Читать книгу Holiday Heart - Margarita García Robayo - Страница 7

3

Inside, steaming broth on the table.

Outside, the deflated paddling pool on the lawn.

‘That market’s fabulous, I even managed to get Andean potatoes,’ said his aunt Lety, coming to join him. She held her mug of boiling broth and took sparing sips from it, her face unmoving.

Yesterday Pablo had a relapse that he blamed on the tiny piece of copper in his artery. Chest pain, shortness of breath, excessive sweating. ‘Panic attack,’ Lety pronounced over the phone, ‘I told you they’d come back.’

‘Where had they gone?’ Lucía would have said.

Yesterday, in the early morning, he was woken by the sound of a car engine running; he looked out of the window to see Lucía bundling the children into a taxi. The driver put the bags in the boot. Four bags. Pablo couldn’t get back to sleep. He sat up in bed and waited for it to get light; and with the first rays of sun, the pain started. It was then that he called Lety. ‘It’s not a panic attack,’ Pablo told her, he was sure about that. ‘How are you so sure?’ she insisted. ‘They’re very common these days.’ Because it had only been a few days since his operation – ten, eleven, he couldn’t really remember – and it more likely had something to do with the fact he’d had a heart attack. Four hours after the call, Lety appeared at his front door with a bag containing some clothes and cooking utensils. Chopping boards, two steel pans, a set of knives. She made a soup with what she could find in the fridge and they ate dinner. They didn’t go outside to watch the fireworks, because they looked better on TV.

The following morning, Lety got up early and went to the market. She bought vegetables and cooked them up into a broth, drained it and served it in two mugs, one of which is now sitting in front of Pablo. He isn’t hungry.

‘…the produce in Port Chester is nowhere near as good.’ Lety is sitting in Tomás’ place at the table.

‘How’s business?’ asks Pablo. Not because he cares.

‘How do you think? Same old, same old.’

‘That’s great.’ He looks outside again. The sides of the paddling pool are splattered with dried mud.

Lety is shaking her head. Or shooing away an insect.

‘This isn’t good.’

A couple of days before, Pablo had taken the paddling pool out of the garage, left it in the middle of the garden and said to Rosa, ‘Tomorrow we’ll blow it up.’ Rosa suggested that they buy a new one, to which he replied no, that one was perfect: ‘We’ll fill it right up to our necks, and watch the Fourth of July fireworks in it, with a couple of non-alcoholic daiquiris.’ Rosa shifted her weight from one leg to the other. And then again. She crossed her arms and looked at him with her head cocked to one side. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Pablo. The moon was almost full. Rosa turned and went back into the house.

It has been a long time since Pablo last saw his aunt Lety. There was a period when they saw each other every weekend: he’d travel to Port Chester on a Friday and on the Monday, he’d return to New Haven where, at the time, he was studying for a master’s degree in Education at Southern Connecticut State University. Lety gave him food – homemade, piping hot, delicious – and a few dollars for extras. In exchange, Pablo helped her out at the launderette, doing the weekend deliveries. On Saturday nights he would take the train from Port Chester to New York, leave the station and take a walk. The first few times, he was blown away by it – the buildings, the stores, the parks. Over time, it all just started to feel samey. He got bored of it; he started getting an urge to blow it all up – the buildings, the stores, the parks. The final few times, he made his way directly to Times Square, sat down on a bench and absorbed all the overload of colours and lights until his pupils begged for a rest. Then he went back and sat in the station bar until it was time to take the train back to Port Chester.

‘It’ll get cold,’ Lety says to him, gesturing towards his mug of broth.

Pablo clasps the mug and brings it to his lips.

‘It’s delicious.’

Lety nods. ‘It’ll do you good.’

Actually, Pablo had been to see Lety just over a year ago, the last time his in-laws visited. It was a public holiday and Lucía had planned to take the children and the grandparents to the Natural History Museum. Big plans. Rosa pleaded with them to let her stay behind with Pablo, but Lucía wouldn’t even consider it: ‘I’ve already bought the tickets.’ ‘Isn’t it free entry?’ said Pablo, and she cut him down with the sort of look that Emperor Montezuma gave his enemies. While they were talking, the grandparents stood outside admiring the trees like a couple of botanists. Tomás was in the doorway, ready to go, a bulky grey scarf wrapped around his neck. His eagerness had nothing to do with him wanting to go to the museum, but was rather due to his inability to contradict his mother on anything. Pablo feared for his son’s future. They were both weird children – bright, good-looking, and weird – but unlike Tomás, Rosa, in the rare moments when Lucía loosened the apron strings slightly, had miraculously developed a rebellious streak.

Lety clears the empty mugs away and washes them up. She takes a bowl of salad leaves out of the fridge, another bowl containing tomatoes, and a glass jar of fat anchovies floating in a darkish liquid. She places it all on the counter. She picks up a knife that is too big for the job at hand: chopping lettuce leaves. Pablo imagines Lety on the train, carrying her bag full of giant knives, moving down the rows of seats, natural as can be.

The day he went to visit her, Lety was out at bingo. She told him off later for not letting her know, but he’d wanted to surprise her. Seeing as he was in Port Chester, he decided to make the same journey he used to make years earlier and took the train to New York. When he heard the tinny announcement of the station names – Mamaroneck, Larchmont, New Rochelle – he felt a twinge of nostalgia, and it wasn’t long before he reached a state of meditative lightness that he rarely experienced sober, by repeating the list of names from the beginning every time the train stopped at the next station, like a mantra – Mamaroneck, Larchmont, New Rochelle, Pelham… By the time he reached Grand Central Station he was groggy. He walked to Times Square and sat on a bench to gaze at the vast screens. A group of teenagers were taking photos with a hologram of Idris Elba. After a little while, he went back to the station, sat in a bar and ordered a coffee. He felt lost and he felt old. A sad old man. He could have started crying right there and nobody would have turned to look at him. He could just not go home that night and Lucía wouldn’t notice, until she needed to berate someone for something. His children would take even longer to notice. Or perhaps they would get used to his absence before they noticed it; they would move around the house, sidestepping the space his body no longer occupied, but which still had a shape. Even invisible, he would probably still get in their way.

‘Sir?’ There was a girl’s face in close-up.

‘Hi,’ replied Pablo, although he couldn’t manage to place her. Nor could he work out if she was twelve years old or twenty-three. His students had the ability to sap his critical faculties entirely. To dim his enthusiasm for anything at all. To turn his world into an abyss. He didn’t even need to have any kind of exchange with them, it happened as soon as he entered the classroom and stood in front of that bland mass of adolescents he was barely able to distinguish as individuals; every day he had to guess which acne-covered face belonged to whom.

‘It’s Kelly,’ she said, with a smile so broad it revealed all her teeth and reminded him of a crocodile.

Pablo taught in one of those high schools that claimed to support the Hispanic community. All the kids spoke Spanish. English too. But badly. Both languages, incredibly badly.

He invited her to sit down, asked her what she was doing there, where she’d come from, and as she rested her neon pink backpack on the table and nattered away about a hip-hop festival in Williamsburg, he managed to locate her in the classroom. Kelly sat at the front; she dressed and behaved like a bitch on heat: ‘Sir, may I…’ she said in English, and the pause was long enough for ‘suck your huge dick and swallow your sweet semen.’ But she never finished the sentence, changed her mind halfway through and shook her little bleach-blonde Puerto Rican head: ‘It’s nothing, sir, no es nada.’ Kelly didn’t have acne, just several generations of second-hand anomie piled up in her brain like a stack of pancakes.

Pablo sighed: ‘Kelly Jane.’

She let out a high-pitched giggle. That wasn’t even her name, she told him later, laughing again. But he didn’t care. From that moment on, he called her Kelly Jane. Because it was more vulgar like that. Like her, with her almond-shaped eyes, her puffy cheeks, her plump red lips: she was a shrine to vulgarity. Seeing her there in the station was captivating, which made sense given the frustrations built up over the course of that afternoon. The time he spent with Kelly Jane felt comfortable. He couldn’t say that she exuded freshness and optimism, not in the slightest: it was comfort, pure and simple. Like sinking into a soft armchair. As if that girl’s face offered his tired eyes – recently flooded with trashy imagery – a terrain they could naturally latch on to.

‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ Lety is now wearing a flowery nightdress.

Pablo had fallen asleep at the dining room table strewn with small dishes: bright red tomato salad, shiny anchovies, black olives, shredded greens, potatoes with cheese and cream sauce, mini sausages, fried pork rinds and yucca.

‘If I eat all this, my arteries will explode, tía.’

The sunlight bounces off something in the garden and dazzles him.

‘But it’s all from the farmers’ market…’

What time was it? Pablo serves himself some salad and hears the sound of the doorbell. Lety grumbles as she gets up from the table and goes to open the door. Elisa. It’s Elisa’s voice, but he can’t hear what she’s saying. Just a constant ‘mm-hmm’ from Lety. The door closes. He prays Lety hasn’t invited Elisa in. She hasn’t. She reappears in the kitchen, carrying a tray covered with foil.

‘Your neighbour says she made some bolas de fraile,’ Lety wrinkles her nose up as if something smells bad. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Leave them over there.’

Lety places the tray on the countertop, lifts the foil slightly and peeks inside.

‘Oh,’ she says disinterestedly, ‘they’re doughnuts’.