Kamchatka Read online

  The Midget agreed to help, although he was afraid that mamá might not understand the subtle distinction between assistant and accomplice. I had no choice but to resort to bribery. I promised him my Superman comics, which were already ruined because the Midget had drawn haloes all over them. (These days he drew a halo over everyone he thought was a good guy. Lex Luthor didn’t have a halo.) We headed off for school together, like we did every day. I went with him as far as the gate because he was afraid of getting lost, but before he went inside, I gave him two comics – the down payment; the rest would come later if he held up his end of the deal and didn’t say anything about where I’d gone – and I stood there watching until he was inside.

  The only thing I hadn’t reckoned on was Denucci, a friend from class. He was in the playground, on the other side of the railings, watching me silently. I suppose he must have noticed that me and the Midget didn’t go in together. For one endless minute we stood there, neither of us knowing what to do. I saw him look towards Father Ruiz, who was standing at the foot of the steps, greeting the pupils as they arrived, as he did every day. If Denucci said anything to Father Ruiz, my escape plan would fail before it had even begun.

  But Denucci did nothing. He stood there, staring at me through the railings, wearing the same expression he did at playtime when he asked me if I wanted to play with his soldiers and I said no. I took one step backwards. Denucci didn’t move. I kept walking backwards like a crab; Denucci still didn’t move. I had retreated about four metres when he raised his hand and waved. I waved back discreetly. I didn’t want Father Ruiz to notice.

  Bertuccio always went home for lunch. I planned to confront him as he left school. I was sure he’d invite me to his place and, with a bit of luck, there’d be milanesas. Taking trains and buses, I arrived in Flores about mid-morning. All I could do now was wait around until lunchtime. I didn’t mind. I could go and see what was on at the cinema – at the Pueyrredón and the San Martín. I could go to Tonini’s bookshop and see if they had a new version of Robin Hood. I could go to the shopping centre on the Avenida Boyacá and look in the window of the model shop that was always full of Zeroes and Spitfires. My one precaution was to take off my school smock, so it wouldn’t look like I was bunking off school. (In my innocence, I thought that a kid wandering around with a schoolbag would look less suspicious than one wearing a school smock.)

  I was surprised to find that nothing had changed. I don’t know what I was expecting. I think I was looking for some sign that I had been missed, I don’t know, for the colours to be more faded, the newsstands closed out of respect (they’d lost one of their best customers, it was the least they could have done), a crack in the façade of the Iglesia San José, I don’t know, something! But everything looked exactly the same: the same colours, the same newsstands, with the same guys running them; the same, graceless church.

  People seemed exactly the same too. They walked up and down Rivadavia, popping into shops, into banks, into galleries, waiting for buses, crossing the avenue with the brisk air of people with a lot to do, with the purposeful gait of people who had somewhere to be. All this briskness ended up making me suspicious. I stopped feeling that nothing had changed and began to suspect that things looked too much like I remembered them. I began to think that maybe this wasn’t Flores but a film set, a mock-up carefully created to look exactly as I remembered it, a replica, accurate in every detail but fake, full of actors playing people I used to know: ordinary people, the guys on the newsstands, the old age pensioners, the bankers who looked exactly as I remembered them (they must have used photos and film clips when they did the casting) but actors just the same, nervous because they were playing out the first scenes, the ones where everyone is so busy trying to remember their lines and their actions that it doesn’t quite flow. You notice that even simple gestures look forced, exaggerated – the way the person across the street raises a hand to hail the bus, the way that old man takes out his wallet, the affected way those girls are laughing; I had been dropped onto a film set without realizing it, or maybe this was all being played out for my benefit. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it.

  Waiting for Bertuccio to arrive was agonizing.

  When he comes out, I don’t go over and talk to him, I just walk in the same direction, keeping to the other side of the street. Bertuccio looks the same as he always did too. The same school smock, the same schoolbag. He’s humming softly to himself, but I can’t really hear. My idea had been to hide behind a tree and jump out suddenly, the sort of dramatic entrance that would appeal to Bertuccio, but I was afraid I might not see him, that I might miss him as I was trying to hide. Before I knew it, there’s Bertuccio, walking along, humming to himself, and all I can do is keep walking, keep looking for a gap in the traffic so that I can cross Yerbal, keep wondering what I’m going to say. ‘Hi’ sounds too dumb, I’ve been gone God knows how long and all I can think to say is ‘Hi’, there has to be something better than that. As we walk, I watch him, observing his every step, his every expression, trying to decide if they look natural or slightly forced, trying to work out if this is Bertuccio or some actor they cast to play him, and before I know it – it’s only three blocks – we’ve arrived at his house.

  He rings the doorbell. The buzzer goes, but I don’t hear it.

  Bertuccio goes inside.

  I stand opposite, dumbstruck. I’ve forgotten to control my breathing. I’m not walking now but my heart is still hammering and the triple ‘b-b-buh-bum’ sounds like one. I curse myself, I wonder what to do. I remember what I told myself not to forget: don’t look back, once you’ve started, second thoughts are fatal; you have to go forward, to escape.

  I put on my school smock again. I cross the street and stand between two parked cars. The idea of ringing the doorbell doesn’t even occur to me; my instinct is working again, my natural mastery of time, but I will only realize this in a moment or two. I am waiting for someone to enter or leave Bertuccio’s building. A minute later, a woman emerges with a shopping cart; I put on my best schoolboy face and walk in as though I’ve lived there all my life. The lady holds the door to let me pass. I say ‘Good afternoon’ and she nods – what a well brought-up boy.

  It is Bertuccio’s mother who answers the door. I give her my best smile. My ‘How are you, señora?’ sounds too poised, too forced, as though I am not me but an actor playing me, and I’m about to step into the apartment when I ask if Bertuccio is there, purely out of formality. His mother tells me he’s not there, that he’s gone for lunch at some aunt’s house. I stand there frozen – ‘Houdini on the rocks’, in a bathtub full of ice cubes up to my neck. What do you mean he’s not there, I think to myself. I just saw him go in. Did he stop somewhere on the stairs? For an instant, all sorts of strange ideas occur to me – the sort of things you think when you’re on a train, that some pervert in the building grabbed Bertuccio as soon as he came in and is hiding him in his own apartment; that Bertuccio decided not to go up to his apartment but to the roof terrace to eat his sandwich instead, because roof terraces are always full of fascinating bits of junk, roofs tell you things – and just then the penny drops.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I say. ‘I really wanted to see him. Tell him I came by.’

  Luckily, the woman sleeping with her mouth open got off before I did. I could sit down, even if it was only for two stops. There wasn’t much to see through the windows now. The city was far behind me; the roofs of the houses were looking down on me, almost scornfully, keeping their secrets. I knew that any minute now, everything would be all right; papá and mamá would yell at me because what I’d done was reckless, even dangerous; by now the Midget would have confessed and they would have decided to wait, knowing that I knew the way, knowing I was always careful crossing the road, knowing – most importantly – that I would come back. And maybe they wouldn’t yell too much when they saw I was crying. I knew I would cry, my instinct was working perfectly, or my natural mastery of time, which amounts to the same th
ing. I don’t often cry, but when I do papá and mamá turn as soft and mushy as marzipan. When I realized I was going to cry, I relaxed; in a few minutes everything would be all right. I distracted myself watching a blind man playing the harmonica and selling lottery tickets. I wondered how blind people manage not to get ripped off by people not paying them; blind people don’t need roofs to hide things away because they can’t see them anyway – you know, the sort of thoughts that come to you when you’re on a train.

  76

  IN WHICH WE PLAY RISK AND I TURN THE TABLES – WELL, ALMOST

  This was the night of the historic game.

  After dinner we cleared the dining-room table and papá and I fought it out over a game of Risk: Captain Nemo versus Harry Houdini. To the death, as usual. But this time things didn’t go the way they usually did. I started winning. I went on winning. I was thrashing him. It was like I had magic fingers. Every time I threw the dice: six, six, six. The blue forces marched across the planet devouring the watermelon seeds. (That’s what I called papá’s units.) Then I started conquering entire continents. I held onto them and I started getting new units with every turn. Then I turned in two sets of cards one after the other, the first time three infantry cards, the second time three different cards: one infantry, one artillery, one cavalry. Papá was finding it hard to keep his cool. He was a sore loser, even when he played Whist. If mamá hadn’t sat down next to me to referee the game, I think he would have found – or invented – some reason to call the game off on a technicality.

  After a couple of hours I had control of forty-one territories – forty-one! – and papá had only one: a territory situated in the top right-hand corner of Asia, bordering Japan and Alaska, a remote, exotic territory, with a name that sounded like the clash of swords.

  The only territory papá controlled was Kamchatka. It was here that my armies bit the dust.

  Charge after charge, papá fended off my units. My strongest attacks were repelled with stronger counter-attacks. Holed up in this tiny enclave, papá’s forces fought back. I recklessly sacrificed one unit after another, quickly exhausting all my troops in Siberia and Yakutsk, China, Japan and Alaska. I had to stop and regroup. Mamá was making frantic secret signals to papá, as though she were the referee, urging him to resign. I don’t know why she thought I couldn’t see what she was doing. And papá made no secret of his response – he shrugged his shoulders, raised his eyebrows, threw his arms wide, a repertoire of gestures intended to communicate that he was unable to influence the dice to turn things back in my favour.

  On my next turn, I marshalled all of my new units around Kamchatka. The disparity between the forces was appalling; a massacre seemed certain. But things went the same way they had the last time, only worse. Every army I risked, I lost. This run of bad luck left me lost for words. It was as though I was cursed, as though our battle was destined to follow the path of other battles: David and Goliath, the 300 Spartans and the Persians at Thermopylae.

  Turn after turn, the curse prevailed. The chimes of the clock dwindled from twelve to a single toll that sounded like my death knell.

  ‘You want me to explain?’ asked papá, stifling a yawn.

  I said something rude and went on playing.

  The game went on for hours. Kamchatka versus the rest of the world.

  At some point mamá went to bed. At some point I asked for a toilet break and changed into Lucas’s orange T-shirt, convinced that this talisman would ensure my victory.

  It was futile.

  I must have fallen asleep on the table like an idiot, preferring to pass out than accept my defeat. I had a disturbing dream in which I was still on the train trying to wake up from a dream, a dream in which I was trying not to fall asleep, because if I fell asleep I’d miss the station where I was supposed to get off; if I fell asleep I’d miss it; if I fell asleep I would be lost.

  The following morning papá called ‘action stations’.

  77

  A VISION

  It has rained during the night and in the silence between trains, you can hear the patter of raindrops that have clung to the trees all night, waiting for morning to fall. It is the only sound in the grounds of the quinta ; the rest is silence.

  The raindrops flatten the fallen leaves, which cling together for comfort, making things easier for the toad. The creature hops and slides as though someone had rolled out a red carpet in his honour. The toad notices the house is unusually empty for this time of the morning; the toad can usually tell there is someone, something, from the sound of the radio, a woman humming, a door slamming. Whatever the weather, the woman always comes outside, sits on the bench and, staring at the garden, smokes a cigarette; once she spoke in some language the toad did not understand. But mid-morning has come and gone and there is no sign of the woman, no sound from the radio, even the doors are silent and still.

  Emboldened by the silence, the toad hops off his red carpet and onto the tiles that lead to the house. He is grateful that the tiles are wet, but even so they are rough and cold as only something that is not and has never been alive can be and they force him to adapt his movements, unlike the fallen leaves, the grass and the mud which adapt to him; there is something despotic in all things inert, in their tenacious refusal to recognize the existence of the other. But the toad keeps moving forward, his instinct tells him that he can do so, that there is no risk. A couple of hops take him to the birdbath, under which there is a spider’s web. The toad feels sure the spider can tell him what he wants to know; since she lives close to the house, attached to the exterior wall, she must have noticed something out of the ordinary, some sound, something that would explain this silence; perhaps the woman said something and the spider understood her strange language. But the spider is nowhere to be seen either. The web is empty but for a raindrop that glistens like a pearl.

  The toad knows he has gone as far as he can. He cannot go beyond the doors, and even if they were open and he felt the urge to hop across the threshold, he would not do so because he is no ordinary toad, he is a young, elegant toad, his skin is mossy green (the twin blotches on his back look like eyes) and his instincts are alert, telling him to be careful.

  If he could go inside, he would find the house as dark and lifeless as the tiles, but he might find signs of the creatures that lived here until a little while ago. The toad knows (it is in his nature) that life is cyclical, and that some residue remains even when the cycle is complete. Snakes shed their skin, cats their fur, manta rays their teeth. Man sheds used-up objects: he leaves an open Nesquik tin and a dirty glass on the kitchen counter, an open toothpaste tube, unmade beds, their sheets stained with urine; he leaves grandfather clocks, cigarette butts in the ashtrays, comics that have been scrawled on and books borrowed from the school library; he leaves clothes in the wardrobes and food in the fridge.

  To go inside would be pointless. Man’s things speak his language, a language that the toad does not understand; besides, when their owners discard them they lose their meaning, they cease to be animate, they become impenetrable hieroglyphics, as though they had expiration dates like the tins in the larder, the open can of Nesquik, the food in the fridge, the slowly hardening toothpaste; like books without a reader or clocks without a hand to wind them.

  Wisely (as I’ve already pointed out, this is no ordinary toad, perhaps it has something to do with the marks on his back), the toad retreats, relieved to return to the wet leaves. The touch of the harsh, rough tiles has left his mouth dry; he feels hot and thirsty. The wet leaves cool him, but he needs more; he needs to swim, he can feel his skin crack with every hop, feel the mossy green he is so proud of is growing dull. He must make a decision. The birdbath is ridiculous, it would be like crawling back into the desert in search of an oasis and besides, it’s too high. The stream that runs along the boundary of the quinta would be ideal, but he would have to hop a considerable distance, and he does not feel up to that just now. Luckily, there is another water source only a few seconds away
. He can feel its wetness even from here, minute droplets of water like a balm against his skin.

  78

  IN WHICH HOUSES CRUMBLE

  We were woken with a start. We had to move so quickly, we could take only things that were to hand. The Midget grabbed his two Goofys. I took my game of Risk and the book about Houdini. At first I thought papá and mamá hadn’t rescued anything (cigarettes and ulcer tablets did not seem like treasure to me), but I later realized that their impulse had been the same as ours. We grabbed the things that gave us comfort; they had done likewise.

  We travelled in silence. The Midget quickly fell asleep: by the time we were half a mile from the quinta, he was dead to the world. I felt tired too, but I couldn’t sleep. I spent the time staring at the backs of mamá and papá’s heads, looking from one to the other, trying to detect some clue to the danger that had forced us to flee the quinta, some sign that the Pawnees were not about to swoop down and scalp us. But the back of the head being the least expressive part of the human body (I think it’s called the ‘occiput’ just to make it sound interesting), either there was none, or there was a sign I didn’t see.

  We spent the day driving around Buenos Aires. The first time we stopped was on some street in a neighbourhood I didn’t recognize, though it was quiet, and there was a public phone. Papá kept feeding coins into it and waving his arms like a crazy man. At first me and the Midget laughed (to ourselves, obviously, we didn’t want to annoy mamá, who was smoking like a Turk and drumming on the steering wheel) because there’s something funny about watching someone waving and gesticulating in front of an inanimate object when you can’t hear the conversation. It’s as if there’s something missing, like a painter trying to paint, not realizing he’s forgotten to pick up his brush, or like Wile E. Coyote running in mid-air not realizing he’s run off a cliff. But papá kept waving and making horrible faces and feeding coins into the phone and suddenly he was talking so loudly that we could hear what he was saying in spite of the distance. We couldn’t make out the words, but we could hear his voice and it was obvious he was shouting, and sometimes, when he found himself yelling, he’d stop and cup the mouthpiece with his hand and he would start talking very slowly, moving from shout to a whisper with nothing in between. When he hung up, he slammed the receiver down so hard he nearly knocked the whole phone booth over.