Читать книгу Ramifications - Daniel Saldaña París - Страница 13

7

The party dynamic was repeated during the following days with a number of variations. The gatherings weren’t always so large, of course, and the pizzas and beer didn’t always appear. Sometimes it was just Citlali, Ximena, and my sister sitting on the floor for hours on end, grumbling about their parents’ general lack of understanding, making themed mixtapes, or comparing the size of their breasts. But in addition to Citlali and Ximena, Rat frequently turned up, not always accompanied by his henchmen.

One morning, when I left my bedroom after a mammoth session of ‘blind origami’ – a discipline that consisted of folding paper by touch inside my Zero Luminosity Capsule – I found Rat sitting alone on the couch in the living room. I asked very timidly where my sister was and he replied that she’d gone to the store. I returned to my room but was unable to concentrate on anything because I was worrying that Rat might steal the tv set or some other gadget.

As the days went by, I began to understand that Rat’s fame was, to say the very least, exaggerated: he was just as bland and apathetic as any other of my sister’s teenage friends (with the exception of Citlali, whose scent of bubblegum held me spellbound, returning to my memory in waves even hours after I’d smelled it). At least when he was in our living room, Rat had no temporary tattoos and didn’t seem particularly threatening. He did smoke, in an unbroken chain I’d only ever seen equalled by the assistant head of Paideia, an obese woman whose sweaters always reeked of cat piss and full ashtrays. For any kid with a minimum of brains, Rat’s ever more frequent appearances in the living room, in my father’s absence, would have had an obvious explanation: he was dating my sister. The erotic subtext of the situation was, however, lost on me, caught up as I was in a symbolic reading of the events and, naturally, concerned by Teresa’s sudden disappearance, the effects of which seemed to be multiplying by the day.

According to my theory, Rat was there, smoking in the living room, because I’d somehow conjured him up when I wrote that note to my father explaining that I’d gone out to play with him. After I’d invited him into my life from the realm of fiction, Rat had answered my call in real life. The fact that he’d become Mariana’s friend was merely a consequence of that invocation.

Entranced by this new variant on my megalomania, I started to spend my time writing false notes on a wide range of topics with the hope that they would have similar consequences in reality. In order to heighten the magical or parapsychological effects of my invocations, I used to pen those notes – expressions of my most secret desires – on pieces of coloured origami paper and then fold them into imperfect cranes and abstract pagodas, convinced that this would cause my fantasies to be realised more quickly.

I wrote an alternate ending for the World Cup, wrote about time travel from the comfort of my wardrobe, and, finally, about Teresa’s unexpected, joyful return one morning carrying a Hawaiian pizza. But Brazil continued to be the world champions, my Zero Luminosity Capsule was still just an ordinary wardrobe with the addition of pillows, and Teresa didn’t return to our lives, with or without pizza, on any morning of that summer. Teresa didn’t in fact return on any morning of any season of any year.