Boca was standing right in front of me, one hand holding a flashlight, which shook ceaselessly, the other clinging to a post. With her back to me, crouching down, Eloísa’s head was jerking away at the level of the old man’s prick. I couldn’t tell who was abusing whom.
I masturbated furiously, along with the two of them. After they left, I waited a few minutes before climbing off the bale. Only now did I realise that the Walkman was still on and I’d been listening to music all this time. Unaware.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aída’s ghost appeared to me in the middle of the night, right underneath the crucifix, her back against the wall, inoffensive. I didn’t attach any great importance to it, I put it down to tiredness, to the countryside and its inventions. She looked thin, not at her best, but underneath it all quite well.
It’s an incredible, sun-filled morning and all the colours are alive and vivid, it feels as though spring has taken a step forward. I return to the library to thank Brenda for the translation. It’s really just an excuse to see her again and try to unravel the intrigue that has begun to build around her. As soon as I open the door, I hear her voice. She’s speaking loquaciously and animatedly in a room at the side. I lean in and see her surrounded by three boys in school overalls, aged between eleven and thirteen, who are listening reasonably attentively. I spy on them. She’s talking to them about antiquity, about Athens, the Parthenon, the Roman Empire and she hands them a heavy, brown volume of an encyclopaedia, which they receive somewhat fearfully, warily. I retrace my steps to the entrance, I don’t want them to discover me. There are two books piled on Brenda’s desk, one in English, the other in Spanish: Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow and Gods and Heroes by Gustav Schwab. The former has all the appearance of a bestseller. When Brenda sees me, she greets me with a smile that erases whatever might have happened the last time. There are no traces of the wounds on her ears.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ she says and hands me a photocopy. ‘I thought you might be interested.’
I read it out loud, for both of us:
‘Today is a memorable day in the annals of public healthcare for the insane in our country, as we comply with the National Law of October 2nd, 1897, which orders the creation of an asylum for the mentally ill, according to the Scottish system known as open door, destined to fundamentally alter the care of these patients.
‘We pray, then, Señor Presidente, ladies and gentlemen, that this establishment, the first and most advanced in South America, might open its doors as soon as possible for the scientific treatment of patients from the entire Republic who currently lack this care, achieving as such a progression worthy of the social culture of our nation.’
Words of the inaugural speech of the National Colony for the Insane, spoken by Dr Domingo Cabred on May 21st, 1899.
Some way from the house, on the other side of the fence, Eloísa and little Martín, Boca’s nephew, pass by. They walk side-by-side; I can make them out clearly in spite of the distance. I wonder whether they’ll see me. Now they disappear behind the pampas grass, heading towards the lake.
TWENTY-NINE
There are nights when I flop on my back in the grass and the sky leaves me speechless. It’s a feeling that lasts for a few minutes and is then undone, either through distraction or sadness. In a second, I come and go from this state of almost pure amazement to a kind of complicated introspection. These things happen more in the country than in the city: this is what happens to town folk when they go into the countryside.
Jaime had gone to bed early, he wasn’t feeling very well. I was in the middle of my star-gazing when Eloísa took me by surprise, scaring me a bit. She said that she’d come to get me to go for a wander. Of course, I didn’t mention the episode in the stable, although I couldn’t get it out of my head, try as I might.
In spite of the rain over the last few days, an unexpected heat had arrived, with mosquitoes and everything. We were on the veranda and Eloísa tried to convince me to borrow the pick-up for a couple of hours.
‘He’ll never find out, if nobody tells him, he’s got no reason to find out,’ she says.
‘It’s lunacy,’ I reply, just to say something.
But she doesn’t give in, she annoys me, she plays the capricious teenager. It’s quarter to twelve and the air is still, stagnant, like a low storm cloud skimming the ground, crawling with fireflies and crickets, synchronised in a mathematical counterpoint, a precise second separating the sparks of some from the screeches of others. No, I tell her. No, and stop bugging me. I want to make her understand my reasons but it’s impossible:
‘He’ll have a fit if he hears the engine,’ I say.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s go and have fun for a while, then we’ll come back, there’s nothing wrong with that.’
Eloísa stays quiet, watching me, like an obedient dog, and her last words ricochet gently through my mind. Come on: her eyes repeat. And that gaze hypnotises me, makes me feel like a nail caught in a magnetic field, with those furious eyes of a perverse child. That’s it, an obedient dog with furious eyes. Everything changes in a fraction of a second with that short, simple sentence, ‘let’s go and have fun for a while,’ it runs through my body like a potent drug, it becomes a perfect logic, a duty. That’s the way it goes, it’s stupid, things reveal their other side, their imminent side. Like that brat, who appeared at just the right time, that uncouth little brat, beautiful and elemental, who I can only think about touching, touching and touching, and yes, we need to have fun, let’s go and have fun for a while and then we’ll come back.
‘Let’s go,’ I say and between us we come up with a brilliant idea to avoid waking Jaime. We need to push the truck as far as the gate and start the engine there.
Eloísa waits on the veranda rolling a joint while I enter the house on my tiptoes and slink with catlike movements towards the bedroom. I use two fingers to half open the door, keeping my breathing to a minimum, three short steps to the bedside table on Jaime’s side, I skim my hand across the surface with the greatest of delicacy, identify the bunch of keys, pick it up in three silent beats, and retrace my steps. Jaime snores softly with his trousers on, unconscious. I get dressed in the dark, using the doorframe for balance, I put on jeans, a white t-shirt and grab the two pairs of rubber boots that are always in the corner of the wardrobe. Now that I’m outside, as I wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, I peek through the keyhole: nothing, utter darkness, nothing to indicate that Jaime has found out. I feel like the perfect thief.
Outside, Eloísa has already smoked half the joint, but you can’t tell, she’s impervious to it, so she says. I put on Jaime’s yellow boots, Eloísa wears mine. Both of us find them too big.
Eloísa grabs the keys of the truck from me. I take a few moments to draw in what’s left of the joint and catch up with her. Eloísa releases the handbrake and moves the gear lever into neutral. She knows what she’s doing. Without closing the door, she clings onto the window frame and signals for me to push.
Reaching the gate is an odyssey full of mud, slips, falls and laughter, stifled to avoid waking Jaime. It’s madness, it’s pointless, I repeat in my head, laughing to myself a bit. The joint is certainly having an effect on me.
We can’t go on, we run out of strength a few metres from the gate. By mutual agreement we lie down in the back of the pick-up, facing the stars. The sky has cleared but the moon can’t be seen. Eloísa takes out another joint. We smoke in silence, two drags each until it’s finished. And now, I can’t move. I close my eyes, whatever happens, happens.