Now it shows, my stomach is just beginning to separate me from the edge of the table. Only a few centimetres, it’s almost imperceptible, but it shows. At least I notice it, and that short distance fills me with questions, it distracts me. If it’s a boy, will Jaime want to call him Jaime, like him and the other Jaime? When should it start kicking? When will the cravings come? How late on can I abort? I don’t know, I just wonder.
Yesterday I went to bed early, at around eleven; Jaime stayed in the kitchen smoking with the radio on. The dream came immediately, very clear, and either I was to blame for interrupting it, or it was the thirst that was scratching at my throat and drying the roof of my mouth until I could bear it no longer and woke up. If I’d had a pitcher of water to hand, who knows, perhaps the dream would have gone on.
It was a vast room, five metres by eight, a magnificent and luminous place. The flat is on a coastal avenue by the beach, second or third floor. The city is Rio de Janeiro. There’s a white leather couch, extremely large, for four or five people, between two clear columns, which are actually fish-tanks full of bubbling water, with oxygen pumps but no fish. There’s another armchair, with an anatomically shaped back and a footrest. And another, upholstered in cowhide, the fibres bristled with static, with a movable base so that it can rock. All the chairs are occupied by suntanned people, mainly twenty-something men, in light and frivolous clothing, their feet mostly bare and playful. They murmur but don’t speak. They propose toasts and laugh. They seem happy. There are two or three, a woman, a man with very little hair, smooth-skinned and chubby-cheeked, and someone else I can’t see, who zigzag gently between the seats, and disappear down a long corridor full of pictures or photographs of clouds, and I follow them until the point where they leave me. I stop outside a bathroom with no door, and a woman sitting on the toilet, wearing thick-framed, feline glasses, her trousers round her ankles, smiles at me, draws her knees together and leans forward: she’s small. I haven’t seen her before. I stay there for a few seconds, or longer, without annoying her, until she starts to pee. Then I get a bit lost, in the kitchen, in the bedrooms, too alone, until I’m back at the party.
Now the woman with glasses is leaning against one of the columns, rocking a baby in a nappy. The others are still there, sprawled on the chairs, drinks in hand, touching one another’s feet. Erotic games. And, not really knowing how long I’ve been holding this rifle with a silencer and laser sight, I point it at the baby, resting the flickering, red circle on its forehead. No one protests, it’s all normal. I change target, from the baby to the man with hardly any hair, and I start swivelling round, marking all of them with the glowing ring, one by one: heads, legs, shoulders, pelvises, at random. It’s insane, but it seems as though I’m going to kill them all.
Boca and Jaime are always playing truco, they never tire of it. Nor does it incite any great passion, they just play. They shuffle, deal, and speak only when necessary for the game to continue. And they keep a tally, point by point, dash by dash. There are no breaks, no half-time, it’s a continual performance, no winner, no loser, a cyclical journey that leads nowhere. Nobody decides when it ends, it’s an organic gesture: to play or not to play. I close in, I spy on them, I make faces at them, but they don’t notice, I don’t bother them. They raise the stakes, without risk or hesitation. Bean by bean. And me too, on the outside, although I’m not taking part in the game, I’m there, with them, half horny, half lonely, circling around them, and I’m part of it, breathing in time, or in syncopation, accepting that this is how it is, that things have to happen this way, first one, then the other, each one in turn, devising a unique, singular present, which immediately escapes the three of us, forever.
Now I see them collecting the cards in their big mitts, piling some on top of others into two decks confronting each other from an equal distance on either side of the table, Jaime’s with blue arabesques, Boca’s orange, and it looks like they’ve finished their game.
I feel a little lonely. I’ve no one to talk to about this approaching maternity.
Tomorrow is the thirtieth of October. My due date is in the middle of February, it’s all happened so suddenly, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
FORTY
We can get married. Jaime is speaking, in the dark, without showing his face. We got back from Luján a short while ago, from a barbecue at Héctor and Marta’s to celebrate the twins’ eighth birthday. We went to bed straight away, slightly nauseous from so much meat. The sheets were damp, almost wet. In the middle of the night I got up to pee. In the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I didn’t look quite as bad as I had in recent months. In the dark, I sensed where the bed was and lay down again on my side, the gate side. It had been that way since the beginning, me on this side, Jaime closer to the other Jaime. Dead or alive. It’s so strange to have something in my stomach that’s going to be someone. I stroke myself, I feel it with my open palm, I wait a while, nothing. I wonder when it was. That first time, when I didn’t even come?
Héctor and Marta treat me as if I’m one of the family now. The twins adore me, they say I’m their favourite aunt. I’m scared. I close my eyes to try to stop thinking and, right then, Jaime decides to speak. Wasn’t he asleep? We can get married, he says and doesn’t insist, he’s not interested in my answer, that’s all he has to say.
I re-read the notes that I’ve written over the last few months on Cabred, Huret, the colony and the lunatics, and it seems like a distant memory, adolescent and boring. There are about fifty sheets or more, the first few handwritten on both sides, the rest printed from the computer, normal type, double-spaced. I scan the pages, and it’s enough to catch a sentence or a few words at random to guess the context, I know what follows. It’s nothing more than that, a collection of sentences linked by sufficient common sense. I lost interest, I can’t deny it, and yet for almost five months my head was full of loonies: loonies on horseback, bricklayer loonies, uniformed loonies, in blue or orange, or both, blue trousers and orange sweatshirt, loonies with no clothes on, undressing in the middle of something, loonies kneading bread, hand over hand over hand, frenetically, old-style loonies, deranged, less neurotic but more insane, loonies who don’t look like loonies, who bite their lips, just slightly, like anyone else, but who only think about that, about biting their lips, loonies who are practically philosophers, who say things that leave us open-mouthed, as if to say: Look what the loony said, lost loonies, loonies who get beaten up, with clean blows, and who one day, without explanation, start to receive fewer blows, or secret blows, out of sight of the other loonies, and more, many more, all of them, dead loonies, like the one that Jaime found amongst the weeds of the nursery, almost albino, his eyes wide open, or the one who appeared hanging from a branch above the clay oven, his feet stained with soot from the smoke that kept churning out, and the loonies who no one looks for, who nobody reclaims, who they call anything, whatever name comes to them, loonies fucking, never coming, all the loonies, in a row, ready to enter the catalogue, invented loonies, who are the vast majority, because it’s easy to invent loonies, nobody makes mistakes inventing loonies, anything could be true. They’re there, even though they no longer interest me, they tell me a load of things, but it isn’t the same. I’m bored.