Open Door (9 page)

How do I know that guy sitting on a bench next to the pergola with sunglasses and a can of Coke in his hand? I can’t remember. He’s a normal-looking guy, the kind you see everywhere. I know him from somewhere though.

Jaime parks the pick-up to one side of the kiosk.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘I’m going to show you something.’

Jaime gives me a brief tour of the hospital facilities: the bakery, the power plant, the various workshops for shoes, textiles and carpentry, but the thing that Jaime really wants to show me is the road that leads to the nursery, his place of work. It’s incredible, I say, quite sincerely. At night, explains Jaime, it’s pitch black. He also shows me the houses for permanent staff and the play park. It’s a little village inside another.

Now Jaime hurries because he has some business to discuss in the office and it’s nearly one o’clock, lunch hour. I follow him. We circle the pergola again and that man, who continues to intrigue me, is still there, his back to me. He doesn’t see me; there’s no way to find out who he is.

Jaime heads towards the door where I dropped off his papers the last time, but he carries on and raps his knuckles against a glass window at the side. A head appears immediately, the same girl whose style had confused me before, but with an unexpected addition: a ring in her nose. Jaime introduces us and she no longer disconcerts me once I find out that her name is Laica. Jaime tells Laica about my interest in the history of Open Door. It’s an idle comment, unnecessary. Laica smiles without saying anything. I feel uncomfortable.

The midday sun hits my forehead, stunning me. I descend the stairs, facing the pergola. The loony bin is at my feet and I’m a bit like a tourist fresh off the train, who leaves the station and begins to discover a new city whose buildings, trees and streets convey the illusion of time stood still: the historic centre, the main square, the town hall, the church, the houses, and its people. I get a bit lost. I’m a new arrival. I skirt the roundabout and head down an endless road with a crowd of ancient eucalyptus on either side. I’m taking a bit of a chance. In the distance, two silhouettes are advancing rapidly towards me. They get bigger. I retrace my steps.

I take some more turns and come out at the back of the sports courts, where the inmates play
pelota paleta
. All these trees are making me dizzy, I need a rest.

I buy cigarettes at the kiosk next to the office, I smoke and feel calmer. Jaime must be about to come by to look for me, he said two o’ clock. Despite being a rural type, he’s quite punctual.

Suddenly I get the feeling that someone is speaking to me, it must be him. No, it’s the man with the sunglasses and Coke. Yes, now I recognise him, but it makes no sense. It’s Yasky, the court clerk, in flesh and blood, a mere five metres from where I’m standing, masked by those old-fashioned motorcycle sunglasses, too bulky for the size of his face, which make him look ridiculous, a cross between a fly and a premature baby. Without his suit, he’s unrecognisable. But what’s he doing here? Why didn’t he summons me if he wanted to see me? I don’t understand. The first thing that springs to mind is that there must be some outstanding legal matter, that I didn’t tell the whole truth and a single word clouds my eyes: perjury. Then my memory clears, of giving the statement in the police station, the pitted face of the obese, gum-chewing officer who spoke into his walkie-talkie as he typed at the computer, and my statement at the court with Yasky’s legs kicking me under the desk, and me, I SWEAR, in capital letters, and I sign at the bottom, here, and here as well, and it’s true, I confess, I did keep some things to myself, things that, well, by now I don’t even know how they really happened. I’ll tell him anything he wants, but he doesn’t give me time. He approaches. Yasky stops half a metre away, takes off his sunglasses and holds out his sweaty hand, which I take in mine. I’m trembling, noticeably. What a surprise, I manage to say. And him: yes, what a coincidence. He’s shaking even more than I am. It doesn’t look like he’s here to arrest me. I’m not in front of Yasky the court clerk, it’s something else, I can see it in his eyes, slightly watery and shrunken, which barely look at me, only as long as they have to, then immediately they dart away, looking at the sky, the ground, an emergency exit, any which way. I calm down. I’m living nearby, behind the hospital, I say gesturing vaguely at somewhere far away. Yes, of course, he says. He talks and every so often he glances to either side, searching. And the business with Aída, no news? I ask quickly, to take the weight off my shoulders. Yasky seems lost, he’s not listening, he’s looking around. My friend, the one from the bridge. Yes, a very unusual case, the coastguard aren’t getting anywhere, or even worse, they find … the thing the other day, for example … and he doesn’t finish the sentence because this time his searching eyes find something: two loonies. One with long hair, regulation blue shirt and trousers, barefoot. The other, in a white t-shirt with a photo of a sailing boat on the front, is, paler and unkempt, a carbon copy of Yasky: the same round face, the classic bearing, the short neck, hairy, neither fat nor thin, a lunatic version of Yasky. They approach and stop a few metres away, taking me in from a distance, heads bowed.

‘This is Julio, my brother,’ says Yasky and widens his eyes for me to say my name.

Now Julio speaks, talking to his brother.

‘This is Omar … I told him to come along so you could meet him … no, he won’t speak to you, he understands but he doesn’t speak, I told him you were here and that we should come and see you … can we have another Coke?’

Omar is somewhere else, he’s inoffensive. He blinks more than is normal, and when his eyes close, he tries to fight it.

The four of us sit down, Yasky, the two loonies and I, around a small white garden table.

‘I’m fine,’ says Julio, ‘I’m fine … how do you think I look? … when the telly’s not working I get a bit bored … just now it’s working … can we go for a drive in the car? I told Omar you’d lend us the car for a little drive … without leaving the grounds, just a little while, he understands everything, can we?’

Yasky doesn’t reply and Julio doesn’t complain. It’s as though they’ve had this conversation before. A code between brothers.

I tell Yasky that Jaime, my friend (I don’t know what to call him: boyfriend, lover, carer, country boy, could he be my country boy?) works in the hospital’s plant nursery. But Yasky doesn’t want to hear about anything to do with the hospital and immediately changes the subject.

‘It’s a mystery, it makes no sense, even with a strong current or at high tide, that stretch is narrow and not very deep, a body can’t disappear just like that.’

‘There are vipers,’ says Omar, the one who doesn’t speak, and we all fall silent.

After a while, Jaime appeared in the pick-up and beeped the horn, so I said my goodbyes quickly. Yasky stood up and didn’t know whether to hold out his hand or risk a kiss on the cheek. It turned out to be neither, something between the two, and he ended up having to manage a balancing act, almost falling.

‘Well, it was a pleasure,’ he said. And a second later, as I was walking away, he almost shouts:

‘I’m Bernardo.’

There is a small path leading from the stable, almost overgrown with bushes, skirting the mill, then getting lost behind a hillock. A tight, zigzagging path.

I start walking along it. It’s quite a nice afternoon, with an autumn sun coming and going, appearing and hiding at intervals. An unstable sun. Past the hillock, the path turns to the right and leads to a ring of trees, of medium height but quite dense. I’m not sure, but it strikes me that they could be the olive trees that Jaime mentioned once.

Now that I’m up close, what I thought was there isn’t there, the ring isn’t such a ring, and the trees aren’t that dense. From a distance, the colours of the countryside are hard to distinguish, they bind together. The sunshine doesn’t help. What had seemed to be a small oasis rising up from the middle of the plain turns out to be a cluster of old trunks, dry, pointed branches that devastate everything, a sort of giant crown of thorns for a super-Christ. I bend down and as I slip through to the far side of the fence I catch my neck. Ouch.

On this side of the fence there is an Australian-style water tank, a couple of metres tall, so completely abandoned that it can’t have been filled for several summers now. The metal sheeting was painted once upon a time, but I can’t tell whether it’s meant to be blue or green. I stand on my toes to peek over the edge, but I can’t, it’s higher than I thought.

I walk around it and come to some tiny aluminium steps attached to the side of the tank. The first thing I see is a layer of oddly coloured gelatinous filth, a nameless mixture of many browns verging on black. And although there is no particular odour, that non-colour floating at the bottom smells horrible.

But there’s more. Amongst the dry leaves, the fallen branches and the slimy algae, in that sub-world containing the worst of plant life, a kite is sticking out. The wreck of a kite, almost unrecognisable. It’s a deliberate image, a visual effect: a dead kite. A cliché. I don’t know why I feel so sad all of a sudden. Like I haven’t felt for a long time. So sad that I let myself slump to the ground, I close my eyes and I touch myself, I stroke myself, for consolation. And that’s how I spend the afternoon.

I make mistakes: I act too hastily, on impulse, like a child.

Jaime was going to the village to send a fax to the ministry to initiate his retirement process. I’ll go with you, I said, and that made him happy. I got into the truck and started the engine while Jaime finished getting some papers together. I turned on the radio and the only thing I could pick up properly was the exultant voice of an evangelical pastor talking in a strange mix of Spanish and Portuguese. Every two or three phrases, a euphoric crowd celebrated his sermon with hoarse cries that lengthened the
o
of glory into paroxysm. It could have been recorded or live, it could have been a joke or serious, it didn’t matter.

I was about to switch off the radio but I waited for a second to see Jaime’s reaction. But Jaime didn’t react, and I tired first. We went past the door of the shop, it looked closed. To tell the truth, it always looks closed. We passed a man wearing a military-green beret who was cycling in the opposite direction. Jaime sounded the horn unwillingly and it produced a toneless electric noise, like a death rattle. The man in the beret raised an arm in greeting and almost lost his balance. Jaime looked at me as though he wanted to tell me who it was, or for me to ask him: Who’s that? I didn’t give him the pleasure.

We stopped at the service station to fill up with diesel. Jaime greeted everyone again, as usual. I got out to buy some gum at the kiosk. Two guys wearing the company uniform, waiting on tiny benches for their turn to serve the next client, were giving me sidelong glances. They weren’t watching me: they were keeping me under surveillance. It was the best remedy for boredom in this circular village, which already knew everything about me and what it didn’t, it invented. Before we left, through some half-paranoid instinct, which sooner or later makes us utterly paranoid, I turned my head, just slightly, just for a second, just long enough to see how the third man, the one who had exchanged a few words with Jaime as he watched the numbers run up on the pump, approached the other two, adding his conspiratorial laugh, loaded with innuendo that secretly named me.

For the rest of the journey to the shopping centre, Jaime stayed silent. A silence that I almost filled with words that I chewed over in my head several times and then aborted without ever opening my mouth.

‘I don’t know how long I’ll be, I have to send the fax, then get that man, the what d’you call him, the administrator, to confirm that it arrived safely. Why don’t you take a walk?’

Jaime had stepped out of the pick-up and was speaking with his hand on the door. Since I don’t reply, not out of meanness but because I don’t know what I want, he gives me the keys so that I can feel free.

‘Here,’ he says, ‘if you go, lock up, I’ll be over here.’

In giving me the keys, Jaime behaves as a father would, and I’m like a teenage daughter. So, to follow to the letter the logic of this bad-tempered girl I’ve become, as soon as he can no longer see me, I get out of the pick-up and start strolling, as he suggested, but without his knowing.

It’s half twelve, the daylight is as hazy as it was a few hours ago and it’s going to stay like this until it gets dark. It’s the middle of autumn, any old day, forgettable. I leave the shopping centre behind me and wander along an unpaved street at right angles to the main avenue, with my back to the school building. Most of the trees are already bare and the privet hedges forming the boundaries between houses are quite stunted. I’m distracted by noises that come from close by or far away, some continuous and subtle, like the humming of an insect that doesn’t let itself be seen, others more violent, appearing suddenly and cutting out just as abruptly. I’m never going to get used to country noises. There aren’t many of them, and yet they are so precise. They always reveal something. And hide the rest.

Right at that moment, as I was beginning to get bored of the empty village streets, a different, complex sound surprises me, one that I wasn’t expecting to hear. There are several voices, all talking at once, rapidly, on top of one another, in rather high-pitched tones. Voices that sound very near but which don’t show their faces. There isn’t a soul to either side, no one behind, no one up ahead, and yet they’re so close. I walk on a couple of metres, focused on the murmuring, which is growing in intensity. I even manage to trap a few words in the air, like ‘evening’, ‘wearing’, ‘damn’, ‘Friday’, and I’m the closest thing to a lunatic who hears voices. The madness doesn’t last long. I don’t even have time to react: in less than a second I become a mess of nerves. Some four or five girls, all in the same school uniform, white blouse and kilt, come out of the garage of the house on the corner, five metres from where I’m standing. And the first thing I see, as if there were nothing else, before I see the uniforms, the garage, is Eloísa, so wrapped up in the conversation that she doesn’t register I’m here, so close, by pure coincidence. It’s best she doesn’t see me, I’d better turn round, without a sound. Yes, that’s the best way.

But anxiety gets the better of me and I follow a narrow dirt alley so that I can go round and meet her at the crossroads. I have to be surprised, it has to be natural, as if by chance.

There’s no one in the other street. Not a voice or a sound to be heard. The house from which Eloísa and the other girls came has an entrance on this street too, at the end. I don’t understand. I take a new street, then another, and I’m lost.

I turn on my heel and find myself on the first street again. From there I go out onto the main avenue, I’m three blocks from the shopping centre. I bend down to tie my shoelace and without warning, the girls appear. Eloísa’s at the front, I smile at her, but she keeps going. She completely ignores me. I catch a flying sentence suspended in the air as they move away.

‘She’s such a maggot,’ says one them who isn’t Eloísa. I wonder who they’re talking about. I stare after the little group, which forms a kind of arrow with Eloísa at the tip. I don’t know whether to follow them, I don’t know whether to join in, I don’t know what to do. At the corner, before turning, Eloísa looks back and waves her hand, laughing from a distance. I feel stupid.

I return to the shopping centre without lifting my eyes from the ground, like a fool, feeling put out. Jaime is waiting for me at the foot of the pick-up, the keys in his hand.

‘You left the keys in the ignition,’ he says and adds with an unbearable smile: ‘It’s not a good idea.’

I don’t answer, grabbing the keys from him and getting into the truck. I switch on the radio. I’m beginning to tire of his moroseness, his persistent nothingness. Jaime looks up at me, his hands now busy with tobacco and rolling papers. He looks at me, intrigued, with the subtle estrangement that used to make him that bit different. He watches me with the expression of an old man who’s seen it all before.

The next day, by the bare fig tree, Eloísa strokes my hair:

‘See over there?’

‘Where?’

‘There, between the shop and the mill.’

‘What is it?’

‘That ranch, see? Some gypsies are occupying it.’

‘And who does it belong to?’

‘Nobody. They say that they’re Romanians. I don’t know how they ended up here.’

‘Who can have tipped them off about it?’ I say, and the question floats in the air.