Читать книгу Ramifications - Daniel Saldaña París - Страница 11

5

My attempts at origami grew worse by the day, or at least that was my impression. Before mastering the crane and the frog, I launched into more complex figures. The result: unrecognisable lumps of paper that had been folded and unfolded too many times. (Paper has that drawback: it’s made to remember all our errors, whether it’s when writing on it, as I do now, or when folding and unfolding it, as I did then.)

Mariana and I were still on holiday; my father had, however, returned to work. Convinced that it would be best to treat me as an adult, so that I’d become inured to the rigours of real life from an early age, he decided that I could – and should – stay in the house alone. My sister was spending the whole day with her girlfriends, having their ears pierced in Pericoapa or organising sleepovers that degenerated into parties or improvised concerts.

The prospect of being alone in the house was exciting, but also pretty frightening. I’d heard any number of stories about the Bogeyman: a slightly ambiguous figure who roamed the streets of the neighbourhood, putting children in a sort of sack and then slinging it over his shoulder. I didn’t quite understand why he would do this or his modus operandi, but it was unsettling to imagine what he wanted all those stolen children for, and the threat seemed real enough to keep me awake at night. On the other hand, being home alone meant having control over the tv, and would also give me the opportunity to rummage in my mother’s wardrobe in search of new clues that would help me to understand what she was doing in Chiapas, and when she was thinking of coming back.

When I did find myself alone, the first day my father returned to the bank, I realised that the imperfect silence of the house only increased my fear of the Bogeyman: every creaking door, every drop of water pounding into the sink, the slightest squeaking of the stairs or flickering shadow when a light fitting swayed in the breeze became an ominous presence, a portent of the miserable life awaiting me, being carried through the neighbourhood streets in a sack, along with other children who’d been unlucky enough to be left home alone. As I couldn’t concentrate on my origami and hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to go through my mother’s wardrobe in search of new lines of investigation, I decided to spend the morning doing my best to prepare myself for every eventuality: I’d construct a refuge, a bunker that would protect me from the Bogeyman.

My clothes were stored in an unvarnished wooden wardrobe of approximately my own height that had a set of drawers on the right-hand side and a rail for clothes hangers on the left. But I used that section – on the left side – mostly for storing board games and odds and ends since, at the age of ten, I had no shirts or suits that needed to be hung up. I emptied the left side of the wardrobe and stuffed the contents any old how under the bed. Then I got inside what could be described as a vertical coffin and sat on the cold wood base with my knees drawn up. It was a good hiding place, or so it seemed to me. There was room enough to spend hours there without having to move, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable. I decided that the comfort level could be increased by the addition of a couple of pillows: one for my back and the other as a kind of seat. But as I had no spare pillows, and the secret would be out if I stole one of my sister’s or took cushions from the living room, I decided to fabricate my own: I filled two T-shirts with the collection of odd socks from the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. It wasn’t a particularly elegant solution, but would do for the moment. I’d work out ways of making improvements to my refuge later.

Finally, with the help of a few shoelaces, I devised a mechanism for closing the wardrobe doors from inside without risk of catching my fingers. When I’d finished all this, I sat inside again with my knees drawn up and shut the ‘hatch’ (as I decided to call the wardrobe door, remembering the submarine imagery that had been the focus of my obsessions a year or two before). The interior of the wardrobe was almost completely dark, with only a sliver of light entering through the upper edge of the hatch. That sliver of light was slightly annoying because, following the thread of my childish logic, if I could see something on the outside, it was highly likely that I, in turn, could be seen from there, so I spent a while attempting to seal the crack to achieve a totally isolated capsule, dark as night, like the sack in which the Bogeyman carried his captives.

I don’t know where I got the idea of calling my refuge the Zero Luminosity Capsule. I guess it was something I’d seen on tv, or read in one of my Choose Your Own Adventure novels, or in a comic book. Whatever the case, I found a crayon and wrote a small sign indicating the official name of my refuge, then stuck it with tape to the inside of the wardrobe. It was only afterwards that I realised what an empty gesture this was, since it was impossible to read the sign in the dark. Notwithstanding, it seemed enough to know that the name of that miraculous machine was written down somewhere: it made the whole affair more formal, added a degree of protocol to the game.

The idea was to spend as much time as possible inside the capsule. If the Bogeyman came looking for me, I’d be hidden in there, protected by the darkness. I rehearsed the drill in case of an emergency – stay still and keep quiet – and it occurred to me that I could put the finishing touch to my strategy by leaving a short note on my bed: a piece of red origami paper, folded and unfolded an infinite number of times, saying, in my spidery handwriting: ‘Dad gone to play with Rat back soon.’ This brief message seemed satisfactory, and, after placing it on my bed, I decided that I was ready to confront the fearsome enemy. When the Bogeyman inspected the house, he’d find the note and think that there were no kids around to snatch. And what was more, the implied friendship with Rat would make me a questionable victim: if the Bogeyman knew about the various local gangs (and it was highly likely that he did), he’d be forced to recognise that I belonged to the group of pre-adolescent hell-raisers who used temporary tattoos with hallucinogenic properties. Such a victim was a less tempting option than some scared-shitless ten-year-old who had been left alone in the house.

At midday I went down to the kitchen and made myself a quesadilla, following the detailed instructions my father had given me on how to light the stove without setting fire to the house. The result didn’t meet my expectations. Teresa had never been an exemplary cook, in fact she hated cooking, but she had a magic touch when it came to quesadillas. I wondered what her secret was. Maybe I could go to Chiapas and ask her. My father would come back from work, my sister would return from her party, and they would find the small red note saying that I was with Rat, but in reality I’d be in Chiapas asking Teresa how she made such delicious quesadillas. I amused myself with that fantasy as I ate. I had only a vague idea where Chiapas was, but did know it was a long way off and to the south. I attempted to summon up a visual memory of the map of the republic hanging on my classroom wall, but it was just a hazy blob. In any case, it would undoubtedly take longer to get to Chiapas than to the Zócalo, where my father had taken us one Christmas (in my memory, that metro journey had lasted a whole day, and from then on the Zócalo had become my yardstick for something distant). After the quesadilla I had two bowls of cereal with milk, enjoying the freedom of having no one to supervise my sugar consumption.

I’d never in my life had so many secrets, and that gave me a sort of pleasurable sense of anxiety, like the anticipation before a birthday that, if not kept in check, might end in an episode of bed-wetting. For one thing, I knew where Teresa was (in a place called Chiapas), and then I also had a machine in my bedroom that was capable of making me invisible, my Zero Luminosity Capsule. Those two secrets were dizzyingly exciting. I urgently needed to tell them to someone. If only my friend Guillermo hadn’t been out of town; it would have been a relief to share them with him.

Despite my mother’s disappearance and my continued lack of success with origami, deep down I felt lucky: I was having the most interesting holiday of my life. I felt as if there were a chasm between myself and my classmates, who would all be in Acapulco or Cuernavaca or some resort, having fun with their conventional families, while I was solving mysterious disappearances, finding ways to avoid criminals, and training myself in the ancient and honourable art of origami – plus the ancient and honourable art of being alone. I thought that when I returned to school, all the other kids in my class would gather around, eager to ask my advice on anything at all, and they would respect the wisdom I’d acquired during the summer. When talking about what I’d done, I might perhaps add a little harmless exaggeration to heighten their awe. I’d tell them, for example, that in addition to staying home without adult supervision for several days, I’d constructed whole origami cities. I could also say that my Zero Luminosity Capsule was really a complicated machine, a sort of paranormal microwave, and not just a wardrobe with cushions made from odd socks.