Kamchatka Page 12

  Just then he moved in his sleep; he was dreaming. I hid the wallet behind my back. When you’re about to be caught doing something and you need an explanation, you never come up with anything plausible. The only excuses I could think of were rubbish, like I was going to wash his jeans to welcome him or that I was looking for change for a 100 peso note (at 3 a.m.!) but luckily, I didn’t need an explanation. Lucas went on sleeping.

  That was when I found the photo. The girl was wearing a white miniskirt, and a black blouse that she held open with both hands so I could see her boobs as she stared tenderly out at me. If proof were needed to confirm my suspicion that Lucas was a sentimental spy, this was it. This girl could have been a Bond girl in any of the movies. Lucas wanted something to remember her by during his missions so he’d come up with the cunning idea of printing her photo on the back of a calendar from Kiosko Pepe, Santa Fe y Ecuador. Simple, but brilliant. Grown-ups do really weird things to hide their sex stuff. Mamá’s cousin Tito used to hide his copies of Playboy and Penthouse in a pile of Hot Rods and car magazines. Papá, who only read newspapers, law books and the Palermo Rosa for the racing form, had a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in his office. If Bertuccio, with his obsession with books for grown-ups, hadn’t alerted me, I wouldn’t even have noticed that he had that dirty book stuck between his volumes of the penal code.

  I put the wallet back where I’d found it and rushed to the loo. OK, if I’m being honest, I wrestled for ages with the temptation to keep the photo for myself, but in the end I thought it was better if Lucas didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary (in any case, I could take it any night I wanted to) so I put it back in his pocket. This way, Lucas wouldn’t know that I knew; now I had the upper hand again.

  Someone should invent toilets with slanted sides. Women are always complaining because we splash but aiming your thing is harder than it looks.

  44

  I AM FOUND OUT

  Papá and mamá left early the next morning. To make up for going away, they promised to swing by our house and pick up some of our stuff. We bombarded them with requests. We wanted the whole world and then some. Mamá tried to impose some sort of limits on what we could have, but papá intervened, clenching his fist to make the sign of the Rock so she would relent. He tried to hide it but I saw it. When she gave in to our demands, we were so happy we rocked the car. (If anyone still doubts my description of how flimsy the Citroën was, it was the sort of car that could be jiggled like a cocktail shaker by a ten-year-old boy and his five-year-old brother.) But even this sudden joy didn’t entirely compensate for the feeling that we were being abandoned, left in the enemy’s clutches.

  The plan was to steer clear of Lucas. At first it was easy, because we had stuff to do. While mamá was taking a shower, I took the Midget’s mattress outside in a stealth manoeuvre so that it could dry in the sun. Mamá noticed anyway and asked what it was doing there but we told her we’d taken it outside to do somersaults. She gave us a suspicious look, but she said nothing more. I let the Midget know mamá was getting suspicious and that he had to take extreme precautions. From now on, there were to be no more drinks before bed. Not a drop. ‘No Coke?’ said the Midget. No coke, I confirmed. ‘What about water?’ No water, no soft drinks, I said. ‘No milk?’ ‘Not with or without Nesquik,’ I said, believing I had exhausted the full range of beverages the Midget drank. It wasn’t a joke, I explained, mamá was on to him and if he wasn’t careful, he was in for the Glacial Stare, the Petrifying Scream and the Deadly Pinch. So there wasn’t even a peep out of him when I told him to wash the sheets, thereby eliminating the evidence of his crime.

  As for me, I’d decided to begin a regimen of intense physical training. I needed to get fit so that I could start my career as an escape artist as soon as possible. This was easy to say, but for me it amounted to a real achievement. Let’s just say I’d never been particularly sporty. At school, when they made us run, my chest would tighten and I’d feel as though I was suffocating, and every breath sounded like a train whistle in my chest. I didn’t even like football – Argentina’s national obsession. My relationship with the ball was cut short at an early age. Once, while I was kicking a rubber ball in the street, I cut my ankle on a broken bottle: I had to have six stitches and still had the scar. A couple of months after that, in Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, I kicked my first proper football into the air and it hit a branch with a beehive on it. That was the end of my interest in sports and the beginning of my unshakeable empathy for cartoon characters who fell off cliffs, had pianos land on their heads and were chased by angry swarms of bees: this was why I always preferred Wile E. Coyote to the Road Runner; Sylvester to Tweety Pie and Daffy Duck to Bugs Bunny. When I got lectures about the importance of sport, I remembered the blood and the scratches and I said to myself however healthy sport is, claustrophilia is healthier.

  My plan of action included several laps of the grounds of the quinta, working on my biceps and sit-ups. To help motivate myself, I had drawn up a graph with the exercises marked on the x axis and the date on the y axis, beginning today. All I had to do was mark down which exercises I’d done, and how many.

  I survived the first lap of the grounds pretty well. As I passed the laundry room I saw the Midget, rubbing soap on the sheets where the stain was, looking appropriately serious and determined.

  The second lap was agony. The Midget was still rubbing soap on the same spot.

  I never finished the third lap. Seeing that the Midget had abandoned his task was a small comfort, but it was a consolation. Almost joyfully I rinsed out the sheet.

  Lucas grilled steaks, and he let us eat in front of the TV. To be fair to him, his steaks were better than mamá’s. There was no fat, even around the edges.

  That afternoon I made another attempt at exercising, but by then I’d lost my motivation. Looking at my graph, I was ashamed to see how little I’d actually done. Two and a half laps around the grounds? Eight sit-ups? There were worms out there fitter than I was and they probably had bigger biceps. I felt flushed and twitchy, my whole body ached and tingled with pins and needles; I went back to the house in the worst possible mood.

  And found Lucas reading my book about Houdini.

  I must have looked daggers at him, because he shut it carefully and gingerly set it down on the table as though it were a flask of nitro-glycerine or one of the little crystal animals that grandma Matilde was always so careful with.

  ‘You interested in magic?’ he asked, trying to cover up by seeming curious.

  ‘Houdini wasn’t a magician. He was an escape artist. Magicians are just liars. They pretend they’ve got magic powers but they haven’t,’ I snapped at him as I angrily snatched up my book. But obviously I wasn’t particularly happy with my comeback because, halfway to my room, I turned around and said. ‘Your name’s not really Lucas, is it?’

  In the silence that followed my question, Lucas dropped the innocent air he’d had while talking to me, like someone taking off a disguise. A new gleam lit up his eyes, something cunning. Until then, I’d thought I was dealing with a kid trapped in a body that was too big for him. Now he looked like an old man trapped in a brand-new, hardly used body.

  ‘No, my name’s not really Lucas,’ he said. I thought he was about to reveal his identity. This was the moment of truth, like in the movies. But I was wrong. ‘And your name isn’t really Harry, is it?’

  I didn’t answer, just went to my room. To be honest, I was angry with myself. I had given up whatever advantage I’d gained from looking through his wallet. I’d allowed him to catch me unawares. How did he know I too had a secret identity? The only thing for me to do was to stay poker-faced and deny everything. But I didn’t know how. I slammed the door and threw myself down on my bed.

  I was woken by a loud noise, it sounded like rain. Then I heard the Midget shouting. It seemed unlikely that it was actually raining since I could still see the sun shining through the window. And the Midget was howling with joy, the voice ech
oing through the corridors of the quinta.

  When I opened the door, I saw him splashing around like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain. The house was flooded. The corridor was full of water, pouring through the drain in the bathroom floor. The house was obviously built on a slope so that the water was flowing towards the dining room.

  The tank was overflowing and Lucas didn’t know how to turn it off. Papá and mamá had gone out of their way to tell me how, because I was little, so obviously wouldn’t already know, but they hadn’t realized that Lucas, even though he was trapped in a giant’s body, didn’t necessarily know all the stuff that grown-ups know. So the tank was overflowing (that was the ‘rain’ I had heard) and Lucas had rushed outside and was turning all the taps he could find and that’s when the Midget yelled ‘It’s flooding’ and went into the bathroom and tried to stop up the grille in the floor with a mop, so the water started flooding out of the toilet. In desperation, Lucas had rushed back inside and started twisting all the taps and levers he could find, and by now the Midget was enjoying the whole mess – ‘What a glorious feeling/I’m happy again’– and that’s when I showed up.

  I turned off the stopcock like mamá and papá showed me. Then me and the Midget went out to the swimming pool to see how the reverse diving board was working (it looked promising, there were no dead toads), leaving Lucas alone in the house.

  Life may not be fair, but it has its moments.

  That night wasn’t too bad. Papá and mamá brought back my game of Risk, my sketchpad and the Dennis Martin comic I hadn’t had a chance to read on the last night before we left. Dennis Martin was a bit like James Bond, but I liked him better: he was Irish, he had long hair and he always gave girls yellow roses. The Midget got his cuddly toy Goofy back, his red plastic cup with the teat (which he wasn’t allowed to use, at least at night, as he had made a solemn promise) and the pyjamas he said gave him sweet dreams. No one remarked on the state of the house, which suggested everything was fine, although I overheard papá say to Lucas that there were roadblocks on the roads and that they’d have to change their route every time.

  Over dinner, we all laughed about the water tank overflowing. The Midget made out it was worse than it was, saying that the water had been up to here and that he’d been swimming and everything. Lucas blushed red as a tomato, half-ashamed and half-amused and confessed that I’d saved his life. Then he tried to grab the salad bowl, but I got there first.

  45

  I AM DELIVERED UP TO A TRIBE OF CANNIBALS

  Maybe because they thought we were going to flood the house again, or maybe because they were afraid that next time we’d set fire to it, papá and mamá decided that me and the Midget should go back to school. This would have made me happy, except they wanted to send us to a different school.

  Their argument – against which anything I said was futile – was that they didn’t want us to get out of the routine of going to school. In that case, I insisted, I want to go back to the same school, the same year, the same class.

  ‘That’s not going to be possible yet,’ they told me, ‘it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘It’s not dangerous for me,’ I said, ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Roberto didn’t do anything either and look what happened to him,’ said papá, going all psycho on me.

  It was a long drawn-out battle and of course I lost. I offered to study at home at the quinta: nothing doing. I screamed, I sobbed: nothing doing. I gave them the cold shoulder: nothing doing. When mamá and papá agreed on something, they were immovable, like a brick wall with no cracks. They were determined that we should not turn into little savages.

  To make matters worse, San Roque turned out to be a Catholic school. The weekend before the fatal Monday was spent giving us an intensive course in Christianity. It was one thing to fake it during mass, which, even if it felt like an eternity, only happened on Sundays, but it was something else entirely to fake it from Monday to Friday, for hours at a stretch. First thing Saturday morning, we practised the prayers we’d already learned and after that mamá started explaining Catholicism to us.

  ‘God created the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested.’

  ‘How can he rest if he’s God?’ the Midget wanted to know.

  ‘Then he created Adam, the first man. He made him out of mud.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to use plasticine?’

  ‘He breathed on the mud, a magic breath, and Adam was alive. But God did not want Adam to be alone and decided he should have a mate.’

  ‘I get it, “Here comes the bride”’.

  ‘Stop being silly. So God created Eve.’

  ‘Eva Perón?!’

  We spent all of Saturday afternoon trying to commit to memory stories that sounded like titles from a B-movie festival: Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath, the Ten commandments. The Midget loved the bit where Moses brought down the plague of frogs and he forced mamá to admit that if God had really asked Noah to save two of every animal on Earth, then there had to be a stuffed Goofy and a plastic Goofy on the Ark.

  On Sunday we went to mass and realized that everything we’d learned was from Book One, which was called the Old Testament. After that came Book Two, the New Testament. It was a lot less interesting than the Book One (Brothers killing each other! Burning bushes that talked! Prophetic dreams! Floods! Seas that parted! Lots of special effects!) but it was more moving. Jesus was the son of a carpenter and he preached love and peace and understanding among men. He was against violence and he despised money because the Earth had riches enough so that all men might eat, have shelter and live well: it was just a matter of getting things organized and learning to share. His ideas made a lot of people nervous – politicians and economists and religious leaders – because Jesus didn’t respect their authority and they were afraid their followers would lose respect for them and stop obeying them. So they killed him – in a horrible way. Exactly like the picture I’d set fire to. And to make matters worse, it was pointless, because what Jesus said still made sense even after he was dead.

  The rest of the stuff about Christ was a bit pernickety and seemed pretty random – about priests being more important than nuns, for example. (The Midget wanted to know why religious orders had fathers and brothers, but no uncles or cousins.) About priests not being allowed to get married. About not being interested in worldly things. And the whole business about the Host: every time you eat it, you’re eating the body of Christ, which is pretty much like being a cannibal. I know it’s only a gesture or a symbol – mamá explained that a thousand times – but it still sounded a bit simple-minded to my mind, like the primitive tribes that eat their victims’ hearts thinking they can absorb their wisdom. Grandpa used to say that there’s no slower process on Earth than the getting of wisdom. The two things that take ages to get, he’d say, are wisdom and a phone line.

  Mamá ironed our school smocks (mine was blue like the cards in Risk), papá and Lucas went out to get pizza, and me and the Midget sat on the edge of the swimming pool watching a toad swimming round and round, too stupid even to realize that salvation was at hand in the form of the reverse diving board. We shouldn’t have got involved, because the whole idea was that the toads were supposed to learn for themselves, but we were touched by all the effort it was making and in the end we scooped it out with the net and put it on the board.

  We all need a helping hand sometimes.

  46

  AMONG THE BEASTS

  We got to the school early. Papá and mamá introduced us to Father Ruiz, the headmaster. He seemed nice enough, though pretty shortsighted, given the thick glasses he wore. He already stank of BO even though it was still early. He led us out into the playground and told us to wait there until the school bell rang. The Midget went over to look at a mural depicting the life of San Roque and I sat on a concrete bench while papá and mamá moved off a little way with Father Ruiz to talk. I heard some of what they said, thanks to my auditory powers, heightened b
y hours and hours spent hiding in wardrobes; Father Ruiz was explaining that we’d be included on the register and in the daily roll call, but that they didn’t need to send any documentation to the Department of Education, so there was nothing to worry about.

  When the bell rang, Father Ruiz went to find the Midget and mamá sat down next to me. She lit up a Jockey, the last one in the pack and, in her best ‘Rock’ voice, asked me: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Vicente,’ I said, dully.

  ‘And why are you only coming to school now?’

  ‘Because we’ve only just moved to the area.’

  ‘What does your papá do for a living?’

  ‘He’s an architect. He works for a construction company called Campbell and associates.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Housewife.’

  Mamá exhaled a large cloud of smoke. She looked tired. She had never been much of a morning person. When she spoke again she didn’t sound like the Rock any more.

  ‘It’s not that bad. You’ll make new friends.’

  ‘I don’t want to make new friends, I want my old friends. The ones you took away from me!’

  At that moment Father Ruiz reappeared and I got to my feet. As I walked over to him, I heard mamá scrunch the pack of Jockeys into a ball.

  When Father Ruiz opened the door to my new classroom, none of my classmates was there. They were all up in front of the blackboard, huddled down like a rugby scrum, killing themselves laughing.

  Father Ruiz launched himself into the scrum like a bulldozer, shouting ‘Get back to your seats’ over and over, pinching their sides. It was obvious he’d had a lot of practice breaking up crowds. He bulldozed until there was only one person left – a skinny boy in a windcheater, a green scarf and a woolly hat, who refused to budge.