Authors: César Aira
When Abel Reyes reached the top floor (curiously, climbing the stairs
never seemed to cost him any effort: he let his mind wander, and before he knew
it, he was there) he found his uncle’s children in the middle of their lunch.
The caretaker’s apartment had been minimally fitted out, ahead of the rest of
the building, to make it livable for Viñas and his family. But not much had been
done, just the bare minimum. No tiles on the floor, no plaster on the ceiling,
or paint on the walls; no fittings in the bathroom, or glass in the windows. But
there was running water (although it hadn’t been running for long), and
electricity from a precariously rigged-up cable. That was all they
needed. There were two medium-sized rooms, plus the kitchen and
bathroom. All the furniture was borrowed and rudimentary. The children were
sitting around a homemade table, with chops and peas on their plates. They
didn’t want to eat, of course. In front of Patri were four glasses, a bottle of
soda water, and a carton of orange juice. She was looking severely at her
half-siblings, who were looking at the glasses and whimpering. The
idea was to make them understand that unless they ate, they wouldn’t get
anything to drink. They were dying of thirst, they said. Their mother was making
macaroons in the kitchen, and had switched off for the moment. Patri, being
younger, had more patience; in fact, since she was still a child in some ways,
she was patient to a fault, and rose to the children’s challenge, refusing to
yield a drop. Trying all their options with a wicked cunning, they cried out to
their mother. But Elisa didn’t respond, not just because she was in the kitchen;
her mind was elsewhere. All of a sudden Patri filled the glasses with juice and
soda and distributed them. The children drank eagerly. She finished her chop and
peas, and had a drink as well. The baby girl, sitting by her side, wanted to
leave the table. Patri picked her up and began to spoon-feed her. The
others started getting rowdy. Juan Sebastián, the eldest, had eaten more than
the others, but still not finished his meal. The older girl, Blanca Isabel,
hadn’t even started, and was already asking for more to drink. The heat in the
dining room was intense, but the light was very mild, because the window was
covered with a piece of cardboard. The sun was beating on the cardboard, which
was thick, but seemed to be slightly translucent. That summer light is
incredibly strong.
What could you do to cool off up there? Well, nothing. It was pure
heat, perfectly real and concrete. Beyond the shadow of a doubt. And yet, if not
shored up by eternities of faith, it would have crumbled to a puff of
ice-dust. Having drunk a glass of soda water and juice, not so much
because she was thirsty, but to set an example for the children, Patri was
suddenly covered in perspiration. Blanca Isabel, who didn’t miss a thing, said,
Did you go for a dip? Thinking it wouldn’t have such a spectacular effect, Patri
helped herself to another glass. Feeling she had done it to taunt them, Juan
Sebastián leapt to his feet and ran to the kitchen to tell his mother, who paid
him no attention. They all started crying out for more to drink. You’ll have to
make do with tap water, because that’s all there is left, said Patri, showing
them the remaining soda. She gathered up the glasses again to make orangeade,
with the dregs, in equal quantities, but only for those who would eat. They made
an effort, and she even had to cut the remains of Ernesto and Blanca Isabel’s
chops into little pieces. Elisa looked out and asked if they had finished. The
meat, said Patri, but not the peas. Sebastián was the only one who had polished
off his meal, but what a performance it had been. His mother asked him if he
wanted any more. He replied with a groan: he had eaten so much, he was full,
stuffed. Patri distributed the glasses. The children emptied them in the blink
of an eye. She left Jacqueline on her chair and went to the kitchen to get the
grapes. It’s the same every day, she said to Elisa: they just don’t want to eat.
It’s because of the heat, Elisa replied, poor things. She asked Patri if she
wanted to finish the peas. Echoing the children, she said she couldn’t. But
wasn’t Elisa going to have anything? She hadn’t even sat down. No, she said, she
wasn’t hungry. Although, in the end, she ate the plate of leftover peas, because
she hated to waste them. Patri went back into the dining room with the grapes
and a clean knife, with which she cut them in half and took out the seeds. Each
child received one grape at a time, and Jacqueline’s took a bit longer, because
she had to remove the skin as well. Luckily she was good with her hands.
Abel went straight to the kitchen and put the bottle of bleach on the
bench for his aunt. There was a big skylight in the ceiling, and at that hour of
the day, the sun was shining straight into it. Elisa had covered it with a blue
towel, which had been wet for a while. That might have afforded some protection
from the heat, but in any case it was stifling, especially since she had been
cooking. She asked Abel if he was going to stay and eat with the men. Well I’m
not going to leave now, am I, he said, as if it were obvious. Have you told your
mother? No, he hadn’t, why? Because she’ll be expecting you, she said. It hadn’t
occurred to him. But Abel said he didn’t think she would, since he hadn’t told
her about the half-holiday. She might have worked that out for
herself, said Elisa. I don’t think so, I don’t think so, said Abel impatiently.
His aunt didn’t really know his mother, he thought. She didn’t realize that his
mother didn’t look after him the way she looked after her children, or even her
nieces and nephews. Like all adolescents, he believed that any family was
preferable to his own. The belief was entirely unfounded, but he held it all the
same. Elisa had guessed all this, and let it pass. She asked him who they had
invited for the New Year celebrations. Abel replied: his elder brother’s
girlfriend and her family. And he launched into a detailed description of those
potential relatives, making them out to be the epitome of all the virtues and
powers. His brother’s future brother-in-law had an
auto-repair shop, and Abel liked to portray him as a big shot, someone
who could do just what he liked, whatever took his fancy, because he had the
means. He ran through a detailed catalogue of the big shot’s properties,
exaggerating outrageously. Because of some subtle bias in the subject, or
subjects in general, property led on to food. Abel believed that he had very
special tastes, worthy of careful study, without which they might seem a mere
jumble of preferences. Elisa let him go on, but her mind soon wandered. There
was no point feeling too sorry for him just because he was ugly and stupid. She
made a suggestion: it would be best not to drink wine at lunch. They’re all
going to end up trashed, those animals, she said. I never drink wine, said Abel,
with a characteristic lack of tact (he was speaking to the wife of the biggest
drunk in the family!). When Patri came in to get the grapes, they greeted each
other with a kiss. She thought he was ridiculous, but was quite fond of him.
They always laughed about him behind his back, because of his hair. Her hair and
his were the same length, and even the same kind: slightly coarse, straight and
black. When the girl went out, he chatted on and on with Elisa, until, fed up,
she told him to go down, because the men would probably have started eating
already.
When they had finished the grapes, the children escaped, without
shoes, and went to play in the empty swimming pool, which was in full sun.
But they loved it, almost as if the pool were full and they were splashing
about in cool water. The three older children were always playing
make-believe adventure games, and the baby girl tagged along. She
was always there, and was sometimes useful, as a victim, for example, a role
that didn’t require much skill, or none at all. After various days of other
scenarios, they had returned to car racing. They had a number of little
plastic cars. Their childish instincts had alerted them to the silence
below, where the builders had stopped working, so they ventured down the
stairs to the sixth floor, and then to the fifth. The cars went down the
stairs in little hands and parked in the farthest rooms. Excited to have the
whole building to themselves, or at least the upper floors, the children
complicated their game, leaving a car on one floor and going down to the
next, then coming back up to look for it, taking unfamiliar routes. A
building site was the least appropriate place for a car race (although ideal
for hide and seek), and yet the adverse conditions made the game special,
giving it a novel, impossible flavor, which made them forget everything
else. They felt they had gone straight to the heart of truth or art.
Jacqueline kept getting lost and crying. Ernesto, who was specially attached
to her, went to the rescue, up or down, depending on where he was. The only
interruption occurred when Abel said, Careful not to fall, and continued on
his way down to the ground floor. When he was two floors below them, they
began to call out “Mophead!” Then they resumed their game with the toy cars,
going up and down. A breeze was blowing over those superposed platforms, but
it was slight and not very refreshing; in any case the heat would probably
begin to ease off once the sun began to go down. The light must have been
changing, gradually, but it wasn’t noticeable; the
brightly-colored toy cars were the light-meters in the
children’s game. They went down to the third floor, but didn’t dare go any
further, because they could hear the men’s voices.
All the builders had, in fact, gone downstairs a fair while before,
and since they wouldn’t be returning to work, had washed and changed, to make
themselves more comfortable for lunch. The radicals among them had hosed
themselves down and dried off in the sun, out in the back yard. They had taken
off their work clothes, which, once shed, were so many dusty, torn and mended
(or not even mended) rags, and packed them away in their bags. Clean now, hair
combed, they sat down around a table made of planks to wait for lunch. They had
put the table as far away as possible from the grill, where Aníbal Soto was
checking on the progress of the meat. There were ten of them in all. As well as
Viñas and Reyes, there were two other Chileans: Enrique Castro and Felipe Rojas.
Rojas was known as Pocketman because he was in the habit of keeping his hands in
his pockets, even when he was sitting down. It was a pretext for endless jokes.
Now, for example, he was sitting with a glass in his left hand and his right
hand in his pocket. Next to him was the fat guy from Santiago del Estero, who
although by no means an ingenious joker, could get a laugh by dint of sheer
ingenuity. He put his hand into the Chilean’s pocket to find out what was so
nice in there, as he put it. This made all the others laugh, and gave Pocketman
a start, making him spill a few drops of wine, which he complained about. The
master builder, a short man with grey hair and blue eyes (he was Italian) was
convulsed with laughter, but he knew how to change the subject in time. They had
all served themselves a glass of wine and were drinking it as an aperitif.
Luckily it was cool down there; it was almost like having air conditioning. They
drank a toast, and so on. The meat was soon ready, but they had clean forgotten
to make a salad. Reproachful gazes converged on young Reyes, who almost always
forgot to buy something or other. But, since it was the last day of the year, it
didn’t matter. Anyway, the meat was first-class.
As well as the Chileans, there was another foreigner, a Uruguayan
called Washington Mena; he was an insignificant person, without any noteworthy
characteristics. The other one with long hair was a young Argentinean, about
twenty, called Higinio Gómez (Higidio, actually, but he said Higinio because it
was less embarrassing), who was spectactularly ugly: he had what used to be
called a “pockmarked” face, due in fact to a case of chronic acne, as well as
that long hair, almost as long as Abel’s, but curly. Then there was one they
called The Bullshit Artist behind his back, although his name was Carlos Soria.
While the others laughed at the fat guy’s joke, he just mumbled and ended up
making openly sarcastic remarks. The joker from Santiago del Estero turned out
to be the most curious character of them all, partly, in fact mainly, because he
was spherically fat. That transformed him. He also fancied himself as a wit and
even a Don Juan. His name was Lorenzo Quincata; he spoke very little and always
gave careful consideration to what he was going to say, but even so, no one
would have mistaken him for an intelligent young man.
Soria started running down Santiago del Estero and its
inhabitants. They let him talk, but teased him all the while. He said that
in Santiago they drank hot beer. Really? How come? He’d been there, of
course, passing through; nothing could have persuaded him to stay on those
sweltering plains. One day, in a bar, he had sampled that strange beverage
(strange for him, anyway). They used a wheelbarrow to bring the beer in from
the yard, where it had been sitting in full sun; it was hot like soup, he
said. Someone asked him: Why the wheelbarrow? To bring the cartons in, of
course, what else could they use? How many cartons, they asked, suspecting
him of exaggerating. First he said thirty-six, then he said eight,
but it wasn’t really clear which number he meant. He pointed out that there
had been twenty people drinking. Some of the builders were laughing so hard
they cried. That’d have to be a record, wouldn’t it, they said. If he drank
thirty-six cartons of hot beer all on his own.
Only in Santiago del Estero.... , said Raúl
Viñas, laughing too. He clinked his glass with Quincata. Viñas was a Santiago
man himself, he explained, but from Santiago de Chile, which made all the
difference.
Soria pointed out once again that there were twenty people drinking, a
whole team of road workers. The cartons of bottles were sitting in the yard, out
in the sun. Did they know what his belly was like, after drinking it? Well,
round, of course. As for how it felt, best not to imagine that, or even try. And
yet they did.