Twist
Page 39
“You brought a bottle of wine?” Zeberio asks, dumbfounded.
“We need everything we can get to survive the night.”
“Do you have anything to open the bottle with?”
Soto’s color drains from his face. Zeberio can’t help laughing.
“No…you don’t have a corkscrew in your love hideout? You didn’t bring your Swiss Army knife, Wojtyla?”
“I would have brought it, had I known you would be bringing a bottle of wine, commander…”
“Fuck, Zebe, I wanted to surprise you…”
“And you did, Soto, you did, big time…but bring a wineskin next time!”
After discarding the possibility of opening the bottle by hitting its neck against the rock to avoid risks and cuts to their hands, they decide to reserve the wine for a better occasion. They bring wet cookie crumbs to their mouths. They eat one reineta apple each. Zeberio improvises a fire and digs out a pack of spaghetti from his Aladdin cave. Since they don’t have a pot in which to boil water, they start eating the spaghetti uncooked, anything to stop the groans from their stomachs. It occurs to Lazkano that they could heat up the spaghetti in the fire, as if they were skewers. With an effort of the imagination, they can pretend they’re eating tiny bread sticks.
Lazkano is proud to have been the one to think they could heat up the uncooked spaghetti in the fire. For once, he feels useful to his two leaders.
A wet but rainless dawn has risen.
“Look!”
Zeberio says Look! in the same way he’s been saying there. There: look!
The owl is asleep.
“I’ll bet my bottom dollar you’ve never seen a sleeping owl.”
No one answers him. It’s proving hard enough to stretch out their limbs and remove bits of straw from their mouths and the backs of their necks.
They shake the Scottish blankets and fold them up to put back in their hiding place while still yawning. Soto’s eyes look tiny before he puts on his very thick glasses. Barely awake, he and Lazkano look like old men. Zeberio, however, looks just as alert as he always does, which would seem to suggest he’s been up for a while.
“Bring a couple of sleeping bags to your love nest next time. Otherwise none of your nuns is ever going to want a repeat session,” Soto suggests.
“Sleeping bags and a couple of glasses, to serve the champagne you’ll remember to bring without saying anything to anyone.”
Despite not having even rubbed the sleep dust out of his eyes, Soto finds the strength to say goodbye to the owl.
“Look after yourself, Ol’ Owl Newhood. Until we meet again.”
They stop at the guard’s house to have breakfast. Fried eggs with enormous yolks, a piece of stewed meat, fried bacon and broth, all of it accompanied by crusty dark homemade bread that’s just come out of the oven. All three eat their breakfast without sharing a word, like castaways who have just been rescued, to the delight of the lady of the house, who is overjoyed to see how healthy her boys are. When they finish the first round, with a mischievous look, Soto orders a second round of breakfasts by drawing a circle around their three empty plates with his index finger. Afterward he opens his backpack to take out the bottle of wine, he’d almost forgotten it.
“Would you open the wojtyl of wine for us, madam of the house?”
The woman, it goes without saying, doesn’t understand their private joke about the Pope, but when the three young men start laughing raucously she joins them too, they all end up laughing at the same time, and afterward they echo their own laughter, drunk in the laughter, celebrating the laughter with more laughter; shaking their heads right and left, clown, what’s wrong with your brain, nutcase, brother, the three men continue eating, fool, nutcase, as if the theater of the world was limited to the circumference of those white porcelain plates, following the bacon with broth and the broth with egg, trying to stem the runaway free flow of volcanic egg yolk with the bread while they chew on the egg white, trying to turn that overflow of orange lava into invisible straight paths before taking that piece of bread into their mouths.
“There’s your open bottle.”
“There?”
“There, there and there.”
The three friends laugh again, without apparent reason. There’s always another hill.
Adding up the ages of the three of them, they’re not even as old as the sixty-five-year-old lady of the house. The cheap wine smells like paradise.
Only two of the three windows of the guard’s house are open. The windows don’t have curtains. The rays of sun soak the unvarnished floor with optimism, casting vivid puddles of rectangular light, reaching, bit by bit, the faces and the eyes of the three young men.
The light blinds them, and doesn’t let them see anything that could take them from such happiness.
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