Abel went straight to the kitchen and put the bottle of bleach on the bench for his aunt. There was a big skylight in the ceiling, and at that hour of the day, the sun was shining straight into it. Elisa had covered it with a blue towel, which had been wet for a while. That might have afforded some protection from the heat, but in any case it was stifling, especially since she had been cooking. She asked Abel if he was going to stay and eat with the men. Well I’m not going to leave now, am I, he said, as if it were obvious. Have you told your mother? No, he hadn’t, why? Because she’ll be expecting you, she said. It hadn’t occurred to him. But Abel said he didn’t think she would, since he hadn’t told her about the half-holiday. She might have worked that out for herself, said Elisa. I don’t think so, I don’t think so, said Abel impatiently. His aunt didn’t really know his mother, he thought. She didn’t realize that his mother didn’t look after him the way she looked after her children, or even her nieces and nephews. Like all adolescents, he believed that any family was preferable to his own. The belief was entirely unfounded, but he held it all the same. Elisa had guessed all this, and let it pass. She asked him who they had invited for the New Year celebrations. Abel replied: his elder brother’s girlfriend and her family. And he launched into a detailed description of those potential relatives, making them out to be the epitome of all the virtues and powers. His brother’s future brother-in-law had an auto-repair shop, and Abel liked to portray him as a big shot, someone who could do just what he liked, whatever took his fancy, because he had the means. He ran through a detailed catalogue of the big shot’s properties, exaggerating outrageously. Because of some subtle bias in the subject, or subjects in general, property led on to food. Abel believed that he had very special tastes, worthy of careful study, without which they might seem a mere jumble of preferences. Elisa let him go on, but her mind soon wandered. There was no point feeling too sorry for him just because he was ugly and stupid. She made a suggestion: it would be best not to drink wine at lunch. They’re all going to end up trashed, those animals, she said. I never drink wine, said Abel, with a characteristic lack of tact (he was speaking to the wife of the biggest drunk in the family!). When Patri came in to get the grapes, they greeted each other with a kiss. She thought he was ridiculous, but was quite fond of him. They always laughed about him behind his back, because of his hair. Her hair and his were the same length, and even the same kind: slightly coarse, straight and black. When the girl went out, he chatted on and on with Elisa, until, fed up, she told him to go down, because the men would probably have started eating already.
When they had finished the grapes, the children escaped, without shoes, and went to play in the empty swimming pool, which was in full sun. But they loved it, almost as if the pool were full and they were splashing about in cool water. The three older children were always playing make-believe adventure games, and the baby girl tagged along. She was always there, and was sometimes useful, as a victim, for example, a role that didn’t require much skill, or none at all. After various days of other scenarios, they had returned to car racing. They had a number of little plastic cars. Their childish instincts had alerted them to the silence below, where the builders had stopped working, so they ventured down the stairs to the sixth floor, and then to the fifth. The cars went down the stairs in little hands and parked in the farthest rooms. Excited to have the whole building to themselves, or at least the upper floors, the children complicated their game, leaving a car on one floor and going down to the next, then coming back up to look for it, taking unfamiliar routes. A building site was the least appropriate place for a car race (although ideal for hide and seek), and yet the adverse conditions made the game special, giving it a novel, impossible flavor, which made them forget everything else. They felt they had gone straight to the heart of truth or art. Jacqueline kept getting lost and crying. Ernesto, who was specially attached to her, went to the rescue, up or down, depending on where he was. The only interruption occurred when Abel said, Careful not to fall, and continued on his way down to the ground floor. When he was two floors below them, they began to call out “Mophead!” Then they resumed their game with the toy cars, going up and down. A breeze was blowing over those superposed platforms, but it was slight and not very refreshing; in any case the heat would probably begin to ease off once the sun began to go down. The light must have been changing, gradually, but it wasn’t noticeable; the brightly-colored toy cars were the light-meters in the children’s game. They went down to the third floor, but didn’t dare go any further, because they could hear the men’s voices.
All the builders had, in fact, gone downstairs a fair while before, and since they wouldn’t be returning to work, had washed and changed, to make themselves more comfortable for lunch. The radicals among them had hosed themselves down and dried off in the sun, out in the back yard. They had taken off their work clothes, which, once shed, were so many dusty, torn and mended (or not even mended) rags, and packed them away in their bags. Clean now, hair combed, they sat down around a table made of planks to wait for lunch. They had put the table as far away as possible from the grill, where Aníbal Soto was checking on the progress of the meat. There were ten of them in all. As well as Viñas and Reyes, there were two other Chileans: Enrique Castro and Felipe Rojas. Rojas was known as Pocketman because he was in the habit of keeping his hands in his pockets, even when he was sitting down. It was a pretext for endless jokes. Now, for example, he was sitting with a glass in his left hand and his right hand in his pocket. Next to him was the fat guy from Santiago del Estero, who although by no means an ingenious joker, could get a laugh by dint of sheer ingenuity. He put his hand into the Chilean’s pocket to find out what was so nice in there, as he put it. This made all the others laugh, and gave Pocketman a start, making him spill a few drops of wine, which he complained about. The master builder, a short man with grey hair and blue eyes (he was Italian) was convulsed with laughter, but he knew how to change the subject in time. They had all served themselves a glass of wine and were drinking it as an aperitif. Luckily it was cool down there; it was almost like having air conditioning. They drank a toast, and so on. The meat was soon ready, but they had clean forgotten to make a salad. Reproachful gazes converged on young Reyes, who almost always forgot to buy something or other. But, since it was the last day of the year, it didn’t matter. Anyway, the meat was first-class.