Paradises E-Book

Iosi Havilio

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 455

Beschreibung

Paradises are trees that abound in Buenos Aires, the fruits of which are known as poison beads. This is what the novel is about: the many kinds of paradise and the poisons that inhabit them.' Iosi Havilio Paradises might be a reimagining of Camus' Outsider - but in female form and living in 21st-century Buenos Aires. Our narrator allows the hazards of death and chance encounters to lead her through the city, where she sleepwalks into a job in the zoo's reptile house, and another administering morphine to one of the oddball residents of the squat that she and her young son move into. Is this life in the shadows, an underworld of cut-price Christmases, drugs and dealers, or is this simply life? And why do snakes seem to be invading every aspect of it? Paradises returns to the enigmatic female characters of Havilio's first novel, Open Door - and has already been highly praised by Beatriz Sarlo, perhaps the most influential critic in his native Argentina. Thoughtful, yet unafraid of squalor or the perils of insecurity, this is a voice for right now, obliquely critical, grimly comic.

Leseprobe

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First published in 2013 by And Other Stories

www.andotherstories.org London – New York

Copyright © Iosi Havilio 2012 English language translation copyright © Beth Fowler 2013 Introduction copyright © Alex Clark 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Iosi Havilio to be identified as Author of Paradises (original title Paraísos) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This work is published within the framework of the “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic.

Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 9781908276247 eBook ISBN 9781908276254

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Contents

Introduction by Alex ClarkOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelveThirteenFourteenFifteenSixteenSeventeenEighteenNineteenTwentyTwenty-oneTwenty-twoTwenty-threeTwenty-fourTwenty-fiveTwenty-sixTwenty-sevenTwenty-eightTwenty-nineThirtyThirty-oneThirty-twoThirty-threeThirty-fourThirty-fiveThirty-six

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This one belongs to Mirko, Loli and Zlé

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‌Introduction

‘I dream of toads, skirts, orgies and horses,’ recorded the unnamed narrator of Iosi Havilio’s first novel, Open Door, whose story is reprised in Paradises. Then, the wildness and surrealism of her sleepscape represented the complications that were multiplying in her waking life: having quit the city following the disappearance of her lover, Aída, she had come to rest in a small countryside town that was also home to a lunatic asylum, formed a fragile relationship with a taciturn farmer, begun a strange, unpredictable liaison with a young local girl and become pregnant. These seismic events suggest a certain self-determination, or even agency, but almost the reverse is the case: our protagonist appeared to drift in and out of places, attachments, states of mind, occasionally allowing herself to be directed by sexual desire or an appetite for experiment, but largely content – or at least prepared – to let events unfold without her intervention.

Havilio uses a correspondingly blank, affectless prose style to describe his creation’s progress, or lack of it, although it is also studded with fragments of imagery and curious juxtapositions, as with the toads and orgies above. Its power is undeniable: we are gradually and stealthily drawn into this peculiar, disturbing story, intrigued by the narrator’s inner and outer lives and wrong-footed by the parallels between the disjointed community she has found by chance and the wider world of the patients at Open Door who, as its name suggests, are free to come and go as they please. The novel’s close – the apparent arrival of a UFO – is both determinedly odd and unusually cheerful: ‘I feel happy’ are its final words.

At the beginning of Paradises, it emerges that life has cohered, only to fall apart again. A few years have passed, and the narrator has built a relatively stable life with the farmer, Jaime, and their son, Simón. But Jaime is killed in a hit-and-run accident, and things begin to unravel; evicted from their farm, burdened with too many possessions to carry comfortably but too few to make a home, the narrator and Simón make their way to Buenos Aires. They have little money and fewer plans. Survival is, clearly, their first priority.

The landscape is demonstrably different – flooded streets through which pedestrians guide themselves by a rope, crowded bars and cheap hotels with communal kitchens – but it would be simplistic to see Paradises as the city sequel to Open Door’s rural beginnings. Both are about contingency, and about the connections between people, but they are also about boundaries: between stability and disintegration, the real and the imaginary, the sane and the insane. They probe the extent to which autonomy and independence are illusions. Despite its urban setting, which could conjure vastness and anonymity, Paradises is notable for its enclosures: el Buti, the squat in which the narrator and her son go to live, named for a young man who died resisting eviction; the zoo, and more specifically the reptile house, in which she goes to work; and the underground shelter in a palatial house.

This last is part of the family home of Axel, a quasi-boyfriend of Eloísa, the sexually uninhibited young woman from Open Door, who makes a characteristically dramatic reappearance in Buenos Aires. Once again the narrator is caught between resisting her attractions and being unable to, although she seems to have gained some perspective, remarking astutely that Eloísa is ‘exhausted from always having to be the same. So theatrical. And yet again, as in the past, as with her adventures in the country, my attention is grabbed by that capacity of hers to re-emerge as though nothing has happened, burying everything, without blame or remorse, like an animal.’

Eloísa’s oddness is not unrivalled, though: the reader is also presented with Tosca, a monstrous and mysterious woman who presides over el Buti and whom the narrator injects daily with morphine; with Canetti, the zoo’s janitor, whose former life as a bank treasurer collapsed when he attempted to deceive his employers; and with Iris, a secretive Transylvanian woman stranded in Argentina after her boyfriend’s departure. These are lives in the process of some kind of complicated collapse, or stalled and circumscribed – and they are the people to whom the narrator, once again despite any outward sign of volition, is drawn.

This, then, is hardly a paradise, and indeed the novel’s title doesn’t refer to an ideal or heavenly place, but rather to the paradise trees that fill the city and strew it with their ‘poison beads’, toxic little fruits that come in through the windows and for which the antidote is the bark of the same plant. ‘The antidote alongside the poison, that sounds reasonable,’ reflects the narrator, although it is also a problematic and confusing state of affairs, that the source of harm and its cure be found in such close proximity.

Those tensions and uncertainties are at the heart of Paradises, which sets the fugue-like state of its narrator against a phantasmagorical backdrop, one seething with snakes and monsters and terrors. Once again, Havilio asks us to suspend judgement on what is materially real and what is a projection of some variety of inner turmoil or distress; to consider whether desire can ever be straightforwardly itself or whether it is always the displacement of another, less approachable appetite; to ponder on what, ultimately, constitutes freedom. These existential questions, impossible to answer, find their unsettling expression in Havilio’s shifting, undefinable exploration of alienation and its surprising consequences.

Alex Clark London, March 2013

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Paradises

‌One

Jaime died at the start of spring. Someone who didn’t see him, or who caught sight just too late to swerve and avoid him, ran him down as he was changing a tyre at the side of the road. From the skid marks, it was thought to have been a lorry, but it could have been a bus or one of those big four-by-fours. And he was left there, lying between the tarmac and the verge for several hours, until around midnight, when a family collecting cardboard to make a few pesos discovered him and notified the police. And even though I saw him in the coffin just the other day, I have a clear picture in my mind that he was found on his back, eyes wide open, looking more drunk than dead.

I didn’t have to take care of anything. Héctor, Jaime’s brother, dealt with it all. He went to the morgue to identify the body, dropped in to the police station, took care of all the formalities for the insurance, arranged the wake and transport of the body with the funeral parlour. All very swiftly, as if it had been planned. First, a policeman who had known Jaime since childhood notified Héctor, who in turn called me at dawn, the time of day when this type of news tends to arrive. It’s terrible, he said, I can’t believe it. I didn’t know how to reply, having forgotten about the possibility of death. Not Jaime’s death or mine, or that of anyone in particular, but Death as a whole. Hello, hello, Héctor repeated and then I let out a Yes, it’s terrible, my eyes on Simón as he slept sprawled out in Jaime’s place. Then I kept still, as still as a person can be, looking without seeing, at the furniture, the high ceiling, the spiderwebs, getting nowhere with the questions about life that were filling my head.

The night of the accident, it didn’t strike me as strange that Jaime didn’t come home to eat, but for the fact that he didn’t let me know. Recently he had become addicted to his mobile phone; he used it all the time, under any pretext, to ask me whether I’d had lunch, pretending he’d forgotten something, to let me know a storm was approaching, always needlessly. In fact, on the phone he seemed like someone else – expressive, self-assured, almost a modern man. I went to bed convinced that inebriation had caught him early. An inoffensive habit that he indulged once or twice a week. At best, he would stagger home, his breath rancid, effing and blinding to no one in particular, and disappear into the woods to vomit. Other times, he would find some open piece of ground and lie back in the front seat of his pickup until he was less plastered. That’s how he described it, plastered. Once, a breakdown truck had to drag him out of a ditch. I remember the expression on his face when he got out to open the gate, equal parts shame and mud. I also remember the breakdown guys brazenly making fun of the old man.

The wake started just after eight, the day after the accident. The funeral home was just a few blocks from the Basilica of Luján, three floors of granite facade with long balconies and tinted glass. At half seven a taxi ordered by Héctor came to get us. A white car, shining white, with black lights inside and a mini-bar that seemed nothing more than a prop, not at all like a funeral car. Five minutes into the journey, Simón was asleep. It wasn’t surprising; he had skipped his siesta, running around all day with unusual energy. I made him comfortable on the seat, curled up with his head in my lap, and I abandoned myself to the scenery.

I had made this trip so many times with Jaime, coming and going, to the vet, to the shopping centre, to the railway station. The very road where the accident had taken place, more or less halfway between Open Door and Luján. By the Camel sign, Héctor had told me on the phone. And although I was looking carefully, forehead pinned to the glass, I couldn’t see anything, no marks, no bloodstains, nor the pickup, which must have already been towed away. Too late: when we were almost on top of it, I recognised the giant, muscular camel posing with a cigarette in its mouth.

At some point in the journey, I wondered whether the taxi driver, a very young, dark-haired lad, knew about us, that we were in mourning, about the tragedy. Whether he knew he had gone to pick up the wife and child of someone who had just died, that this wasn’t just any old trip. I’ll never know; we didn’t exchange a single word and the tuneful FM station he was playing at a very discreet volume allowed for either possibility.

We had to go round the houses to get there. A spring rock concert had been organised in front of the cathedral. The event was announced with overhead banners every two or three blocks: 21st September 5pm 21 Bands. We went round the perimeter of the plaza along side streets, held up in a bottleneck that was unusual for a place like this. The driver, one hand on the wheel, the other arm hanging out of the window, sighed several times in protest. The third time, he caught my eye in the rear-view mirror in search of complicity, a comment, or perhaps not, perhaps just apologising. I didn’t know what to say so I ignored him and kept my eyes fixed on the cars around us. A twenty-minute delay. In the background, the high and low notes of guitars and basses competed with car horns.

At the door of the funeral parlour, I could make out Jaime’s twin nephews from afar. Like two soldiers, more twin-like than ever, as if the occasion of their uncle’s death had forced them to emphasise their natural similarity: both dressed in grey suits, almost certainly school uniform, the same hair and fringe, truly identical. I hadn’t seen them for a long time, which must have been why they greeted me distantly, raising their hands rather than moving to kiss my cheek. Or perhaps because the situation made them uncomfortable and they hoped to go unnoticed. Too many changes of position forced Simón awake and there in front of them he opened his eyes, teary but not actually crying, looking for something around him.

That was when it first occurred to me that sooner or later I should try to find some way of telling him what had happened. I had spent the entire day attempting to organise a whole series of thoughts, past and future, relating to Jaime, to me, to the house, to life in Open Door and at no point had it entered my head that I needed to talk to Simón; the more distant and distracted he was the better. Now it was late, I had to surrender to what was coming, I would think about it tomorrow. Anyway, time and Jaime’s absence would take care of explaining better than me.

After greeting the twins, I don’t know why, perhaps intimidated by their rigid posture, I avoided the main door and entered through the garage. I moved forward with Simón in my arms, in near darkness, between a small ambulance, a quad bike and a barbecue that still contained ashes from lunchtime. Instead of retreating, which would have been the sensible thing to do, I grasped the handle of a panel door and surprised two girls painting their toenails in front of a giant television. Sorry, I began to say, and vaguely waved a finger in the air. Not so much unwilling as in a state of absolute sloth, one of the girls, shaven-headed and wearing a sleeveless top, stood on her heels and gestured to another door, next to a string of garlic bulbs hanging from a hook. Go through there and climb the stairs.

We enter another room, not as dark as the first but definitely much more frightening, with a row of coffins standing on end, leaning against the walls like resting totems. Show coffins, waiting for their time. I follow a light and we finally come out in the foyer of the funeral parlour. We appear at the foot of a wide staircase, once again face to face with the twins, who have abandoned the door and are now guarding their father, eyes swollen with exhaustion.

The sight of us unleashes Héctor’s tears. Lots of tiny tears. He embraces me, I’d like to cry too but I can’t. I’m sad, inside myself as well as by contagion, but more than that, I’m stunned. For the few seconds the embrace lasts I can smell a strong odour of mothballs. Images of Jaime and Héctor run through my head, not as I knew them, already old, but at the start of everything, when they were really brothers, five and seven years old, chasing each other, playing, fighting, the countryside always there in the background, snapshots of a childhood I imagine to have been happy.

Héctor dries his face with his cuff, recomposing himself quickly. He tells me that the wake will be on the second floor, that he’s just come from the police station, that no witnesses have come forward as yet, other than the cardboard-collecting family who found him, and that the room will be ready in fifteen minutes. He provides this information without making eye contact. Héctor’s wife, Marta, also takes part in this little conclave, and another man I’ve never seen before, white haired and smooth cheeked, who doesn’t stop nodding. The man asks how it was, what happened, and Héctor goes over the little he knows out loud, as he will continue to do for the rest of the evening. He says that the man who ran him over didn’t stop to help, that it’s hard to believe he didn’t see him, that he must have felt the impact, although perhaps he thought he had hit an animal. Marta sighs, silently indignant. He’ll go on to tell how a lawyer approached him in the police station. An arsehole, Héctor calls him, who accompanied him to the scene of the accident to take photos before they took the pickup away. What we know for sure, he concludes, is that Jaime didn’t put out the markers when he changed the tyre and that he was parked very close to the road.

The wait seems long, we’re squeezed in under the landing. As people arrive, they look at me from a distance, measuring me up, observing Simón; they must know the story, they will have heard of us, of Jaime’s new life. They’ll know that in some way I was his wife for the last four years, that the child in my arms is our son. They don’t approach, just in case. I think about Boca, the ranch hand and companion who spent so much time with Jaime. I say to myself that someone should have told him, I’m about to ask Héctor but I hold my tongue, he’s already got enough on his plate.

A boy with a piggy nose announces that the room is ready. We climb the stairs in a slow procession. The layout and wallpaper make it feel like an old house. First, a room with mirrors positioned opposite each other, to multiply the number of people, to make you feel less alone. Before it was converted into what it is now, this must have been the living and dining room. A bit further along, on either side of a wide corridor, are the bathroom and kitchen. At the back, a closed door and the room where the coffin lies.

I let Héctor and the twins approach Jaime before me. The truth is I don’t really know how to behave. I suppose I’m something like a widow and yet I’m not. When Héctor withdrew, I asked Marta to hold Simón so that I could go up. As I stepped forward, I realised I was less frightened by the idea of seeing Jaime dead than of seeing him disfigured. Héctor had given me no indication of the state in which the body had been found and I hadn’t asked. I slowed down for the last few steps, so that I would see Jaime’s body appear gradually and so lessen the shock. Not as pale as I would have expected, hands interlaced over his chest with a rosary between his fingers, jaw held up by a white handkerchief knotted round the neck, Jaime seemed, as they say, to be at peace. And for me, seeing him, no longer imagining him, had a calming effect.

I touch his forehead with the back of my hand, as if checking for fever, then his chest, and I rest my clenched fists on the cold handles of the coffin. After the initial shock, I take a step back, running my eyes over the objects decorating the room – the wreath of flowers, a standing crucifix, more flowers, in vases, bunches, some loose, two chairs made of dark wood – and I go back to observing Jaime, more carefully this time. Then I notice something perturbing.

In this new Jaime, the final Jaime, who I’ll only see this once, in addition to his stillness, the smell of alcohol, or formaldehyde, I’m not sure, I suddenly discover an oddity that bears little relation to death. Instead of his lips being sealed, as was his habit, somewhere between resignation and embarrassment, I catch sight of a small opening at the right-hand corner of his mouth, a sarcastic, sly smile, as if death had caught Jaime mocking something.

I must have been standing alone by the coffin for five minutes. From what I heard in passing, Héctor had paid extra to have a slightly superior coffin to the standard model provided by the insurance. Polished and varnished, with a bronze-plated cross. Appealing to look at and to touch. Gradually, other people began to approach, relatives, friends of the family, all unknown to me. A tiny old lady with platinum hair and sagging cheeks, a younger woman of around fifty with acne pockmarks, and two very circumspect shaven-headed men. Whether deliberately or in imitation, the four of them positioned themselves on the other side of the coffin, leaving me without protection. For a while I could feel their eyes wandering from the dead man to fix on me out of poorly disguised curiosity.

Pushing my introspection to its limit, at some point I can’t bear any more and raise my head suddenly, to greet, to make myself known, and I meet those four pairs of eyes directed at me, which look away slowly but simultaneously. I thought I felt marked out before, but this is worse. To my relief, a man in suit and tie appears and causes them to forget about me. At first he is disconcerting but he soon reveals himself to be part of the ceremony. He walks around the coffin, straightens a badly folded cloth, retreats a few steps, adjusts the stand where the wreath is and finally approaches the candelabras. He removes a spoon-like tool from his pocket and collects the wax accumulating at the base of each candle so that it doesn’t spill. He does this with great care, taking pride in his work. I suppose a candle with spilled wax would give the wrong impression, somewhere between sloppiness and indifference.

I need air, so I disappear. To reach the street, I have to go via the first floor. Unlike Jaime’s, which is more intimate, the wake on this floor is brimming. So much so that, timidly at first, gradually with more confidence, the attendees will invade our territory throughout the night, using the toilet, stealing chairs, helping themselves to coffee. They also take ownership of the staircase to sit and chat.

Out on the pavement, the night is lively. I notice many passers-by crossing the road a few metres before the funeral home. People prefer to avoid death. A blonde girl with no superstitions, ice cream in hand, comes towards me pushing a pram. She comes so close that I’m convinced she’s going to speak to me, but no, she carries on unhurriedly. I sneak a glance into the pram: she’s carrying supermarket bags. The fake baby reminds me of Simón, who I left in Marta’s care. I go back inside and no one notices my distraction; they must think I went to the toilet to cry in private. Marta and Simón are in the kitchen making little boats and planes out of paper napkins. Thanks, I say, and she replies: He’s an angel.

By one o’clock, there’s hardly anyone left. Simón is sleeping on the floor like a puppy, between a couple of women wearing too much make-up. Marta approaches Héctor, who is sitting three chairs from me. The boys are hungry, she says. Héctor springs up: Let’s go. And to me: Will you come for something to eat? First, he breaks away towards Jaime, takes a look at him and returns. I follow suit, without wanting to; I feel I’ve already said goodbye, but it’s the done thing. He’s the same as before, slightly less alive, with that stony smile that will stay with me for ever. At the very last second, there’s time for a fleeting memory of that rough man I fell in love with unintentionally and with whom I fell out of love without realising it. I can still feel him jerking about on top of me, like an animal, impotent at times, insatiable at others. A memory that belongs to me and me only, I think as I turn my back and move away.

Héctor and Marta walk in single file to the stairs; one of the twins, I’ll never be able to remember their names, turns his head before disappearing to check whether I’m following them, looking slightly put out, who knows why. I pick up Simón, who doesn’t wake in spite of all the commotion, the conversations flying around him and the noise from the floor below, which by now sounds more like a party than a wake. On the way out, I discover a little pile of ashes and cigarette stubs, swept into a corner but not yet thrown out.

When we reach the street, Héctor gestures to say he’s forgotten something. I’ll just be a minute, he says, pushing back through the tinted glass door. As they wait, the twins start to argue. One wants a hamburger, the other pasta. Honestly, boys, Marta says indignantly. An ambulance identical to the one I saw in the garage arrives at full speed and brakes sharply in front of us. From the driver’s side, a short man with a beard gets out, in a nurse’s uniform, and runs into the funeral home. I wonder whether those girls are still painting their toenails. Héctor reappears and says in a low voice to Marta and me: I went to ask them to close the coffin so that he doesn’t spend all night on show.

In a daze, or perhaps not, perhaps just to take our minds off things, Héctor chooses a pizzeria half a block from the basilica. It couldn’t have been noisier. Stragglers from the rock festival move around us: gangs of boys and girls, singing, trucks with equipment, lots of mess. The next room has table tennis and pool tables. At the back, a row of bowling lanes separated from the dining room by a transparent screen that doesn’t quite reach the roof.

Initially we sit there feeling rather uncomfortable. In fact, before we are served, Marta will suggest to Héctor more than once that we look for somewhere else. Yes, he’ll say, I didn’t realise but we’re here now. Marta shakes her head but doesn’t back down. She just protests: Honestly, Héctor.

As the minutes pass, it feels as though all the various sounds in the place are helping us fill the void. Random shouts of triumph; cursing; the sound of balls hitting the wooden floor and skittles toppling, sometimes all at once, sometimes out of time; the waiters’ orders as they pass in front of the till with loaded trays, never stopping; and snippets of conversation from the tables around us.

Héctor and the twins devour the pizza without chewing, at record speed. Marta gestures with her hand for them to slow down, but they take no notice. I’m given two slices of napolitana and one of fainá flatbread. I eat with no appetite, out of habit. The pizza is topped with mashed hard-boiled egg, which makes it difficult to chew. More than once I have to hold down a retch.

Are you still hungry? Héctor asks, standing up. He goes out to smoke, the twins go to the toilet together and take half an hour to return. I’m left alone with Marta. She stretches out her arm and offers me her palm. I hesitate, I’m not in the mood, but it would be much more difficult to refuse, so I copy her movement and put my hand in hers, which she immediately covers with her free hand. It’s as though we’re going to make a promise to each other. She looks me in the eye silently and finally says: You have so much yet to live.

Héctor returns, orders another beer and we start chatting. In reality, they talk and I listen, occasionally emitting a Yes. The topic of conversation is roads, accidents, the brutality of lorry drivers and Jaime’s carelessness. Why on earth did he stop there? protests Héctor. If he’d just pushed the truck a few metres further in, he’d still be with us. What a man, he keeps saying, and Marta pacifies him by squeezing his wrist. I come out in his defence: But he was always so careful. They look at me in unison, reprovingly, as if I spoke unknowingly, as if I’d never met the real Jaime, and once more I feel like a perfect intruder. Luckily, Simón wakes up and his ill humour makes us forget everything for a while.

In a daze, understanding little of anything, Simón puts pieces of pizza in his mouth and magically wakes up. More beer and Héctor starts ranting about the folk from the other wake. How disrespectful. Back and forth, making a terrible mess, as if they were at a football match. Marta says that everyone says goodbye to their loved ones as they see fit. The discussion grows heated, I follow fragments of it, busy ensuring that Simón doesn’t stray too far. Not so much out of fear as to keep Marta quiet, because she keeps throwing out warnings: Oh, I’m terrified he’s going to head over there, watch one of those balls doesn’t escape, she says pointing at the pool tables.

On the return journey it wants to rain but doesn’t. Just a few insignificant drops land on the umbrella, you could count them if you wanted. Not even a drizzle. Instead, the night is cooling quickly, winter’s last effort. I sit behind the twins, who are entertaining themselves with a hand game. As soon as the car pulls out, Simón falls asleep for the third time since we left home. Neither Héctor nor Marta speaks to me for the entire journey. Nor do they say much to each other, just a few short phrases; they can’t agree whether the boys should go to school the next day. Two or three times, Marta will point out the fuel needle, already in the red. There’s more than enough, Héctor will reply.

We leave the Camel sign behind; no one says anything. As if we had come to a mutual agreement, out of respect for Jaime and for fate. We take the dirt track towards the farm in the deepest darkness. Several winds get up at once, whirling the air in all directions. The car’s headlights form a long cone of light full of milling dust. I’m not wearing a jacket, nor is Simón; I never thought the cold would return.

When we finally arrive, Marta caresses my cheek over the back of the seat, one of the twins says Bye, the other stays silent. I carry Simón, who is lying almost crossways, like a pennant. I’m shivering. Héctor waits by the gate with his hand on the latch until we get out of the car. He hurries us a bit. It’s ridiculous for him to drop us so far from the house, he doesn’t even suggest the possibility of taking us right up. Nor does he justify himself. He doesn’t want to come in, to see what his dead brother left, he prefers the distance. In a sense I understand him. With one foot in the car and the other on the ground, before he gets in and shuts the door, Héctor grabs me by the arm, drawing me towards him, and says, very close to my face, his breath smelling unmistakeably of pizza and beer: You have to be strong, things will sort themselves out, you’ll see.

‌Two

I had to imagine Jaime’s burial. It rained all night and the taxi wasn’t able to pick us up. Héctor phoned to let me know: The man says the road is impossible. Anyway, he added after a silence, a bit of interference or a drag on a cigarette: Why such a long send-off? Héctor sounded annoyed, angry, a far cry from the friendly, affectionate tone of the previous day. It must have been lack of sleep and the certainty that death, after the initial novelty, brought nothing but complications and desolation.

I imagined a small, hurried burial, the duty priest going through the motions of a quick prayer, not wanting to get wet. I imagined a sober tombstone, no epitaph. I imagined Jaime, his mouth stuck in that sarcastic smile for all eternity. I thought about all those things his eyes suggested when we were face to face, things that came out suddenly, all at once, not in words but in grunts or kicks, always clumsy. I also imagined that if he woke up, which they say happens once in a million burials, because he’d been taken for dead when he was just unconscious, Jaime wouldn’t go crazy, beating the coffin lid for someone to open it. Instead, he would calmly consume the air he had left, guessing at the grain of the wood in the darkness.

Earlier, in the middle of the night, I had nightmares, shivers and something that felt like fever but wasn’t. My stomach spasmed too, driving me blindly to the bathroom. I vomited three times in a row, everything I had eaten and more. Red, tomato-tinged vomit. As it was happening, I had the impossible feeling that I was bringing up small triangles, like mini portions of pizza that my intestines had taken the trouble to reshape before sending back to the surface.

Around midday, after spending all morning watching television – two news broadcasts, El Zorro, a cookery competition – I got out of bed when hunger started to make Simón grumpy. Aching bones, in my face and limbs, as if I had been stretched on the rack in my sleep. Leaving the room brought confirmation that it had been raining: pools of water in the corners and a small lake in the middle of the house. I put a pan of stew on to heat, left over in the fridge from two nights ago, Jaime’s last supper, and I picked up a tea towel to mop the floor.

At the end of the winter, Jaime had experienced a surge of uncharacteristic enthusiasm, finally ready to devote himself to a bit of home maintenance. After a great struggle, he had managed to retire, and now that he had he felt diminished. Fed up of doing odd jobs in faraway houses, repairing roofs, stopping drips, unblocking drains, he never took the step of fixing the leaks in our own home, although they multiplied after every rainfall, especially above the fireplace. He limited himself to putting out tubs, buckets or rags in the corners to catch the water. Until one cold morning he took out the big stepladder, the one for important jobs, and started cleaning out the gutters. He took out the earth, the dry leaves, all the accumulated mulch, and the task clearly spurred him on because that same night he announced: I’m going to raise the roof.

First he spent some time studying how to do it, whether to replace the broken tiles, remove the rotten struts or change a central, worm-ridden joist. He decided to go for a mixed approach: one part of the house, the kitchen, the bedrooms and the bathroom, would keep its original roof, and he would put corrugated iron over the other part. That’s what he said: I’ll rip off all this shit and put down corrugated iron. The job was half done: he had replaced the broken tiles with new ones and raised the roof, which he had covered with plastic sheeting, but the corrugated iron never arrived. On the night of the accident he was on his way to or back from buying it, I’ll never know which.

Clutching the tea towel, I stood distractedly for a while, my eyes fixed on that provisional, half-naked roof. When I had finished with the cloth, I leant into the bedroom to tell Simón the food was ready. I sat down and once again fixated on all the ornaments, lamps and old-fashioned junk that perhaps the time had come to start recycling. I realised that, somehow, this house belonged to me now, or at least it had ended up in my charge.

I pondered all this as Simón ate, playing at trying to squeeze his tiny elbows through the tines of the fork. I raised my eyes and fixed them on that plate hanging on the wall, with a blue border depicting a hunting scene. A plate Jaime had rescued not long ago, a reminder of his mother or grandmother that he had hung next to the window, the only decorative gesture I’d ever known him to make. In the middle, it read in cursive, sprawling writing:

Make a bigger door, Pa,

For I no longer fit,

You built it for the children;

I’ve grown, to my regret.

I realised that Simón was staring at me as intently as I was at the plate. The spoon, suspended dripping in the air, demanded my attention. When our eyes met, he smiled. An ambiguous smile, ironic yet kind, testing me, an adult smile, lips nearly sealed, identical to Jaime’s smirk in the coffin. I was about to say something to him, in fact I mentally rehearsed several phrases, but I failed in the attempt and kept quiet.

We had lived in this house for the last four years, moving less and less, going out only when necessary. No sudden shocks, obligations or big adventures. In fact, we had formed something that wasn’t far off a family. A family that was harmonious in its own way. We shared breakfasts, lunches and dinners. A frictionless family, each of us in our own little world. Now things had to change and my role was still to be determined.

We went out to the veranda. Simón started playing with some broken tiles, while I moved a few metres away from the house, my espadrilles sinking into the mud. I thought about the roof again. Corrugated iron, I thought, and said out loud: Corrugated iron. I couldn’t think of anyone who might take care of it. I remembered an old tarpaulin folded up under the mill. I set myself a challenge.

Manoeuvring the roll of canvas wasn’t easy. I dragged it as if it were a corpse, pulling it by the feet. Unbelievably, it was just about the right size. I climbed the ladder and lifted it, secured by a rope. I stretched out the plastic Jaime had put down and spread the canvas on top, nice and tight, pinning it in place at the edges with branches and stones, along the line of the crossbeams. I was exhausted and sweating heavily, a smell of burnt caramel rising from my armpits. It wasn’t the ideal solution but it would buy us some time.

The first week passed as if Jaime was still there. Prowling. Leaving at dawn and returning when we were already in bed. His presence was evident in every corner. In the dirty boots at the foot of the bed, in his clothes hanging in the wardrobe, in the shovel and the rake, covered in soil and dried grass. In the smells, too, in the room, the bed, the shed, the constant sweat, the dampness of the walls and that spicy tang impregnated in the sheets, which wasn’t exactly Jaime but which I always associated with him.

Naturally, Simón came to sleep with me, usurping the side made free by Jaime. The cot, which was actually getting too small for him, started to fill up with clothes, boxes and papers. Simón didn’t seem particularly bothered by his father’s absence. He didn’t look sad or quiet. Quite the opposite in fact; shedding his usual calm demeanour, he developed a series of skills, as if he were undergoing a sudden growth spurt: the tricycle he had previously used as a handcart or a seat from which to contemplate the horizon was now used for getting around. He was so excited by this novelty that he didn’t stop cycling back and forth from one end of the veranda to the other, pedalling as if possessed. Only once did he ask for Jaime, and after pausing for a long time to find a gentle but effective formula, I ended up saying: He had an accident, I don’t think he’ll be coming back. That’s how I put it: I don’t think. Simón listened to me with his brows furrowed, he stayed silent, sighed deeply as if commenting on the situation like an old village gossip, then returned to his pedalling. And that was it.

I, on the other hand, began to feel his absence more keenly as the days passed. I needed his hands to yank the water pump, to battle the rats and also, although he had barely done so recently, to touch me. It had been a long year since we had last made love, not even caresses; physical contact had been reduced to accidental brushes in bed, in the bathroom, going through a door. Now that he wasn’t here, it gripped me like a new kind of fever. A heat I could only calm with a lot of masturbation, every night, two or three times. Almost always thinking about the last Jaime, the one in the coffin; other times it was abstractions that turned me on in the darkness. Nervous rubbing, full of fury. Then it passed and I forgot about sex again, as before.

Without the pickup, we were more isolated than ever. Twice in one month we walked into Open Door, loaded up a taxi at the supermarket and came home. We hardly had any neighbours left. The few remaining shacks had disappeared the previous summer. Eloísa’s house too, the store-shed and the shop. We had witnessed machines razing the lot. I’d stopped seeing Eloísa before the demolitions. She’d moved to the capital and very occasionally came back to visit her parents. Only once did she approach the gate, and we had a short, awkward conversation, which Simón took it upon himself to interrupt with a tantrum. She hated Jaime, the baby; she liked me but not my life.

It was said that the Dutch people who had bought the club with the polo fields and stables were offering a lot of money for the surrounding land. The idea was to put together an immense country club with a golf course in the middle, right where we were. Everything together in one single complex, almost as big as the adjoining psychiatric hospital, but not quite. Jaime had laughed when he remarked on it: They’re going to end up throwing the loonies out in the dirt. But he never said anything about selling the farm, didn’t even mention it, he seemed determined to resist.

Six weeks after the burial, just when I was starting to wonder how long I could take care of the house alone, lacking the will to cut the grass, with the scrub growing and advancing, but above all unable to imagine a way to make money to pay the bills, a very tall man appeared, claiming to be a representative of the firm. He dragged us from sleep one heavy morning, the sky covered in storm clouds. Beeping his horn. First it woke Simón, who began to whimper and kick me. I opened the shutters slightly and peered through the slits, taking care not to be seen. On the far side of the gate, perpendicular to the track, a red car was parked. I spent a while trying to guess who it could be, I didn’t recognise the car or the man standing next to it, and all the hypotheses that occurred to me were discouraging. I left it for a while in the hope that he would get tired and go away. But the guy seemed determined, or else he knew we were there, because he persisted, blasting the horn ceaselessly. I got dressed in the first thing I found, a raincoat of Jaime’s, and went outside with Simón protesting in my arms. Inevitably, I kept guessing all the way to the gate. The man, sunglasses, lots of grey hair, formal but clearly a country type, reached into the car to take out a briefcase when he saw me approach. We made our greetings across the wire fence, not touching, with a nod of the head. Sorry to call so early, but I had to catch you at home, that was how he began. Then he shot out: Do you know who owns this land? Satisfied by my silence, the man started talking again: That was what we assumed, you have no idea about anything, do you? So much the better, why would you want to complicate things with other people’s stories, he said and handed me his card: Agent. While the man flicked through a sheaf of papers in the briefcase he had opened on the bonnet, I wondered what those stories might be and who these other people were. This is what it’s all about, he said, proffering a printed sheet that I took a few seconds to accept from him, Simón’s weight making it impossible for me to move my arm.

I tilt my neck to read the heading: Eviction Agreement. I raise my eyes in search of answers and the man rotates his finger for me to keep reading. I scan the text from top to bottom, right to left, and random words leap out at me: OPEN DOOR, The Occupier, The Owner, Camino de la Legua, cancellation, debt, reinstate, farm, single instalment. Several spelling or typing errors also catch my eye: peanal for penal, retension for retention, divergense for divergence. The man is clearly impatient because he takes the sheet from my hands and puts on a pair of magnetic self-assembling glasses: It says here thirty days, but we can talk about that, it could be forty-five, even sixty, and in respect of the rent owed, taxes, rates, etcetera, you’ll see that we’re offering you total debt relief. Look, he said, I suggest you get this sorted quickly, I’m saying that from my heart. It’s best for you; sign on time and don’t complicate things. If you make a decision, then we’ll get the parties together and talk money. I can assure you they’ll offer you a tidy sum. I thought about saying: There must be some mix-up, or even, Are you sure it’s this land, this house? I thought that someone else in my place would have told him where to go, would have screwed up the paper and thrown it in his face. Before taking his leave, he suddenly became very familiar with me, saying in a low voice, as if someone could hear us in the middle of the countryside: A word of friendly advice, think of something that makes you happy – here’s the means to do it. The guy got into the car, reversed and drove off, raising a cloud of dust.

That night, after giving the matter a lot of thought, I called Jaime’s brother. I told him about the agent, the eviction agreement, I mentioned the money. He wasn’t surprised. He sighed heavily. I warned him about this, he said, and launched into a monologue that sounded overacted to me, full of clichés and formulas that gave me the feeling that it was directed not just at me but also at whoever was standing near him: That’s life, sometimes nothing, then everything happens at once. It’s the same old rotten story, I wouldn’t get involved if I were you, and another thing, sooner or later they’ll make you crack. A pause and he continues: Things aren’t going that well for us either, it’s an uphill struggle. What do you want me to tell you? that’s what he says and I stay silent, with a But on my lips and the telephone in my hand. It was the last I heard of Héctor.

Several days passed with no sign of the agent and I began to think they’d been mistaken or moved to pity. Perhaps it was just to size me up, a test. Of course they’d found out about Jaime’s death and believed they could catch me with my guard down, an estate agent’s strategy. But no, the man returned during the week with two blond men, I could have sworn they were father and son. These gentlemen have to take some measurements, said the tall man, and I opened the gate in no mood to resist. The agent settled himself in the kitchen. As he spoke, I could see the other two entering and exiting my field of vision through the window. They took photos and notes, they joked. Have you given it any thought? I shrug. He writes on a bar napkin that he removes from his trouser pocket and shows me: 5,000. How about that? He raises his eyebrows and on top of the five he now firmly marks a six. I don’t know what to say. The blond guys enter and the man scrunches up the paper and hides it in his clenched fist.

The agent almost lost his composure, his eyes narrowed with childlike annoyance and he was, it seemed to me, on the verge of hitting the table. But he contained the violence with three short breaths and a thought seemed to strike him. He switched tension for threat. I’ll leave you my number, think about it, look, time’s running out and later on things may take a slightly more, let’s say, drastic course. Take it as a piece of friendly advice. He insisted on being my friend.

After that second visit, things started to precipitate, by coincidence or necessity. An accumulation of episodes that weren’t so much serious as significant ended up driving us out. First it was the water pump, which I forgot to turn off, causing it to burst and spark. From that point on, I had to go back and forth to the stream or the pond filling buckets. And then water complicated our lives in another way, this time from above. A strong wind, the kind they call gale force on the radio, made the canvas and plastic take flight as if they were paper. The following morning we woke up to a space of open sky in the middle of the house, between the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen, a patio complete with armchair and fireplace. I no longer had the strength to climb a ladder in search of a solution. To tell the truth, the thought didn’t even cross my mind. For a few weeks, the final weeks, we shut ourselves in the bedroom, sleeping, eating, watching television. I only crossed the strange furnished garden to go for a pee or to boil some noodles in the kitchen.

Ultimately, it was the dogs. Packs of hounds we heard at night-time that brought us close to terror. Unhinged, barking and getting into interminable fights. They were nothing like those more or less inoffensive prowling dogs to which we occasionally threw scraps, bones or rice. This was something else, wolf howls that kept us from sleep.

Without a phone, which had been cut off by a fallen pole or lack of payment, I never knew which, the biggest effort was gathering the momentum to call the agent. One horrible morning, when everything seemed to be falling irreversibly apart, I got myself together and we went to the entrance to the hospital, where I remembered there being a phone box. Half an hour’s walk, only part of which Simón did on foot. He travelled on my shoulders for the longest stretch. The booth was there, but not the phone. It was removed a while ago, one of the guards informed me. And he risked adding: Nowadays no one uses public phones, what with mobiles and everything. He also pointed out a phone box at the service station.

The agent’s voice sounded like someone shouting from one riverbank to another. Hello, hello, I hear in the distance. I leave it a few minutes, assuming that he’s busy or unable to speak, and I dial again. Ah, it’s you, he says. Yes, yes, good, you’re doing the right thing calling me, he continues, and adds: The thing is that it’s a bit late now, I did warn you. I wanted to interrupt but the guy was in full flow: I made it quite clear, these people don’t mess around, it’s just like I told you. A pause, a bit of interference and he continues: All the same, I’ll see what I can do. Shall I arrange a hired van for you? What for, I manage to ask. For the move. No, no, I say, nothing in the house is mine. It’s just the two of us and a couple of bags. A taxi, then. What day is it today, he asks and answers himself: Tuesday the thirteenth, well, it would be within a fortnight. I’ll be calling you, but I have to go now, he says and leaves me thinking about Tuesday the thirteenth, I would never have known.

The eviction order arrived, but there was no eviction. Very early on 30th November, a white car was waiting for us on the other side of the gate, very similar to the one that had taken us to Jaime’s wake. Guarding it on either side, in a V formation, there were two other cars, the agent’s and a four-by-four. When everything is stowed in the boot of the taxi, the tall man approaches me, leans down and says softly: It’s a shame things had to be this way. I did my part, he says, and puts an envelope in my hand: Don’t mention this to anyone, take it as a gift. On the way to Luján, I tear open the envelope and count 1,500 pesos. Enough to survive for a month or two.