Читать книгу Holiday Heart - Margarita García Robayo - Страница 5

1

Lucía and the children are lying on the sand.

Tomás is slotted into one side of her body and Rosa into the other. Like two soft organs, easily removed.

They smell of salt and of grilled corn.

Tomás is complaining about the book Lucía bought him. ‘Benjamin goes for a ride in his spaceship and runs out of fuel. He makes an emergency landing on an asteroid and sits down to wait…’

‘I hate it,’ he says.

‘Why?’ Lucía asks.

He shrugs and furrows his brow. This is a tic he has; he does it several times a day. A tiny but vital movement, the way the diaphragm expands and contracts with every breath.

The fireworks are already over. Only the Russians are left, their brash voices carrying in the air as they try to salvage some rockets which, instead of exploding, belch thick black smoke. A while ago, the children started coughing and Lucía moved them to the next stretch of beach along, where they found a small mound of sand likely carved up by a quad bike. Lucía sat down and leaned back against it.

She is on the verge of falling asleep.

The last of the rockets drop onto the sand with a dull thud, colourless and broken.

Tomás says he can tell a better story than the one in the book. He opens it and pretends to read: ‘Benjamin leaps into the abyss. He plummets into a deep hole of freezing water and is instantly immobilised.’

‘Who taught you the word immobilised?’ Lucía asks.

And what does Tomás do? He shrugs.

Rosa is asleep. Before dropping off, she’d asked where her dad was. ‘He had to stay home and work,’ Lucía replied. Rosa stared at her, as if searching her face for some other answer. Then she gave a huge yawn, her gaping mouth wide enough to fit a clenched fist inside.

It’s the Fourth of July. The fireworks started at around 8 p.m. when it was still light. ‘I don’t see anything,’ Tomás complained, shading his eyes with his hand as he searched the sky. Once it grew dark, the entire shoreline of Miami Beach was filled with lights exploding into more lights. People sat on the sand clutching bottles of beer and eating food out of tins. Lucía had brought juice boxes along for the children, and champagne for herself. Plus, some organic grapes that Rosa fancied in the supermarket and then later didn’t want. They’d cost almost as much as the champagne. Around 8.30 p.m. Rosa spotted some corn on the cob being grilled at the pool bar, went over, ordered three and told them to charge it to the room. She was more than capable of looking after herself in hotels. She had not yet grasped basic multiplication – according to what one Miss Fox had written in her latest school report – but she knew the sixteen digits of her mommy’s credit card off by heart.

‘Benjamin remains frozen for twelve centuries, until a meteorite lands in the sinkhole of ice-cold water and explodes inside it. He comes back to life, but in pieces.’

‘Tommy,’ says Lucía, ‘It’s time for bed. You can carry on tomorrow.’

Tomás shuts the book and gets to his feet. Lucía scoops Rosa up and they start walking back towards the hotel beach. The Russians are sitting in a circle, drinking out of disposable cups and singing Russian songs. They are raucous. Their clothes are expensive but ugly. The younger ones, both the men and women, are outrageously good-looking. The older ones are flabby and weathered. Seeing that makes her feel slightly relieved.

‘I don’t like those people,’ says Tomás.

‘They’re called Russians.’

To get back into the hotel, they must cross a gravel path up to some steps leading to the pool.

‘I don’t like Russians,’ says Tomás, once they’re inside the lift.

Lucía wants to reach out and smooth the furrow between his eyebrows, but she needs both hands to support Rosa’s weight.

‘Me neither,’ she replies.

They had arrived from New Haven that morning, to spend two weeks at Lucía’s parents’ apartment in Sunny Isles. Located in a modern but low-key hotel, it has everything that a reasonably well-off Latin American family requires when they go on holiday – including a daily cleaning service and the option of hiring an in-house maid to do all the extras for them: cooking, cleaning, ironing, grocery shopping, childcare. Some families bring their nanny with them. Lucía’s parents have Cindy, who came with the apartment, thus offering them a marginally less third-world solution to carting along their own maid – or at least that’s what they say. Cindy was born in the United States, but her parents are Cuban. She doesn’t wear a uniform. She has curly brown hair, her own car, and wide, shapely hips. And a jealous husband, as she once announced, though nobody had asked. Cindy is one of those girls who gets extremely close to you when she’s talking, as if everything she says is top secret. She’s also overly tactile: ‘Want me to give you a foot massage, Lucy?’ she’ll say, out of the blue, and before you can answer she’ll have whipped off your shoes and be digging her thumbs into the soles of your feet, generating a combination of pleasure and revulsion. Lucía doesn’t give her enough space to get close to her, but even so, she is unable to keep her in check. Cindy hates her. Or that’s what Lucía thinks, although her mother disagrees: ‘You haven’t given her a chance to get to know you.’ Lucía: ‘Of course I haven’t.’ Cindy uses the children as a means of communicating her resentment; almost all the grievances she lets slip while scrambling eggs or pouring coffee or inspecting her cuticles are to do with Lucía’s personality: ‘What did your mommy have for breakfast, hydrochloric acid?’ The children gaze at her, enraptured. ‘Or lemon and vinegar?’ The children hug her, kiss her.

The first time they visited the apartment, all of them were there: Pablo, Lucía, Tomás and Rosa, who were still babies then. The grandparents joined them a few days later. Cindy was frantic with excitement. She had about as much awareness of personal space as a lapdog, wriggling through tight spaces as if she’d been swept up by a tornado. One day she whacked Pablo with her bottom. Right in the face. She’d bent over to pick up one of Tomás’ toys from under an armchair, and Pablo, who was trying to read a book in the chair opposite, received the full force of her backside, square on the nose. Tears clouded his vision for a moment. ‘It was like kissing a wrecking ball,’ he would say that night to Lucía, and they would giggle like a pair of drunkards. Because they would be drunk. They hadn’t yet had the conversation about alcohol and the children. Or about alcohol as a stand-in for sex. Or about alcohol and the rancid breath they both had lately.

Tonight, Lucía is sleeping in her bed with the children.

Or rather, the children are sleeping while she lies there awake, watching the news. The forecast is for days of sunshine. This should probably be a cause for celebration, but she’d actually prefer to be hit by a storm that very night. Something threatening, but not tragic. Not the kind that tears off lots of roofs, but one that forces them to stay inside the hotel for most of the holiday, the children glued to their iPads or playing Ludo with Cindy (the best thing about Cindy was that she could get them to sit down and play games which didn’t involve screens), while she reads her way through the trashy novels on her mother’s bookshelves. The kind of utter bilge that dulls her mind more effectively than Valium.

She gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen for some milk.

She pours it into a mug and pops it in the microwave. When it’s warmed through, she adds a dash of cognac: her dad’s recipe for sleep.

Cindy has left them fruit, bread and eggs for breakfast. Inside the fridge, the food looks too bright and shiny, too healthy, like props. Cindy has also put fresh flowers in the bathroom, and there is a note tucked into the frame of the mirror, held in place by a magnet of the Brandenburg Gate in miniature. ‘Welcome!’ it reads. Lucía pulls it down and tosses it in the bin.

*

At the end of the corridor was a floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto the landscape: a wooded area and a lake with ducks bobbing on it. Disrupting this view was a girl wearing a baggy t-shirt and a plaid mini skirt that would clash with pretty much any other clothing choice. Her name was Kelly. She was the girl who’d called the ambulance and accompanied Pablo to the hospital. Not that Lucía knew this as she arrived there herself.

Kelly was also one of the girls who’d signed that letter Pablo received the previous semester, just before Christmas, from the high school where he worked. Now she remembered the name, which had appeared at the top of the list of students. It was followed by a ‘J’ and a full stop – which jarred with the formal nature of the letter – and was written in purple ink, in lower case.

The afternoon of the letter, Pablo told Lucía – by way of an excuse, she’d thought at the time, but now she thought it had perhaps been a distraction technique – that he was having a breakdown. Apparently, he wanted to give up teaching and focus on his writing. Lucía would’ve preferred his crisis to a) be more original, and b) take a pragmatic approach that might transform his aspirations into more of a project, and less of a fantasy which had ample – enormous – potential for failure. The day of the letter, Pablo had already been working for a year on a novel about a Colombian island where he’d lived for part of his childhood. He’d been busy doing research about a canal that cut through the island, the construction of which had driven all its fauna to extinction. She didn’t understand how this could form the basis of a novel. ‘What about the plot?’ Lucía had asked him once. He seemed to take it as an ironic question; one he preferred not to answer.

The letter arrived on a Friday. The children were away on a school camping trip, and Pablo and Lucía were sitting down to dinner. He read it out to her at the table. ‘Did you get fired?’ she asked. She could feel a small lump of sauerkraut stuck in her throat. Pablo didn’t answer. Instead he said – as if it were somehow relevant – that on the island he was writing about, there was a swamp that was home to some very strange insects. These insects were, in his opinion, the perfect allegory for explaining most of the social and political history of his country. In fact, he said our country, but Lucía pretended not to hear, so as to avoid getting into their usual argument. He carried on describing the creatures, endowing them with nonsensical features such as protrusions on their heads, poisonous stingers and amorphous trunks which stuck out above the surface of the water, to suck in oxygen. ‘What does that have to do with the letter?’ she asked, interrupting what was turning into a monologue. Pablo was on the verge of tears, his sentences becoming increasingly garbled. He was having a breakdown, it was true, but then again, thought Lucía, feeling suddenly furious, who wasn’t? She poured a glass of water and nudged it towards him. Taking it, Pablo shot her a look that was pleading, yet unreadable. But Lucía was quickly distracted by the bulging veins in his corneas. Red cracks against the yellowish white.

He left the table and went upstairs to the bedroom. The letter lay there, beside the leg of roast pork, the red cabbage, and the potatoes slathered in creamy parsley sauce. Was it necessary to eat like that? She was the one who’d cooked dinner, but now, the sight of that plate of heavy, medieval-looking food physically sickened her. The letter contained serious accusations from the high school principal, concluding with a warning that Pablo needed to change his attitude, or leave. Halfway down, there was an extract from the students’ account, in which they complained about his ‘awkward and offensive’ teaching methods, his ‘unfair and unfounded’ marking system, his frequent absences (‘he spends his days in the local bars’) and his physical appearance (‘the teacher comes in wearing the same clothes every day and smells of piss’). Following that was a list of names, probably in the region of thirty, all written in black ink, except for Kelly J.’s.

‘Seeing as he has no history of heart disease, or anything in his heart that would lead us to diagnose any kind of anomaly, I can only conclude that it’s this syndrome…’

As soon as she was inside the hospital – even before going to see Pablo – Lucía headed straight for Ignacio’s office. He’d been her family doctor ever since she’d arrived in New Haven. Ignacio was Chilean but had lived there for decades, and during that time they’d established one of those friendships which enabled them to bypass all the red tape. So, as soon as she got the call from the hospital, she called Ignacio and asked him to check everything out. She was far too anxious to deal with some doctor who didn’t know her and who would certainly underestimate her need to know every minute detail about what was wrong with Pablo, and about any potential treatment.

Ignacio was now sympathetically explaining to her, with his elegant mannerisms and measured tone of voice, how arteries worked. On his desk was a small plastic heart sliced in half. He was pointing at it with a laser pen. After the lecture came the diagnosis: her husband was a goddamn party animal. Ignacio was telling her about a disease that affects the cardiovascular system and is caused by excessive consumption of alcohol, red meat, salt, saturated fat and certain drugs. An acquired disease rather than a congenital one, it occurs most commonly during the holiday season, when people get wasted and ignore their expanding waistlines.

‘That’s where the name comes from.’ Ignacio cleared his throat.

‘Huh?’

The syndrome was called Holiday Heart.

A sentimental love song, thought Lucía.

A roadside motel with blinking neon lights.

‘In Pablo’s case, this all appears to be accompanied by excessive and, I presume, risky sexual activity.’ He cleared his throat again and Lucía, even in her confused state, had the urge to rummage in her handbag and find him a cough drop. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ignacio, then fell silent.

The silence nurtured the humiliation.

The office’s peach-coloured walls and the small picture frames adorning them – displaying photographs of caterpillars and butterflies that were either cutesy or pornographic, Lucía couldn’t decide which – all had more dignity than her at that moment. What was he sorry about? Was it really so obvious that the risky and excessive sexual activity did not involve her? And then, shattering the brief period of incomprehension due to Lucía’s narcissism, Ignacio revealed that Pablo had been brought to the hospital unconscious, accompanied by an underage girl.

The silence expanded in the seconds that followed, like a plague, building vast totems of humiliation.

Luckily, Pablo was fine, Ignacio said.

Luckily for who?

He went on: it had been a scare, a minor arterial obstruction that had been easy to fix with a stent. At his age, he was perhaps slightly young for a stent, but nowadays it was no biggie – ‘no biggie’, he said, and she was perturbed by that colloquial expression, like a gob of spit out of a cultivated mouth – lots of men had one, or several.

‘Oh, really?’

Yes, Ignacio said. It was fairly common. As long as he took certain precautions, Pablo could return to normal life as soon as he wanted.

When she left the office, she still didn’t go and see Pablo. She ambled down the hospital corridors, taking her time, as if she were visiting a museum. She passed medical students in their apple-green uniforms, crisp and new. Right there, in another wing, Tomás and Rosa had been born. It was an incredibly difficult birth: the doctor had slid her greased-up hands inside Lucía’s cervix and massaged it in a certain way designed to put pressure on the sides, to help dilation, to ease the babies’ passage. It was a painful method, but effective in eighty percent of cases. Lucía couldn’t endure it. She asked them to cut her open. She’d already suffered enough with the pregnancy. Housing two children in one body, she thought at the time, was a forced and unnatural thing. She would open her eyes in the middle of the night, feel her tight, swollen belly, the movement inside, and think: aliens have taken up residence in my body.

Afterwards, once they were out of her, she completely changed her tune. ‘Very few mammals only give birth to one offspring at a time,’ she began to repeat at regular intervals. As the years passed, she convinced herself of her body’s wisdom. By her mid-forties, she wouldn’t have been able to face a second pregnancy, but fortunately she didn’t need to in order to prove that having two children was the perfect measure of motherhood. More was boastful. Fewer was stingy. She was also well-positioned statistically: just a couple of points above American women, who had 1.8 children on average, and a couple of points below Latina women, who had 2.2.

‘You can’t have such rigid opinions on everything,’ a former colleague said to her, back then, at a get-together of former colleagues. Carla, her name was. She worked at the University of Texas and her career path, seen in perspective, resembled that of a feral cat clawing its way up a skyscraper. ‘Why can’t I?’ Lucía replied. The others looked at her in silence, bulging with morbid fascination. ‘Because you sound like one of those women who see motherhood as the primary, hypertrophic drive of female existence,’ Carla retorted. Lucía looked at her, expecting her to elaborate further, but Carla simply added, ‘It’s not a good look.’ Lucía replied, ‘Anyway, it wasn’t an opinion, just a close analysis of myself.’ ‘Anyway,’ said Carla, ‘how is it possible to have 1.8 children?’

The others laughed, their teeth all smeared with salmon and cream cheese, olive tapenade and pâté. Sickly tongues. Poisonous eyes.

In the hospital cafeteria she bought herself a Diet Coke. At the checkout there was a selection of children’s books and she chose one for Tomás. She liked buying books for them in Spanish, to reinforce the language. Rosa didn’t like reading, she preferred sports. And food – she was a six-year-old girl with the appetite of a sixteen-year-old boy.

On her way to Pablo’s room, she examined the book. It was about a boy who dreamed he went travelling in his spaceship and got lost in between galaxies. She suspected it might have been designed as a gift for children in hospital. She wanted to return it, but by then she was already in the lift. She pressed the button. As soon as the doors opened, she saw the outline of Kelly J., who stood looking out of the window. Along with the plaid skirt, she was wearing combat boots and glittery thigh-high socks, all no doubt purchased with loose change at a garage sale. It was 8:15 on an unusually cold Saturday morning. The wind banged against the windows like the screams of a heavy metal singer hitting Lucía’s eardrums.