Open Door

by Iosi Havilio

  Jaime doesn’t show up either. He left suddenly, with no explanation. One afternoon as he returned from the hospital, he parked the truck outside the front door, came in without even registering me, and locked himself in the bathroom until the following morning. Four days passed like that, just like the first. He would arrive, lock himself in the bathroom until the next day and leave at dawn. On the fifth day, a Friday, at about six, the telephone rang. It was Boca. He said that Jaime was going to be late because a job had come up on a ranch near Luján. A small job that would take them a few hours, so he told me. A week has already gone by, with no word from Jaime. He’s a big boy. I don’t need to worry about him.

  The food runs out, only half a bag of self-raising flour left in the cupboard. I have neither the cash nor the will to go out and buy anything. Without really thinking about it, I begin scraping the wall behind the headboard with my nails and bringing to my mouth pieces of plaster, which peel off without too much difficulty. It’s pure inertia. I suck them unenthusiastically, the edges scratch the roof of my mouth. Now I feel able to do a bit more, and I start chewing them. Inside my mouth, the slivers of plaster break into smaller and smaller pieces, and eventually dissolve in contact with the hot saliva. The sensation is strange but pleasant. A bit like eating consecrated wafers, I don’t know, I’ve never tried them, it just occurred to me.

  Without Jaime and without Eloísa, the days become long and nights empty. I feel useless, with no desire to do anything. As if the only truth were this country house that destiny made mine, these old sticks of furniture, the loonies prowling too close by, the village turning its back on me in its eternal siesta, and this solitude. Like a bad dream that I’ve always been here, waiting.

  In the meantime, I smoke all the remaining cannabis with unfamiliar voraciousness. Tired, horny, moving from the bed to the kitchen, bouncing, leaning on the walls or crawling. Suddenly, without warning, a stabbing pain in my stomach makes me double up. I don’t make it to the bathroom and halfway there, spattering the bedroom wall, I bring up all the plaster. I find it so disgusting that I have to spend a long time spitting up a kind of transparent cream, and it leaves me limp.

  I spend the whole day dozing in bed, in the dark. Outside it must be raining, or cold: it’s always inhospitable outside. I’m starting to like all of this less and less. I spend the day alone. I don’t move and at times, because I’ve smoked so much weed, as they call it in the country, my head just goes, I lose all sense, I’m spaced. Everything becomes dark, dense, gelatinous, it all goes through my fingers, which scratch at my skin, hard, they seem to pass through my flesh and, right there, I stop being, I stop acting, I let myself be taken, lying down, standing up, my stomach pressed against the basin of thick, cold, Pampas-style porcelain, and I don’t stop, I laugh alone, I dance about, I shiver slightly, and my fingers don’t stop, as if they weren’t mine, rubbing my clitoris, my button, twisting the hairs that cover my cunt, rubbing and putting themselves inside me, one, two, three, as many as can fit, I’m sweating like mad, and the other fingers go into other parts, massaging my arse, moistening my anus with the juice that slides down the crease, and a little ochre pool, pretty and transparent, spreads over Jaime’s sheets, which swallow what he won’t, what disgusts him, and the smell of the country, of wet grass, of fireflies, of dry vines, the newly cut privets, and the fruit trees, the medlars, kumquats, figs, the smell of wet mud, the smell of pollen, all those smells, native smells, mixing with mine, boiling, like those of a cat on heat, a mad cat, unhinged, a cat who can’t take any more, who crawls, who comes for the umpteenth time, wildly, with misty eyes, undone by myself.

  At some point the phone rings. I don’t have the strength to answer. I pull myself upright as best I can and pick up the receiver. It’s Yasky, he says that he has to see me. I don’t let him finish, I hang up. In a minute the phone rings again, I assume it’s still Yasky, offended, but I hear a silence filled with street noise and then Jaime’s choked voice, coughing before speaking. I’m in the capital, I’m with Boca, he says. And I tell him the truth: I don’t feel too good, I woke up with an upset stomach. I hear the sound of the city again, competing with Jaime’s breathing, which sounds like the puffing of a thoughtful animal. He’s about to say something but hangs up instead. He doesn’t call again.

  I dream of toads, skirts, orgies and horses.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Eloísa reappeared after two weeks, as if nothing had happened. She’d been in Buenos Aires, staying with a guy she had met in the bar in Pilar, the same place she took me that time. A respectable boy, well-off, who lives with his parents in one of the gated communities, but who acts the hard-man, the druggy, and plays bass in a rock group with four guys just like him, a bit full of themselves, but pretty cool. That’s how Eloísa describes him. This boy took her to a squat, or what she thought was a squat in Calle Estados Unidos, where some six or seven girls and boys lived. According to Eloísa there were a lot of drugs going about and she’s not sure, but she thinks they were cutting cocaine in a room at the back by the utility room. She didn’t go in.

  ‘There were two older girls, your age, who wandered round topless all day. They made me think about us, I was dying to be close to you, to touch you,’ says Eloísa.

  We spend all afternoon smoking in the store shed behind the shop. Between joints, we have sex: wild, violent, without pleasure.

  Eloísa asks me whether now that I’m pregnant we’re going to stop seeing each other. She looks at my flat stomach. She strokes it. I think it’s great, she says, although I’m quite shocked. Do you think it’s all right, what we’re doing? It’s the first time that Eloísa has asked whether something is right or wrong, I thought it was only me who wondered about that kind of thing. But she immediately laughs and pinches my bum. It’s a joke, she says. She does what she likes with me, she plays with my body and my thoughts. She’s a little bitch.

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing with that old man. It doesn’t make sense,’ she says, soaked with sweat, her mouth still tasting of sex. ‘It’s madness. If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were wrong in the head.’

  Dawn breaks. I start to get cold, a light but continuous shiver passes through my body. Pieces of burnt sky covered by a single, red, uniform cloud reach me through the rafters.

  ‘Aren’t you saying anything?’

  Eloísa speaks very close to my face, far more seriously than usual, challenging me.

  ‘This place is hell, why don’t you have an abortion and stop kidding yourself you’ve still got time to think about it?’

  I look her in the eye, I stroke her hair, she curls up in my arms, she apologises.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I’ll say anything.’

  All day alone in the house, devouring pieces of plaster, loose rendering from the wall behind the wardrobe. I resist as long as I can, but the impulse is stronger than me, unstoppable. It leaves me with a harsh, piquant taste in my mouth, inflaming my throat. How long can this go on?

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jaime is moving his mouth, as if speaking, but I can’t hear a single word. I’ve just opened my eyes and the first thing I see is a mountain landscape with very tall pines that cover nearly the whole sky. It’s hanging in the middle of a wall papered with flowers so small they make me dizzy and force me to shut my eyes again. I’m exhausted. I breathe deeply, dispel all the air through my nose and look again. I can’t control my eyes, they open and shut in spite of me. Behind Jaime there’s a window covered with white curtains and a bit further over, in a corner, a kind of metal clothes rack. Above my head there are two neon tubes stuck to the ceiling, one switched on, the other off. My feet itch, I would love to be able to scratch them. To my right, a fat lady in a pale blue apron is also moving her lips, she’s standing up, and bit by bit, I begin to make out scraps of words.

  Things suddenly become clear. I’m lying in a hospital bed, Jaime is talking to a nurse and immediately that other hospital I woke up in some mont
hs ago comes into my mind. This feels more or less the same.

  I want to raise a hand to say here I am. My arm doesn’t respond straight away and only when I manage to shake it with the minimum of energy do Jaime and the nurse stop talking and turn their full attention to me. They observe me silently for a few seconds, waiting for me to do something else, I don’t know what.

  Now Jaime moves closer and strokes my hand, still in the air, and places it back beside the other. I try to speak, to ask the first questions, but Jaime silences me by raising his index finger to his lips as nurses in posters do.

  ‘Rest,’ he says twice, ‘stay calm.’

  I spend what is left of the day lying in bed, Jaime entering and leaving the room without saying much. At one point, without wanting to, I find myself with a mirror. I’ve never seen myself looking so horrible. Night falls and I’m fully awake at last. A different nurse brings me a tray with a piece of skinless chicken on a cushion of runny mash and a jelly the colour of piss.

  ‘Eat,’ says Jaime, ‘it’ll do you good.’

  The nurse presses a button and the headboard rises until I’m almost sitting up. The chicken, the mash and the jelly all have the same taste of nothing. I quickly swallow all I can, Jaime eats the rest.

  ‘You fainted,’ he begins to tell me, ‘I found you in the kitchen. They’re going to do some tests. They say that if everything’s OK, you can leave tomorrow.’

  The night seems eternal, it feels like morning will never come. My head is full of gaps. Every time Eloísa enters my mind, I think about something else to get rid of her quickly.

  Jaime can’t sleep either. He’s sitting on an armchair by the side of the bed. Our eyes meet two or three times and we become rather idiotic, each of us with a load of questions that the other won’t answer because we never do. At one point I’m on the verge of confessing what he’s going to find out sooner or later, but I don’t know how.

  The next day, with the tests that say I’m pregnant stuffed safely in my trouser pocket, Jaime helps me to dress and pays the hospital bill.

  On the way home, just after the level crossing, at almost the exact place we first met, Jaime says that I should have told him sooner. He says it in a whisper, embarrassed, and I don’t know how to respond.

  I don’t want to even think about how things are going to be from now on.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Outside it’s thundering, without raining. The thunderclaps are long. They grow, they draw out, they growl, they burst and they extinguish. Jaime managed to get me a computer a few days ago, an old model, but it works. The mouse only moves from side to side, so I need to touch the little ball every now and again to get it in the right place. The monitor is one of those you used to get, fourteen inches and convex. The image flickers and every so often the colours disappear, then suddenly return. The keyboard makes a lot of noise, but evenly. All the letters sound the same, the a is the same as the l, the j as the s, the same as the space bar, the comma, the full stop, the underscore, the brackets, all the same. It’s a cacophonous language. Only the intensity and the rhythm change. I wonder whether Jaime can sleep with all this hammering. It would seem so. He’s on his back with his hands crossed on his chest, serene. This paternity business has returned him to his old self, docile and melancholic, like the other Jaime.

  Now it shows, my stomach is just beginning to separate me from the edge of the table. Only a few centimetres, it’s almost imperceptible, but it shows. At least I notice it, and that short distance fills me with questions, it distracts me. If it’s a boy, will Jaime want to call him Jaime, like him and the other Jaime? When should it start kicking? When will the cravings come? How late on can I abort? I don’t know, I just wonder.

  Yesterday I went to bed early, at around eleven; Jaime stayed in the kitchen smoking with the radio on. The dream came immediately, very clear, and either I was to blame for interrupting it, or it was the thirst that was scratching at my throat and drying the roof of my mouth until I could bear it no longer and woke up. If I’d had a pitcher of water to hand, who knows, perhaps the dream would have gone on.

  It was a vast room, five metres by eight, a magnificent and luminous place. The flat is on a coastal avenue by the beach, second or third floor. The city is Rio de Janeiro. There’s a white leather couch, extremely large, for four or five people, between two clear columns, which are actually fish-tanks full of bubbling water, with oxygen pumps but no fish. There’s another armchair, with an anatomically shaped back and a footrest. And another, upholstered in cowhide, the fibres bristled with static, with a movable base so that it can rock. All the chairs are occupied by suntanned people, mainly twenty-something men, in light and frivolous clothing, their feet mostly bare and playful. They murmur but don’t speak. They propose toasts and laugh. They seem happy. There are two or three, a woman, a man with very little hair, smooth-skinned and chubby-cheeked, and someone else I can’t see, who zigzag gently between the seats, and disappear down a long corridor full of pictures or photographs of clouds, and I follow them until the point where they leave me. I stop outside a bathroom with no door, and a woman sitting on the toilet, wearing thick-framed, feline glasses, her trousers round her ankles, smiles at me, draws her knees together and leans forward: she’s small. I haven’t seen her before. I stay there for a few seconds, or longer, without annoying her, until she starts to pee. Then I get a bit lost, in the kitchen, in the bedrooms, too alone, until I’m back at the party.

  Now the woman with glasses is leaning against one of the columns, rocking a baby in a nappy. The others are still there, sprawled on the chairs, drinks in hand, touching one another’s feet. Erotic games. And, not really knowing how long I’ve been holding this rifle with a silencer and laser sight, I point it at the baby, resting the flickering, red circle on its forehead. No one protests, it’s all normal. I change target, from the baby to the man with hardly any hair, and I start swivelling round, marking all of them with the glowing ring, one by one: heads, legs, shoulders, pelvises, at random. It’s insane, but it seems as though I’m going to kill them all.

  Boca and Jaime are always playing truco, they never tire of it. Nor does it incite any great passion, they just play. They shuffle, deal, and speak only when necessary for the game to continue. And they keep a tally, point by point, dash by dash. There are no breaks, no half-time, it’s a continual performance, no winner, no loser, a cyclical journey that leads nowhere. Nobody decides when it ends, it’s an organic gesture: to play or not to play. I close in, I spy on them, I make faces at them, but they don’t notice, I don’t bother them. They raise the stakes, without risk or hesitation. Bean by bean. And me too, on the outside, although I’m not taking part in the game, I’m there, with them, half horny, half lonely, circling around them, and I’m part of it, breathing in time, or in syncopation, accepting that this is how it is, that things have to happen this way, first one, then the other, each one in turn, devising a unique, singular present, which immediately escapes the three of us, forever.

  Now I see them collecting the cards in their big mitts, piling some on top of others into two decks confronting each other from an equal distance on either side of the table, Jaime’s with blue arabesques, Boca’s orange, and it looks like they’ve finished their game.

  I feel a little lonely. I’ve no one to talk to about this approaching maternity.

  Tomorrow is the thirtieth of October. My due date is in the middle of February, it’s all happened so suddenly, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

  FORTY

  We can get married. Jaime is speaking, in the dark, without showing his face. We got back from Luján a short while ago, from a barbecue at Héctor and Marta’s to celebrate the twins’ eighth birthday. We went to bed straight away, slightly nauseous from so much meat. The sheets were damp, almost wet. In the middle of the night I got up to pee. In the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I didn’t look quite as bad as I had in recent months. In the dark, I sensed where the bed was
and lay down again on my side, the gate side. It had been that way since the beginning, me on this side, Jaime closer to the other Jaime. Dead or alive. It’s so strange to have something in my stomach that’s going to be someone. I stroke myself, I feel it with my open palm, I wait a while, nothing. I wonder when it was. That first time, when I didn’t even come?

  Héctor and Marta treat me as if I’m one of the family now. The twins adore me, they say I’m their favourite aunt. I’m scared. I close my eyes to try to stop thinking and, right then, Jaime decides to speak. Wasn’t he asleep? We can get married, he says and doesn’t insist, he’s not interested in my answer, that’s all he has to say.

  I re-read the notes that I’ve written over the last few months on Cabred, Huret, the colony and the lunatics, and it seems like a distant memory, adolescent and boring. There are about fifty sheets or more, the first few handwritten on both sides, the rest printed from the computer, normal type, double-spaced. I scan the pages, and it’s enough to catch a sentence or a few words at random to guess the context, I know what follows. It’s nothing more than that, a collection of sentences linked by sufficient common sense. I lost interest, I can’t deny it, and yet for almost five months my head was full of loonies: loonies on horseback, bricklayer loonies, uniformed loonies, in blue or orange, or both, blue trousers and orange sweatshirt, loonies with no clothes on, undressing in the middle of something, loonies kneading bread, hand over hand over hand, frenetically, old-style loonies, deranged, less neurotic but more insane, loonies who don’t look like loonies, who bite their lips, just slightly, like anyone else, but who only think about that, about biting their lips, loonies who are practically philosophers, who say things that leave us open-mouthed, as if to say: Look what the loony said, lost loonies, loonies who get beaten up, with clean blows, and who one day, without explanation, start to receive fewer blows, or secret blows, out of sight of the other loonies, and more, many more, all of them, dead loonies, like the one that Jaime found amongst the weeds of the nursery, almost albino, his eyes wide open, or the one who appeared hanging from a branch above the clay oven, his feet stained with soot from the smoke that kept churning out, and the loonies who no one looks for, who nobody reclaims, who they call anything, whatever name comes to them, loonies fucking, never coming, all the loonies, in a row, ready to enter the catalogue, invented loonies, who are the vast majority, because it’s easy to invent loonies, nobody makes mistakes inventing loonies, anything could be true. They’re there, even though they no longer interest me, they tell me a load of things, but it isn’t the same. I’m bored.