Him
The day after the Miden celebration, they put up posters on the street with a group photo of everyone on the beach, everyone harmoniously distributed along the shore, each wearing a silver-coloured mask shaped like a circle that covered the entire face, with two holes for the eyes and a big smile for a mouth. They looked like stylised children’s drawings. Some held hands, others held meditative poses. The photo accentuated the stylised effect: the contrasting tones, the flat sea behind them, the clean line of the horizon. ‘We are the people’ was written in the sky above the parade of silver masks, the letters simulating cirrus clouds coloured to harmonise with the landscape. It was my academy that came up with the idea of the masks. For entire days the kids had cut out circles of silver cardboard, lots of bright, identical spheres meant to represent the inhabitants of Miden as what they were and wanted to be: the people. Social equality behind the round masks, happiness restored in everyone’s smile. There was no traumatised girl in that photo, no answers to any questionnaires, no me. There were the people, happy people. My refusal to attend the celebrations and the group photo made me feel even more like an outcast, and that was the noble version. In the more honest version I felt like a peevish kid who, instead of donning a mask, holed up in his room to sulk. The football club calls me back to play with them after they’d kicked me off for a bad foul, and I don’t show up. What an idiot. I was offered a second chance and I refused it, even though it was just temporary. But that’s how carnivalesque role reversals have always worked. So why not enjoy it? Even in history’s most unjust and ruthless societies, hordes of miserable people and outsiders had been able to enjoy reversing the hierarchies for a day. So why couldn’t I enjoy it too? This was what I taught at the Academy. It’s always been an alluring concept for the students. Maybe it leads to a latent desire for revenge, or vanity, maybe it seems frivolous and profound at the same time. In any case, I reversed nothing. I didn’t put on the smiley mask, I merely stole that cap with the pom-pom to give to my girlfriend as a token.
The idea of abandoning Miden before even hearing the verdict forced me towards a sense of alienation, a confinement in which I would cling to my girlfriend and our future child. I cultivated both comfort and resentment, as well as a nagging migraine. I was an adolescent and an adult man. I can’t say that we felt like a happy family, maybe not even a family, but that’s who we were, and that’s how we wanted to be.
Whenever I saw the billboards scattered throughout the city, though, I longed for the Miden spirit. The first game with the football team. The carefree competition. You can only be ironic about things you’re still a part of. The irony of the outlier is pathetic. In my country we all grew up as part of something. We all went to parties and had fun. We harvested grapes, picked oranges, took ramshackle trains, pogo-danced at concerts, took part in demonstrations, protested against the police clearing out squatters. We revelled in our weariness. The social gathering after stomping grapes, the political songs at sunset, the popular dances, waking up near the embers of a bonfire that still smelled of smoke, or on the lowered folding seats of a train – it was incredible that you could still smoke inside the local trains – and we were always so tired, weary, legs full of lactic acid, as if it were lymph running through a single organism. Then came the distance, the harsh words. My friends held grudges against the enthusiastic holdouts. We wrote sentences full of scorn for what we had once been. We shared them. They blinked on our telephone screens. It all seemed ridiculous. Shitty losers, my friends thought. ‘Shitty losers,’ they typed on their keyboards. We hated the generations before us and held the new ones in contempt. We wouldn’t let anyone else feel as weary as we had in our best years. Addled and comatose, we injected ourselves with lethal apathy.
WE ARE THE PEOPLE, said the posters on the streets of Miden. I would have said it too. Just a few years earlier, I would have shouted it drunk on the national liqueur while holding the girl. I remember when I marched in the procession with her on the way to the beach. The semi-secret nature of our affair seemed like a craven precaution on that holiday. We even kissed in public. A chaste kiss on the lips. And then she went on to kiss half of Miden. She jumped up and down barefoot on the sand to give away her kisses; smacking her lips, she pushed away the hair that the wind had blown into her mouth and kissed the people. We were all the people, and she kissed all of us. Admittedly, she was high. We all were. Swathed by natural MDMA, homemade and organic. When I found myself back home in the morning – which was no longer morning, but a long day already dissolving into the afternoon, an infinite night that had ridden out the hours, years, cosmic cycles, entire youths – I was dead tired. The girl was with me. We were always tired then. We never slept. In class I had red eyes, and she had perfectly beautiful circles under hers, black diadems on a white face. The memory of that weariness makes me cry.
Her
The disposal of heavy waste has never been a big problem in Miden. One, because there is little to dispose of; two, because the Disposal Commission, like everything else, is very efficient. But the category ‘heavy waste’ includes things that in my country you would have thrown into the skip, or, more probably, next to the skip, as they were always full. I had developed a bird phobia because of those skips. There were months when no one came to empty them. Going for a walk had become repugnant, as had drinking a beer outdoors in the sticky, foetid air. The newspapers warned of epidemics and an invasion of rats. We expected them, but the rats never came. There were only birds. Seagulls that grew bigger every day and cannibalised the carcasses of smaller birds, blackened feathers and innards dismembered among the pizza scraps. Layers of guano on the ground, like sleet that wouldn’t melt.
In Miden, when you stare at the sea, the birds cut grooves through the horizon. They beg timidly for crumbs that fall under the tables. They chirp in the morning to announce the new day. But I continued to look at them with suspicion. Sooner or later they too would soar into a rapacious nosedive to pounce on the organic waste, on the cadavers, on our remains. I didn’t trust their eyes.
We hadn’t turned to the Heavy Waste Disposal Commission to get rid of my wheelie suitcase, because we had a plan in mind. It had been a long time since we’d gone for a ride in a car, so my boyfriend rented one. We loaded the wheelie suitcase into the boot, easing it in like a coffin in a hearse. We drove towards the forest, the car windows open despite the chill. We heard our breath as we tried to open our lungs. The only time I’d ever been to the osteopath was when my back went out; he had me lie down and he started pressing on my diaphragm. It hurt like hell. I was blocked there, he said. All the pain – I thought at that moment – all my pain depends on this point in my stomach. I didn’t think then that the pain would take other paths, that my stomach would contain another life. But back then I often thought about my diaphragm. If I had only paid more attention to its deaf complaints, maybe I could have unblocked my whole body, all my thoughts. I imagined my child manipulating my diaphragm from inside to give peace to his mother. What could it do with its little hands? From the window I breathed cold air and thought of my child. Was he able to feel the Miden breeze? Could he feel anything?
The forest welcomed us like a Gothic cathedral. The landscape didn’t change gradually, but went from tundra directly into a monumental block of trees. We left the car at the entrance to the forest, dragging the wheelie suitcase behind us. Our ears may have been made to hear the pitter-patter of a fawn in the woods, but the wheels of a wheelie suitcase were like the clattering steps of a new kind of predator. And if the fawn were to flee, pitter-pattering through the woods, our ferocious beast would follow.
I burst into laughter.
‘I have to ask you something,’ I said.
‘Go ahead.’
‘Do you remember when I moved to Miden? I was laughing about all the noise the wheelie suitcase was making …’
‘Yeah?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘I remember I was happy to see you.’
‘You were happy, but you kissed me on the mouth to keep me from laughing.’
‘I kissed you because I was happy.’
‘You didn’t kiss me because you were happy.’
‘I kissed you because I was dying to kiss you.’
‘No.’
I fell silent, pausing to savour the vastness of the silence, and from the bowels of the forest came the screams.
Him
We went into the forest to bury my girlfriend’s wheelie suitcase, and then we started to hear the shrieking. Desperate human shrieking. My girlfriend was frozen with fear. I hugged her tight and felt her body flinch in my arms. We were still on the edge of the forest; it would have been easy to turn around and run back to the car. But we didn’t. I’d never heard anyone scream so fiendishly. And it was more than one person. The screams started multiplying, rising beyond the treetops into the sky. Then suddenly they stopped. Were they all dead? Another single scream tore through the silence. It subsided. And then another. And still another. A sequence composed of screams.
Her
My boyfriend understood before I did.
And yet, I’d seen those flyers everywhere. At the market they would always hand me a couple of them. I had filled the house with flyers in that never-ending season of advice.
Him
We abandoned the wheelie suitcase and headed towards the screams. In a clearing in the middle of the forest there were ten people gathered in a circle. In the centre of the circle was a woman miming the movements of an orchestra director. Their choreography was interrupted by our arrival.
‘We didn’t mean to disturb anyone,’ my girlfriend said.
‘We’re here to welcome you,’ the woman said.
The circle opened out to make space for us. Behind us the trees marked off the natural curtain of that open-air theatre. You could smell the forest and the sour odour of dry mouths lacking saliva, dehydrated. I recognised the mother of one of my students in the group. She was purple in the face, and I didn’t know whether she was annoyed or embarrassed, or perhaps it was just her skin’s reaction to all those screams. She glanced at my torch and waited in silence for a response.
‘We’re here to be free,’ the woman in the middle of the circle said with a benevolent smile. ‘If you don’t feel free, then leave the circle.’ She was the group therapist. My student’s mother gestured assent, breathing in deeply to give more depth to her conviction. No one left the circle. Then the therapist lifted her hands again.
‘Scream!’
We started screaming. They seemed like expertly guided screams, responding perfectly to the cue. Some threw themselves to the ground in a convulsive lepidopteran dance, some dropped to their knees, some pulled their hair, some punched hard at the air in front of them. I felt stiff, embalmed in my position. I took a few hesitant steps towards the centre, just to do something. I’m someone who screams with his hands in his pockets. My screams were ridiculous compared with those of the others; I was a novice. Beside me my girlfriend screamed as loud as she could. I barely recognised her. Majestic and beautiful, a priestess pregnant with sensuality. There was no desperation in her voice, no fear, no hysterics. She wasn’t crazy, didn’t betray rage, hate, or discomfort. She was perfect, so calm. She screamed with an unreal peace. In total control, ascetic and present. I looked at her with admiration. She was the best of the group. I yearned to possess her like never before.
Her
I heard the voice of my child take possession of my body. I screamed with my entire being, but it was the being inside me that was screaming.
A birth before birth.
A painless wail.
The baby’s gentle voice filled the whole forest.
Him
She was the most beautiful woman at the party.
That’s what I thought when I returned with my girlfriend to retrieve the abandoned wheelie suitcase. She was spent after the screams, plunged into a dense silence, her muted thoughts already far away.
‘It did us good to scream,’ I said.
I spotted some grey strands in her hair. I hadn’t noticed there were so many, or maybe they’d recently increased. For the first time, I thought about us growing old together, and it was almost a reassuring thought. We no longer needed to force each other to grow.
‘We didn’t scream together,’ she said.
I pulled a spade out of the suitcase and sunk it into the soft earth. My girlfriend wandered around in the forest, then came up to me and took the spade out of my hands. She wielded it in the air and started digging, pummelling the ground violently. I saw her rise up and come down with jerky movements, breathing heavily. It didn’t seem like the most suitable exercise for a pregnant woman, but I had the feeling that trying to intervene would have led to a spade in the face. So I let her be. At that moment I wasn’t even clear on why we had brought the wheelie suitcase into the woods to bury it. The previous day we had spoken of leaving Miden as lightly burdened as possible, and that suitcase was pure ballast. But we could have just left it in the living room together with the rest of the stuff rather than sinking it into Miden’s bowels. The upturned earth emanated an odour that reminded me of moments when I’d gathered moss with my father for the manger scene we would set up under the Christmas tree. I liked arranging everything before we put Jesus in on Christmas morning, sculpting the landscape: the patches of green among the pebbles, the water from the well made with tinfoil, the hut with pine needles, the starry sky made with pins. But I would get bored arranging the characters, all those little shepherds, busy people, shopkeepers selling their fish, laundry women rubbing clothes against their washboards, little peasant women with their baskets of honey, bagpipers as annoying as any mariachi band. They ruined everything with their zeal, uselessly busy in a landscape that asked for nothing more than to be contemplated.
Digging furiously, my girlfriend was just as zealous. I was trying to figure out how to take the spade from her when we saw some living creatures peer out of the ground. Or rather, one of the creatures was no longer living; my girlfriend had just sliced the body of an animal in half. It looked like a huge mouse, probably a mole, or whatever being might be hiding in the Miden underground. It was hard to make out the blood in all that dirt; it seemed almost like a magician’s execution: two perfect halves of a body bereft of all humours. But around those two lumps there were little living creatures, a litter of the animal’s newborn pups.
My girlfriend dropped the spade and burst into tears. ‘What did I do?’
The creatures emitted no sound, maybe because they were too little or were mute. It was hard even to make out their gazes, those half-closed eyes like buttonholes. They had soft, slimy, still-unformed bodies covered with a substance similar to mucus. You can’t say they aroused feelings of tenderness – more like gentle revulsion. My girlfriend wouldn’t stop crying.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I told her, even though that was a lie. Because yes, it was her fault. She’d scythed clean through the body of an animal and left its babies to wriggle in desperation.
She leaned over to get a look at the spectacle up close, extended a hand out to the little animals, and then recoiled. She couldn’t bring herself to touch them. A sweet expression came to her face as she tried again to approach the slimy bodies, but her hand wouldn’t move a millimetre. So she turned all her sweetness on me.
‘We can put them in the suitcase and bring them home,’ she suggested.
‘I don’t think they make good pets.’
‘You’ll be carrying your sarcasm to your grave.’
It wasn’t the worst thing I’d be taking to my grave, but this time I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic. I imagined they were underground creatures, unable to survive in a house, especially deprived of whoever had brought them into the world. Not to mention the fact that we had gone into the
forest to bury a suitcase and would instead come back with a suitcase full of life. What sense was there in prolonging the agony? My girlfriend took the spade again and tried to gather the pups together along with some earth and spread them into the suitcase. Her hands were shaking. When one of the animals was grazed by the spade, it convulsed with agitation, and she jumped back with a shriek. The forest muffled nothing. I began to fear that the group of professional screamers might descend on us at any moment.
‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I said.
She became very serious.
‘You’re abandoning our child to wheeze in the mud.’
At that point I became serious too.
‘Okay, if this stuff is our child, why are you too disgusted to even touch it?’
Her seriousness segued into fatalism, then blame.
‘Why didn’t you take the spade out of my hands?’
I much prefer insults to recriminations, but it seems that I inspire only the latter. At that point, though, I did take the spade from her hands, and she didn’t put up any resistance. She leaned over again to the anguished creatures. She put out her arm till her finger was a few inches from their bodies. She forced a smile, the way you do in front of a patently ugly baby in a pram. She stayed there for a few seconds, her arm extended and her finger wagging, her smile a kind of facial paralysis. She lightly brushed one of the little beings, and in response it tried to climb the mountain of her shoe. She shrieked again and jumped to her feet, shaking her shoe hysterically. ‘I can’t take it! I can’t take it –’ She started crying again. I felt the threat of the screamers looming. The silence of the forest worried me more than her tears. I didn’t know how they would react to the extermination of these moles, and above all I didn’t want to have to justify the presence of that wheelie suitcase.
The Girl at the Door Page 11