Open Door (7 page)

The last weekend in February was the end of the carnival. We ate early, lentil stew, which I made myself and turned out a lot better than I expected. Exquisite, said Jaime after the first mouthful and he devoured the rest in one go.

As he did every day, Jaime started talking about the horse. It was his favourite subject, his only subject. Over the last few days, the other Jaime had made a noticeable improvement, it was difficult to explain. And, even though the nodules were still there, they’d magically decreased in size. Jaime fantasised about riding him again.

It’s a miracle, he was saying, and the animal looked at him with his enormous eyes, with a mixture of helplessness and scepticism. Jaime repeated the word, with all the excitement of someone who suddenly believes in miracles for the first time.

‘It’s carnival,’ I say presently, to interrupt him, ‘let’s go along for a bit and see what’s happening.’

Jaime didn’t refuse, but he didn’t say yes either. He crushed his half-smoked cigarette into his plate next to the scraps of food and went to put on his boots straight away. He was an odd man, almost always decent, but he would change suddenly and become terse, ill-humoured. I was getting to know him.

I stuck my head out onto the veranda. A light, slanting drizzle was falling, swirling about to form thousands of razor-sharp droplets. Like fake carnival snow. Jaime brought the pick-up right to the door so that I wouldn’t get wet. On the way to the village we didn’t say anything, silenced by the thrum of the engine, or by the excitement of zigzagging over the wet mud to leave fresh tracks.

The
fiesta
took up five blocks on Avenida Cabred, the heart of the village. First of all, there was a parade of floats, each recognisable by the sound of their chosen anthem, repeated ad nauseam on loudspeakers. Each song played over the next, composing a kind of diabolical meta-melody. The floats were themed. Girls in dresses of fake sequins danced on top, making the rickety structures tremble. It was impossible not to think an accident would happen at any moment.

Alongside the floats passed jugglers, flame throwers, a giant caterpillar, the young and the young-at-heart exchanging jets of foam sprayed from bottles in the shape of Rey Momo the carnival king, a gaggle of internees from the hospital wearing unrecognisable costumes, families, single men and women, the two village transvestites and a small group of inoffensive drunks at the tail of the parade. Jaime parked the truck widthways across the street, parallel to the railway tracks, right in front of the abandoned silos at the entrance to the village. All kinds of vehicles had sneaked in behind the endlessly circulating floats: motorbikes, cars, a fire engine, sulkies and a cloud of bicycles that entered and exited the darkness like swift ghosts. Jaime bought a couple of cans of beer and we sat on the pavement, our legs hanging down into the ditch. And even though I was what you would call a recent arrival, some faces, still mostly nameless, were becoming familiar to me.

At one point a row broke out and Jaime became uneasy. We couldn’t see much, but from a distance it appeared that two guys were about to come to blows. We moved closer and recognised Boca from behind, throwing himself on top of someone else who stumbled. Jaime signalled for me to stay where I was and pushed his way through the crowd, broke the circle of goading onlookers and shook Boca by the shoulder. It took him a good while to cool Boca down, all the blood had risen to his head and his gin-breath reached across the street. Jaime’s intervention wasn’t well received by a public hungry for a fight but you could tell that the other man, Boca’s rival, wasn’t entirely sure about fighting anyway because he didn’t protest the matter for a single second.

Boca calmed down and at once acted as if nothing had happened. He talked a lot, we understood very little. He kept repeating that carnivals were old-fashioned.

‘There’s too much noise here,’ he said at one point, fixing us with his tiny eyes. Jaime shrugged and I smiled.

Boca proposed going to buy more beer. Jaime stood up and gestured for me to go with him. I’ll wait for you here, I said and Jaime smiled at me in the way that boyfriends do when they’re parting from a girlfriend they’ve just started seeing.

The drizzle persisted, still swirling, still with thousands of tiny drops of moisture pricking at my cheeks. Everything seemed so strange to me, so new and fleeting. It was a bit like being on holiday, visiting a distant relative, the kind you never miss but who seem indispensable when they are close by.

Suddenly, a small hand rested on my shoulder. I jumped slightly and turned my head at once to see who it belonged to. It was Eloísa, the girl from the shop, who was already moving away with short steps, surrounded by other girls, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, with a mocking or conspiratorial little laugh, I never knew which.

I lay down on the wet grass, closed my eyes and Aída’s face came into my mind, blurred by the smoke of the cigarette she calmly inhaled and exhaled. I began to drop off.

Boca’s booming voice returned me to what was left of the carnival. Jaime sat down at my side, happy to find that his girl was still there. We shared a final can of beer, while Boca resumed his monologue. He was no longer talking about the carnival, now he was saying something about some guy who swore he’d seen a flying saucer in a nearby field.

Jaime and Boca had gone out early to buy building materials. It was a day of clear blue skies and fluffy, starched clouds. I was washing down the veranda when the telephone rang. Yasky’s voice trembled slightly, it was hoarse, unclear.

‘No, there’s nothing new,’ he says and pauses before continuing. ‘It was just that, I wanted to let you know, I thought you’d be waiting … I’ll call again when I have some news.’

That was it.

I continued mopping the veranda tiles until I couldn’t go on and I lay down on the grass. Lying like this, my hands scratching at the dirt, my eyes duelling with the harsh rays of the sun, as if I were somewhere else, I let myself be taken by a delicious lethargy, which is violently interrupted by a sharp jolt that shakes me so hard I’m lifted a couple of millimetres off the ground. A powerful blow from within the earth. The echo of the tremor lasts for a few seconds. Then it fades, without explanation.

At lunchtime, Boca took over the barbecue again. I stayed with him for a while as he prepared the fire. A boy of about twelve or thirteen, with curly hair and a big mole at the base of his nose, was loitering around us. He kicked at broken pieces of brick with a grumpy face. He was entertaining himself in his own way. Later on I found out that his name was Martín and that he was Boca’s nephew.

Although it was autumn the midday sun still warmed the skin. Boca was talking about the different cuts of beef, his hands smudged with charcoal, his eyes red as usual.

‘Are you a believer?’ he asked suddenly. Since I didn’t know how to reply, he hunched his shoulders, pursed his lips and arched his eyebrows, all at the same time, but he didn’t say anything else.

After eating, I started raking the path that leads from the house to the stable. When I opened the stable door I had a bad premonition. A short-lived premonition. The other Jaime was sprawled out, his head crushed against the back wall, his gums on view, tail mingling with the straw. The horse’s eyes said it all: death had arrived suddenly.

Jaime didn’t react immediately. He spent the rest of the afternoon and a good part of the night playing cards with Boca. They emptied a whole bottle of gin between them. I came and went, from the bedroom to the kitchen, I slept a bit and played a few hands when one or other of them went to the bathroom or needed a rest. A couple of times, Jaime left the house to go and see his horse. The first time he went alone, the second, Boca and I accompanied him. We dragged the animal outside, pulling him by a rope tied to his back legs. We took him as far as the mill. Jaime didn’t seem to have taken it in, he was talking about buying a new scythe and about a loony who hid amongst the bushes at the plant nursery and made Jaime almost crap himself with fear when he appeared. Boca listened to him, drunker than ever. I watched them in silence, thinking that there’s no such thing as miracles.

At one point, Jaime mentioned something about the stable, he said it was going to be left empty now, but he didn’t make any direct reference to the animal. And that was the other Jaime’s wake: in the open air and with lots of alcohol.

My eyes open in the middle of the night and, with less of a shock than the first few times, I find the bronze crucifix suspended in the air. A dusty, yellowish light forms its outline. It no longer seems as sordid to me, nor as suffocating as it used to. Now that I know it, it’s inoffensive, necessary, in keeping with this rickety iron bedstead that squeaks when I try to make myself comfortable, and with all the rest, the vast doors, the cold floors, the marbled kitchen table, the broken bathroom tiles, every corner of the house frozen in time, the splintered shelves in the wardrobe, the earthenware pots, the bordered tablecloths, all the old stuff, Jaime, snoring at my side, and the mosquito nets. All of which brings me a new and unfamiliar peace.

The following morning, Boca and Jaime are talking in the kitchen. It doesn’t look like they’ve been to bed at all. Boca says that the best thing would be to burn him, then bury the ashes somewhere. Cremate him, corrects Jaime. It sounds logical; a normal burial would be a colossal effort. Jaime doesn’t seem convinced but he eventually accepts the solution and they decide to organise the bonfire for that same night. For the ceremony, Jaime invites his brother Héctor, who lives in Luján.

I spend the whole afternoon in bed, facing the ceiling. On the wardrobe, under some thick, moth-eaten blankets, there are two identical boxes, flat and round. I climb onto a chair to find out what’s in them. The first one is empty, or practically empty. When I lift it up, a couple of mothballs rattle about inside. In the other, there are two books, a bundle of handwritten sheets of paper, a couple of faded photos and some loose locks of dark brown hair.

Later that day, I ask Jaime about the boxes.

‘They’ve always been there,’ he says and I can see that he’s never had any reason to move them.

As the afternoon light was dying, Héctor arrived in his old pick-up, with his wife Marta and their twin sons. Nobody really asked what I was doing there, I was just another one of the family. Boca dug a groove around the horse to contain the fire. The boys accompanied me to the woods to collect dry logs and branches. Marta stayed in the house preparing the meal. Jaime and Héctor took charge of arranging the wood, creating a kind of primitive shack that caged the animal. At around ten we reconvened to start the bonfire. Jaime seemed to prepare himself to say a few words but he swallowed them and, without preamble, lit the fire at its four cardinal points, starting at the south and finishing in the west. At first, the fire didn’t take properly, so Boca tried to revive it by dousing the wood with spurts of kerosene.

When we had eaten, the flames were still very high and the other Jaime was invisible. The twins played with the embers using lit branches as sparklers. Afterwards, they fell asleep, shoulder-to-shoulder. Boca drank all the wine again. Héctor told Jaime all about his projects, country stuff. I bored myself talking to Marta until she got bored of me.

There was much more left of the horse than we expected. Instead of ashes we found a heavy jumble of long bones, not entirely bare, which filled a pit the size of a small child behind the stable.

Skirting the fence, I spend the afternoon kicking pine cones. Behind the row of poplars, so that Jaime can’t see me. I told him I was going shopping in Luján.

‘And what do you need to get?’ he asked.

‘Women’s stuff,’ I answered in jest, but he didn’t laugh. He was wondering what kind of stuff that might be.

The sky splits into almost perfectly equal bands, over where the sun is going to disappear. A whole spectrum of pastel colours. I’m beginning to lose count of all the afternoons I’ve already spent here.

I’m walking with my head down, in search of new pine cones to kick, so I jump when I hear a timid hello close by. It’s Eloísa, the girl from the shop. Hi, I say and her eyes dart all over the place. Under her arm, she’s carrying a rolled-up burlap bag. She’s wearing a buttoned blouse patterned with tiny bunches of flowers, yellow, red and white, rococo style, and a black bra, which is very see-through, making her diminutive tits more pronounced.

‘I’m going mulberry picking. Want to come?’ she says. ‘They’re the last of the season, after these there won’t be any more until October.’

We walk next to each other, my legs shrouded in denim, hers covered to the knee by a kilt, school uniform, I assume.

‘Once, when I was little, I ate so many that I had a fever for at least a week,’ says Eloísa and laughs, deliberately dragging her trainers. A cloud of dust follows us.

At the end of the road, Eloísa ducks and slips through a tiny gap between the strands of barbed wire that separate Jaime’s land from the polo field. I catch a glimpse of her knickers. I squeeze through, with a bit of a struggle. Eloísa laughs again.

On the left, between two trees interlacing at their crowns, a narrow path begins, plunging to a practically dry stream. Momentum sends us flying down. It’s outright forest. Eloísa runs in front of me, raising the burlap bag above her head as if it were a mini parachute.

‘We need to go higher, the branches down here have already been picked, they’re the easiest to reach. Are you game?’

We climbed the tree, and it felt a bit as though we’d always been doing this. We ate red mulberries, those that were left, which weren’t many.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And where does he live?’

‘There,’ I say, pointing at the farm. Eloísa laughs at Jaime and at me. She imagines us together.

‘But he’s an old man,’ she says and I don’t know how to respond. I cough. Eloísa doesn’t insist but she asks me lots of other questions, whatever comes into her head. I answer some, others, most of them, she answers herself.

Where are you from? Do you like it here? Aren’t you bored? What about your friends? Do you smoke? How long are you going to stay? You’re joking about the old man, aren’t you? Have you ever eaten white mulberries? What about medlars? Would you like to try them?

She speaks rapidly, all at once, while she destroys a rotten mulberry between her finger tips. Her nails are bitten, painted a long time ago with a child’s varnish. Now she falls silent and without meaning to, in trying to reach some difficult mulberries, she shows me her knickers again. I can’t help it, I want to touch her.

We said goodbye a few steps from the gate, with the night on top of us. First, we tried to cross the stream to pick some little wild tomatoes that were visible from the other side. But Eloísa slipped and fell in the water. She was drenched.

‘If you like, another day we could go and see if there are any figs left on the other side of the polo field,’ she said to me in the almost darkness.