“Hey,” I yelled.“Help!” By now I was just shouting at the receding back of a man, the top of his head, slightly balding, strong, rounded shoulders. Without even a glance, he stepped back inside.
I turned back to the room. The whole situation felt out of my hands. I was in a foreign city, in a place not my own, no one was helping me. I pictured the water steadily rising, inch by inch, as high as a foot. Soon I'd be wading through the rooms, like people waded across the streets when it flooded here, the water at my shins, then knees, then thighs.At some point, I'd have to simply get the hell out of here. I'd pack my things and walk out with my bag, leaving the apartment, the whole building, to rot and crumble. What else was I supposed to do?
But I wasn't ready to abandon ship yet. Staring at the semisubmerged room, I decided that one thing I could do was go around and pick up everything possible and put it on higher ground, while I waited for either Olga or Gabriel to call. I picked up all my possessions, shoes and bags and clothes, and then the apartment owner's possessions, where possible. I cleared the books out of the lower shelves of the bookcases and put them on the table. I put smaller furniture on top of unmovable items. But wait, wouldn't the best thing be to turn the water off entirely? I thought of the last time when I'd had no water, the whole situation of the water tank and valves on the roof. Remembering the details of this kind of thing was not my forté, but at least I could go up there and give it a shot.
As I was walking up the stairs, Gabriel called. My description of what was happening came out nonsensically.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I'll call Hugo. And I'll come by myself too, as soon as I can.”
I went up on the roof. I looked at the tank, the valves. As far as I could see, there were two possible valves, or valve-like appendages. I turned one of them, turned it back, then turned it again. The only way to know would be if I went back downstairs again. I went back downstairs. The water was still streaming out of the pipe. I could only imagine what was happening below. I pictured that dark swath of water I'd already seen. Now that whole wall must be dark and wet.
The person I should really be calling is the owner of the apartment, or rather the owner's brother. This had occurred to me before and I had asked Olga for his number, but she'd said he didn't want to be involved with the tenants. Everything had to go through her.
As I stepped out my door to go up to the roof again, I heard music coming from the apartment upstairs. Had the guy just come home? I went upstairs again and rang his bell.Again, no answer. This guy clearly didn't want to be disturbed. I could respect that. Still, this was a particular situation. I continued up onto the roof, where I climbed up to the water tank again and turned the second valve.
I was carrying my cell phone with me everywhere. Right after I turned the valve, Olga called. She sounded distressed. I felt like telling her I was much more distressed. She was out in Olivos, a wealthy suburb, where she was showing houses to a client who was looking for a swimming pool. She'd call the brother. She'd try to be there as soon as she could.
When I got back downstairs, I noticed a silence. Or at least a new kind of sound, gentle lapping. The water had ceased pouring out. I checked to be sure. Yes, it really had stopped. The pipe below the sink stood there gleaming uneventfully.
I got a broom and started sweeping the water out onto the balcony. It sloshed down into the back garden. I did this for a while and then Gabriel showed up. There was still an inch or so of water on the floor.
“Christ, dude! What's wrong with this apartment?” he said.
“At least I managed to turn the water off,” I said. “You should have seen it before.”
He followed me into the living room and looked around. “Shit, girl, this is not a good scene.”
“I feel like we should get as much water out as we can,” I said. “So things don't rot.”
“Okay, let's do it. Hugo's on his way.”
I handed Gabriel the broom and told him to sweep the water off the balcony with that. I went and got the mop and all the towels I had. He swept and I mopped. Then we both got down on the floor and soaked up all the water we could in the towels, wringing them out over the balcony at intervals and coming back for more. By the end, we were both sweating and tired. We lay there, he on the chaise lounge, me on a chair, exhausted.
Olga called again, sounding frazzled. I said the plumber was arriving. “Oh, good,” she said. She was still out in Olivos. Her client was “very demanding.” She whispered this into the phone.
Gabriel sent Hugo another text. He was on another job, would be there as soon as possible.
“So how's everything?” Gabriel asked.
I told him about the latest scene with Leonarda and Miguel.
“I remember once when I didn't know what to do, I went away to this place in Uruguay,” he said. “It's, like, this little squatters' settlement on the beach. You can't get there by car. You have to walk over the dunes. Or you can pay for a jeep to take you. There's no electricity or running water. I went there because someone had told me about it. I was alone, I wasn't sure what to do next, and when I was there I had this sort of panic attack. Yeah, way out there, in the middle of fucking nowhere. That was an important point in my life.”
“And then what? What happened?”
“I came back and started studying to be a doctor. Yeah, really.”
Once he'd left, I felt agitated. I got up and wandered around the apartment. I looked in the mirror. The more I stared, the weirder my face appeared. For the hundredth time, I looked through the owner's things, the books, knickknacks, tape cassettes. I pulled out a book, a novel, whose spine said
La Creciente
. I looked up
creciente
in my English-Spanish dictionary. It meant “tide.” I sat down and read the opening:
The city was constructed on the edge of a river, but it wasn't a companionable river on whose shores inhabitants could walk, that linked up between welcoming piers, under bridges with memorable names, one of those rivers that it was enough to mention to situate immediately the city which is its near-synonym: the Seine, the Tiber, the Thames, the Guadalquivir, the Moscow. It was a river independent from the city like a watery slice attached to it, a river that men didn't need to cross to go from one end of the city to another, that did not impose itself on their vision and about which they hardly ever thought, since weeks and even months could pass without seeing it. They only went to it in the summer, but for this it was necessary to go a good distance from the city.
It was a South American city and maybe for this reason the river was different from those of European cities. Everything about South America is different from Europe, something that saddens and humiliates the inhabitants of this continent, even leading them to deny this reality. Its landscapes, its people, its elements, its political events, its rivers are different. It was difficult to reach this particular river.
A foreigner, attracted one day by the copper color of its waters, scenes on a postcard, wanted to find it and throw in a coin, an indispensable ritual when you arrive at any city where there's a river. He was a determined and meticulous man, since Nordic blood ran in his veins and no one can deny that Nordic people know how to plan their days and accomplish their plans. He went down to the big avenues that run along the river and then turned on a transversal street. It was closed. He repeated his attempts tirelessly over the course of the day. At one point he encountered a wall that was hundreds of meters long. When he arrived at the end of it, he thought he saw the river, but it was only a barrier; he went to the other end of the street entrance and saw a sign that said “Closed to traffic.” His patience and perseverance did not flag, he had been a boy scout from the age of seven and a mountain climber since he was eleven; he had waited an entire year in the Siegfried Line and two and a half in a concentration camp, so he could definitely dedicate a day to looking for the river. But night fell and he still hadn't found the way.
The following morning, he repeated his search, he ran into other walls, other barriers, other streets closed to traffic, long rows of warehouses, coast guards who prevented his passing, rusted rails with out-of-use wagons put there like barricades and always, at the end, as if making fun of him, the tall masts that proclaimed the existence of the river. I don't know how this apparently fruitless persecution ended, and it isn't especially related to this story in any case apart from the definite fact that people had forgotten that they had a river and they neither feared nor enjoyed it. Maybe the foreigner managed to make it out from the top of a modern building or possibly he had to travel several kilometers away in order finally to catch a glimpse of the river on whose shores the city had been constructed.
I called Gabriel. “Hey, what's the name of that place in Uruguay? I think you're right, I need to go away and think.”
Part III
twenty
It took pretty much a whole day to get there. I took a midnight ferry across the RÃo de la Plata, the brown water transformed by night and the movement of the boat into a black sheet scattered continuously with white diamonds. We arrived at three in the morning in the port of Colonia. Then a six-hour bus drive across Uruguay into the dawn. It was a small countryâI'd looked it upâroughly the size of my home state, Washington.
I was sitting in the very front of the bus and watched the sun come up through the slanted windshield. The landscape was soft and green, with reddish roads, stands of eucalyptus, comforting clumps of sheep. Just looking out at it made me feel quieter. I had my iPod on and drifted in and out of sleep. Finally, we pulled in at an outpost where there were several jeeps parked around a wooden ticket booth. After I waited for an hour or so, a jeep took me and a few other passengers across the dunes to the fishing village that was my destination.
I was glad to get away, to have my mind filled with new impressions. I made a point of not thinking about the things I'd come away to think about, at least not at first. I wanted to flood my mind with this other world, so that by the time I did think of them, it would be a different mind thinking.
As Gabriel had said, there was no running water or electricity here. I had a little wooden cabin set back from the beach, a bucket, a well. During the day, I wandered down to the beach. The sand was packed hard. The waves were long. At certain points, they looked especially turbulent, as if currents were meeting, and could suck you right down. There were people here and there, not many. I walked along. A woman was selling crushed whale bones in little vials, which she claimed were aphrodisiacs. In the distance were high dunes, scaling, plunging. Every now and then, a dark tiny figure appeared on top of one of them, looked out, paused and then started to descend, stick-like legs sinking deep into the sand. There were dolphins in the water. Farther along were seal carcasses washed up on the shore, sometimes just the bones, sometimes the whole body, giving off a putrid smell.
Back in my cabin, I lay down on the floor. Sometimes when I lay there, I felt a sensation in my chest, a sort of pressing feeling. It was oddly soothing, as if there were a hand resting there. Occasionally, I could summon the feeling, usually not. But if the feeling was there and I kept my awareness on the spot, the sensation grew. Sometimes it hurt. Sometimes it felt nice.
The days melted into one another. I began waking up much earlier than I ever would. In the early mornings, the sky was a deep crazy pink. I thought about things I wouldn't have thought about otherwise, the way the water curves down the drain in one direction in the northern hemisphere and in another in the south. Consequently, rivers also carve different paths, the high bank on one side in the north, on the other in the south.
I noticed the way the long grasses, swirling in the wind, left their own form of hieroglyphics, grass writing, circles in the sand. I stared down at the imprints left by tidal streams, those wavy patterns, like the form of the branches of trees, the shape of neurons, blood vessels, the shape of everything. From a certain spot on the dunes, you could see the sun and moon at the same time. I remembered things I had learned years ago. Sand actually consists of sea shells crushed tiny. Tides are the moon pulling water toward itself. To this day, no one understands why.
It's true that sometimes when staring at a tidal imprint in the sand, Leonarda in her various incarnations would come into my mind. At times I felt revulsion, especially when thinking of that last scene. Why get involved with such people who treated each other cruelly, wished each other harm? Then I'd see her in a different light, how fragile she was, the confessions she'd made to me. Another day, I had a vision of birds on branches hung with blossoms, moving in the wind. The birds took off, landed again, took off, this light, bright happiness I had felt with her. I thought of how it was in the beginning, just the two of us playing out in the world, before she'd introduced the Master Plan. What I wanted was to return to that early state, if we possibly could.
A general retreats from battle, hunkers down in the hills. I had come away to nurse my wounds, recuperate and think through my next move. I would use all the tricks I had at my disposal. She could change shapes all she wanted. I didn't care. Underneath was something else, I felt sure of it, this warm furry creature, sitting there quietly, waiting for me.
I stayed away a month. But even on returning to Buenos Aires, I didn't call Leonarda right away. I wanted to be careful, to do this right. The city had emptied out in my absence, as I'd been told it always did at this time of year. Isolde was in Uruguay, a different part than where I had been, Punta del Este, where the summer parties were. I called the hairdresser's to make an appointment with Vera, but she was also at the beach, the Argentine coast. And Leonarda? For a moment, I imagined that she'd gone away with him, that the two of them were in Tigre, swanning along the muddy waterways, checking out island properties together. I panicked for a moment, was about to call her, then lay down on the floor for as long as I needed to, to calm myself down.