Читать книгу Optic Nerve - Maria Juliana Gainza - Страница 12
ОглавлениеI woke to fog. And what a fog: as though a fat linen cloth had been draped across the world, giving a ghostly density to the view from my apartment window. The sun-blasted square, the headless statue of some worthy gentleman (the plaque was stolen a while ago, so everyone’s forgotten who he is), the dogs sniffing the foot of the marble plinth, and their owners gathered in a circle, some with surgical masks, others covering their mouths with handkerchiefs. It was like one of those famous London fogs, but without the watery eeriness: a scratchy haze the color of unpolished granite. A mile-wide column of ash had entered the city from the west, blowing in from some meadow fires that had sprung up in the Delta. Emergency helicopters had been out for several days attempting to douse the flames. A few hours earlier, both of Buenos Aires’s airports had been closed, and all road traffic was being diverted away from the city.
On the news it said there was nothing to worry about, that the carbon monoxide levels were low. That didn’t stop me worrying about carbon monoxide levels. Any kind of pressure, it seems, and I come unstuck . . . I was on a ship once and began feeling seasick, my head spinning like a cheap umbrella in a storm. I went over to the railing and, though I did hear the other passengers call out that the waters were shark-infested, jumped straight in. When I feel wrong physically, any danger, however great, simply becomes unreal in comparison with my personal state. And now, now I had to escape this fog. I tried to convince my husband to leave the city with me; we could head south, the smoke was sure to clear at some point, we’d get a view of the sky again. Before I became pregnant I could be very persuasive, I’d do anything (anything) to get my way, but lately all my husband’s replies had been starting with the word “no.”
So I took the car and drove myself; my own private space to think. I put on my sunglasses to make it from the house to the car. I’d happily have donned a chador if I had owned one. I turned on the AC; bad idea: a blast of air like sandpaper hit me full in the face. After a brief coughing fit, I turned it off and headed south along Avenida Corrientes. I didn’t know where I was going at first, but whenever I’m in survival mode like this I find myself drawn irresistibly to museums and galleries, like people running for air raid shelters in wartime. I remembered one on the other side of the city that I hadn’t visited in a long time, which was strange given that the collection included work by one of my favorite painters. I’d been having to rest during the pregnancy, and was feeling rusty on my history of art, though I’m not sure that entirely explains why I talked to myself the entire way. I tried not to move my lips at traffic lights, so as not to alarm the other motorists. I told myself the story, or the bits I could remember, still coughing every now and then although I kept the windows up and the AC off. I was like a paleontologist climbing out of an excavation, bringing forth the final trio of bones she’s been missing to piece together the creature.
Cándido López thought that in order to touch the heart of reality, it had first to be deformed. He studied under Ignacio Manzoni, who, convinced he saw signs of the true artist in López, suggested he go on a tour of Europe. Not having the money to do so, he set off around Buenos Aires Province instead, offering his services as a portrait painter, or he could do daguerreotypes if people preferred. He stopped in a place called Carmen de Areco, where nothing worth painting caught his eye except for a young American woman he met during carnival. She wore her hair in plaits, golden as wheat, and she also happened to be spoken for. López went on his way. An accounts book has survived from the time, and you can read all of his incomings and outgoings, town by town. Mercedes; Bragado; San Nicolás de los Arroyos. The last is where his records end, on April 12, 1865: we know that at some point that day Cándido López bought matches.
On the same day, President Mitre of Argentina refused permission to Solano López, the president of Paraguay, to sail a fleet past the river port of Corrientes and go to the aid of the Paraguayan Blanco Party. Solano López reacted angrily, capturing two Argentinian ships. In Buenos Aires the locals gathered outside the presidential palace to protest, chanting: “Death to the tyrant!” Argentina entered an alliance with Brazil and Uruguay, taking Paraguay as their common enemy, and the War of the Triple Alliance began. They put forward Solano López’s dictatorial behavior as justification, but in war there are always two sides to the story—at least two sides. Control of the Paraguay River was the real prize. For the neighboring towns along this immense watercourse it was like being pitched into civil war, rather than a war between nations. Cándido López, however, was pro-Mitre, and a porteño to boot, and when news of the hostilities reached him he went straight to the Guardia Nacional barracks in San Nicolás de los Arroyos to enlist. Some say he was compelled by a desire to put the American woman out of his mind, others that he had plans to set up as a war reporter. He took along a leather satchel full of notebooks and pencils. Manzoni’s response was unequivocal: “With this you forsake any future as a painter.”
CLEAN ME was written on the hoods of parked cars, and as the ash continued to drift lazily down, the world became less and less clearly defined. A painting in grisaille. The man in the car alongside mine was wearing a surgical mask and I, having been so terrified, suddenly felt a sensation of imperviousness, of utter immunity to the ash: do your worst, I thought. For a moment I forgot what I was doing and where I was going: so it seems to be anytime I experience happiness, it always has to be slightly to one side of reality. Some very faint jabs inside my belly brought me back to earth. I was much bigger than I had been just four weeks before. I still didn’t know the baby’s sex but, whatever it was going to be, it was that by definition—going to be. There, floating in its own private jacuzzi, it was in the best of all possible worlds. Future-bound, nothing more. I remembered the cloying song my mother used to sing to us at bedtime: “Qué será, será.” I always found this both bewildering and depressing, mistaking it for a question, one that I was expected to answer, rather than a line about accepting your lot. How am I supposed to know what will be? I always wanted to shout. How I hated that song. I swear I ruined a childhood trying to come up with the right answer.
The guardias of San Nicolás ford the waist-high Batel River, wading on through the estuaries of eastern Argentina, watching for quicksand as they go. Dead bodies begin appearing four days in. Cándido López spends his free time sitting sketching the troops. “So much horror, it is difficult to look upon,” he writes in his notebook after they camp in the vicinity of some emaciated children’s corpses, so little flesh on their bones that the pyres refuse to light. All talk in the evenings ceases, and rather than falling asleep the men collapse into it: it would be quite possible for them to cross from sleep into death and not know it. One day Lieutenant Cándido López is called to General Mitre’s tent. Mitre is deep in a translation of The Divine Comedy, but he has left his Italian–Spanish dictionary behind at their previous camp, and is looking for distractions while he waits for it to be brought. Looking over Cándido López’s sketches, he says: “Look after these. History will have need of them one day.” Then, putting the pictures to one side, he says: “Enough talk of you and me, let us discuss Dante.” The dictionary never comes, and a number of hours later Mitre orders the advance on Curupaytí. Frustrated in his attempts to translate The Inferno, he chooses instead to perpetrate one of his own.
Later in the day, the Brazilian admiral, sensing rain, will advise against the attack. The Paraguayans have dug in: the trench is just over a mile long and lined with tree trunks, branches bristling forward like metal tines. The horn sounds and the Allies begin their advance, Cándido López running full tilt, eyes dead ahead, convinced that some invisible mantle is protecting him, until a grenade blows off his right hand—the one holding his saber aloft. He picks the weapon out of the tufty grass with his left and goes on, blood gushing from him; soon he begins to shake all over and, feeling nauseated, collapses in a crater.
Lying in the mud, he watches as a ladybug saunters along a blade of grass near to his face. A soldier, face bathed in blood, drops to the ground a few feet away. On the verge of losing consciousness, Cándido López drags himself to the camp at Curuzú. A medic does what he can to halt the gangrene, before deciding to cut off the hand. “Nothing for it.” Weeks later, another amputation, this time above the elbow. The guardias of San Nicolás had set out with eight hundred volunteer soldiers, and eighty-three came back alive, including the One-Armed Man of Curupaytí. Cándido López is no good to the army anymore. The war goes on without him.
The fog grew thicker as I inched toward El Obelisco, the traffic semi-stationary. The man in the Fiat behind was blasting dementedly on his horn, as if he’d identified me as the root of all his life’s problems. Can’t you see it’s the same for all of us? The ash had been causing mechanical failures across the city, and the traffic lights up ahead blinked amber without ever turning green or red. Brake or accelerate, I had no idea, always the way; everything ambiguous, everything admitting at least two interpretations. A Renault Megane, its driver wearing a surgical mask, tried to cut in off Humberto Primo: Over my dead body, mister! I put my foot down while honking on the horn, glaring across at him. Turning to look forward again, I found the exhaust pipe of a bus coming straight for my windshield. Before I knew it I’d gone into the back of the bus. The ash cloud also had strange acoustic properties: there was a jolting impact, but the sound of it came through muffled and indistinct.
Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote in a letter from an 1867 journey along the Paraguay River: “The ship went well, but our lives were literally in the hands of the drunken sots that drove her, and who passed their time draining the bottle or dancing bear-like to the colic-causing strains of travelling Italian zampognari.” Not that he was afraid: he had explored Africa’s inner reaches in search of the Nile’s source, been on expeditions to uncover the fabled Icelandic sulfur mines, as well as translated The Thousand and One Nights and memorized the Koran; he was by now legendary in Britain for his capacity to blend in with the natives on his travels. But he was in Latin America as a British consul, and didn’t need to disguise himself. He slept in the best hotels and rubbed shoulders with nobility, although his considerable beard failed to hide the scar on his cheek from a run-in with a Somali spearman. Burton was a man constantly at war with himself: part pure Victorian xenophobe, part “lover of all things heathen,” as he put it. Just a fact of life for those of us who happen to exist at the interfaces between cultures.
A Paraguayan guide took him to see the battlefields. A sweet smell drifted across them, dust mixed with the scent of passion fruit in flower, and the Englishman sensed death in the air, the presence of “souls whose suffering is not ended.” The pair went to leave, but the horses refused to take another step. The men dug in their spurs, but could not move the obstinate animals. Straight ahead of them, less than ten feet away, a skinny dog had stopped in their path. Red coat, black legs; in the fading light its silhouette had all the solidity of a mirage. Burton gave a friendly whistle—he had a way with dogs—but its only response was to raise its hackles and snarl.
At the end of the war Cándido López returns to Buenos Aires and takes a job in a shoe shop. One day the blond American woman he encountered in Areco comes in, though in fact her hair is brown: the blond plaits were a wig, part of an outfit for carnival. Her name is Emilia Magallanes, and she has recently been widowed, and Cándido López wastes little time before proposing. They decide to leave the city, going to a place called Baradero, halfway between Buenos Aires and San Nicolás de los Arroyos, where they set up as tenant farmers. In free moments Cándido López begins training his left hand. At first he produces nothing but unsightly scribbles: the right hemisphere of his brain needs dusting off. Once he has managed this, he turns to earlier sketches to begin a series of oil paintings depicting the Paraguay War. These together will eventually form his masterpiece, but they require a lot of work. The hell of the battlefields has stayed with him; he needs only a little solitude for it all to come flooding back. The fire and smoke pose him the greatest difficulties, but what painter can resist the impact of reds, oranges, and white emerging from a black horizon? In his work, though, fire always means dead men, and lots of them.
The new landowner comes to visit one day. He arrives not on horseback but in an automobile. His travels have taken him to Europe, and he’s visited the Prado, the Louvre, the Uffizi, but nothing has prepared him for the pieces he finds on this farm. Cándido López always works in a format that is very wide but not correspondingly tall, and, stacked in a corner, the low, seemingly stretched images at first look dark—but when the painter brings them over to the window they shine. On the prompting of the landowner, he decides to exhibit. Dr. Quirno Costa makes arrangements at the local sports club, and twenty-nine works are put on show. “There, the history professors will have something to look at now,” says Cándido López. The one or two reviews to appear in the newspapers concur: not bad for a one-armed man, and certainly of documentary value. Nonetheless they do not sell. What sell are his still lifes; these he carries out on commission, signing them Zepol.
On the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Curupaytí, Cándido López offers his paintings to the state—for a fee. “I would donate them,” he writes, “but I am a very poor man.” The government buys thirty-two paintings, which are handed over to the Museum of National History and end up in storage. One of the guards, nothing else to occupy him, spends the long hours staring at them as he sips his maté. His eye is particularly drawn to one called Battle of Yataytí Corá, though he thinks of it as “the black painting”: it shows a field in Paraguay at night, fires raging. He sometimes thinks he glimpses white figures emerging from the charred forest in the background. He mentions this to the museum director in a hallway one day.
“You’re telling me you’ve seen ghosts in the painting?” says the director.
“What I saw were white uniforms,” says the guard.
Before embarking on the return river journey to Buenos Aires, Burton hears of a phalanstery in the middle of the jungle. “People live there who don’t want war,” say the peasant farmers. They are referring to a group of around two hundred deserters, from both sides, who have set up a utopian commune. They have women with them—prostitutes also tired of the war—and they all live together, at odds with the rest of the world but in harmony with nature. They claim that the aguará guazú, the maned wolf, comes out to watch over them at night. The Bordello of Chaco Plain, people call it. Its precise location is never established, nor what really goes on there, because no one who finds it ever comes back.
The museum director wants no loose talk on his watch. The following day, he arranges for the guard to be transferred to a local post office branch. Rumors of the white uniforms spread among the staff, and though they take care not to mention it in front of management, anytime they have to go down to the basement they always do so in pairs. Eighty years pass and Cándido López is never mentioned in art-historical discussions, until the critic Jose León Pagano includes him in his 1971 compendium Argentinian Art. Only then does Cándido López emerge from the basement.
No one on the bus even noticed, but I ended up with a smashed headlight. Could have been worse, I thought, as Lezama Park loomed up ahead, along with the Museum of National History, which had the look of a palace floating on clouds.
I’d had the constant sensation, for a while, that I was forgetting something. Since the conception, my brain had been leakier than a perforated hosepipe. When I walked past the two stone lions at the entrance, the same color as the ash, they eyed me sternly. I felt they could watch a person be impaled and still show no emotion. I ran a finger along one of their backs, coating my fingertip with gray. A sinking feeling came to me.
“The Cándido López paintings are up, aren’t they?” I asked the ticket lady.
“No,” she said, counting out my change with supreme impassivity (it was a donation). “They’re being restored.”
So that was why I had stopped coming.
“All thirty-two?”
My words hung in the air. The lady handed me my ticket. My condition wasn’t going to make her budge. I remembered the sign from the conservators: they said it would take twelve months, but it had now been three years. Which meant there was nothing I wanted to see. I went in anyway.
I came out after a brief look around. I was feeling furious. Why did they have to take them all down at the same time? The thought of the restoration process was unnerving in the extreme, rendering the ash cloud a distant second. I simply couldn’t believe it: the moment you get over one obstacle, up springs another. I found a bench and set my handbag down as a cushion. There was a fair in the park below, stalls selling handicrafts, Justin Bieber T-shirts, DVDs, little multicolored ponies, and people milled around, appearing out of the fog, disappearing into it, slightly like a B movie with cheap special effects. I was lowering myself onto my handbag (an undertaking) when I heard something go crunch, and remembered my glasses were inside. I got up and fished them out, first one arm, then the other: they reminded me of the legs of an Amazonian mosquito, and something about this just broke my heart. I felt suddenly felled, everything was a disaster, no more trying to deny it: I simply wasn’t cut out for life. I was an army of one, and as the enemy bore down, when they were right on top of me, only then would I realize I’d forgotten my bayonet.
Mitre had promised: “In twenty-four hours we will be in barracks; in two weeks the campaign will begin; in three months, we take Asunción.” The war lasted nearly five years, and more than 50,000 were killed. When the troops returned to Buenos Aires, a yellow fever epidemic ensued. The aristocratic families moved to the north of the city, abandoning their mansions in the south, many of which were converted into boardinghouses in the following months. A number of these families also acquired land in Paraguay for next to nothing.
Three decades ago my husband went to live on one of those parcels of land. He went with his first wife, Cecilia, and her brother Charly. The idea was to work the land, though it was also an escape from the claustrophobia of late-1970s Buenos Aires under the junta. Charly was the moving spirit, the dreamer. “Enough of this shithole,” he said. “Let’s have our very own Woodstock, Guaraní-style!” They went to a place called La Serena, deep in the jungles of Paso Curuzú, on land owned by Charly and Cecilia’s father, Franio, a man whose gaze would darken by degrees as he proceeded to drink his daily succession of whiskeys. Franio was half-Paraguayan, half-Argentinian, and his father had been minister for the economy in the government of Alfredo Stroessner. He had inherited thousands of hectares in San Pedro Department, but was no enthusiast when it came to agriculture. The trio set up in the main house, a single-floor building with whitewashed walls and a veranda held up by a colonnade of quebracho trees. The walls were thick enough that the windowsills served as seats, and the master bedrooms had all been built overlooking the vast finca.
For the two men, both under twenty-two, it was like a game. In the mornings they went out riding. They took bags of salt with them in their panniers, brought in any bulls that had crossed onto the mountainside, and checked on how the kikuyu grass was growing, the aggressive Pennisetum clandestinum that Franio had planted for pasture. In the surrounding jungle—vast tracts that could be crossed only by plane—myrtle, the white-leaved inga shrub, and papaya grew unchecked.
My future husband and Charly had been friends since childhood. They both played the guitar, both wrote songs, and they fantasized about one day setting up a band. Marrying Charly’s sister had been the most manly way of sealing their friendship. In the photos from that time my husband wears flares, a guitar at his shoulder; Charly stands beside him in a tie-dye T-shirt. Their hair is long—my husband’s chestnut brown, Charly’s a deep black. They’re constantly laughing, the kind of laughter that shows the canines—they remind me of hyenas. I once asked my husband what the joke had been. “Couldn’t tell you,” he said. “We were stoned pretty much twenty-four seven.”
They all sat down together for dinner one night at La Serena. Franio had arrived in the afternoon: his first appearance since they had been there. He bore the gift of a very large bottle of whiskey, so large it was held inside a hinged metal contraption that enabled you to pour without pulling a muscle. A gift that was also a way of saying “mine.” “Manna from heaven,” he said, setting it down on the table. “None of that horse piss the English drink at five in the afternoon.” My husband had met his father-in-law only twice, owing to the long periods Franio spent in Europe; his children said he always had a mistress with him on his travels, but the mistresses changed so frequently they never got a name. The last time they had seen each other was at the wedding reception; the party lasted until dawn, and at some point my husband went to the toilet and found Franio in there. “You want to be very careful with what isn’t yours,” Franio said, eyes front at the adjacent urinal. My husband kept his eyes fixed on the white tiles above his urinal, and was able to piss only once Franio had left.
After dinner in La Serena, Cecilia went off to clean the dishes and the men made themselves comfortable out on the veranda. They left the lights off to avoid insects. The crickets chirred, lizards darted around under the seats, bats swooped overhead, and the dogs slunk to and fro, panting in the airless night. They were country dogs. Nobody claimed ownership of them, and they recognized no masters. Franio had started drinking early—“Wouldn’t want to overheat,” he’d said—and went on pouring himself glass after glass in the darkness. He had his own glass, though my husband says a pitcher would be a better description, and he was knocking whiskeys back like aspirin. My husband drank his over ice; Charly was teetotal, wary of alcohol as children of bad drinkers always are, but that night he had poured himself a glass for the first time. Two fingers of whiskey. He was always on edge around his father.
The fan above them spun around on its highest setting. Serú Girán played on the little Sony cassette player, though Franio soon asked the boys to switch it off. They had little in common, and the conversation inevitably turned to the farming. Charly and my husband had been finding the going harder than they had expected. My husband thought pigs might be an idea. Franio, reaching for another drink, said nothing. “You can do well out of them,” insisted my husband, making his case, using terminology learned during the months he’d spent there. He mentioned the spike in beef prices, and talked about exporting to Russia. Franio, staring into his glass, moved his head from side to side. Moths flew repeatedly into the mosquito screen covering the windows behind them, trying to reach the lights in the living room, as though pleading to be let in.
“Didn’t you tell this guy nobody tells me what to do?” said Franio. Though addressing Charly, he was looking straight at my husband.
“We’d need time, obviously . . .” said my husband, but suddenly Franio was on his feet and had taken his pistol out from under his guayabera.
Charly sat stock still. As did my husband; he looked at the gun, which in the low light seemed to dance a little waltz on the air before him.
“You little pricks,” said Franio. “I’m the boss around here. If you don’t like it, the gate’s open.”
His hands were shaking. He took a step back, so that they could barely make him out, but the anger in his voice remained all too clear. The crickets had fallen silent. Charly twirled a cigarette between his fingers and kept his eyes on the ground.
“And what’s up with you? Missing a bone or something? Look at me when I talk!”
They both knew the myth about the Paraguayans lacking a bone, this being why they didn’t hold their heads up—the reason for a purported submissiveness.
“Don’t get heavy, right? I know, I know, everything’s cool. Think you’ve got it made, don’t you, you and that guitar of yours are going places?”
Then, finger still on the trigger, he began talking in Guaraní. His voice changed, grew thick, and as it resounded in the darkness it was as though everything had disappeared and it was just Franio, talking to himself, or talking to someone inside his head—deep, deep inside. Then there was a howl and Franio whirled around.
“Who’s out there?” Then, to his son, in his normal voice again: “Light, fuck sake, shine a light!”
Charly snatched up the storm lamp and lit it. The flame jumped up with a hiss, blinding them all momentarily and illuminating the cocked heads of the dogs—all looking in the direction of a tree-covered knoll a little way in the distance. There was nothing there. My husband got a view of the gun, and saw that it was a Parabellum. A detail he always includes at this point in the story: the Parabellum was a German pistol, more commonly known as a Luger, after its inventor, Georg Luger. But the name Luger had chosen came from a maxim in Latin: Si vis pacem, para bellum: If it is peace you want, prepare for war.
“Shine it that way,” ordered Franio, lurching off the veranda, past the dogs and away in the direction of the knoll. He suddenly seemed not to have a care in the world, and tottered off with the dogs sniffing after him. A hammock had been slung between a couple of the trees, and he subsided into it, gun on his stomach, the other hand hanging down. He stroked the head of one of the dogs, until eventually his hand hung slack as a bunch of bananas. His snoring rang out as the million-starred sky looked on blithely, quite indifferent to terrestrial concerns. Charly went back into the house. My husband put out the lamp and sat a little while longer. One by one the crickets started up again, until the night was full of their song once more.
The next morning, straight from the shower, his wet hair swept back, Franio put on an exaggerated air of innocence. Helping himself to a third cup of coffee, he popped a succession of chipá rolls into his mouth and cracked jokes, most of which were about Paraguayan women cuckolding their men. My husband sat at the table and listened. Franio was due to leave shortly for Asunción in his private jet: he was the pilot. My husband needed to go to the city as well but said nothing. He would rather the seven-hour journey in the back of the milk truck than be shut in a cockpit with his father-in-law. Charly wasn’t there to say goodbye; he had gone out riding early.
The situation soon turned sour. Franio had seen the obvious: they were too soft, and too hippyish, to keep the place in check. They also began to squabble, and Charly getting high on a daily basis didn’t help. My husband threw in the towel at the end of the year and went back to Buenos Aires. Cecilia went to Asunción. Charly stayed on at La Serena, and Franio began to visit more frequently, which troubled my husband. He called Charly up to convince him to come back too, but he said he’d grown to like it there. Like the aguará guazú, he had found somewhere in the undergrowth to hide, a place where he and his demons could have it out.
A year after they had separated, and nearly ten years after they first met, Cecilia rang my husband from Asunción. Franio had died a month before, she said, and she was worried about her brother. He had been found wandering around naked on the mountainside a few days after the death, and it was now ten days since she’d heard from him. “Even in his really bad periods, he always calls every two or three days.” She said she would have asked the local farmers, but she was concerned that people would start to talk. Would he go, please? She begged him; the family would cover his costs.
My husband arrived at La Serena at night. The beams of the car headlights swung across oranges rotting on the branches. Weeds were growing up between the veranda flagstones, and the jungle seemed poised, ready to take back this strip of land that men had toiled so long to clear. The only people left were a handful of locals; he found them perched in the palm trees in the moonlight, cutting down the leaves they used to thatch their huts. Nobody had seen anyone come out of the main house for days, but neither had they felt much like going inside. My husband crossed the veranda and pushed open the door. It was the same inside as when he had left: the smell of whiskey and ash, the armchair decorated with cigarette burns, and the Sony cassette player positioned next to the fireplace. He called out, and got no answer, though when he strained to listen he could make out a low wheezing sound somewhere inside the house. He established that it was coming from the main bedroom, the door to which he found ajar. Looking in, he found Charly sitting on the stripped wooden floor, the strings of his guitar wrapped around his neck, chewing on something. Moving closer, my husband saw cassette tapes scattered around, the tape unspooled: this was what Charly was chewing. My husband looked into his eyes. They sparkled but at the same time looked vacant, like those of a stuffed animal.
Charly was taken to Asunción and committed. For the next few years he was in and out of various rest clinics.
Every now and then the phone will ring in the middle of the night. I happened to be awake the last time it did, having been trying to get comfortable in bed for hours, my mind buzzing, and my bladder, with the baby pushing on it, forcing me to make several trips to the toilet; the due date was a few weeks away. My husband opened his eyes and immediately shook his head. He knew who it would be. I picked up, and was greeted by Charly’s slurred voice. I had only ever heard it at this hour; perhaps that accounts for it seeming so distinctive. Music was playing in the background.
“I’m listening to the record that shithead next to you made. I know he’s there, and I know he’s ignoring my calls. Know what, though?” He laughed. “I don’t care if he doesn’t want to speak to me.”
“He’s fast asleep, Charly. Bombs could be going off.”
I’d usually cut the conversation short, always feeling like an intruder in their relationship, but now a nighttime confidant was exactly what I needed. I’d never met Charly in person, we were two voices in the night: perfect for the speaking of truths.
“You know you married a fucking madman, right? I always told him he had a screw loose.”
I smiled. Charly knew my husband in ways I didn’t. He started talking about when they were young, the time they spent in Paso Curuzú, and there was something comforting in hearing it; no bitterness in his voice. Then, suddenly, he said he had to go:
“Doubtless you won’t believe me, but someone here needs the phone.”
He was right, I didn’t believe him. A vague stab at politeness as he went to hang up, leaving a woman alone with her insomnia. It was then that he asked:
“Things okay there?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’re pregnant.”
I tried to sound happy, radiant even, like the women in magazines. But I wasn’t fooling Charly. Eventually I gave in:
“I don’t know, Charly. I’ve been feeling like I might not be ready.”
Then, out of the oceanic night, I heard him sigh and say “Little lady”—final proof that he didn’t know me, because truly I was far from little. But I liked the way he said it, and decided not to correct him. And, as though he knew, he said it again:
“Little lady . . . None of us is ever prepared for anything. That’s what’s so funny, right?”
He laughed to himself, a flash of teeth in the darkness.
“What do I know, but anyway that’s how it seemed to me then.”
He didn’t say when he was referring to, or where, but something told me he meant during his time in the jungle. He hung up, and I sat thinking about what he’d said. His meaning wasn’t entirely clear, a little like if you ever read your horoscope or look at a fortune cookie, but it didn’t matter, he had still given me a lift. As the first rays of sunlight began to filter through the shutters, and with the receiver resting on my belly, I murmured, “Thank you, Charly.” It was then, hearing myself speak, that I remembered this was the catchphrase of the three heroines in my favorite TV series as a child. I’d tell him, I thought, the next time he called. Then again, I wasn’t sure if Charly would know what I was talking about, being that much older than me. A different generation entirely.
