Santiago's Way

  ‘This man is an incubus.’

  ‘He is the man who loves me.’

  ‘I can’t believe that.’ His voice was now childish. ‘Haven’t you noticed how he takes everything you have to offer? He’s put an end to plans and dreams.’ I did not understand to what plans and dreams he was referring. Most likely, Santiago sketched out ideas and maps on the soft surface of the tank of pus he dwelt in. ‘When you’re asleep, he puts his nose near your mouth and inhales your breath. That’s how he survives. It’s nothing new for him to tell you how well he is feeling. You, on the other hand, are frozen there like a pillar of salt in front of the television set. His semen is lava. It hardens as it builds up inside your bloated womb!’

  ‘That’s my colitis!’

  ‘No, it’s feelings you’re not supposed to be feeling. There’s a pillar of cement growing in there. Soon you’ll be all cement. Check him out carefully. There’s nothing behind his eyes. Look into the pupils and you’ll see right down into the abyss. When he comes close, the marks of what makes a human being human go all blurry. What does he offer you in return for all the vital juices he squeezes out of you?’

  ‘For one thing, protection.’

  ‘So that’s it. The big con.’

  ‘I’ve never felt so safe in my life.’

  ‘Safe? Safe from what?’ Then he added, ‘I asked you a simple question: what does he offer you in return for all the life he sucks out of you?’

  ‘He understands me. He understands everything. He brings me breakfast in bed. He is a good man.’

  Santiago let loose a sinister chuckle. ‘It suits him to behave well.’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss the matter any further.’ I got up from my armchair and headed to the refrigerator.

  ‘Oh, brilliant! Let’s eat! That’ll solve everything.’

  ‘I didn’t have any pudding.’

  ‘Let’s silence the truth with our nutritional needs. Is that your answer? You distract yourself with a couple of simple pleasures while the man is eating you alive. Let me tell you something. Hey, that bun you picked up has a strawberry-jam filling! I’ll tell you why he picked you. He saw a woman out of sync with reality, whose only defence was an ambiguous smile nobody could figure out.’

  ‘I don’t know how to smile,’ I retorted, chewing away. ‘Lilia is the one who knows how to smile.’ But then I recalled the smile that had been stuck on my face on the ferry to England.

  ‘Don’t know how to smile?’ Santiago took advantage of my error to sneer at me. ‘You’re a woman who collects false memories the way other people collect paintings.’

  I switched on the coffee-pot and toasted another bun. The afternoon sun was slamming down through the kitchen door.

  ‘You’re not going to convince me. He’s a good man.’

  ‘If he is, why didn’t he choose a good woman like your sister?’

  My saliva began to acquire a bitter, metallic taste. Instead of eating jam I felt I was sucking on a rotten grapefruit.

  Santiago kept on talking and I began to chant childishly:

  I don’t hear nothing,

  I don’t hear good,

  Because my ears

  Are made of wood!

  He pulled out a freshly developed photo.

  ‘Check this out,’ he said, shaking the image to dry it off. ‘Here comes the monster!’

  In it we are celebrating the birthday of a colleague who works with me at the translation agency.

  ‘Why did they invite you?’ Santiago wanted to know. ‘Because you’re such a lively, enthusiastic little soul? Or maybe because you say hi to her every morning when she comes in to work?’

  ‘This can’t be happening,’ I said. I switched off the coffee-pot and looked in the pantry for a bottle of wine. When I tried to pull the cork out it came to pieces.

  ‘I’m going to tell you why they invited you.’ He pulled out from deep down in his collection an image in black and white. Lucio was still asleep in his armchair with an open book on his lap, but in the image he approaches wearing a cloak and dark sunglasses. He is staring in the direction of my office. Night is falling.

  ‘That’s a picture of Dracula!’ I said, with a giggle. And at that moment I managed to get the rest of the cork out of the bottle.

  ‘Well, everybody looks alike in the dark. But see how he is staring at you. Now night has fallen and he removes the sunglasses. You, in contrast, remain fully illuminated by the lights in your cubicle.’

  I poured myself a full glass and took a big swallow.

  ‘You’re the evil one,’ I told him. ‘You’re a devil. Disappear!’

  I got up and put on some music to wake Lucio.

  Santiago spoke his last words of the day. ‘That’s why you’re always so tired and are always getting infections in your bodily fluids. Every morning it’s more of a struggle to get out of bed. The garden needs watering. Your dog has run away. Your cat died. The house is overrun by ants. This place is turning into a coffin, wouldn’t you say?’

  24

  The following morning I got out of bed, determined to take control of the situation. Yes, it was true that the house was crumbling to pieces. Just to think of Lilia’s lovely home sent me scrambling to the telephone to call in the help of an interior decorator. They brought samples to my office. I chose a red and gold wallpaper for our bedroom. I made several phone calls in search of a reliable gardener. When Lucio picked me up from work I asked him to take me to the pet shop. We arrived back home with an Alsatian puppy and two budgerigars.

  Santiago showed up, full of sarcasm, as I was fitting a sheet of newspaper into the bottom of the birdcage.

  ‘Tweet, tweet, tweet!’ he mocked. ‘I see you’ve solved all your problems.’

  I ignored him for as long as I could.

  Lucio was outside fixing something.

  ‘Tweet! The woman who falls to pieces in a crisis, tweet, went out and bought budgies, tweet, tweet.’

  I tried to pick up one of the birds to help me ignore him.

  ‘The victim recovers her energy so that the vampire will have more to feed on. She’ll turn herself into a juicy morsel the better to satisfy his appetite. If you discover your husband’s true identity, who is going to believe you? A priest? Your mother? Oh, I know. The Macho Brigade!’

  I thought about my father.

  ‘Of course! I was forgetting the old man. Everything he didn’t do for you in life, he can do for you now he’s dead!’

  Lucio came into the kitchen and planted a kiss on my hair.

  ‘All done!’ he said to me, as if I knew what he was talking about. He washed his hands in the sink. Then he rubbed his fingers hard with the scouring-pad.

  What was he washing off?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Santiago. ‘An incubus never feels guilty. He likes to make you think he doesn’t exist. Then he eats you away, quietly, slowly, exquisitely. By the way, what would you like for supper? As if it mattered!’

  As if I were an echo, I said, ‘What would you like for supper?’

  Instead of Lucio, what looked back at me was a wide tunnel full of foul creatures waiting for me to fall asleep.

  We ate our supper in silence. Lucio kept smiling. His teeth now had the look of fangs. That night I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed and scrutinized him in the darkness. I ended up seeing him as a gargoyle curled up in the foetal position, a gargoyle that snored.

  I came up with a temporary solution. I would wait until Lucio fell asleep, then I’d creep away into the spare bedroom and lock the door behind me. My mental alarm clock was very precise. It would wake me before dawn and I’d get back into our bed.

  Lucio did not notice. He would get up the same as always, bursting with a genial enthusiasm for life. He sang in the shower. He would come out, wrapped in a towel, and fill the whole house with the smell of coffee and the sound of baroque music. This was the signal for me to crawl out of bed.

  Santiago undermined this stratagem. ‘I warn you he
doesn’t need physical proximity to finish you off. He can do it at any moment. When he’s kissing you, when he’s looking at you, while you’re lost in some book or other. When he comes up behind you as you’re watering the garden.’

  He kept up his attacks in my dreams. He employed resources he had never used before, a photograph that had a soundtrack and special effects.

  ‘Look, this is how he is finishing you off.’

  In my dream I open my eyes. My vision hurtles dizzyingly around a corner, like a camera loaded on a dolly shooting pictures in the depths of a mine. The truck slows down as I hear phlegmy breathing, a snorting that comes from the insides of a beast. But I see nothing. I am desperate to get out of the cave. I try to run in the direction away from the breathing of the animal, which is now sniffing out my trail. The beast takes a flying leap. Its hide is covered with spines and they rip into my neck. I want to escape its hold. I scream. The beast pins my arms down so that I cannot move.

  Lucio was holding me in that position when I woke up. He tried to calm me down by whispering in my ear. ‘It was just a bad dream.’ But his face was still hidden in my neck, and the bristles on his chin hurt me. I struggled out of his embrace. Instead of seeing the numbers of the digital alarm clock all red, it was Lucio’s eyes that burned red. With a frantic leap I was out of the bed.

  ‘Don’t come near me!’ I shrieked.

  Lucio got out of bed and switched on the light. We stared at each other for a second or two. I can’t say what he saw in me at that moment. What I saw was a sleepy man wearing blue pyjamas, with an expression on his face that was both weary and puzzled, who was trying to find his glasses.

  I was beginning to feel sorry for him, looking so defenceless there, but then I stroked my neck and felt some light scratches there. I shut myself in the bathroom and placed my burning cheek on the cold tiles.

  I went skidding forwards unstoppably until I plunged headlong into the memory of my fourteenth year when I was forced to accept the loss of Mina, my marvel of a friend, and face the horrifying prospect of either entering a whirling void or seeing the entire universe compressed into the space of a light bulb. My Mina, she who came to me from the beyond, always fascinated by the music of my urine running hot from me, always ready to test the waters of the ocean. Mina, enamoured of the colour of cockroaches and the rigid skin of a dead rat. Together, on many an afternoon, we crept into my mother’s bedroom while she snoozed away the siesta hour and took delirious delight in her enormous-seeming body as we wound an index finger in and out of her capricious curls and kissed her cold bare feet. Back then there was no terror in the approaching footsteps of my father. I was all eyes peering up at the mass of coarse hairs sprouting from his wide nostrils. I stood stupefied by the flexibility of my brothers’ bodies as they climbed fences and trees with equal bravado and recklessly charged across swollen rivers. My Mina, soaked by the rains of October or basking like a lizard in the noon-day summer sun. Mina with her goodnight kisses that always tasted new. Mina, lover of things without number: hurricanes, waves, wind, garbage, the dead, old iron, puddles, frogs, sand that burned the soles of the feet, mangoes glowing on their trees, squabbles, experiments, the stink of burning rubber, brightly coloured vehicles racing past the window, the rag-and-bone man who stole away children, Sunday pocket money, the Chinese sweet-seller, a rose-bud opening, drying out and toppling from its stem.

  My mother taps on the door. I have been sitting in the bathroom for some time now with my veins opened, but the blood is still coursing through my body. The tapping turns into banging. How much longer, I ask myself, before everything comes to an end? My father is ready to smash the lock. I play with the wounds in my opened wrists. They are like little mouths. With my fingers I force them to pout, to smile, to frown. The blood leaks out with an infuriating slowness.

  My father manages to break open the door as I am hit by a current of searing fire that demands I surrender my life to it. It burns its way along the paths of my blood until it finally installs itself in the space behind my forehead.

  From this vantage point it forces my eyes open. The invasion is declared a triumph! Everything suddenly shines with a terrifying lucidity. I am filled with a false enthusiasm, and for a moment I mistakenly believe that Mina has been restored to me. But instead, for the first time I hear the voice of Santiago, who then, as now, tells me to get up off the floor.

  Lucio also forced the door. I had been in the bathroom far too long without answering him. He crouched down to hug me. But it was my mother’s voice I heard.

  ‘Good God in heaven!’ she screams. ‘The girl wants to kill herself!’

  ‘I can’t believe my eyes,’ says my father while he lifts me up with one arm and reaches with the other for alcohol and bandages in the medicine cabinet. My mother shakes off her habitual detachment and asks me with a pained grimace, ‘But why? Why?’

  ‘What do you mean why?’ answers my father. ‘She’s failing at school. She can’t sit down long enough to study. And when she gets home you have her sweeping and mopping the house.’

  ‘She wants to kill herself because I make her clean the house?’ asks my mother incredulously.

  ‘What else could it be?’

  After a makeshift bit of first aid my father leads me into the kitchen. He puts on some water for coffee and sits down opposite me.

  ‘What you’ve just done is a total disgrace. If you’re set on killing yourself, go and do it somewhere else. Not in this house, got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He twists his head around to make sure nobody can overhear him and gives me whispered advice on the best ways to kill myself. ‘Next time get some sleeping pills and a bottle of tequila. Drink it down along with the pills. If you decide on gas, you’ll need to rent a room with a gas fire. You open the tap with one of these things.’ He stands up and sorts through his toolbox, looking for the appropriate implement. ‘Have you got enough money to rent a room with a gas fire?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Then throw yourself under a train. But you don’t do anything in this house, understand?’

  Clutched in Lucio’s embrace, I discovered traces of skin from my neck under my own fingernails.

  Nice try, Santiago! Clever trick!

  25

  In less than two months Santiago put me through a host of wild nightmares. Some of them woke me up, while others pursued me even after I was awake. Once I walked to the window to shake off the after-effects of what had been only a mildly unpleasant dream, and there I saw Lucio out on the rear patio ripping the skin off a human victim. At other times I could not wake at all, for my eyelids were two metal curtains too heavy to raise. At those times Mina availed herself of the complicated geometry of dreams and their instant transformations to elude Santiago and came to my aid and woke me.

  That was until Santiago discovered the plumbing system that allowed her to sneak into my dreams. Then, down the strainer of the drain he emptied weird logarithmic formulas that mimicked the gurgling rush of water and barred her access.

  Sometimes I think I am conducting a wordless conversation with Mina like those we enjoyed in our earliest days. But she cannot get past the strainer in the pipe and all I hear is a polysyllabic word that sounds like the booming music of the ocean, but in fact Mina is not really there. Deep in my dreams I promise I will set out in search of her, but on waking I succumb to the insistent battering of Santiago. So my Mina remains aloof, unreachable on her starry throne, for ever hoping to win the battle against Santiago and, on descending, to show up daily life for the sham it is.

  Then arrives my good-morning kiss from Lucio, fresh from the shower. I am lying face down and his damp hair is cold on my neck. He gives a soft laugh, which I interpret as his embarrassment at having enslaved, as if by divine right, the life of the woman who loves him. But I react with generosity, my standard response. Lucio and I are paragons of generosity. We are generous with our bodies, generous when it comes to giving the benefit of the doubt,
generous about conceding spaces. We are tender with the words we address to each other. Lucio behaves courteously towards my depressions, my prolonged silences produced by the cerebral dysfunctions that Santiago induces on a whim. I am generous towards his optimism, his ecological formulas designed to save humanity from catastrophe. I am generous with his aquiline profile, framed by childlike curls that fall on his neck, while he writes letters of support to financially strapped charitable organizations. I am generous towards his memory packed with trivia about the major philosophers who have challenged life to reveal its meaning.

  And he is generous towards my failed attempts to be a housewife.