Ghosts

by Cesar Aira

  Elisa took the bags into the kitchen, and Carmen Larraín went with her, asking the usual question: Did she need any help? It was customary to reply in the negative. Raúl Viñas had suggested that they bring glasses for the first toast. Your husband’s eyes are so red, dear, said Carmen, they’re like slices of raw ham. Elisa laughed uproariously. Her sister-in-law was renowned for her witticisms. In case it wasn’t obvious, she explained that he had been celebrating with his workmates at lunchtime. Ah, well, it’s understandable then. Of course it is! A transition: Tell me, what are you cooking? Oh, nothing special, chicken, and the salads there, see what I bought. Perfect, perfect, said Carmen Larraín without even looking. Who’s hungry in this weather? Hey, what do your kids like? Everything, but they don’t eat much; don’t make anything special for them. You’ve brought them up so well, your kids, said Elisa Vicuña. Mine just refuse to eat. Wait till they grow a bit, dear. I guess that’s all I can do: wait. They laughed. Patri came in, like a shadow. Her mother asked her to take out cups for all the children and put an ice cube in each one. The girl counted out six orange plastic cups and placed them on a tray of gold-colored cardboard. The mothers started talking about Carmen’s pregnancy. The experience of pregnancy was always interesting; though repeated often enough to be envisaged by all women, it still retained an exceptional character, which set it apart from, and above, normal repetitions. Outside, the men were talking about oceanography: the return of the catastrophic El Niño current. The children rushed for the cups, and were disappointed to find that they contained only little ice cubes, and nothing to drink. Reluctant to waste the opportunity to do something, they started shaking the cups to make a noise, and naturally some ice came out and fell on the floor. Inés Viñas called them to order and took them all to a tap so they could rinse off the cubes, which were covered with dust. Even those who hadn’t dropped their ice wanted to rinse it. I’m bringing the Coke, said Patri. Hey, Patricita, bring our glasses, don’t forget, will you, said Raúl Viñas. She smiled: Mom brought them already. What a good girl, remarked Javier. The heat seemed to have diminished with the approach of night. Perhaps it hadn’t really, but at least the light was not so harsh. Elongated shadows hung in the air above them, and the sun was sinking toward their homeland.

  The grown-ups helped themselves to two or three ice cubes each, which they put into the good glasses. They were abundantly served with soft drinks and wine, and began to drink immediately. What about the toast? asked Inés Viñas. The first drink’s for thirst, said her brother Raúl. Anyway, remarked Elisa, Roberto still hasn’t arrived. Well, said Raúl, accommodatingly, what about we drink an interim toast? Let’s just wait for the sweat to break out. His joke was a great success, because they had all noticed that almost as soon as the drink went down their throats, they were wet from head to foot. Apparently it was hotter than they had thought. Or perhaps their bodies had dehydrated without them realizing, and now had to go through a phase of re-adaptation. For a moment all of them, even the children, remained still, dripping with perspiration. The climate of Buenos Aires was different; it still had surprises like this in store, although they had been living in it for years. Elisa went back to the kitchen to start preparing the chicken. The children broke the spell, and began to shout and run around again. A big white piece of paper came floating through the still air from somewhere and fell onto the men. Javier Viñas shook it off, and then examined it. With a few precise movements he folded it into a boat; it was a skill he had perfected. He gave it to the children, who had never played with such a big paper boat and immediately wanted some water to float it in. How could we get enough water? asked Carmen. Put it in the pool, suggested Javier, and when they fill it up, it’ll float. So they did, for a bit of fun, and since fun always finds a way to go on, the older cousins climbed down the metal ladder into the pool, although they had been forbidden to do so, on the pretext that the boat had fallen on its side, and they wanted to leave it upright, waiting for the flood. Rock music emerged from a neighboring house.

  When Elisa looked out from the kitchen, Raúl Viñas seized the opportunity to propose a first toast. He called his wife, and since there was a general desire to formalize the little ceremony, everyone, including the children, picked up their refilled cups and glasses. All eyes converged on the host, who had lifted his glass and was gazing absently at the wine. We’re waiting, said Javier. Raúl Viñas raised his eyebrows, as if he were about to speak, yet a few seconds of silence ensued. Could he have been thinking? Possibly, because when he finally uttered the toast, they were struck by its aptness. He said simply, “To the year.” And they all approved. If it had been a year of happiness, it was worth drinking to. And if not, it didn’t matter, because the three words had a deeper or higher meaning: the prodigious gift of a year’s time, loved and respected by all. But it had been a year of happiness, thought Patri, and in that sense the toast concealed a secret, not shared by the others, known only to them, Elisa, Raúl and Patri (the children didn’t count, although they were an essential component of the happiness). The others were left out, but they didn’t know. It was immediately suggested that the children should also propose toasts, and Patri was invited to open the proceedings, as the oldest member of the next generation, so, without much thought, she said: To my mom and dad. Then, thinking that the last word of the sentence might lead to confusion between her progenitor, “the best man in the world,” and Raúl Viñas, she added: “That is, Raúl Viñas.” This was considered very fitting; the grown-ups smiled. The children followed her example, each proposing a toast, “To my mom and dad, that is Raúl (or Javier) Viñas,” even baby Jacqueline, who babbled it out, parroting the words of her siblings and cousins. The adults listened seriously right to the end, smiling a little as well. Then they knocked back the wine. The conversations began again, with an extra degree of joy and liveliness.

  But Patri went on worrying that she had put her foot in it. She hadn’t; on the contrary, if she had been able to read the adults’ thoughts, she would have seen that she had their full approval. But it wasn’t what she had said that was worrying her so much as a familiar yet troubling anxiety, which had been mounting for a few minutes. It was like approaching the void. She left her glass on the ground and walked over to the edge of the pool, on the bottom of which the giant paper boat was lying, forgotten now, right in the middle, on the dry cement. She walked all the way around the pool until she came to the rear of the building. From there, the sunset was visible, becoming intensely yellow and red. The sun was setting, and the year was setting. The “Year of Happiness,” as Raúl Viñas had suggested. They had drunk the sun in one gulp, and the originator of the toast had a special reason for doing so: it wasn’t just that he had spent the year drinking, or even that he was going to continue from now until midnight; the reason was that drinking allowed him to stretch time, without in any way altering its punctuality and precision. Also, by virtue of a curious linguistic habit, “New Year” was an instant, twelve midnight, the minute when the sirens went off. And happiness was, precisely, an instant, not a year.

  When Patri lowered her eyes, still dazzled from looking directly at the sun, she thought she saw human-shaped shadows flying through the air and into the sixth floor, just below her feet. Who could they be? Her anxiety gave way naturally to a feeling of curiosity, and she could see no reason to suppress it. So she continued her circuit of the pool, walking along the other side now, more quickly, heading for the stairwell. To get there she had to pass in front of the
others, who were chatting away noisily, but no one noticed her. She went down the stairs. Although the sixth floor was empty, it seemed different. In the several minutes or half-hour since she had come up with Inés, the configuration of light had changed. The shadows had thickened toward the front, and an intense yellow light was coming in from the back, through the passageways. The perfection of the silence was accentuated by the faint, far-sounding noise of conversation and laughter coming from the terrace above. Paradoxically, a frightening intimation of the unknown was creeping in from the bright side.

  Stepping lightly, Patri ventured toward the back. This is not unusual. When a woman, in a film for example, approaches a mysterious room where the bravest spectator wouldn’t dare set foot, fear counts for nothing. In this case, it’s true, there was no possibility of supernatural danger or any other kind (although the gate in the fence had been left unlocked and unchained). She reached the back landing, onto which the bedroom doors opened; the empty spaces were outlined with strong yellow light. There was not a sound to be heard. She went into the middle room. Somewhat dazzled, she took two steps, and two ghosts passed her saying, “We’re in a hurry, a big hurry,” then disappeared through the wall. She turned around, went out, and rushed into the adjoining room, so as not to miss them. They were already passing through another wall, and their legs seemed to be sinking into the floor. “Why?” she asked them. She went onto the landing. One of the ghosts had turned toward her. “Why what?” “Why are you in a hurry?” “Because of the party,” the ghost replied. They had been tracing a downward curve through space and now they were sinking into the floor and the base of the bathroom wall. “What party?” she asked. Before his head went under, the slower ghost had time to reply: The Big Midnight Feast....

  Patri rushed to the stairs, realizing there was something entirely new and unprecedented about the ghosts. In her surprise all she could do was hurry, without stopping to think about what they had said. The novelty was precisely that they had spoken to her, and answered her questions.

  Although she hated running (and was aware that whatever disappears will reappear), when she got down to the fifth floor, Patri ran to the place where, according to her calculations, the ghosts should have emerged from the ceiling (it still hadn’t dawned on her why she was hurrying), but they were already gone. She plotted the curve approximately with her gaze, down to the point where the floor should have swallowed them up. She hesitated for a moment, and then, through a doorframe, saw a group of five or six go by, floating half way between the ceiling and the floor. Although momentary, the vision struck her as even stranger than what she had just seen, almost as if she were in the presence of real men. She took a few steps in the passageway; on this floor there were a number of bedrooms in a row. She could see ghosts in the next bedroom, and in the third. “Are you going to the party too?” she asked, finally. One of the ghosts turned his head and said, “Of course, Patri,” but a second later they were disappearing through the wall. These ghosts were moving along a curve as well, but it would only have been visible from above, since they were maintaining a constant altitude. They passed briefly through the corner of the third bedroom, and came out into the big living room at the back, which was flooded with light. There the velocity of their movement increased. Patri got her first good look at them, as they traced an increasingly rapid arc in front of her. “Why did you say ‘of course’?” she asked, continuing the conversation. A different ghost, not the one who had spoken before, asked in turn, “Who’d miss the Big Midnight Feast?” but didn’t look at her (indeed he seemed to be facing the opening at the back, the source of light). And when they were already disappearing through the wall on the left, she heard one of their characteristic peals of laughter, which, for some reason, sounded incongruous now. She wanted to ask who was throwing the party, but was too shy. Instead she followed their circular path all the way to the big living room at the front (corresponding to the one at the back) where they scattered like a squadron of fighter planes.

  Since she had ended up near the stairs, and various ghosts had been following downward paths, she decided to go down to the next floor. From one floor to the next, the light diminished. Since fewer partition walls had gone up on the fifth floor, she could see through to the back, where some of the ghosts were floating in empty space, beyond the edge. It wasn’t really accurate to say that they were floating. It looked to her more like they were standing, on something that could not be seen. She went toward them, with a sleepwalker’s clear innocence. And they were watching her.

  There was something architectural about the dusk as well. It was a construction, not governed by chance, as one might have supposed in the case of a meteorological phenomenon, but well thought out; or rather, it was itself a kind of thought. The largest conceivable spaces were transformed into instants, and under covering layers like roofs or paving stones, grids of shadows, light and color formed. But it couldn’t be called a real construction, not in the usual sense of the word, not as the building was real, for example. The dusk was provisional, indifferent, subtle; its compartments of light were home to no one, for the moment, but anyone could see their image cut out of a photograph and stuck to the beautiful heavenly roof. Within the imaginary Great Construction, minor, real constructions reared, gloriously useless and incomplete, provisional too, but in their own way, hinting at permanence. And the strangest thing about it was that all this was a time of day, or night, but really more a time of day, and nothing else.

  Absorbed by the sight of the ghosts, Patri had come almost too close to the edge. When she realized this, she took a step back. She observed them in the half-light, although they were a little too high, relative to her line of sight, for her to study them in detail. She could tell that they were the same as ever; what had changed was the light. She had never seen them so late in the day, not in summer. The unreal look they had in the saturated light of siesta-time, at once so shocking and so reassuring, like idiotic bobbing toys, had evaporated in the dramatic half-light of evening. They rose up in front of her quite slowly; but, given her previous experiences, Patri had reason to believe that their slowness was swarming with a variety of otherworldly speeds. Seen from the right distance, what seemed almost as slow as the movement of a clock’s hand could turn out to be something more than mere high velocity; it could be the very flow of light or vision.

  In this new, late apparition, their bodies had become three-dimensional, tangible; and what bodies they were, such depth and strength! The dust that covered them had become a splendid decoration; now that it didn’t have to absorb tremendous quantities of sunlight, it allowed the dark golden color of their skin to show through, and accentuated their musculature, the perfection of their surfaces. Here were the bulging pectorals she thought she had seen in normal, living men, the well-proportioned arms, the symmetrically sculpted abdomens, the long smooth legs. And their genital equipment, somewhat curved, but also slightly raised by the sheer force of its own bulk (it’s true she was looking from below), was different from anything she had seen, as if more real, more authentic.

  They watched her as they rose, since they were rising and moving forward, toward the fifth floor, at the rear of the building. They looked down at her and smiled an indecipherable smile.

  Who’s throwing the party?

  We are.

  They were no longer laughing as if possessed. They were speaking, with warm voices and words she could understand, in a Spanish without accent, neither Chilean nor Argentinean, like o
n television. They were speaking to her, and it was like being addressed by television characters. She was even more surprised by the way they seemed to be rational. Her surprise crystallized the feeling that had made her come downstairs; that vague, indefinite worry and alarm were becoming a specific torment, a pain, which was indefinable too, but for different reasons, as if it were impossible for her to touch the most genuine reality, the reality of a promise that eluded her grasp. Not that the ghosts had aroused her desires; that was, of course, impossible; and yet, in another sense, they had. Some desires, while less exact and practical, are no less urgent, or even less sexual. She told herself she shouldn’t have heeded her curiosity, she should have resisted. But it was useless. She would do it again, a thousand times, as long as she lived.