Kamchatka Read online

  We weren’t laughing any more. When papá slammed down the phone, the Midget flinched and asked mamá what was going on. Mamá smiled, reached back to stroke his leg, and took several deep breaths as though she was about to say something, but she said nothing.

  Papá saved her by coming back to the car. He slumped into the passenger seat; the Citroën rocked on its suspension. And even though he knew mamá was waiting for him to say something, he didn’t, in fact he didn’t even look at her. He looked down at his feet, just like me and the Midget do when mamá is trying to get us to confess to some crime, when we know we’ve been caught but are trying to postpone the moment when we have to face the music. Mamá had to shake him. The Midget looked at me, as if to ask if papá had fallen asleep. Eventually papá looked at mamá and said in a whisper, like he was still talking into the receiver: ‘The safe house has fallen through.’

  It was clear that mamá didn’t need to hear anything else, because she straightened up in her seat, put the car into first and moved off.

  We must have gone round in circles a thousand times before she found a restaurant that was acceptable. They must have been hungry for something special, but driving around in circles like that must have ruined her appetite because in the end she hardly ate anything; she picked at a paella, ate a couple of prawns, slowly slumping over the table like a toy winding down, staring at nothing.

  The Midget, on the other hand, wolfed down his food as he always did, and quickly got bored. He knelt up on his chair and I had to keep an eye on him to make sure the chair didn’t fall over backwards. At one point, he and the little girl at the table behind us started pulling faces at each other. We knew her name was Milagros because her mother kept saying ‘Don’t do that, Milagros, please sit still, Milagros’; only a miracle could have made Milagros sit still or her mother shut up. In other circumstances I would have made fun of the Midget, taunted him about having a new girlfriend, but I didn’t feel up to it, I felt heavy and sluggish, probably something to do with my digestion. To some extent I felt jealous of the Midget, who could kneel up on his chair, make monkey faces and sing ‘Great big Nesquiks in their bodies / as they march they make milkshakes’ and no one would say anything. I had to behave myself, sit up straight, eat with my mouth closed, act my age; worse still, I had to watch as papá went on butchering a bloody piece of steak that was probably stone cold, silent except for the sound of his knife on the china plate. All the words papá wasn’t saying, milagros’ mamá was saying behind my back; an equal and opposite reaction.

  After Milagros left, it was as though an invisible hand suddenly switched off the treble: all the sounds in the restaurant – cups, cutlery, plates, bottles, laughter, voices – sounded dull and muted, as if I was hearing them through a wall. To test my own voice, I asked mamá if I could go to the bathroom. She didn’t even answer. Maybe she didn’t hear, because even to me it sounded like my voice was coming from the bottom of the swimming pool.

  Suddenly the Midget stiffened and pointed at something. To my surprise, his voice sounded perfectly clear when he shouted: ‘Look, mamá, look! The vagina!’

  Mamá reappeared from behind her curtain of smoke. Papá looked up from his steak. The waiters froze where they stood. Every head in the restaurant turned – the cashier, the diners, the guy selling roses – looking anxiously to see what it was that the Midget was pointing at. Look, mamá, the vagina, see?

  It wasn’t a vagina: it was the Virgin, an image of the Virgin of Luján, on a little shrine mounted on the wall.

  Mamá burst out laughing and papá immediately joined her. Everyone in the restaurant laughed too. The treble was back with a vengeance, in the music of laughter and the clinking of cups, cutlery and plates. The waiter who had come over to ask if we wanted dessert was blushing; he tried to say his piece but he couldn’t get the words out.

  We didn’t have dessert. Mamá didn’t even ask. I think she was so desperate to leave that it was an effort just waiting for the bill and paying.

  In the car, the Midget was silent. He sat with his little hands clasped in his lap, like someone praying, staring out the window at a strange angle, like someone scanning the sky. I knew what was going through his mind, how literal-minded he could be. The Midget obviously heard papá say: ‘The safe house has fallen through’. As we drove around in circles he was staring up at the houses, terrified that whatever disease papá had been talking about was contagious and they too might ‘fall through’, might collapse, one after the other, like in some Japanese B-movie.

  79

  THE PRINCIPLE OF NECESSITY II

  It was only much later that I realized that going back to the quinta was the worst thing we could have done, something we should have avoided at all costs. That mamá and papá decided to go back anyway gives some idea of how desperate they were.

  We spent the afternoon in a playground while papá ran round trying to get change and feeding coins into public phones as though they were piggy banks. At least he was doing something. Mamá looked shattered by having to wait; waiting is the worst, it’s a life sentence. After the sun set we felt the cold and realized that we hadn’t brought any warm clothes, but we didn’t say anything. We did our best to go on playing, though the Midget was starting to look more and more like a ‘Blue Period’ Picasso and my fingertips went numb from holding onto the freezing chains of the swings. At one point, the Midget pointed to a couple of kids playing on the monkey bars and asked if they were on the run like we were.

  We left the car on a street outside the village and walked back to the quinta from there. When we were a couple of blocks away, papá passed the sleeping Midget to mamá; he told us to wait where we were and to take care not to be seen. This was easy; it was so dark that by the time papá had walked a few feet, we couldn’t see him anymore. Mamá wasn’t even allowed to smoke, in case someone saw the burning tip of her cigarette in the dark. I had my Houdini book with me, and while we waited, I tried – pointlessly – to read. The print was just an inky smudge. It’s horrible when you want to read a book and can’t – it feels sacrilegious, or like a tear in the fabric of the Universe.

  It was a while before papá came back. He said we could go inside, that it was safe, but that we should prepare ourselves for what we would see.

  They’d taken things, the dining-room table and chairs, the telephone, the TV. The floors were a mess, covered in muddy footprints (it had rained the night before), huge tracks from rubber boots that reminded me of the footprints Neil Armstrong left on the moon. On one wall, where the grandfather clock had stood, was a patch of darkness darker than the shadows: with the clock gone, the filth and grime accumulated over time was exposed. They’d even broken the windows. There were shards of glass everywhere and you couldn’t move without hearing the crackle and crunch of glass. It seemed to me a pointless thing to do, though later I realized it wasn’t. It was the only way they had found to murder time, to bring it to a halt and thereby stop life itself; in breaking the panes of glass they halted their inexorable downward flow, they had interrupted the process – killed the glass.

  They had taken both mattresses from my room and the clothes that had been in the wardrobe. It was as empty now as it had been when I first opened it. Seeing it bare gave me the idea, or maybe reminded me of what I had always intended to do. (The broken windows upset my notion of time.) I picked up one of the Midget’s pencils from the floor and, under the words ‘Pedro ’75’ I wrote: ‘Harry ’76’. After that, I climbed on the night table and put the book back where I had found it, trusting that the dust would hide it, keep it safe until the next escape artist arrived.

  Mamá laid the Midget down on their big double bed (obviously, they hadn’t been able to take this mattress) and papá put his jacket over him.

  ‘I need to be sure that they’ll be safe from all this shit,’ papá said, in a deep voice that sounded like Narciso Ibáñez Menta.

  ‘You know the only thing that terrifies me? The thought of never being able to
see them again,’ mamá said, with a strange gurgling sound in her throat.

  I know all this because I was listening. I was outside the house, but I was listening. The windows in their bedroom were broken too.

  It was at that moment, just after mamá made the strange sound, that I heard the plop. At first I thought it was mamá gargling again, but then I realized it was coming from the other direction – from the garden, from the swimming pool, the ‘plop’ was the sound of water. I ran to the edge of the pool, imagining that another toad had fallen in and I would have to rescue it. I couldn’t wait – we would probably be leaving again soon – and I couldn’t afford to trust the reverse diving board, I didn’t have time. I had to save the toad right now, because I was tired of dead toads, tired of burying them, sick of waiting; waiting is the worst, it’s a life sentence.

  I got a surprise. The plop was not the sound of a toad falling into the water, but of a toad hopping out of the water onto the reverse diving board: there he was, up on the sloping plank. I couldn’t believe it, it was a beautiful toad, mossy green with two dark patches on its back that looked like eyes, and it was obvious that he had just climbed out because the board was dry except for the wet patch the toad had left when it had hopped out of the water.

  We stared at each other for a minute, me standing on the edge of the pool, the toad on the reverse diving board, as though everything that had happened was leading to this moment, the moment that had been written: our two lives coming together for a few seconds, each forever changing the other. Things change when they have no choice, as Señorita Barbeito had told me.

  When it got bored with looking at me, the toad gave a hop and disappeared into the grass.

  80

  IN WHICH SOME LOOSE ENDS ARE TIED UP

  And that’s everything. This time it’s the truth – or almost.

  If I have to, I can fill in a few more details. Bertuccio grew up to be a playwright and a theatre director. He’s not what you’d call famous, but he always chose to work outside the commercial theatre; it’s good to know that he still holds to the artistic creed that he learned so early, because it makes me feel that something – something worthwhile, obviously – persists in this world in spite of those who try to convince us that nothing lasts and that nothing, therefore, is worth anything.

  Papá’s partner Roberto never reappeared. Ramiro and his mother stayed in Europe. I don’t know anything about what happened to them, though a friend told me that they said they would never set foot in Argentina again.

  Several years passed before, opening the newspaper one day, I saw Lucas smiling out at me from an old photograph. He was just as I remembered him, the unruly shock of hair, the pathetic little beard, the radiance that somehow shone through despite the second-rate photo and the cheap print quality. Only then did I discover his real name, from the plea for information printed next to the photo. Only then did I discover that, a few days after I last saw him, he became one of the disappeared. I wondered if he had met up with some old friend after he left the quinta; I hoped with all my heart that he had, that someone had hugged him, clapped him on the back, said a goodbye that might make up, if only a little, for the goodbye I had refused to say. It took several more years before I fully appreciated how right mamá had been that night when she tried to persuade me to say goodbye to Lucas, when she explained the importance – and consequently the necessity – of goodbyes. Ultimately, we all realize that our parents understood more than we thought they did; it’s a part of growing up. But it is rare that they should be so wise in grief, in the art of loss, in the way they cope with untimely and violent death.

  Eventually I plucked up the courage to get in touch with Lucas’s family. It was in telling them what had happened during our few short weeks together, that I discovered – it was like an epiphany – the power of stories. Until then I had always believed that the fascination they held for me was personal, almost unilateral. But as I talked, I realized that I was giving Lucas back to his family. All the while I was telling them the story – I did my best to draw it out, to conjure details I had never known – time came together splendidly and Lucas was alive again; Lucas appeared (I like to think this is a story not about los desaparecidos, but about los aparecidos) and we laughed at his jokes as though they were new, because they were reinvented in the retelling.

  Year after year, the family still publish the same photograph, the same plea for information. Now my name is there too. When Lucas’s family suggested that they add my name to theirs, I was speechless – something that, you might have noticed, is very rare. I accepted immediately, on condition they allowed me to show Lucas’s younger brother something. (As I had suspected, Lucas had a brother about my age.) I stayed up until midnight teaching him the knots that Lucas had taught me, which I still remembered perfectly. As we practised them together, it felt as though there was something sacred in the movement of our fingers, we were tying together something that should never have been unravelled.

  There are lots of things I don’t know, things I probably never will know. Who Pedro was, for example, and whether Beba and China were his aunts or what, and how much truth there was to my suspicion that the quinta was haunted by a ghost. I don’t know who has the book about Houdini, if it still exists. Or what became of Denucci, of Father Ruiz or of mamá’s friend who gave us refuge that first night. I’d like to be able to tell them that their generosity helped me to survive during my long exile in Kamchatka.

  In all those years I was never without a book from la colección Robin Hood that I’d found in grandma matilde’s boxes, or a copy of The Prisoner of Zenda that had belonged to mamá when she was a little girl. It was here that I discovered the Princess Flavia, a noblewoman by birth but, more importantly, a woman noble in spirit, her hair as blonde as the sun on the Risk board. I can’t explain how I felt when I found out that, even on our island, where we lived as castaways as the country was brutally laid waste, mamá had decided to call herself Flavia as a protest, and as a vindication, because she had never wanted to be the Rock – or at least this world had made her the Rock – this world that starves children to death because it allows others to steal the food from their plates, a world in which you have to be a rock so as not to die of heartache. What else is there? mamá had never wanted to be made of stone, this was why she instinctively appealed to the things that would help us to survive the dark times – those few certainties that you carry with you from childhood: memories of love, of grief, or simply fantasies, like the fantasy she had had since she was a little girl, a dream she found so embarrassing that she never dared tell anyone about it, because it was childish, because it was politically incorrect – the dream of being a real blonde, of being called Flavia, of becoming a princess.

  81

  KAMCHATKA

  The last thing papá said to me, the last word from his lips, was ‘Kamchatka’.

  We were on the forecourt of a petrol station, we had just had breakfast. Mamá went to get the Midget – a king of infinite space – who was still sleeping in the car. He wasn’t simply asleep, he was unconscious: he didn’t wake up when he was lifted up, or when mamá covered him with hugs and kisses, or when she put him in grandpa’s arms. I remember that grandpa carried him to the truck and then it was my turn for hugs and kisses, mamá squeezed me hard and then put her hands on my shoulders, as though distancing herself, and said: ‘Behave yourself’. She didn’t say anything else – ‘Behave yourself’, that was all – in the same tone she always used if she was leaving us alone in the house. It was an attempt to impose limits on our flair for disaster, but also a way of letting us know what would happen if we didn’t listen to her: mamá would come home and we would get what was coming to us; mamá would come home, that was guaranteed. I thought: the Rock, mamá never weakens, and if papá had been nearby I would have made the Rock sign and clenched my fist, but papá wasn’t there, he’d gone back to the Citroën to fetch something.

  Sometimes there are variations in wh
at I remember. Sometimes mamá turns and walks back to the Citroën and, as she does, she drops something small, something red, an empty packet of Jockeys she’s scribbled on; I pick it up and read what’s written on it; over and over she’s scribbled my name – my real name – covering the whole cigarette packet, as though she’s afraid I might forget, might end up believing I was Harry forever. Harry, the escape artist. I’m not Harry, at least not now. I don’t perform escapes any more. I understand this as I read it, I’m sure of it; but now, as I remember that scene for the nth time, I understand it more than ever.

  Time is weird. Sometimes I think it’s like a book. Everything is inside, between the front and back covers, the whole story, from beginning to end. You could get a bunch of people together, give them all copies of the same edition and ask them to open the book at any page and start reading and voilà, everything is happening simultaneously, in a concert of voices, like listening to several radio stations at the same time. It would be hard to work out what anyone was saying, just as it’s hard to pick up a book, turn to a page at random, read a paragraph and truly understand what it means. It’s easy to assume you would understand better if you had read what comes before, but it’s not always true; sometimes you pick up the Bible or the I Ching or Shakespeare, open it at random and it seems as though the sentence you have happened on is telling you exactly what you longed to know, what you needed, what is essential. It doesn’t always work, I admit. I imagine that someone listening to me talking about the toads might assume that I’m a biologist or that I’m telling a children’s story. But it could also happen that they hear me precisely when I say: love one another madly, the people you know, but more importantly the people who need love, because love is the only thing that is real, it is the light, everything else is darkness; and maybe whoever was listening would understand completely without needing to hear the beginning, without needing to question my moral authority, without needing to know whether I have any moral authority, without needing to know what I have lost – what we all lose.