Santiago's Way

  This pact of cordiality arose out of mutual compassion. We are not two people with hearts like empty vessels that can be replenished by an invigorating interchange of intimate bodily fluids. Rather, we are two vessels shattered against life’s illusions. We have lost our faith in metaphors and have turned pragmatic and precise to prevent our brittleness from being shattered even more.

  We have formed a social union based on an uncomplaining acceptance of the everyday. From time to time, with a sort of panting nostalgia for our lost sexual passions, we sit naked on the patio and drink drops of the falling rain.

  All the same, Lucio, like Lilia, bursts with sunny enthusiasm, organizing ability and prosaic methodicalness. I drift along, a pale moon to his efficient sun, one or two steps behind him, when we go for a walk along streets or through parks. That way we are spared the necessity of walking arm in arm and gazing at each other with a permanent smile.

  26

  My smile gets progressively more nervous. The grinning ellipse extends to its maximum reach. But Lucio reacts cordially to my boomerang-shaped mouth. Deep down we are partners in confronting the unnameable, the particles of energy that underlie human life but are alien to it. He preserves his silence about them, to avoid feeding them with the force of his imagination. He asks me no questions about my shivers, my floods of tears. He simply hugs me tight until my fears start to lose their heat.

  Santiago avenges this consolation with his own tales of terror.

  Nightmares are child’s play compared with the stories he tells my wide-awake brain. It is as if we are in a perpetual winter’s night, where he sits by the blazing fire of my innermost energies and flips through a book of lurid horror stories. This book, which details the origin of the incubus and the vampire, is not written in any human language because, he tells me, such creatures immediately kill anyone who, even in fantasy, reveals the formulas that bring them to life. But the formula requires a woman like me with a hole in her heart, close to where babies suck their first milk. Inside this hole a swarm of resentments weave the placenta for the womb that bears the incubus.

  At any hour of the day Santiago will whisper to me. He answers all my doubts and queries with an enviable complex of logically compelling reasons. Thus, as I get into bed and lie down, I have been taught that under my pierced heart a tunnel opens up through the flesh and leads to a soft landing-place, the spongy earth where consciousness fades away to nothing, and there hangs, its body throbbing fiercely, the dark foetus of the next incubus awaiting birth.

  That is why Doña Rosa, Lucio’s mother, is an optical illusion, a human-seeming form who sucks the life-energy out of those around her. If anyone visits her house, she forces herself out of her usual comatose state and manages to maintain a lively conversation with the visitor, thanks only to her mechanical reflexes.

  Santiago assures me that before long I will end up in a condition similar to hers.

  Already I have only to observe how reality recoils from my gaze.

  The more coherence Santiago’s arguments acquire, the more scrambled become the objects in my sight. The wall, the red traffic signal, the gaping void, a foetus, Lilia, a trip abroad, Reginald, Lucio, all mix their colours in a shapeless mass of undirected rage and nonsensical violence.

  27

  Santiago must be a being independent of my body and my imagination. Otherwise, where am I getting all these stories from? The most heart-breaking story I have in my album concerns a bewildered dog.

  I am around eight years old. We are returning from a short vacation and find our house ransacked. The thieves stole such personal belongings as our clothes and an alarm clock, since my family’s economic position did not run to our leaving jewellery and seductive electrical appliances around the place. My father was particularly enraged because the thieves had pretty much left him in his underwear, having taken his three pairs of khaki trousers. He went so far as to accuse the postman of the robbery the next time the poor fellow came to drop off the mail wearing khaki trousers. My mother and brothers had to hold him down to stop him removing them.

  To prevent a second theft, we got an enormous black guard dog named Baxter. The perplexed creature had already passed through the hands of five owners in four years. We took to him immediately, because after sniffing us out he pranced around wagging his tail in loving delight.

  But it took only one brief family holiday for him to get his scents in a muddle. Here is the photo. We are once again returning home late at night, this time after a visit to my mother’s parents. My father pulls out his key to open the front door when the air is filled with menacing growls. It is Baxter dutifully defending his territory and baring his powerful teeth to prove it. My father slips his hand through the grating to loosen the padlocked chain. Baxter does not appreciate the intrusion and leaps to bite my father’s hand. Only an agile leap backward saves my father from serious injury.

  Baxter barks furiously and wakes up the whole neighbourhood. People begin to emerge from their houses and find my family standing, baffled and thwarted, in the street, barred from entering their own house.

  My father strides from one side of the pavement to the other, puffing on a cigarette and cursing vilely. A well-intentioned neighbour tries to distract Baxter, while my father makes a second attempt. But Baxter is no fool, and with psychotic energy he whirls back and forth, defending the whole doorway.

  Soothing words have no effect on him. Shouts and chunks of sausage tossed by another neighbour fail to impress him. Nothing will deter him from his mistaken sense of duty. Two hours later he is still warding off his enemies. My father throws rocks and lighted matches at him. He threatens to kick him to death. All to no avail.

  We go back to Grandma’s and spend the rest of the night there. The following morning we return to the house, accompanied by a vet armed with a syringe. The precaution is unnecessary. Baxter welcomes us joyfully, wagging his bushy black tail with undisguised glee. Extravagant licks from his pink tongue and the humble submission in his black eyes get him nowhere. He is taken away by his seventh owner.

  That photo is followed by Santiago’s collected images of foul beasts. Some are patently plagiarized from other imaginations, but the most menacing beast, the one created solely out of Santiago’s fears, is a monster whose strength and cunning are perfectly tailored to carrying out its most perverse fantasies. Its name is Lucio.

  28

  Thanks to something, perhaps to the thin thread that still ties me to Mina, I am aware deep down that I am being misled. But the thread is so tenuous that it cannot hold for long. When it snaps I lose control of reason, of the things I see and hear, of what comes spewing out of my mouth, like venomous foam, against Lucio and others who surround me.

  With my will-power lost, I step out into the street and find there a rain that does not wet me. It evaporates as it falls, but it leaves my vision blurry. A fierce wind howls in my ears and horrifies me. Then the sun’s hot rays come crashing down like lightning and I have to turn my back on them and hurry home.

  When I step out next I am wearing a waterproof overcoat, a sou’wester and tall Wellington boots that I bought in case of a flood. From time to time I dare to glance up at the dazzling sky, defying its heat. If I use my imagination sufficiently, I can feel a gentle breeze.

  I come across Lucio, walking along entirely unprotected from the sun. Now he is opening the door of his car.

  He bows graciously and invites me to get in. As I enter, he pulls off my sou’wester. He opens a paper bag that contains a decent pair of shoes, and he slowly removes my Wellington boots. He humours me with a few jocular words.

  I want to talk in order to answer him, to tell him about Santiago, to side-step shame for once and cast some light on my problem, to ask for help.

  The very thought of receiving help converts the car into Lucio’s mobile lair. Now the filthy beast will drive me into unknown territory and abandon my bloodless carcass there, once he has sucked the life out of it.

  Lucio p
arks the car in front of my office. He switches off the engine and offers to take me home, if that is what I want. Pale with shame, I make a great effort to get control of my vision and manage to see the real features of the building and pavement, while Lucio smiles at me, assuring me I am fine.

  ‘Fine? How are you going to be fine?’ Santiago asks me in the elevator. ‘That creature isn’t going to change. That ridiculous get-up was the best you could do with the remnants of instinct he’s left you with, but it’s not going to deter him. He’s still set on annihilating you.’

  Then he screams. ‘I’m at the end of my tether!’

  I put my hands to my ears.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he urges. ‘Let’s make a run for it! How can I convince you that your office is full of his accomplices and that some of them are incubi themselves? That’s your real tragedy, not listening to me. You think I’m somebody else, but I’m not. That’s how you started this whole nightmare, by refusing to admit that I’m only your feeble attempts at reason.’

  The gates of hell slide open and there stands the accountant from my office.

  ‘Don’t let him inside the lift!’ shouts Santiago. ‘Press the button. Shut him out.’

  The lift doors do not close fast enough, so I whack the man hard on the head with my handbag just as he is stepping inside. He staggers back, and I take advantage of his confusion to press the close button of the lift once more.

  In the foyer of the building the doors open again. I stand there, looking out.

  I cannot leave without some form of protection.

  ‘You have to get out,’ says Santiago.

  ‘I can’t walk.’

  ‘Make an effort. We have to get away before they come looking for us.’

  I totter forwards, as the waters of a swollen river come pouring into the building. I hang on to some rocks to stop the river from sweeping me away.

  ‘I need my Wellington boots.’ say. ‘I need my boots.’

  I reach the kerb, just where it emerges from the water. I keep my balance and move forwards. I reach the comer. The sun dazzles me, but it doesn’t stop me seeing a huge wave lifting itself up in the distance. I swing my arms high to keep my handbag from getting wet.

  I cannot help it; everything gets soaked.

  We have walked for far too long. It is now well after dark and I take refuge behind some bushes in a deserted square. I remove my clothes and spread them out to dry. I gather together my money, my bank cards and other credentials, as well as my powder-compact and my eye-shadow. Santiago talks and talks, never stopping. I hum a tune to myself until I fall asleep.

  29

  I wake up in a hospital bed. There are no tubes or restraining straps attached to my body. I get up from the bed and drag a chair over to the window, which is divided into tiny squares.

  I do not know how long I have been here. I imagine a doctor walking into the room to ask me how I feel, and in walks a doctor. I get off my chair and stare at him. He reads from a file folder in his hands and nods approvingly.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  The predictable question immediately puts Santiago on guard. I hear him firing questions at me, but I know that this is the moment to ignore Santiago and act out my own desires, now or never.

  I must look agitated, for the doctor tells me to calm down.

  Santiago forces a sigh, but I oblige him to convert it into precise words, an elegant flow of considered language, forgoing all his usual arrogance.

  With an acting ability rarely seen before, Santiago mimics Mina’s authenticity to perfection. He squeezes every last drop of sweetness out of himself and avoids any mention of floods, of incubi and, above all, of escaping from the hospital.

  While Santiago is occupied in deluding the doctor, I slip away into the shadowy areas of the brain. I stand motionless for a while to let my eyes adjust to the uncertain reddish light. Santiago has his back to me, perched on the ocular mechanism from where he playfully directs sight at the doctor, as if toying with a pair of gigantic binoculars.

  Something clatters to the ground, and Santiago spins around. I avoid being seen by concealing myself in a darkened recess.

  The doctor repeats a question, and this obliges Santiago to crouch down once again over the eyes.

  I find myself in front of a small mound of pulsing flesh, swollen like a replica of my badly constipated belly. I climb up it and suddenly hear that Santiago is stuttering, as though treading on this piece of flesh interferes with the flow of language. I slide down the other side towards the tank of pus. Right now not a single photo is floating in the acid-green goo.

  As I squelch through the gummy mush, I become aware that Santiago has lost the thread of what he was saying. He must have detected me. If he were less arrogant he would now come charging after me, but I know his pride will not let him lose the battle with the doctor’s leading questions. I recognize the uneven ground under the network of veins, both large and small, where once before I was reduced to crawling along. At the end of the tangled tube I find myself on the verge of a precipice. Small bones and strips of calloused flesh litter a mountain pass, but, as I get nearer, they are hidden by a rising mist, at first red, then turning black.

  From the far distance comes a hubbub of anxious voices. Thousands of nightmares are hovering there, continually interchanging features, so as to be ready to perform in answer to a summons from Santiago. I feel compassion for the hundreds who will never see the light of dreams, those discouraged and disappointed ghostly images. Flitting about the red-tinted gloom, their shapeless silhouettes make pained gestures at having to reconstitute themselves endlessly in the hope of being called on to play a role in Santiago’s capricious theatre.

  I look ahead to what I remember was the distance, but now I encounter only the cranial dome, perfectly marked out by its red walls. The fleshy matter here seems repulsively alive.

  Suddenly everything falls silent and lets me hear the fury of Santiago, who is shouting, sobbing, pleading. He is still in control of my body, as it wars against the doctor. In the end the doctor wins the day by injecting into Santiago a substance that slams the binoculars shut and paralyses Santiago’s puny body until it resembles a statue perched precariously on its little mound.

  Dazzled by the abrupt onset of lucidity, I totter along the edge of the tank. Hanging from arteries that protrude from the walls are cocoons containing the larvae of dreams so wild they would baffle the imagination. I break one open, interrupting its gestation. Inside is a viscous paste in which is set a pair of unseeing eyes. I hurl it far away, shuddering at what it might have become.

  I need to speed up. I do not know how long the sedative will keep Santiago quiet. I tread carefully, pushing to one side the adipose tissues and the intricate network of blood vessels. I follow the open ground along which Santiago dashes to supply nourishment to his creatures. Turning a corner, I find myself on the threshold of a grotto.

  It is Santiago’s lair.

  Here are catacombs of finely sculpted flesh, an elegant masterpiece, where the sly tenant dwells with all his weird obsessions. On a work table lies a terrifying plan for my next fit of delirium. It contains a map of my brain, with numbered areas and bewildering geometrical patterns. There, charted with precise coordinates, are the routes he navigates.

  By the wall, beside the table, stands a delicate construction of cells like a honeycomb. Here the flesh does not throb but is of a pink material as hard as polished marble. I touch it curiously. With nervous care I open one of the cells and am startled to see a black-and-white image of my mother as a teenager. It is night-time and she is running along the bank of an irrigation ditch. A man is pursuing her. He catches hold of her and throws her down on to the soft earth. My scream and hers mingle into one. Her desperation disrupts my heartbeat. I slam the cell shut and open another. Here is another black-and-white photo, this time of my brother Luis. He is staring at the nakedness of his sleeping wife, but he is humiliated by sexual impotence. In another cell I
listen to the weeping of my father as a child. He is playing the violin, while rose petals wither on the corpse of my grandmother.

  Where on earth did Santiago find such images?

  I open more cells: voices, bangs, moons and seas. I close them: cackles of laughter in the distance, the far distance.

  One of the cells is throbbing lightly. I look at it curiously. The palpitations are regular and unhurried. I pluck up my courage and open it. A hysterical cloud of colours comes bursting out. Then it dissipates, and I am looking into a long tunnel.

  I step inside. Here are memories. I speak to them. I want to touch them, these memories of my siblings, the memories of myself being with them. But they are all holograms. I cannot accept this, and I apologize every time I pass through one.

  I trek down a long road. Now, at long last, the reds are turning purple. I sigh, sensing the proximity of Mina. I pick up the sound of her breathing, for ever full and tireless. She feels no resentment for all our lost opportunities. I grasp the hand of her blue body and then I turn my eyes, for a few seconds, to see myself in the hospital bed.