Santiago's Way

  I run to overtake them at the corner.

  ‘Don’t run, you idiot. You’re going to make him suspicious.’

  But already far beyond suspicion Don Simon is yelling curses from the door of his store.

  Wearing a woollen jacket and a bowler hat Don Simon barges into the kitchen, up to the table where my father is smoking and drinking coffee while he plays over some celebrated chess games. We can’t hear clearly what is being said, only whispers. A chair grates on the floor as my father gets up. His slippers skid over the kitchen floor. He catches us all pretending to play marbles. He lifts me up by one ear. With his dagger-like glare and a raised hand, he tells me to hand over the stolen yo-yo. Terrorized, I confess that it is hidden in the sock drawer.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ says Don Simon. ‘There are five yo-yos missing altogether.’

  Alejandro gives the game away by trying to bolt between Don Simon and my father. My father grabs him by the hair on the back of his neck. He gets all five of us in the kitchen and offers Don Simon a cup of coffee. Each one of us stands there with a yo-yo, its string attached to a finger.

  ‘I want you all to play with them,’ orders my father. Javier goes first. He drops his yo-yo towards the floor and it dangles there, refusing to return. My father twists his ear viciously.

  ‘Next!’

  We all quake.

  None of us can work the yo-yo. My father pays Don Simon for all five and apologizes to him. When Don Simon leaves we spend long hours in the kitchen under my father’s eye, learning in between pinches and yanks of the ear how to manipulate a yo-yo. When we have mastered it he confiscates the lot.

  ‘I’ll buy you a ticket to Bogota,’ offers Cuco.

  ‘No, no,’ answers Santiago on my behalf. ‘That would be far too expensive. I plan to go to London by bus and fly from there. That way it’s a lot cheaper.’ Santiago is incapable of concealing his constitutional stinginess. But that doesn’t stop him from adding,‘I’ll need it in cash.’

  That night I was convinced our attempt to extort money from Cuco had failed. But the next day he called. It was the only call of his I ever accepted. We went out one more time. He put the money right into my hands. He caressed me, then had to stop the car to cough all over the steering-wheel. He spat gobs of phlegm out of the window. He also presented me with a card. Through the thin white envelope I could see it was blazoned with a gigantic heart. Back in my room I opened it. Inside the card were another six hundred dollars in freshly minted notes, crisp, uncreased and new-smelling. Printed on the card itself was some joke about lovers told by a cartoon bear. Under it Cuco had written, ‘So that you can come back.’

  ‘You’ve cost him more than a French-style tart!’ Santiago sneers, but at the same time he jumps with joy, because we now have twelve hundred dollars to get us out of Spain.

  Then remorse set in. I felt the urge to phone Cuco and tell him the truth.

  ‘What truth?’ Santiago wanted to know. ‘That Interpol is on our trail because of a letter from your mother? That we are locked in a cupboard and can’t escape? That we have a dream to realize? That a psychiatrist is on the point of stuffing us full of pills? That everybody at the San Lorenzo eyes you with suspicion and scampers out of the kitchen the second you emerge from your room? That you’ve lost your job?’

  I set myself the task of scanning mental images of prostitutes. One of them refers directly to me when I was in grade nine, a short while before my suicide attempt.

  Since I had been unable to grasp the logic of humanity I needed in order to survive in society and had learned nothing from my earlier brush with Felicitas, I decided to make sure that nobody else learned anything.

  I had persuaded myself that none of my classmates felt the least interest in chemistry, history or maths. I used to jab them in the ribs with pencils, I passed them scribbled notes, I scratched the covers of their exercise books, and I offered them my shoe to smell. Once in geography class, while the teacher was telling us about Africa, I got up from my desk and danced around, swaying my body in African style, while the more mischievous students beat a tom-tom rhythm on their desks. This minor deviation from academic seriousness was enough to earn me the ill will of the teacher. This was how my clumsy rebellion began, and two days later it ended in an absurd bet.

  ‘I bet you daren’t go into the boys’ bog and do your African dance there!’

  Now that was what I called an academic challenge. The bets piled up. At break-time a mob of classmates followed me to the entrance of the boys’ lavatories. Laughter and cheers urged me on. I heard drums beating as my classmates pounded on the door and in I danced, in front of the horrified boys peeing into the urinals.

  My mother was summoned to the school. ‘I suppose’, she purred, ‘they want to congratulate me again.’ She was accustomed to receiving praise for the scholarly miracles of Lilia.

  When I got home the family was in crisis. The geography teacher had exaggerated my sins. She told my mother that I had been dancing naked in front of the boys and that they had rewarded my performance with sweets and fizzy drinks.

  My father’s punishment went beyond the merely physical. For the next six months he ignored me totally, after telling me that I had his full permission to leave the house and become an exotic dancer. For, as far as he was concerned, I had died.

  19

  My attempts at being honest are over. Santiago is perfectly correct. How long can it have been since even a third-class whore was prepared to have sex with Refugio Vidal? Without knowing it, we performed an act of charity by sleeping with him, and now we had received our just reward. So I went to consult a travel agent. Santiago was thrilled and gleefully checked out posters of Greece, Prague and Thailand.

  The woman who handled my enquiry told me the price of a ticket to Bangkok. Six hundred dollars exactly. Santiago was in seventh heaven, organizing and reorganizing the photos to come, but I felt a sudden heaviness in my chest, as if an ice-cube had inserted itself into my aorta and, as it melted, was dripping chilling drops of water into my heart. I collapsed into the chair in front of the agent’s desk. Her mouth kept on moving at me, but I heard nothing. Then another character entered this silent movie: a man. He tapped me on the forehead, opened my eyelids with his fingers and breathed on to my pupils. The agent was fanning me with something. The man grasped my hand and spoke to me. His mouth appeared like a gigantic red tunnel into which I was falling, falling. I tried to grab on to his uvula but I went sliding down into the darkness of his trachea. It was there that I bumped into Santiago.

  Santiago, I discovered, is flesh without bone. His single eye is a throbbing spiral of flesh, pumping blood. He is like a marble made out of liver, with red slimy extremities. His mouth is a mere pinprick. We stared at each other for a long time.

  Then he speeded up the pulse that activates his blob of a body, and at each beat he emitted a black fog that obscured my vision. I let out a shriek and scrambled up a mound of gooey pulp that rose mountain-like beside him. He raced up after me. I thought my head was going to explode. He grabbed me by the legs to pull me back down. I managed to struggle to the top but only to slip back down. We both ended up in a pool of pus, in which were floating, half submerged, old videotapes covered with green slime. I waded through the pool, ignoring photos that drifted to the banks. I reached the edge and clambered out, but Santiago’s body had sunk below the surface as he swam around trying to salvage his precious images. Then I crawled up towards a mass of ashen veins and in under the darkness of its tangled network. There I stayed, as motionless as a hibernating reptile.

  Finally I dared to call out, ‘Mina! Mina!’

  The deep well of blackness responded by assuming a bluish hue. Santiago immediately sounded the alarm. Out of his mouth he launched gasps of blood-red breath that crashed into the abyss and, as they fell, crystallized into violet-coloured quartzes.

  I could not move away to escape his rage. All around was the directionless void and cold devastation.


  But, to my delight, the blue-black of the distance began turning indigo, as if Mina were answering my call.

  Then, abruptly, the man in the silent movie was shaking my body. I finally reacted. I jumped out of the chair and fled from the travel agent’s as fast as my legs would carry me.

  20

  Two days later I was on a ferry heading across the English Channel. I felt as light as air. Space and time were under my control. The sea was just the sea. The prow of the ferry was nothing but the prow of the ferry. The sailors were simply sailors. And the coffee-dispensing machine was exactly that. My only luggage was my handbag, which contained my passport and Cuco’s money.

  I simply don’t know how many days I wandered the streets of London. I assimilated myself to its geography without forming memories and composing photographic images. I was London’s damp, chilly air, its domes, the waiter who served me, the body that cheerfully ate the food he served. I was the bell that tinkled as I left the restaurant, the steam rising from coffee in a disposable cup, the waves driven to shore by a cruise along the Thames, then a bench and the body seated on it. My shoes looked tatty. I breathed hard between my hands to warm them.

  I ended up on Albert Street, a deserted thoroughfare flanked by abandoned houses and derelict sites. There I approached a group of men who were smoking and drinking booze around a fire. I was sure I was already part of them. I sidled into their circle. Silence fell immediately. I was wearing a grin that had not left my face since I had escaped from my closet-room. One of the men pulled out a black package that contained a perfume and offered to sell it to me. I took hold of the box and stroked it. Then I pulled out the bottle and sprayed them all. The owner of the perfume let out a yell of rage. He snatched back the box and bottle and, cursing me, stowed them away inside his clothing.

  ‘You off your trolley, or what?’

  I suppose I looked like I might be with my painfully fixed smile.

  ‘Hey, I’m talking to you!’ He blew his stinking breath into my face and gave me a push.

  ‘Go on! Piss off!’

  But I couldn’t move. I was drawn magnetically to their circle and their fire. Perhaps it was the fire more than anything, for my eyes were dripping tears from the cold November weather, even though my grin remained in place.

  The man with the perfume spotted my handbag and wrenched it from me. Refugio’s dollars were no longer in it; they were hidden inside my shoe. The man up-ended the bag and shook out my passport on to the cobbles. He peered at it curiously.

  ‘You don’t speak English? Bloody foreigners!’

  He grabbed my arm and pulled me about ten yards out of the circle. He pushed me again and threw my bag and passport at me. ‘That means fuck off!’

  Some of the men laughed, but I stayed just where I was, for how long I’m not sure. Then the lights went out in the corner shop at the far end of the street. A few figures flitted past us in the dark. All that remained of the fire was a small heap of bright-red coals. The men began to drift away. Of the last two to go, one came back. I watched his silhouette drawing closer. My heart leaped with joy at his approach.

  ‘Mina,’ I whispered. It seemed that finally I had found her, as shapeless as a metallic-blue mist seeking to escape from a bottle and spread itself over city after city. The figure reached my body. Out from the centre of blues overlaid with blues stepped Reginald.

  ‘Come with me.’

  He took my arm and we walked down the deserted streets. We arrived at a dark house. He pulled a bunch of keys from his coat pocket. He opened a metal gate and we went down steps. He then opened the door of a basement where the ceiling seemed menacingly low because of the unpainted pipes criss-crossing it.

  The living space was very small. The place was cold and untidy. In one corner was a single bed, heaped with woollen blankets.

  Reginald switched on a lamp. We looked at each other directly for the first time. He could not have been more than eighteen. While I observed him he put his hands to my cheeks, trying to massage away my ghastly fixed grin. I had hoped to find him still wrapped in the blue mist, but the only blue about him was in the wordless warmth of his two eyes, like a pair of blue marbles.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  I wanted to answer him, but the words would not come out.

  ‘Me,’ he said, pointing to his chest. ‘My name is Reginald, Re-gi-nald. Right?’

  Finally he had got rid of my smile. I had such a pain in my jaw that even though I wanted to say something I could not articulate a word.

  ‘Come ’ere,’ he said. He gestured to me to follow him. He opened a narrow door.

  ‘Bar-froom. Show-er.’ He turned a tap on and let the water run. ‘’O’ wa’er. OK?’

  Again he took my hand and led me to another corner. He clicked on a light bulb hanging from an enormous pipe. Under it I saw a small refrigerator and an electric cooker. He put water in a kettle. Every time he looked at me he smiled. I felt welcome.

  Classes were over. He stopped insisting on knowing my name and trying to teach me things. We drank our tea in silence and ate bread and butter. We slept in the same bed, fully clothed, with our shoes on. He lent me a woollen cap, putting it on my head and pulling it down over my ears. He was still smiling.

  At first I didn’t speak because I couldn’t. Then silence proved an advantage. Our relationship was founded on silence. We drank our tea and ate our bread and butter without a word. The silence forestalled invasions by Santiago. But my smiling certainty that I knew precisely where I was in the world I owed solely to Santiago, and in his absence I succumbed little by little, in early December, to melancholy. This was not a particularly painful experience – because I did not understand what was making me feel so scattered and anxious – so I accepted it as if a telescope were extending itself out of my heart and looking out longingly through the tiny window of the basement up towards the blue beyond.

  Reginald had some sort of job. Maybe as a bricklayer or a car mechanic or a plumber. The nights set in early, and he would arrive at the basement, drink his tea, eat a snack and look at me long and tenderly. He would try to teach me some basic English – for example, ‘muck under me fingernails’, while he was cleaning his nails with a toothpick. He strummed his guitar and sang in a barely audible voice, as if he were afraid I would hear him. I recall him with his eyes shut, displaying the dark line of his lashes. His cheeks would flush when I sat close to him to hear his song. A faint dusky down grew on his chin and upper lip. His fingers were strong and stiff, his nails black. He sang songs about heartbreak, loneliness, politics and war.

  I made a habit of sleeping in late. I would get up, make the bed and wash the few plates in the hand basin. To kill time I used to go out in the afternoons. I had become obsessed with numbers. I started by counting my steps down long, busy roads. I made a note of them in a litde notebook that Reginald had given me. With an uncertain hand like that of a child at infant school he had drawn the letters of the alphabet and, spluttering with giggles, he sang them out for me to imitate. Finally he admitted defeat. Our language of glances was all we needed. Like a seed germinating in the humidity of the basement, this language without words fed his body and mine. The dizziness and gloom I had felt in the early days of December began to dissipate.

  I counted my steps to my regular destination along the road and reached the number 1,850. That was too many. I felt that the number should have been 1,632. Neither more nor less. On my third attempt, taking longer strides, I made it in exactly that number.

  My next objective concerned the numbers on private houses and public businesses. Some places did not have their street numbers visible, so I had to go into shops and blocks of flats and ask for them. Nobody questioned my exhausting and exhaustive task. I wore some of Reginald’s clothes, the old workman’s boots he stored under the bed and his blue woollen cap. Everybody answered me with the seriousness appropriate to a census. Some housewives complained to me about the postman or the government, and with a grave fac
e I jotted down their complaints in my notebook. I nodded courteously as I left and stuck my pencil behind my ear. When the cold weather got too much for me I would hurry back to the basement. With spectacular precision I would count the rooftops, the dark ones, the greens and the reds. Then the awnings. After them, the restaurants, Italian, Chinese and Indian. After them, the neon signs. And I would note the exact time I passed Albert Street on each occasion.

  One day I stationed myself at the mouth of the Underground. People came bustling out in great haste, but I would pursue them with my questions.

  ‘Excuse me. We are conducting a survey on the difficulties of being human. What is your opinion of the void?’

  ‘The what?’ some would answer.

  ‘Say that again,’ said others.

  Most of them ignored me or shook their heads at me without slackening their pace. I discovered there were lots of Lilias in London. These always knew what to reply. They came along, impeccably dressed in dark raincoats, with umbrellas that matched their shoes.