The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  He agreed to go with her that morning, a morning with an overcast sky and a south wind so propitious for migraines and bad tempers. The cemetery wasn’t sad but ugly, drab, and crushed beneath a crudely provincial air. Moss covered the stone of the niche. That’s all it was—an enclosed space no bigger than a pelota court, with stinging nettles growing inside it. There was glass from beer bottles. He wondered whether these were the remains of a drinking spree; perhaps on Saturday nights young tomb raiders gathered here and held witches’ Sabbaths with alcohol and hashish. Ana laid down a wreath of Gerbera daisies, crossed herself, and rested her chin on her chest. He merely stared at the tips of his shoes, rocking forward and back. He passed the time by drawing in the gravel with the tip of his umbrella. He glanced around at the names on the other stones, evaluating the neighborhood around his daughter’s grave. She was the youngest in that part of the cemetery, there could be no doubt about it, apart from the rockers who drank beer and then urinated all over the walls. When Ana finished praying, he took her by the arm, and they headed for the exit. A slightly putrid smell of roses floated in the air, so he grabbed her elbow and quickened his pace. A magpie cawed at them from the railings at the entrance; it was a bird like any other, a black and white corvus with green-blue iridescence on its tail. He waved his arm to frighten it away, but the magpie redoubled its caws. His wife looked at him, as if seeking an explanation for the bird’s behavior. He shrugged his shoulders and waved his arms again, forcefully this time, as if wanting to disperse a herd of cows that had stopped on the highway, but far from being scared off, the bird rose to its full height on the railings. He thought that if he’d had a shotgun, he would have killed it right then and there. He considered hurling a stone at it. “What’s the matter with that bird?” asked Ana. A dog prowling around the entrance to the cemetery barked at the magpie. It was an old German shepherd, barely capable of moving its hindquarters, its eyes masked by cataracts. It barked furiously, hoarsely. He didn’t know which to frighten away, the dog or the bird, but his gesticulations only succeeded in exciting them both. His wife pleaded with him for them to leave. Behind the dog, a man appeared, a tiny beret pulled over his head. He swung a broom in the air, at hip height. By this time, three more magpies had joined the chorus from the top of a cypress. There was a sense of gregarious ferocity in their calls. Ana yanked at the sleeve of his raincoat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, but he bent down to pick up a stone, though he wasn’t sure who to throw it at, the dog barking more and more loudly, the groundskeeper, or one of the birds. The guard had managed to grab the dog by the tail and gestured to them to get out of there, but the German shepherd turned around with surprising agility and made as if to bite, without seeing who it was attacking, with the instinctive perceptiveness of the blind, opening its mouth full of chipped teeth, yellowed as if by nicotine. It latched onto the guard’s hand. In an ingenious, effective move, his wife grabbed the umbrella from him and, opening and closing it energetically, advanced, flop, flop, flop, toward the dog, which meekly retreated into its kennel. The guard clenched his lips in pain. The bite had sliced through a nail and the skin of his phalange hung loose, pink and translucent. Alarmed by the cawing of the birds, they sought refuge in the car. Ana dressed the wound with a handkerchief. On the way to the hospital, the groundskeeper couldn’t explain why his dog, Tula, had bitten him; they’d been together for fourteen years, it had never bitten anybody, not even the troublemakers that hung around the cemetery at night. Until then, it had simply barked. It was a very obedient animal. He suggested putting it down, it might have lost its mind, this happened to animals that were very old, he said. The man accepted the money Ana offered as compensation, and they left him at the entrance to the nearest hospital. On the way home, they discussed the details of the incident, Ana’s intrepid gesture with the umbrella, his own inability to frighten those birds out of a Hitchcock movie. They seemed relieved it was all over. He noticed how the racket of birds and dogs had banished any reference to Laura. He smiled on thinking it had just been a joke, but he didn’t share this thought with Ana. It must have been a code of signals one had only to know how to interpret, clues as subtle as the twitching of a net curtain, a whisper behind a partition wall, a tickling on the back of the neck, signs that, as with plagues, start revealing themselves little by little, in the insistent flight of a fly, or the presence of insects in the bathtub, insignificant signs, the revelation of which presages the arrival of something one can only surrender to without putting up any resistance. That’s what it must have been. A joke of his dead daughter’s. But he didn’t explain his theory, he just said he would have to find a good cleaner to get rid of the blood stains on the car’s upholstery.

  He surprises himself with a second cigarette between his fingers. He flaps his hand, as if driving flies away from his face. He gets up from the tree trunk with sudden urgency. He crushes the cigarette butt against the crust of lichen covering the bark. He hears a crack behind him. He grasps his cane. Bends down to put himself at the height of the shadow moving behind the bushes. It could be the stray dog that sometimes prowls around the house in search of scraps of food. He picks up a stone. The shape emerges from the undergrowth. He has never seen a fox so close before. They look at each other, united by a bond of atavistic mistrust. The fox pants with its jaws wide open, watches him, prepared to accept whatever might happen now that this man is also staring at it, standing there, ready to pounce, armed with a cane and a stone. It sees this figure, but does not sense the predatory instinct of the men shouting on the other side of the highway or the ferocity of their hunting dogs, whose barks can no longer be made out. It hesitates for a moment between retracing its steps or slipping slowly past, toward the promise of freedom coming from the mountain, on the other side of the tree line. The man drops the stone. The fox walks unhurriedly past, watching him the whole time, and the air carries a scent it has never smelled before, except on some of the animals left in the ravine by shepherds, animals whose remains it sometimes feeds on, an impression that is mixed with other, stronger smells, but it finds nothing threatening in them, so it keeps moving away from the figure of the man, leaving it behind, and forgetting it as soon as it reaches the bend in the river.

  The sound of the siren pierces the forest. He lifts his binoculars. On the shoulder of the highway is a fire engine, and several men running toward the scene of the accident; he identifies the figure of Jeremías approaching the car with a beach ball under his arm. He sees him stop next to one of the doors and crouch down without letting go of the ball. He lies down on the ground and gesticulates as if talking to somebody inside the car. He gets up and takes a few indecisive steps, not knowing what direction to go in. Suddenly, he puts his hands on his head and the ball bounces at his feet. A man dressed in a reflective vest pushes him away from the scene of the accident. The two men walk now toward the gas station. Jeremías continues gesticulating, and his companion puts an arm around his shoulder. The red and blue lights of an ambulance flash next to the alfalfa field. Another man spreads out a thermal blanket next to the wreck of the car. On the other side of the highway, an iodine-colored dog runs up and down the shoulder. A hunter kicks at the bushes. He holds an unlit cigarette butt between his teeth. The others stare up at the sky with their shotguns on their shoulders, scanning, as if expecting the arrival of a low-flying flock of woodpigeons. But in that angle of clear sky, the only thing that can be seen is the peaceful flight of a black kite.

  6

  One would have to be a tireless mole coming from the forest to be able to reach the notebook that’s waiting, buried in the garden, wrapped in a plastic bag, beneath the hydrangeas. At the beginning of its journey in search of the promised land, it had to go around a gas pipe running perpendicular to the house, the route of which indicated the direction its fledgling tunnel should take. It dug earth, left the forest behind, the familiar territory crisscrossed by thick oak roots, and bored through the darkness until it reached a no-m
an’s-land so dry and packed with garbage it seemed to promise nothing good. The crossing through that desolate subsoil led it to the discovery of a cemetery for old farming implements and fragments of Celtiberian pottery, a few coins, but its instinct told it this wasteland was nothing more than the test every adventure requires, since this was the place where others had perished before him, fumigated by insecticides, suffocated between successive layers of gravel and archaeological remains, or detected in the open by the cat watching from the lounge chair in the garden. And although the geological strata bore witness to endless disappearances, defeats, and wars, the adventurous mole did not fall into despair but carried on slowly, blindly and silently, leaving behind other fragments—this time some Roman jewelry, two Carlist bayonets, and a shell from the Civil War—until it reached the garden fence. It got past the final obstacle at the border by digging on a night with no moon, which protected it from the cat’s watchful gaze. In the early morning, the nutritious smell of humus indicated its efforts were about to be rewarded. The tunnel came out in the promised garden. In a state of excitement, it sniffed the fragrance of a paradise of black earth and wet grass, the olfactory signs of a habitat in which a commune of worms and slugs, carefree and peaceful, had proliferated freely, oblivious to the dangers that might come from outside, from the other side of the fence, their only occupation being to enjoy, generation after generation, the surpluses of an Eden from which rivers of organic nutrients and mineral salts would never cease to flow.

  Blinded by hunger and predatory euphoria, the mole received its first reward. It devoured a translucent worm, thick as a pinkie finger. A few languid shakes were the entirety of that decadent invertebrate’s resistance. It supplemented this first banquet with half a dozen white larvae and a flaccid, medium-sized slug that it swallowed down unhurriedly, savoring its watery, slightly salty texture with just a hint of minerals and fertile clay. It was dozing next to the roots of some hydrangeas when it noticed a very different smell, of cellulose and plastic, coming from a shape buried next to the roots, arousing its exploratory instinct and an appetite that, worked up over a lifetime of penury and barbarity in the forest, had turned into gluttony.

  One would have to be a mole to detect the hint of a teenager’s perfume still clinging to the sheets of paper and to start sniffing in search of a nursery of maggots nesting between the pages, or perhaps a colony of tiny crustaceans—a mole intent on the idea of rounding off its own private banquet with a dessert of tender little snails, throwing precaution to the wind, rummaging around in the paper of the notebook and suddenly feeling the need to come up to the surface because beneath the weight of the bag, the tunnel has given way, with a landslide that has blocked the passage of air. It digs in the direction of the surface in search of oxygen, but fate has decreed that it will emerge in the very place where, having observed some suspicious movements of earth from the porch, the cat is now waiting, and the mole doesn’t even have time to feel the early morning air, since the cat, trapping it between its claws, with little effort, almost disdainfully, sinks its canines into the mole, breaking its back. A slight crack between the jaws, and it’s all over. Polanski waves the dead mole around in an unnecessary display of skill, oblivious to the man shaking a box of Whiskas on the porch.

  “Another mole, Polanski?” he asks, blowing out a bubble of steam.

  The cat looks at him without letting go of its prey. The roots of the hydrangeas peep out from the disturbed earth. The man feels the cold of morning and tightens the belt on his bathrobe. He checks the dampness of the frost with the toe of his slipper and as if crossing over stones in a stream, in little jumps, approaches the scene of the hunt.

  “What a mess,” he says. He attempts to bury the tips of the roots showing through the earth. He straightens the battered stem of the plant. In vain, he tries to fix it back in the earth. He pats the ground flat, but the plant, exhausted, doubles over again. “Fucking Polanski,” he mutters, and pulls the hydrangea out in one go, extracting a plastic bag that appears to be stuck to the roots like a spider nest. He gazes at the object in surprise, as if he had just caught a fish, especially since there is an incongruous sheet of paper poking out through the airtight seal.

  Leaning over the kitchen table, he removes an oilskin notebook from the bag. Some of the pages crumble in his fingers. The majority form a sheaf of paper plastered together with organic matter. He manages to rescue a dozen sheets from the mass of cellulose paste and spreads them out on the table. He cleans the surfaces with the edge of a knife until the letters start to be visible. He remembers having seen a hair dryer, so he goes up to the second floor and searches in the bathroom cabinet. When he comes down, he is holding a red hair dryer that looks like a galactic weapon. He dries the pages and chooses those that still appear legible. The lines of writing cover the graph paper of the notebook with a healthy use of the margin, though the angled writing, with large dots like balloons on the i’s, descends to the right a little, falling off the dividing line. The line spacing is generous. The text appears to have been written in a hurry. He senses that the letters transmit cold and that, as he goes over them, this cold sticks to his fingertips as if they were frost. Each entry is headed with a day of the week. His fingers tremble a little on the paper, and in a mechanical gesture he isn’t entirely aware of, they drift until they locate a pack of cigarettes. He thinks the narrative recourse of a found manuscript is a joke in bad taste, a recourse that is clearly excessive, pushes him into a corner, places him under an obligation, but one he cannot ignore, since it is right there, on the kitchen table, like a forensic scientist’s evidence in the light of a lamp.

  He smokes with an anxiety he seemed to have already forgotten, and half a cigarette turns into a compact ember under his nose. He spreads the sheets on the floor, like a folding map, and tries to discover a chronological order, a meaning, possibly mistaken, he thinks, to this text, since there is nothing that immediately indicates the order in which they were written. He looks at the clock and orders a pizza over the phone. A girl’s voice answers.

  “Telepizza, how can I help you?”

  “I’d like a four seasons pizza . . . and a Coke,” he adds.

  “Small, medium, or family-sized?”

  “Normal,” he replies,“a normal Coke.”

  “The pizza, sir—small, medium, or family-sized?” the clerk insists.

  “Family-sized,” he replies, feeling stunned.

  “Thirty minutes,” answers the voice, after noting down his order.

  Three hours later, the cat has managed to prize open the now-cold box and detach an anchovy covered in oregano from the mozzarella. But the man doesn’t seem to care, or hasn’t even noticed the act of larceny, absorbed as he is, crouching on the floor, the pages from the notebook between his legs, failing to notice he has just run out of cigarettes with which to get through the night.

  Tuesday the 11th.

  I’ve never written about myself. I don’t know why I’ve decided to do it now. Maybe if I do, I’ll understand myself better—like seeing myself from the other side of the mirror. And seeing everybody else. It makes me blush just to think that somebody might read this, so when I’ve finished, I’ll hide it somewhere nobody will ever find it, except me. I’d like to see myself without makeup, without deodorant or lipstick. I might even start to like myself.

  Thursday the 26th.

  I got off the bus for no particular reason; it wasn’t laziness, it’s just that the park looked nice, just like the light, the air, and everything. To hell with my classes. I sat on the first bench I came across, facing the lake. There was a mime artist and people jogging in tracksuits. The water reflected everything. An old man came and sat down next to me. He smelled of cognac. I hate the smell of cognac. I hate the smell of cigar smoke. I hate the smell of sweat. The heels on his shoes were very worn down. His ankles, which were soft and fat, stuck out. He asked for a cigarette, I said no. His eyes were
very red. I don’t smoke, I said, and he grunted. He marched off, saying all women were whores. I also left, in the opposite direction, toward the mime artist. I had time to kill, so I bought myself a cookie and shared it with the fish in the pond, but when I got home, Mom asked me about my classes. She seemed to have guessed. She’s like that. It’s enough for me to do something wrong, and she senses it. She sometimes dreams things that later happen. She sleepwalked as a child and used to open closets and pack a suitcase. Or so she says. The point is she asked me,“So how were your classes?” I didn’t know what to say, maybe the school had called to ask why I was absent. I think I was a little obvious about it. She got a bit annoyed, but not too much. I always get good grades at the end of the year. She reminded me I’m going to college next year and have to make more of an effort. Dad didn’t say a word, though. He lives enclosed in his bubble of air, just like the fish in the pond.