I leave the zoo, avoiding the photographer with the pony; I cross the avenue, join the labyrinth of long queues at the bus stop and get off at the paved plaza full of bookstalls. I look around me and wonder how long it would take for everyone in my range of sight right now, pedestrians, drivers, people in cafes, those queuing to enter the chemist, cyclists, those hidden away in apartments, everyone, me included, to disappear.
I walk all the way round and pause at the last stall. The books are on shelves, in boxes, organised by genre, author and various labels: Bestsellers, Crime, Vampire, Self-Help, Borges and Sabato, Historical Novels, One4Five, Three4Twelve. The vendor, younger than thirty with thick, rather forced sideburns, like a caudillo or an Elvis impersonator, is talking on a mobile phone connected to earphones, slanting his chin slightly so as to speak into the mic. He looks straight ahead as if at me, but no, he’s looking beyond me, at the short horizon of traffic on the avenue. It really pissed me off, he says, falls silent and in a second adds: Yeah, he’s a fucking bastard, he just doesn’t give a shit. I stay there for a while flicking through the books with no real interest, more intrigued by this guy who is now laughing and spitting. In the Science Fiction section I come across The Marvellous Journey of Mr Nic-Nac to the Planet Mars by Eduardo L Holmberg.
On the flap, the author’s biography: A writer and naturalist, he was the first director of the Buenos Aires Zoological Garden between 1888 and 1904. In addition to his extensive scientific work, he wrote, among other books, Hoffman’s Pipe, The Bag of Bones, Insomnia and The Diabolical House. Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, the very same man mentioned on the stamp of the bestiary I found in the skip in front of the Adventist church. Another coincidence, too much. Making timid signs so as not to disturb him too much, I ask the boy the price, he doesn’t stop talking and answers by showing two open hands. Ten pesos, I understand, but I don’t have enough. Another day, I say circling my index finger in the air. Before returning the book to its place, I read the first few lines, murmuring out loud: There is nothing more admirable than the perfect mechanism of the skies. Nothing is more pitiful than human ignorance.
In the evening, Tosca asks me to inject her with an extra phial of morphine. I’m not sleeping at all, she says. Two or three hours at most, it’s less every day. I’d like to think I sleep but I don’t at all. I close my eyes, that’s it. At the start, she doesn’t exactly feel pain so much as the shadow of pain approaching. It grows gradually, like a snowball, but when it grabs you it won’t let you go. Sometimes it makes her want to shout for me to come down and inject her again in the middle of the night. She feels like two big hands are squeezing the back of her neck, the scruff as she likes to call it, strangling her almost to the point of asphyxiation. A perverse game, sometimes unbearable. She pauses, coughs and continues. The worst thing is the lack of sleep, those long-nailed hands squeezing her neck become so real that she can’t help thinking that they belong to someone, that somewhere beyond there must be a body, a pair of arms and a head, someone contriving to fold away behind the headboard. And that mystery is precisely the thing that’s hardest to tolerate, even more than the pain. She’d like to be able to turn round and discover who he, she, it is, the one who shelters in the darkness to wring her neck.
Torture, she concludes and gives a long sigh that’s only interrupted by the agitation the tale has caused her. I agree to inject her with another dose. The same ceremony every day: I take the top off a phial, load the syringe, look for the vein, right arm in the morning, left arm now. Then Tosca, as if she didn’t think I was entirely convinced, or just to impress me, says what she’s never said before: Give me your hand, come here, touch it, it won’t do anything to you. I’ve already seen it, the first day, I studied it from a distance under the fabric of her nightdress, but I don’t know whether I want to touch it. What for?
It’s the size of a lemon, a tennis ball, a bull’s testicle, rough, ever so slightly more hairy than the skin surrounding it, definitely much purpler. The spud, she calls it. First I press it carefully, as if it were a delicate creature, the back of my hand on the ball of flesh, fat, tissue, that knot of cells that are quicker than the others. I barely graze it, just in case, to see her reaction. Tosca’s words resound in my head: It’s another being that lives with me, inside me. I continue, growing more confident, I become bold and press it without hesitating, covering it, my hand wide open, then cupping it. A curved, prominent nerve splits it down the middle, like a swollen vein, strange to touch. The most powerful, most terrible, most evident thing is its strong, regular heartbeats, not Tosca’s, which beat elsewhere, but those of this small, raw being. Gentle, she says to me, be gentle. We don’t want to disturb it so much that it wakes up. As she speaks I think how stupid I am, that I know nothing of pain.
At least you can see this one, touch it, says Tosca. My sister’s was much worse, a horror, it was right inside her like a poisonous gas, like a ghost. First in the uterus, then the lungs, blood, bones, everywhere. Metastasis, she says loudly as if she’d said Magnificent. She really had a bad time of it, and the treatment was even worse. It left her bald, shrunken, wrinkled, like a raisin. One day I’ll tell you all about it, she says and concludes: Violet was killed by the medicine.
I become engrossed staring at the ochre phial of morphine, thinking about illness, about matters of the body and about decomposition, the time it takes for flesh to disintegrate. A matter of days or months, depending on the climatic conditions, I studied it a while ago. I wonder what Jaime looks like by this stage. It also occurs to me that one day I’ll tell Simón, assuming that he’ll be the one taking care of it, that when the time comes I want to be burnt to ashes.
Tosca brings me back to earth with her hoarse voice: Get me some water, girl, I’m dying of thirst, she says, and after three gulps she spits on the floor. The sight reminds me of Iris, the vomit that never came on Christmas Eve, her features drawn, as if halted by reins pulling at her jaw to stop her from bolting. The difference with Tosca is that her reins are inside, rolled up under her skin, in the form of cancer.
Before injecting her, I ask whether she knows anyone who could take care of Simón in the afternoons. I don’t call him Simón but the boy, like she would say. I explain that my friend isn’t able to do it any longer. A long silence and she calls Benito over. Go and find Sonia, she says. Benito leaves and I inject the morphine. Tosca tilts her head, inflates her chest and slackens. I stay, watching her false teeth submerged in a glass. She now removes them before every injection because her mouth goes to sleep and she hurts herself on them.
Instinctively, like a child left home alone who takes advantage of the occasion to search his parents’ room, I stand up and head for Benito’s hideaway. I snoop around his things, the junkyard. An extraordinary world, jam-packed with everything, which in some way explains the size of his head. The bed is too short, he must sleep with his legs hanging out. I take another three paces and decide to step through to the other side of a glass-bead curtain. A dark tunnel, access to the basement, the entrance to a garage that never was, an inexplicable space. In some strange effect of angles and refractions, the scant light illuminates from the waist up, as if the scene were submerged in muddy water. In front of me, a door invites me to spy. I lean into a windowless bathroom, brought in from somewhere else: a bathtub with feet, a tank with a chain and a chequerboard floor. Remote in space and time.