Sevastopol

by Emilio Fraia

  But that was two weeks ago. Now, the water is dropping, revealing the swimming pool’s tiles, and Adán really did disappear, because he’s nowhere to be found.

  Did you really think he might be in here? Walter asks.

  Nilo blinks. He brings up the squash again. He wants to know how long before they’ll be able to harvest the squash. His employee replies that if the weather holds, in forty, fifty days, max. He says this and then leans against the railing on the aluminum ladder.

  The water is low, the ladder looks like a fragile skeleton. Without the weight, volume, and pressure of the water, it is surrounded only by the tiles, floating, in the middle of the empty swimming pool.

  Walter hops down from the third rung. The water splashes up onto his boots, hitting just below his knees. He walks around the pool. He drags his feet along, pushing the dark water. They still can’t see the bottom, there’s too much mud, and Walter walks around the bottom of pool, glaring up at Nilo, as if to say: this is all a big waste of time, it makes no sense, your drunk Indian-faced friend ain’t down here.

  Then, for a moment, not even Nilo understands why he asked his employee to drain the swimming pool. He blinks. It makes no sense. There’s nothing, no one.

  The hours that follow elapse like a long, drawn-out soccer match, stretching on and on. Nilo goes back to look for Adán in the guest rooms, in the orchard, in the small storage shed where there are sacks of feed, cement, a pile of beams. Then he gives up. He falls asleep on the sun lounger, mouth open, his magazine on his chest.

  He wakes to a sound. Far away at first, then getting closer. Echoed by the mountains. It’s a car, probably a big car, a pick-up truck, driving past the gate at the entrance to the property, its gears grinding. He thinks it might be Adán. He cranes his neck, focuses his attention, and tries to hear something. But after a peak of intensity, the roar of the engine begins to move away. It hangs behind the mountain mist, growing fainter until it disappears completely.

  Nilo remembers how, three or four days ago, instead of waning, an engine roar grew louder. Same as all the cars that came down the narrow road at the entrance to the property. The noise grew and took shape. The smell of burning oil filled the air.

  Then, coming through the gate and up to the house, he saw a VW Bug. Yellow, well maintained. It gleamed. When it came to a stop and the door opened, a man got out.

  It was Adán. Standing there, leaning on the hood. He was smiling. Everything mingled with the sound of the engine, which seemed to percolate inside them — the car was running the entire time, quivering, the landscape trembled, Adán’s face trembled, and suddenly the twitch turned into a full-blown coughing fit. Then Adán hawked a ball of phlegm from his lung and spat on the ground, bringing everything to a stop.

  He said he’d gone into town the night before. At the bar, he made friends with these two remarkable guys. He’d bought the car off one of them. He bought a little house too. The car in cash. For the house, he wrote four checks. He said all this, grinning, coughing, slapping the hood. Nilo, standing in front of him, blinked. His expression was of someone trying to understand. Someone who asks questions, but isn’t getting any answers. Behind Adán, on the horizon, were the mountains and, on top of them, eucalyptus trees.

  Nilo remembers this and believes Adán may have gone back into town. Who could say for sure that he hadn’t gone back into town, who could say for sure that he hadn’t gone to see that house in the light of day? He said he’d bought a house. A place by the river. Or who could say for sure that he hadn’t simply grown tired of all this and gone back to São Paulo?

  Walter says that could be. It’s a possibility. But the yellow Beetle was still sitting on the lawn, behind the guest rooms. I don’t think your liquored-up Indian-faced friend could have gone far.

  Nilo takes the keys and decides to go to the room. He’s still limping, his knee slows his step, it feels like he’ll never make it. It feels like it’s taking him years, as if, from one step to the next, a long time had passed, as if everything had changed. When he reaches the door, he smells the strong scent of wood, the walls are made of old timber, the room looks like a bunker, in the winter it gets cold and the mist covers the mountain, framed by the window. Adán’s belongings are still there. A denim shirt on the bed, boots, socks. His suitcase leaning against the table in the corner. Half a blister pack of pills on top of the dresser.

  Things take on a life of their own, that’s what Nilo always says. Objects blend with people, over time they come to life.

  Not a trace, however, of Veronica’s things. Because she’d decided to take off the very first week. They’d had a nasty argument. She’d almost knocked him out with one of those stone ashtrays. You could hear the screaming. She was tired. If you won’t change, then how will you ever be free of it? You can stay here with this crazy old man who barely opens his mouth. I’m not going to ruin my life because of you.

  So she took the car and drove the more than two hundred and fifty kilometers back to São Paulo. But she called every day. Adán said he had no plans to return. He was going to stay longer. He said it like that, that he was going to stay a little longer. A few more days, a week. He was paying more than what they’d agreed upon for the room, he was feeling good. That’s what money is for. It’s a kind of energy. Idle money, idle everything. Money flows, everything flows. It was like the fresh air. The river water. But when he told her he’d bought a house in town, Veronica snapped. A little shack for you to take your whores! She said she would talk to a lawyer, scrap the deal, put a stop to it. You bet I will. As for the car, it’s probably worthless. You can do whatever you want with it, kill yourself with it for all I care. Adán laughed. Are you drunk again? He said he had enough alcohol to last until the end of the world. Our actions in life are not many. And then one day it’s all over.

  Before Adán vanished, however, before he was nowhere at all, Nilo had spent a long time with him on the concrete bench beside the tennis court, or what had once been a tennis court. That was the day before yesterday, around four. Walter had seen everything. Nilo sat beside Adán, in front of the frayed net, weeds breaking through the cracks in the pavement. Adán wore a Yankees jersey, white sneakers, white socks. A watch that looked like it was from like another time. He was holding a bottle of whiskey. He smelled like booze.

  They sat for a while in silence. The sky was blue. The leaves on the trees changed color as they were carried by the wind and, on the ground, they looked rusty, worn-out. At one point Adán said he would like to tell a story. The story of my life, he said, and grinned, tossing his head back. In the end, old pal, that’s all there is to it: people have just two or three stories in their lives. You won’t learn anything from it. No one learns anything from any story.

  Adán coughed a few times. Then he mopped his forehead and glistening cheeks.

  I haven’t always had money, old pal. Not that I’ve got much now, but I’ve had my fair share of luck in life. He opened the bottle, took another drink. That all started around ten years ago, more or less the time I’ve been with Veronica — now that was a complete mistake. But what I’m going to tell you happened long before Veronica.

  Back then, I had nothing. Sometimes I look back on that time and think: that was a whole other lifetime, which just happens to also be mine, but might not be, because we have more than one life, and they don’t all necessarily look alike. Sometimes there’s not even any continuity between them, but after a while we learn how to talk about past lives, and they become harmless as we talk about them, and as we start to think we understand what they mean. It calms us down. But of course that’s just one more delusion among many. I think that we tell and repeat these stories because we’re afraid of them. That’s what it is, really. A cry for help. We want someone to help us, to protect us from them.

  Adán said that he had been born in Peru, in Lima, the son of a Brazilian mother and a Peruvian father, and that soon after his birth hi
s parents separated, he’d grown up in São Paulo with his mother. But then he decided to return to Peru. It was 1975. I was eighteen, he said. I wanted to know more about my father, who’d died the year before in a fire, a story that had never been fully explained. His car, a red Belina, had been found intact in a vacant lot on the outskirts of Lima. When I returned to Lima, in May 1975, the car was sitting in the garage of his house, where his older sister had gone to live after his death. After some inquiries, which were all dead ends, the car had been returned by the police and no one had touched it since, making it seem like my father might turn up at any moment and get in the car to go for a ride with me around that city covered in dust and people who seemed more like the undead, sprouting up from the dryness of the fuzzy, earth-colored horizons, wandering aimlessly from one place to another.

  The car was surrounded by junk, a bicycle, woodworking tools. There was an impressive layer of dirt on the hood. Adán forced the door open, almost breaking off its handle in his hand.

  When he settled into the driver’s seat, he smelled a mixture of wax and stale beer, which to this day he thinks must be his father’s scent. It was what he could believe, and somehow that became the truth to him, that smell, one thing explaining the other, one thing giving meaning to the other. That’s how our brains work, right? Adán sat there for a while in the car, the last place his father had been before he disappeared. He put his hands on the wheel. He played with the gearshift. He pressed the pedals.

  Break, accelerator, clutch. There was a wadded up washcloth, forgotten between the windshield and the dashboard. A Christmas tree with the words Happy Holidays hung from the rearview mirror.

  He regretted that he knew almost nothing about his father, although that’s the only thing you can ever know about a person: nothing, isn’t that right? I stayed in Peru until 1990. Fifteen years, old pal. There comes a time when everything grows old, too. There was nothing more to do. It was March 16, precisely, the day I went back, the day after you all got a president again, and one month before the Peruvian Congress met its famous demise. A nightmare. It’s always the same story for those of us born in this corner of the world, the same story for you all, the same old story, some bigger, darker hole right around the corner. It was a long trip. What did I learn? That there are animals that spend the winter in deep waters. And that with great hope also comes a great lack of hope.

  Adán breathed heavily. There was ecstasy in his voice. He told this story and paused. He took another drink from the bottle. He began to babble on about something and grin and suddenly he slapped his forehead, saying he’d remembered something else. He had seen a pig on the property that morning. Lying in the middle of the dirt road. It looked like an ox. It was pink, extraordinary. There was a chunk missing from one of its ears. Must have lost it on a barbed wire fence. It just laid there staring at me, you should’ve seen it. Then it got up and disappeared behind the bushes.

  When he shared this, in spite of all those heartwarming stories of man and animal coming together, tales of great friendship, Adán said he wanted to eat the pig. He smiled. You keep hogs here, don’t you? He took another swig. His hands were shaking, clutching the bottle. On the farm, there were half a dozen chickens, one scrawny horse, ducks, a skeletal parrot, which Nilo never got rid of, even though he knew it was wasting away and on the verge of disintegrating into a heap on top of an old wardrobe — but no pigs.

  Nilo said he could have pork brought in from town. But Adán wasn’t talking about just any pig, he was talking about that particular pig. He smiled. The tennis court was on the upper part of the property. From the concrete bench, you had more or less an overview of the surroundings. There was a winding road, a gentle sloping hill. Behind that, the river, Mr. Hermes’s farm, the mountains of eucalyptus trees that looked out of place because they were so tall.

  Nilo said he would ask his employee, Walter, to see about it. The pig must be from someone’s livestock. From Hermes’s farm, odds are. Hermes’s farm is big. A few years ago, his children came in and modernized everything. They started to keep bees, invested in fruit trees, coffee, vegetables. All to supply a chain of stores. They created a chain of stores. Organic produce. Sustainable agriculture. But they didn’t once consider giving up the eucalyptus trees. That’s where the money was. The old man deals in eucalyptus trees. Has for many years. Little by little the mountains were covered with eucalyptus. If he’d planted eucalyptus, Nilo would have been rich. Nothing he tried to grow really worked out. People said that when Nilo bought the place, he had a wife and a baby daughter. They said he was interested in things like meditation, magic, alternative healing. He wanted to create a community, that’s what they said. But then he got it in his head that he could have an inn. He invested what he had, built the little cabins. Then time passed. A long time, nobody even knew how long anymore. It was already like that when Walter arrived. Everything seemed to have happened in another lifetime. Walter often says that it’s a region made for eucalyptus trees. Nilo shakes his head, gets angry. Sometimes he has nightmares and wakes in the middle of the night — from a distance you can see him walking around like a ghost, turning the lights on and off around the house.

  The story of the pig. The story came out of nowhere and seemed to have no end. Adán gave details about its appearance. Then he spent some time describing recipes for pork. Stews, roasts, pot pies. He said the pig was so fat that his eyes were sunken into his nose. It had a frightened look in its eyes, more like that of a guinea pig. As a matter of fact, the whole time he stood on that road, watching the pig, that’s what he’d been thinking about: a guinea pig. One of those little rats, because that’s what they are, little rats, balls of fur. The story’s actually about a lot of things, but it’s mostly about a guinea pig.

  Then Adán smiled again, a smile that was constantly changing. He looked down, shook his head, then looked at Nilo: a goddamn guinea pig. Can you believe it, old pal?

  Once, he said, his son had asked him for a guinea pig. He must have seen one on some ad or TV show. He asked me with his tiny eyes wide open, two wet little balls. At first he tried to tell Oscar that they didn’t make good pets, because they really didn’t. In Peru people eat guinea pigs, it’s one of those traditional things, which usually shocks tourists, outsiders, like Eskimos who eat live seals for dinner, or the octopuses in Tokyo restaurants that have their heads beaten in and are served up still moving. That kind of thing. One day, if he stayed in that country, his son would also eat guinea pigs. People have cats and dogs as pets, not chickens. Nobody eats a cat or a dog, do they?

  Imperceptibly, without the slightest noise, or without either of them noticing the slightest noise, an airplane cut through the sky. Adán put the bottle of whiskey on the ground and rested the palms of his trembling hands on his thighs. Nilo blinked.

  They looked like an old man and his demon, and it was hard to figure out who was who. A demon who’d need some help to get home. But it had been a long time, and even if it were possible to return, it would be impossible to know where home was. For some things, it would be better if they never happened at all. I’m talking about death, of course. And how we keep falling, from one ordeal to another.

  Adán went to that city to learn more about his father, and he wound up having a child.

  Back then, in the early eighties, he lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchenette and a pitiful little bathroom. Gracia, Oscar’s mother, lived in a district near Lima called Callao, on a small street near the fire department, two blocks from the Italian sports center, a club for people who’d come to the Americas in search of opportunity, determined not to starve to death, and only managed to fuck up what, for centuries, had already been fucked up by our grandparents’ grandparents, old pal. In those days, by day, Adán worked in an office, in a building downtown on Calle Quilca, where the archives of the state department of roadways operated. The door to his office was kept ajar, and anyone walking down the corridor could see
him there, beset with maps, files, folders, and reports on what back then was called the Average Daily Highway Volume. Adán was in his early twenties, he didn’t have a pot belly yet, he wore his hair long, tied back in a knot, which made him look like an Indian from an old Western, but an Indian from a made-for-TV movie, one who didn’t get killed by John Wayne, but by some B-list actor, against a fake desert filled with cardboard rocks.

  At the time, I thought things might get better, that the job might lead somewhere, as if a job could lead anyone anywhere, but back then I was betting it would, and so without even realizing it, over time I slowly became part of that room, with those lucuma-colored walls and metal filing cabinets, waiting for the swivel of a fan that didn’t really do much, that is to say, nothing at all, against Lima’s radioactive heat. Adán took a crumpled photo from his wallet and showed Nilo.

  It was of the three of them, the woman, Adán, and their baby son in his arms, in front of an ice cream stand, the Pacific behind them, a place that a decade later would be besieged by a wall of high-rises, with each apartment costing half a million soles or more.

  The photo was taken at night and on one side you can see the lights of Callao. It looks like a bomb went off that, in a couple seconds, would wipe everything off the face of the earth.

  As for Nilo, he doesn’t want any photos on the property. No picture frames, nothing. One day, many years ago, Nilo decided he should leave the photos behind. He felt bad when he looked at them. So he gathered them all into a big wooden box, went down to the basement, and put them under a dresser, pushed against the wall where a rotting oar hung, suspended by two hooks. A place where rafters passed through the damp wall, between old records and stacks of magazines with headlines about flying saucers and lost civilizations. It was as if he were saying to the photographs: stay right there. I don’t want you around the house.