Santiago's Way

by Patricia Laurent

  Finally I pick it up in a kitchen towel and creep with it past the bedroom where my parents are taking an afternoon nap. Out on the patio I put it in a trough. I speak words of consolation to it, but they are really meant to bring comfort to me. I want to end its suffering with a deadly blow, but I cannot bring myself to hit it. I have no poison. Its one healthy eye continues to weep in misery. I tell it to wait, and I go to fetch an aspirin from the medicine cabinet.

  I come back with four and dissolve them in warm water. With a dropper I put the liquid in its mouth, and it runs out through the wound in its gullet. Many maggots also drop out. I decide to wash its wounds. With warm water I begin to flush out the maggots, but many of them only flee deeper inside the body. I can do no more. I feel desperate and helpless. I leave the cat wrapped in the kitchen towel in a corner of the patio. Two days later it is dead.

  Cuco is on top of me, kissing me. Beside us is a lamp, and by its light I can see the same suffering in his eyes. Blindly I choose a sore on his back and run the pad of my finger over it as if it were an antique Egyptian scarab lately discovered by an anthropologist. Then I choose another and another. They are like the maggots in the cat, only fossilized on his skin. He is embarrassed and hides his face in my neck. After we caress each other for a while he starts to cough. First a few dry heaves, then a crackling burst of phlegm. He wants to get off the bed, but the coughing doubles him over. He manages to hold one hand to his mouth, but blood-streaked phlegm slips out between his fingers. He covers his head with the sheet. Coughing and reeling he heads to the bathroom. From the bed I can hear him spitting and choking. I hear him pull back the sliding door of the medicine cabinet and the clinking of glass bottles. He takes a long swallow of medicine and comes out of the bathroom grinning, ready to carry on with his caresses. Santiago, still in a sulky voice, begs that we get out of there.

  ‘Take me back to the lodging-house,’ I say to Cuco.

  ‘No, no!’ protests Santiago. ‘Don’t let him take you there. He ought not to know where you live. Phone for a taxi.’

  I have no will left to argue. My head is spinning from so much alcohol, from vomiting and wild emotions. I take the easy way out. Cuco drops me off at the door of the San Lorenzo. He hugs me fiercely. He asks for my phone number. My thoughts are not on the horror of the maggots eating the cat alive but on its death two days later. I give him my number.

  16

  Sunday morning dawned with an acute sense of crisis. As I awoke, I could smell on me the sickly odours of Cuco’s kisses and taste fermented wine in the corners of my mouth. Santiago was insisting we swallow a whole box of antibiotics.

  ‘You’ve got to rinse your teeth with alcohol. Then gargle. Maybe Maria de las Angustias could let us have some antiseptic mouthwash.’

  Getting out of bed I discovered thrust under the door a letter from Mexico. It must have arrived on Friday. It bore signs of having been opened and resealed. The sender’s name was my mother’s. Before I read it I thought for a moment and speculated that Maria de las Angustias, anxious about my health, had opened it, but when I read the contents – as much of them as I could read because my mother had written in felt pen and her tears had smudged many parts of them – I nearly fainted.

  Darling little daughter,

  [Erased] well, but I am very worried by the [erased] Spain. I know your character and [erased] thirst for justice. I hope you’re not involved [erased] of terrorism. If you can’t [erased] the Basque terrorist organization, you always have your family. Even if we have to sell [erased] Reverse the charges. All of us here love you. Javier says [erased] school. Probably [erased] Seek political asylum in the Mexican Consulate.

  Kisses and [erased] us all.

  Your mum, who loves you

  ‘What on earth ...?’ cried Santiago. ‘What’s got into your mother?’

  ‘Ssshh! Let me think.’

  ‘Think? There’s no time to think. We’ve got to pack and get out of here fast. They’re going to stick us in gaol because they believe you’re in league with the Basque terrorists, and once inside we’re going to die from the disease Cuco infected us with.’

  I reread the letter several times. I checked the envelope. It had certainly been opened. I toyed with the hope that my mother had sealed it, found the glue wasn’t holding and then stuck it down more firmly with drops of white paste. But if that were so I would have got the letter on Friday, not on Sunday morning.

  Santiago kept imploring me to get us out. We would hang out in a railway station, reverse the charges to Mexico to ask for money and go back home. His belief was that the letter had been opened not in the lodging-house but in the offices of the Spanish counter-terrorism branch. Of course they had already contacted Maria de las Angustias, and she was reporting back to them on our suspicious behaviour.

  He managed to put me into a state of panic. I sat on the edge of my bed, my face in my hands. Where did my mother ever get such a wild idea? We began to scour the photograph files in search of an image that suggested I was a potential guerrilla. But, as we flicked through them there was only one that possessed anything like ideological content, and that lacked all traces of insurgent courage. However, there were dozens where, at Santiago’s urging, I had lied extravagantly to my family.

  While images flashed across the screen in rapid succession, Santiago’s alarm caused me terrifying anxieties.

  ‘You can bet for sure that the whole Guardia Civil is outside the door right now.’

  I made as if to lie back down on the bed.

  ‘No!’ screamed Santiago. ‘Pack your stuff. Let’s get out of here!’

  I pulled some clean clothes out of the wardrobe and put on my sandals to walk to the bathroom. If I could only leave Santiago here in my bedroom, or anywhere, and have a moment to think for myself! Then I inched open the door of my room, scared that I would find myself staring down the muzzle of a sniper’s rifle.

  In the bathroom I allowed the hot water to cascade over my shoulders. What was to be done? The worst thing would be to take Santiago’s advice and make a run for it. That would simply confirm suspicions. For the moment the wisest course of action was to stay put.

  The letter hardly seemed typical of my mother. She was never a woman to worry. She wandered through life with a blithe carelessness, always laying what few concerns she had on the shoulders of Divine Providence. The photographic evidence makes that plain.

  Here she is walking along, her nose in the air. We are in the town centre. The streets are crammed with people and traffic. My brothers and sisters and I trail behind her. We are out on a trip to buy uniforms and shoes for school. Because of my diminutive size and the masses of people, I keep losing sight of her and my siblings. I have to gallop after them. We reach a junction. My mother looks right, then left and crosses. She forgets that she has a train of children trotting after her. We all try to cross with her. Suddenly a car comes racing towards us.

  ‘Look out!’

  We hurtle back to the pavement. Meanwhile my mother is on the far side of the street and carries on walking. Alejandro, the tallest, shades his eyes and tries to pick out her dark, curly hair.

  ‘Everybody grab a hand,’ says Javier. ‘One, two, three!’

  We cross in one long chain. Pulled by Enrique, I almost fly across the junction. When we get to the other side we let go and it’s everyone for himself, darting past human obstacles until we reach the shop window where my mother, blissfully indifferent to our problems, is peering at the display of goods.

  Santiago pulls up another photo that confirms my mother’s detachment from the world around her. This is one of my first memories. It is here that my fear of abandonment is chillingly featured. I am around two years old. We are going on a trip somewhere. We climb aboard a bus and find a seat. While other passengers are boarding, Lilia, instead of sitting down, gets off through the back door. Suddenly Alejandro sees her through the bus window. ‘Mum! Lilia got off!’

  My mother races to the back door and jumps
off the bus. All my brothers follow her and, I am left there. Before the bus speeds away the last thing I see through the window is the six bodies of my family, until that moment the only bodies my infantile antennae can recognize, all grouped cheerily around Lilia. I am terrified, but I do not make a sound. Thanks to my intuition or my terror, I make myself as tiny as I can as I travel alone on the bus.

  Santiago smiles at the next image. I am at the police station. A policeman buys me an ice-cream cone. He strokes my hair and tells me not to worry, that my mother is on her way.

  There is always some compensation for being abandoned.

  17

  I try to explain everything in a goodbye letter to Reginald. I thank him for his infinite tenderness, for his protection. I tell him that, although I know my leaving will hurt him and my proficiency in English take him by surprise, I had needed him to help me escape from a mystical earthquake, a volcano spouting magma up from the depths of the abyss. That was the condition I saw myself in when I arrived in London at around Christmas time.

  Back in Madrid I had found Santiago fenced in, surrendered, terrified, threatened. By then I had realized that he used every occasion when my life felt unsatisfactory to extend his dominion over me. So I was glad I had stayed put rather than run off in a profound depression. Even so I had had to book an appointment with the psychiatrist recommended by Maria de las Angustias.

  He was the director of an asylum on the outskirts of Madrid. Thanks to Maria de las Angustias he wasn’t going to charge me anything, but I could see him only at ten o’clock at night. ‘Every day, if you don’t mind.’

  My conflict with Santiago had now reached distressing proportions. His paranoia had extended to unsuspected limits. The letter from my mother suggesting that we belonged to a terrorist organization convinced him that I had been entrapped in a plot concocted by Maria, the psychiatrist and the Spanish government. Maria now started to visit me frequently and ask all sorts of questions. Santiago answered her with all sorts of lies.

  ‘When are you going to see Jose Luis? He really will help you.’

  Climbing up the asphalt path, sparsely lit by a few mercury lamps set at ground level, I passed through the steep gardens of the enormous hospital. It was at this point I was tempted to believe Santiago. There would be no way back. I observed the heavily barred windows and the closed shutters. Santiago played his old trick of jumping around my temples in an attempt to prevent me from entering. Once inside we would never be allowed to leave, he alleged. But in the end my curiosity simply won out.

  After I had waited a few minutes in the reception area Jose Luis appeared. With a gesture he invited me to follow him down the passageways. Everything was in silence. The doctor’s rubber shoes and my moccasins made no sound on the gleaming floors. We passed down several corridors before we reached his office. He sat in an armchair with a high back and indicated for me to sit on a chair facing his desk. A small lamp on it illuminated only his chest and my face.

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘Don’t say a word to him!’ ordered Santiago. ‘This isn’t an asylum. It’s just like one of those torture chambers they use in Argentina. It’s a secret prison. Get out of here while you can. Tell him you’re going to the toilet and make a run for it.’

  I started to cry, first out of fear, then out of rage, finally I don’t know for what reason. I wept through my nose, my eyes, my mouth. All the doctor did was to reach for disposable handkerchiefs and pass me some. The ball of paper in my hands got bigger and bigger, as if an avalanche from my mouth had produced it. I struggled to stop crying, but I couldn’t. I was totally ashamed of my behaviour.

  It happened that way at all our interviews. I would arrive at the hospital, wait for him to turn up, and he would come for me, then we would walk in silence down the glistening hallways, we would arrive at his office and I would promptly burst into tears. After a week of this he ignored the clock indicating the end of the session and, tilting the lamp so that it lit up his eyes, said to me, ‘You have a mental block.’ He interlocked the fingers of both hands. ‘My suggestion is that you come here for one more week while you make preparations to go back to Mexico.’

  ‘What about Tokyo?’ Santiago protested. ‘What about that map of the world we planned our trip on? This doctor is a head-case. We’d be better off not seeing him again. Maybe he isn’t a doctor. I bet the real doctor is tied up in the basement.’

  After that Santiago produced photos he had faked, images of the rest of the world that we had planned to see. In them I appeared wearing an elegant business suit, smiling obliquely just like my sister Lilia and speaking Japanese in some boardroom or other. Since he had no personal experience of life in those faraway places, he would flash before me starding snapshots in which I was walking in down-at-heel sandals, following in the footsteps of some lama across an oriental desert.

  He insisted on displaying fragments from my future. Here I was at carnivals, there at temples. All the same, I thought the doctor had made a good point. I ought to get away from Spain. But to ask my family for money would be an admission of financial incompetence, and I had left Mexico to demonstrate my ability to succeed, to gobble up the world as if it were my personal oyster. It would also put my siblings in the embarrassing position of having to chip in enough money to buy me a ticket home.

  Santiago suggested that we speak to Refugio Vidal.

  18

  Once again we are seated in an upmarket restaurant, but this time I wear a face of inconsolable woe. I decline to eat anything, and I adopt the far-away look I learned from my mother. Cuco tilts his head from side to side like a dog unable to understand his master’s commands. He smiles at me. Finally the inevitable question arrives: ‘What’s the matter?’

  Abetted by the memory of the psychiatrist’s verdict, I start to weep. But with exemplary refinement I collect my tears in the cloth napkin.

  ‘This is daylight robbery!’ I hear myself protesting to Santiago, who has holed up in his den trying to avoid the alcohol fumes.

  ‘I have a dreadful problem,’ Santiago whines to Cuco. ‘My brother Vicente is terribly sick in hospital and I need to get back to Colombia to see him.’ I conjure up the image of my ex-lover, his face eroded by cancer, and I wince. ‘But I haven’t got a penny.’

  ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘Six hundred dollars!’ I pout and let my tears run freely.

  ‘This is a cheap and humiliating act of theft,’ I tell Santiago, and in revenge I down the glass of wine in one gulp. Over-reacting, he covers his nose. At the same time a photograph of yo-yos tumbles into my cerebral area. In it my brothers are planning a theft from the store of Don Simon, an old man who is almost blind. Crouching behind the door, I eavesdrop on their plan. Then I open the door and tell them I want to go with them because I, too, want a yo-yo.

  ‘You? You’re nuts!’ says Javier.

  ‘Then I’m going to tell Dad.’

  ‘You do,’ threatens Enrique, ‘and we’ll slit your throat.’

  ‘I’ll tell him you said that as well.’

  The four of them heave a collective sigh. Alejandro slides his arm around my shoulders and patiently explains that I can’t go with them because I’d be sure to end up in gaol. ‘Anyway, yo-yos are for boys,’ he concludes.

  ‘I want to go.’

  They ask me to wait a moment, while they consider my role in the crime. All four join arms and form a circle, with me outside.

  ‘She can’t go. She’s so stupid. She’ll dribble all over the yo-yos.’

  ‘Shut up!’ snaps Alejandro. ‘She can keep the old man busy while we rip off his yo-yos. She can go in to buy something, and when Don Simon is off guard, we’ll grab the yo-yos and take off fast.’

  The group breaks up. My brothers come over to where I’m standing, awaiting the results of the discussion.

  ‘You’re going to go to Mum,’ says Alejandro, giving me the first part of my instructions. ‘You’re going to ask her if she needs you to run
an errand. She’s going to say no because you always lose the money. Then you ask her to give you another chance. We all deserve a second chance, don’t we?’

  I nod my head affirmatively.

  It works. My mother looks at me tenderly, smiles, thinks of a possible errand and gives me money to buy a litre of milk. My brothers are waiting for me on the corner, and there I receive part two of my instructions.

  Three of us go into the shop. I ask for the milk. When Don Simon wearily turns away to the cooler Javier and Alejandro stuff four yo-yos into their pockets. They still have to get one for me, I notice. Too late! Don Simon is now turned back, his eyes on us. Enrique and Luis whistle from the doorway, gesturing to the street with their eyes. Don Simon gives me the change and, as if I were the owner of all the yo-yos in the world, I pick one up in front of his incredulous eyes and exit after my brothers.