Читать книгу Ramifications - Daniel Saldaña París - Страница 8

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Maybe I need to start earlier. Before 1994, I mean, before that stupid Tuesday. Writing about the past is, as I’m beginning to realise, writing inward, not forward. Rather than continuing the narrative, it makes more sense to focus on detail, clarify the scene while it, in turn, becomes clearer in my memory.

My first memory, my oldest, is this: I’m five years old and am walking, holding her hand. My sister hasn’t come with us that day. Teresa and I are walking along the edge of a market, doing the rounds of the stalls on the pavement: we pass one with fancy dress costumes and piñatas. I stop to look curiously at the brightly coloured textiles and she, Teresa, raises the hand that had been holding mine to the back of her neck. Without warning, she falls to the ground. It can’t have lasted more than two minutes: the woman serving in the market stall notices and shouts to her husband, in the adjoining stall, for help. Almost immediately, a number of people arrive, offering assistance. But during those interminable moments, before the woman in the market stall notices, I look at my mother lying on the ground, her eyes closed, and think that she’s dead. I let out a desperate wail and look at her jeans, which are blurring as my eyes fill with tears. Finally, someone among the people assisting her brings a vial of alcohol and revives her by wafting it under her nose. Teresa, my mother, rubs her hip, which she’s hurt in the fall. My wails falter and then dissolve into a sensation of surprise, relief, disbelief. Teresa has been resurrected before my very eyes. She reaches out her hand to me and, still sitting on the ground, dizzy and being attended to by strangers, strokes my hair. It’s a miracle, but to me, at that age, miracles still feel natural. Teresa’s resurrection seems no more miraculous than, say, the appearance of a tiny plant on the damp cotton wool where my sister had, a few weeks previously, made me hide a seed: the laws of physics don’t exist: the world is a more or less painful system of arbitrary events in which Teresa’s resurrection outside the stall selling piñatas and fancy dress costumes on the edge of the market is just one more example. But why is that my first memory and not something else? Maybe because I was then forced to understand that people die, even though they might later come back from the dead and live apparently normal lives for several years.

In the days following Teresa’s escape in 1994, I was overcome by a sense of loneliness similar to the one I’d experienced on the edge of the market. At midday on Thursday, my father announced that he was going to buy groceries, having grudgingly accepted that we couldn’t survive on pizza deliveries alone. Mariana had gone to her friend Ximena’s house early in the day, and my father insisted that I accompany him – he didn’t want to leave me by myself – but I explained that I preferred to continue practising my origami and he let me stay home, with a warning not to open the door to anyone or go into Mariana’s room and mess with her things.

As soon as I heard the Tsuru moving away down the street, I made my needlessly stealthy way to the bedroom door with the intention of stealing Teresa’s letter. The door opened with its characteristic creak, and I felt my heart pound with every step. But that melodramatic buildup was wasted: the drawer of my father’s nightstand contained nothing more than his passport, a few coins, the key to his office, and his reading glasses, which he never used because he said they made him look idiotic – and there was some truth in those words. Ensuring that I left everything just as I’d found it, I then searched the dressing table, the wardrobe, and the nightstand on the other side of the bed – Teresa’s nightstand – where I found only a few necklaces, an address book, and my last report card (which Teresa had congratulated me on in her monotone voice). The letter was nowhere to be seen.

I consulted my Choose Your Own Adventure book in search of suggestions or ideas on how to proceed with my investigation, but there were insufficient clues. It was like trying to make an origami figure you’d never seen without having the instructions at hand. The letter, the piece of evidence that promised to reveal the secret of the plot, had disappeared. Everything seemed to be disappearing.

Defeated, I waited in my room for my father to return laden with supermarket bags and plastic tubs of precooked food (rice, cutlets, potato croquettes, nopal salad, agua de Jamaica). Since it was just the two of us (Mariana was still at her friend’s), my father agreed that we could eat in the living room. We sat by the coffee table – me on the floor, he on the sofa – trying not to get stains on the upholstery or the carpet. The tv was showing a rerun of the football World Cup semi-final: Sweden versus Brazil. A few weeks before, that tournament had annexed every conversation in the country, as well as my father’s undivided attention. I couldn’t have cared less about the prowess of Romário and Bebeto, and while this put a considerable distance between my classmates and me, it drew me slightly closer to Teresa, who hated football and sports in general. Disillusioned by my reaction, my father sought an ally in Mariana, who took a little more interest in football than I was ever capable of.

But on that occasion, sitting at his feet – so close that I could smell his freshly dry-cleaned shirt – eating potato croquettes and watching a match whose result we already knew, I suddenly understood that the situation made my father happy and that it would cost me nothing to feign enthusiasm for a while. This discovery, unexpected evidence of maturity on my part, made me a little sad, as if by taking a condescending attitude towards my father I was seeing him as a simpler, more hollow person: as if, in an instant, I’d understood that my father lacked the intelligence or complexity that Teresa and I – and probably my sister – shared. And so when Romário scored a header in the eightieth minute, putting Brazil in the final (which they later won), I made a calculated comment on the forward’s strengths, and saw my father smile innocently before launching into an explanation of the merits of the defender Jorginho, whose ‘extraordinary pass’ had set up the goal. It warmed my heart to hear my father use the very same expression the commentator had employed just a few seconds before. Or maybe I’m feeling that warmth now, and projecting the emotion onto the ten-year-old boy I was then. It’s hard to say.

That Thursday I didn’t manage to read the letter Teresa had left, but sitting in front of the tv set, I had an inkling of a vital clue to her disappearance, one of the deep-seated reasons that were the cause of – or at least contributed to – her mysterious flight. That clue was nothing other than my father’s disarming simplicity, his lack of crease marks (a sheet of virgin origami paper, you might say), the level of awareness – lower than that of the rest of the family – at which he lived his life.

Until that day, my father had always seemed to me one more element of the domestic infrastructure, a sort of robot that provided transport and a certain amount of affection; something between a pet and a household appliance. There was no fundamental difference between my father and some of the other people who formed the backdrop of my personal drama – the man who sold newspapers at the nearby kiosk, for example. True, when I was younger, I held him in higher esteem. I believed, as children often do at that age, that my father was a being with incredible magical powers. But at a given moment, that admiration vanished, never to return. Seen from a distance, I guess the change in my attitude coincided with the deterioration of my parents’ marriage. Witnessing the increasingly frequent episodes of friction between Teresa and my father, I began, almost instinctively, to take her side. At the same time, my father started to seem like a sullen, irritable man whose unpredictable temper made him dangerous. He, as far as I could tell, felt trapped, and that made him angry and taciturn, wounded by the simmering mutiny of the rest of the family.

In contrast to him, Teresa, and even my sister, were enlightened people, touched by the grace of a god with whom, in my infantile megalomania, I imagined myself to be in close contact. They were Human, dammit; there was absolutely no doubt that they possessed souls. The same could not be said with any certainty of my father.

Now that I come to think of it, in those days I had a very clear organogram of divine influence: god had chosen me to be his favourite human being; on the second rung of the ladder, in descending order of importance, was my mother, then Guillermo – my best friend at school – and after that, without distinction, my sister, one of my cousins, and a few other classmates. Such was my undernourished theology.

As a counterbalance to the deep-rooted Catholicism of my paternal grandparents, my mother brought me up in a belligerent secularism that my father accepted as a given, without asking too many questions (basically because he neither wanted nor knew how to be involved in our upbringing in any meaningful way). Christian precepts were a foreign language to me, and the idea that a man who was born 1994 years before might have been chosen over me to be the messenger of god seemed absurd and impractical. This delusion of grandeur manifested itself in the most diverse range of fantasies. While I was patiently but ineptly folding sheets of coloured origami paper, I’d imagine myself giving master classes on that noble Japanese art to packed auditoriums of enthusiastic disciples. And once, at school, when the teacher told me off in front of the whole class, I mumbled to myself the ritual chastisements reserved for her, certain that god, whoever he or she might be, would do me the favour of administering them in their due time.

My father had no well-defined or even relevant place in the egocentric theocracy of my childhood. He was, for me, some form of peripheral butler, his labours limited to the most banal functions of survival – finding and maintaining a supply of food and putting a roof over our heads – as, I’d been told, is the case of male gorillas in their natural habitat, while the females and their young dedicate themselves to such spiritually elevated activities as playing and delousing each other.