Kamchatka (10 page)

Since by now the sun had set, and it was chilly, me and the Midget gravitated towards the warm glow of the TV screen. The Midget was conducting some experiment using empty bottles, dirty glasses, water, flour, and some screws and paintbrushes he'd taken from the tool shed. Whenever his experiment seemed to come to a standstill, to some scientific crossroads, some other item on the coffee table offered him a new way forward. The coffee table was laden with potential. Coke, for example, mixed with Nesquik, increased the potential for making froth.

I was rereading the Houdini book, looking for clues about how he managed his escapes. The book talked a lot about physical
preparation and mental concentration but it was silent on the details of how each escape was done: the writer was probably an escape artist himself and had the greatest respect for professional secrecy. And so I found myself looking at the frontispiece, ‘
Harry practises his first escapes with the help of his brother Theo
', as if the illustration might give me some answer the text refused to divulge, and glanced over at papá with his Gancia, at the disembowelled grandfather clock, at the Midget, who had now whipped his experimental gloop until it was just right, and it occurred to me that maybe the illustration had given me the answer, maybe it was just a matter of starting.

I took off my belt (my belt that, apart from the usual buckle and holes, was made of some kind of elastic material: don't ask) and asked the Midget to tie me to my chair. His face and hands covered in flour, the Midget stared at me, trying to figure out if this was some kind of trap. I showed him the illustration in the book. He understood straight off.

The lackey newsreader must have said something terrible because papá leapt to his feet and stormed out into the garden where he could say any words he liked without having to restrain himself.

The Midget tied my hands behind my back. He made a slipknot and then wound the belt around my wrists a thousand times, pulling the elastic as tight as he could. He asked me if he had done it right. I struggled a bit, just enough to make sure the belt didn't come off at the first attempt.

‘Wait, I forgot something,' he said. He grabbed the bottle of gloop he'd been stirring with an old paintbrush and painted some on my face.

Since I was tied up, there was nothing I could do. I asked him if he'd gone crazy. The gloop tasted like Nesquik-flavoured pizza dough.

‘I'm whitewashing the prisoner. Didn't you hear what papá said? You have to whitewash the prisoners!'

We ate dinner in silence, just the three of us. Cold leftovers from the barbecue, with lots of mayonnaise. It was getting late. We surveyed our handiwork – the living room and dining room were a disaster area, stained chairs, scattered clock parts, organic waste – silently evaluating our complicity in this chaos. There never was a more perfect demonstration of the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics (which concerns the dispersal of energy), establishing the tendency of systems to gradually move from order to disorder. And yet, our efforts had fallen short. All the chaos in the world had not been enough to conjure up mamá.

When, in despair, we finally decided to wash the dishes, we discovered there was no water. We had forgotten to fill the tank.

The whole region was divided into
quintas
– country houses owned by middle-class families that stood empty most of the year except in summer, or at weekends. There was nothing showy about them, the plots were small, and most of the houses, like ours, were simple bungalows, some of them half-finished, waiting for some spare cash, or for a new owner willing to take a chance on them. The roads were just dirt tracks; it was a five-minute drive from our gate to the nearest proper road. The plots were bounded by fences or by young poplars, their suppleness an attempt to soften the rigid boundaries.

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.

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 board 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.

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.