Ghosts

by Cesar Aira

  All the builders had, in fact, gone downstairs a fair while before, and since they wouldn’t be returning to work, had washed and changed, to make themselves more comfortable for lunch. The radicals among them had hosed themselves down and dried off in the sun, out in the back yard. They had taken off their work clothes, which, once shed, were so many dusty, torn and mended (or not even mended) rags, and packed them away in their bags. Clean now, hair combed, they sat down around a table made of planks to wait for lunch. They had put the table as far away as possible from the grill, where Aníbal Soto was checking on the progress of the meat. There were ten of them in all. As well as Viñas and Reyes, there were two other Chileans: Enrique Castro and Felipe Rojas. Rojas was known as Pocketman because he was in the habit of keeping his hands in his pockets, even when he was sitting down. It was a pretext for endless jokes. Now, for example, he was sitting with a glass in his left hand and his right hand in his pocket. Next to him was the fat guy from Santiago del Estero, who although by no means an ingenious joker, could get a laugh by dint of sheer ingenuity. He put his hand into the Chilean’s pocket to find out what was so nice in there, as he put it. This made all the others laugh, and gave Pocketman a start, making him spill a few drops of wine, which he complained about. The master builder, a short man with grey hair and blue eyes (he was Italian) was convulsed with laughter, but he knew how to change the subject in time. They had all served themselves a glass of wine and were drinking it as an aperitif. Luckily it was cool down there; it was almost like having air conditioning. They drank a toast, and so on. The meat was soon ready, but they had clean forgotten to make a salad. Reproachful gazes converged on young Reyes, who almost always forgot to buy something or other. But, since it was the last day of the year, it didn’t matter. Anyway, the meat was first-class.

  As well as the Chileans, there was another foreigner, a Uruguayan called Washington Mena; he was an insignificant person, without any noteworthy characteristics. The other one with long hair was a young Argentinean, about twenty, called Higinio Gómez (Higidio, actually, but he said Higinio because it was less embarrassing), who was spectactularly ugly: he had what used to be called a “pockmarked” face, due in fact to a case of chronic acne, as well as that long hair, almost as long as Abel’s, but curly. Then there was one they called The Bullshit Artist behind his back, although his name was Carlos Soria. While the others laughed at the fat guy’s joke, he just mumbled and ended up making openly sarcastic remarks. The joker from Santiago del Estero turned out to be the most curious character of them all, partly, in fact mainly, because he was spherically fat. That transformed him. He also fancied himself as a wit and even a Don Juan. His name was Lorenzo Quincata; he spoke very little and always gave careful consideration to what he was going to say, but even so, no one would have mistaken him for an intelligent young man.

  Soria started running down Santiago del Estero and its inhabitants. They let him talk, but teased him all the while. He said that in Santiago they drank hot beer. Really? How come? He’d been there, of course, passing through; nothing could have persuaded him to stay on those sweltering plains. One day, in a bar, he had sampled that strange beverage (strange for him, anyway). They used a wheelbarrow to bring the beer in from the yard, where it had been sitting in full sun; it was hot like soup, he said. Someone asked him: Why the wheelbarrow? To bring the cartons in, of course, what else could they use? How many cartons, they asked, suspecting him of exaggerating. First he said thirty-six, then he said eight, but it wasn’t really clear which number he meant. He pointed out that there had been twenty people drinking. Some of the builders were laughing so hard they cried. That’d have to be a record, wouldn’t it, they said. If he drank thirty-six cartons of hot beer all on his own.

  Only in Santiago del Estero.... , said Raúl Viñas, laughing too. He clinked his glass with Quincata. Viñas was a Santiago man himself, he explained, but from Santiago de Chile, which made all the difference.

  Soria pointed out once again that there were twenty people drinking, a whole team of road workers. The cartons of bottles were sitting in the yard, out in the sun. Did they know what his belly was like, after drinking it? Well, round, of course. As for how it felt, best not to imagine that, or even try. And yet they did.

  Castro reminded Viñas about a famous liar they had known in Chile, a man who, whenever he met someone, would say that that he had just crossed the Andes from Argentina, braving extremely risky or at least unusual conditions, coming through unlikely passes, or right over the mountain peaks, crossing snowfields, always on foot, alone, setting off on the spur of the moment. Each time he ran into someone he knew, he came out with the same story, or rather, a variation. But sometimes he ran into the same person again quite soon afterward, and then he had to invent the opposite journey, since he couldn’t always be crossing from Argentina into Chile, without crossing back the other way at least occasionally, indeed just as often, even in the world of the imagination with its somewhat flexible laws. It was a pretext for doubling his lies.

  “Lorenzo”, they felt, was an incongruous name. They all thought it suited its owner, but at the first stirring of doubt, they flipped over to the opposite opinion. It was the same with “Washington,” and again with “Higinio,” and so on through the names, even the commonest ones, like “Abel,” “Raúl” and “Juan.” It would have been absurd to claim that people looked like examples of their names, and yet, in a curious way, they did. The worst (or the best) thing was that in any given case you could convince yourself of a name’s appropriateness or inappropriateness simply by listening to the other person’s arguments, and if that became the norm, even within a small community of friends or colleagues, it would be like seeing ghosts emerge. They were pouring out wine for familiar ghosts. (The real ones had disappeared a while before, as they did every day when the smell of meat rose from the grill, as if it were detrimental to them. But they would reappear later on, more active than ever, at siesta time, which was the high point of their day, in summer at least; in winter, it was dusk.)

  This reminded the master builder of certain regrettable episodes from the past; some of the men present had been working with him for quite a few years, and they joined in the reminiscing. There was the time they had put up a building, like this one, or even bigger, with materials and tools that were hopelessly inadequate, especially the tools. You know the way there’s always some liar exaggerating outrageously, he said. Well, it was really like that. But in this case, the witnesses, including Carlitos Soria (The Bullshit Artist), were not going to let him get away with lying. Which building? they asked him. The one on Quintino Bocayuva. Oh, that one! They all remembered how terrible it had been. Torture. Instead of.... just about everything, really, they had had to make do with, well, anything at all, whatever came to hand. Instead of wheelbarrows, they used some old baby carriages they found dumped in a vacant lot. Instead of buckets, flowerpots (they had to block up the hole in the bottom). And it was the same with everything else: a truly abject scramble for makeshift solutions, which had scarred them for life.

  In less than an hour, and the time flew by because of the interesting conversation, every last mouthful of food disappeared, including the bananas and the peaches and the bread. There was really nothing strange about that: the whole idea was to eat it up. With the wine, however, it was different. In a sense, drinking it was not the whole idea. And yet that is what they had been doing, and they continued: instead of coffee after the meal, they had a glas
s of wine, or two. The drinking, in fact, had become absolute. Inevitably, though, some drank more than others. The three adult Chileans (young Abel Reyes was drinking Coca-Cola) were the quickest, and so attained the highest level of stupefaction, to the point where they could hardly say a coherent good-bye when the others began to leave. And yet they still had some more drinking to do. They did it sitting down, staring into space, smiling vaguely. The others finally vanished, and the three of them underwent a kind of collapse. They felt as if they had imbibed the whole world, but in tiny doses, or as if a joy outside of them had begun to spin, sweeping them up. And, what is more, although they were off their faces by now, it seemed they could go on drinking, go on filling the glasses and lifting them to their lips. At least they still had that feeling, like a giant smile inside each one of them.

  At four in the afternoon, just after the last of the builders had gone, Elisa came down to see what state her husband was in. She had to look around twice to find him, slumped as he was. She wasn’t too alarmed, but she did check to see if there were any others left. And sure enough, the other two Chileans were there. As it happened, Pocketman emerged from a brief spell of unconsciousness and volunteered to help get her husband upstairs. She accepted: Raúl Viñas had come around sufficiently for the two of them to suffice. Almost restored to his normal lucidity by the climb, Pocketman offered to chain up the gate from the outside, although he wouldn’t be able to lock it. After saying good-bye, he went back down. The remaining Chilean, Castro, was still sleeping, but when Pocketman gave him a shake, he woke up completely, if in a bad mood, and since they were both going in the same direction, and a fair way (they had to take the train), they headed off together, placidly, though not entirely steady on their legs. Pocketman kept his promise of chaining up the gate, so unless someone took the trouble of looking for the absent lock, the building appeared to be securely shut. It wasn’t really, but there weren’t any passersby. It was siesta time, the quietest and most deserted time of day, and the hottest. The silence was complete.

  When the man of the house was peacefully unconscious in bed, covered only with a fine sweat of wine, Elisa asked Patri if she could do her a favor, a big favor (she stressed these last words with a certain irritation), and go fetch the children, who shouldn’t have run off in the first place. Patri, who was a model of good manners and respect, repressed a “huh!” but couldn’t quite stifle a sigh, which made her feel immediately ashamed, although it had been as faint as a breeze in the far heights of the sky. Elisa, who was deeply Chilean in this as in all other respects, could perceive the subtlest shades of an intention. So she added a comment, to compensate for the unfortunate tone of her request—or, at least, to unhinge it and let it swing loose beyond, where the real words are, which have no meaning or force to compel. It was amazing, she said, that even in this heat they still had the energy to run off. Playing excited them so much they just couldn’t get enough. It was the equivalent of “living” for adults: you’re not going to decide to die when night comes just because you’ve been living all day. Patri smiled. Also, they had been up early, said her mother; and lack of sleep, which makes adults slow and drowsy, makes kids restless. But they’d have to take a nap, or they’d be unbearable at night. Patri couldn’t promise that she’d be able to get Juan Sebastián to go to bed, or even his buddy Blanca Isabel. The older boy hated the siesta. Elisa thought for a moment. She had, in fact, seen them when she was coming upstairs with her husband. She regretted not having told them to follow her. Each time they saw their father in that state, they thought he was sick and about to die; she could have exploited that momentary terror and shut them away in the dark. With a bit of an effort, they could get to sleep. If they ran off, it was hopeless. Luckily there was no danger of them getting out into the street. For some reason, that danger didn’t exist. There was the possibility of a fall, from any of the floors, since the building was still a concrete frame, with just a few internal walls in place, not all of them, by any means. But neither mother nor daughter mentioned that possibility; it didn’t even enter into their private reflections. They had once said that an adult was just as likely to fall as a child; there was no difference, because the planet’s gravitational force worked in the same way on both. It was like asking which weighed more, a kilo of lead or a kilo of feathers. And that’s why they were vaguely but deeply revolted by the way the owners of the apartments took such care not to let their children approach the edges when they visited, like that morning. If that was how they felt, why were they buying the apartments in the first place? Why didn’t they go and live in houses at ground level? “We’re different,” they thought, “we’re Chilean.”

  But there was an easier way to do it after all, said Elisa, and that was to take away the toy cars. Without them, there would be no reason to remain at large. If she knew her children, and she was sure she did, it was bound to work. It had sometimes worked for her in the past. Patri said they would hide them. Her mother bent down calmly (they were at the door of the little apartment, talking in hushed voices, unnecessarily, since Viñas was sound asleep), and picked up the cardboard box full of toys. With an expert hand, she began to rummage through it. She knew every one of her children’s toys. “The big yellow one, the red one, the little blue truck....” She calculated that exactly four were currently in their possession. She even told Patri which ones. But Patri wasn’t paying much attention. She didn’t think it would be possible to recover all the cars, and so bring in the children. As long as they still had one, just one, Juan Sebastián would stay awake all through the siesta, the little devil.

  She went downstairs to the sixth floor. The quickest way to do it was to check the floors one by one, room by room. If they heard her, they would try to hide. She set about it systematically, but it was hard to concentrate because the heat and the time of day had dazed her. The sixth floor seemed endless. Her chances of finding anything in that void perpetually full of air were minimal, given the terrible brightness, which she had grown so used to, living up there as summer set in, that her pupils had shrunk permanently to pin-points. She didn’t understand the arrangement of the rooms, which wasn’t clear at that stage of the construction; but she felt there were too many of them. The trend toward having more and more rooms was, she felt, absurd. A family couldn’t observe the protocol of a royal court. If people started multiplying rooms by their needs, they could float away into the infinite and never touch the ground of reality again. One for sewing, another for embroidery; one for eating, one for drinking, one for each activity, in short. The same room reproduced over and over, each one fulfilling some silly requirement, as if in a perpetually receding mirror. Her mother had put it very well, except that she hadn’t gone far enough in her generalization. Because the illusion of exhaustivity affected things as well as people. In any case, the children weren’t there.

  When she went down to the fifth floor, she was already tired and her eyelids felt heavy, which surprised her slightly, since she didn’t like the siesta—she was still a child in that respect. Having washed the lunch dishes and left the miniscule rooftop apartment impeccably clean and tidy (in so far as they could, given that it was still under construction), she and her mother had watched television. She would have liked to go on watching, but the time slot for the kind of show they preferred had come to an end, and the ones that were starting required a different kind of attention.

  It might seem odd that at lunchtime, when Abel Reyes came up, his cousin Patri had greeted him
with a kiss. A kiss on the cheek was a normal enough greeting; what might seem odd is that they needed to greet one another, when he had been working in the building since early that morning. But, as it happened, they hadn’t seen each other, which was not unusual, because she hardly ever went down. Her mother did the shopping, and rarely needed help. Patri went down once a day, if that. She helped a lot around the apartment, watched television, and looked after her half-brothers and -sisters. She was pretty much a homebody, like all Chileans, except when they are tireless travelers (she was a bit of both). She was fifteen; her surname was Vicuña, like her mother’s, because she had been born when her mother was single. Very quiet, very serious, pretty hands.