Kamchatka Page 8

  At dawn, in the middle of the week, the silence that pervaded the quinta was as piercing as a siren. Sometimes you might hear cicadas, a burst of static from a radio carried on the wind, but in general the silence was total. It devoured everything, it rang in your ears, it was impossible to ignore.

  When the television shut down for the night, the Midget’s energy depleted rapidly and he quickly fell asleep. TV was the sun to him: he rose with it in the morning and set with it at night. His surrender marked the beginning of peace in the house. The other noises – dishes being washed, teeth brushed, bolts shot home – were muted, bedtime conversations were conducted in a whisper so as not to disturb the Midget’s sleep, but also as a mark of respect for this silence.

  I wasn’t asleep yet, but I was tucked up in bed with my book in my hand. It was just then that I heard the Citroën calling to me from beyond the silence. When everything else was silent, the engine of the Citroën could be heard half a mile away. It sounded like an ordinary car bogged down in sand, its wheels spinning uselessly.

  I heard the gate, then mamá and papá whispering.

  Five minutes later, mamá came up to see us. The Midget was fast asleep, his face deformed from being pressed against his plastic Goofy.

  Mamá sat on the bed and told me she’d bought me the new issue of Superman, but it had been confiscated by customs (which meant that papá wanted to read it first). I kissed her, genuinely grateful. Back then I was a Superman kid. Superman fans liked superhuman powers, the brightly coloured costumes, the troubling presence of Lois Lane; we waited for each fortnightly issue of the Mexican edition with a religious fervour and despised Batman fans, who we considered behind the times.

  Mamá looked over at the Midget and asked if he had given me much trouble. Actually, I said, he was behaving himself pretty well, given the circumstances. He was bearing his privations with a stoicism we never realized he was capable of. Mamá nodded. She asked how I was bearing up. I sighed. I didn’t want to be more Midget-like than the Midget but the truth was I missed everything – I missed Bertuccio, I missed the girl in my English class I had a crush on. (Her name was Mara and she was prettier than a Barbie doll.) I missed my bed and my pillow, my books and my bike; I missed my Airfix planes, my fortress with the movable drawbridge and the model Stuka my grandparents had given me; I missed my drawing pads and my drawings, my sailboat and my battery-powered speedboat; I missed my remote controlled Mercedes and the few Matchbox cars that had survived my brother, my fibreglass bow and arrow, my collection of Nippur de Lagash comics, my Editorial Novaro magazines and the Beatles record that Ana gave me when she got tired of us calling and begging her to play it over the phone.

  I told mamá I was fine.

  She asked me about the book I was reading. I told her where I’d found it and showed her Pedro’s signature and the postcard from Beba and China, the glue that held together my theories about the previous tenants. The truth was I felt sorry for Pedro. I assumed he was devastated at losing his book on Houdini; I was particularly sensitive to losing things. But mamá demolished my theory, suggesting that maybe Pedro had done it on purpose, maybe he had left the book and the letter as a welcome present for me, hypothesizing a chain of gifts that stretched back to the kid who had lived in the quinta before Pedro (what had Pedro’s present been?) and forward to me, because at some point we would leave and I should think about the boy who might come here after me. Alluding to our Spartan circumstances, I pointed out that for me to leave something, I had to have something in the first place. Mamá shot me a look, the look that means she’s thinking this kid is going to grow up to be a lawyer, took the book from my hands and looked at it, trying to find some way to change the subject.

  Houdini was staring her in the face. ‘Houdini the magician?’ she asked, proffering the carrot of an easy response.

  But I volleyed the ball firmly back into her court. ‘Houdini wasn’t a magician, he was an escape artist. It’s not the same at all. That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up, an escape artist!’

  Since the uncertainties of the present weighed heavily on me, I had been spending a lot of time thinking about my future. The idea of becoming an escape artist struck me as clearly as a vision: once the notion was firmly planted in my brain, all my worries disappeared. Now I had a plan, something that would, in the near future, make it possible to tie up the loose ends of my circumstances. I imagined that Houdini himself had done much the same thing. Making his choice made it possible for him to rearrange the jigsaw pieces of his life, giving meaning to each individual piece (leaving his native Hungary, the longing for transcendence of his father, the rabbi, the poverty, his physical prowess) and, by fitting the pieces together differently, turn it into something new.

  Mamá looked at the illustration of the Chinese Water Torture Cell, then stared at me as if trying to gauge how serious I was. I had gone through phases of wanting to be a fireman and an astronaut, which mamá had ignored, knowing they were just passing whims. Later I had wanted to be a doctor, an architect, a marine biologist, choices she approved of since they meant I would go to university. Mamá had a tendency to think that any career choice was valid if you could get a doctorate in it. Given there was no such thing as a Ph.D. in escape artistry, I knew there was trouble ahead.

  ‘It looks dangerous,’ she said, looking at the illustration again.

  ‘That’s the whole point.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with danger, as long as you take all possible precautions.’

  ‘Public transport is dangerous,’ I said.

  ‘And being a TV repair man,’ she said.

  ‘And living in Argentina,’ I said.

  ‘So you called yourself Harry after Houdini?’ she said, sidestepping the subject.

  ‘Where did you come up with the name Flavia?’

  ‘I don’t think I can tell you.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Life isn’t fair. It may be beautiful, but it’s not fair. So what’s with this sarcophagus?’

  ‘Houdini used to get inside all chained up, then they’d throw the trunk in the water. He’d be in there for ages, but he never drowned.’

  ‘Because he carefully calculated the air.’

  ‘You don’t calculate air, you breathe it.’

  ‘What I mean is that he knew how much air he had when he was in the trunk, so he knew how long he could stay underwater. If you really want to be an escape artist, you’ll need to be able to calculate too.’

  ‘OK then, I’ve changed my mind. Do bus drivers have to calculate things?’

  ‘Journeys.’

  ‘Archaeologists?’

  ‘Years.’

  ‘Nurses?’

  ‘Doses.’

  ‘I could be an escape artist and you could be my assistant.’

  ‘For a reasonable price. Let’s talk figures.’

  She kissed me, tucked me in and told me that she loved me. I must have fallen asleep in her arms. My sun was different from the Midget’s.

  Señora Vicente was a very good mother.

  31

  A FOOLPROOF PLAN

  That night another toad drowned in the swimming pool. Without even waiting for breakfast, me and the Midget decided to put a stop to this.

  It was tempting to create a physical barrier to stop the toads from getting into the water, a solution as drastic as it would be effective. But I didn’t want to alter the course of their lives, to usurp the preeminent role of Destiny. Besides, the swimming pool might be of crucial importance to the toads without my knowing – it might be full of their eggs.

  Consequently we opted for a middle way, which also had the benefit of being practical. Using an old wooden board we found in the shed and a length of wire, we managed to make a diving board that worked in reverse. Whereas diving boards were designed for men to launch themselves into the water, our reverse diving board would be used by toads to launch themselves onto dry land.

  I used the wire to attach the b
oard between the handrails of the ladder. This way, one end of the plank stuck out into the air. The other end dipped below the surface of the water.

  Until now, if a toad fell into the pool it was bound to die. It would swim around, exhausted, searching vainly for a way out, crashing into the sides of the pool until finally it went under. The reverse diving board offered the toads the way out that they hadn’t had up until then. If they swam up to it, they could clamber onto the plank and breathe and they could climb up to the other end and leap into the long grass whenever they wanted, as often as they wanted.

  Some of them would still die. They wouldn’t notice the plank, or they wouldn’t understand its potential. But the lucky toads would use the reverse diving board to save themselves, and the cleverest toads, hearing the word ‘Eureka’ in their tiny brains, would save themselves a second time, and a third time. Their offspring (I was still a Lamarckian back then) would be born with an innate ‘Eureka’ and they would know what to do, what to look for whenever they fell into this swimming pool which had proved so lethal to their forebears.

  ‘When you have no choice but to change, you change. That’s what Señorita Barbeito told me. It’s called the principle of necessity. The toads have to change so they won’t die. All they need is a chance,’ I explained to the Midget.

  ‘D’you think that we’re as disgusting to God as toads are to me?’ asked the Midget.

  ‘Right, that’s it,’ I said, giving the wire a last twist.

  All that was needed now was time.

  32

  CYRUS AND THE RIVER

  When one of his favourite horses drowned while attempting to cross it, Cyrus the Great, king of the Persians, furious with rage, vowed to humble the river Gyndes. He stopped his army, who were marching on Babylonia, and forced his soldiers to divert the course of the river, digging 360 trenches to channel the water away. Cyrus wanted the waters to dissipate onto the plain, pooling in swamps and marshes, and for the original riverbed to run dry. The extent of the humiliation he inflicted on the river was precise: at its deepest point the river Gyndes was not to come above a woman’s knee.

  This story is usually told to emphasize the power of Cyrus, the king who mutilated a river, who had his soldiers work like slaves to avenge a horse. The leader of the most powerful army in the world, whose hail of arrows could eclipse the sun, Cyrus would have punished the sun for its envy, or the moon, or the seas.

  My response to the story of Cyrus was always different. Even as a kid I thought Cyrus was ignorant and stupid. A river can’t murder someone, let alone be malicious; a river is just a river. It was stupid to jeopardize his campaign on a whim, making his men run the risk of injuring themselves as they dug the trenches, reducing their effectiveness with their bows and arrows and their swords. The story doesn’t say as much, but some of the soldiers must have died during the digging, making his revenge all the more costly. No horse would ever receive a more bizarre tribute.

  Over the years, my view of Cyrus ceased to be quite so black and white. At first Cyrus was an exotic prince, with braids in his beard, who spoke a barbaric language and whose decisions could be understood only in the context of the Olympian logic of great kings and warriors. Then time passed (there are rivers that even Cyrus could not stop) and when I went back and read the story of Cyrus again, he didn’t feel alien or unfathomable. He seemed like a lot of people I knew, people with whom I shared a human frailty: the tendency to accumulate power without wondering why or how to use it. People who have Cyrus’s power (military, political, economic) always forget that with power come responsibilities, they prefer to believe that evil exists only in other people. Diverting a river is easier than facing the truth; Cyrus did not want to acknowledge the fact that his horse would not have drowned if he had not forced it to try and cross the river.

  I’ve known a lot of Cyruses in my life. Some of them now only appear in books nobody ever reads. Others walk the same streets, breathe the same air as we do. And though they now live in palaces and people pay them tribute, time will do to them what it did to Cyrus. Men who accumulate power and misuse it are like coins with only one face, they have no currency in any market.

  I was thinking about the story of Cyrus as we worked on the reverse diving board. The fact that there was no obvious connection between the two ends of the plank did not mean no connection existed; we don’t see the network of roots that keeps the tree anchored in the ground, but it’s there just the same.

  But I admit, I came to no conclusions. I like to think that the way in which others had forcibly diverted the course of my life back then had conferred on me a compassion beyond my years. I like to think that I was better than Cyrus, that I assumed responsibility for the death of the toads and respected the existence of the river. I like to think I was trying to act according to the wisdom of nature, doing no more than nature might have done in toppling a tree whose branches might dip into the swimming pool. At the time I thought none of these things, preoccupied as I was by The Invaders and Houdini, but that does not mean these things did not contribute to my actions. If I have learned anything in life, it is that we do not think only with our brains. We think with our bodies too, with our emotions; we think with our concept of time.

  On the face of it, the fact that, a few pages later, Cyrus dies and has his head cut off and plunged into a bath of blood has no connection with the story of the river Gyndes. And yet something tells me that the truth is not so simple.

  We see with more than our eyes; we think with more than our brain.

  33

  WHAT THEY KNEW

  I knew we were in some kind of danger. I knew that the military junta was hunting down all those who opposed it, in particular self-confessed Peronists and/or those who held left-wing views – a broad category that included papá, mamá and the ‘uncles’. I knew that if mamá and papá were caught, they’d be arrested, just as papá’s partner had been arrested. And I knew that there was a risk of lethal force. The bullets that killed Tio Rodolfo had not come from his own gun, if in fact he had actually been carrying one when he died.

  But danger was a secondary consideration. Papá had already disappeared for a couple of days once before, some time in 1974 or 1975, at the peak of the Triple A’s activities, only to reappear safe and sound and convinced that things had calmed down. Life went on. Nothing serious ever happened. Political stuff. People campaign, go on marches and demonstrations, sing songs and make speeches. Sometimes they get a round of applause, sometimes a brickbat.

  This time things were clearly more serious – after all, this was the first time that me and the Midget had become caught up in it – but not really serious. For the time being we all had to disappear for a few days. After that, we’d go back to our house, back to our lives and everything would go on as before, with or without the military.

  What bothered me, my main preoccupation, was the disruption to my daily life, the fact that I had been cut off from my games with Bertuccio, from my belongings (given that I no longer had access to them whenever and wherever I wanted to); cut off from my world, the streets, the neighbours, the local grocer, the guy at the local newsstand, my club; cut off from a universe of familiar sensations: the smell of my bed linen, the feeling of the floor beneath my feet when I got up, the taste of tap water, the sound of sawing and hammering drifting in from the patio, the sight of mamá’s flowerbeds, the rough feel of the knobs on my TV.

  I could pretend our time at the quinta was a spur of the moment holiday – after all, that first weekend we spent more time with papá and mamá than we had in months – but it was hard to forget that it was a holiday we had been forced to take. A holiday that is planned, that you dream about, is one thing. It was a very different matter to be forced to run away, forced to live somewhere else – however wonderful the quinta was – until the mists cleared and we got our own lives back.

  For years, when I was living in Kamchatka, keeping watch for wild bears, I thought I was the one who had been
forced to go through the long tunnel that was the winter of 1976 blindfolded. In time, I came to realize that mamá and papá had been almost as blind as I was. Their political beliefs were clear and unambiguous; they would never give them up. But before 24 March 1976, when the military coup occurred, they knew exactly what to expect. Afterwards, they didn’t know what to expect anymore. (The dictatorship began on 24 March, Houdini was born on 24 March. Time is strange and everything occurs simultaneously.)

  The advent of the dictatorship changed the rules of the game. Everywhere my parents looked they saw shadows. They knew the military junta were hunting them, just as they were hunting down their political comrades, but what they didn’t know was what happened to those who were caught. They simply vanished into thin air. Their families searched for them, but in the police stations, the army barracks, the courts, everyone claimed to know nothing. No arrest warrants had been issued, no charges brought. Their names did not appear on any list of prisoners. A week after papá’s partner was hauled away, nobody knew anything of his whereabouts.

  These first months were the months of devastation. Many people thought that all they needed to do was retire from political activism and they would be spared. But they were dragged from their homes regardless. Public places – bars, cinemas, restaurants, theatres – were dangerous because a raid could occur any place, any time. Leaving the house without papers was dangerous because being unable to prove one’s identity was sufficient reason to wind up in a police station. But leaving home carrying identity papers was more dangerous still. Once identified, there was no need to take someone to the police station; they were dragged away and – poof – they vanished into thin air.