Open Door

by Iosi Havilio

  ‘It got late, I’ll be back early tomorrow.’

  ‘And the girl? Was it her?’

  I stay mute, as does Jaime. He murmurs a sad goodbye before hanging up.

  Yasky brings out some blue sheets patterned with shooting stars and apologises for them:

  ‘I’ve still got them from when I was a teenager.’

  And although he says it in reference to the sheets, Yasky is talking about himself, he’s confessing, behind the court clerk there’s a teenager with problems. He goes into the bathroom, leaving me alone, I don’t know what I’m doing here.

  I grab the phone again and dial rapidly, without thinking. Eloísa answers, half asleep. I hang up. It might have been her mum, the doubt lingers.

  Later, with coffee, the chat flows again, we talk about everything. To tell the truth, he talks, jumping from topic to topic without pause. He’s happy. He tells me about university, about everything he gave up to live for his studies, he mentions Esteban a hundred times, the best friend he’s known since primary school and who he sees every Thursday night, come what may. He lights up when he talks about his father, who died two years ago and left him this little flat, which isn’t the house he would have chosen to live in, but which isn’t bad, it’s enough for him on his own, and the location is unbeatable, everything’s on the doorstep.

  My eyes close, Yasky resists, he still has one topic left, his passion for the racetrack. He loves it, he doesn’t miss a single Sunday.

  ‘But I control myself,’ he cuts himself short. ‘I’m far from an addict.’

  Finally he shuts up and I make the most of the pause to shut him up completely.

  ‘Bernardo,’ I say in a low voice, as if to keep it between the two of us. ‘I’m a virgin.’

  His face freezes, he doesn’t get the joke. I seem to have offended him. Yasky arches his eyebrows in a sign of annoyance and starts washing the dishes, charging the atmosphere with a melodramatic silence. He must feel ridiculous because in a minute he gets over it and suggests we see if there are any films on. With the television on, we forget about everything. Me, about Aída, who still hasn’t shown up, and about Eloísa’s hands exploring my body, and life in the country which is starting to drive me insane, and that story about lunatics from a century ago, which intrigues me, I still don’t know why. Yasky must be trying to erase my joke from his mind, which I’m sure will torture him all night.

  At about one o’clock, the blank screen barking the apocalyptic noise that marks the end of transmission, we go to sleep in separate rooms, like an old-fashioned marriage.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Romanians on the ranch have a party every night. They start early, at around half eight, sometimes a bit earlier to prepare the bonfire. Eloísa and I smoke in the storeroom behind the shop, about a hundred metres from where they are. Without meaning to, we fall silent to listen to them, to see what they’re doing. They talk loudly, they sing, they play the guitar, and as the hours slip by some of them become violent, they break bottles, insult each other, or rather they shout things that sound like insults. They almost go insane.

  Eloísa tells me that one of the Romanians goes to the shop to buy flour and gin. She says he has a kind face and he’s handsome, if a bit dirty. She asked him his name but as she didn’t understand his reply, he wrote it on a piece of card. Eloísa shows it to me. I read: Loti. Eloísa laughs.

  ‘Isn’t it a ridiculous name?’

  •

  Inside the Huret book, folded into four, I found a piece of yellowed paper, stained by time, and written on a typewriter with annotations in the margins.

  Inebriation and insanity. By Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Reading at a meeting of doctors in his house on July 29th, 1884.

  Conclusions:

  1st – As far as the production or cause of dementia is concerned, the statistics from the dementia hospices are inevitably incomplete.

  2nd – The dementia of today is the peculiar condition of an imperfect civilisation.

  3rd – The alien population in America vastly increases the number of elements, and acts indirectly as an element, of generation or production of dementia in the native population.

  4th – Heredity, whether in relation to physical, intellectual or moral conditions, is of greater importance in the production of dementia than generally supposed.

  5th – Poor education, lack of it, or superficial education, increases the number of demented individuals, while on the other hand, a good system of moral and scholarly education has great influence in the prevention of dementia.

  6th – Certain occupations are more conducive than others to the development of dementia, whilst lack of occupation is frequently a cause, and on occasion a symptom, of dementias.

  7th – Unhealthy marriages increase dementia, and single men, and probably single women too, are more prone to dementia than married couples. Furthermore, marriages between blood relatives are shown, with much uncertainty and in very rare cases, to be the exception to this.

  Yesterday one of them committed suicide, Jaime tells me at breakfast, as Boca swings the axe on the other side of the window and Martín piles the wood against the wall of the veranda.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Jaime had gone out on a job with Boca. They had to change the roof tiles of a ranch house on an estate about two hundred kilometres from Open Door. We’re going to spend a few nights there, until we finish the job, said Jaime and asked me whether I was scared to be left alone. Not at all.

  An hour after Jaime left, Eloísa appeared, in perfect synchrony, as if she had planned it. She brought a generous fistful of hash that she could barely contain in her hand. There’s enough here to smoke five a day for a week, she said, placing the small mountain of marijuana in a bowl on top of the fridge. It was three in the afternoon, we had to pass the time somehow. Let’s have a bath together, suggested Eloísa. It seemed like a good idea, so I prepared the tub for the two of us while Eloísa rolled the first joint, leaving another ready for later.

  I snogged the Romanian in the storeroom, Eloísa tells me casually as she undresses. He’s a sweetie, a really good kisser, she says. Did I tell you that he’s called Loti? Isn’t it funny? Loti, Loti, Loti, she repeats, as if it were a game. I still have no idea how old she is: it’s all the same to me, but it’s strange, sometimes I put her at seventeen, sometimes thirty-five. Eloísa continues to tell me about Loti, gently pinching my bum between sentences. Did you know he’s got a gold tooth?

  We spend the whole afternoon in the water, without kissing or anything. Eloísa taught me some new songs by a rock group she’s fanatical about. She sings badly, but I like it. We smoked the joint, and half of the second one, which slipped from my fingers and fell into the water. We laughed a lot, about Jaime, about Boca, about the poseurs who play polo, about the shape of my feet, rather crooked and crablike, and about a load of other nonsense.

  I don’t know why it occurred to me to tell her about Aída. To fill a gap, or because I sobered up and it seemed a good moment to confess. Eloísa became serious when I mentioned the bridge. Her seriousness lasted about as long as the fall did, less than a minute. And with her smoke-filled cackles, feeling rather dizzy, I suddenly understood everything: the precision of chance, the cosmic, the inevitable.

  The night caught us dozing, still naked, brushing against each other time and again, in Jaime’s bed.

  Eloísa lit another joint, our third, and a ferocious hunger attacked us, which we sated by emptying the larder of anything edible: noodles, tuna, breadcrumbs, turrón and birdseed. Then we went back to bed.

  ‘Do you want me to go down on you?’ asks Eloísa out of nowhere, once we’ve switched off the light.

  •

  Jaime came in slowly, noiselessly, in the middle of the night. His head appeared first, he was almost on tiptoe. Eloísa was curled up between my legs, under the blanket, barely visible. She was breathing hard, her nose blocked with mucus. Jaime came in slowly, noiselessly, but I saw him out of the corne
r of my eye. He stayed on the threshold without letting go of the handle, leaning on it, then he disappeared.

  I put on the first thing I could find, a long jumper with buttons, a kind of cardigan. I lit a cigarette and went into the kitchen in bare feet, shivering. Jaime had his back to me, trying to hurry the kettle to a boil. I grabbed a chair and dragged it back needlessly, to attract his attention, but Jaime didn’t turn round. I spoke first.

  ‘You’re back early.’

  ‘They brought me back,’ he says, ‘the truck broke down on the way.’

  ‘And how did it go?’

  ‘It was a fiasco,’ he says and turns round, with the same expression as always, a bit paler than usual with a nervous laugh biting his lips. He doesn’t look at me, he talks to the kettle which is now steaming.

  ‘That guy is a swindler,’ he says and I can’t help laughing.

  ‘A swindler,’ I repeat quietly, ‘that’s funny.’

  ‘Not to me,’ grumbles Jaime, ‘he makes me drive 200 kilometres on a fool’s errand and to crown it all we’re left stranded in the middle of the road.’

  Jaime’s language is old-fashioned, provincial, sometimes I forget that he’s a country boy and that, by now, I must be a country boy’s girl. A new generation of country girls.

  ‘And the kid … ?’ he finally brings himself to ask, gesturing towards the bedroom with his chin.

  ‘It’s Eloísa, the girl from the shop.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘We were chatting until late, and I told her she could stay here, she’s just a kid.’ I don’t know why I add the last part, it wasn’t necessary. Jaime lifts his chin once more to indicate the bedroom as if to say: Oh right, or well, well, or even: Is the girl going to be in my bed for long? When he’s lost for words, Jaime points with his chin to complete his sentence, as if he’s neighing.

  Grudgingly, Jaime says we’ll wait until morning, there’s no point in waking her and making her leave at this time of night. Not entirely convinced, he goes and slumps in the armchair next to the chimney. Eloísa is sitting on the bed waiting for me, in a Buddha position.

  ‘Get dressed and go, Jaime’s back, he’s in the next room,’ I say and she throws herself on top of me, tickling me. Leave, I tell her, and half joking, half serious, I give her a kick which knocks her out of bed. And, from the floor, naked, unabashed, she laughs like a loony. She opens her legs and shows me everything. She mocks: Get dressed and go, imitating my voice and she throws herself on top of me again. She sits on my back and grips my wrists as if she has the strength to pin me down. I let her defeat me although I say, just for the sake of it: OK, Eloísa, that’s enough. And she repeats in a commanding voice, the most serious she can summon: OK, Eloísa, that’s enough. Now she lets me go and gets back under the sheets, she quietens down. Then I turn over and grab her head so hard that I surprise myself and bury it between my legs. She freezes slightly, I guide her, I teach her. She learns quickly, and she practises, for the rest of the night, until it gets light. Do you like it? she asks quietly, and I grit my teeth. Jaime doesn’t show his face again, or at least I don’t see him.

  Eloísa stays for breakfast. We drink mugs of maté and eat bread with butter and sugar.

  ‘I like horses too, we had one until recently, it was half mine and half my brother’s. We called it Tato, after a mad uncle who lives in Misiones, but my old man sold it to pay off some debts at the shop,’ says Eloísa and Jaime looks at her as though he wants her far away.

  Come with me to the gate, Eloísa asks in my ear. Once we are a reasonable distance from the house, she grabs my hand, trying to interlace her fingers with mine, she says nothing, nor do I, there’s no need. Before going through the gate, she kisses me quickly on the lips.

  ‘I had a great time, thank you,’ she says, and I can’t quite believe she said thank you.

  Jaime and Boca spend all day fixing the pick-up, one underneath, between the wheels, the other with his head buried in the engine. I tend to the house, I sweep, I cook, I make the bed, like an automaton. To get Eloísa out of my head, I lie down in a deck chair with Brenda’s pages and start reading at random, without paying too much attention, as if praying.

  ‘Open Door is built in the middle of the Luján plain, not far from a famous cathedral, the best-known pilgrimage site in Argentina. The establishment is divided into two distinct parts: on one side, the central asylum, which holds the administrative and hospital services, and houses for patients under full-time surveillance or in temporary isolation; on the other side, the open door and agricultural work colony.

  ‘No walls restrict the horizon, nothing to limit the illusion of absolute liberty. The establishment is composed of fourteen separate blocks, rooms, workshops, kitchens and offices, whose white facades and red roofs are scattered happily through the green countryside. The interior is just as cheerful as the exterior: corridors and verandas with white walls, floor tiles of different colours and flowers at the windows. From the open blocks comes the sound of songs and gramophone orchestras. It is hard to imagine a working establishment more perfect than this.’

  ‘That’s it sorted, it was the carburettor,’ says Jaime, coming into the kitchen, and adds: ‘I don’t want you to see that girl anymore, the one from the shop. That kind of girl brings trouble.’

  Later that same day, Eloísa asks me whether I’ve tried ket. Ketamine, she says and I laugh. We laugh. We’re sitting on the bank of the stream, her behind me, scratching my back underneath my blouse. Have you never tried it? Not even out of curiosity? My friends, she says, take it when they go dancing.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Curled up by the chimney, I pass the time hypnotised by the fire, spellbound. My eyes follow the path of the flames. It’s crazy, the way everything changes, so quickly, so imperceptibly. And by the time I’ve registered it, there it is, it’s already changed. There are those first timid flames that need to be revived by blowing, then the powerful ones that wrap around trunks and branches, from the smallest to the largest, the thinnest to the thickest. Each flame follows its own path. Sometimes, for some reason that escapes me, the fire swirls and forms corkscrews that come and go from yellow to red, so frenziedly. And they hollow out the wood, forming eyes in it. But from a distance, the most fascinating, beautiful, and at the same time terrible part is the moment of destruction. The burning wood splitting into two, falling into pieces, turning into smoke. They are tiny catastrophes, homemade, controlled, miniature cataclysms. Jaime is standing in silence behind me. He’s watching too.

  Away from the fire and its charms, the truth is that it’s brutally cold and if we don’t move away from the chimney it’s because we can’t bear to be in the rest of the house. The kitchen is freezing and we can’t even bring ourselves to enter the bedroom, it’s almost certainly worse.

  ‘A rat,’ Jaime says suddenly, his voice changed, rather hoarse, so much so that I have to turn round because I’m not sure I’ve heard correctly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A rat,’ he repeated, slightly irritated and, despite not having seen anything resembling a rat, I climb onto a chair, just in case, it seems like the obvious thing to do. Jaime took a shotgun off the wall and pointed it downwards, in every direction, towards the armchair, the door, the chimney, always downwards. I took a moment to react, mainly because I could have sworn that the gun was purely decorative. Jaime continued with his hunt, his face red and overwhelmed. I still hadn’t worked out whether this was a joke or not. To further confuse me, Jaime talked to it, to the rat, about all sorts of things. He talked to it more than he’d spoken to me all day. He was saying: Come out, you bastard, come out of there, you lousy bastard, and he stamped and kicked the furniture, he tried to make it move but the rat didn’t reveal itself. Jaime kept going for some time, so long that I began to get bored perching on the chair, and I sat down and started watching the fire again. At one point, I looked behind me and my eyes met Jaime’s as if to ask him: Are you sure you saw a rat? But he averted his
gaze immediately, he was engrossed in this opponentless duel, his gun still pointing at the floor, although carelessly now, without precision.

  All this time, the fire had made and unmade a thousand things. It was impossible to reconstruct the path of the flames. Of some thin branches that I remembered from before, nothing remained but confused traces with no identity. They had become embers, and the embers ashes. The fire, which by now was looking a bit lifeless, needed to be fed. Order needed to be imposed to restore the calm.

  I was getting up to do just that when a strange, living weight, from another world, dropped onto my right shoulder and looked me in the eye. And now there was no doubt. There it was, clinging to my body like a fairground parrot, a country rat in flesh and blood. And it was so different from the picture I’d had in my mind, so big and solid, it was anything but a rat. But how had it landed on my shoulder? I’ll never know. The truth is that it was on me for a very short time, a fraction of a second, which at that moment seemed like a year and a half. Just long enough to look me in the eye, then it jumped.

  Jaime let out a gruff shout, like a caveman. He threw a half brick, I don’t know where he got it, and when he thought he’d cornered the beast, he began to shoot, point-blank, like a madman. He shot, reloaded, shot, reloaded again and shot, I lost count how many times. I closed my eyes, on reflex, and like that, with my eyes tight shut, it felt just like being caught up in a shootout in a film. Blindly, I had gone into the kitchen, either instinctively or because Jaime had pushed me there, I can’t remember. I sat down, opened my eyes carefully and observed the scene with my mouth half open and my fists clenched close to my neck to support my head. I watched what I could, what the angle and frame of the door would allow me to see. Finally the last shot rang out, followed by that humming stillness that comes after the firing subsides.