Kamchatka Read online

  Five years later, the Midget showed up. According to papá, the Midget was the result of a wild night celebrating a win on the horses at the Hipódromo de Palermo. According to family legend, it was papá’s first time at the races – he’d been dragged there by colleagues from the law office in Tribunales and rapidly developed a taste for gambling. Having picked two winners on his first night, he suddenly thought he was an expert. I don’t remember him ever winning again. This was probably why the Midget was the only brother I had.

  For a long time, I thought there was some kind of connection between fate, fortune and children (I liked to imagine I was the son of a professional poker player and consequently of royal birth) and, more specifically, a fateful connection between my little brother and racehorses. I stoically endured him breaking my Matchbox cars, tearing my comics, breaking my Airfix models, because I believed his actions were dictated by fate. His bestial behaviour was something that was written in the stars, a theory supported by the fact that he was born on 29 April, World Animal Day. My brother was born under the sign of the beast.

  It was about then that mamá began working as a professor and started some group at the university, something to do with trade unions, and ended up winning elections. It was because of mamá that papá devoted his career to defending political prisoners: mamá found new cases for him every week. A lot of the ‘uncles’ were mamá’s political friends or from the union; some had been in jail. Tío Rodolfo, for example.

  At first papá wasn’t too keen on all this politics. He used to tease mamá, saying he was happier when she was reading trashy novels by Guy des Cars rather than political pamphlets by Hernández Arregui and El Descamisado and huge tomes with titles like Instability and Chaos in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems, but he didn’t mean it. Whenever they talked about politics, I could tell he was just as passionate as she was. Papá was the sort of man who screamed at the news on TV as though the newscasters and politicians could hear him. People say Shakespeare’s soliloquies are contrived but what’s the difference between Hamlet talking to a skull and papá talking to the TV?

  For a while, during the time of the ‘uncles’, they used to drag the Midget and me along to any protests and demonstrations they went to. We loved this, because there was always an ‘uncle’ who’d sit us on his shoulders or give us a piggyback. People would buy us drinks or sweets, and we’d learn songs with words like ‘policía federal la vergüenza nacional!’ (‘federal police, a national disgrace!’), which made us popular in school the day after. Besides, everyone seemed to know everyone else at these demonstrations, so everyone was happy and it’s well known that happiness is contagious.

  In the beginning, papá was none too happy about mamá’s open-door policy but, in the end, he gave in. It was partly because mamá kept nagging him, calling him a ‘reactionary shyster’ and a ‘pencil-pusher’; but at least he was true to his pretentious, little-rich-boy roots, she used to say, a niño bien just like in the tango. But actually papá gave in because he believed in what she was doing and because he genuinely liked the uncles. They’d drink beer and he’d talk about the races, about his ‘sure things’. He’d get angry if one of them was having trouble with the police or the Triple A (in books it says it stands for the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance, but papá always called it the Argentine Assassins Alliance) when they were thrown in jail or beaten up.

  One day he told me that Tío Rodolfo was dead. He asked me to go to the wake with him. And when Tío Raymundo asked me where I lived, I lied. I told him I lived near La Boca.

  11

  LET’S GO

  Mamá put her head around the classroom door and asked if she could come in. She was wearing the navy blue tailored suit that I always liked because it gave her a wasp waist. She had a lit cigarette between her fingers, as she always did. I think this is the only trait of the mad scientist I ever associated with mamá, that and her obsession with explaining everything in terms of physics – her inability to see a game of football as anything other than a complex system of masses, resistances, vectors and forces. If mamá needed to remember anything, whether it was a phone number or a formula, she jotted it down on the back of her pack of red Jockey Club cigarettes; then she’d forget she’d written something important on it and throw the packet in the bin. This was a law as unchanging as the law of gravity.

  Señorita Barbeito turned the projector off, went to the door and had a whispered conversation with mamá. I took advantage of her well-timed interruption to stop playing Hangman so I could regroup (one more mistake and I was hanged), pretending to be interested in what was happening. What was mamá doing here? Shouldn’t she be in the lab? Maybe she had come to pay the bursar and stopped by to say hello?

  ‘Get your things, you’ve got to go,’ said Señorita Barbeito.

  I made a covert triumphant gesture and started stuffing my things into my schoolbag. Bertuccio looked annoyed. Mamá had robbed him of his victory.

  He filled in the missing letters and asked what we were doing that afternoon.

  ‘Same as always,’ I told him. ‘I’ll come by your house right after my English class.’

  ‘My mother is making milanesas,’ Bertuccio said to tempt me. And boy did it work. To extrapolate my grandpa’s expression: ‘God is in the details – and in Bertuccio’s mother’s milanesas.’

  Then Bertuccio gave me the piece of paper we’d been playing Hangman on. Now, it didn’t read A _ _ A _ A _ A _ _ A. The solution was simple and elegant. In fact, it was magic.

  Bertuccio’s word was ‘ABRACADABRA’.

  12

  THE CITROËN

  At this point it’s essential to dwell for a moment on the merits of the car in which we made our getaway. Mention the name Citroën and the average man pictures an elegant car driving around Paris with the Arc de Triomphe permanently in the background. But while it’s true that our car had the same name and could trace its ancestry back to France, Citroëns in Argentina in 1976 were as different from that stereotype as Rocinante is from Bucephalus.

  First: the shape. Seen in profile, our car might be described as having the classic curves of a Volkswagen Beetle, a large semicircle comprising the boot and the interior with a smaller semicircle containing the engine sticking out in front – but you’d be wrong. Whereas the Volkswagen has the reassuring sturdiness of German engineering, our Citroën was so flimsy it was like a Matchbox car.

  The chassis was the problem. If a Volkswagen Beetle crashed into a common or garden wall, it would simply plough through it, whereas our Citroën would crumple like an accordion playing ‘La Vie en Rose’. The roof was just as flimsy. It was a canvas roof, but don’t confuse this with the folding roof of a European convertible. When I say it was made of canvas, I mean it could be unhooked and rolled up.

  The flimsiness of the chassis was obvious as soon as the car was in motion. On sharp bends, it listed to port or starboard – it felt like sitting in a bowl of custard. Fortunately, the engine was incapable of reaching any great speeds, only of making a great deal of noise.

  Two details about the interior should be enough. The design of the gearstick was unique, utterly unlike the popular floor-mounted gear stick (sports cars), or those tucked behind the steering wheel (Dodge, Chevrolet). Our gearstick, a metal lever embedded in the dashboard, looked as though it should have been on the control panel of the flying saucer in Plan 9 from Outer Space rather than a car. And the seats were designed around a metal frame that dug into your flesh when you sat down. The only practical solution was to sit with the metal rod carefully aligned with the cleft of your arse, unless you wanted another crack in your buttocks or a bad case of scoliosis. Sleeping stretched out on the back seat felt like what Indian fakirs must feel lying on a bed of nails. Maybe it was during his frequent naps in the back of the Citroën that the Midget developed his taste for the ascetic.

  Lastly, and most glaringly, our Citroën was a lime green colour which, on a cloudless day, when the sun hit it just right, could b
lind even the most experienced driver.

  But please don’t read any contempt into this description of our steel (aluminium? who knows?) stallion. Our Citroën was a noble beast. It never failed us, not in the beginning, nor at the last. We loved everything about it, even bizarre features like the roll-down roof through which we liked to pop out and launch projectiles at other cars with the precision of a Panzer tank.

  Every word I write about it is written with love; not the wide-eyed infatuation that makes virtues out of flaws, but genuine love, a precise sense of the importance it had – and still has – in my life.

  I would like to think that if I’ve learned anything during my odyssey, it is to be true to those who have been true to me.

  13

  ENTER THE MIDGET

  The Midget was waiting for us in the car. He was sitting in his usual place, curls falling into his eyes, wearing his check pre-school smock. He didn’t react when we climbed into the car, as if we hadn’t yet arrived, as if he operated on a time-frame different from ours, similar but not identical.

  I didn’t want to disturb him. He was still absorbed in his thoughts. Two minutes later he split my head open with his lunchbox.

  According to scientists, a black hole is a dark region of space whose gravity traps all matter and radiation that comes within its field. Sort of like an intergalactic Hoover. Though they have not yet been able to prove it exists, there is irrefutable evidence to corroborate the phenomenon: the Midget is one indicator – he is a singularity of negative energy.

  The Midget destroyed everything that came within his field. He did not seem physically violent, things simply disintegrated the moment he touched them. Though he turned them with infinite care, the pages of the books I lent him tore in his hands. Though he did nothing but twirl it around, pieces dropped off my Airfix model Spitfire as though it was suddenly struck with metal fatigue, as though the glue had turned to water. Though my medieval soldiers never left my side, the accessories that came with them – helmets, pikes, swords, shields – gradually disappeared. I never found them again, even after an intensive search and repeatedly pleading with mamá and papá to buy me a gold panning sieve and a Geiger counter.

  It was impossible to ignore the phenomenon. Even mamá, who always tried to downplay it to mitigate the impact of my various losses, must have had a hard time trying to come up with a rational scientific explanation. Yet the Midget, this Lord of Chaos, was deeply attached to certain objects and certain rituals. He liked these sheets and these pyjamas, which had to be washed while he was at school so they would be ready for him the same night. He loved drinking chocolate, but it had to be made using a brand of milk called Las Tres Niñas and a brown powder called Nesquik, and it had to be mixed according to a precise formula: pouring the milk from a specific height, stirring four times – no more, no less – and obviously it had to be made in that cup.

  In spite of this combustible combination of elements, the chemistry of our relationship had always been stable. For example, before we got our own record player, I used to phone Ana, my mother’s cousin, and ask her to put on a Beatles record for us. She would crank up her Rasner and put on a single with two songs on each side (‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Chains’, ‘Anna’ and ‘Misery’) and the Midget and I would sit in silence, sharing the phone as the music came through the receiver all the way from the Avenida Santa Fé.

  When the record ended, the Midget was always the first to shout ‘Again, again!’

  14

  BLIND IN THE FACE OF DANGER

  Mamá lit another cigarette and twisted the gearstick of the Citroën. We were between potholes, our heads bobbing like the little tigers taxi drivers always have in their rear windscreens.

  Everything was fine until I mentioned Bertuccio’s mother’s milanesas.

  My mother’s failings as a housewife were an essential weapon in our regular battles, and I often used Bertuccio’s mother’s milanesas as a battering ram. As a cook, mamá had never moved beyond the grill – grilled steak, grilled sausages, grilled hamburgers. Her rare attempts to fry meat turned out milanesas so tough it felt like chewing a Pompeii dog charred in lava.

  I had planned to steal one of Bertuccio’s mother’s milanesas that night, hide it in my school bag and smuggle it into our house where I could subject it to a battery of experiments destined to reverse-engineer the phenomenon: degree of cooking, composition of oil, chemical composition of the butter. Blabbermouth that I was, I informed mamá of my intentions in advance.

  ‘You’re not going to Bertuccio’s tonight,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s Thursday today!’ I pointed out.

  Going to Bertuccio’s house was an ineluctable weekly ritual. On Thursdays I went to English lessons at the Institute and Bertuccio lived only one block away. When I got out of English class, I would ring his doorbell, we’d have our afternoon milk, watch The Invaders and then act out scenes from a play. (Bertuccio played Polonius – hilariously – in the voice of the pompous radio presenter Jorge Cacho Fontana.) I’d have my dinner there, and then they would drop me home. When Bertuccio’s mother made milanesas, I’d arrive home in a state of rapture much like Pepé Le Pew’s when he gets a whiff of a petite femme skunk.

  ‘I know today is Thursday, but you’re not going to Bertuccio’s,’ said mamá.

  His curiosity aroused by the unfamiliar landscape, the Midget asked where we were going.

  ‘To a friend’s house,’ mamá said, smoking furiously.

  I asked why I couldn’t go to Bertuccio’s.

  ‘Because we’re going to visit a friend and then we’re going on a trip,’ mamá said.

  ‘On a trip? In the middle of term? How long for?’

  ‘Your papá can tell you that,’ said mamá, kicking the ball wide for a corner.

  ‘Are we leaving as soon as we get to your friend’s house or are we staying there for a while?’

  ‘We’re staying until papá gets there.’

  ‘Then why can’t you just drop me off at Bertuccio’s and pick me up later?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  I only said this to cause trouble. Nothing annoyed mamá more than when I resorted to this pet phrase, especially if she knew or suspected I was right. My obsession with justice infuriated her, even more so when I raised the stakes and threatened to ask papá to get me a good lawyer.

  At this stage of our game of mother–son ping-pong, we both knew what came next. When I said ‘That’s not fair’, mamá would get angry, then she would snap back with her standard line (‘Life might be beautiful, but it’s not fair’) and that would be the end of the argument. Mamá would have won a Pyrrhic victory, elevating the specific to the universal and thereby diluting it.

  The Midget interrupted to ask where his things were. Although she knew the answer, mamá chose to ask him what he meant.

  ‘My pyjamas,’ said the Midget. ‘My cup, my Goofy!’

  Mamá glanced over her shoulder, silently pleading with me for help. She was hoping I might limit the devastation caused by the Midget’s inevitable explosion. He couldn’t get to sleep without his toy Goofy.

  I ignored her look and glared at her. ‘Who is this friend we’re visiting anyway? What about school? How I am supposed to catch up? Why do we have to go right now?’ And then my $64,000 question, the question with which I deliberately betrayed her, since I knew it would send the Midget off the deep end, ‘And why can’t we stop by our house, even just to get his Goofy?’

  At some point in the silence that followed, I realized the Citroën had stopped. We were stranded in a huge traffic jam, cars in front, cars behind, cars to either side. But the traffic jam was not the result of a red light or a double-parked car blocking the road. Thirty feet ahead, two police cars were parked across the avenue, creating a funnel though which only one car could pass at a time.

  Mamá lit another cigarette and brought it to her lips, her hands were shaking. In any other circum
stances, this intimation that she was on the brink would have made me wary, but I had nothing to lose – or that, at least, is what I thought. What could I possibly have left to lose, I wasn’t allowed to go to Bertuccio’s and I’d been temporarily deprived of my precious possessions, all of which were back at our house?

  I kept on nagging her, the Midget’s voice providing counterpoint. Mamá endured our litany of complaints in suspicious silence as the Citroën inched at walking pace towards the police roadblock, like a grain of sand flowing towards the neck of an hourglass.

  ‘Why can’t we go an’ pick up my Goofy?’

  ‘It’s not fair!’

  ‘I want my Goofy!’

  ‘How can we go on holiday with just the clothes we’ve got on?’

  ‘I want my pyjamas!’

  ‘And I want my game of Risk!’

  Mamá stared straight ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel of the Citroën. Out of the corner of my eye, I registered the police at the neck of the funnel. Though I was scared of them, and I instinctively hated them (‘federal police, a national disgrace’), right at that moment the person I most hated in the world was mamá.

  It was my thoughtlessness that saved us.

  I imagine that when it came to our turn and the police peered into the car, they saw an olive-skinned woman, her face contorted in pain as she listened to her screaming kids, and thought ‘Poor woman’, and waved us on.

  When the roadblock finally disappeared in the rear-view mirror, mamá reached back to pat us, but I pushed her hand away and the Midget followed my example. I thought this was her pathetic way of trying to ingratiate herself – since she could hardly use the Searing Smile while she was driving – and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of giving in. The only thing I could think about was Bertuccio and his mother’s milanesas and Risk and school and the episode of The Invaders I was going to miss and the fact that I was being forced to go on a holiday I didn’t want to go on, wearing my school shoes.