Kamchatka Page 15

  Lucas understood, but he said that my logic was flawed. Don’t you make friends when you’re on holiday, friends who might live in Salta or Bariloche, even though you know that when you go home you won’t be able to see them? And don’t you have fun with them in spite of that, in spite of knowing that it will end? In conclusion, he offered me what he believed was irrefutable proof. If I was right, if it was sensible not to forge new ties, to make new friends in times of change and uncertainty, then what were he and I doing here, at the foot of a poplar tree, practising knots in the weak winter sunshine?

  It was impossible to fight with Lucas. He avoided all confrontation – something that was usually my style – but it was not out of cowardice or lack of conviction, it was simply a different way of making a stand.

  Lucas knew how to listen, and when he thought it was his turn to speak, he outlined his position clearly and carefully: he never became bitter or aggressive, neither when his position was weak nor when – as now – he obviously had the advantage. And even when he had come up with one irrefutable argument after another, he always left the door open so that the other person could make a dignified exit. I took this route, arguing that it wasn’t the same, that he was my trainer and I was his pupil; we were master and disciple, Lucas was Master Po, I was Grasshopper: a kind of relationship that was permissible in times of change and uncertainty. Then he smiled, his fingers moving restlessly over the rope, and said that our relationship was about to come to an end because the knot he was about to show me – he called it a buntline hitch – was the last thing he had to teach me.

  From now on we would be equals. And everything we lived through, whether it lasted or not, we would live through together.

  My first attempts as an escape artist were a disaster. At first, feeling bold, I told Lucas to tie the knot tighter and tighter around my wrists. As a result, after a few minutes it cut off the circulation to my hands and my arms went numb. It felt as though I was missing an arm – or worse, it felt like having two sandbags strapped to my sides. Then I started to get the hang of it; I kept my wrists stiff while he was tying the knots. When I relaxed the rope slackened a bit, but then I started to pull and tug and the ropes burned my arms and all I succeeded in doing was pulling the knots tighter. The trick was to be relaxed. When I stopped obsessing about the escape, my heart stopped racing, the blood stopped pulsing in my hands, making me supple rather than stiff and, with a bit of effort, I was free. Lucas suggested I think of a poem or a song or something I could recite to myself while I was doing it, to take my mind off the knots. I promised I’d think about it, but for the time being, given that I wasn’t in a padlocked trunk at the bottom of the sea, I’d prefer to chat to him – which had the same effect.

  I remember one of those conversations vividly. We were out in the gardens. It was about five o’clock in the evening, the time the sun sets in the winter. Papá and mamá still weren’t back from their daily expedition into the jungle of Buenos Aires. The Midget was in the house, and though I couldn’t hear him, I could hear the TV, which was reassuring. Lucas tied my hands while I worked at keeping the muscles in my arms tense, so as to offer the greatest resistance.

  ‘If you can get out of that in less than a minute, you’re Houdini,’ he said as he adjusted the final knot. ‘If you can get out in two, you’re Mediocrini. If it takes you longer than that, you’re Disastrini.’

  I asked him to stand on the other side of the tree. I didn’t want him to see me as I struggled with the knots.

  This was the moment when I needed to relax, to breathe out, let the rope go slack; the moment when conversation should have helped take my mind off the fears and anxieties conjured by my conscious mind. Feeling I needed to find something to talk about, I went back to the subject that had been nagging at me for days. I had been losing sleep trying to think of a convincing proof for the superiority of Superman. Lucas’s attack had taken me by surprise, and I had been preparing my counter-attack ever since.

  ‘Superman can save more people in less time.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Lucas from behind the trunk (it was as though the tree itself was talking to me), ‘but most of the time he’s too busy saving Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen.’

  ‘Superman is global – he can get to anywhere on the planet in a matter of seconds.’

  ‘That’s true. But have you ever seen him dealing with a disaster outside the USA? have you ever seen a poor person in a Superman comic? Have you ever seen Superman take on a Latin American dictator? And this guy is supposed to work for a newspaper!’

  It had been a mistake to choose this subject: Lucas was thrashing me and knowing I was losing made me angry, and the anger made me tense and the tension made the rope bite into my wrists like a rabid dog. To make matters worse, he was already up to one minute. Now I couldn’t be Houdini. With a bit of luck, I might still be Mediocrini.

  ‘Besides, there’s a structural problem in the storyline,’ Lucas said, merciless now.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Superman can move at super-speed, right? And when he flies around the Earth at a thousand miles an hour he can make time run backwards, right?’

  Reluctantly, I admitted this was true. ‘One time Lois Lane died and Superman went back in time to stop her from dying.’

  ‘But if he can do that, why can’t he go back years and stop the planet Krypton from exploding and his parents from dying?’

  This left me speechless. I’d never thought of it this way. Was Superman, as Lucas seemed to be insinuating, an ungrateful son and a traitor to the people of Krypton? If Lucas was right, did that mean Superman was so stupid that the idea had never occurred to him, or did it mean he was so selfish and insensitive that he preferred to cut himself off from his past life so he could be the only superhero?

  ‘Twenty more seconds and you’re Disastrini.’

  It came to me out of the blue, a brainwave flying the flag of victory. Don’t ask me how, but suddenly I had the answer to the riddle, the evidence that would prove that I was right and Lucas was wrong, and prove that Superman was not only a good person but the greatest superhero of them all. I opened my mouth, prepared to shout it from the rooftops. I barely recognized the voice that came from my throat as my own: it sounded hoarse and squeaky, as if the rope around my arms had crept up and was now around my throat.

  ‘Superman can only go back in time here, in this solar system, because he gets his powers from our sun. If he flew back to Krypton, he’d lose his powers so he wouldn’t be able to do anything. It’s not like he doesn’t want to save his parents. He can’t. He can’t save them, get it? He just can’t!’

  I stopped squawking and fell to my knees. I was exhausted.

  Obviously my voice surprised Lucas too, because he came out from behind the tree, crouched down and untied me.

  ‘I can’t feel anything,’ I said, my voice faint.

  Lucas rubbed my forearms so fast it burned. He was nearly as fast as Superman.

  ‘What if they don’t come back?’ I asked in a whisper. ‘Papá and mamá – what if they never come back?’

  He put his arms around me and started to rub my back as though my back had gone to sleep too.

  We stayed like that for a while. Before we realized it, it was dark and the cold air prickled our noses.

  The afternoon wasn’t a complete waste. At least we agreed on the fact that, from time to time, Superman did fly to the Arctic Circle and shut himself away in the Fortress of Solitude.

  54

  THIS YEAR’S MODEL

  Words, like all things, exist in time. Some fall into disuse and end up imprisoned between the pages of old books, where nobody ever visits them, like pensioners in old folks’ homes. Some change through their lives, losing some traits and gaining others. Take the word ‘father’, for example: the dictionary definition is concise and firmly rooted in biology (a man or male animal in relation to its offspring), but the characteristics we associate with the word are very different. Nobody thinks of a fathe
r simply as a male animal; the word conjures the image of a lovable man who is a part of his children’s lives, who protects them, loves them and guides them. But that definition, which most people would agree on, is more recent than we might think. It might be older than the combustion engine, but it’s more recent than the printing press and much more recent than the concept of romantic love. Didn’t Romeo and Juliet reject their fathers’ authority to be faithful to an emotion they considered more sacred than blind obedience?

  What we understand by the word ‘father’ is very different from what, for centuries, the word meant. The Book of Genesis makes no mention of what Adam and Eve were like with their children. It doesn’t even indicate how they reacted when Cain murdered his brother Abel: that the text is silent on the subject suggests bewilderment rather than grief. With a similar fatalism Abraham, who for decades had cried out to heaven that Sarah might bear him a son, agreed to sacrifice Isaac, the child he had so longed for, to the very God who had granted his prayer. In the Bible, Yahweh, the Father of humanity itself, is extraordinarily ambivalent to his creatures: twice he almost wipes them off the face of the Earth (with the Flood and again when the people of Moses began worshipping false idols), and both times he repents at the last minute. He only ever unconditionally embraces the human race when he finds himself overcome with love for David, his favourite; it is the first time that he refers to himself as the Father of Man.

  In other traditions, the role of the loving father is also the product of a gradual development. The Greek gods father demigods and heroes right and left, but they don’t seem to feel anything for their progeny beyond a vague sense of responsibility; many of them seem more sympathetic to certain mortals than to their own offspring. Saturn, as Goya had revealed to me, went to the extreme of eating his children. Laius tried to kill his son Oedipus, though in the end it was he who was murdered. The first great portrait of a father–son relationship appears in The Odyssey, but the glory goes not to Odysseus but to Telemachus, who praises the image of his father during his long absence, which begins with the Trojan War. Homer introduces us to Telemachus in the palace in Ithaca; there he is daydreaming, his heart consumed with grief: ‘He could almost see his magnificent father, here … in the mind’s eye.’

  King Arthur never gets to know Uther, who sired him. On hearing the prophecy that his own son will dethrone him, Arthur does as herod did and orders the death of every newborn male child in the kingdom; on this occasion Mordred survives, but when he grows to be a man he dies after being run through by his father’s lance. In Shakespeare, it is the children who show devotion (Cordelia for example, or Hamlet, who owes much to Telemachus), a devotion their fathers do not seem to deserve. The best characters in Dickens are orphans: David Copperfield, Pip, Oliver Twist, even Esther Summerson, raised by an aunt who openly curses the day the girl was born. We know nothing of Ahab’s father, or Alice’s or Dr Jekyll’s; they seem to have appeared in the world just as we meet them, like Venus rising from the shell.

  This does not mean that our current concept of what a father is did not exist in other times. A seed can be found in the New Testament, in the parable of the Prodigal Son: a father is he who has the kindness to give the best of himself to his children, the wisdom to leave them free to learn from their own experience; the patience to wait for them to attain maturity; and the goodness, when they return, to welcome them with open arms and invite them to sit at his table once more. This notion of the father tempers that of the Olympian, authoritarian father of the Old Testament, in whose image all patriarchs are made, from Lear to Adam trask in Steinbeck’s East of Eden. In the course of a single book, the balance of power shifts dramatically. In the beginning, fatherhood in the Bible is synonymous with power. By the end, it is centred on love.

  Until quite recently, children were born into a world that seemed predetermined and unchanging. Their parents were who they were – shepherds or soldiers, hunters or miners – and remained so until the day they died, categorized into classes and castes that bore witness to an immutable social order, which they accepted without even wondering if there might be some other place for them. Fathers were expected to be distant, authoritarian. They cared for their children as a wolf might, providing them with food and shelter, protecting them from predators. By the time their children could walk, they had taught them to communicate through language, to use their hands – whether working with a plough, a lance or a printing press – believing that their children would go on doing so until the time came for them to teach their own children. That was all, and it was a lot.

  That world no longer exists. My grandfather belonged to the last generation of fathers in the classical sense of the word: early in life he chose a career and he stuck with it to the end. He faced down storms and fires and drought (I choose these images because it is difficult for me to separate my grandfather from the land he worked), but he never suffered a crisis of identity. My father, on the other hand, first opened his eyes on a world whose certainties had crumbled. As a result, he did not need to be stern (since boundaries were more fluid now) or distant (because this new world had eliminated all distance) with us, which was a good thing. But at the same time he played out the adventure that was his life in front of us – one adventure that was far from resolved. I’d like to think that, in the long run, this too will prove to have been a good thing, but it’s too early to tell.

  My grandfather was a distinct, unique man. My father was many men: the fool and the soldier, the donkey driver and the fan of The Invaders; the cool father and the rebellious son, the saviour and the lover; the professional lawyer and the defender of hopeless cases. I’m not saying that these things were irreconcilable, simply that they were conflicting elements that existed within my father and were constantly struggling towards resolution, never more so than after March 1976, when the country he thought he understood began to slip away beneath his feet. It is easy to think that my mother was not similarly conflicted, because she had fashioned a mask that perfectly concealed her feelings. But it was obvious that she cowered in the fearsome shadow of grandma Matilde, another member of a generation that never confessed to having any doubts – at least not until it was too late.

  55

  I FIND MYSELF IN THE MIDDLE OF A 3-D MOVIE

  After the setbacks of the first few days, our stay at the quinta took on a veneer of normality. At first sight, the only thing that appeared to have changed was the sets. We were all still playing the same roles – only the screenplay was different. Me and the Midget still went to school. Papá and mamá went off to work. Even Lucas, a foreign body introduced into the family, had been assimilated: one more son who slipped into a pre-existing long-established family dynamic. Over dinner, he might talk about the news with papá and mamá while playing with a ball made of crumbs of bread, firing it between the goalposts I created with my hands; Lucas had become an equidistant centre, a point of perfect equilibrium. He even kept his toothbrush in the same glass as the rest of ours.

  On the face of it, the fact that our new life went smoothly seemed to be a triumph over the Midget’s obsessions and phobias. My little brother had been placed in a special rocket, wearing only his favourite pyjamas, with Goofy in one hand and his training cup in the other, and launched towards another planet. It was a disruption that would have been upsetting to any kid his age; but for the Midget, who was abnormally attached to the rituals and objects that made up his world, the break must have been all the more traumatic. There had been no room on the spaceship for his bed, his school, his LEGO; nor had there been room for my toys and my games which provided his daily diet of destruction, no room for the armchair where he did his little dance every time the TV announcer said ‘Coming up next: The Saint’; and there had been no room for the blue and red tricycle he was almost too big for. And yet, in the zero gravity in which we now found ourselves, the Midget floated like an experienced astronaut. There was the small problem of his bedwetting, but that was a secret and the two of us wer
e working to resolve it. Papá and mamá knew nothing about it, and from their point of view, the Midget’s adjustment to all these changes had been simply remarkable.

  In one way or another, all of us were trying hard to see the silver lining; as Manolito puts it in Mafalda when he breaks Guille’s toy car and then shows him how to use one of the cogs as a spinning top: ‘It’s all about finding the little victories in the big defeats.’

  At the same time I sensed there was something unnatural about the Midget’s new-found normality, but it was only a hunch. I didn’t know, for example, that our parents’ decision to send us back to school was the cornerstone of this edifice: they thought that, in spite of the differences in how they operated, the familiar routine of school smocks, studying and playtime, might serve to counterbalance the silence of the cosmic void in which we found ourselves floating. What calamities might have befallen us had they not stopped by our old house to collect the Midget’s fetish objects, my comics and my game of Risk, we will never know, but given the inherent risks involved in making the trip, it was clear just how far they were prepared to go to keep us happy. Even while we were living as fugitives, they were determined that we should have some semblance of a normal life.

  When they were with us, they took pains to pretend that they were the same as ever, but it took hard work and courage to feed this illusion. From time to time they would let slip some hint of how worn out they were by the constant pretence that life was perfect: it might be by saying something intended to reassure us that they weren’t really worried, or laughing a little too hard, like actors not used to their roles. I noticed these things but kept right on playing the part that had been allotted to me in this drama. But sometimes something happened that took me aback.