Kamchatka (21 page)

‘There's a film on I want you to see. It's on TV on Monday.' She put the sachet of milk in its plastic holder and handed it to the Midget.

‘What's the film?
The Sound of Music?
'

Wrong question. Mamá still hadn't got over the disappointment of taking me to see it in the cinema. I fell asleep.

‘This is how you make Nesquik,' said the Midget, who loved to explain the process as he made his Nesquik, as though we were trainees.

‘Is it a horror movie?' I asked. The last time mamá had made me watch a film on TV it was
The Miracle of Marcelino.

‘No, silly.'

‘You put in three teaspoons,' said the Midget, filling his cup with brown powder.

‘It's called
Picnic
.'

A film about a picnic? It sounded boring.

‘It's not boring,' said mamá, who could read my mind, or at least my expression. ‘The music is wonderful, and there's fight scenes in it, and I know you like them.'

‘Then you pour the milk from way up high.'

‘Is there anyone famous in it?'

‘William Holden. The one who was in
The Bridge on the River Kwai
.'

The Bridge on the River Kwai
was boring (at least it was then, it got better later) and it ended badly (that hasn't changed), and I didn't like films that ended badly (that hasn't changed either).

‘The guy who was in
Stalag 17
.' Mamá didn't give up easily.

Stalag 17
was brilliant. It was about these guys who escape from a German POW camp. I like films about escapes.

‘And then you stir, but not too much, otherwise there won't be any little lumps. The little lumps are the best bit,' said the Midget, taking his first sip.

‘Lucas?'

‘He said he'd be back around seven. I was fired from the lab today. Do you want me to get you a cup?'

I nodded mechanically.

Mamá took a cup down from the cupboard and pushed it across the counter to me.

‘It might be nice to go down to the farm for your grandfather's birthday. What do you think?' she said, looking for another teaspoon in the drawer. The Midget never lent his spoon. He liked drinking his Nesquik with the spoon still in his cup.

‘Does papá want to go?' I asked suspiciously.

‘I'll talk him into it. After all, it's his father. He has to stop acting like a prick around him.'

‘You said “prick”,' the Midget noted.

‘I'm allowed to say it, because I'm me,' mamá said pedantically.

‘So you're allowed to say “prick” because you're a grown-up?'

‘And you're not allowed to say “prick”, even when you're repeating what I say. Stop being a smart aleck.'

‘What do you mean they fired you?'

Mamá looked at me with a mixture of resentment and admiration, shielding her face behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. She hated being forced to talk about things when she didn't want to, but she grudgingly acknowledged my skilful manoeuvre. Having just told
the Midget not to be a smart aleck, my question put her between a rock and a hard place; now she wasn't allowed to act the smart aleck either.

‘They fired me, that's all there is to it.'

‘But why? Were you terrible at your job in the laboratory?'

‘I'm a stupendous lab technician. And I'm a stupendous teacher, just like I'm a stupendous mother.'

The Midget noisily sucked his Nesquik through his teeth, approvingly.

‘You're a terrible cook,'I said.

‘Nobody's perfect.'

‘But why did they fire you, then?'

‘Politics.'

At that moment an angel passed. According to grandma Matilde, when there's a sudden silence in a conversation it's because an angel is passing.

Then the Midget shouted: ‘Look, mamá, look!' He showed her his cup. The teat of his cup had snapped and was now attached by a thin thread of plastic.

‘That's because you're always chewing on it, you little prick,' I said.

‘Don't you start!' said mamá.

‘He called me a prick first!'

‘That doesn't mean you have to repeat it!' mamá snapped, but with no real conviction. The Midget was genuinely upset and she didn't want to make things worse.

The three of us stood there, staring at the Midget's cup, the Midget with his arms around mamá, me leaning against both of them. There was nothing much to be said. It was impossible to fix. And buying another one, even one exactly the same, was unthinkable. My brother had never accepted the concept of the production line. For him, no two objects were the same. In general we avoided allowing
him to make decisions about what to buy, because it could take him an hour to choose a pair of clackers when to us they all looked identical. We'd tell him until we were blue in the face that they were all the same and he would swear that they weren't. The funniest thing was that, privately, mamá admitted that the Midget was right. He had science on his side. Although they might look identical, no two cups are actually the same. No two cars are the same. No two lamps, no two railings and no two moments are ever the same.

In the days that followed, we observed the phenomenon of mamá as housewife as both privileged witnesses and innocent guinea pigs.

Mamá had never been a housewife. Mamá was a terrible housewife. Whether the former was a consequence of the latter, or the latter the result of the former was a problem as philosophically taxing as the chicken and the egg.

But my view is completely objective. I have hundreds of exhibits to enter into evidence.

Once she put a chicken in the oven without taking the plastic bag full of giblets out of it.

Once she tried to iron a nylon shirt with the iron on full blast and burned it to a crisp.

Once she wanted to paint my bedroom and she painted over the wallpaper.

Once she filled the blender all the way up to the lid and then she turned it on.

Once she turned on the oven without looking inside first and set fire to the chopping board.

Once, half-asleep, she put the Midget's school smock on him without taking out the clothes hanger and sent him off to school with the hanger still inside.

Papá dealt with these things magnanimously. Partly because he loved her, partly because mamá was perfect in every other way, and partly because, even if she was a terrible housewife, he was no better at playing the handyman (once our toilet was blocked for six days and in the end I took the plunger and fixed it myself, because papá couldn't go near it without throwing up), so he was in no position to cast the first stone.

But all of these disasters were the work of a different mamá, a mamá who spent as little time as possible in the house, and when she was there, spent her time doing the things she enjoyed, like watching movies on TV, doing crosswords or reading for hours in the loo.

Now everything was different. With no work at the university or the lab, mamá had no choice but to spend her days at the
quinta
. How many films can you watch in a day? How many crosswords can you do? How many hours could she spend sitting on the toilet reading
Stability and Flux in Thermodynamic States
?

For a couple of weeks I could work out every single thing that had gone on at home while I was at school. For the Sherlock Holmes in me, it was easy: all I had to do was follow the trail of cigarette ash. The ash beside the radiogram indicated that she had put on music while she was working. The ash on the marble countertop in the kitchen meant she had been smoking as she washed the dishes. The ash next to the outside sink meant that she had been hand-washing clothes, even though it was freezing cold. The ash by the drain in the bathroom floor meant that she had been sitting on the toilet for long enough to have had to dispose of her cigarette – I lifted the grille and there was her cigarette butt, floating on the water.

There were other, more subtle, clues. For a while I thought that the burn mark on the windowsill was getting deeper. Had mamá set down a lit cigarette in a place where someone – a previous tenant, some other mamá – had left one before? Was there a moment during the day when mamá stopped cleaning, whirling around like the white tornado in the Ajax commercial, and stood here, looking out at the garden, with a cigarette burning away next to her? What could she have been looking at? (It was a pretty view, calming even, but not in any way exceptional.) What had the other people who had briefly lived in the
quinta
stood here looking at?

I thought maybe the house was taking hold of mamá. These things happen, especially in Stephen King books. The man who had smoked the first cigarette (to me it had to be a man, but that was pure intuition) had met with some tragic fate. He must have been related to Pedro, because Pedro was a kid like me and kids don't smoke. I imagined it was Pedro's uncle, an uncle he really loved – it would have made more sense to think of it as his father, but I ignored this possibility – whose death had plunged Pedro into a terrible depression that China and Beba hoped to tempt him out of with Havanna biscuits. Having his life cut short meant that his soul was still wandering the Earth. It's common knowledge that when someone is betrayed or murdered, their ghost can't rest in peace, it roams around looking for justice. (There are ghosts that look for vengeance, but they end up in hell, like Hamlet's father. He didn't realize that you can't purge a sin by asking someone to commit another sin; justice and vengeance are two very different things.) So the ghost of Pedro's uncle still haunted the
quinta
and possessed whoever spent the most time in the house – in this case, mamá – who, without realizing it, started doing the same things the dead man used to do, like smoking a cigarette, standing by the same window, victims of the same daydream. It occurred to me that maybe Pedro's uncle might be buried here, in the grounds of the
quinta
, with no cross or headstone to mark the grave. One day me and the Midget
would go to bury another dead toad and we'd dig up a skeleton wearing threadbare clothes, and in his pocket would be a half-smoked pack of Jockey cigarettes. (This is the problem about thinking about something else to take your mind off something. It works for a while, but in the end you always come back to the thing you were trying not to think about, only now whatever it was is worse.)

One afternoon, me and the Midget got home from school to discover that the Ajax white tornado had run out of puff: last night's dirty dishes were still on the table; our pyjamas, our slippers and our dirty clothes were on the floor where we'd left them; the ashtrays were overflowing and there were cigarette butts floating in a coffee cup. Mamá was sitting on the sofa, cigarette in hand, feet up on the coffee table, the tin of Nesquik between her ankles, watching TV.

‘What I don't understand,' she said, without even bothering to say ‘Hi' or ‘how was your day', ‘is this thing about not being able to move their little fingers. How come a civilization sophisticated enough to design interstellar spaceships, can't work out how to move their little fingers?'

‘It's a manufacturing flaw,' I said, sitting next to her. ‘It can happen to anyone. Achilles' heel was vulnerable because his mother held him by his foot when she dipped him in the river Styx.'

‘Where are the clean cups?' asked the Midget, emerging from the kitchen with a carton of milk.

‘There aren't any. Pour the milk into the Nesquik tin, there's not much Nesquik left anyway,' said mamá, without taking her eyes off
The Invaders
.

And that was how we got mamá back. After days and days of trying, she had to face the facts: it was as physically impossible for her to do housework properly as it was for the Midget to pick something up without breaking it. Laboratory or no laboratory, ghost or no ghost, mamá was still mamá.

This, in case you didn't realize, was the good news.

‘Where are you off to?' mamá asked me later that night. I stood there, my mouth open, my book under my arm. What kind of question was this? It was nearly ten o'clock, we'd had dinner, I was carrying a book (one about King Arthur that I'd borrowed from the school library) and my body was clearly pointing in the direction of the hall that led to the bedrooms. Where could I be off to, except to bed? Then I remembered. It was monday. Mamá, with suspicious conscientiousness, had just cleared the table. She was carrying a plate of biscuits and was clearly heading in the direction of the living room, where I could hear the theme music to
El Mundo del Espectáculo
. Tonight they were showing
Picnic
. We had a date. I was trapped.

Not that I didn't see the advantages of the situation. It was a rare opportunity to have mamá all to myself. If there was a romantic movie on, papá scuttled away faster than a cockroach when you turn the light on. Without mamá there to stop him, the Midget knew he could bounce on his bed until he was exhausted or had split his head open. So it was just me and mamá. And the biscuits (called ‘Ladies' Lips' – delicious!).

But there were disadvantages too. Mamá's taste in movies, for a start. If previous experience was anything to go by, I was doomed
to two hours of agony. Or, in the case of
The Sound of Music
, more than two hours.

In general, the movies mamá liked left me cold, or worse. But what was worse was the seriousness of mamá's relationship to the cinema. Everyone likes films, but not so much that they keep a photo of Montgomery Clift on their bedside table. When she was in a cinema, mamá behaved the way the Midget behaved in church. Her every emotion was amplified. She took everything in with wide eyes and a sweet tooth. Sometimes, though she didn't realize it, she'd be sitting there with her mouth hanging open: in the dark of the cinema she didn't care if she looked stupid. On the subject of the cinema, she was an evangelist: she was determined to convert me to the faith, to infect me with her enthusiasm for this religion, patiently explaining to me how the experience of sitting with other people in a darkened cinema watching light play on a huge screen was something mystical and profound. Like all evangelists, she made me feel awkward. I never really understood the intensity of her faith. I was happy to go to the cinema, but, to me, the chocolate-covered peanuts you bought in the foyer were as important as the film.