Kamchatka Read online

  ‘Bertuccio’s mother taught me.’

  ‘Did she now?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? Bertuccio’s mother is a genius.’

  ‘You’ve got a strange concept of what a genius is. Aristotle, Galileo, Einstein and Bertuccio’s mother!’

  ‘You’re burning the oil!’

  Mamá quickly tossed in the first milanesa, which spattered furiously in the pan.

  ‘Bertuccio’s mother is a fat slob who doesn’t know her arse from her elbow!’

  ‘Firstly, she’s not fat, she’s thin. And secondly, she knows lots of things. She helps Bertuccio with his homework all the time!’

  ‘And why would I help you? You never need any help. I’ve got a clever son!’

  ‘And she’s at home when Bertuccio comes home from school.’

  ‘When you get home from school, you switch on the TV and I can’t get a word out of you. Whenever I ask you how school was, all you ever say is “fine”. What do you need me to be here for?’

  ‘You’re burning it!’

  ‘Oops…’

  Too late. The milanesa was no longer Quasimodo; it now looked like London after the Great Fire.

  As mamá was staring at her pitiful attempt, I managed to turn the heat down to low.

  ‘How about you try?’ she said. ‘I have to go.’

  I had been expecting this. The phone conversation I had overheard had prepared me for this contingency, and I’d decided to resist it.

  ‘What do you mean you have to go?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A meeting at work.’

  ‘What work? They fired you!’

  ‘I got fired from the lab, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have other things to do.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Things. You know.’

  ‘Things that are more important than us?’ (I was prepared for anything.)

  ‘Nothing is more important to me than you two.’

  ‘Well then, stay here.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Stay, just this once. You can go some other day!’

  Mamá took the frying pan off the heat, then rested her hands on my shoulders. She looked me in the eye, bringing her face close to mine (almost close enough for us to rub noses like an Eskimo kiss) and hit me full force with the Devastating Smile.

  ‘Don’t ask me to do a bad thing. Not you.’

  Mamá, one. Harry, nil.

  The milanesas were delicious. They were succulent and tender. Papá and Lucas showered me with praise, relieved for once to be spared the bland, often inorganic meals that were mamá’s speciality. I must have eaten too many because after a while I had a stomach ache and eventually I threw up.

  When I went to bed, mamá still wasn’t home.

  She arrived back a little later. Papá and Lucas were still up. I heard them talking about roadblocks. Then papá mentioned that I’d had a stomach ache and a second later she was opening the door to my room.

  I pretended to be asleep, but it didn’t matter. She talked to me like she knew I was faking it – even though I was brilliant, I kept my eyes closed, my body still, my breathing deep and regular, nothing to give me away. She obviously didn’t want to wake the Midget because she whispered. I can clearly remember her warm breath on my left ear, telling me not to worry, that everything was going to be OK, that she would always be there (by my side, or in my ear?), that she loved me very much, that of all the scientific experiments she’d done in her life, I was the one that had turned out best. She said she didn’t care whether I could hear her prattling on; didn’t care that she was dribbling into my ear; didn’t even care – get this – that she was behaving like Bertuccio’s mother.

  She probably twigged because I was smiling.

  62

  WE RECEIVE AN ANNOUNCEMENT

  No one who did not have mamá’s persuasiveness, which, though based on her keen intelligence, owed much to her natural air of authority (some, shrewdly, called it seductiveness), could have persuaded papá to go to grandpa’s birthday. Since the beginning of the world – which, in this case, means for as long as I could remember – papá and grandpa had never got along.

  Relentless hostility was the basis of their relationship. Just as the duellists in Conrad’s short story symbolize a constant in a world of change, so papá and grandpa fought whenever and wherever they met – at parties, family reunions, Christmas and christenings – with the inevitability of ritual. Grandma insisted that they had not always been like this, but every time she made this claim, mamá and I would exchange a sceptical glance. Whatever harmony had existed between them dated back to Eden before the Fall; the last time they had hugged was long before Adam asked Eve if there was anything for dessert and she said: ‘Wouldn’t you prefer a nice piece of fruit?’

  They invariably argued about the same things – the car, for example. Grandpa thought the Citroën was little more than a go-kart with a bit of fancy bodywork. Mortally offended, papá took this as his cue to unleash every weapon in his arsenal. They argued about the farm. If grandpa started talking about the harvest, or the livestock or some new fertilizer he was trying out, papá would interrupt him and try to change the subject, but he could never manage to get in before grandpa asked the question he always asked: ‘Have you never thought of coming back to live in the country?’ And every time Papá would reluctantly answer. There were two answers, one for mixed company and one that included the word ‘fuck’.

  The most sensitive subject, however, was Argentina. Aside from the name of the country and the colours of the flag, there was nothing on which papá and grandpa agreed. They argued about the army, censorship, the economy, the disappearances, the bombings, the newspapers, the repression, petrol, while grandma heaved loud sighs and mamá took papá’s side, though she was more measured than he was – it was important not to crush grandpa and ruin things completely. I found these conversations deathly boring. Broadly speaking, it pretty much boiled down to the fact that grandpa thought the Peronists were a bunch of shits and papá thought they were good people, or some of them at least – not López Rega obviously, or Isabelita, or Lastiri who wore all those different ties, or some of the union leaders like Casildo Herrera, the guy who left Argentina, saying: ‘I’m out of here’.

  Papá would say grandpa was a gorilla – that’s what people called anti-Peronists. The Midget would stubbornly argue that grandpa was a gentleman so as to tease him; papá would say grandpa was worse than Magilla Gorilla in the cartoons. Sometimes, when papá wasn’t around, the Midget would pretend to be a monkey in front of grandpa, who thought it was funny, though he had no idea what it actually meant, or why the Midget suddenly stopped monkeying around when papá showed up.

  I didn’t think politics was anything to take seriously. It seemed to be something that got people all worked up about nothing, a sport that was as loud as it was pointless, a bit like football. Although I wasn’t really interested in sport, in theory I supported Boca and Bertuccio supported River Plate, but even then we never fell out, except for the day after a clásico – derby games when Boca played River – when one of us would flay the other red raw until the bell rang for first break and it was time for more important things: trading cards, comics, playing Titanes, the usual stuff. This was why I suspected that there was something else at the root of papá and grandpa’s endless feuding, something more than the Citroën or the farm or even Peronism, something so important that it had them facing off at dawn, staring down the pommels of their swords. Maybe it was the typical father/son stuff people talk about – the stuff that papá and I would go through when the time came – the conflict between a father’s plans and his son’s need to assert his own identity, rough edges that are worn away by time if and only if no outside force interrupts the normal sequence of events, if and only if nothing – no country, no person, no sword – intervenes.

  In spite of what papá thought, to me grandpa was the best grandfather
in the world. You could tell just by looking at him: fat, friendly, given to explosive bursts of tango (‘decí por Dios qué me has dao, que estoy tan cambiao…’) and always eager for an opportunity to play with us. Grandpa had a moustache as white as the hair he plastered down with Brylcreem as soon as he got out of the bath so as to temper its natural curliness. He didn’t smoke cigarettes, but he liked cigars, Romeo y Julietas, and he’d give me the empty boxes when he was finished with them to put my trading cards in. (I think I liked Orson Welles before I ever saw an Orson Welles movie because he had the same look, like a smoking bear, that I associated with my grandfather.) Any time he saw me with a Superman comic he’d say: ‘When are you going to stop reading that rubbish? You’re a big boy now!’ I’d tell him I’d stop reading comics the day he stopped reading pulp westerns by Silver Kane and Marcial Lafuente Estefanóa, the sort of lurid novels you can buy at newsstands, and when we next passed a newsstand, we’d laugh, call a truce and buy another two, three, five….

  Sometimes I’d see him doing something strange. Whenever he got worked up about something, he’d laugh and cry at the same time. He knew it was weird: he tried to explain it to me. He’d be watching Sábados Circulares, for example, and the presenter, Mancera, would introduce a choir of poor blind kids and grandpa would listen to them singing like angels and he’d start laughing and crying at the same time. It’s not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot more practice than Houdini’s four minutes underwater. The difference is, for the four-minute trick, you have to learn to do it, you have to take it seriously, practise like a professional, whereas laughing and crying at the same time is something life teaches you without you even noticing. If life was a movie and someone asked you what kind of movie it was, the best answer would be: it’s a movie that makes you laugh and cry at the same time. Grandpa knew that.

  We never found out what mamá did to persuade papá, because the news that we were going to Dorrego superseded all other considerations. Me and the Midget immediately started daydreaming. Dorrego meant our grandparents, whom we hadn’t seen since the Christmas holidays, but it also meant the farm, horses, the tractor, animals, the library, papá’s old toys, the lagoon, the boats and – last but not least – the Salvatierras, the foreman’s children, with whom we were always getting into scrapes. One time we found some pots of paint and it occurred to us that, when he got up after his siesta, papá would be thrilled to see the Citroën (the one before the one we had now) painted a brilliant white. I’ll leave the rest of that story here to the reader’s imagination.

  In my mind Dorrego meant something else, something that I didn’t mention to the Midget – it meant leaving the quinta and therefore leaving Buenos Aires. It meant that mamá would not be going anywhere on her own. And it was a way of reconnecting with our own story, which had been in a state of suspended animation since the day mamá had unexpectedly come to school to collect us. Dorrego would not be our house, but it was the nearest thing to it we had left. A place where we would be surrounded by familiar sounds, by the people we knew and loved.

  It was a pity Lucas couldn’t come.

  63

  THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

  It didn’t take long for Lucas and me to reach the limits of what we could say to each other. In the time we spent together, we talked until we were hoarse about everything we were allowed to talk about, given the rules of the game. We talked a lot about the Beatles, our four evangelists; it was Lucas who pointed out to me that there was a Beatles’ song for every possible mood (even the most bleak, like ‘Yer Blues’).

  We talked about how pointless most of the things we learned at school were, and discussed the things kids should be taught. Wouldn’t students be better off if they were given the opportunity to discover the book that would change their life? Shouldn’t we have to listen to the best music, to sing and dance? In learning Geography, shouldn’t they start by teaching us how to find our way around? (Nobody much used a compass any more, as though we couldn’t get lost.) And as for history, wouldn’t it make more sense to start with the present day? If we couldn’t make sense of what was going on around us, how could we learn from the experience of those who had gone before us?

  (Every now and then, when he recounted more recent memories, Lucas would let slip a plural – ‘we were’, ‘we ran’, one time ‘we saw’ – which made me think that he had also been forced to leave a Bertuccio behind, or a Midget, but obviously I couldn’t ask him any questions.)

  We discussed our experiences with the female of the species; his, which were many and varied – although he still denied that the girl in his wallet was or had ever been his girlfriend – and mine, which were limited to Mara, the daughter of friends of my parents who was in my after-school English class, whose mere presence made me want to do stupid things. I suspect I made a rather feeble case for the sensitive, intelligent man.

  We also talked about comics and TV shows and movies. Lucas asked if I’d ever read a comic called El Eternauta, which he was sure I’d love, given how much I loved The Invaders. I told him I’d try and find a copy. I remember a Mona Lisa smile lit up his face and he told me that, these days, asking for a copy of El Eternauta at a newsstand was also the wrong question. All roads seemed to lead to the wrong question. Back then, we felt as though we were condemned to silence.

  I don’t know whether Lucas started the game or I did. I suspect it was me. Being the son of the Rock and a fervent disciple of Houdini, I felt a feverish desire to flout, or at least mock, the constraints imposed on me; I wouldn’t say I was blind to my conditioning, but I was getting a little short-sighted. Since asking the wrong questions was prohibited, I began to rack my brains to come up with the right ones, questions that could be spoken aloud, in the light of day. I bridled at being told what I could and could not do: people start by forbidding you to ask certain questions and you end up not being able to ask any at all, and a man who has stopped asking questions is a dead man. Pretty quickly, we hit the mother lode. There were basic, obvious questions to which we didn’t know the answers. Why is the sky blue? Why is the Earth shaped the way it is? Why is water wet? Why did nature evolve spicy food? Why does helium give you a high-pitched voice like Benny the Ball from Top Cat? Why is air transparent? How do LPs store music? Why are saints always shown with haloes? (This was the Midget’s contribution.) Why did dead languages die? Why don’t people sing rather than talk? How hot is the surface of the sun? – a question that, in the dead of winter, provoked an exquisite nostalgia for summer. The questions kept coming.

  We would slump on the grass, our backs against a tree, indifferent to the cold, and sit there for a long time, saying nothing. To the casual observer, it might seem as though we were doing nothing, whereas in fact our senses were working overtime. We could feel the rough bark at our backs, in spite of our thick jackets, feel the smoothness and the damp of the ground we were sitting on. As we breathed in the icy air, we could follow its course through our bodies as it became lukewarm, only to lose it when it became a part of us. Sometimes I thought I could see windows melting. (Glass is a super-cooled liquid; it’s just that our perception is like a video recorder set to ‘Pause’.) Then one of us, it didn’t matter who, would ask a question – Are the hairs on our head antennae? – and the other would come up with another one – Why do we have five fingers on each hand rather than three, or seven, or twelve? – and after that they’d come thick and fast, our breath like white clouds, making us seem like friendly dragons, because everyone knows that good dragons belch white smoke.

  Lucas and me didn’t even bother trying to answer these questions. Mostly because we didn’t know the answers, except for a few that Lucas could explain: for example, he was the one who told me about aquifers. Aquifers are reservoirs or layers of water under the ground that collect rainwater and somehow manage, by rivers and streams, to get it back to the sea; everything is connected. Sometimes he’d come up with an answer that was funny or poetic – saints have haloes so that God doesn’t lose trac
k of them when he’s looking down on them from above, or, if books were feathers, there’d be no birds, there’d be flying libraries, things like that – but only sometimes, because the game was about the questions. It was about proving that there was no such thing as a wrong question, only wrong answers.

  In the days before we left for Dorrego, I hardly saw him. One day he’d leave five minutes after I came home from school and wouldn’t get back until long after I was asleep, another day he’d get back early but he’d claim he was exhausted and would go to bed without any dinner. I don’t think he wanted to talk to anyone, he was pale and he looked as though he felt like zipping his sleeping bag over his head, returning to the womb, smelling his own smells to make sure he was still alive. I felt frustrated. Like an ant, I felt I needed to store up affection for those times when there would be none, I wanted to have days when there was lots of Lucas to compensate for the shortage of Lucas in Dorrego. It’s possible to stockpile affection and carry it around like the huge leaves you see ants carrying around on their tiny little bodies. But I couldn’t do it. On Friday night, I waited up as late as I could, but Lucas didn’t come back in time.

  I did see him for a minute, on Saturday morning. We made so much noise getting ready to leave – I was particularly noisy – that he woke up and came to say goodbye. The Citroën had already set off when he suddenly seemed to remember something and he ran after the car on his long spidery legs.

  ‘Nine thousand, nine hundred and thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit,’ he said, his breath misting my window.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The temperature on the surface of the sun.’

  ‘Look after the toads for me,’ said the Midget.

  ‘Don’t worry… we’ll keep each other company.’