I dream of toads, skirts, orgies and horses.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Eloísa reappeared after two weeks, as if nothing had happened. She’d been in Buenos Aires, staying with a guy she had met in the bar in Pilar, the same place she took me that time. A respectable boy, well-off, who lives with his parents in one of the gated communities, but who acts the hard-man, the druggy, and plays bass in a rock group with four guys just like him, a bit full of themselves, but pretty cool. That’s how Eloísa describes him. This boy took her to a squat, or what she thought was a squat in Calle Estados Unidos, where some six or seven girls and boys lived. According to Eloísa there were a lot of drugs going about and she’s not sure, but she thinks they were cutting cocaine in a room at the back by the utility room. She didn’t go in.
‘There were two older girls, your age, who wandered round topless all day. They made me think about us, I was dying to be close to you, to touch you,’ says Eloísa.
We spend all afternoon smoking in the store shed behind the shop. Between joints, we have sex: wild, violent, without pleasure.
Eloísa asks me whether now that I’m pregnant we’re going to stop seeing each other. She looks at my flat stomach. She strokes it. I think it’s great, she says, although I’m quite shocked. Do you think it’s all right, what we’re doing? It’s the first time that Eloísa has asked whether something is right or wrong, I thought it was only me who wondered about that kind of thing. But she immediately laughs and pinches my bum. It’s a joke, she says. She does what she likes with me, she plays with my body and my thoughts. She’s a little bitch.
‘I don’t understand what you’re doing with that old man. It doesn’t make sense,’ she says, soaked with sweat, her mouth still tasting of sex. ‘It’s madness. If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were wrong in the head.’
Dawn breaks. I start to get cold, a light but continuous shiver passes through my body. Pieces of burnt sky covered by a single, red, uniform cloud reach me through the rafters.
‘Aren’t you saying anything?’
Eloísa speaks very close to my face, far more seriously than usual, challenging me.
‘This place is hell, why don’t you have an abortion and stop kidding yourself you’ve still got time to think about it?’
I look her in the eye, I stroke her hair, she curls up in my arms, she apologises.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I’ll say anything.’
All day alone in the house, devouring pieces of plaster, loose rendering from the wall behind the wardrobe. I resist as long as I can, but the impulse is stronger than me, unstoppable. It leaves me with a harsh, piquant taste in my mouth, inflaming my throat. How long can this go on?
THIRTY-EIGHT
Jaime is moving his mouth, as if speaking, but I can’t hear a single word. I’ve just opened my eyes and the first thing I see is a mountain landscape with very tall pines that cover nearly the whole sky. It’s hanging in the middle of a wall papered with flowers so small they make me dizzy and force me to shut my eyes again. I’m exhausted. I breathe deeply, dispel all the air through my nose and look again. I can’t control my eyes, they open and shut in spite of me. Behind Jaime there’s a window covered with white curtains and a bit further over, in a corner, a kind of metal clothes rack. Above my head there are two neon tubes stuck to the ceiling, one switched on, the other off. My feet itch, I would love to be able to scratch them. To my right, a fat lady in a pale blue apron is also moving her lips, she’s standing up, and bit by bit, I begin to make out scraps of words.
Things suddenly become clear. I’m lying in a hospital bed, Jaime is talking to a nurse and immediately that other hospital I woke up in some months ago comes into my mind. This feels more or less the same.
I want to raise a hand to say here I am. My arm doesn’t respond straight away and only when I manage to shake it with the minimum of energy do Jaime and the nurse stop talking and turn their full attention to me. They observe me silently for a few seconds, waiting for me to do something else, I don’t know what.
Now Jaime moves closer and strokes my hand, still in the air, and places it back beside the other. I try to speak, to ask the first questions, but Jaime silences me by raising his index finger to his lips as nurses in posters do.
‘Rest,’ he says twice, ‘stay calm.’
I spend what is left of the day lying in bed, Jaime entering and leaving the room without saying much. At one point, without wanting to, I find myself with a mirror. I’ve never seen myself looking so horrible. Night falls and I’m fully awake at last. A different nurse brings me a tray with a piece of skinless chicken on a cushion of runny mash and a jelly the colour of piss.
‘Eat,’ says Jaime, ‘it’ll do you good.’
The nurse presses a button and the headboard rises until I’m almost sitting up. The chicken, the mash and the jelly all have the same taste of nothing. I quickly swallow all I can, Jaime eats the rest.
‘You fainted,’ he begins to tell me, ‘I found you in the kitchen. They’re going to do some tests. They say that if everything’s OK, you can leave tomorrow.’
The night seems eternal, it feels like morning will never come. My head is full of gaps. Every time Eloísa enters my mind, I think about something else to get rid of her quickly.
Jaime can’t sleep either. He’s sitting on an armchair by the side of the bed. Our eyes meet two or three times and we become rather idiotic, each of us with a load of questions that the other won’t answer because we never do. At one point I’m on the verge of confessing what he’s going to find out sooner or later, but I don’t know how.
The next day, with the tests that say I’m pregnant stuffed safely in my trouser pocket, Jaime helps me to dress and pays the hospital bill.
On the way home, just after the level crossing, at almost the exact place we first met, Jaime says that I should have told him sooner. He says it in a whisper, embarrassed, and I don’t know how to respond.
I don’t want to even think about how things are going to be from now on.
THIRTY-NINE
Outside it’s thundering, without raining. The thunderclaps are long. They grow, they draw out, they growl, they burst and they extinguish. Jaime managed to get me a computer a few days ago, an old model, but it works. The mouse only moves from side to side, so I need to touch the little ball every now and again to get it in the right place. The monitor is one of those you used to get, fourteen inches and convex. The image flickers and every so often the colours disappear, then suddenly return. The keyboard makes a lot of noise, but evenly. All the letters sound the same, the a is the same as the l, the j as the s, the same as the space bar, the comma, the full stop, the underscore, the brackets, all the same. It’s a cacophonous language. Only the intensity and the rhythm change. I wonder whether Jaime can sleep with all this hammering. It would seem so. He’s on his back with his hands crossed on his chest, serene. This paternity business has returned him to his old self, docile and melancholic, like the other Jaime.