In all these months we hadn’t been in contact once. The truth is she looked great, her skin younger than ever, and she had dyed her hair a furious red. She arrived in a funeral car, the only one in the cortège. She was accompanied by a man who was much too young to be her husband and yet embraced her with evident tenderness.
It was a quick goodbye, without tears. The circumstances in which everything had happened discouraged any spirit of a wake. The time that had elapsed, the supposed suicide, Aída’s clandestine life, the deceit, the confusion, everything that made this story an episode more delirious than traumatic, gave rise to an unusual funeral, not to mention the fact that it had been decided to cremate the body. I don’t know who had taken that decision, whether it was Beba or the judge, Yasky, or Aída herself in the will I never saw.
Jaime insisted so much that in the end I let him accompany me. But I asked him to wait for me in a bar opposite the cemetery. During the half hour that the ceremony lasted, Beba didn’t say a word to me, she looked at me only once in passing, but I’m not even sure it was intentional. I didn’t really understand the reasons behind her indifference. The only thing I would have wanted to ask was who had ended up with Diki, the crippled dog that Aída had left orphaned.
Yasky, on the other hand, was by my side the whole morning. After the initial shock, a paternal instinct seemed to have awoken in him, or something like it, because he didn’t stop referring to my stomach and the closeness of the birth.
Beba and her young boyfriend took a taxi. Yasky said goodbye quickly as he had a hearing in fifteen minutes on the other side of the city, demanding that I promise to let him know when I had news.
As I went down the cemetery steps, there was something, difficult to define, a new sensation that slackened my whole body, like a wave, which sank me to the ground without violence. And there, sitting on the bottom step, with the points of my shoes crossing on the pavement, I realised that my skirt was wet. I had left a pool behind me and a yellowish stain opening in the shape of a fan, it surrounded me, like a shadow. I didn’t have time to wonder what had happened, people came from all sides to help me, a man in a waterproof, a policeman and a woman holding a child by the hand. All together, all at the same time.
‘It’s nothing serious,’ I heard behind me, ‘her waters have broken.’
It was a woman’s voice, deliberate and confident.
EPILOGUE
It was Simón’s first birthday on Saturday. He’s a quiet baby, cute, he barely cries, just the right amount. In the evening, Jaime held a barbecue to celebrate. Eloísa came with her new boyfriend, and Héctor and Marta, the twins, Boca and his nephew Martín. Guido was there for a while but he had to leave early because some friends were playing in a bar in the capital.
A year has passed and everything goes on in much the same way. Everyone fulfils his own destiny. Eloísa left school and is working as a waitress in a pizzeria in Luján. We see less of each other. We hardly see each other at all. Her new boyfriend is local, an ordinary guy with a kind face. You can tell he’s in love.
Jaime planted a vegetable garden behind the stable. He sowed courgettes, potatoes, pumpkins, spinach, green leaf lettuce, chicory, garlic and tomatoes. He says the first harvest will be ready next month. I take care of the baby and the house. It’s a different life, I’d never have imagined it, but it’s not bad. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I find myself switching on the computer and re-reading all that madness about Open Door, and it’s as though someone else wrote it. One day, who knows, I’ll do something with all that.
A few weeks ago I received a postcard from Yasky from Florianópolis in Braziclass="underline" a sunset, half sky, half sea, taken from the coast. He tells me that he received a research grant in international law. He’s studying Portuguese at the university and preparing his doctoral thesis. He says that it’s changed his life. It’s not hard to see why.
At around midnight, after eating, Jaime and Boca proposed a trip into the woods to hunt partridges. Little Martín and the twins gave a shout of joy.
The preparation is the best part: cleaning out the shotguns, sorting the cartridges, dividing up tasks. Eloísa, Martín, the twins and I are all going. Marta is staying behind to take care of Simón, and Héctor doesn’t like guns. Eloísa’s boyfriend isn’t coming either, because he doesn’t feel like it, or because Eloísa won’t let him, it’s hard to tell which.
We wrap ourselves up in anticipation of the dew. Jaime drives, Boca and the boys are in the back of the pick-up, Eloísa and I in the front. Eloísa switches on the radio and turns the dial from end to end until she picks up a Ramones riff. Jaime complains silently. Eloísa moves as if she’s dancing. She keeps elbowing me in the stomach. Jaime gets tired and turns down the volume. Eloísa imitates his face for my benefit, the face of a grumpy old man. They’re never going to get along.
We arrive in a clearing. Boca and Jaime lean their hefty shotguns on their shoulders, Martín has to make do with an air rifle. The twins carry the ammunition. Eloísa and I follow everything from the outside, as spectators.
In silence, we penetrate the heart of the wood with the obligatory respect that the night imposes on us, all its stars sparkling in chorus.
It gets late and there’s no excitement to keep us awake. I wonder how far we’re going to walk. It must be after two, there’s not a soul to be heard. Dawn in the countryside is enough to frighten anyone.
Finally we stop. Jaime and Boca scan the dark, even ground with their guns pointing at the earth. Eloísa and I share a split trunk to sit and rest a while. Martín and the twins entertain themselves with the cartridges. I look at the sky and think about Aída. I’ll never understand her.
I get the feeling that I can hear those guitar rounds that the gypsies used to play. Quite far off, but unmistakeable. If I tell Eloísa she’ll think I’m mad. Better keep it to myself.
Right then, all of a sudden, when it seems that nothing else is going to happen, as if in a bad film, a weird B-movie, a beam of incandescent light at the level of the horizon dazzles us straight on, here and there lighting up the plain. We stop, all at the same time, avoiding each other’s eyes. We don’t want to believe it, we’d rather it passed by quickly, that it was an optical illusion. But the brightness grows, changes colour, from perfect white to a pale red that intensifies into a fiery red and suddenly extinguishes, then lights up again as it did at the start. It hypnotises us, this soft sphere between the sky and the earth. Martín passes me his rifle and disappears behind a tree. I feel like peeing too. Jaime moves forward ever so slightly, a couple of steps, Boca does the same. They fix their gaze on this inconceivable apparition. They start walking again, straight towards it. In the second row, by mutual agreement, Eloísa, the twins and I follow them, without joking about. Martín reaches us at a sprint and joins the line.
The word UFO quashes all others in my head. It’s the strangest thing to happen to me recently. Is it possible? As we approach, it’s as if I were relinquishing all my prejudices, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have an extraterrestrial experience at some stage in life. To make contact with the beyond. Someone, Martín or one of the twins, coughs to attract attention and says: Let’s go back. It sounds like a joke but nobody laughs. I can’t bring myself to say anything. Boca murmurs something in Jaime’s ear. The thing is getting closer, taking on increasingly monstrous yet familiar shapes. It’s a kind of rotating house, flat and long, emitting thick rings of light that start to illuminate our path. Like a circus. The tip of the rifle bangs against my knee and only now do I realise that Martín never asked for it back. He’s obviously lost interest.