Kamchatka Page 7

  Toads are vile, horrid creatures. Consider their beady eyes, cruel and black as obsidian. Consider their cold, clammy skin covered with ridges and pustules, the webbing between their toes, the almost human agility of their back legs …

  ‘Once upon a time we were just like that toad,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t start …’ said the Midget.

  ‘No, it’s true, thousands of years ago. We lived in the ocean and we crawled out to try our luck on land. First we stuck our heads out, then we crawled out and lay on the beach for a while.’

  ‘I’m telling mamá.’

  ‘Some species stayed in the water and they’re still aquatic, some got used to both and they became amphibians, like toads, who spend half their time in the water and the other half on land. If they stay in one place for too long, they die, like this one.’

  ‘Can a toad drown?’

  ‘This one obviously saw the pool and jumped in thinking it was a pond or a lake and then he realized he was stuck. Ponds and lakes have a bank, so you can go in gradually and get out gradually. Swimming pools are different – either you’re in or you’re out. And toads don’t know how to use ladders.’

  ‘We have to bury him.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘But first we have to hold a wake for him. Grandma Matilde says the wake is the most important part.’

  ‘She only says that because she likes parties.’

  ‘Abuela says you have a wake for someone to make sure the person is dead and not just asleep.’

  ‘That’s just an old wives’ tale. How could anyone sleep with all their relatives bawling in their ear?’

  ‘What’s the difference between a wake and a vigil?’

  ‘None, I think.’

  ‘It has to be that at a wake, they’re trying to wake the dead person and at a vigil they’re just … they just vigil. Are you sure it’s dead? What if it’s just asleep?’

  I picked the toad up by one leg, dangling it in front of the Midget’s face. He ran off howling and only stopped when he got to a safe distance.

  ‘Actually, he looks a lot like you,’ I said.

  ‘Liar!’ the Midget yelled from afar.

  We picked a shady spot at the foot of a tree. I went and found a spade in the shed and started digging a hole. While I was digging, I went on explaining to the Midget all the stuff Señorita Barbeito had taught us with her illustrations and the documentary, about how after the first amphibians, species evolved who could only absorb oxygen directly from the atmosphere and live on land, and about specialized habitats and stuff like that. The Midget glared at me suspiciously because he couldn’t believe that all vertebrates shared common characteristics.

  ‘Frogs have a sense of taste just like hens, honest, I swear. If you peel the skin off a chimpanzee it looks just like a huge frog, they even smell the same. You’re lucky you have a big brother to explain all this stuff to you.’

  As a rule, reality and all its trappings are more improbable than any fiction. What writer would have dreamed up the Komodo dragon, or tonsils or the weird way we go about reproducing? What imagination could have thought of having coral reefs made by tiny animals excreting calcium from their bodies? Who would have the nerve to create a world like ours, ruled over by the descendants of toads and frogs and salamanders and newts?

  During the digging and the burial, the Midget said nothing; he listened to what I was saying, a gleam of suspicion in his eyes. But in the end, something I said must have got through to him, because after we had levelled off the grave, he placed stones on the little mound and asked me if toads go to heaven too.

  28

  A PEACEABLE INTERREGNUM

  The weekend slipped by peacefully. An outsider watching us would merely have witnessed the Vicente family in blissful dolce far niente, making the most of the sunshine, the grounds, the swimming pool and enjoying the gastronomic holy trinity of the Argentine middle class: asados (barbecued meat), pasta (store bought, obviously, since mamá never set foot in the kitchen) and facturas (pastries).

  A more attentive eye would probably have noticed that mamá and papá left the quinta with bizarre frequency for periods of no more than fifteen minutes, sometimes in the Citroën, sometimes on foot, but never together. (When they needed to phone someone, it was safer to use a payphone rather than the phone in the quinta.) And if this attentive eye were accompanied by a keen ear, it might decide that the Vicente family’s habit of constantly asking each other blatantly obvious questions (What’s your name? When were you born? What are your parents’ names? What’s your brother’s name?) was some private family game whose rules were incomprehensible to the general public.

  Of the events that took place during those days, a few deserve to be recorded; for example, Papá started to grow a moustache. After three days he had a perceptible shadow on his upper lip which, to me and the Midget, looked like a respectable moustache, but mamá said it looked like papá had been drinking the Midget’s Nesquik and forgotten to wipe his mouth. On Sunday morning, the three men of the house stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Papá David declared himself satisfied with his moustache and, taking a pair of scissors, began to shape it. Harry, his first-born, bewailed his own smooth face and declared his desire to grow a thin moustache in the style of Mandrake the magician as soon as possible. Simón, the younger son, pronounced himself perfectly content with his freshfaced, clean-shaven appearance, in keeping with his television idol, Simon Templar, and asked why Templar was the only saint he’d ever seen who didn’t have a beard or a moustache.

  There had been three games of Risk, the results of which require no comment. I had time to reread the book about Houdini and to come up with some ideas about my future, which I’ll talk about later.

  The Vicente family’s visit to the local church for midday mass was an event in itself. As far as I could remember, I had never been in a church in my life, except for baptisms and weddings. Consequently I knew nothing whatever of the peculiar rites of the Catholic mass. Worse still, what might have been an adventure became a sort of torture as soon as we started to get ready. Mamá had got it into her head that the Vicente family was very devout, so she had us repeat the words of the Our Father, the Creed and the Hail Mary both in the quinta and again in the car, because as soon as we got to the church we had to be able to pretend to follow the ceremony with the confidence of committed believers.

  Both my parents had been raised Catholic and both, in time, had lapsed. Papá had put his faith in the laws of man while mamá devoted herself to the laws of science, thereby distancing herself from the sanctimonious superciliousness of grandma Matilde. Together they had agreed that the Midget and I should be raised in complete and utter ignorance of all things religious. I suppose they thought they were doing us a favour, but growing up differently, we had real trouble dealing with commonplace concepts like heaven and hell. Our lack of reliable information about our eligibility for membership of certain clubs caused us occasional distress. And our meagre understanding of the central articles of the Catholic faith also contributed to my sense of being a fish out of water.

  I remember that one Holy Week, the magazine I got every Thursday, Anteojito, came with a free poster depicting the Stations of the Cross. I burned the poster and flushed the ashes down the toilet to dispose of the evidence. The idea that I was supposed to pin this graphic depiction of torture and death on my wall seemed to me as obscene as if someone had suggested decorating my room with pictures of the inner workings of Auschwitz.

  But my most traumatic experience came when I watched The Miracle of Marcelino, an old movie I caught on Channel 9 one night. Marcelino is an orphan boy taken in by the monks of the local monastery. One day he’s up in the attic, looking for something, when suddenly he hears a voice asking for water. Marcelino looks around but he can’t see anyone, because there’s no one in the room except him. The voice is coming from a huge crucifix on the wall, where the wooden figure of Christ is asking him for a drink.

>   The worst thing about the movie was that, at the end, when Marcelino dies, the fat monk cries tears of joy and the bells ring out to celebrate the fact that the boy had been ‘chosen’ by the wooden doll. (The film, I should point out, ignores the basic fact that wood expands when it gets wet. With all the water he was drinking, there wouldn’t be a cross strong enough to hold up a fat Christ.) Everything about the film made it seem as though we were supposed to rejoice because Marcelino was a saint and had been taken up into heaven, but all I could think was that Marcelino had been murdered by a big wooden statue and nobody was doing anything about it.

  From then on, whenever me and my friends told each other horror stories, they would tell stories about Frankenstein and mummies and Dracula, but whenever I mentioned the wooden Christ (oh, I nearly forgot, the statue rips one of his hands from the Cross so he can take the cup Marcelino offers him) there was a stony silence and they all looked at me like I was weird, which I suppose I was. After a while I learned to keep my mouth shut. My friends would wake up in the middle of the night, terrified they were being hunted by werewolves and headless horsemen. I’d wake up screaming, trying to escape from murderous T-shirts, ravenous Saturns and wooden Christs who clambered down from their Crosses and lumbered after me, trying to convince me that the only good child is a dead child.

  On the subject of religion, the Midget had his own issues, but they were minor by comparison. He asked mamá if he could skip the line in the Our Father where it says, ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’, because he was too little to have done any trespassing. The thing that really worried him about Catholicism was the concept of the resurrection of the flesh; I don’t know exactly what he imagined the phrase meant, but I have a pretty good idea.

  And so we arrived at the village church with quavering hearts, determined to play the part of the devout Vicente family to the hilt. Papá was in his Sunday best, mamá was wearing a tailored trouser suit and me and the Midget were wearing the matching shirts and ties we usually wore under our white school smocks, an outfit I loathed with every atom in my body. The church, built on a corner of the main square, was as unremarkable as the village. Clearly everyone in the village went to midday mass on Sundays, since we had to park the Citroën two blocks away.

  After the first few minutes of panic, I was bored stiff. Whenever we were supposed to do something, mamá would squeeze my leg and I’d say the Creed or whatever it was I was supposed to say. The rest of the time was just spent standing up when everyone else stood up and kneeling down when everyone knelt.

  I know that the Midget, for his part, was profoundly affected by his first time at mass. He had been so thoroughly instructed in the simple art of making the sign of the Cross (which he practised over and over, even though, like most kids his age, he couldn’t tell his left from his right), that the sign that begins and ends the mass made a profound and lasting impression on him. Like Pavlov’s dog, the Midget had been prepared to make that sign whenever he was told to, what he was not prepared for was the sight of hundreds of people all making it at once. The combination of the mysterious, cabbalistic nature of the gesture, and the sight of all these people performing it simultaneously so astonished the Midget that his eyes popped out of his head as if he’d just seen water turned into wine. I suspect that, for the first time, he felt part of something bigger than the sacred family unit, something that both transcended and included us.

  When we got back to the quinta, there was another dead toad in the pool. I cursed my lack of foresight and resolved to do something so this wouldn’t happen again, because I didn’t believe that the only good toad was a dead toad – just the opposite.

  The Midget asked if he could perform the last rites.

  29

  WE FIND OURSELVES ALONE

  When we woke up on Monday at about noon, mamá wasn’t there. Papá, in the dining room, had taken the old grandfather clock apart, laying the countless pieces over an old blanket, the diningroom table, even the sideboard. It looked as though Time itself had exploded, scattering tiny pieces all over the place.

  The Midget made himself some Nesquik. I grabbed a banana and went out into the grounds with the book about Houdini under my arm. (The Citroën was not parked in the usual place. Obviously mamá had taken it.) At noon papá turned on the news and turned up the volume so he could listen without having to stop working on the clock. I was some way away but even so, I couldn’t help hearing. There was nothing new. Presidente this, Armada that, new economic measures, the military government’s tireless struggle against traitorous subversion, evil guerrillas, the province of Tucumán, the dollar, same old same old. The day stretched out languidly, we didn’t even have a proper lunch. If one of us felt hungry we just went to the fridge, grabbed whatever we could find and tried to find somewhere to eat that wasn’t already covered with fragments of time. Cold chicken sat next to the packet of Nesquik, which sat next to the carcass of an empty packet of biscuits.

  Given its strategic position in front of the TV, the coffee table was quickly covered in rubbish and dirty dishes. (By common consent, we decided: a dirty glass is a discarded glass. Every time one of us wanted a drink, we simply took a clean glass from the kitchen.) Over the hours, the dirty glasses piled up in strata with geological precision. I went into the pool whenever I felt like it and nobody nagged me about waiting an hour after eating. There was news followed by soap operas followed by cartoons and then the news again with more stories about the economy, more deaths, more about the man with the moustache who looked like a bad guy.

  By now, papá seemed to have given up on the clock, whose entrails still lay strewn where they had fallen. Having decided to watch the news, he made some space on the coffee table for his bottle of Gancia and his ulcer medicine and began to soliloquize. ‘Who cares what you have to say, you reactionary lackey,’ he began, talking to the newsreader, a phrase that would have been interesting coming from the mouth of Hamlet in Act I, scene IV, when he first meets the ghost. ‘I know more about what’s going on in this country from watching The Invaders than listening to you,’ he grumbled, still glaring at the newsreader. ‘Go ahead! Whitewash the prisoners,’ papá was now offering advice to the Minister of the Interior. ‘Go on, whitewash the whole situation, there are no “Disappeared”, there are no prisoners …’

  Since by now the sun had set, and it was chilly, me and the Midget gravitated towards the warm glow of the TV screen. The Midget was conducting some experiment using empty bottles, dirty glasses, water, flour, and some screws and paintbrushes he’d taken from the tool shed. Whenever his experiment seemed to come to a standstill, to some scientific crossroads, some other item on the coffee table offered him a new way forward. The coffee table was laden with potential. Coke, for example, mixed with Nesquik, increased the potential for making froth.

  I was rereading the Houdini book, looking for clues about how he managed his escapes. The book talked a lot about physical preparation and mental concentration but it was silent on the details of how each escape was done: the writer was probably an escape artist himself and had the greatest respect for professional secrecy. And so I found myself looking at the frontispiece, ‘Harry practises his first escapes with the help of his brother Theo’, as if the illustration might give me some answer the text refused to divulge, and glanced over at papá with his Gancia, at the disembowelled grandfather clock, at the Midget, who had now whipped his experimental gloop until it was just right, and it occurred to me that maybe the illustration had given me the answer, maybe it was just a matter of starting.

  I took off my belt (my belt that, apart from the usual buckle and holes, was made of some kind of elastic material: don’t ask) and asked the Midget to tie me to my chair. His face and hands covered in flour, the Midget stared at me, trying to figure out if this was some kind of trap. I showed him the illustration in the book. He understood straight off.

  The lackey newsreader must have said something terrible because
papá leapt to his feet and stormed out into the garden where he could say any words he liked without having to restrain himself.

  The Midget tied my hands behind my back. He made a slipknot and then wound the belt around my wrists a thousand times, pulling the elastic as tight as he could. He asked me if he had done it right. I struggled a bit, just enough to make sure the belt didn’t come off at the first attempt.

  ‘Wait, I forgot something,’ he said. He grabbed the bottle of gloop he’d been stirring with an old paintbrush and painted some on my face.

  Since I was tied up, there was nothing I could do. I asked him if he’d gone crazy. The gloop tasted like Nesquik-flavoured pizza dough.

  ‘I’m whitewashing the prisoner. Didn’t you hear what papá said? You have to whitewash the prisoners!’

  We ate dinner in silence, just the three of us. Cold leftovers from the barbecue, with lots of mayonnaise. It was getting late. We surveyed our handiwork – the living room and dining room were a disaster area, stained chairs, scattered clock parts, organic waste – silently evaluating our complicity in this chaos. There never was a more perfect demonstration of the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics (which concerns the dispersal of energy), establishing the tendency of systems to gradually move from order to disorder. And yet, our efforts had fallen short. All the chaos in the world had not been enough to conjure up mamá.

  When, in despair, we finally decided to wash the dishes, we discovered there was no water. We had forgotten to fill the tank.

  30

  A DECISION AT DAWN

  The whole region was divided into quintas – country houses owned by middle-class families that stood empty most of the year except in summer, or at weekends. There was nothing showy about them, the plots were small, and most of the houses, like ours, were simple bungalows, some of them half-finished, waiting for some spare cash, or for a new owner willing to take a chance on them. The roads were just dirt tracks; it was a five-minute drive from our gate to the nearest proper road. The plots were bounded by fences or by young poplars, their suppleness an attempt to soften the rigid boundaries.