Ghosts (5 page)

Castro reminded Viñas about a famous liar they had known in Chile, a
man who, whenever he met someone, would say that that he had just crossed the
Andes from Argentina, braving extremely risky or at least unusual conditions,
coming through unlikely passes, or right over the mountain peaks, crossing
snowfields, always on foot, alone, setting off on the spur of the moment. Each
time he ran into someone he knew, he came out with the same story, or rather, a
variation. But sometimes he ran into the same person again quite soon afterward,
and then he had to invent the opposite journey, since he couldn’t always be
crossing from Argentina into Chile, without crossing back the other way at least
occasionally, indeed just as often, even in the world of the imagination with
its somewhat flexible laws. It was a pretext for doubling his lies.

“Lorenzo”, they felt, was an incongruous name. They all thought it
suited its owner, but at the first stirring of doubt, they flipped over to the
opposite opinion. It was the same with “Washington,” and again with “Higinio,”
and so on through the names, even the commonest ones, like “Abel,” “Raúl” and
“Juan.” It would have been absurd to claim that people looked like examples of
their names, and yet, in a curious way, they did. The worst (or the best) thing
was that in any given case you could convince yourself of a name’s
appropriateness or inappropriateness simply by listening to the other person’s
arguments, and if that became the norm, even within a small community of friends
or colleagues, it would be like seeing ghosts emerge. They were pouring out wine
for familiar ghosts. (The real ones had disappeared a while before, as they did
every day when the smell of meat rose from the grill, as if it were detrimental
to them. But they would reappear later on, more active than ever, at siesta
time, which was the high point of their day, in summer at least; in winter, it
was dusk.)

This reminded the master builder of certain regrettable episodes from
the past; some of the men present had been working with him for quite a few
years, and they joined in the reminiscing. There was the time they had put up a
building, like this one, or even bigger, with materials and tools that were
hopelessly inadequate, especially the tools. You know the way there’s always
some liar exaggerating outrageously, he said. Well, it was really like that. But
in this case, the witnesses, including Carlitos Soria (The Bullshit Artist),
were not going to let him get away with lying. Which building? they asked him.
The one on Quintino Bocayuva. Oh, that one! They all remembered how terrible it
had been. Torture. Instead of.... just about everything,
really, they had had to make do with, well, anything at all, whatever came to
hand. Instead of wheelbarrows, they used some old baby carriages they found
dumped in a vacant lot. Instead of buckets, flowerpots (they had to block up the
hole in the bottom). And it was the same with everything else: a truly abject
scramble for makeshift solutions, which had scarred them for life.

In less than an hour, and the time flew by because of the
interesting conversation, every last mouthful of food disappeared, including
the bananas and the peaches and the bread. There was really nothing strange
about that: the whole idea was to eat it up. With the wine, however, it was
different. In a sense, drinking it was not the whole idea. And yet that is
what they had been doing, and they continued: instead of coffee after the
meal, they had a glass of wine, or two. The drinking, in fact, had become
absolute. Inevitably, though, some drank more than others. The three adult
Chileans (young Abel Reyes was drinking Coca-Cola) were the
quickest, and so attained the highest level of stupefaction, to the point
where they could hardly say a coherent good-bye when the others began to
leave. And yet they still had some more drinking to do. They did it sitting
down, staring into space, smiling vaguely. The others finally vanished, and
the three of them underwent a kind of collapse. They felt as if they had
imbibed the whole world, but in tiny doses, or as if a joy outside of them
had begun to spin, sweeping them up. And, what is more, although they were
off their faces by now, it seemed they could go on drinking, go on filling
the glasses and lifting them to their lips. At least they still had that
feeling, like a giant smile inside each one of them.

At four in the afternoon, just after the last of the builders had
gone, Elisa came down to see what state her husband was in. She had to look
around twice to find him, slumped as he was. She wasn’t too alarmed, but she did
check to see if there were any others left. And sure enough, the other two
Chileans were there. As it happened, Pocketman emerged from a brief spell of
unconsciousness and volunteered to help get her husband upstairs. She accepted:
Raúl Viñas had come around sufficiently for the two of them to suffice. Almost
restored to his normal lucidity by the climb, Pocketman offered to chain up the
gate from the outside, although he wouldn’t be able to lock it. After saying
good-bye, he went back down. The remaining Chilean, Castro, was still
sleeping, but when Pocketman gave him a shake, he woke up completely, if in a
bad mood, and since they were both going in the same direction, and a fair way
(they had to take the train), they headed off together, placidly, though not
entirely steady on their legs. Pocketman kept his promise of chaining up the
gate, so unless someone took the trouble of looking for the absent lock, the
building appeared to be securely shut. It wasn’t really, but there weren’t any
passersby. It was siesta time, the quietest and most deserted time of day, and
the hottest. The silence was complete.

When the man of the house was peacefully unconscious in bed, covered
only with a fine sweat of wine, Elisa asked Patri if she could do her a favor, a
big favor (she stressed these last words with a certain irritation), and go
fetch the children, who shouldn’t have run off in the first place. Patri, who
was a model of good manners and respect, repressed a “huh!” but couldn’t quite
stifle a sigh, which made her feel immediately ashamed, although it had been as
faint as a breeze in the far heights of the sky. Elisa, who was deeply Chilean
in this as in all other respects, could perceive the subtlest shades of an
intention. So she added a comment, to compensate for the unfortunate tone of her
request—or, at least, to unhinge it and let it swing loose beyond,
where the real words are, which have no meaning or force to compel. It was
amazing, she said, that even in this heat they still had the energy to run off.
Playing excited them so much they just couldn’t get enough. It was the
equivalent of “living” for adults: you’re not going to decide to die when night
comes just because you’ve been living all day. Patri smiled. Also, they had been
up early, said her mother; and lack of sleep, which makes adults slow and
drowsy, makes kids restless. But they’d have to take a nap, or they’d be
unbearable at night. Patri couldn’t promise that she’d be able to get Juan
Sebastián to go to bed, or even his buddy Blanca Isabel. The older boy hated the
siesta. Elisa thought for a moment. She had, in fact, seen them when she was
coming upstairs with her husband. She regretted not having told them to follow
her. Each time they saw their father in that state, they thought he was sick and
about to die; she could have exploited that momentary terror and shut them away
in the dark. With a bit of an effort, they could get to sleep. If they ran off,
it was hopeless. Luckily there was no danger of them getting out into the
street. For some reason, that danger didn’t exist. There was the possibility of
a fall, from any of the floors, since the building was still a concrete frame,
with just a few internal walls in place, not all of them, by any means. But
neither mother nor daughter mentioned that possibility; it didn’t even enter
into their private reflections. They had once said that an adult was just as
likely to fall as a child; there was no difference, because the planet’s
gravitational force worked in the same way on both. It was like asking which
weighed more, a kilo of lead or a kilo of feathers. And that’s why they were
vaguely but deeply revolted by the way the owners of the apartments took such
care not to let their children approach the edges when they visited, like that
morning. If that was how they felt, why were they buying the apartments in the
first place? Why didn’t they go and live in houses at ground level? “We’re
different,” they thought, “we’re Chilean.”

But there was an easier way to do it after all, said Elisa, and that
was to take away the toy cars. Without them, there would be no reason to remain
at large. If she knew her children, and she was sure she did, it was bound to
work. It had sometimes worked for her in the past. Patri said they would hide
them. Her mother bent down calmly (they were at the door of the little
apartment, talking in hushed voices, unnecessarily, since Viñas was sound
asleep), and picked up the cardboard box full of toys. With an expert hand, she
began to rummage through it. She knew every one of her children’s toys. “The big
yellow one, the red one, the little blue truck....” She
calculated that exactly four were currently in their possession. She even told
Patri which ones. But Patri wasn’t paying much attention. She didn’t think it
would be possible to recover all the cars, and so bring in the children. As long
as they still had one, just one, Juan Sebastián would stay awake all through the
siesta, the little devil.

She went downstairs to the sixth floor. The quickest way to do it was
to check the floors one by one, room by room. If they heard her, they would try
to hide. She set about it systematically, but it was hard to concentrate because
the heat and the time of day had dazed her. The sixth floor seemed endless. Her
chances of finding anything in that void perpetually full of air were minimal,
given the terrible brightness, which she had grown so used to, living up there
as summer set in, that her pupils had shrunk permanently to
pin-points. She didn’t understand the arrangement of the rooms, which
wasn’t clear at that stage of the construction; but she felt there were too many
of them. The trend toward having more and more rooms was, she felt, absurd. A
family couldn’t observe the protocol of a royal court. If people started
multiplying rooms by their needs, they could float away into the infinite and
never touch the ground of reality again. One for sewing, another for embroidery;
one for eating, one for drinking, one for each activity, in short. The same room
reproduced over and over, each one fulfilling some silly requirement, as if in a
perpetually receding mirror. Her mother had put it very well, except that she
hadn’t gone far enough in her generalization. Because the illusion of
exhaustivity affected things as well as people. In any case, the children
weren’t there.

When she went down to the fifth floor, she was already tired and her
eyelids felt heavy, which surprised her slightly, since she didn’t like the
siesta—she was still a child in that respect. Having washed the lunch
dishes and left the miniscule rooftop apartment impeccably clean and tidy (in so
far as they could, given that it was still under construction), she and her
mother had watched television. She would have liked to go on watching, but the
time slot for the kind of show they preferred had come to an end, and the ones
that were starting required a different kind of attention.

It might seem odd that at lunchtime, when Abel Reyes came up, his
cousin Patri had greeted him with a kiss. A kiss on the cheek was a normal
enough greeting; what might seem odd is that they needed to greet one another,
when he had been working in the building since early that morning. But, as it
happened, they hadn’t seen each other, which was not unusual, because she hardly
ever went down. Her mother did the shopping, and rarely needed help. Patri went
down once a day, if that. She helped a lot around the apartment, watched
television, and looked after her half-brothers and -sisters.
She was pretty much a homebody, like all Chileans, except when they are tireless
travelers (she was a bit of both). She was fifteen; her surname was Vicuña, like
her mother’s, because she had been born when her mother was single. Very quiet,
very serious, pretty hands.

They weren’t on the fifth floor either, as she was able to
verify (or so she thought), by checking from the front to the back, room by
room. The children weren’t there, but the other characters, those bothersome
ghosts, were legion. They were always around at that time. To see them, you
just had to go and look. Although they kept their distance, with an air of
unaccountable haughtiness. For some mysterious reason, they had started
shouting, bursting into thunderous peals of laughter that shook the sky.
Patri wouldn’t have paid them any more attention than usual, if not for two
rather particular circumstances. The first was that there weren’t just two
or three or four ghosts, as one might have expected, given their
characteristic and constitutive rarity, but a veritable multitude, appearing
here and there, then moving away, laughing and shouting all the while like
exploding balloons. The second circumstance was even more remarkable: they
were looking at her. Normally they didn’t look; they didn’t seem to pay
attention to anything in particular, or even to have attention. They were
like that now too, except that they seemed to be making an exception for
her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious, senseless amusement.
She didn’t take offence, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a
flying puppet show, an out-of-place, unseemly kind of
theater. She had seen naked men before, of course (although not many); she
didn’t find that especially frightening. But there was something implausible
about it, since you wouldn’t normally see men without clothes except in
particular situations. The way they were floating in the air accentuated the
ambivalent impression. She had occasionally heard them speak, and wondered
about it afterward, for a while. It seemed easy enough to take them by
surprise, to slip past behind them. But perhaps it wasn’t so
easy.