Читать книгу Holiday Heart - Margarita García Robayo - Страница 6

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For Pablo, it had all started a year earlier. One weekend when Lucía and the kids had gone with her parents to visit a bear park. For the old folks, seeing a bear was like seeing a dinosaur, and they were super excited about the plan. Pablo wasn’t even invited; Lucía said there was no room in the car. His in-laws’ car was parked outside, meaning there were two cars available. Pablo decided not to point out the obvious.

He had zero interest in seeing bears.

Or in spending time with his in-laws: a pair of old codgers addicted to enchiladas and Pepto Bismol, who belched up burning balls of gas, and considered it appropriate to talk about their gastritis at every opportunity. Gastritis was a nice euphemism for rotten guts. Their breath alone – not to mention their farts – was enough to strike down a whole army of anosmic soldiers.

When he said goodbye to the kids, he handed each of them a face mask through the car window, and they started giggling. With things like that, and anything scatological, his children had a cosmic connection with him. Lucía simply shook her head and shot him a disapproving look in the rear-view mirror. The grandparents, not getting the joke, were delighted at the kids’ laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’ said the old woman.

Pablo, serious as a monk, replied, ‘It’s just that yesterday, they recorded gas emissions in this area that shattered the state’s Geiger counter.’

Rosa coughed like she was having a fit. The old lady patted her on the back and said, ‘Oh! Is it dangerous?’

‘Pablo, that’s enough,’ said Lucía.

‘It can cause immediate loss of consciousness,’ replied Pablo.

‘Gosh, Luchita, is it still safe to go?’ said the old man.

The children laughed so hard they were practically convulsing.

‘I’d say that you two are immune,’ said Pablo.

Lucía had to get out of the car to fetch Rosa some water.

Finally, the car pulled away with a roar that subsided as they disappeared around the corner, and the street was plunged into the deafening silence to which Pablo was now accustomed.

At around 5 p.m. he received an email from Gonzalo and Elisa – gonzaloandelisa@gmail.com – inviting them over for a barbecue. They lived next door and they saw them often but were not particularly close friends. He bumped into Gonzalo most days when they each took out the rubbish to the bin they shared, halfway between the two houses. The bin for recycling was a bit further away, so they walked that stretch together as they discussed the news, usually about terrorism. They talked about Isis, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and the FARC as if discussing the performance of different soccer teams. He couldn’t recall how this had become their go-to subject, but they’d kept it up for years. This was handy for Pablo, because it allowed them to dance around more delicate subjects such as the fact that Gonzalo, a while back, had stuck his hand up Pablo’s sister’s skirt.

The email said that they had some Argentinian friends visiting, and they’d organised a get-together for them. They would expect them from 8 p.m. and offered their son Danny’s bed for Tomás and Rosa, as they’d done previously, so that the kids could go to sleep when they wanted. On these occasions, Danny – who was nearly fourteen and couldn’t bear to be around six-year-olds – hid away in the attic room where he had a projector connected to a laptop with hundreds of videos and movies. Gonzalo said that Danny wanted to be a film director. In response to this, or to any other remark by Gonzalo, Danny said nothing. He gave him a look of contempt which, just to witness, burned your skin like the lash from a whip. If Danny were their son, Pablo and Lucía had once remarked, the first sign of an expression like that would have received swift punishment. What kind? They had opposing stances on that. They both started off with a caring conversation, but along the way their choices diverged. Lucía ended up with the boy in the office of a renowned New York psychoanalyst. Pablo ended up with the boy – unconscious – in the intensive care unit of Yale New Haven Hospital.

He replied to the email: Thanks! Great plan!

He decided not to clarify that he was on his own. He decided to surprise them because, he thought, for his neighbours it would be a relief seeing him turn up without his brood who, in one way or another, required additional effort. He took a shower. After a while, he found himself in a surprisingly good mood as he shaved in front of the mirror. He’d been to plenty of barbecues at Gonzalo and Elisa’s house, and they were never very joyful occasions. Perhaps because Gonzalo was from Argentina and was always comparing gringo barbecues to the asados in his own country: he launched into rambling digressions about feedlot versus grass-fed cattle, or Napa versus Mendoza wine. He tainted everything with a feeling of unbearable melancholy. Plus, the children soon got bored and Pablo had to set them up in the bedroom belonging to Danny – who was about as friendly and gracious as a dead rodent – and persuade them to share the only iPad in the house, which generally involved much sobbing and scratching. Lucía thought it was poor taste to bring their own devices with them – ‘they’ll think we plug them in to those things so we don’t have to take care of them’ (and that was exactly what they did, thought Pablo) – but she didn’t think it was poor taste for them to hijack someone else’s. Anyway, the main reason Pablo probably felt uncomfortable was because Gonzalo, unburdened by rubbish bags, would talk exclusively to Lucía and they would monopolise the conversation. They shared that nerdy, shallow and closed-minded attitude of pretentious Latinos, of Ivy League scholars. It didn’t matter if they hadn’t won a big scholarship: a six-month stay in one of those universities was enough for them to proudly sport the fusty coat of arms. That left Pablo to contend with the vacuous Elisa, her constant griping about the United States – the ignorance, the obesity, the consumerism, the guns – which he might have agreed with (in fact, he probably sparked the initial conversation) if it hadn’t been coming from this dim, highly-strung blonde, who had about as much intelligent input as she had fat on her backside.

‘You came on your own?’ said Elisa, opening the door. She side-stepped him and peered out, looking for the others.

‘I brought wine,’ said Pablo. He held out the bottle.

‘Come on in,’ she said, hurrying off, ‘they’re all out the back.’

Lucía rang at 8 a.m.

The bears hadn’t wanted to come out.

She didn’t know why: actually, the behaviour of bears was not a subject she’d studied in depth. She sounded grumpy.

‘Okay,’ said Pablo. His head hurt; his pulse was racing.

Lucía told him the children had made friends with some other kids visiting the park and they’d all downloaded a walkie-talkie app onto their iPads which had kept them entertained. The grandparents had taken refuge in the hotel dining room.

‘That’s great.’

Pablo struggled to imagine his children’s conversations with other children. At home they didn’t usually talk about much.

The buffet, Lucía was now saying without much conviction, seemed quite healthy. In the afternoon they were going on another excursion to see if they had more luck.

‘I’m sure you will,’ said Pablo.

Lucía said nothing.

Pablo was about to tell her about the barbecue.

‘So what have you been up to?’ she asked.

His mouth felt furry.

‘Nothing,’ he yawned.

‘Uh-huh.’

Lucía was by far the most intelligent person he knew. Before giving birth, she’d been both the most intelligent and the kindest person he knew. Therein lay her flaw, though he didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it: nobody could be both of those things to such a superlative degree at the same time. Plenty of evidence existed to back this up, in the form of evil geniuses, and foolish saints.

‘I’m going for a shower,’ she said.

After she gave birth, Lucía expelled all of that false kindness along with the placenta. What she was left with was a head full of knowledge which, outside of the Yale World Fellows Program, was of no interest to anyone.

‘Can I talk to the kids?’ said Pablo.

‘They’re not here right now, I’ll tell them to call you.’

‘Okay.’

They hung up.

He got out of bed. He saw that all his clothes were strewn across the carpet, including his underpants. He walked to the bathroom, turned on the shower and looked in the mirror. The first thing he discovered was a mark on his neck. It was a bright purple colour, like an old bruise, only it wasn’t old. Nor was it a bruise. The second was a bite mark on his nipple. He hunted around in the bathroom cabinet, soaked a cotton wool pad in surgical spirit and wiped it over the wound. Then he showered. Afterwards, he slathered himself in Lucía’s moisturiser and wrapped a scarf around his neck.

When he went downstairs, he thought he could smell coffee. He swallowed hard. If he’d told Lucía about the barbecue, the rest of the night would now be accounted for. The third discovery was a note on the kitchen island, pinned down by a Snoopy mug. On it was drawn an arrow pointing towards the coffee pot, together with the words: For the hangover, sir. K.J.