Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (33 page)

Silence filled all those spaces between us
and the wind wove its arabesques of sound upon that heavy blank
canvas.

Every now and then, I felt
Ajax’s gaze on me, like a mix of discomfort and joy. I’d almost
say, of pride.

The native studied me in a way that made me
think that, perhaps... maybe... almost a miracle... I could be
important for someone.

Hours passed like this.

I burned with the desire to ask him so many
things and he simply watched me, like someone beloved. Like someone
with whom he shared a secret.

A secret that I,
obviously, didn’t possess.

Not yet.

And why doesn’t my father
talk to me?

Well, it’s simply because
he doesn’t talk to anyone.

It wasn’t a personal
question. It was simply... the dust. Yes, that’s my
theory.

The dust is something
omnipresent on Mars. It’s fine, it’s red, and it makes you
cry.

It gets in your clothes,
in your boots, in your hair. There is no safety seal in any home
that keeps it out, not even in the Mayor’s Office, even less in the
Church, and people only go in there once a week or when there’s a
funeral.

But above all, it gets
into your throat. It’s like a dry, asphyxiating hand.

And my father is dry, like Martian dust.

He smells of sweat and talc. He only drinks
alcohol on weekends, a lot of it. He works from sun up to sun down,
prays, and stays silent.

And I don’t seem to exist
at his side. It’s as if I turned invisible the very moment I step
onto the porch of our house.

A house that still has the
same lavender-colored curtains it’s always had, because they’re the
ones my mother had chosen (as my father recounted, one Christmas
Eve, when he had especially indulged with the ouzo).

Sometimes I wish I were anywhere else.

That night, I returned with the feeling of
having taken part in something grand.

When the Chevy parked in front of the door
to the house, the four of us (if we include Borzoi) were a mass of
reddish sand.

We shook ourselves off as best we could, in
that strange tired way we Martians do, almost resigned to the
uselessness of trying.

Mister Capadocia told me not to say anything
to Amos, just to avoid explanations.

I nodded. In any event I
didn’t plan to tell him anything about this marvelous
day.

I untied Borzoi, who licked my face, leaving
a tangerine mark on it, and I waited as the Bel Air moved once
again to its spot in the yard, under the yellowish willow.

I remained at the fence, waiting, marking
time by kicking little rocks.

An hour later, the native emerged.

He looked at me with an
amused expression: “You’re still here?”

I shrugged my shoulders without moving my
gaze from a little rock that was especially difficult to kick,
feeling as if my face were boiling.

“
Did you want to talk with
me?”

His voice sounded gentler.

I raised me head and found myself staring
into his silver pupils.

He was intimidating and, at the same time,
he inspired a trust in me that I had never felt with anyone
before.

He placed his hand on my head, ruffling my
dirty hair, red on red.

“
Don’t forget me, all
right?”

“
Never!” I said, more
vehemently than I had wanted to be.

He smiled with a
half-chuckle. “Good, good.”

He gave me a last look, tinged with
nostalgia.

He began to draw away, walking slowly, in
the center of the street. It was already dark.

Something within me burned.

I ran after him and
crossed his path. What I said was more an entreaty than an
enunciation: “I’d like to be your friend!”

He lowered his gaze to my
face. I would’ve sworn that, in the darkness of the night, I saw a
tear shine.

He took my face between his hands with a
delicacy that seemed wrong for a colossus like he was.

He rested his forehead
against my own and whispered some words that I didn’t understand
until much later: “Of course you’ll always be, Jedediah. Never
forget what I feel for you.”

Then, he took off a necklace he wore and put
it over my head, in silence. I felt like I had a knot in my throat.
He gave me a slap on the back and left, walking very slowly.

I stayed in the middle of the street until
he disappeared from sight.

I spent all night looking at the oval of
bone with its intricate designs, dreaming of the time when I was
old enough to go in search of him and be like him.

I don’t feel notably
different. I mean to say, I don’t think that I have anything
particularly notable that distinguishes me from others.

But I know that I am not like others.
Perhaps something in me is missing.

I don’t get along well
with people my own age.

All of them want to be
soldiers to fight in the Schismatic Revolts. But I am disgusted by
war and all that. I don’t think it serves for anything.

What I do like a lot is to talk with Mister
Capadocia. Or rather, to listen to him. To hear all his stories of
when he was in the asteroid exploration squadrons.

Mister Capadocia has told
me many times that, when I’m older, he’ll give me the Chevy... I
don’t think this will be true, but meanwhile he lets me ride in it
as often as I want, in his yard, under the willow.

I also like playing with
Borzoi a lot, he’s good and affectionate. And he’s a very
intelligent dog. Some nights I let him come in through the window
of my bedroom and he sleeps with me for a while.

Lately, I think a lot
about Mister Ajax. I’ve stopped dreaming of being an outer planet
pilot and instead I think about being an archeologist or
anthropologist or a geneticist, or anything that will let me work
close to the natives.

It’s a strange feeling,
which gives something almost like meaning to my boring
life.

I think they call it hope.

Around when I turned sixteen, many strange
things happened in Olympic.

First was the “long
peregrination.” The natives of the Peridier Crater had chosen to
emancipate themselves and headed for the autonomous territories on
the other side of Planitia Utopia, a name that was never better
chosen for a place of promises.

The ones who I had so admired went
there.

Later, the mine closed because the supply
route lay in the middle of the conflict zone. Thus I found myself
unemployed: I had begun to work, to earn a few nickels to use to
get out of there.

This was a tragedy for the
town which went, in months, from a few thousand down to a few
hundred inhabitants. Although Mister Capadocia said that the
closing of the mine had been a blessing for me in particular, for
I’d been spared having my spirit burn out in earning a regular
salary that could barely fill my stomach and would cloud my
thinking, as if to say, in the end, that there was no reason for me
to leave there.

But the old man was wrong; I wanted to leave
Olympic with all my strength and that was the sole motive of my
existence.

Then, Mister Capadocia
died and I inherited an old dog that didn’t last more than a week
before, out of grief, finally rejoining his master. I cried like
I’d never cried before, as much for one as for the other. My
childhood had forever left me, and although I’d known that that had
been inevitable for some time, for the first time it was
palpable.

I inherited the Chevy and
the house; the old man had left them in my name. I couldn’t believe
it. On Mars, you’re an adult at sixteen, but without gold that
doesn’t mean anything and he knew it. Now I could choose my
tutorage, which was how the lack of universities in the mining
zones was handled, or I could move to a large city and enroll at a
major college. But I knew what I wanted. I’d known it for five
years.

And then the most astonishing of all the
events that happened that year in Olympic took place: my father
spoke to me. Little and bitterly, of course. Drunk as he was
(perhaps to work up the nerve) he stumbled over the words, unused
to using them. But he told me something strange, something which
perhaps would define my future from then on. He told me that he had
always loved me and that he would be very happy if I left that
run-down town.

That night I left home, crying and swearing
that I would never let an entire lifetime pass in order to have a
soul and show it. That I would never again remain silent.

I went straight toward the east, beyond the
Phlegra Mountains, to the Schismatic Zone.

I was not a mercenary or a Blue Cross
doctor. I had no idea what tasks I could do there.

In reality, I wasn’t much
more than a guy who had quickly moved from being a short and skinny
sprat into a tall young man, thin and ungainly; who had a pink Bel
Air Chevy as his whole fortune and a necklace of bone to which he
prayed every night. A simpleton who had learned what little he knew
from books and the stories of an old man.

I had no idea what I was getting myself
into.

Magenta is a good color on Mars, almost a
camouflage.

So no, I won’t change the
color of the Bel Air.

And I don’t plan to, a bit
for that reason, a bit out of an homage to Mister Capadocia and
also because, well, I can’t afford the luxury of repainting the
vehicle.

Maybe it’s a classic or,
what’s just the same, a clunker with pretensions of
eternity.

I’m very nervous. By Zeus,
I’m so nervous!

I know that it’s very
unlikely that Ajax is here, that he remembers me or that he’s even
interested in seeing me. And even less in giving me a
job.

But that’s why I’m there,
yes.

I know, I know, five years
and this is the best plan I’ve come up with: to go and ask him for
a job.

But the truth is that I’m
only going for that.

And perhaps to reassure
myself that all that wasn’t a dream.

I knew that the natives aged so slowly that
they could live five or six times longer than an ordinary human.
But nothing prepared me for seeing him just as he was on that
remote day of my childhood when my life changed.

There were no visible boundaries to cross
into the Schismatic Zone, but as soon as I crossed that imaginary
line, eight natives on sleipnirs surrounded the Chevy.

I shut off the engine and got out of the car
slowly. I shook off the dust, which fell in torrents from my
clothes and hair, and I waited quietly, as people did in the holos,
with my hands raised.

One of the men, who came from the rear,
suddenly spurred his eight-legged steed and stopped a few meters
from the car. He leaped down and ran toward me with the lightness
of a predator and such elegance that it inspired both admiration
and fear just to see him.

When he reached my side, he pounced on me
and hugged me until my ribs hurt. With superhuman strength, he
lifted me in the air and began to laugh. Then I recognized his
deep, warm voice.

“
Ajax?”

The native let my feet touch the ground once
more and ruffled my dusty, reddened hair, like that time five years
earlier.

“
You’ve come back to me,
Jedediah!”

Then his eyes found the necklace I wore at
my neck.

He smiled proudly.

“
You didn’t forget me,” I
said, in a shaky voice. I had the same knot in my throat as when I
was a sprat. A strange emotion that made me think that at last I
was home.

“
Forget you?” Something
crossed his face, as if an unstoppable force had impelled him to do
something, and he would have had to use all his force of will to
stop himself. “That’s impossible!”

The rest of the troop left at a hand signal
from him. He freed his sleipnir, who began to follow close behind
us like an affectionate dog, while we returned in the Chevy.

Ajax laughed heartily at all my insipid
stories, and he marveled at anecdotes about the town, as if I were
recounting the Odyssey for him.

He was exactly as I remembered him, but
different: more human, more a friend.

I think that I was never so filled with
happiness in my entire life.

When we reached the city, I was astonished
by the grandeur of native architecture. The buildings were
spectacular and organic. As if Gaudí had been resurrected, and he
was a Martian.

Ajax led me straight to his house and we sat
down to eat. Well, I did. He studied me, ignoring the time that had
passed and picking up his observation that had been interrupted
five years ago.

“
What do you want to do as
a job?”

I hurriedly swallowed the enormous spoonful
of chickpea and sausage soup I had in my mouth, and Ajax muffled a
laugh.

“
Anything I can be useful
at.”

The native was thoughtful,
pondering that. I feared that his pause meant that I wouldn’t be
useful at anything. But suddenly he lifted his head and asked me,
“Would you be interested in being my field assistant?”

I jumped to my feet and
shouted such a vociferous “yes!” that I spilled what remained of
the stew onto the floor.