Читать книгу August - Romina Paula - Страница 8

2.

I hear mouse sounds all the time. Which translates into: I would like to move, get out of here. Ramiro doesn’t feel that way. Ramiro thinks it’s stupid. He maintains that any city will be full of mice, let’s just thank our lucky stars it’s not a rat and that we can resolve it by not keeping things in the pantry anymore. Yet meanwhile, every time I come across another package of something that you can tell has been nibbled on by the tiny teeth of vermin, I feel like throwing up. And like leaving, moving. Ramiro says every time there’s a problem, no matter how small, instead of thinking how I might be able to fix it, I just want to run away. That may be. But I can’t think of any real solution here. And besides, it’s not the only one. The only problem, I mean. Besides, what he calls running away is probably just my instinct for self-preservation. So for me ultimately the mouse invasion confirms the state of total disrepair we have the house in now, how disconnected we are (me at least) from where we live in order for another thing to take up residence, another being. And if it’s not that, then how do you explain why it never happened before? I can hardly think it’s a coincidence. Or maybe it is—or maybe what it is is an accumulation of coincidences that in turn form a sort of mouse grid. I have a dream about rodent teeth, and then one night, standing at the corner where our place is, I look up and see a mouse running along the wires like they’re pathways, with that determination, that certainty. A few days later I come upon another one, another mouse in another neighborhood. Frozen. Tense. Close to a cable. I put two and two together, understand it got electrocuted and fell, splat, onto the sidewalk. And then, from the bus, I see rats—these are rats, these ones are enormous—and I see them circulate, emerge from an abandoned building, and head for a mound of trash bags, absconding with something, absconding with things, food, coming and going, real fast, lightning fast, one with a piece of bread. I can see them multiply before my very eyes, there are more of them each second, forcing me to think about the rodent, about our rodent. Is there just one of them or are there more of them? Maybe it’s a family. Making themselves at home, I mean turning our pantry into their home. I’m resigned, I want to leave the mouse the house, I don’t want to kill it, I don’t want to poison it; if it winds up dying in the kitchen I’ll still want to leave. It’s so revolting, it’s done now, the havoc has been wreaked: the mouse is there, we’ve seen each other now, we’ve looked each other in the eyes, now I can neither kill it nor have it killed, even less so live with it. So I surrender the kitchen. I’m thinking, now, about—was it in Bleu or Rouge where the girl comes across a mouse, or maybe even a mother mouse with baby mice in the pantry or the laundry room (I can’t remember exactly what it was), and it completely freaks her out? At the time, as I was watching it, I didn’t get why it was such a big deal, why she would make such a big deal out of a few little mice. Then I think she borrows a neighbor’s cat and goes and shuts it in the room with the mice for it to do its thing, and I remember that she really freaked out when she did that, I guess because she had kind of made this mental association between the mother mouse and herself. That was definitely Bleu. Although if it were Rouge it would be the same, I mean identifying with the mouse, so many tragic women, girls who suffer, all of them tragic.

I don’t want to live here anymore. Ramiro says we should do that, just bring a cat in. That if I feel sorry for the mouse like an idiot and refuse to kill it or poison it, then I should at least let nature do its thing, let the cat do its job, and we won’t even see it, we won’t even know, and anyway, says Ramiro, it probably won’t even happen because the mouse probably won’t even come back if it smells cat. That could be. Ramiro reminded me of how when somebody broke into our house, back in Esquel, it was basically the same thing in the sense that back then, too, I kept on saying we should move. I had forgotten, but that’s true, that was a long time ago. Indeed, the sense of intrusion was horrible for me, not because of the things themselves, I don’t even remember what they took, but indeed, it did take me a long time to get over it, the fact that they came into our house while we were sleeping, while we were there, all three of us, because there were still just three of us when that happened, Dad hadn’t gotten married again yet. I not only couldn’t sleep the night after the robbery but also for many, many nights afterwards. It’s not that I wasn’t sleeping, I guess, so much as that I kept waking up at the same time really early every morning. I would go to the VCR in the living room that had the time on it in big green letters, they hadn’t taken that, I guess they’d heard some noise or something that had stopped them before they got to it or whatever, in any case they hadn’t taken it. Anyway, I kept waking up at the same time, like by some internal alarm, always in a kind of panic, and I would get up and go down the hall and into the living room, where we had the TV and the VCR. I would look to see if the green light that the VCR gave off was still the same, if the trajectory of the light of the numbers was the same as before, if I could recognize it or if there was anything obstructing it. If it was okay, then that was a sign that we were going to be okay, at least for that night. If not, if there was something obstructing the light, or if it just wasn’t there, then we’d been hit again. It was like that night after night, while my dad and my brother just went on sleeping, unaware that I was roving around, that there was someone ranging around the house, that there was a person watching over them and looking out for them while they were sleeping. I don’t remember exactly how long that lasted. Obviously I didn’t mention my nocturnal meanderings, I never told them anything, but I did insist for a while that we move. For me at that time that home had reached the end of its cycle: that was where my mom had run away from, that was where she hadn’t wanted to live with us anymore (not there or anywhere else, now I know that, but back then I didn’t quite yet have that clarity), and as if that wasn’t enough we’d started to be vulnerable to the outside, too, to external threats. And that was more than enough for me to deem it cursed. Deem the duplex. The cursed duplex. But Dad’s reasoning was always a lot more levelheaded and concrete than mine: Where the hell did I think we ought to move to? Conclusive. And he reversed the theory on me: our house was actually now safer than any other, than all the other homes we could ever possibly reside in, because the chances we’d get broken into again were one in a thousand, one in a million. I don’t know, this argument didn’t really work on me, but at the time I had no option other than to go along with it. And then, I don’t know when, but at some point I stopped waking up at three in the morning, and then that was it: I was over it. Dad still lives there. My reasons for having to leave were probably the same as his reasons for staying. At the same time I think he really believed in his probabilities argument. And now Ramiro reminds me about that, about that other time that I insisted that we leave, and how then I just got over it, how then it sort of simply fizzled out. It’s true, and besides, there’s not much I can do without him being on board. I can’t live alone. And I can’t live with Manuel. So I’ll probably take your parents up on their invitation. A few days down south might do me good. Meanwhile the cat can do its thing. I personally prefer not to be around.