Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  Diego feels dizzy. He leans on and then sits on the only varnished chair, before his father is able to warn him. He’s literally stuck to it.

  “I’ve discovered scuba diving here in Mexico. You should try it sometime. It’s a relief to know that no one is going to ask me to exterminate any of the creatures down there…I experience things with another temperament under the water, son, I have found another life. It helps to be in a place where no one owes you anything. A place where you owe no one nothing.”

  Diego Lazkano remembers the reservoir. How they went through it inch by inch, in vain. How they weren’t able to find Soto and Zeberio’s bodies there, or his father’s. And then he remembers the Toad, the attorney, his daughter, Cristina. “Let’s submerge ourselves in subjectivity, let’s dive into it.”

  “Things look different under the surface, even your own reflection. You have no idea how calming it is to be able to dive among the corals, to marvel at the undulating glide of the manta ray; everything is more harmonious under the water, there’s hardly any speed, it’s life in slow motion, a means of stretching life out…I used to close my eyes whenever I went swimming, I used to prefer not knowing what was down there. Until I opened my eyes and discovered a new world. You should try it.”

  “You’ve told me that before. You’re repeating yourself…Are you sure you don’t suffer dementia after all?”

  Gabriel Lazkano doesn’t take that comment well at all. Diego tries to take advantage of that moment of weakness in his father to move the conversation in a direction of his choosing, but the old man is faster than him.

  “It would be ironic, wouldn’t it? First you interpret the role, and after years it becomes your reality. It happens sometimes, in this life.”

  He is not mistaken, but Diego is unwilling to acknowledge that his father is right about anything.

  “When that day comes I’ll go into the sea and never come out. It’s much more agreeable to contemplate the void in the sandbanks at the bottom of the sea than to look at anything outside the water. Marine vegetation…those gigantic ladybushes that break through the sand…with the years we end up finding sex where there isn’t any, in food, in drink; sights and smells become substitutes to action…there is a lot of that under the water, believe me.”

  The Toad and his theory about cold showers come to Lazkano’s mind. They would get on well, his father and the Toad, for as long as Mr. Bug didn’t exterminate him, of course: toads can be pests, and not marine pests, precisely.

  Mr. Bug. The Bug Outer. The Bug Offer. Sir Insect. Mr. Infect.

  “Your new life. Should I admire you for what you have achieved?”

  “I’ve worked hard, son. New beginnings have their disadvantages: I haven’t been able to cash my pension. I’ve had to continue with the business: all sorts of plagues, the owners of these homes don’t like to wake up with ants. They don’t know that they’re fighting them in vain, those poor fools don’t realize that ants aren’t the intruders in our homes: we are the intruders in theirs. These cliffs belonged to the seagulls and the albatross, until speculators came to cash in. And despite everything, that unease toward all living things has been tremendously beneficial for me. The Danes, the Germans, the Dutch…they are most generous with their tips. The Americans, which is what you usually find here, not so much.”

  “You’ve continued killing bugs, following your true vocation.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a vocation, it’s not the same as yours. But it’s true, when you are competent in a field, whether it’s due to vocation or not, you end up being fond of your routine: rodents, insects, microorganisms, Psychoda alternata, mold, Mus musculus, Blatta orientalis, Hofmannophilia pseudosprettella…Brown mice Rattus rattus or Rattus norvegicus…the cockroach Blattella germanica, Ctenocephalides canis…Latin always adds a little something, it looks good on the leaflets…Periplaneta americana, Musca domestica, Lasius niger…I sound like an Oxford professor when I say them all in a row, don’t you think?”

  Non bis in idem. Diego fucking hates Latin. They could definitely be good friends, his father and the Toad.

  “What does this or that name matter, you may say, they’re only bugs after all…But the truth is that to read them all in a row really soothes my clients, especially if next to each Latin name of the species you tick the little boxes that mark whether the infestation is severe or mild, that, of the whole list of potential threats to their homesteads, only one or two need to be combated…that the incidence is two on a scale of one to five, that they are relatively safe…”

  “That’s how you made a living, that’s how you were able to buy this house.”

  “I had to start from nothing, kill lots of bugs to build it. How many dispatched bugs for each of these bricks…”

  “Us among them.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “I always kept track of you, I read your books, I bought them over the Internet, they were posted to me. I bet that the trail that left through the post office has something to do with you having located me. It’s ironic, given that all of this started in a post office, with a bunch of books…”

  “I came to the wrong place, Diego; I was convinced that the books were parcels that I needed to post.” Diego’s face is expressionless. “Let’s submerge ourselves in subjectivity, let’s dive into it.”

  “My son’s trajectory never ceased to surprise me, your chosen path; your mother and I would have never imagined that…I don’t know…I would have liked to show you mine too: explain things to you that I’ve never been able to tell you all these years, our relationship with the Institute of Toxicology, for example, how methods of extermination have changed, the way in which we approach preventive inspections, how we combat infestations through chemical, biological, mechanical, or passive measures, how the first step consists of differentiating the inside of a house from the outside…Ants, for example, are very stubborn…”

  Why the sudden insistence on ants? Did his father remember that strange phone call of his all those years ago, perhaps?

  One of the bad holes. Best to fumigate. Your friend’s house. Quite a big nest.

  No, no way, it was impossible. But Diego stood on guard, as if his father really knew how much and why he hated ants so much. But no, it was just his paranoia, his father couldn’t know anything. The ants, the engineer. How he was in charge of the zulo, how all his work guarding that place ended up being completely useless. Or maybe not. Maybe not completely.

  There’s something disconcerting, a kind of sadness that open chasms in the rock causes him to feel, the resin of the varnish that’s stuck to his clothes, something that stops him from leaving that place. He had found his father and his father was safe and sound, but he was incapable of forgiving him. Should he? Was he being too mean to him? No, what his father had done to them was unspeakable. To escape to start over was in itself unforgivable, but to feign a degenerative illness showed an unmatched degree of cruelty. His mother, his sister, and he were not fictional characters, but they had been treated as such.

  “Would you like me to walk you to the village?”

  His father makes one last attempt, in vain. Diego Lazkano walks without saying a word, and only takes out his cell phone to order a taxi when he’s certain to be out of his father’s field of vision.

  That was the last time he saw his father. He exterminated him from his life, in the same way his father had exterminated them.

  Ghosts should be left alone, even when they are living ghosts; he knew that, year after year, the more he resembled his father physically, the more he would try to guess what he might look like and where he might be, that he’d be curious to know what that portrait of a submarine Dorian Gray hidden in a wardrobe might look like, precisely because he was deprived of the mirror that could provide him with an advance view of his own decline.

  Lazkano was trapped. His hands were tied. Either he accepted Fontecha’s deal, or he allowed the matter of t
he folder to come to light, sacrificing his whole career in exchange for one last attempt at justice in a case in which the chances of implicating Fontecha and his superiors were, let’s face it, rather slim. He’d been held in El Cerro, true. He had been tortured, true. Soto and Zeberio’s murderers had been there, true. But he didn’t really have any specific proof against Fontecha. Even though he had threatened his father with the courts, old man Lazkano was right, he would never do it; as a matter of fact, he never did declare in the Soto and Zeberio case. He left Agirre Sesma and his daughter in the lurch, forced to embarrassingly remove one of the witnesses for the prosecution at the last minute. Fontecha came out of the process unscathed, by the skin of his teeth: his subordinates, not so much. The Toad did a great job, he got far, even without him. Would the result have been any different if Diego had testified? He would never know. Cowardice is stronger than us: we choose to maintain our miserly plot of land, even when the price to pay is the betrayal of an incorruptible attorney like Agirre Sesma and his beautiful daughter, Cristina. We are guardians of repetition, we push for everything to remain the same, even when we switch homes for a while, even when we spend a few days in a hotel, we transplant our habits, our ways, our patterns of territorial distribution, reconstructing our original bedside table with little mementos – accessories, little jars, watches. And just like we replicate and reconstruct with objects, so we reconstruct our essential misery. We are all crazy, and the omniscient narrator that looms over our craziness, that narrator who inhabits our minds, knows that very well. We almost always make the myopic choice that preserves a reasonable degree of misery, that covers up our shame and sustains the nonsense of our daily doings. Diego remembered Faulkner’s quote: “But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”

  Lazkano felt his world crumble, he remembered his father, that man he hated so much, that fraudster, the enormous dimension of his cruelty, and the way he’d punched him on the nose in Casa Morel, where do you think your vocation to write comes from? How could he not have noticed it before? How could he have been so blind? Why did he replicate his father’s behavior in his own way, appropriating what was someone else’s, turning into a usurper, perpetuating the same mindset he reproached his father for, if not something even worse? A terrible shiver ran down his spine as he imagined the satisfied cackle with which his father would rejoice if he found out his real story. What better reproach to indulge in than that salmon-pink-colored folder that rose and swam against the current? “You are like me, I can be proud of you,” he would say, raising his margarita to the heavens, like a transparent hot-air balloon, among noisy seagulls, Peruvian boobies and albatross, in his inscrutable refuge among the rocks, in his hideout under the sun.

  Lazkano felt his world collapse, felt such impotence and anger at the realization that his DNA knew more about him than he did. That’s what it was all about then. There was nothing else: to live, consciously or unconsciously, a life that was a carbon copy of someone else’s sketch, a true or a false life, whatever you want to call it; we are but borrowed skins, everything was in vain, we thought we fooled everyone when in truth we only managed to fool ourselves.

  When all that was over – although it looked like all that would never end – Diego would only have one path left: to start writing, once and for all, from his own skin, to tell the story of how he met Soto and Zeberio, to write everything that happened in the time they shared together and everything that happened in the time they weren’t able to share. Exhume their bodies with a fountain pen. Sculpt their profiles. Try to go deep into the dark jungle. Recompose the thread of his mental jungle. Reconstruct all that on paper. Leave his skin in the endeavor. Every inch of his skin. Tell all. Get malodorously naked. Gobble himself up and leave nothing but a snake’s shed skin behind. Don’t hide any infamies. Write that book and heal. Some people call that redemption, as if using one word or another mattered.

  You are right: it matters.

  Lazkano wanted to tell the truth, he was eager to start finding his own skin. To write, as soon as possible, the first few lines of a story only he could tell; as soon as possible, that very night preferably. But, having arrived at this point, he could well wait one more night: the truth is he was going to have to wait a little, given that the theater play Gloria was directing premiered that night, and he couldn’t miss that, even if he could only turn up in a precarious, borrowed skin.

  Lazkano didn’t know Platonov, but the play hooked him from the start. Although it wasn’t as famous as The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, or The Cherry Orchard, Diego liked it better than all of them, more so when he found out that Anton Chekhov was barely twenty years old when he wrote it. Just twenty years old, and all the obsessions and concerns of the great Russian writer were already there: his bitter humor, indebted families forced to leave their lands and mansions, passionate, thrilling characters led to perdition by fate and alcohol, lucid dialogues that would drive any wretched fellow human being to self-destruct, a heartless dissection of the human condition…Pathetic gentlemen who would challenge each other to a duel only to cry like children immediately afterward, promises to lovers to run away together that never ended well, criminals scorned by feudal lords who end up becoming customers of their criminal handymen…he was a great master, Chekhov. A huge crook, Chekhov. A damned bastard, Anton. A monstrous genius like him made any writer feel tiny in comparison to him. He was only twenty years old when he wrote that, a similar age to Soto and Zeberio when they made them disappear. Some similarities can kill: Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, an age Lazkano had already surpassed. Platonov was a very long play, were it to be performed in its totality, it would last five or six hours, he was sure that Gloria was going to shorten it a lot, not even the most fervent theater fan would be willing to suffer in silence through such a lengthy theatrical tour de force.

  The main character in the play was the schoolmaster Mikhail Vasilievich Platonov. It was clearly a version of Don Juan. Charmed by his attentive words, each and every one of the women who appear on the stage, be them married, teenagers, or widowed, eat out of his hand. Platonov doesn’t hide his seductive character, and he warns the women at his feet that they will be unhappy by his side, that he is a married man, that he will use them and then abandon them, but they care little for any of this, they love the schoolmaster all the same. Platonov describes another one of the characters in the play like this: “The hero of the most contemporary of novels. Unfortunately, that novel hasn’t been written yet.”

  There was another detail that made Diego feel close to the play. When he wrote it – Anton Chekhov didn’t even bother to give it a title – the brother of the great Russian playwright sent the play to Maria Yrmolova, the famous actress. She, as was to be expected, didn’t even take it into consideration. And Chekhov destroyed the manuscript with great sorrow. They found a handwritten first draft after his death. This was, precisely, the original he used to develop the copy that he then destroyed…Once again, salmon-pink folders, salmon that swam against currents, manuscripts that came to the surface. The blessed damned copies. It was like his own story, one hundred years ago.

  The phone rang. It was Gloria.

  “What did you think?”

  “You didn’t tell me that it was a version of Don Juan.”

  “Why do you say that? Did you identify with Platonov, or what?”

  “Not at all, but I must admit that every now and then I gave your face to the female protagonist Anna Petrovna: ‘In this world one mustn’t trust one’s enemies, and apparently one’s friends either…‘”

  “I prefer this line from Anna: ‘As long as there are intelligent people who want to grow increasingly intelligent, the rest will come on its own.’”

  “You should play Anna yo
urself.”

  “Not in a million years: Sara Fernandez said yes to playing the part. All I need is for you to tell me that you’ll do the translation…will you?”

  “I can try.”

  “Diego! It makes me so happy to hear that!”

  The translation wasn’t too complicated. Oral register, but with the marked reflective tone of speech typical of the turn of the twentieth century. Chekhov’s writing wasn’t at all rhetorical. There was little overflow in his texts. Lazkano had to admit that he was enjoying that occupation, for the first time in a long time he felt a certain lightness in abandoning creation to undertake translation, in the process of searching for a voice. What he’d told Gloria wasn’t completely true: he did identify with Platonov every now and then, and not exactly because of his Don Juanism, but because of his fatalistic approach to life. Platonov wasn’t the only tormented character in the play, not at all, the play was brimming with them. As a matter of fact, the script oozed fatalism through every pore, why deny it. He underlined a lot of passages as he undertook their translation:

  GLAGOLIEV: We loved women like the most faithful gentlemen, we had faith in them, we adored them, because in them we saw the best of human nature…Because women are a better kind of human, Sergei Pavlovich! We also had friends…In my day, friendship didn’t seem as naïve or useless. In my day, we had salons, meetings…Back then we would jump into the fire for our friends.

  VOINITZEV (yawning): Those were the good old days!

  GLAGOLIEV: In our time, we weren’t ashamed of tears and no one laughed at them…We were happier than you are now. In our time, people who understood music would never leave the theater, they would stay until the end…

  Lazkano is particularly struck by the way in which Platonov self-flagellates, his absolute lack of self-pity, his profound awareness of his own process of self-destruction, and his lack of willpower to do anything about it. He perceives himself as a harmful person, but never displays the tiniest attempt to straighten up his toxic personality: “Gentlemen, I am afraid that my friendship is certain to bring you tears too. Let us drink to the happy resolution of all friendships, ours included! May its ending be as pleasant and deliberate as its beginning.”