Kamchatka Read online

  After his death, grandma was rarely at home. She travelled a lot, mostly in Europe. When she was in Buenos Aires, she would go out every day, to have tea, to go to the theatre, to play canasta, or on a ‘date’ with one of her long list of suitors – many of whom were young enough to have dated mamá. Grandma made no attempt to be discreet. Young men would call and collect her at the house, or ring the doorbell and leave flowers, chocolates, necklaces. In the beginning, mamá often opened the door to them, but she finally gave up and after that, opening the door became the sole responsibility of grandma’s maid Mary.

  Grandma was too smart not to realize that many of her suitors saw her as a good catch – properties, businesses, bank accounts – which is why she never accepted another proposal of marriage. But she wasn’t sensitive enough to notice how much the age of her suitors bothered mamá. My parents had already told me that, whenever mamá had boyfriends over, grandma liked to make a dramatic entrance, wearing a dress copied from Brigitte Bardot or Claudia Cardinale. The quarrels between grandma and mamá were noisy, loud and futile. Grandma would fiercely defend her right to dress however she pleased, go wherever she pleased and see whomever she pleased. Grandma, I think, saw mamá as a rival and it was a competition she was not inclined to lose. Mamá only wanted a mother.

  It was at this point that mamá decided marriage was her only way out. Her famous fiancé was short, boring and almost penniless, ensuring grandma wouldn’t flirt with him. But then papá showed up: he made mamá laugh, he listened to her, he loved rather than judged her and mamá realized that she had found much more than a way out.

  According to papá, the night she brought him home to dinner to meet the family, mamá was a bundle of nerves. Throughout the meal, papá, in spite of grandma’s insistence, refused to call her Mati, but addressed her as señora, a word that stung grandma since it reminded her of her position and her age. But grandma could not ignore the enthusiastic blessing the rest of the family bestowed on papá. With the exception of grandma, everyone else had noticed how happy mamá was when she was with him.

  I realize that this portrait of grandma Matilde is hardly flattering. But she is much more than the monster I once thought she was; she is also the saddest person in this story. Maybe this is the moment to say that – if they do not know about her grief – everyone these days knows who my grandmother is. They have read about her in the newspapers, seen her on TV, supported her struggle and that of the ‘mothers of the disappeared’ on the Plaza de Mayo. I would not have believed it myself had I not witnessed her transformation, watched her grow old and full of light. It was she, in Kamchatka, who told me many of the things I’ve just told you. My grandmother, the woman who admitted she had never been able to be a mother to mamá, became her daughter, as though mamá had given birth to her. My grandmother says that mamá saved her life.

  And I’m not talking about that Sunday night when the Midget tried to kill her.

  38

  THE DEADLY SURPRISE

  By lunchtime on Sunday, mamá and papá had already been forced to admit defeat. It was obvious that there was no way grandma Matilde was going to stay, given that she clearly found the quinta about as hospitable as the Amazon jungle. Nor could they imagine her allowing us to stay in her house, full of jars of face cream, cut-glass animals and immaculate rugs. As for me and the Midget, though we knew nothing about their plans, our opinion of grandma Matilde was unequivocal. The only time we saw the grown-ups was at mealtimes. The rest of the day we spent as far away from her as possible.

  We had a light lunch, after which papá planned to drive grandma back to her house. I remember a conversation about the state of the country which shocked me because grandma Matilde’s opinions seemed wildly radical. If it were up to her, she said, the government would disband the army, lynch the bankers and distribute the wealth of the country equally between everyone. (This was what grandma used to be like: regardless of the circumstances or the subject of the conversation, grandma had to be noticed; she had to be more extremist, more charming, more youthful, more frivolous than anyone else.) The only problem, she admitted, was that, if the government did these things, she would have to do without champagne, and well, champagne is so delightful …

  The Midget, who had already left the table by then, came back and whispered to me that the reverse diving board still wasn’t working: there was another dead toad floating in the pool. Exasperated, I asked for permission to be excused and was refused. Mamá wanted me to help her clear the table – something grandma could easily have helped with if she had been a different grandmother – and by the time we had finished, I’d forgotten about the toads and we were already saying our goodbyes. Grandma, stinking of face cream, kissed us and asked if we had seen her handbag. The Midget, the epitome of politeness, said, ‘I’ll get it.’

  The sound of the Citroën had already faded by the time I went out to the swimming pool. I couldn’t see anything. I looked carefully, dragging the net across the surface. There was no toad. I shouted to the Midget to tell him he’d been wrong. He said he wasn’t, there had been a dead toad but that he had recovered the body himself.

  ‘Where did you put it? Let’s bury it.’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s gone.’

  ‘Have you buried it already?’

  ‘I put it somewhere.’ ‘

  What do you mean you put it somewhere?’

  So he told me.

  Mamá was up to her elbows in lukewarm water, washing the dishes very slowly as though being forced to live with grandma had sapped all her strength. When she saw me in the kitchen she asked if I would help her to dry, that way it would get done more quickly. I said sure, of course I would, but first I needed to tell her something. Something important.

  ‘The Midget played a practical joke on grandma,’I told her.

  ‘Saints alive!’

  ‘Have you noticed how sometimes there’s a dead toad floating in the pool?’

  Though she still had her back to me, mamá froze.

  The Midget was hiding behind the back door, watching, more outside than in, keeping a safe distance.

  ‘What did he do with the toad?’ mamá asked in a tone of voice that suggested that she was about to use the Glacial Stare.

  ‘He put it in grandma’s handbag. Just now. She’s just gone off with it.’

  Mamá turned to face us. I could feel the Midget go rigid behind me, he was ashen.

  She stared at us for a moment, looked from him to me, back to him, back to me and then she burst out laughing.

  ‘She’ll have a heart attack!’ said mamá, tears running down her cheeks, still flushed from the steam.

  I gave a sigh of relief. The Midget, sensing that his death sentence had been commuted, appeared in the doorway, doing the stupid little dance he always did when he thought he was the cleverest kid in the universe.

  ‘She’ll have a heart attack!’ mamá said again, wiping her face with a tea towel.

  Just then she realized the significance of what she had said. She thought about grandma’s high blood pressure, the fatty goulash, grandma’s morbid fear of strange animals. Grandma, she remembered, kept her keys in her coat pocket rather than in her handbag so it was likely that she would not open it until she was on her own and needed one of her jars of gunk. She realized that ‘she’ll have a heart attack’ might be more than an expression of surprise: it might be prophetic. When she rushed into the living room, the Midget, assuming she intended to kill him, took off.

  Mamá grabbed the phone, dialled, hung up, redialled, hung up again. She hoped grandma would hear the ringing as soon as she got home and answer before she had a chance to open her handbag.

  The Midget was nowhere to be found.

  Much later, I found him in the grounds, hiding behind a tree next to the fence, as far from the house as he could get. He refused to move until mamá came to him with a white flag and a promise that, for the second time in h
is short life, she would let him live.

  39

  ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY

  The hospital was only a few blocks from grandma’s house. It was an old but well-maintained building that stood on a corner, though it was not in fact a hospital. According to papá, It was a clinic.

  ‘A hospital is a place where everyone is treated free of charge,’ said papá breathlessly, as we rushed through the front doors and up the steps, taking them two or even three at a time. ‘This is a clinic. Clinics are not public, they’re private. If you want these people to cure you, it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.’

  An expression the Midget would have loved if he hadn’t been sound asleep in papá’s arms.

  The accident and emergency room was on the left. Actually it looked more like a crowded corridor than a room. There were people waiting to be called – I remember a man in a grey shirt with a blood-soaked tea towel wrapped around his hand – there were metal drip-stands everywhere, making it difficult to get through, boxes of supplies and fat nurses with faces that would turn milk.

  Grandma was at the far end of the room, lying on a stretcher. The buttons of her blouse were open and you could see her bra – it was disgusting. She was hooked up to a drip and a bunch of machines that made pinging noises and had colour screens. She also had tubes up her nose. I figured she was supposed to breathe through them, but grandma was breathing through her mouth, almost gasping.

  Something had happened to her hairdo. It still had the same shape, the same size, the same artificial shine, but it looked out of place, as though the top of her skull had been rotated several degrees so that it completely covered one ear while the other ear was uncovered.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ grandma asked when she saw us.

  I turned on my heel and headed for the door but papá grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me to him.

  Mamá ignored this daunting question and took grandma’s hand in hers. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘A lot of rubbish, like doctors always do. Just stay calm, señora. Your condition is stable, señora. We won’t know anything until we know something, señora. I don’t know why they don’t give me a pacemaker. And they’re planning to discharge me today!’

  A possible reconstruction of events might run as follows: papá dropped grandma at her front gate and waited until he saw her go inside before turning the Citroën around to head back to the quinta. Grandma went in via the garage door and, stepping into the kitchen, decided to make herself some tea with honey when suddenly she heard the phone ringing at the far end of the house. She wondered who could be calling her at this hour. As she headed towards the living room, handbag still over her shoulder, she decided to take off her false eyelashes and put them back in their case.

  The case was in her handbag.

  When mamá dialled for the nth time and the phone was engaged, she knew that something had happened. She tried again a couple of times and then made us go out and stand by the gate so we could let her know the minute we heard the rumble of the Citroën in the distance. When papá arrived, she made him let her drive, piled us into the back like sacks of potatoes and shot off back towards grandma’s house.

  Luckily it was Sunday night and there was no one else on the roads at midnight. Of the journey itself, I need only say that there was a point when I thought that the entire frame of the car was about to disintegrate and we would be left hurtling along, sitting on the bare chassis.

  Mamá had a set of keys to grandma’s house. She rushed through the door and found the lights on, the handbag lying on the floor, the phone off the hook and the murder weapon lying green and stiff on the rug. Since there was no sign of grandma, mamá assumed she had managed to get out of the house by herself and decided to try the private clinic where grandma had been treated while grandpa was still alive.

  According to Néstor, the trusted chauffeur of whose virtues we had heard so much, grandma had called him and in two seconds managed to explain the situation. (By the time they had finished talking, grandma was not able – or could not be bothered – to hang up the phone, which explained why it had been permanently engaged.) Néstor acted swiftly. By the time he arrived at her house, grandma was waiting for him at the door. He helped her to walk to the reception desk of the clinic. Grandma began banging on the counter and, with her customary theatrical flair, said, ‘You’d think they’d get a move on, che, I’m having a heart attack here!’

  It was not as serious as that, but her fear was genuine. Grandma, kept in for observation, lay on a trolley, waiting for the results of her tests.

  Mamá gave papá the keys to grandma’s house and told him to go back, turn off the lights and tidy the place up. The order was unspoken, but papá understood: she wanted him to get rid of the murder weapon so that grandma wouldn’t find it there when she got home.

  So papá headed off, carrying the Midget, who was still asleep – or pretending to be asleep to avoid the wrath of the grown-ups.

  ‘Why don’t you all go?’ asked grandma. ‘I’ve already sent Néstor to fetch Luisa. She should be here any minute. I think I’d prefer that. The quinta is so far away and by the time …’

  ‘I am not leaving here with you in this condition. I wouldn’t dream of it!’ mamá said firmly. ‘Which doctor did you see?’

  ‘That one over there, with the face like an enema bag,’ said grandma.

  Mamá went to talk to the doctor.

  If I’m not mistaken this was the first time me and grandma had ever been alone, one on one, face to face. It was hardly the most auspicious timing. The place made me feel uncomfortable. Everything smelled of disinfectant and sweat-stained sheets. Every sound was metallic, things being dropped onto instrument trays. On the trolley next to grandma, the man with the tea towel around his hand was having stitches put in. Lying there, half-dressed, tubes distorting her features, the dignity she wore like a crown deserting her, it looked as though she was dying.

  ‘You’re so serious,’ she said between gasps. ‘Your mother was just like you … always serious … She would look at you … like she was judging you … the conscience of the world … strange girl … doesn’t do any good … being serious … gives you wrinkles … You think too much, don’t you? You’re thinking right now … thinking I’ve lost my marbles … well, maybe you’re right … God only knows what they’re … putting up my nose … pure oxygen … I can feel the bubbles … inside my head … champagne!’

  Grandma tried to laugh and almost suffocated. ‘You know where my house is?’ she said, gasping.

  Of course I knew where her house was.

  ‘But you know how to get there, you know the address?’

  I knew the address; I knew how to get there.

  ‘Good. If anything happens. Well, you know. I’ll be there. When they let me out. All these tubes and wires. I’ll be there. Anything at all. I’ll be waiting.’

  I nodded emphatically like a puppet. I needed grandma to stop talking. I was terrified she was going to suffocate. Mamá and the doctor weren’t here. They had gone outside. It was all down to me.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ grandma asked. ‘Something I’ve never told you?’

  She lifted her hand and straightened my hair. A hand with a tube snaking out of it. ‘I love you very much,’ she said.

  This was the first time I had really met my grandma, the handbag-wielding monster with an overdose of oxygen in her bloodstream as a result of one of the Midget’s practical jokes.

  By the time we saw each other again, I was already in Kamchatka.

  Playtime

  * * *

  Estoy muy solo y triste acá en este mundo abandonado.

  Tengo una idea, es la de irme al lugar que yo más quiera.

  (I am so sad and lonely here in this desolate world.

  I have an idea, I want to go to the place I love best.) Tanguito, ‘La Balsa’

  Third Period: Language

  * * *

  Noun. 1. The facult
y, particular to Man, of using articulated sounds to express oneself: ‘The invention of language’. / Speech.

  2. The system of communication specific to a particular community or country.

  40

  ENTER LUCAS

  Lucas showed up one afternoon in the Citroën with mamá. We were waiting for him. Or rather, we were ready for him. In the days before he arrived, me and the Midget had turned the quinta into a fortress calculated to repel the invader.

  Mamá had announced his arrival a couple of days earlier. ‘There’s a kid coming,’ she told me, just like that, out of the blue. ‘He’ll be staying with us.’

  ‘You’re going to adopt him?’

  ‘No, you silly goose. It’s for a few days. He needs a place to stay.’

  But I didn’t believe her. This information was coming from the same source who had told me that grandma Matilde’s visit was purely social, when in fact it was part of a devious plan thwarted, among other reasons, by the providential appearance of the kamikaze toad. How could I be sure that this was not another of mamá and papá’s tricks? Maybe they would just wait for us to get used to the presence of the interloper before admitting his true status as a permanent fixture – their new son. The appearance of this ‘kid’ implied that they weren’t satisfied with us. We weren’t enough for them. We didn’t measure up. They needed something more.