Kamchatka (25 page)

Worse still, grandpa took it upon himself to tell us how long it had been since he'd last seen us. He rattled off the number of months, days and hours, having worked it out exactly, or at least that was what he made us think.

‘That is a pretty long time,' the Midget admitted.

And grandpa, having persuaded the jury to convict, rested his case.

It was true that we didn't visit often. At 500 kilometres from Buenos Aires, the trip is no joke, especially in the Citroën. Usually, when we hadn't visited for a while, grandma and grandpa would come and visit us, but it was obvious that papá and grandpa's quarrel the last time they had come to visit had been more acrimonious than usual. (The great advantage of a farm is that, if the conversation turns ugly, there are lots of places you can go to get away.) As a result, we hadn't seen our grandparents since.

During lunch, which was fantastic, the conversation was light enough to ensure that there would be no quarrels. The subject of the farm came up, but it was grandpa who quickly changed the subject. The state of the nation was mentioned, but both papá and grandpa agreed that Argentina was becoming a subject best not talked about. Me and the Midget ended up monopolizing everyone's attention: he stood on a chair and performed his version of the national anthem – with the line ‘Great big Nesquiks in their bodies' – and I gave a demonstration of the various knots Lucas had taught me using napkins.

Eventually papá and mamá went for a siesta. Grandpa retired to the living room, lit a Romeo y Julieta (there are few things in the
world that stimulate daydreaming like the smell of a good Havana cigar) and sat in his chair facing the window. Next to the fireplace, the Midget was talking to the two Goofys, explaining to the plastic Goofy, the newest member of the family, that it was right here that I once ate half a beetle. The Midget had inherited grandma's fondness for recounting memories; grandma was the permanent curator of the Museum of Our Happiness: anywhere she went evoked some memory she felt compelled to share with whoever was with her, even if they had already heard the story a thousand times.

I sank into a big armchair, intent on capturing this moment: my grandparents, the smell of the Romeo y Julieta, the perfect idleness of a Saturday afternoon that seemed eternal. It didn't last long. In that moment the glass seemed half-full, yet a nagging doubt prevented me from draining it.

Maybe that's the way I've always been, from the moment I emerged from my mother's belly and was launched into the world; I know what I want and how to get it, but once I have it in my grasp there is always some part of me that refuses to relax, to enjoy the moment; a part of me that is already worrying about what will come next, about a future that has not yet taken shape. That afternoon remains in my memory as the first time I became aware of my limitations. I can never live entirely in the moment. There is always a part of me that is absent, not where I am seen to be, where I seem to be, a part that is somewhere in the future, waiting for the call ‘action stations'.

‘When will you teach me how to drive the tractor?' I asked grandpa, who was lost in his own daydream. (When you're a kid, it's impossible to imagine all the things that might be going through the mind of a grown-up who looks as though he's not thinking about anything.)

Grandpa exhaled a plume of grey smoke and said, ‘Right now.'

When we were down in the country, grandpa liked to take us around and show us things. Whenever he drove the tractor, I sat up beside him, perched on a metal toolbox. If he went riding (though
he was fat, grandpa was an excellent horseman), he always asked for two horses to be saddled. If he went to pick tomatoes, I took another basket and we went together. I didn't ask, but I figured he had done the same with papá when he was little and that my being there helped him forget the void that had been by his side for twenty years.

‘So, how are things,
che
?' he asked ingenuously as I was practising changing gears on the tractor. ‘How's your friend, the little Chinese guy?'

‘Japanese!' I corrected him, as I always did. Grandpa liked winding me up. I must have been in first or second grade when he told me he was psychic and that he had had a vision that I had a Japanese friend. At the time I was stunned, but later, when I became a little less gullible, I realized that it had been a lucky guess. There were Chinese, Japanese and Korean kids in every state school in the country. Probability was on his side. But I never dared question his psychic gifts.

‘Chinese, Japanese…'

‘I don't know… he left the school last year.'

‘You don't say? What about the other lad, what's his name, Bertolotti, Bergamotti…'

‘Bertuccio!'

‘How's Bertuccio?'

I couldn't get the hang of changing gears. I tried to force it.

‘Hey, hey, easy does it,
che
. It takes skill, not brute force.' By now grandpa had realized that something was wrong. He didn't need to be psychic. ‘Don't tell me Bertuccio left too?'

At this point I would like to say that I carefully considered the possible consequences of my actions, but that would be a lie. It was like someone had given me a truth serum with lunch; I would have answered any question grandpa asked me, however private or embarrassing the answer.

‘He didn't leave. I left. Me and the Midget. We're going to a religious school now. The priest is a friend of papá. Since we started going there the Midget wants to be a saint. Mamá got fired from the laboratory. Papá's law office is gone, some guys stormed in and trashed everything. He worked in bars for a while, but there's too many police now, so he works at home. But it's not our home, it's someone else's home. We're living on a
quinta
now, with a swimming pool and a bunch of suicidal toads.'

Grandpa didn't say anything. For a minute I thought he hadn't heard a word I'd said. I wondered how a foreign correspondent would have put it, the guy who was on the TV every night at midnight, just before the ‘moment of meditation'. His voice and his face were funereal, if memory serves; his name was Repetto, Armando Repetto, he had dark hair, slicked back like Bela Lugosi. I could almost hear him intone, in his deep baritone voice: ‘The situation of the vicente family has taken a turn for the worse. Already facing the challenges of living in secret, they are now in financial trouble. Flavia has lost her job and the future of David's work is precarious, raising the threat of insolvency… David's father confessed to media sources that he was not surprised, and insisted that he intended to take steps to…'

‘
Abuelo
,
abuelo
, are you listening to me?'

‘Of course, darling.'

‘Don't fight with papá, please. Not this time.'

I remember once there was this opossum that drove grandpa crazy. It laid waste to the chicken coop. I have a fleeting memory of blood and feathers and broken eggs. Grandpa laid traps, blocked every hole in the coop, but the opossum kept squeezing through and decimating the hens. Until one day grandpa decided enough was enough and we set out to hunt down the opossum.

I was excited by the prospect of joining the hunting party. It was like a Western. The opossum was a cattle-rustler, grandpa was the sheriff and I was his trusty deputy; I stood next to him as he took down his shotgun and filled his pockets with red buckshot cartridges and I ran over to get Señor Salvatierra when he asked me to. The two boys came, too. Lila wanted nothing to do with the whole thing. Women have better instincts.

We wandered around in circles for so long that for a while I thought the opossum was outwitting us. Finally Señor Salvatierra tracked him down. He stopped about a metre from a tree, stared at a hole in the trunk and announced that the opossum was inside. At first I didn't believe him, but then he pushed the barrel of the shotgun into the hole and fired.

Shotguns sound like cannons. I can't imagine what cannons sound like.

Then he put his arm inside and pulled it out.

Opossums are disgusting animals. On the outside they look like little furry cushions, but inside they're all vicious teeth and claws. Señor Salvatierra threw it on the ground and poked it in the belly with the barrel of the shotgun. This seemed to me a little unnecessary, given that it was obviously dead, but it confirmed what Salvatierra had been thinking.

‘She's with young,' he said.

Inside her pouch were several white hairless creatures that looked like little more than larvae, twisting and turning as though stretching themselves.

‘What'll happen to them now?' I asked.

Señor Salvatierra looked at grandpa. Grandpa said nothing. He was busying himself unloading his shotgun and stuffing the cartridges back in his pockets with the others.

Manolo, the older of the Salvatierra boys, who was kneeling next to me beside the opossum, said, ‘They'll die.'

I gave him a push and he fell on his backside. ‘No, they won't,' I said stubbornly. ‘If I feed them and keep them warm they won't die.'

‘They're too little,' said Manolo. ‘Can't you see, they're still suckling? Look at their mouths. You'll never find a teat small enough to feed them!'

‘Get on home!' Señor Salvatierra said imperiously. Manolo looked at him resentfully. Why was he being sent home, when I was obviously the stupid one? But he reluctantly headed off, his little brother trailing behind him. Señor Salvatierra quickly took his leave. I stood, frozen, caught between disgust and helplessness, wanting to take the larvae with me but terrified I would hurt them if I picked them up, not knowing how to hold them, where to put them, what to do. Looking up, I saw grandpa watching me, the look on his face was one I'd never seen before – the forlorn expression adults have when they are unable to shield their children or grandchildren from pain.

I didn't even want dinner. I sat by the fire, cradling a cardboard box filled with scraps of cloth, a makeshift mattress for my larvae. After she put the Midget to bed, mamá came over and sat next to me; after a while she told me to sit on her knee, and I did, still clutching the cardboard box. The larvae were sleepy and so was I.

The next morning I woke up in my own bed. For a minute I thought the whole thing had been a nightmare. But mamá, who had been waiting for me to wake up, took me in her arms – I would have been about six or seven then, and still manageable – and carried me out to the bank of the lagoon.

She had buried the larvae there, in the mud bank where the rushes grew. She told me that their bodies would help the rushes to grow strong and supple. Living creatures never completely disappear, mamá told me, when something we love dies, it lingers in the air that we breathe, the food we eat, the ground we walk on. I didn't know what to think, I didn't really understand what she was saying, and I wasn't sure that I believed what little I did understand. But I felt reassured to know that the larvae were close by, somewhere I could visit whenever I liked.

That stretch of the lakeshore was always special to me. I still like to go there when I manage to escape the clutches of the world. I close my eyes and listen to the whistle of the breeze in the rushes; it's the same whistle mamá gives when she's right.

By mid-afternoon, it was so hot that we began to wonder if the sun had forgotten what season this was. We were ill equipped for such weather: the lightest clothing mamá had packed for me was the check flannel shirt I was already wearing. But grandma said she had some old clothes of papá's that might fit me: a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts, something lighter than my lumberjack outfit. She and I went upstairs to papá's old room, which had been locked to spare it from the destructive talents of the Midget. Papá's room was an entire universe in miniature; a black hole would have damaged it irreparably.

Despite having been shut up, the room smelled clean. It was obvious that grandma aired it regularly. Papá's telescope was still on its tripod next to the window. The bed was made up with clean sheets and everything. There were pennants pinned to the wall above the headboard, reminders of local sports clubs and the sort of philanthropic associations you got back then, the Rotary club and the Lions club. On one side of the bed was a small bookcase with a load of children's books all from
la colección Robin Hood.
Through one of the publishing miracles of the Argentina of a different era, papá and I had read exactly the same books.
David Copperfield
translated by a posh lady called Maróa Nélida Bourguet de ruiz, for example. Papá had a copy of the second edition from 1945 that he
bought in 1950, to judge by the name and the date scrawled in his childish handwriting on the first page.

On the desk I found an entire battalion of lead soldiers, ranged against an invisible enemy. On the shelf at head height there was a collection of model cars that, in size and detail, put my Matchbox cars to shame, a collection of model airplanes and a red sailboat whose sail rose to a couple of inches below the ceiling.

‘It's exactly the same,' I said as grandma poked around in the wardrobe.

‘Exactly, exactly.'

‘You could have thrown all this stuff out and had a room for the two of you,' I said, thinking of grandma Matilde, who had boxed up all of mamá's belongings and turned her old bedroom into a showcase for the souvenirs of her trips abroad: hats and
mantillas
and dolls (the most extravagant being a flamenco dancer the train of whose dress was a metre long).

‘What would I want with another room?' said grandma, practical as ever. ‘Here, try this on.'

She handed me a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts. They stank of mothballs, but they were clean and looked almost new. It was weird to think that papá had ever been this small.