Kamchatka Page 11

  ‘You see what I’m saying, Midget? You’ll see, I bet he’ll have blond hair. I bet he’ll be this perfectly behaved kid who always remembers to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. How much do you bet that he never wets the bed?’

  The Midget swore undying loyalty to me and volunteered for battle.

  The first thing we did was to barricade our room. Our aim was to prevent it from being occupied by the interloper: If mamá and papá wanted a new son, he could sleep in their room. We made signs so there would be no doubt as to who owned what. The sign on our bedroom door read: ‘Hideout of Harry and the Saint’. There were signs on the headboards of our beds too – and on the outside of the wardrobe door. Lest there be any doubt, we divided the space inside the wardrobe in two, half for me, half for the Midget. (Not that we had anything we needed to put there, but you never know.) We sealed up the drawer of the bedside table with bits of sellotape, which of course meant that we couldn’t open it either, but it was worth it for the sake of the message it sent. The Midget attached Goofy to his bed with a piece of string but, worried that this might not be enough, asked me to make a sign that he could put on him. We hung the last sign on the window screen facing outward. It read ‘Beware of the Dog’, in English, just like in the Merrie Melodies cartoons. Underneath the words we stuck the only picture of a dog we had: Superman’s pet dog Krypto; he didn’t look very fierce but he had superpowers. In case of emergency, me and the Midget agreed we would hide under our beds and bark to give the impression there was an actual guard dog. We practised a couple of times and everything. The Midget sounded like the little puppy he was.

  Our preparation extended to the grounds of the quinta. We removed the crosses we’d made out of lollipop sticks that marked the places where the toads were buried; after all, the interloper might easily turn out to be a grave robber. As for the reverse diving board, we decided to say it was already here when we arrived and we didn’t know what it was for. We needed to divert his attention from the swimming pool, away from our rescue mission designed to produce future generations of intelligent toads. The experiment was too important to be jeopardized. If interrogated, we would give only the essentials: name, rank and serial number. Vicente, Simón. International Spy. Number 007. (This was the only number the Midget could remember easily.)

  All of this went against everything I had promised mamá. When she had told me that this kid was coming, she had asked me to help keep the Midget from getting upset.

  ‘You know how he can be, how easily he gets upset by anything new, anything strange. Right now, he’s handling things pretty well, the poor thing. Don’t you think?’

  I nodded but I was thinking about how the Midget had started wetting the bed again and had begged me not to tell on him. How could I possible refuse her? This was why I didn’t feel any remorse about breaking my promise to mamá: It had been extracted under duress.

  When Lucas showed up, all of our plans proved to be futile.

  I was hiding out in the tool shed.

  From here I could see the place where the Citroën was always parked (behind the lemon trees) without being seen. Stationed in the driveway, the Midget was supposed to warn me when they were coming and then go to the bedroom and lock the door until I knocked: three quick taps followed by two slow ones; that was the secret code. We had stored provisions in our room so that we could hold out there for as long as necessary: ham, cheese, crackers and – obviously – milk and Nesquik.

  From the start, everything went wrong. The Midget got bored waiting at his post and went inside to watch TV. Mamá parked the car between the lemon trees and, instead of sizing up the enemy and then running back to the house, I sat there in the tool shed, open-mouthed until I heard them calling me at the tops of their voices.

  Lucas was the biggest kid in the world.

  41

  A HOUSE POSSESSED

  Lucas dressed the same way all my friends did: jeans, Flecha trainers and a really cool orange T-shirt with a motorbike and the words ‘Jawa CZ’ on the front – only it was size XXL. Lucas was a giant. He was over six feet tall, which made him quite a bit taller than papá and mamá. He was carrying a light blue bag with a Japan Airlines logo on it and a sleeping bag. He was really skinny, with arms and legs as long as the spiders I’d imagined finding in the mysterious house. It looked as if he’d been stretched on a rack just before he came and wasn’t really used to his new size yet. Because he walked like he had springs inserted into the soles of his feet. And he had three or four black hairs on his chin that looked ridiculous. He looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but creepy: Shaggy possessed by an evil spirit, a victim of voodoo; the sort of Shaggy who’d eat your eyeballs and suck your brains out through the empty sockets.

  I had no choice but to come when mamá called me. By the time I joined them, most of the introductions had been made. Everyone was smiling, everyone except the Midget who barely came up to Lucas’s waist.

  ‘This is Harry,’ said papá.

  Lucas held out his hand and said he thought Harry was a really cool name. People who are possessed always try to make out like they’re nice. I shook his hand so he’d think I’d fallen for his trick.

  ‘Boys, this is Lucas.’

  ‘Lucas what?’ asked the Midget.

  Papá, mamá and Lucas exchanged looks, then Lucas said, ‘Lucas, just Lucas.’

  Then papá suggested he show Lucas around the quinta.

  The Midget wanted to go with them, but I signalled for him to stay behind. We let the grown-ups head off and we rushed into the house, in a race against time.

  In a matter of seconds we tore down all the signs. The Midget didn’t really understand why, but faithful to his oath of obedience, he carried out my orders without a word while I tried to explain the inexplicable.

  We had been duped. Lucas wasn’t a kid. He was a grown-up disguised as a kid, an impostor, a guard they had hired to keep an eye on us while papá and mamá were away. Had it not been for the attempt on grandma Matilde’s life, we would have been left with her; at least we would have known what to expect. Now we were at the mercy of a complete stranger – a stranger with legs like springs and arms like wires who moved like no one we had ever seen before. Whatever Lucas was, he certainly wasn’t human but he could mimic human movement. This was the mystery we had to solve. Was Lucas who he claimed to be, who papá and mamá believed him to be? Or was he some messenger from the dark side intent on enslaving us, our own personal Invader?

  Reduced to silence by the weight of these doubts, the Midget handed over the signs, picked up Goofy and started hurling it across the room. He liked the noise the string made when it pulled taut and Goofy stopped in mid-air. But he didn’t fool me. I could see through his charade, I could tell how scared he was.

  Just as I was about to ask him, mamá and Lucas appeared at the bedroom door.

  ‘Lucas will be sleeping in here with you guys,’ she announced.

  Hands in my pockets, I squeezed the signs we’d torn down into little balls.

  ‘I can sleep in the dining room if you’d rather,’ Lucas said to mamá, noticing our discomfort.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing, there’s a terrible draught in the dining room,’ said mamá, and left the room as though nothing had happened.

  The moment lasted for centuries. (All time, I believe, is simultaneous.) The Midget was hugging Goofy, Lucas was hugging his sleeping bag and I was squeezing bits of paper. It was as if, without anyone suggesting it, we were all suddenly playing a game of Statues.

  It was the Midget who broke the ice. In his little head, he decided on the only way to settle his doubts and immediately put it into practice. He laid Goofy on his bed, brought both hands level with his face and crooked his little fingers several times.

  Lucas, who thought this was some sort of greeting, dropped his sleeping bag and imitated the Midget, crooking both fingers over and over.

  ‘Hello, Simón Vicente,’ said Lucas.

  ‘Hi, Lucas Just-Luca
s. Do you know how to make Nesquik? Come with me, I’ll show you.’ And the Midget headed off in the direction of the kitchen, with Lucas bringing up the rear.

  In a fraction of a second, the Midget had confirmed that Lucas was not one of the Invaders, and welcomed him into the human faction.

  I was not so gullible. I knew there were different kinds of Invaders.

  I threw the balls of paper into the air in a fit of anger and went and hid in the wardrobe.

  42

  IN PRAISE OF WORDS

  In the beginning, words served to name things that already existed. Mother. Father. Water. Cold. In almost all languages, the words that define these fundamental truths are similar, or have something of the same music to them. Mother is ‘’umm’ in Arabic, ‘mutter’ in German, ‘maht’ in Russian. (All land is land.) On the contrary, words that describe similar human emotions, like fear, do not sound the same anywhere. ‘Miedo’ is not the same as the English ‘fear’ nor the French ‘peur’. I like to believe that we are more alike in our positive experiences than in our negative ones, that what binds us is stronger than what separates us.

  Every language is a way of imagining the world. English, for example, is sharp and precise. Spanish tends to be baroque. It is obvious that they have adapted to the needs of the peoples who speak them, because both have stood the test of time. From time to time, academics accept new words that have already been tested in everyday speech, or accept as correct constructions they previously considered ungrammatical. These new words are leaves on a tree that is already lush with foliage, and the new constructions are the pruning, which helps it to grow; but the tree is still the same tree.

  Despite the already advanced age of human languages, it is possible to think of things which do not yet have names. For example, there is a word for the fear of confined spaces: claustrophobia. But there is no word for the love of confined spaces. Claustrophilia? Could the monks of Kildare, whose skill as copyists saved much of Western culture, be called claustrophiliacs? Can a miner or a submariner be called claustrophiliac?

  My family maintain that I was claustrophiliac from the time I learned to crawl. I would look for small, dark places and squeeze inside: a dog kennel, a wardrobe, the boot of a car. Since I never cried, I would remain hidden until someone noticed I was missing and set out to look for me. If I’d fallen asleep, as I did most of the time, the search might last for hours. If I was still awake, they would quickly find me, because they would hear me laughing. Obviously I must have liked hearing lots of people shouting my name.

  Most people argued that my claustrophilia was the result of the ten months I had spent in my mother’s belly. According to this theory, these dark cramped spaces reminded me of the sanctuary of the womb I had been so reluctant to leave. There were other theories – though they were often no more than jokes. For a while, after they had to drag me out of the barrel of an old cannon in the museum in Los Cocos in córdoba, there was a theory that I had suicidal tendencies.

  I was growing and the cannons were a little small for me. But from time to time, when I was really bored or particularly angry, I would still seek refuge in a wardrobe somewhere. I would make myself comfortable among the piles of clothes and listen intently. Inside a wardrobe you can hear everything. It acts as a sound box for the whole house. You discover layer upon layer of noises: the cistern in the bathroom, the hiss of the immersion heater, the TV in the distance, the hum of the fridge, the movements of everyone in the house, the conversations you’re not supposed to overhear. On humid days, you could even hear the creaking of the wood of the wardrobe itself.

  The afternoon Lucas arrived (or ‘Lucas Just-Lucas’ as the Midget called him) all I could hear was my own heart beating. It was like a train hurtling along a track, the engine about to explode. My chest hurt as though a fist were thumping on my ribs from the inside. I was furious! I felt I had been tricked by my parents and betrayed by the Midget. I decided that I would repel the intruder, even if I had to do it alone. I wanted to think about how I would go about it, but I couldn’t concentrate. My heart was making too much noise.

  Señorita Barbeito says that the heart is a muscle. It expands and contracts. As it beats it makes the sound ‘b-b-buh-bum’. No, it’s not ‘buh-bum’, it’s ‘b-b-buh-bum’; the ‘b’ that starts it off is slower; as with any machine, the initial motion is the most difficult and therefore lasts longer. According to Señorita Barbeito, the fact that it is a muscle suggests that it can be controlled. But the heart is a complicated muscle and has a tough job to do. Most muscles respond to direct, conscious commands, but the heart is automatic rather than manual, like the cars they have in America. You have to work out how to shut off the automatic switch and set it to manual, if only for a short period. It’s a difficult thing to learn, because the body doesn’t come with an instruction manual (if it did, it would save us a lot of time and trouble), and there’s no off switch or key or lever to switch from one system to another. It’s like Airport – the book, not the film (I haven’t seen the film, but mamá lent me the book): the plane is in danger, the real pilot is unconscious and you have to take over the controls even though you’ve no idea how to fly a plane, and let yourself be guided by the voice of the guy in the control tower, or, in my case, by the (imaginary) voice of Señorita Barbeito. Books about planes in trouble were very popular back then. There was The President’s Plane Is Missing, in which, at some point, the hero says you should always look carefully at a girl’s mother before getting hitched, that way you know what she’ll look like in twenty years’ time and decide if she’s worth it. This seemed to me a perceptive remark and I jotted it down in my mental notebook, intending to make use of it when the time came.

  By the time I thought about it, my heartbeat had slowed. I wondered if that was because I hadn’t been thinking about my heart, because I was thinking about something else. You think about something else, you get distracted, you follow the thought and while you’re doing it you forget that you were panicked, and when you forget to panic, you calm down again. It was like the thing that worked for me with my breathing, when my chest felt tight and it felt like I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. I thought I was suffocating and that made me suffocate all the more. So I’d turn on the TV or make myself a café con leche or read a book and drift off to Oz or Neverland or Camelot and after a while I’d discover I was breathing normally again. You had to pretend to ignore the problem if you were to get through it, otherwise it was like surrendering. It had worked with my lungs; now it was working with my heart. Well done, said Señorita Barbeito’s voice inside my head. An almost perfect landing. Now, you can climb out of the cockpit and everyone will be cheering and clapping. You’re a hero, Harry. (I called myself Harry even when I was thinking. Papá had been very clear – our real names had to be kept safely under lock and key. The slightest slip could be fatal. We weren’t even allowed to use our real names with each other. Papá called me Harry. Mamá called me Harry.)

  Houdini must have been a claustrophiliac too. Or maybe there was a lot of stuff going on around him that made him panicked or angry and he had to climb inside trunks and vaults and glass boxes so that he could think about something else – something silly – until he could calm down and decide to come out and face the world again.

  43

  LUCAS HAS A GIRLFRIEND

  That night I got up to go for a pee (I thought about taking the Midget with me, but it was too late, he’d already wet the bed) and nearly killed myself. Lucas was lying right in the middle of the path in his sleeping bag. Since the sleeping bag was too small, or he was too big, the only way he could fit inside was by rolling into a ball. He looked like a (giant) baby kangaroo inside the pouch of his (giant) mother.

  Stepping around him, I noticed he’d left his clothes on a chair. The moonlight streaming through the Venetian blinds gave his orange T-shirt an otherworldly glow. I dared myself to touch it. The motorbike and the writing that said ‘Jawa CZ’ felt weird, not like fabric, it
was sort of rubbery. I’d never seen a T-shirt like it. I squinted so I could read the label inside. ‘Made in Poland.’ What had Lucas been doing in Poland? It was a weird place to go, even for tourists who go to Europe. Tourists go to Madrid or Paris, or London or Rome, but Poland? It would have been better if it read ‘Made in Transylvania’, because at least then it would have made sense. Lucas would be Renfield, Dracula’s one acolyte who hadn’t yet been turned into a vampire. But Poland was just mysterious. It sounded like spies and double agents and zither music, like Anton Karas’s music for The Third Man. (My knowledge of central European geography was sufficiently vague back then that I was capable of getting Poland and Austria mixed up.)

  And what about the light blue Japan Airlines bag? How could Lucas be so young and have travelled so much? And why did he always go to weird places? Japan was a case in point. I couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would want to go to Japan, except maybe if you were James Bond and M sent you on a mission and you were in the book called You Only Live Twice. (Grandpa had a complete set of Ian Fleming’s books in his house in Dorrego, in editions that had photos from the Bond movies on the covers.) Was Lucas some kind of secret agent? And if he was, did papá and mamá know, or had he tricked them the same way he was trying to trick me? I needed to know more.

  And there was Lucas’s wallet, sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans. I waited a couple of seconds (well, not too many, I was about to piss myself) to make sure that Lucas was sleeping soundly. Then I carefully took his wallet out of the pocket.

  Not much money. No ID. I expected this: Lucas would want to conceal his true identity, he wouldn’t want anyone to know his real name wasn’t Lucas Just-Lucas, or Lucas Thingamajig. There were a couple of bus tickets and a programme for a cinema on the Calle Lavalle. The programme was dated 1973. Why would Lucas keep such an old programme? The answer was in the film itself: Live and Let Die with Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto and Jane Seymour. The first movie with Roger Moore as James Bond. Lucas was keeping this as a reminder of his own initiation as a spy – he was soppy.