A snap of fingers summons me and I jump back into the room. Tosca has returned from her trance. Where did you get to, girl? I thought you’d split. I gesture to the curtain and Tosca nods, understanding what I’m saying, my curiosity. A pause and I clear my throat: Between you and me, when you want, you can take a bath. I thank her with a smile. Sitting on the edge of the bed again, something comes out of my mouth which I regret as soon as I utter it, convinced I’ve said something really stupid: Better? She shrugs, deflecting the question back to me with her chin raised. And suddenly she lets her arms fall, as well as her head, she relaxes her facial muscles, unlocking her jaw in slow motion, like a rehearsal for death. And what seemed like sarcasm or a challenge before becomes serenity and candour. She says: Much better, yes.
I think about the delayed effect of the drug. As I’m beginning to see, after the injection, after the narcotic peak produced by the fluid entering her body, the balsam, the nothing, the dreams, when she opens her eyes there is a vertiginous comedown, as violent as the ascent, during which she doubtless recovers awareness of her surroundings, what is real, what the senses detect, colours, light, the aftertaste of bile, the roughness of the hands, and the presence of the tumour and all that it is. But fortunately that ends too. Accustomed to the comings and goings, it would seem that, in desperation, the mind comes back to offer a helping hand to what remains of the morphine in the blood and constructs a plateau of well-being, the true effect, the good, long-lasting one, but one that also finishes, gradually abating towards morning.
That’s where Tosca is, entering the field of relief, when Sonia appears. For a moment, no one speaks. Not the woman who’s just entered, nor the giant escorting her, nor the woman lying back in bed, even less me, observing them all as I bite my lips. But the reasons for the silence are different, particular to each of us, timidity, mental retardation, expectation, torpor. It’s Tosca who’s directing the scene, taking all the time her body requires to intervene. But when she does, it’s without words, a repeated, sluggish gesture, like a drowsy traffic cop, tracing an imaginary line with her index finger joining me to Sonia. I take a while to interpret it, which exasperates her slightly, even though she lacks the strength. She wants me to talk. Sonia listens to me with a concerned expression. She’s a slim woman, more than that, skinny, with fine features, hair to her waist, men’s clothing. In order to think, Sonia opens her deep black eyes wide and looks at me, but not exactly at me, more at the portrait of the Virgin of Syracuse hanging a few centimetres above my head. She stays like that for a good couple of minutes, more gone than concentrating, as if she’s forgotten the question and doesn’t know how to get out of the situation, what to invent. Until she wakes up, gives a slight jump and addresses Tosca as if she were the only valid interlocutor. She says: Herbert, it could be Herbert. Tosca, still silent in her cushioned morphine cloud, gives two eternal nods.
Thirteen
I dream about snakes. There are hundreds of them, thousands, very fast, fleeing from the reptile house en masse, as if surging from a spring.
Herbert, I should have guessed, is an eleven-year-old boy. He comes at quarter past twelve, fifteen minutes earlier than we agreed with Sonia. I hide my surprise and ask him whether he fancies keeping an eye on Simón. Yes, miss, he says. You know it’s for the whole afternoon. He raises his eyebrows and asks: Can I take him to my house?
I introduce the two of them and move away. Herbert and Simón immediately click, they soon start operating under their own codes. In a corner of the room, I pretend I’m tidying so I can watch them. Herbert is taking his job seriously, he tries to work out how to entertain Simón. He chats to him, asks about his toys, and the other boy responds silently, pointing out the shoebox where his little cars are kept. I get distracted for a moment leaning out of the window, a grey, heavy day, and when I look back, they’re already mid-game. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Simón is holding a hook-shaped piece of black plastic, somewhere between a C and an L. It looks like the elbow of a pipe, the piece that drains a washing machine, a reject from something broken. On his feet, Herbert issues instructions for him to hold it in a certain position, the base parallel to the floor, the short arm perpendicular. Herbert corrects him several times, Simón does as he’s told but he keeps turning his hand a little more or a little less until finally the other boy tells him, in a voice approaching a shout: There, leave it there, don’t move. Then Herbert, two or three metres away, launches the little cars which, if they pass the test, ascend the ramp and go flying through the air. Not at all easy. They switch positions, but Simón gets bored and rebels. He throws the cars everywhere. Then Herbert, who knows I’m watching, twists his head, stretching the corner of his mouth as if to say: Poor thing, he doesn’t get it.
I go into the bathroom and brush my teeth for the second time that day to see if I can get rid of the bitter taste that every so often makes me produce involuntary clicks with my tongue, and it occurs to me that it’s crazy to leave one child in the care of another.
Now they have made a bridge with the piece of plastic. Every time Simón manages to get a car or the cat and sidecar underneath it, Herbert celebrates as if it were a goal. Great, he says loudly with one arm raised, perfect. But Simón doesn’t return his enthusiasm, he limits himself to passionlessly repeating the game. He lets himself be led by the other boy’s suggestions and at times he gets lost, his gaze fixed somewhere else, an expression that someone who didn’t know better might associate with sorrow. An attitude in which I can’t help but see myself. So obviously and to such an extent that I wonder at one point whether he’s doing it on purpose, to show me up, even to blame me. Yet this likeness to me, which I can now see in him as never before, could just as well be inherited from his father’s personality: that passive air, the moroseness, the stomach out. Watching him interact with Herbert, I can’t help thinking about him as an adult, my age, or fifty-something. I can imagine his face, the build of his body, his gaze, but I can’t decide on his circumstances. I don’t know where to locate him, whether in the country, in the city, neither of the two, whether he’s with a woman, or a man, alone, a nomad, sedentary, a warrior or subordinate, I can’t even be sure whether he’ll be near me or far away.
Herbert, I say, and he comes up to me smiling like a model employee. I ask him about his days, what he does. He tells me his routine: he gets up at six and goes to training until half eight. Training? Yes, football. He wants to be a professional footballer, he’s a defender. The last man, as he says. From the club he goes to school and comes home for lunch. Then he’s free until seven, he goes back to training at quarter to eight. Half nine he eats and he goes to bed at ten. He says the trainer tells him to get a good rest. Some nights, he goes out for a drive with his father.
I prepare some noodles which the three of us eat quickly and in silence. I explain to Simón that he’ll be staying with Herbert until I come back, he looks at me as if to say he already knows. He makes me feel entirely dispensable. Before I leave, I ask Herbert how much he wants paying. He exposes his lower lip, I offer him thirty pesos for the six hours. That’s fine, he says biting his lips, I can’t tell whether it’s a smile of approval or discontent.
On my way out, I come across two boys loitering outside the building: ripped jeans, white T-shirts and black sunglasses. They’re looking for the Chemist. I don’t know him, I shake my head. I’m new.
Six hours at work and I walk home with Canetti. There are days when his company doesn’t annoy me at all, it’s almost pleasant. His philosophies are childlike, generally predictable and occasionally wise. He’s full of surprises, which you would guess he was making up, but he isn’t. After walking a couple of blocks in silence, he gestures with his arm extended upwards and starts praising the rosewood trees, noble and indigenous like few others, he says. From one side of the avenue to the other, a multitude of rosewoods. I raise my eyes: extremely tall, sturdy trees adorning the city with their drooping limbs, enormous but tame. We cross. On the street with the Adventist church, Canetti swaps praise for protest in front of a row of banana trees: A pestilential blight.