Authors: Matilde Asensi
While I dried off and got dressed, I kept circling around that elusive memory, brushing it with the tips of my fingers without managing to catch it. And then the phone rang. I examined the screen in my room, and could see the number and the name of the person who was calling me, but I didn’t recognize either. I had never heard of Joffre Viladomat something-or-other.
“Ignore the call,” I told the system, while I used a shoe horn to put on my sneakers without having to undo the knots and laces. But thirty seconds later, Joffre Viladomat insisted. “Ignore the call,” I repeated, and the computer made a busy tone for the second time. But even then, Viladomat didn’t give up. I suppose that if the circumstances had been different, I would have ordered a systematic block on all calls coming from that number, but I must have really had my guard down, because, on his third attempt, although I was irritated, I answered. I froze when I heard the unforgettable contralto voice of a completely detestable woman.
“Mr. Queralt…,” Why did nature bestow instruments as perfect as that voice on people as vulgar as that professor? “Good afternoon. This is Marta Torrent, the director of your brother’s department.”
“I remember you perfectly, Dr. Torrent. What do you want?”
I couldn’t get over my astonishment.
“I hope you don’t mind that Mariona gave me your phone number,” she said with perfect modulation.
“What do you want?” I repeated, ignoring her pomposity.
She was silent for a second. “I see that you are annoyed, and honestly, I think you have no reason to be. It is I who should be angry, yet I am calling you.”
“Dr. Torrent, please, just tell me what it is you want!”
“Very well…. Look, I can’t leave the material you showed me yesterday in my office in your hands. You think that I’m trying to steal Daniel’s research, but you are very wrong. If we could speak more comfortably….”
“Excuse me, but it seemed to me that you were accusing Daniel of being a thief.”
“Only part of the documentation is mine, I recognize it; the other part belongs completely to Daniel, although it is obvious that he obtained it later. This is a very delicate situation, Mr. Queralt; we’re speaking of a very important project that has taken many years of research. I would like for you to understand that if just one of the papers you have in your possession gets lost or falls into the wrong hands, it would be a catastrophe for the academic world. You are a programmer, Mr. Queralt, and you cannot imagine, not by a long shot, how important that material is. Return it to me, please.”
It was not just her voice that was like a radio announcer’s; her manner of expressing herself was, as well. But not even her voice or her expression could hide the urgency that overwhelmed her. The professor was in a hurry to get her hands on the documents.
“Why don’t you wait for Daniel to get better?”
“Will he get better?” she asked ironically. “Do you honestly believe that he will get better? Think about it carefully, Mr. Queralt.”
Marta Torrent had just crossed the line again and that time, definitively.
“If you want the documents, file a lawsuit!” I spit with rage, pushing the escape key to cut off the call. “Block all calls that come from this number,” I rumbled, “and also all those that come from the owner of the number, whoever it is; those from Marta Torrent and those from the Department of Anthropology of the Autonomous University of Bellaterra.”
I left my room in long strides, asking myself why the hell I had to be involved with people like her. Supposing that Daniel really was a thief, something that I could in no way believe, and supposing that everything that witch said was true, wasn’t there some other way to claim the documents? Did she have to insult my brother, call me at home on a Sunday afternoon and insinuate that Daniel was never going to get well? Who the hell did that woman think she was? Did she have no conscience? I had meant the lawsuit thing very seriously. Only if I received a subpoena would I begin to believe her, and even then, I very much doubted that I would be able to come to even remotely suspect my brother Daniel of being capable of appropriating research materials that did not belong to him. To think! When we were little, whenever he took something from me, he would leave a note! My brother was incapable of stealing anything, of profiting off of anything that was not his, and of that I was completely certain, so the only possible conclusion was that Dr. Torrent had seen something in Daniel’s documents that had interested her a great deal, something for which she was willing to wound, insult, and lie like a scoundrel. She might have been able to convince Ona—her or any other person with less of a strong personality than myself—but the professor had had the bad luck of running into me, and it was going to be very difficult for her to lay claim to my brother’s work. One does not become the director of a university department by having a heart of gold. Only the climbers, the real sharks, are capable of prospering in very competitive environments, and good people, like my brother, tended to be their victims, the steps they had to tread on in order to rise. I had gone to her looking for help, and all I had done was wake up the monster. I should never have brought Daniel’s materials to light, but it was too late to regret it now. Now I had to figure out, as quickly as possible, what the professor had seen in the papers to so awaken her ambition.
On Monday morning I woke up at eight ready to begin a long hard day of work. But I didn’t feel the normal laziness of just any beginning of the week. In fact, almost nothing was the same as before Daniel took ill. That morning, I didn’t have to go down to my office and listen to Núria recite the string of interviews and meetings scheduled for the day, while I took possession of my chair and the system connected me to sources of global economic and stock market
information. I didn’t have to hold video conferences with New York, Berlin, or Tokyo, and I didn’t have to meet with expert technicians and programmers of systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, or diffuse logic. My only obligation was to have a relaxed breakfast in the sun and wait for the arrival of Jabba and Proxi which we had agreed upon for nine o’clock, last night, before they had left for their house, leaving my study a disaster area, to be frank.
My grandmother arrived punctually from the hospital while I was sipping my tea in the garden and enjoying the nascent morning. From the way she stomped, panted, and talked to Magdalena and Sergi as she came inexorably toward where I was sitting, I guessed that her mood was scrambled and her hard drive was blocked.
She came into the garden like a hurricane, still taking off the thick jacket she liked to wear at night in the hospital. Her annoyed expression changed when she saw me, and she gave me the hint of an affectionate smile, still broken by a series of clipped sighs.
“I should have been satisfied the day I brought your mother into the world!” was the first thing she said while she took a seat at my side and touched her hand to my stubbly cheek by way of a greeting.
“You shouldn’t take her seriously, Grandma,” I exclaimed while I shook off my laziness, stretching my arms toward the splendidly blue sky. It had been proven that whenever my mother and grandmother spent a couple of days together, World War III started. In this case the beginning of the hostilities had been somewhat postponed because they’d barely seen each other, but in the end, and as was to be expected, the opportunity had presented itself in one of their brief encounters when they were changing shifts. “You know how she is.”
“Which is exactly why I say it! Lord, how could I have had such a silly daughter? I realize that her father was a bit harebrained, but he always had his head in the right place. Where in the world did that girl come from? If you only knew how many times I’ve asked myself that!”
The girl, as she said, had already passed the threshold into her sixties.
“How was last night?” I asked, to change the subject.
My grandmother lowered her gaze to the teapot and sadly straightened the corner of my napkin.
“Daniel was very restless,” she replied. “He didn’t stop talking.”
We remained in silence, watching Sergi walk discreetly by the oleanders.
“Do you want anything?” I asked.
“A glass of hot milk.”
“Skimmed?”
“God, no! Might as well drink dirty water! No, whole milk, like always.”
I didn’t have to bother to go ask for it. The system would transmit the order to Magdalena,wherever she was in the house.
“Well, last night he was very calm,” I commented, remembering my brief visit.
“Last night, yes,” she agreed, fluffing her flattened hair with a tired gesture, “I don’t know what happened to him after that, but we couldn’t make him sleep, not even with those pills they give him. It was horrible.”
“Did he move around?” I wanted to know, hoping.
“No, no, he didn’t move around,” my grandmother murmured sadly. “He was obsessed with his burial. He wanted us to shroud him and bury him. It was a good thing that when I explained to him that those things aren’t done anymore and that now the dead are burned, he didn’t keep insisting. Why is it that he has such a strange mania?”
“It’s Cotard’s syndrome, Grandma.”
She made a strange grimace with her mouth and looked at me, rejecting my words, shaking her head slowly.
“Tell me something, Arnauet…,” she hesitated. “That thing that Lola, Marc, and you are doing, it has to do with Daniel, right?”
A ray of sun moved slowly toward my cup, and suddenly jumped from there to my eyes with a flash. Narrowing my eyelids, I nodded. She sighed again.
“Would it do any good for me to tell you what your brother says at night, or would that be silly?”
What a clever, intuitive woman! She always managed to surprise me. I smiled as I pushed the hair out of my face.
“Tell me, genius.” And I leaned over to give her an extravagant kiss on the forehead. She batted at the air to push me away, but didn’t even graze me.
“I’ll tell you on the condition that you let me smoke a cigarette, without making my life difficult.”
“Grandma, please!” I protested. “At your age, you shouldn’t be doing those things!”
“At my age is exactly when I can do them!”
And without saying another word, she took out a beautiful leather cigarette case and pulled out a cigarette with a gold-colored filter.
“Young people today don’t have any idea of what’s good.”
“Don’t preach to me.”
“Am I talking about religion? I’m talking about enjoyment! Besides, if you’re going to pester me, I’m going to my room for some peace. I won’t tell you anything about what Daniel says.”
I swallowed my protests, and, with my forehead crinkled to make my displeasure clear, I watched her exhale the first cloud of smoke. The weird thing was that she had started smoking very late in life, around sixty, influenced by her crazy friends, and never was there a meal or celebration at which she didn’t take out her cigarette case at the end.
“Mariona has explained to me that these weird words he says are in a language he was working on for the university,” she began, leaning back in the wicker chair. “Quechua, she said, or Aymara. I’m not sure. Don’t ask me to repeat them to you because I wouldn’t be able to. But he also talks a lot about a chamber that’s beneath a pyramid, especially when he’s most nervous. Then he talks about that chamber and says the original language is hidden there.”
I sat up suddenly, resting my elbows on the table, and stared at her. “And what does he say about that original language?”
My grandmother seemed surprised by my reaction, but quickly lost her gaze again in the bushes surrounding us.
“He talks a lot about that, but the truth is, I thought it was nonsense. Anyway, what he keeps repeating is that the original language is made of strange sounds that have natural properties, or something like that.” She flared her nostrils and pressed her lips together, trying to discreetly swallow a yawn. “He also says that those sounds are in the chamber, that the chamber is beneath a pyramid, and I think I understood, although I’m not sure, that the pyramid has a door on top.” She sighed bleakly. “How sad, my God! My poor grandson Dani! Do you think he will get better?”
Magdalena appeared in the doorway that opened into the living room, carrying a tray with a glass of milk on a saucer. Behind her, framing her like a giant shadow, came Jabba with Proxi at his side dressed in some stretchy jeans that made her long legs seem much more endless and
slender. Both wore their hair strangely polished, as if they had poured gallons of gel onto it, and since Jabba’s was very red and Proxi’s very black, the contrast was, at the very least, odd.
“Good morning, good morning!” exclaimed Jabba, dropping, abundant and expansive, into one of the wicker chairs, which creaked as if it were going to break. Good thing it was sturdy and had good thick canvas cushions. “It’s great not to have to go to work!”
Proxi situated herself between my grandmother and me, with her back to the sun, without taking her astonished gaze off the cigarette my grandmother was smoking, from which the smoke trailed in soft spirals.
“Are you just getting back from the hospital, Eulàlia?” she asked her.
My grandmother smiled faintly. “Just now, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to sleep.” She went about the business of slowly getting to her feet, as if her body weighed a ton. “I know it’s very rude of me to leave when you’ve just arrived, but I’m very tired. Daniel has had a bad night. You tell them, okay, Arnauet?”
“Don’t worry, Grandma. Sleep well.”
“Sleep well, Eulàlia,” Proxi said.
“Good night, kids,” muttered my sleepy ancestor, taking the glass of milk and the rest of her dose of tar and nicotine with her.
“Do you want breakfast?” I asked them, once my grandmother had disappeared inside the house.
“No thanks, Root. We’ve already eaten.” Proxi explained. “Besides, you wouldn’t have enough food to offer this troglodyte. He eats everything in the morning.”
“Daniel had a bad night?” Jabba asked, wanting to quickly change to subject. The thick layer of lipids that kept him warm was something very intimate to him. In fact, his older brother had started to call him “Jabba” after having watched
Star Wars
and seen the enormous flabby worm of the same name that ran the intergalactic mafia and chased Harrison Ford (Han Solo) to make him pay the money he owed.