Simón has taken advantage of those seconds of distraction to escape from my sight. He’s hiding or being hidden by the landscape. One of the two is using the other. I’m not going to shout, I wouldn’t know how. I wait, to see if he appears, surely he’ll appear, but he doesn’t appear. I stand up and walk without alarm, accommodating my flip-flops between the holes and the stones. I look both ways, nothing. I’m no longer looking for Simón but for the green of his T-shirt. Any green. I let myself be deceived by false clues, but they don’t offer the right measurements, always the wrong width or height.
Left or right. I choose the bank, I take fifteen paces and I should be starting to worry, admit that he’s lost and ask for help, and then it’s almost as though someone places their hand on my shoulder, calling me. I turn my head and discover Simón next to a bush five metres from where I was sitting. I walk over to him. He doesn’t say anything or look at me with reproachful eyes. His face merely suggests a: Where were you going? I’d explain but best not to, it’s like Iris with Draco or Draco with Iris. You don’t know who left whom, who is the mother of the blame.
Simón guides me behind the bush and between two pieces of concrete rubble and some remnants of bricks rounded by the water, the wind and everyone’s footsteps, he shows me a small cemetery of beheaded dolls. Three, four centimetres long, made of ceramic, some with old-fashioned dresses, Egyptian, Asian, others naked, an army of little mutilated dolls awaiting burial or reanimation. Legs, arms, loose limbs as well. I think that someone must have reunited them, the river couldn’t put them together so painstakingly. Simón fills his arms with dolls and I don’t know why I censure him, I tell him not to grab so many, Not so many, I order, but I offer no reason. And he answers me with a look that says: Poor things. Yes, poor things.
I check that Iris is still with Draco’s aunt and uncle, but her attitude of ten minutes earlier, so fed up at having met his relations, is now one of happiness. In fact, she sees me and calls me over, arms open, almost euphoric. Yuri and Olga barely speak Spanish and when they do it takes quite some effort to understand them. Olga is ash blonde, with slim legs, freckled skin and severe eyes. Very similar to Iris, the antithesis of Yuri who never stops joking and laughs hard. I witness a litany of anecdotes and complicities which I try to guess from their expressions. Simón entertains himself with the little dolls, building them a cave in the sand. Hunger grabs us. Without consulting me, Iris decides that we’ll share lunch with them. Two picnics in one. We contribute our cheese, bread, salami and Coca-Cola. From them, hard-boiled eggs, pâté, more bread and a bottle of pineapple cider which they have brought in a foil cooler. Yuri tells us that it’s hullabaloo every night in the hotel where they live. He says hullabaloo with an incredible accent, as if he were beating his tongue against the skin of a drum. Always something, he says, and I think I understand him saying that a few weeks earlier a woman fell from a balcony on the building and embedded her head in the roof of a taxi. Olga, who as I will find out later is Yuri’s second wife, he has at least twenty years on her, laughs with her hand over her mouth. Iris pulls a disgusted expression.
We scoff everything in minutes. We toast with the pineapple cider, which despite the thermal bag is warm when it reaches my mouth. The conversation continues but I throw myself down with my face to the sky, the voices reach me without translation, in a strange but transparent register, in which words are beyond meaning. At one point I could swear Iris is telling them the story about the fat woman who got jammed in the hanging walkway in the subtropical rainforest. The phrasing, the highs and lows, the exclamations, remind me of the way she told me.
The sun changes position and leaves us without protection. We react in unison, forced into movement by the glare. Simón? Right here, burying the little dolls. A moment of indecision: over there, further this way, in that little wood, I suggest. In the end, Yuri and Olga go their own way. The goodbye is short and cold, as if resentment has finally won over. We take a path cutting through the reed bed as far as a flowering ceibo tree. Canetti again, and his catalogue of trees. Simón doesn’t take long to fall asleep. We lie on the grass, feet up on a bench, blood on a steep slope to the brain. In silence, we are bewitched by the network of leaves and flowers that separates us from the sky, until our eyes close. In my dream, brief, very brief, a small, flattened bird appears to me, its feet separated from its body. And yet it moves, dragging itself like a reptile.
The need to pee cuts short my siesta. I walk a few metres along a trail, I lower my trousers and knickers, squat and release an effervescent stream of piss that smells of pineapple cider. Through the pampas grass, I see the smudge of an animal passing, making the ground crunch, a chinchilla, a rat or a weasel. I can’t make it out. Closer to me, a hole, the burrow. I don’t lie down again, I sit next to Iris, who is still sleeping, her skin tattooed by a thousand nervous filigrees: all the shadows of the ceibo. I observe those features of hers, from other lands. I start caressing her head, I use my fingers as a comb to clear her face of hair. I smooth her eyebrows, I measure her lashes and notice those tiny hairs magnified on her lips, a little blonde moustache, microscopic. I stay like this for a while. Suddenly, frightening me, as if instead of waking her I had set fire to her, her eyes open, she looks straight at me. She smiles when I jump and I pass my hand over her forehead again. She lets me do it. That night at Christmas and some fantasies come to my mind, and very naturally the need rises in me to kiss her. She sees it coming and doesn’t stop me. She reacts belatedly, when our lips are almost brushing. She moves my mouth away brutally, gripping my jaw. It disconcerts me, not the rejection, but the fact that it was expressed like that. So violently.
Twenty-one
Herbert shows up with a bruised eye. A large, mature plum. Simón looks at him impressed, as do I. He allows himself to be examined, frowning with a mixture of pride and shame. I don’t ask anything, I let him speak. He says he was elbowed during a match. And he clarifies: At training. I offer him a glass of milk, he drinks it in one go, almost closing the healthy eye; the other stays alert, halfway open. Simón points at his own cheekbone, as if his hurts too. I move away, they start playing. I’m going shopping, I say. And, with one foot outside, I ask: What do you want to eat? They both shrug at the same time and they remain like that, stony, transferring the doubt from one to the other.
At the supermarket on the corner there’s a commotion of police cars and ambulances. I see it coming, first in scale, now life-size. I’m about to go and do my shopping elsewhere, but curiosity wins over and I stop behind the police cordon. Slightly further along is Mercedes, he doesn’t see me, doesn’t recognise me, or maybe that’s just the way he is, rough, laconic, not one for niceties. Looking straight ahead, concentrating, he keeps rubbing his fist over his mouth and beard. His eyes are pinned on the shop. I stand on tiptoes: behind the blue shoulders of the uniformed officers and the couple of civilians spinning like tops on their axes, I can make out the shelves, and closer to me, too close, two dead legs sheathed in pale grey jeans. A body covered hurriedly from the waist up, lying between the boxes and a Budweiser fridge. A fresh corpse covered with bin bags. As well as the trousers, you can see the gold trainers pointing in opposite directions, forming an open V. I return my gaze to Mercedes in search of complicity, an explanation. Nothing. He’s smoking, gritting his teeth, dismayed, or else it’s hatred. Whichever it is, he’s not indifferent to this particular death. I raise my eyes and escape for a minute as I observe the multicoloured sign above the shop: a collage of cities of the world, statues, towers, monuments, typical postcard images and the name of the supermarket: King Kong.