Читать книгу The Wind That Lays Waste - Selva Almada - Страница 6

After several weeks of touring around Entre Ríos – they had come down from the north along the Río Uruguay to Concordia, then taken Highway 18 right through the middle of the province to Paraná – the Reverend decided to go on to Chaco.

They spent a couple of days in Paraná, the city where he had been born. Although he no longer had relatives or acquaintances there, having left when he was very young, he liked to go back every now and then.

They stayed in a run-down hotel near the old bus terminal: a poky, depressing place with a view of the red-light district. Leni amused herself watching the weary comings and goings of the prostitutes and transvestites, who wore so little they barely had to undress when a client turned up. With his nose in his books and papers as usual, the Reverend was completely oblivious to their surroundings.

Although he couldn’t bring himself to visit his grandparents’ house, where his mother had brought him into the world and raised him on her own (his father, an adventurer from the United States, had vanished before his birth, along with the in-laws’ meagre savings), he took Leni to see an old park on the banks of the river.

They walked among ancient trees and saw the watermarks on their trunks, very high up on the ones near the bank; some still had flood wrack in their top branches. They ate their lunch on a stone table, and the Reverend said that as a child, he’d come to that park several times with his mother.

‘It was very different then,’ he said, and bit into a sandwich. ‘On the weekends it was full of people. Not run down like this.’

As he ate, he looked nostalgically at the broken benches, the long grass and the rubbish left by visitors the previous weekend.

When they finished their lunch, the Reverend wanted to go farther into the park; he said that there used to be two swimming pools and he was curious to see if they were still there. It didn’t take long to find them. Bits of iron were visible in the cracked cement around the edges; the tiles covering the inside walls were smeared with mud, and some were missing here and there, as if the old pools were losing their teeth. The floors were miniature swamps, breeding grounds for mosquitoes and toads, which hid among the plants growing in the slime.

The Reverend sighed. The days were long gone when he and other children his age would bounce off the diving board into the water, planting their feet on the tiled floor and pushing back up to break the bright surface with their heads.

He put his hands in his pockets and started walking slowly along the edge of one of the pools, head hanging and shoulders slumped. Leni watched her father’s bowed back and felt a bit sorry for him. She guessed that he was remembering happier times, the days of his childhood, the summer afternoons he’d spent there.

But her sympathy didn’t last. At least he could go back to places full of memories. He could recognise a tree and reconstruct the day when he and his friends had climbed it right to the top. He could remember his mother spreading a chequered cloth over one of those ruined tables. But Leni had no lost paradise to revisit. Her childhood was very recent, but her memory of it was empty. Thanks to her father, the Reverend Pearson, and his holy mission, all she could remember was the inside of the same old car, crummy rooms in hundreds of indistinguishable hotels, the features of dozens of children she never spent long enough with to miss when the time came to move on, and a mother whose face she could hardly recall.

The Reverend completed his circuit and came back to where his daughter was still standing, as rigid as Lot’s wife, as pitiless as the seven plagues.

Leni saw his eyes glistening and quickly turned her back on him.

‘Let’s go, Father. This place stinks.’