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  When they aspired to glory, the indigenous peoples of the continent chose the other ocean, the Pacific. Lima was the golden city of the Incas while Buenos Aires was still a swamp. And when Europeans set up military outposts in South America, they too preferred the line that runs from México with the Peruvian high Andes. Buenos Aires was a last resort, a city beyond the pale, the last bastion of civilization standing on the frontier of barbarism. Or was it beyond that frontier, capital of a savage kingdom?

  All we know for certain is that no one wanted to live in Buenos Aires. Even the name was like a tasteless joke. The air was unhealthy, heavy and humid. It was like breathing water. Oxen and carts sank into the mud. This oppressive weather still reigned when, in 1947–48, Lawrence Durrell, in his letters from Buenos Aires, described the area as ‘large, flat and melancholy … full of stale air’, where the powerful fought over meagre resources and ‘the weak are discarded … Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity is trying to get away from here – including me.’ Lest there be any doubt about the malign influence the city had upon his soul, Durrell also wrote: ‘One’s feelings don’t rise in this climate, the death-dew settles on me …’

  To the imperial powers of the eighteenth century, Buenos Aires looked – on paper – like a marvellous opportunity. It was the last port on the Atlantic seaboard before Cape Horn and offered access to a network of rivers that connected it with the heart of the continent. Rivers meant trade and trade would bring wealth, civilization, culture. But in practice Buenos Aires was a nightmare. The River Plate offered scant depth, making it difficult for large ships to dock and though there were rivers, they presented even greater navigational problems. It was at this point that the dichotomy between the idea of Buenos Aires and the reality of Buenos Aires became apparent, a dichotomy that has never been resolved: the conflict between what we might be and what we are leaves us paralysed, a ship run aground on a muddy spit of land.

  Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in geography books. The result of centuries of research, they tell us how the Earth was formed, how the incandescent ball of energy of those first days finally cooled into its present, stable form. They tell us about how successive geological strata of the planet were laid down, one on top of the other, creating a model which applies to everything in life. (In a sense, we too are made up of successive layers. Our current incarnation is laid down over a previous one, but sometimes it cracks and eruptions bring to the surface elements we thought long buried.)

  Geography books teach us where we live in a way that makes it possible to see beyond the ends of our noses. Our city is part of a country, our country part of a continent, our continent lies on a hemisphere, that hemisphere is bounded by certain oceans and these oceans are a vital part of the whole planet: one cannot exist without the other. Contour maps reveal what political maps conceal: that all land is land, all water is water. Some lands are higher, some lower, some arid, some humid, but all land is land. There are warmer waters and cooler waters, some waters are shallow, some deep, but all water is water. In this context all artificial divisions, such as those on political maps, smack of violence.

  All the people who inhabit all these lands are people. Some are blacker, some whiter, some taller, some shorter, but they are all people: the same in essence, different only in details because (as geography books teach us), that part of the Earth allotted to us is the mould from which our essence pours forth, molten and incandescent as in the first days of the planet. What form we take will be a variation moulded by that place. We grow up to be placid in the tropics, frugal in the polar regions, impulsive if we are of Mediterranean stock.

  Durrell intuits something of this in his letters when he talks of flatness, of melancholy; Buenos Aires forces him to adapt or die, as bacteria were once forced to contend with oxygen, forced to convert this toxin into the air they breathed. Durrell left, but those of us who choose to stay, adapt our sensibilities. Some of the characteristics we develop as a result of this mutation are as extraordinary as those developed by bacteria. Tango, for example: music of Baltic melancholy which expresses the flatness, the humidity and the nostalgia which mark us out from the rest of the Hispanic world. On this point I disagree with grandpa: I believe what that Piazzolla plays is tango. But it is a conclusion I arrived at through reading geography books.

  Between the primeval swamps and the Buenos Aires of today, centuries have passed, but time is the most relative of all measurements. (I believe all time occurs simultaneously.) We are still shapeless creatures, as shifting as the muddy coastline. We are still creatures of mud, God’s breath still fresh in our cheeks. We are still amphibious, on land we long for the sea, and longing for land we swim through the dark waters.

  20

  THE SWIMMING POOL

  The quinta papá had borrowed was on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It had a kidney-shaped swimming pool surrounded by flagstones. The water was not exactly what you might call clean. It had a Citroën-green tinge, and the surface of the water and bottom of the pool were covered with leaves that had fallen from the trees. Getting the leaves off the surface was easy. There was a net with a long handle specially designed for the purpose. The leaves on the bottom of the pool were a different matter; they had rotted into a slimy gloop we had to walk on.

  As soon as we arrived, I asked papá if I could go for a swim. Papá, obviously, glanced at mamá. She made a disgusted face. What the swimming pool contained was not water, but something like a soup of bacteria, microorganisms and decomposing vegetation. But that afternoon, the April sun was still beating down and mamá owed me one because of the whole Bertuccio thing.

  I didn’t have a swimsuit with me, but I dived in anyway – in my underpants. The water was cold and slightly soupy. When I tried to stand on the bottom, my feet slithered around as though the bottom was covered in cream. It was better to keep swimming, even if all I could do was doggy paddle.

  I had never really been interested in style. Most boys learn the front crawl so they can race, or they learn something showy like the butterfly so that they can splash people on the side of the pool. But what I liked best was staying underwater. I’d hang on to the bottom of the ladder and exhale all the air in my lungs, bubble by bubble, until there was nothing left and then lie on the bottom with my tummy pressed against the tiles for a few seconds before shooting back to the surface for air.

  The things my mother thought were disgusting about the pool were exactly the things that most fascinated me. The green tinge, the shifting rays of light, made it easy to pretend that I was at the bottom of the ocean. The leaves and the branches suspended in the water gave a sense of depth to my underwater adventure, the long-legged insects diving like me but with more grace. There were curious formations all along the waterline, countless clusters of tiny translucent eggs. And the dark slime at the bottom – a mixture of moss and decaying leaves – added to the feeling of being at the bottom of the sea.

  People say that being underwater stirs memories of the place where we were conceived and spent our first nine months. Being surrounded by water rekindles sensations we first felt in our mothers’ wombs: the weightlessness, the languid, muted sounds. I’m not about to argue with this reasoning, but I prefer to believe that the pleasure of being underwater has another explanation, less Freudian and more in keeping with the history of our species.

  When, at the dawn of life, our ancestors left their aquatic environment, they took the water with them. The human womb replicates the water, the weightlessness, the salinity of our erstwhile ocean habitat. The concentration of salt in the blood and in bodily fluids is the same as that in the oceans. We abandoned the sea some 400 million years ago (by my chronology), but the sea has never abandoned us. It lives on in us in our blood, our sweat, our tears.

  21

  THE MYSTERIOUS HOUSE

  When he said the house was ‘mysterious’, papá set my imagination racing. I had imagined a dark, dank, two-storey English manor house
, walls shrouded in thick ivy, hiding thousands of longlegged spiders. I imagined looking up as we arrived and noticing a boarded-up window high up near the chimney stack – a secret room that no staircase in the house led to. I imagined a neighbour nodding sagely and confessing that the window was a mystery, then asking ominously if I had heard what had happened to the previous tenants, a strange family …

  The actual house was very different. It was a simple, low-rise square box with a tarred roof. It looked more like a compromise with reality than with architecture. The walls had been whitewashed, though the job looked half-finished.

  I wandered into the house half-naked, wrapped in a huge towel with the price tag still attached. I was wet and my whole body itched from the pine needles. Papá and mamá were coming and going, bringing in shopping bags and going out to fetch more. In an attempt to keep the Midget occupied – he was more dangerous when he tried to help with family chores than when he skived off – they had sat him in front of the TV, an ancient Philco with a rabbit-ear aerial; the knobs fell off as soon as you touched them.

  The house was full of mismatched cast-offs and second-hand furniture in different styles and colours. The living room alone had a fake Louis XV sofa, two wooden chairs – one pine, one mesquite. The coffee table was made of wicker and the TV stand was orange Formica.

  Papá stood, captivated before a broken grandfather clock. He slipped his hand inside the case and ding, dong, ding sounded the chimes – a little ominous, a little magical.

  All houses retain something of their former residents. People shed traces of themselves everywhere they go, the way we constantly shed and renew our skin without even noticing. It doesn’t matter how efficient the movers were, or how thoroughly the house was cleaned. The floors might smell of wax polish and the walls might be freshly whitewashed, but a vigilant eye will still detect the clues left by history: the floor, worn where it has been walked on, a dark groove on the windowsill where someone set down a cigarette as they gazed out at the gardens. Marks on the floor indicated where the original furniture had once stood.

  We didn’t know anything about the people who owned the house. All papá told us was that it had been lent to some people and they were now lending it to us. Maybe this was where the mystery lay. What was the logic behind such generosity? Were these cigarette burns made by the owner or by one of the brief tenants of the house? Why were there so many signs that the house had been recently occupied: a jar of mayonnaise in the fridge that was still within its best-before date, the March issue of a magazine? Who were the last tenants here, how long did they live here and what had forced them to leave?

  Still dripping wet, I started to look for hidden clues. Mamá said I looked like a ghost in my big white towel and told me to dry myself right away before I dripped water all over the house.

  First I explored the living room and dining room, opening all the cupboards and all the drawers. I didn’t find any personal items. One of the drawers was lined with a piece of paper that fascinated me, it was covered with a magician’s props: top hats, white rabbits, magic wands. I thought of Bertuccio’s word, the game of Hangman and I wondered where I’d put the piece of paper he had scribbled the word on. I thought I remembered stuffing it into my trouser pocket and that calmed me.

  There was an old radiogram with a record-player that looked even cheaper than the cabinet it was in. The bottom shelf was full of singles. There was nothing I liked, it was mostly stupid instrumental stuff by Ray Conniff and Alain Debray, along with a bunch of singers I’d never heard of like Matt Monro and some guy with a name like a tongue-twister called Engelbert Humperdinck. It was Engelbert’s record that slipped out of its sleeve and fell to the floor.

  I bent down to pick it up and noticed something odd underneath the radiogram. It looked like a scrap of paper that had slipped down behind the cabinet and got stuck between the skirting board and the wall.

  It was a postcard of Mar del Plata: a typical photograph of the rambla. It was dated that summer, the summer of ’76. The sentences were simple and the handwriting was terrible. ‘My dear little Pedro, we hope you are having a lovely holiday. It’s good to have fun once in a while. Tell your mamá you can come and stay with us for a few days if you like. If you need anything, just call. You can both come and stay. You know how much we love you. Xxx’ and it was signed Beba and China.

  I wondered who Pedro was, whether he was a kid as the postcard made it sound. But the line I found most disturbing was: ‘It’s good to have fun once in a while’. Was this Pedro a really serious kid, or was he ‘special’ (deformities, extra-sensory powers, pustules all over his body, the sort of thing that makes a family lock their son up in an attic so no one ever sees him)? Or was there some tragedy in his past? A tragedy that still loomed over him, much to the regret of Beba and China?

  I took the postcard with me, a damp ghost seeking the privacy of his room.

  22

  I FIND TREASURE

  Our room was at the back of the house. From the window you could see the washing line and the small hut that served as a tool shed. Papá was wandering around, collecting wood for a barbecue. I called out to him through the window screen and asked if the people who had lent us the house had a son called Pedro. He said no, he didn’t know any kid called Pedro.

  The bedroom had two mismatched beds, a bedside table and a wardrobe. Otherwise it was completely empty. The drawers weren’t even lined with paper. I put the postcard on the bedside table and sat down on the bed. Under the bedspread, the mattress was bare.

  It was sheer frustration that prompted me to go to the wardrobe and stand on the bedside table to check a high shelf that, from what I could see, was empty. I had the bright idea of blowing hard to clear the thick layer of dust and almost blinded myself. I rubbed my eyes until they watered, but when I opened them again, it seemed to me I could see colours on the shelf that hadn’t been there before.

  Pedrito had left a book behind. I used the bedspread to wipe off the dirt and opened it. The proof was right there on the first page. It read ‘Pedro ’75’ in what was clearly a child’s handwriting.

  The book didn’t have many pages, but it was big and had colour illustrations on the title page. It was called Houdini, the Escape Artist. Inside the book were a number of colour plates printed on glossier paper than the text, and at the bottom of each photo there was a caption. The first one read: ‘Harry practises his first escapes with the help of his brother Theo’. (Houdini’s first name was Harry.) Another caption read: ‘In the asylum’ and showed Houdini in a padded cell, his arms strapped into a straitjacket. Another caption read: ‘The Chinese Water Torture Cell’ and the photo was of a glass box filled with water, with Houdini inside, upside down, his wrists handcuffed.

  Everything I knew about Houdini, I had seen in a TV film. Houdini was Tony Curtis. He was kind of like a magician and he escaped from all kinds of places. I remember them throwing him into a freezing lake, in a big trunk, I think. Houdini escaped from the trunk but nearly died because the lake was frozen and he couldn’t find a hole in the ice to get out. He had practised in his bathroom at home, filling his bath with ice cubes. (‘Houdini on the rocks.’)

  I read the book until I felt cold; then I got dressed and went back to reading. After a while I had to turn the light on because it was getting dark.

  23

  HOUDINI ESCAPES …

  This is a list of the things I found out from the book about Houdini:

  Houdini was born in Budapest on 24 March 1874 – a little more than a century ago!

  Houdini’s name wasn’t really Houdini, it was Erik Weisz. His father was Mayer Samuel Weisz, he was a rabbi (they’re the ones who breathe life into the Golems) and his mother’s name was Cecilia.

  Houdini’s family emigrated to the United States when he was four years old, and they were really poor so he had to go out to work shining shoes and selling newspapers when he was still a kid. In New York, he worked as a messenger boy and cut cloth for a t
ailor’s called Richter & Sons. But the only job he was any good at was being a messenger boy. Not only was little Erik fast, but he had a lot of stamina for his age; he could run and run practically all day. And in the spring, when the frozen surface of the Hudson had barely melted, he was always the first to dive in: swimming was his great passion.

  When Houdini began his career, he called himself Eric the Great, but later on, inspired by his famous French forerunner RobertHoudin, he decided to call himself Harry Houdini.

  When Houdini first started performing, his assistant was his little brother Theo.

  Houdini met Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner in 1894; they married two weeks later and after that she was always his assistant. (In the film, she was played by Janet Leigh, who was Tony Curtis’s wife in real life.)

  Houdini offered a reward to anyone who could defeat him with handcuffs, straitjackets, shackles, by locking him up in cages, in jail cells, in coffins, by throwing him into water weighed down with chains, claiming there was nothing he could not escape from. He was right; he never paid out a single reward. He often escaped from prisons to the mystification of dozens of journalists and the cheers of prisoners delighted to see that it really was possible to escape.

  Houdini’s most spectacular escape was the Chinese Water Torture Cell, where he spent four minutes suspended upside down underwater, escaping from his bonds before the very eyes of his enraptured audience.

  Houdini’s mother Cecilia Weisz died in 1913, plunging him into terrible grief.

  Houdini kept on going in spite of everything and became the most famous escape artist in history, a true artist, a man no one could contain, who made freedom his vocation.

  One not insignificant distinction made in the book (it opened my eyes) was the difference between what we call a magician (who is really just an illusionist, he has no magic powers, he just pretends he has) and an escape artist. Houdini belonged to the second category. He hated illusionists because they sullied the purity of his art: illusionists claim they can do things they can’t actually do whereas an escape artist only claims to be able to do things he actually can do, using no tricks apart from his peak physical condition and his ability to control his body. This was not a minor distinction to Houdini, who expended enormous effort on unmasking tricksters and frauds. Magicians deal in lies. Escape artists, on the other hand, dedicate themselves to the truth.