Kamchatka Page 17

  Not that I didn’t see the advantages of the situation. It was a rare opportunity to have mamá all to myself. If there was a romantic movie on, papá scuttled away faster than a cockroach when you turn the light on. Without mamá there to stop him, the Midget knew he could bounce on his bed until he was exhausted or had split his head open. So it was just me and mamá. And the biscuits (called ‘Ladies’ Lips’ – delicious!).

  But there were disadvantages too. Mamá’s taste in movies, for a start. If previous experience was anything to go by, I was doomed to two hours of agony. Or, in the case of The Sound of Music, more than two hours.

  In general, the movies mamá liked left me cold, or worse. But what was worse was the seriousness of mamá’s relationship to the cinema. Everyone likes films, but not so much that they keep a photo of Montgomery Clift on their bedside table. When she was in a cinema, mamá behaved the way the Midget behaved in church. Her every emotion was amplified. She took everything in with wide eyes and a sweet tooth. Sometimes, though she didn’t realize it, she’d be sitting there with her mouth hanging open: in the dark of the cinema she didn’t care if she looked stupid. On the subject of the cinema, she was an evangelist: she was determined to convert me to the faith, to infect me with her enthusiasm for this religion, patiently explaining to me how the experience of sitting with other people in a darkened cinema watching light play on a huge screen was something mystical and profound. Like all evangelists, she made me feel awkward. I never really understood the intensity of her faith. I was happy to go to the cinema, but, to me, the chocolate-covered peanuts you bought in the foyer were as important as the film.

  Every trip to the cinema with mamá became an ordeal. On one hand, I had to avoid falling asleep at all costs. The second half of The Sound of Music was one of the best naps I’ve ever had, but it came at a terrible price. Mamá made me feel that it was some sort of betrayal. It was as if I’d insulted her family. (Maybe we were distantly related to the von Trapp family and no one had told me?) On the other hand, I had to be diplomatic when giving my opinion. She told me that The Miracle of Marcelino was a lovely film and she didn’t take it very well when I told her that it was the most horrible film I’d seen in my whole life. I tried to explain that I’d said it was horrible because of the horror of what happens in the film, not because I thought it was a bad movie, but it was too late, the damage was done. She greeted this comment coldly. I slept with the light on, but even so I dreamed of a big wooden christ chasing me down endless corridors, trying to nail me to his cross so that he could be free.

  In spite of my reservations, Picnic wasn’t that bad. There was this little village and this pretty, curvy girl, Kim Novak, who seemed like the saddest woman in the world in spite of the fact that her boyfriend was this rich guy. Then this other guy shows up, William Holden, who’s much nicer than the rich kid, but hasn’t got two pence to rub together. As you’d expect, Kim Novak and William Holden fall in love. He makes her feel happy and she makes him feel like the richest man in the world. What I didn’t really get was how they went on and on about how young they were. They didn’t look young to me. They were at least as old as my parents, maybe older.

  During the first ad break, mamá replenished the supply of biscuits. During the second break, she stayed with me, talking vaguely about the film and how it was different from how she’d remembered it. I couldn’t really work out what she was getting at, given that she was being pretty inarticulate by her standards; I assumed she was complaining about having to watch the movie on a black and white TV, with bad reception and ads for Gargantini wine every five minutes.

  Eventually we got to the picnic part of Picnic. Everyone was there: Kim Novak, her family, her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s rich father, the spinster teacher and the guy who’s always trying to marry her and, of course, William Holden. I remember a scene where William Holden is dancing beside a river, which I thought was funny because he was obviously supposed to be a good dancer and it was the dancing that won Kim Novak’s heart, but I thought the way he danced was embarrassing and ridiculous. It was so funny that I almost had the nerve to say so, but when I looked at mamá I saw she was crying – I mean, really crying – her face was all wet like she’d just got out of the shower, but she didn’t make a sound, while her shoulders rocked like the chassis of the Citroën.

  I asked her what was wrong. ‘What’s the matter, mamá? Are you OK?’

  She nodded but kept on crying, never taking her eyes off the TV.

  ‘mamá, I do like the film, honest, I swear I do.’

  At that point the teacher, Rosalind Russell, rips William Holden’s shirt and makes him look like a fool, and I wondered if mamá was crying because she knew that bit was coming, because sometimes with a book or a film you feel sad in advance because you know that something bad is going to happen, like it did with me and the Houdini book, and that reassured me for a bit. Then mamá hugged me and she didn’t say anything, at least not until the film was over, and it was a happy ending (why was she crying then, why all this rain?). She gave me a wet kiss and said goodnight, goodnight, my darling, and left me sitting alone on the sofa watching the news. Presidente this, Armada that, new economic measures, the military government’s tireless struggle against traitorous subversion, evil guerrillas, the province of Tucumán, the dollar, same old same old.

  59

  THE MOST TREACHEROUS SEASON

  Winter complicates everything.

  Light clothes have to be taken out of circulation and winter clothes dusted off – long-sleeved shirts, pyjamas, scarves and mufflers, woolly gloves and hats and anoraks. They all smell of mildew and they itch (even the new clothes papá and mamá had bought me in a shop called ¡Verguenza! Mimito that made me look like the Michelin Man). You have to dig through the wardrobes, looking for eiderdowns and blankets that weigh down the bedsheets, so that when you’re tucked up it feels like you’ve got a boulder on top of you. You have to light electric fires and gas stoves and the first time you light them they always smell of scorched Earth. You have to close the windows, check the doors so draughts can’t sneak in, look for cracks and put up weather strips. You have to turn down the fridge so the milk doesn’t make your teeth hurt. Having a bath becomes a torture, because it’s so cold, because the towels are never completely dry and because of the mist that makes it look like you’re taking a steam bath; this means that, as well as itching, your clothes stick to your body.

  The air stinks because it’s yesterday’s air, last week’s air, going round and round like a horse on a merry-go-round, carrying the smell of sweaty socks from the bedroom to the hallway, the smell of soup from the kitchen to the living room, the smell of mud from the living room to mamá’s bedroom. Everyone in the family catches everyone else’s colds until the last person collapses in a heap and it starts all over again.

  Going outside is painful. The days are too short. (There’s nothing more depressing that getting up in the dark to go to school.) The rain turns the roads into quagmires. We can’t even play in the puddles because our rubber boots are back at our real house and papá and mamá never get around to keeping their promise to buy us new ones. Me and the Midget pretend that winter doesn’t exist, but the fallen leaves are rotting to become a stinking slime under our feet, there are no toads any more, and half the time I don’t even understand what the Midget is saying. With his scarf wrapped round and round his face he looks like ‘Son of the Black Mummy’.

  It’s the same as always – or almost. Because this winter, something is different.

  People lock up their houses early, double-lock their doors, put on the window locks, close the shutters and padlock them. There are lots of strange bugs going around this winter, they say, lots of diseases. They prefer to breathe musty air, prefer familiar smells to unfamiliar ones because a new smell means another organism and an unfamiliar organism is a stranger and no one has the time or energy to get to know strangers. It’s winter, there are lots of strange bugs going round, lots of d
iseases. When people come knocking, they pretend they’re not at home, or shout through the closed door. Postmen wonder if they will ever see a friendly face again. Even phone calls are cut short as though callers feel sorry for these words forced to travel along telephone lines exposed to frost and hail and rain, because it’s not healthy to talk this winter, there are lots of strange bugs going around, lots of diseases. When people talk, their breath comes out in clouds of vapour, which isn’t good because it makes it obvious that you’re talking; it’s better to talk indoors where the air is warm and your breath doesn’t come out in clouds and you can say I’m hungry, I’m lost or what’s on TV, without fear of being betrayed by winter.

  60

  HEAVEN HELPS ME HOLD MY BREATH

  During these dead afternoons, I took really long baths so I could practise holding my breath. My aim was to be able to spend four minutes underwater, one of the many feats that had made Houdini a legend. While I was underwater, the Midget timed me using mamá’s watch. Not that he knew how to tell the time yet, but he could tell how many times the little hand made a full circle. The Midget didn’t count in minutes; he counted in circles.

  ‘When I grow up, I want to be a saint,’ the Midget said, sitting on the toilet seat and playing with the watch. Mamá’s conditions had been very clear: keep your hands dry and keep away from the bath.

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Simon Templar isn’t a real saint!’ I protested between deep breaths.

  ‘But San Roque is a real saint.’

  I nodded as I exhaled.

  ‘There are lots of saints. The other day, during the long mass, they must have mentioned about a thousand of them, remember? San Roque, pray for us, San José, pray for us…’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Wait until the little hand gets to the twelve. San Martín, pray for us. San Pedro, pray for us…’

  ‘Hey…’

  ‘Go!’

  I went under. Below the water I could still hear the Midget who was talking as if I could still hear what he was saying.

  With practice I had learned a couple of little tricks. When you’re worried or nervous, you can’t hold your breath as long. But when you distract yourself – and stop thinking about what you’re doing – you can hold it for longer. Since the bottom of the bath doesn’t offer much in the way of distraction, I had arranged my own show. I had two toy soldiers. One of them was huge, it must have been twenty centimetres, a medieval knight dressed head to toe in armour. He wielded a mace until the Midget lost it. The other one was tiny, maybe six centimetres and completely blue. Papá bought it for me in one of those incredible supermarkets that were starting to pop up all over the place, called Gigante or Jumbo or something, where they even sold toys. This one had his arms stretched out in front of him, because he came with an underwater tow sled like the one James Bond has in Thunderball, which, needless to say, the Midget had broken, wearing a pair of flippers that I broke from moving them up and down all the time. The good thing about these soldiers was they could play out all sorts of stories. Since his helmet had a crest in the middle, the knight could be Ultraman, and given that the little soldier had his arms stretched out, he could be flying, he could even be Superman, or …

  Time to surface.

  ‘… pray for us. San Jorge…’

  ‘How many did I do?’ I gasped.

  ‘The hand didn’t get all the way to twelve, it got as far as here.’

  ‘Forty seconds?’ It was embarrassing. I had to prepare myself better. Breathe in, deep, deeper. Breathe out…

  ‘San Mateo, pray for us … That’s all I can think of! Tell me more saints!’

  I shook my head and kept practising.

  ‘Tell me, or I’m not helping anymore.’

  ‘San Felipe.’

  ‘That’s the name of a wine, silly.’

  ‘But before it was a wine, he was a saint.’

  ‘Pray for us… Another one!’

  ‘San Carlos…’

  ‘… de Bariloche, pray for us!’

  ‘San José.’

  ‘I said him already.’

  ‘Well, make some up, then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You can use words that start with San… San Atorium, for example… Let’s go again!’

  ‘Wait till it gets to the twelve. San Atorium, pray for us… San ChoPanza… Is San ChoPanza OK?’

  ‘It’s fine, come on.’

  ‘Go!’

  I go under again. The Midget continues his litany.

  Superman swims to the deepest depths of the ocean. He’s received a message from Jimmy Olsen saying that Lois Lane has been kidnapped by Lex Luthor and is trapped in an underwater cave, and there’s a big rock over the mouth of the cave that looks just like a bath plug. He has to get her out before she uses up all the oxygen and suffocates. Eventually, Superman gets to the cave and, using his super-strength, he moves the rock. (All of this happens with a soundtrack: my mental orchestra is always poised for the climactic scene.) Then he realizes he’s been tricked: there’s no sign of Lois Lane, she was never there in the first place. The stone wasn’t blocking the entrance to a cave; it was blocking a deep chasm capable of swallowing everything, a bit like an underwater black hole that could swallow the whole ocean in a matter of minutes. He has to seal up the opening before all ocean life perishes… and with it the thousands of people in the city of Atlantis only a few miles away. (In my fantasies, I measure things in miles.)

  Superman struggles with the terrible weight of the rock-plug. Against him is the power of the underwater black hole called Abyss Sinnian, whose power grows with every passing second. He is desperate, and then he sees that someone else has shown up. It’s Ultraman! There is hope! He asks Ultraman to help him move the rock back into place. Only then does he find out that Ultraman has been hypnotized by Lex Luthor and is actually there to stop him from saving Atlantis! Super and Ultra (they sound like two kinds of petrol) wrestle with each other. Can Superman stop him in time to replace the rock-plug and save all ocean life? Will he be able…?’

  Time to surface.

  ‘San Dal, pray for us…’

  ‘How many did I do?’

  ‘One turn. Tell me some more saints!’

  ‘San Dwich, San Itation, San Ity! I did a whole circle!’

  I jumped out of the bath, splashing water everywhere. (For the curious, I should say that when I took a bath with the Midget present, I did it in my underpants. By that age my concept of modesty was fully developed.) I wanted to tell mamá about my feat. I’d held my breath for a whole minute! Now – ever the optimist – all I had to do was keep practising. If it had only taken me a couple of days to hold my breath for a minute, then in a week I’d be able to hold it for two and within two weeks I’d be able to hold it for four. Simple logic, as mamá liked to say.

  I opened the bathroom door. From the doorway I could see mamá in the living room talking to someone on the phone. She had her head down, like she was talking to the floor.

  ‘… ten o’clock then. Yes, I know it. I’ve got blonde hair and I’ll be reading a book… about physics. Sure: Stability and Flux in Thermodynamic States.’

  ‘Saint Salive!’ the Midget screamed from behind me.

  At that moment mamá saw me. The scream must have scared her because when she looked at me, her eyes were sunken.

  I closed the door and got back into the bath.

  For the next dive I played out the story again, right up to the Super–Ultra battle. I didn’t get to find out the end that time either. I don’t think I ever found out how it ended.

  61

  ON THE ART OF THE MILANESA

  As with all really simple things, milanesas are hard to make properly. If you don’t believe me, you only have to take mamá’s efforts as an example.

  Mamá did everything wrong. For a start, she didn’t cut off the fat or the little bits of tendon, which meant that as soon as you put the meat into the frying pan it shrivelled
into a ball – Quasimodo milanesas were her speciality – and as a result they weren’t evenly cooked. And she never sieved the breadcrumbs, leaving big lumps in with the crumbs so that her milanesas looked like they were dipped in rocks. Sometimes, you’d get a piece of eggshell in your teeth that had fallen in when she cracked the eggs.

  ‘Milanesas are better if you tenderize the meat,’ I said, making a dash for the cutlery drawer. I’d seen one of the spiky wooden hammers for tenderizing meat in there somewhere.

  She looked at me suspiciously as she busied herself with the frying pan, the oil, the cooker. As far as mamá was concerned, there were no gradations, no such thing as ‘low’ or ‘medium’: she always turned the gas up as high as it would go.

  I found a chopping board and got down to work. The idea is to pound the meat so it becomes tender, that way you don’t end up cutting through the breadcrumbs to find shoe leather inside.

  Bam. Bam. Bam.

  ‘It tastes better if you put some stock in with the beaten egg,’ I said, still hammering. ‘It gives it flavour.’

  ‘Why are you hitting the meat?’ yelled the Midget. Sitting on the kitchen counter wrapped in a huge towel, he looked like Humpty Dumpty. ‘It’s already dead!’

  ‘Where did you learn all this from?’ asked mamá, intrigued. ‘Have you been watching Doña Petrona?’

  The Midget laughed. Doña Petrona was a fat woman with knobbly fingers who did cooking on women’s programmes on TV. She had an assistant called Juanita and she had a really funny way of talking: she didn’t say ‘Juanita’; she pronounced it ‘Whaa-Nee-Tah’, stressing every syllable.