the desk, and me, I SWEAR, in capital letters, and I sign at the bottom, here, and here as well, and it’s true, I confess, I did keep some things to myself, things that, well, by now I don’t even know how they really happened. I’ll tell him anything he wants, but he doesn’t give me time. He approaches. Yasky stops half a metre away, takes off his sunglasses and holds out his sweaty hand, which I take in mine. I’m trembling, noticeably. What a surprise, I manage to say. And him: yes, what a coincidence. He’s shaking even more than I am. It doesn’t look like he’s here to arrest me. I’m not in front of Yasky the court clerk, it’s something else, I can see it in his eyes, slightly watery and shrunken, which barely look at me, only as long as they have to, then immediately they dart away, looking at the sky, the ground, an emergency exit, any which way. I calm down. I’m living nearby, behind the hospital, I say gesturing vaguely at somewhere far away. Yes, of course, he says. He talks and every so often he glances to either side, searching. And the business with Aída, no news? I ask quickly, to take the weight off my shoulders. Yasky seems lost, he’s not listening, he’s looking around. My friend, the one from the bridge. Yes, a very unusual case, the coastguard aren’t getting anywhere, or even worse, they find … the thing the other day, for example … and he doesn’t finish the sentence because this time his searching eyes find something: two loonies. One with long hair, regulation blue shirt and trousers, barefoot. The other, in a white t-shirt with a photo of a sailing boat on the front, is, paler and unkempt, a carbon copy of Yasky: the same round face, the classic bearing, the short neck, hairy, neither fat nor thin, a lunatic version of Yasky. They approach and stop a few metres away, taking me in from a distance, heads bowed.

  ‘This is Julio, my brother,’ says Yasky and widens his eyes for me to say my name.

  Now Julio speaks, talking to his brother.

  ‘This is Omar … I told him to come along so you could meet him … no, he won’t speak to you, he understands but he doesn’t speak, I told him you were here and that we should come and see you … can we have another Coke?’

  Omar is somewhere else, he’s inoffensive. He blinks more than is normal, and when his eyes close, he tries to fight it.

  The four of us sit down, Yasky, the two loonies and I, around a small white garden table.

  ‘I’m fine,’ says Julio, ‘I’m fine … how do you think I look? … when the telly’s not working I get a bit bored … just now it’s working … can we go for a drive in the car? I told Omar you’d lend us the car for a little drive … without leaving the grounds, just a little while, he understands everything, can we?’

  Yasky doesn’t reply and Julio doesn’t complain. It’s as though they’ve had this conversation before. A code between brothers.

  I tell Yasky that Jaime, my friend (I don’t know what to call him: boyfriend, lover, carer, country boy, could he be my country boy?) works in the hospital’s plant nursery. But Yasky doesn’t want to hear about anything to do with the hospital and immediately changes the subject.

  ‘It’s a mystery, it makes no sense, even with a strong current or at high tide, that stretch is narrow and not very deep, a body can’t disappear just like that.’

  ‘There are vipers,’ says Omar, the one who doesn’t speak, and we all fall silent.

  After a while, Jaime appeared in the pick-up and beeped the horn, so I said my goodbyes quickly. Yasky stood up and didn’t know whether to hold out his hand or risk a kiss on the cheek. It turned out to be neither, something between the two, and he ended up having to manage a balancing act, almost falling.

  ‘Well, it was a pleasure,’ he said. And a second later, as I was walking away, he almost shouts:

  ‘I’m Bernardo.’

  There is a small path leading from the stable, almost overgrown with bushes, skirting the mill, then getting lost behind a hillock. A tight, zigzagging path.

  I start walking along it. It’s quite a nice afternoon, with an autumn sun coming and going, appearing and hiding at intervals. An unstable sun. Past the hillock, the path turns to the right and leads to a ring of trees, of medium height but quite dense. I’m not sure, but it strikes me that they could be the olive trees that Jaime mentioned once.

  Now that I’m up close, what I thought was there isn’t there, the ring isn’t such a ring, and the trees aren’t that dense. From a distance, the colours of the countryside are hard to distinguish, they bind together. The sunshine doesn’t help. What had seemed to be a small oasis rising up from the middle of the plain turns out to be a cluster of old trunks, dry, pointed branches that devastate everything, a sort of giant crown of thorns for a super-Christ. I bend down and as I slip through to the far side of the fence I catch my neck. Ouch.

  On this side of the fence there is an Australian-style water tank, a couple of metres tall, so completely abandoned that it can’t have been filled for several summers now. The metal sheeting was painted once upon a time, but I can’t tell whether it’s meant to be blue or green. I stand on my toes to peek over the edge, but I can’t, it’s higher than I thought.

  I walk around it and come to some tiny aluminium steps attache
d to the side of the tank. The first thing I see is a layer of oddly coloured gelatinous filth, a nameless mixture of many browns verging on black. And although there is no particular odour, that non-colour floating at the bottom smells horrible.

  But there’s more. Amongst the dry leaves, the fallen branches and the slimy algae, in that sub-world containing the worst of plant life, a kite is sticking out. The wreck of a kite, almost unrecognisable. It’s a deliberate image, a visual effect: a dead kite. A cliché. I don’t know why I feel so sad all of a sudden. Like I haven’t felt for a long time. So sad that I let myself slump to the ground, I close my eyes and I touch myself, I stroke myself, for consolation. And that’s how I spend the afternoon.

  NINETEEN

  I make mistakes: I act too hastily, on impulse, like a child.

  Jaime was going to the village to send a fax to the ministry to initiate his retirement process. I’ll go with you, I said, and that made him happy. I got into the truck and started the engine while Jaime finished getting some papers together. I turned on the radio and the only thing I could pick up properly was the exultant voice of an evangelical pastor talking in a strange mix of Spanish and Portuguese. Every two or three phrases, a euphoric crowd celebrated his sermon with hoarse cries that lengthened the o of glory into paroxysm. It could have been recorded or live, it could have been a joke or serious, it didn’t matter.

  I was about to switch off the radio but I waited for a second to see Jaime’s reaction. But Jaime didn’t react, and I tired first. We went past the door of the shop, it looked closed. To tell the truth, it always looks closed. We passed a man wearing a military-green beret who was cycling in the opposite direction. Jaime sounded the horn unwillingly and it produced a toneless electric noise, like a death rattle. The man in the beret raised an arm in greeting and almost lost his balance. Jaime looked at me as though he wanted to tell me who it was, or for me to ask him: Who’s that? I didn’t give him the pleasure.