Читать книгу Fate - Jorge Consiglio - Страница 13

She pushed. She pushed with all her might and succeeded in moving the fridge twenty centimetres. Marina Kezelman was gifted with an extraordinary physical strength. She’d been into athletics as a teenager. Athletics had toned her legs – her abductor muscles were perfectly defined – and taught her to ration her energy. Her stamina was exceptional. She never lacked vigour. That very day, a cloudy Saturday, she’d been up since 7 a.m. She’d prepared breakfast for Simón and immersed herself in an Excel graph, plotting humidity metrics of a forest in the northern province of Chaco, near the Pilcomayo river. On the graph, the curve – a green line connecting twelve points – was ascending. Kezelman verified that all the data was correct. Sorted! she exclaimed out loud.

She was researching the link between humidity and the growth of a particular herb – a variety of wild chamomile – that exhibited a direct relationship with the reproduction rate of rabbits in the area. The survey was done using satellite imagery, but on occasion she went out into the field. Closing her laptop, she checked on her son and went to put some coffee on. From the kitchen window, she could see people standing at the bus stop. She brought her fingers to her lips as if she were holding a cigarette and shifted her gaze. By chance, she noticed two ants on a tile, to the left of the cupboard. She swept them away with a single stroke of her hand. At once she went to examine the side of the fridge. The nest was swarming. Marina Kezelman instantly asked herself a thousand questions, yet all of them, in one way or another, were focused on resolving the same enigma: what were those damn bugs feeding on in a kitchen like hers?

She acted as she’d been advised. She moved the fridge to improve the angle of attack, sprinkled the poison and placed the bait at strategic points. As she washed her hands, she decided to order an Uber to the airport in the morning. A trip to the northern province of Formosa had come up overnight. She had to go with Zárate, a biologist from the Institute of Experimental Medicine she’d never met, who was joining the rabbit project.

Leaving the city was always bittersweet. She relished getting a bit of distance from her surroundings: it helped her re-evaluate the day-to-day. On the other hand, giving up the coherence of her habits made her feel somewhat uncomfortable. With her hands still wet, she stood motionless. Silent in thought. That’s how her six-year-old son found her. One of its ears is falling off, he said, holding up a toy dog made from coarse fabric. It had an oval-shaped head – disproportionally oval – and its eyes, two translucent balls, were set far too high, where the forehead should have been. Marina Kezelman hunted for the sewing basket. She chose a strong thread and a slender needle and painstakingly began to sew. Just as she faced everything else in her life. Resolute. Relentless.