Open Door (16 page)

We can get married. Jaime is speaking, in the dark, without showing his face. We got back from Luján a short while ago, from a barbecue at Héctor and Marta’s to celebrate the twins’ eighth birthday. We went to bed straight away, slightly nauseous from so much meat. The sheets were damp, almost wet. In the middle of the night I got up to pee. In the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I didn’t look quite as bad as I had in recent months. In the dark, I sensed where the bed was and lay down again on my side, the gate side. It had been that way since the beginning, me on this side, Jaime closer to the other Jaime. Dead or alive. It’s so strange to have something in my stomach that’s going to be someone. I stroke myself, I feel it with my open palm, I wait a while, nothing. I wonder when it was. That first time, when I didn’t even come?

Héctor and Marta treat me as if I’m one of the family now. The twins adore me, they say I’m their favourite aunt. I’m scared. I close my eyes to try to stop thinking and, right then, Jaime decides to speak. Wasn’t he asleep? We can get married, he says and doesn’t insist, he’s not interested in my answer, that’s all he has to say.

I re-read the notes that I’ve written over the last few months on Cabred, Huret, the colony and the lunatics, and it seems like a distant memory, adolescent and boring. There are about fifty sheets or more, the first few handwritten on both sides, the rest printed from the computer, normal type, double-spaced. I scan the pages, and it’s enough to catch a sentence or a few words at random to guess the context, I know what follows. It’s nothing more than that, a collection of sentences linked by sufficient common sense. I lost interest, I can’t deny it, and yet for almost five months my head was full of loonies: loonies on horseback, bricklayer loonies, uniformed loonies, in blue or orange, or both, blue trousers and orange sweatshirt, loonies with no clothes on, undressing in the middle of something, loonies kneading bread, hand over hand over hand, frenetically, old-style loonies, deranged, less neurotic but more insane, loonies who don’t look like loonies, who bite their lips, just slightly, like anyone else, but who only think about that, about biting their lips, loonies who are practically philosophers, who say things that leave us open-mouthed, as if to say: Look what the loony said, lost loonies, loonies who get beaten up, with clean blows, and who one day, without explanation, start to receive fewer blows, or secret blows, out of sight of the other loonies, and more, many more, all of them, dead loonies, like the one that Jaime found amongst the weeds of the nursery, almost albino, his eyes wide open, or the one who appeared hanging from a branch above the clay oven, his feet stained with soot from the smoke that kept churning out, and the loonies who no one looks for, who nobody reclaims, who they call anything, whatever name comes to them, loonies fucking, never coming, all the loonies, in a row, ready to enter the catalogue, invented loonies, who are the vast majority, because it’s easy to invent loonies, nobody makes mistakes inventing loonies, anything could be true. They’re there, even though they no longer interest me, they tell me a load of things, but it isn’t the same. I’m bored.

The dream from the other night returns, it never ends. Still in Rio de Janeiro, it still seems as though I’m going to kill them all. But I don’t kill them.

A car with tinted windows stops by the gate. It beeps three times. The first two short, the third sustained. I approach slowly. I don’t walk as quickly as before.

One of the front windows opens, on the passenger side, and Eloísa appears. She’s dressed entirely in black. A bit like a goth, but not entirely. She raises her hand, waves and shouts my name. She’s had her hair cut, it’s uneven, two long tufts cover half her face. We say hello without opening the gate. She kisses me on one cheek, then the other, and in passing she brushes my mouth. Only just. Now she extends her arms, to see me better, and she says or protests, with emotion or anger: So it was true. She strokes my belly, without really touching me much, from a distance. And you, I ask. I’m good, and in my ear: I’ve got a boyfriend. And she gestures for the person sitting in the car listening to music to get out. And he gets out, rather ungainly, his hair tousled, chewing red gum. She introduces us. They look at each other, they smile, I smile. And he says: How’s it going? Fine, I say, hi. I don’t know whether they want to come in, I don’t know whether I want them to stay. Since I’m unsure, we say goodbye. Eloísa winks at me. I hate her.

I want to talk to you, says Jaime and immediately plugs his mouth with a cigarette as if he regrets saying it. But he takes courage and continues: About what I said to you the other times, the other night, you haven’t said anything. About what? I ask and play dumb. About getting married, he says. Jaime speaks without looking at me, uncomfortable, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. He pauses. The first thing that comes to me is: There’s no need, we’re fine like this, we can carry on like this. Jaime doesn’t answer, he smokes and becomes sad. Let’s see what happens, I say and stretch out a hand that stays in the air, like a silent word that Jaime doesn’t catch. He nods, obedient, incapable of arguing. It’s the first time a man has proposed to me.

I spend all night crying, in the dark, locked in the bathroom so that Jaime doesn’t see me.

It’s New Year next week. In the countryside you barely notice. Meanwhile, here, in the city, the year is coming to an end all around. In the faces, in the scents, in the speed of things.

I’m in a bar, sitting by the window. Yasky should be about to arrive. We arranged to meet at half twelve. There are five minutes to go. It had been several months since he called. His voice was different, more serious, hardened. Can we see each other tomorrow? It’s important, he said. It’s to do with your friend.

I didn’t say anything to Jaime. He would have wanted to come with me and I preferred to go alone. Recently, we’ve barely been apart for a minute. What with his retirement, Jaime has begun to work less. He hardly goes to the hospital any more, he says there’s no cure for that nursery. He doesn’t know what to do with his time. Neither do I. I never go out. I spend my time in bed, now and then I read something and I watch a lot of television.

I’m going shopping in Luján, I told him. The same lie as usual. Take the truck, he said. And before I left, seeing me off at the gate: Drive carefully.

On the road, I try to think about Aída, but I can’t. Every time I bring her to mind, she escapes me. After everything that’s happened, it’s an old and faded story. And more than anything, it’s very complicated. Why am I going?

Yasky gets out of a taxi. He’s let his hair grow long and he’s fatter. He looks my way, I signal to him, but he doesn’t see me. I go out onto the pavement and now he does, we wave. He crosses the street, and as he approaches he can’t conceal his surprise. He looks at my stomach. I smile, I’d forgotten too. Our telephone conversation was very brief, and the truth is that it hadn’t occurred to me to tell him. For me, it hadn’t been a novelty for quite a while. I didn’t know, says Yasky, prolonging the last vowel until he runs out of breath. He seems different, both euphoric and drawn, with new dark circles around his eyes. We start walking. He takes my arm. With the sounds of the street, I’m unable to pay him much attention, and anyway, what I hear doesn’t surprise me. At a corner, a traffic light brings us to a halt.

‘From the photos, it seems very likely that it’s her, although we can’t confirm it one hundred per cent.’

We cross the street. We pass a square. I recognise this route, we’re a block and a half from the morgue and we’re heading in that direction. I don’t protest, I let myself be led by Yasky, who hasn’t let go of my arm. The weather is very humid, sticky. We walk in silence. When we’re almost there, Yasky stops short, gives a serious, elaborate pause and, all at once, without releasing his breath, squeezes my arms at the elbows, arches his brows and looks at me straight on. There’s something else, he says, something that doesn’t make sense. Another pause and he comes out with it: the autopsy says that she died two days ago. It’s inconceivable, but there it is, he concludes, and his mouth stays open.

Yasky lets go of my arms and his stubby hands hesitate in the air for a few seconds until they make bold and clutch mine. He’s waiting for me to speak, to answer him, to cry or break down. He’s waiting for me to embrace him, waiting for something that I don’t give him and he moves away sadly.

The equation is obvious but even so it surprises me: Yasky is still in love with me. And once again, he’s used Aída to be able to see me. This time, by devising an impossible tale. He turns his back to me, he can’t look at me again, he knows I’ve found him out and so he goes on with the farce.

We enter the morgue. Like the first time, I follow close behind him. We walk to the end of the corridor. Yasky knocks on the office door, fulfilling his role as court clerk to the last. The enormous ginger guy from the first few visits isn’t there; an extremely thin man appears in his place. Yasky introduces us, the man glances at me and makes a grimace with his lips that doesn’t quite manage to be a smile. Now they take a couple of steps aside and exchange a few words in low voices. Yasky nods, the other man goes ahead and enters the room, gesturing for us to follow.

We stand around the middle trolley. Yasky looks at the floor, avoiding my eyes. The other man is impatient, he grinds his teeth, swallows saliva and without preamble, lifts the plastic sheet covering Aída’s body.

On the way out of the morgue, Yasky asks whether I’m all right and whether I wouldn’t like to go for a coffee. I nod, still a bit dazed. It makes no sense, I repeat to myself, and the absurdity of the situation makes me chuckle. I hang my head and the irregularity of the floor tiles ends up disconcerting me. It’s as though it’s all just a trick of Yasky’s. But no, he’d never go that far. And, I’d almost forgotten, it was Aída, slightly changed, but it was her. And it was precisely that which perturbed me most: that she’d cut her hair and plucked her eyebrows, that all those months when I thought she was dead she had been somewhere, she’d rented another flat, she’d gone to a hotel, to a friend’s, or wandered through the city, perhaps she’d even had a job, it was madness, to think that Aída had been alive all this time, and so close.

We go into a bar, we sit down at a table set for lunch. I have to say something, I have to express my bewilderment somehow, but Yasky beats me to it.

It’s a bit like going back to square one, he says. But so far as our involvement goes, it’s case closed. They’ll have to open a new investigation. I can’t bring myself to ask him anything. Not who found her. Or how. Or where. I stay silent, my mouth half open. Yasky talks, to cover the void. Poor girl, he says.

Beba took care of everything, all the procedures, the funeral director, the cremation and arranging a priest to give the urn extreme unction. She travelled from Asunción as soon as she heard the news. I don’t know why she didn’t come before, why it was me instead of her who had to come and meet those unknown corpses so many times.

In all these months we hadn’t been in contact once. The truth is she looked great, her skin younger than ever, and she had dyed her hair a furious red. She arrived in a funeral car, the only one in the cortège. She was accompanied by a man who was much too young to be her husband and yet embraced her with evident tenderness.

It was a quick goodbye, without tears. The circumstances in which everything had happened discouraged any spirit of a wake. The time that had elapsed, the supposed suicide, Aída’s clandestine life, the deceit, the confusion, everything that made this story an episode more delirious than traumatic, gave rise to an unusual funeral, not to mention the fact that it had been decided to cremate the body. I don’t know who had taken that decision, whether it was Beba or the judge, Yasky, or Aída herself in the will I never saw.

Jaime insisted so much that in the end I let him accompany me. But I asked him to wait for me in a bar opposite the cemetery. During the half hour that the ceremony lasted, Beba didn’t say a word to me, she looked at me only once in passing, but I’m not even sure it was intentional. I didn’t really understand the reasons behind her indifference. The only thing I would have wanted to ask was who had ended up with Diki, the crippled dog that Aída had left orphaned.

Yasky, on the other hand, was by my side the whole morning. After the initial shock, a paternal instinct seemed to have awoken in him, or something like it, because he didn’t stop referring to my stomach and the closeness of the birth.

Beba and her young boyfriend took a taxi. Yasky said goodbye quickly as he had a hearing in fifteen minutes on the other side of the city, demanding that I promise to let him know when I had news.

As I went down the cemetery steps, there was something, difficult to define, a new sensation that slackened my whole body, like a wave, which sank me to the ground without violence. And there, sitting on the bottom step, with the points of my shoes crossing on the pavement, I realised that my skirt was wet. I had left a pool behind me and a yellowish stain opening in the shape of a fan, it surrounded me, like a shadow. I didn’t have time to wonder what had happened, people came from all sides to help me, a man in a waterproof, a policeman and a woman holding a child by the hand. All together, all at the same time.

‘It’s nothing serious,’ I heard behind me, ‘her waters have broken.’

It was a woman’s voice, deliberate and confident.

It was Simón’s first birthday on Saturday. He’s a quiet baby, cute, he barely cries, just the right amount. In the evening, Jaime held a barbecue to celebrate. Eloísa came with her new boyfriend, and Héctor and Marta, the twins, Boca and his nephew Martín. Guido was there for a while but he had to leave early because some friends were playing in a bar in the capital.

A year has passed and everything goes on in much the same way. Everyone fulfils his own destiny. Eloísa left school and is working as a waitress in a pizzeria in Luján. We see less of each other. We hardly see each other at all. Her new boyfriend is local, an ordinary guy with a kind face. You can tell he’s in love.

Jaime planted a vegetable garden behind the stable. He sowed courgettes, potatoes, pumpkins, spinach, green leaf lettuce, chicory, garlic and tomatoes. He says the first harvest will be ready next month. I take care of the baby and the house. It’s a different life, I’d never have imagined it, but it’s not bad. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I find myself switching on the computer and re-reading all that madness about Open Door, and it’s as though someone else wrote it. One day, who knows, I’ll do something with all that.

A few weeks ago I received a postcard from Yasky from Florianópolis in Brazil: a sunset, half sky, half sea, taken from the coast. He tells me that he received a research grant in international law. He’s studying Portuguese at the university and preparing his doctoral thesis. He says that it’s changed his life. It’s not hard to see why.

At around midnight, after eating, Jaime and Boca proposed a trip into the woods to hunt partridges. Little Martín and the twins gave a shout of joy.

The preparation is the best part: cleaning out the shotguns, sorting the cartridges, dividing up tasks. Eloísa, Martín, the twins and I are all going. Marta is staying behind to take care of Simón, and Héctor doesn’t like guns. Eloísa’s boyfriend isn’t coming either, because he doesn’t feel like it, or because Eloísa won’t let him, it’s hard to tell which.

We wrap ourselves up in anticipation of the dew. Jaime drives, Boca and the boys are in the back of the pick-up, Eloísa and I in the front. Eloísa switches on the radio and turns the dial from end to end until she picks up a Ramones riff. Jaime complains silently. Eloísa moves as if she’s dancing. She keeps elbowing me in the stomach. Jaime gets tired and turns down the volume. Eloísa imitates his face for my benefit, the face of a grumpy old man. They’re never going to get along.

We arrive in a clearing. Boca and Jaime lean their hefty shotguns on their shoulders, Martín has to make do with an air rifle. The twins carry the ammunition. Eloísa and I follow everything from the outside, as spectators.

In silence, we penetrate the heart of the wood with the obligatory respect that the night imposes on us, all its stars sparkling in chorus.

It gets late and there’s no excitement to keep us awake. I wonder how far we’re going to walk. It must be after two, there’s not a soul to be heard. Dawn in the countryside is enough to frighten anyone.

Finally we stop. Jaime and Boca scan the dark, even ground with their guns pointing at the earth. Eloísa and I share a split trunk to sit and rest a while. Martín and the twins entertain themselves with the cartridges. I look at the sky and think about Aída. I’ll never understand her.

I get the feeling that I can hear those guitar rounds that the gypsies used to play. Quite far off, but unmistakeable. If I tell Eloísa she’ll think I’m mad. Better keep it to myself.

Right then, all of a sudden, when it seems that nothing else is going to happen, as if in a bad film, a weird B-movie, a beam of incandescent light at the level of the horizon dazzles us straight on, here and there lighting up the plain. We stop, all at the same time, avoiding each other’s eyes. We don’t want to believe it, we’d rather it passed by quickly, that it was an optical illusion. But the brightness grows, changes colour, from perfect white to a pale red that intensifies into a fiery red and suddenly extinguishes, then lights up again as it did at the start. It hypnotises us, this soft sphere between the sky and the earth. Martín passes me his rifle and disappears behind a tree. I feel like peeing too. Jaime moves forward ever so slightly, a couple of steps, Boca does the same. They fix their gaze on this inconceivable apparition. They start walking again, straight towards it. In the second row, by mutual agreement, Eloísa, the twins and I follow them, without joking about. Martín reaches us at a sprint and joins the line.

The word UFO quashes all others in my head. It’s the strangest thing to happen to me recently. Is it possible? As we approach, it’s as if I were relinquishing all my prejudices, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have an extraterrestrial experience at some stage in life. To make contact with the beyond. Someone, Martín or one of the twins, coughs to attract attention and says: Let’s go back. It sounds like a joke but nobody laughs. I can’t bring myself to say anything. Boca murmurs something in Jaime’s ear. The thing is getting closer, taking on increasingly monstrous yet familiar shapes. It’s a kind of rotating house, flat and long, emitting thick rings of light that start to illuminate our path. Like a circus. The tip of the rifle bangs against my knee and only now do I realise that Martín never asked for it back. He’s obviously lost interest.

Everything becomes so real and so dangerous. Boca raises his shotgun to his shoulder, pointing at the spaceship, either in jest, to prepare himself, or because he’s afraid and this is how he expresses it. I can’t see properly but I’m sure that Jaime disapproves.

We advance. Confusion makes way for a certain logic. Things gradually begin to humanise. We recover our breath. We stop about ten metres away and we can make everything out perfectly: the trucks, the trailers, the cranes, the people toing and froing, the row of spotlights of varying intensities. Eloísa separates herself from the group and disappears into that world which, until a few minutes ago, we thought was from another planet.

Eloísa returns and tells us: It’s full of guys dressed like natives, they’re filming an advert. Fake natives, says Boca, laughing hard. And to think we believed they were Martians. I was hallucinating that it was a spaceship, says one of the twins. We all were, corrects the other.

Shall we go and see? asks Jaime. Martín and the twins are enthusiastic. We’d better leave the guns here, in case they still think we’re the enemy, says Boca. We laugh.

Go, we’ll stay here to keep an eye on them, Eloísa convinces them as she interlaces her fingers with mine. So Jaime, Boca and the boys, rather timidly, step into the film set.

Eloísa and I forget the guns and everything that’s been left on the ground. We lose ourselves in the night, turning our backs to all the commotion. No one sees us. Eloísa hugs me tightly, I can tell she’s horny. We kiss like a couple of teenagers, devouring each other in secret, against the trunk of a giant
ombú
tree. I feel happy.