Kamchatka Page 13

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Father Ruiz barked. ‘Get to your seat.’

  The only answer he got was gales of laughter from the rest of the class.

  The ‘boy’ was actually the school’s model skeleton dressed up to look like one of my classmates. At least it was definitely a skeleton. I wondered just how far Catholics took this cannibalism thing.

  Father Ruiz blushed, then finally burst out laughing. (He was obviously more short-sighted than I’d thought.) He pulled the clothes off the skeleton and thanked my classmates for their generous donation of old clothes. Most of them booed, except for the ones who owned the clothes, and they simply turned pale.

  He stood me at the front of the class and explained that I was new to the school. He gave a little welcome speech, emphasizing how awkward people feel arriving at a new school where everyone knows everyone else and asked them to open their hearts to me. His words were received in a respectful silence. Headmaster or not, Father Ruiz was a good man and everyone who had dealings with him clearly knew that. But the atmosphere of calm he had managed to instil shattered into a million pieces when, at the end of his speech, he announced: ‘May I introduce Haroldo Vicente.’

  Haroldo! A yelp came from somewhere at the back of the class.

  I closed my eyes. I wanted to die.

  This was something I hadn’t foreseen. With a respect for my wishes, my parents had tried to preserve the name ‘Harry’ In the world of my new school. ‘Harry’ is a diminutive of ‘Harold’, which in Spanish is ‘Haroldo’ – a stupid name which, as someone at the back of the class worked out, happens to rhyme with all sorts of rude words. Soon, thirty little monsters in blue uniforms – like the Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine – were all pointing and laughing at me, even though I’d never wanted to be Haroldo. I wanted to be Harry but now they’d all got in on the act and started rhyming everything I said. It was like I was in a musical with no music, with everyone speaking in rhymes. All we needed now was for the school skeleton to get up and dance on the walls and the ceiling like Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding until someone pulled him down by the green-striped scarf.

  47

  I LEARN TO BREATHE

  I felt like one of those characters in comics that have a little black cloud floating over their heads that follows them around and every now and then shoots out bolts of lightning. I spent the whole day playing Hangman by myself, not paying attention to anything that was said in class. I’d always been a good student, but right now I was prepared to boycott the whole thing: I wanted to get a Fail in every subject so papá and mamá would have no choice but to take me out of this school. Eventually, the kid I was sharing a desk with noticed me playing Hangman, a boy called Denucci who couldn’t figure out the rules (how could I guess the wrong letter in a word when I already knew the answer?) and couldn’t figure out why I hanged myself in game after game after game.

  After school, papá and mamá were waiting for us. We all walked back to the quinta together because they wanted to show us the way. The Midget ruined my perfect bad mood by babbling on enthusiastically about his day: he loved the new school.

  ‘My teacher says I have beautiful hair. And she said I’m really nice. And she said that Simón is a lovely name. Sandra is a lovely name. My teacher is called Sandra. Why didn’t you call yourself Sandra, mamá? Did you see the picture of San Roque? He’s got a dog! Can I get a dog?’

  Papá, who was in a good mood, commented that San Roque also had wounds all over his legs and asked if the Midget wanted the wounds too.

  ‘No, cos the dog might lick them, like San Roque’s dog does and then I’d have to get a ninjection so I didn’t get rabies. When I grow up, I want to be a saint, but only if I can be a healthy saint.’

  ‘Like San Atorium,’ said papá.

  ‘Essactly,’ said the Midget.

  Lucas didn’t get back to the quinta until late, by which time we had already had dinner. He couldn’t think of anything better to do than ask me how my first day at the new school had been. This was the perfect excuse for me to get up from the table and storm off into the garden, slamming the door behind me. The grass was still damp from the brief, torrential shower that afternoon. The wind shook the branches, showering down droplets that stung my face.

  School had upset my routine, but I didn’t want to abandon my fitness regime. Although I was worn out and angry and had eaten too much, I started on a lap of the grounds. This time I barely managed one lap before I collapsed onto the grass by the kitchen window. I was panting. From inside I could hear music being played loud, some guy with a nasal voice singing ‘How sad Venice can beeee/When you return aloooone/to find a memoreee/in every paving stooone.’ I thought I could see mamá in the kitchen. To hide my feeble condition, I tried a few press-ups. I managed two. Two! the breath was whistling in my chest when I heard the door slam. It was Lucas. He was running. Around the grounds. Alone.

  The strange thing was not that he had come out to run so soon after accepting mamá’s offer to make him something to eat, it was the fluid ease of his movements when he ran. Lucas, with his scrawny, lanky frame, all knees and elbows, who looked like Groucho Marx when he walked, could run effortlessly, steadily, gracefully, as though his body had been designed for speed. And just to rub salt into my wounds, he did three laps of the grounds without even breaking a sweat.

  ‘The secret is the rhythm,’ he said, running on the spot after every lap. ‘It has to be completely regular. You run at a set pace and you breathe at the same pace. You breathe in through your nose, deep into your belly, then you breathe out. Not from your chest, from the pit of your stomach. If you do that, you’ll never get tired.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘You want to see me run four more laps?’

  ‘Can I run with you?’

  Lucas adjusted his rhythm to mine. We jogged slowly, me imitating the regular swing of his arms, breathe in for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four, to the privet hedges at the far end of the grounds, then back, breathe in, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four. I wasn’t wheezing any more. Running like this put my lungs on auto-pilot; they worked the way they were supposed to work, in time with the rest of my body, without me stupidly interfering.

  I asked Lucas if he had been running like this since he was little.

  He told me that it was something he had learned to do. Anything worth knowing, he said, had to be learned.

  I pointed out that there are some things we know how to do when we’re born.

  ‘But we have to learn how to do them well,’ he said. ‘For example, everyone breathes, but a lot of people don’t know how to breathe properly. When they’re born, babies instinctively know how to swim, but you have to help them develop it. Everybody moves, but they move awkwardly: you need to refine it. Lots of things are like that. We’re all born with the right equipment, but we’re not born with instructions for how to use it.’

  ‘I never thought of that,’ I said. ‘What other things do we have to learn?’

  ‘When we’re born, we make noises, but we have to learn to speak.’

  ‘And to sing.’

  ‘Exactly. And to think.’

  ‘And to feel.’

  ‘Feeling is important,’ said Lucas.

  By the time I’d thought about it, we had already done three laps.

  We were coming back to the house. The music was deafening. Matt Monro singing: ‘can’t take my eyes off of you’ in terrible Spanish.

  We went into the dining room, sweating, happy, to find papá and mamá dancing while the Midget pranced around between their legs. As soon as he saw me, he wanted me to dance with him and mamá asked Lucas to dance. But Lucas said no, no, no, his mouth full of bread, lapsing back into his usual awkwardness (dancing is something else you have to learn) while papá scratched his head, looking at the empty glass on the sideboard and said: ‘Che, who drank my wine?’

  48

  AN UNFINISHED SONG

  When we’re born, we
’re also able to hear, but we have to learn to listen.

  From an early age, my experience as a denizen of wardrobes taught me to evaluate sounds. Early on, I realized how deceptive sounds could be. I was surprised to discover that what I thought was the sound of an insect crawling over a piece of wood was, in fact, the sound of my mother sweeping the floor and was obviously not coming from inside the wardrobe, as I had thought, but from downstairs in the kitchen.

  What we can hear is dependent on the acuity of human hearing: it’s something that can be measured and the results are the same for everyone. But what we can make out from what we hear depends on how we listen, something which is completely individual. In listening we use our experience; listening taps into our fears, our desires, and into the deepest recesses of our subconscious. In listening we use the language common to all those who speak it, but which is also utterly individual. If 180 million people speak Spanish, that means there are millions of personal variations of Spanish, each with its own vocabulary, syntax, mistakes and silences; a monologue defines its author as reliably as his fingerprints.

  The twists and turns of language are more obvious in the lyrics of songs than almost anywhere else. Wrapped up in music, words learn to dance. Sometimes they dance close to us, sometimes they move away to do a pirouette, leaving us with one hand hovering in the air. At such times we hear not what they mean, but what we imagine they mean. One of my classmates at San Roque, a little guy called Rigou, used to giggle to himself at every mass during the same hymn, because what he heard was not ‘Gladly the Cross I’d Bear’, but ‘Gladly, the cross-eyed bear’. And in the Christmas carol, he thought ‘Sleep in heavenly peace’ was something to do with ‘heavenly peas’. National anthems are like a Rorschach test for anyone. When the class had to stand up and sing ‘To my Flag’, Ottone – a tall kid who smoked cigarettes in the school toilets – used to howl ‘when the sad enslavéd Homeland/Brady broke his bonds’, never stopping to wonder who on Earth this Brady person might be, not realizing that the line is actually ‘when our sad enslavéd Homeland/Bravely broke its bonds’

  The Midget knew almost nothing about the history of Argentina. He could barely identify Sarmiento (bald guy), San Martín (big-nosed guy) and Belgrano (the guy in the knickerbockers), and he wasn’t really up to memorizing lines like ‘Thus in the high radiant aurora / The arrow-tip evokes the gilded countenance’. But he could appreciate the energy and the passion of these songs and he loved listening to them even if he didn’t understand a word. It happens to grown-ups too. In Gilda, the Rita Hayworth movie set in a casino in Buenos Aires, a crowd celebrating the end of the Second World War suddenly starts singing ‘La Marcha de San Lorenzo’ to honour both the Allied Forces and the original Sergeant Cabral. The words aren’t important, it’s the spirit of the song that matters: it sounds joyous and triumphant and that’s all they care about. The Midget went about things in much the same way without knowing it. Whenever he was happy, he sang the national anthem.

  That night he was really happy, partly because of the dancing and partly because of the glass of wine he’d drunk; I had forbidden him from drinking before bedtime so he wouldn’t wet the bed, so he was dying of thirst. We finished dancing, cleared the table, brushed our teeth and went to bed, with the Midget still singing ‘Hear, mortals, the sacred cry: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”’ I wasn’t really paying attention because I was still trying to wheedle information out of Lucas. As long as Lucas let me continue my interrogation, the Midget could sing and jump up and down on his bed as much as he liked. In the half-light of the bedroom, the rumpled sheets, the pyjamas and the sleeping bag encouraged secrets.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what your father said? The less you know about me, the better.’

  ‘May the laurels be eternal …’

  ‘Well, from the city or from Gran Buenos Aires?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘You’re Polish!’

  ‘Where on Earth did you get that idea?’

  ‘Your T-shirt is from Poland.’

  ‘My grandparents brought it back for me.’

  ‘I suppose they brought you the Japanese knapsack too?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘… those we fought for and won …’

  ‘Do your parents live here or in Poland?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wrong question.’

  ‘Where? Go on, tell me.’

  ‘In La Plata, but that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Do you live with them?’

  ‘Wrong question.’

  ‘… those we fought for and won … ‘

  ‘Did they throw you out?’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘So what are you doing here, then?’

  ‘I’m on a secret mission.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘You see? Even when I tell the truth you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Did you move out so you could live with your girlfriend?’

  ‘What girlfriend?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb. I saw her.’

  ‘Saw who?’

  ‘The photo. You’ve got a girlfriend and I saw her boobs!’

  ‘Let us live crowned in glory …’

  Bonk!

  When we turned round, the Midget had disappeared. With all the bouncing, the mattress had flipped over and there was no sign of my brother. It was as if he’d been a victim of spontaneous combustion, like Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate in Verona in the early eighteenth century: she burst into flames and in a flash she was reduced to ashes. For a minute I thought maybe this was why kids weren’t allowed to drink wine.

  But the Midget hadn’t disintegrated. His face appeared on the other side of the bed, between the mattress and the wall. He was scratching his head where he had hit it when he fell and looked as if he was about to cry. Lucas and me were staring at him with funny looks on our faces, a mixture of panic and surprise, because he smiled and said: ‘I killeded myself!’ Then he climbed back onto the bed and started singing the national anthem again at the top of his voice: ‘Great big Nesquiks in their bodies/As they march they make milk shakes …’

  At this point mamá and papá rushed in, startled by the loud bang. What they saw left them speechless. I explained that the Midget was drunk. Papá asked why he was singing about milkshakes. We all ended up singing the national anthem together, falling about laughing.

  Mamá covered the Midget in kisses and was trying to explain that the actual words were ‘Greatness nestles in their bodies/As they march they make things quake’.

  ‘Don’t,’ papá interrupted. ‘I think his version is better.’

  Papá was right. When you’re five, ‘Great big Nesquiks in their bodies/As they march they make milk shakes’ is better because there are some things you’re too little to understand.

  49

  IN WHICH I DISCOVER THAT SOMEONE I LOVE VERY MUCH IS NOT PERFECT

  Lucas became my personal trainer. Our sessions were unpredictable, because he spent more and more time away from the quinta and sometimes he’d get back really late, but on these occasions he always left me a ‘training schedule’. When he got back, the first thing he’d do was ask me for what he called ‘a debriefing’: had I carried out the plan? If I had, had I completed it or only partially completed it? Which exercises had I left out? I’d tell him everything, in detail.

  Lucas, on the other hand, never told me where he went. Every time I asked, he’d stop me with an unequivocal: ‘Wrong question’. Sometimes he’d come back so exhausted that he’d climb into the sleeping bag and go to sleep without even having dinner; me and the Midget would creep into the room on tiptoe, careful not to wake him. From time to time he would ask mamá or papá or both if he could discuss something with them, and their talks always took place where they could be sure we couldn’t hear them. But from their body language, i
t was clear that they were plotting something. By now I realized that mamá and papá knew about Lucas’s secret mission and that in some way they were helping and supporting him.

  Lucas’s idea was for me to do some basic physical training before launching my career as an escape artist. Houdini had an advantage over me in that he had been a keen runner and a swimmer from an early age, and I had to make up this gap in our physical capacities. While I was training, Lucas suggested, we could plan out a series of escapes of increasing difficulty.

  So he could plan, I offered him total access to my Houdini book. The first time he accepted it with an almost solemn gesture, indicating that he realized how precious it was to me. He read it very quickly and gave it back, suggesting I make notes on the most important bits, writing down questions whose answers went beyond what was in the book: for example, it was important to increase lung capacity gradually. Houdini could hold his breath for four minutes underwater. Four minutes! So I noted on a piece of paper: ‘Houdini holds breath 4 minutes’, and slipped it between the pages of the book.

  The questions had to do with things we needed to find out. One of the subjects we needed to study was how locks worked, from the simplest to the most complicated, obviously focusing on padlocks. Another one was something mamá mentioned to me, the importance of calculating how long it would take me to escape from the chains or the ropes so I would know how much air there needed to be in the trunk. This note read: ‘How much time?’

  Sometimes I’d find myself doing embarrassing things in front of Lucas, the sort of things I’d only ever do when I was with Bertuccio: picking my nose and wiping the snot on the nearest available surface, or staring at a photo of a girl in a bikini as though I could undress her with my eyes. I lost the ability to censor myself, maybe because Lucas was an easy-going guy and sometimes I’d come home and find him watching Scooby Doo with the Midget, both of them breathing through their Nesquik. Some things about him I found weird, like him shaving every day (which was pointless since he didn’t have a beard, apart from the four hairs on his chin which sprouted again, black as ever, after a couple of hours) or his obsession with reading the newspapers. These were grown-up things, but he did them with the same artlessness as he ran laps or read my Dennis Martin comics: Lucas never tried to hold back, except when we persisted in asking him the wrong questions.