When the man of the house was peacefully unconscious in bed, covered only with a fine sweat of wine, Elisa asked Patri if she could do her a favor, a big favor (she stressed these last words with a certain irritation), and go fetch the children, who shouldn’t have run off in the first place. Patri, who was a model of good manners and respect, repressed a “huh!” but couldn’t quite stifle a sigh, which made her feel immediately ashamed, although it had been as faint as a breeze in the far heights of the sky. Elisa, who was deeply Chilean in this as in all other respects, could perceive the subtlest shades of an intention. So she added a comment, to compensate for the unfortunate tone of her request — or, at least, to unhinge it and let it swing loose beyond, where the real words are, which have no meaning or force to compel. It was amazing, she said, that even in this heat they still had the energy to run off. Playing excited them so much they just couldn’t get enough. It was the equivalent of “living” for adults: you’re not going to decide to die when night comes just because you’ve been living all day. Patri smiled. Also, they had been up early, said her mother; and lack of sleep, which makes adults slow and drowsy, makes kids restless. But they’d have to take a nap, or they’d be unbearable at night. Patri couldn’t promise that she’d be able to get Juan Sebastián to go to bed, or even his buddy Blanca Isabel. The older boy hated the siesta. Elisa thought for a moment. She had, in fact, seen them when she was coming upstairs with her husband. She regretted not having told them to follow her. Each time they saw their father in that state, they thought he was sick and about to die; she could have exploited that momentary terror and shut them away in the dark. With a bit of an effort, they could get to sleep. If they ran off, it was hopeless. Luckily there was no danger of them getting out into the street. For some reason, that danger didn’t exist. There was the possibility of a fall, from any of the floors, since the building was still a concrete frame, with just a few internal walls in place, not all of them, by any means. But neither mother nor daughter mentioned that possibility; it didn’t even enter into their private reflections. They had once said that an adult was just as likely to fall as a child; there was no difference, because the planet’s gravitational force worked in the same way on both. It was like asking which weighed more, a kilo of lead or a kilo of feathers. And that’s why they were vaguely but deeply revolted by the way the owners of the apartments took such care not to let their children approach the edges when they visited, like that morning. If that was how they felt, why were they buying the apartments in the first place? Why didn’t they go and live in houses at ground level? “We’re different,” they thought, “we’re Chilean.”
But there was an easier way to do it after all, said Elisa, and that was to take away the toy cars. Without them, there would be no reason to remain at large. If she knew her children, and she was sure she did, it was bound to work. It had sometimes worked for her in the past. Patri said they would hide them. Her mother bent down calmly (they were at the door of the little apartment, talking in hushed voices, unnecessarily, since Viñas was sound asleep), and picked up the cardboard box full of toys. With an expert hand, she began to rummage through it. She knew every one of her children’s toys. “The big yellow one, the red one, the little blue truck….” She calculated that exactly four were currently in their possession. She even told Patri which ones. But Patri wasn’t paying much attention. She didn’t think it would be possible to recover all the cars, and so bring in the children. As long as they still had one, just one, Juan Sebastián would stay awake all through the siesta, the little devil.
She went downstairs to the sixth floor. The quickest way to do it was to check the floors one by one, room by room. If they heard her, they would try to hide. She set about it systematically, but it was hard to concentrate because the heat and the time of day had dazed her. The sixth floor seemed endless. Her chances of finding anything in that void perpetually full of air were minimal, given the terrible brightness, which she had grown so used to, living up there as summer set in, that her pupils had shrunk permanently to pin-points. She didn’t understand the arrangement of the rooms, which wasn’t clear at that stage of the construction; but she felt there were too many of them. The trend toward having more and more rooms was, she felt, absurd. A family couldn’t observe the protocol of a royal court. If people started multiplying rooms by their needs, they could float away into the infinite and never touch the ground of reality again. One for sewing, another for embroidery; one for eating, one for drinking, one for each activity, in short. The same room reproduced over and over, each one fulfilling some silly requirement, as if in a perpetually receding mirror. Her mother had put it very well, except that she hadn’t gone far enough in her generalization. Because the illusion of exhaustivity affected things as well as people. In any case, the children weren’t there.
When she went down to the fifth floor, she was already tired and her eyelids felt heavy, which surprised her slightly, since she didn’t like the siesta — she was still a child in that respect. Having washed the lunch dishes and left the miniscule rooftop apartment impeccably clean and tidy (in so far as they could, given that it was still under construction), she and her mother had watched television. She would have liked to go on watching, but the time slot for the kind of show they preferred had come to an end, and the ones that were starting required a different kind of attention.
It might seem odd that at lunchtime, when Abel Reyes came up, his cousin Patri had greeted him with a kiss. A kiss on the cheek was a normal enough greeting; what might seem odd is that they needed to greet one another, when he had been working in the building since early that morning. But, as it happened, they hadn’t seen each other, which was not unusual, because she hardly ever went down. Her mother did the shopping, and rarely needed help. Patri went down once a day, if that. She helped a lot around the apartment, watched television, and looked after her half-brothers and — sisters. She was pretty much a homebody, like all Chileans, except when they are tireless travelers (she was a bit of both). She was fifteen; her surname was Vicuña, like her mother’s, because she had been born when her mother was single. Very quiet, very serious, pretty hands.
They weren’t on the fifth floor either, as she was able to verify (or so she thought), by checking from the front to the back, room by room. The children weren’t there, but the other characters, those bothersome ghosts, were legion. They were always around at that time. To see them, you just had to go and look. Although they kept their distance, with an air of unaccountable haughtiness. For some mysterious reason, they had started shouting, bursting into thunderous peals of laughter that shook the sky. Patri wouldn’t have paid them any more attention than usual, if not for two rather particular circumstances. The first was that there weren’t just two or three or four ghosts, as one might have expected, given their characteristic and constitutive rarity, but a veritable multitude, appearing here and there, then moving away, laughing and shouting all the while like exploding balloons. The second circumstance was even more remarkable: they were looking at her. Normally they didn’t look; they didn’t seem to pay attention to anything in particular, or even to have attention. They were like that now too, except that they seemed to be making an exception for her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious, senseless amusement. She didn’t take offence, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a flying puppet show, an out-of-place, unseemly kind of theater. She had seen naked men before, of course (although not many); she didn’t find that especially frightening. But there was something implausible about it, since you wouldn’t normally see men without clothes except in particular situations. The way they were floating in the air accentuated the ambivalent impression. She had occasionally heard them speak, and wondered about it afterward, for a while. It seemed easy enough to take them by surprise, to slip past behind them. But perhaps it wasn’t so easy.