Kamchatka (6 page)

‘Did you go by our house?'

Papá shook his head. This was how bad things were.

‘But we can't go with just the clothes we've got on!' I protested.

‘Whatever we need, we can buy.'

‘Well, then, we'll have to buy a new game of Risk.'

‘You fancy losing again?'

‘No way, José!'

‘I think you've got a death wish.'

I tried to think of a brilliant comeback, a zinger that would hit him like a smack in the mouth, but I was the one who got smacked when the Midget rolled over in his sleep and gave me a right hook.

That night I woke up on the thin duvet, which was the only thing separating me from the hard floor, to find that papá, who had been lying next to me when I fell asleep, was not there. The room was still dark. It smelled of sweaty socks.

Papá and mamá were sitting on the cold floor in a corner of the room. Mamá had raised the blinds a few inches and was peering through the narrow slit, out at the road, barely lit by the glow of the streetlights. She was wearing a nightdress I'd never seen before and she had no shoes on. One of her feet was tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Papá was sitting beside her in T-shirt and boxer shorts, staring at nothing. Dressed like this, or rather undressed, he looked even more like the Midget. The lock of hair plastered to his forehead, the self-absorption. All he needed now was his own Goofy.

Papá and mamá were huddled together as close as their bodies would allow and yet they looked incredibly distant.

Then the noise of a siren, far away but clear, broke the silence of the early morning. I don't know if it was an ambulance or a police car. Papá and mamá reacted as one, suddenly connected again, peering through the blinds as though they could actually see anything in the street but the shadows.

‘What's going on out there?'

Mamá hushed him.

A few seconds later, the siren faded as abruptly as it had begun, a calamity that was not part of our world, one that had brushed past, sparing us.

The silence was transparent and now I could hear again, the tap-tap-tap of mamá's foot and the sound of breathing, of a heart beating, that I suppose must have been my own.

In a hushed whisper, papá told mamá to try to sleep for a while, even if it was only a couple of hours, because she would need to be clear-headed in the morning. It was going to be a long day, there was a lot to do and then there was us. ‘We have to try not to spook the boys.'

Mamá nodded and lit another cigarette. The harder she puffed on the cigarette, the brighter the tip glowed. I thought she'd gone crazy, because she leaned across to the blind and kissed it. Actually, she was just blowing her smoke out through the crack in the window. She didn't want the room to get full of smoke.

I felt like getting up and going over to them. Hugging them, saying something stupid, joining their vigil, peering through the blinds and, when the church bells chimed, saying ‘Three o'clock and all is well,' like they used to when Buenos Aires was still a colony.

I think I wanted to protect them – for the first time. But I figured papá would probably say the same thing to me he had said to mamá. He'd give me a little lecture on the salutary effects of a good night's sleep and send me back to my thin eiderdown and my aching bones.

I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and in the end I dozed off again.

Can I view thee panting, lying

On thy stomach, without sighing;

Can I unmoved see thee dying

On a log

Expiring frog!

Charles Dickens, ‘Ode to an expiring frog',

The Pickwick Papers

Noun.
1. Science concerned with the physical features of the Earth's crust and as a habitation for man.

2. The topographical features of a region: ‘The danger extends across the entire geography of Argentina.'

For centuries, no one wanted to settle the land where Buenos Aires now stands.

The native peoples turned their backs on it, preferring the green pampas to the insalubrious air of the marshes, this zone that is neither sea nor land, nor anything. When the Conquistadores arrived by sea, the natives attacked them more out of curiosity than anything else and finally left them to their own devices, knowing well how things would turn out for them. Locked up in their fortresses, the Europeans succumbed to plague and starvation until they were finally forced to eat each other. The land on which the city stands retains the memory of these cannibals. I'm not sure whether this was an isolated incident or whether it was a sign of destiny.

When they aspired to glory, the indigenous peoples of the continent chose the other ocean, the Pacific. Lima was the golden city of the Incas while Buenos Aires was still a swamp. And when Europeans set up military outposts in South America, they too preferred the line that runs from México with the Peruvian high
Andes. Buenos Aires was a last resort, a city beyond the pale, the last bastion of civilization standing on the frontier of barbarism. Or was it beyond that frontier, capital of a savage kingdom?

All we know for certain is that no one wanted to live in Buenos Aires. Even the name was like a tasteless joke. The air was unhealthy, heavy and humid. It was like breathing water. Oxen and carts sank into the mud. This oppressive weather still reigned when, in 1947–48, Lawrence Durrell, in his letters from Buenos Aires, described the area as ‘large, flat and melancholy … full of stale air', where the powerful fought over meagre resources and ‘the weak are discarded … Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity is trying to get away from here – including me.' Lest there be any doubt about the malign influence the city had upon his soul, Durrell also wrote: ‘One's feelings don't rise in this climate, the death-dew settles on me …'

To the imperial powers of the eighteenth century, Buenos Aires looked – on paper – like a marvellous opportunity. It was the last port on the Atlantic seaboard before Cape Horn and offered access to a network of rivers that connected it with the heart of the continent. Rivers meant trade and trade would bring wealth, civilization, culture. But in practice Buenos Aires was a nightmare. The River Plate offered scant depth, making it difficult for large ships to dock and though there were rivers, they presented even greater navigational problems. It was at this point that the dichotomy between the idea of Buenos Aires and the reality of Buenos Aires became apparent, a dichotomy that has never been resolved: the conflict between what we might be and what we are leaves us paralysed, a ship run aground on a muddy spit of land.

Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in geography books. The result of centuries of research, they tell us how the Earth was formed, how the incandescent ball of energy of those first days finally cooled into its present, stable form.
They tell us about how successive geological strata of the planet were laid down, one on top of the other, creating a model which applies to everything in life. (In a sense, we too are made up of successive layers. Our current incarnation is laid down over a previous one, but sometimes it cracks and eruptions bring to the surface elements we thought long buried.)

Geography books teach us where we live in a way that makes it possible to see beyond the ends of our noses. Our city is part of a country, our country part of a continent, our continent lies on a hemisphere, that hemisphere is bounded by certain oceans and these oceans are a vital part of the whole planet: one cannot exist without the other. Contour maps reveal what political maps conceal: that all land is land, all water is water. Some lands are higher, some lower, some arid, some humid, but all land is land. There are warmer waters and cooler waters, some waters are shallow, some deep, but all water is water. In this context all artificial divisions, such as those on political maps, smack of violence.

All the people who inhabit all these lands are people. Some are blacker, some whiter, some taller, some shorter, but they are all people: the same in essence, different only in details because (as geography books teach us), that part of the Earth allotted to us is the mould from which our essence pours forth, molten and incandescent as in the first days of the planet. What form we take will be a variation moulded by that place. We grow up to be placid in the tropics, frugal in the polar regions, impulsive if we are of Mediterranean stock.

Durrell intuits something of this in his letters when he talks of flatness, of melancholy; Buenos Aires forces him to adapt or die, as bacteria were once forced to contend with oxygen, forced to convert this toxin into the air they breathed. Durrell left, but those of us who choose to stay, adapt our sensibilities. Some of the characteristics we develop as a result of this mutation are as extraordinary as
those developed by bacteria. Tango, for example: music of Baltic melancholy which expresses the flatness, the humidity and the nostalgia which mark us out from the rest of the Hispanic world. On this point I disagree with grandpa: I believe what that Piazzolla plays
is
tango. But it is a conclusion I arrived at through reading geography books.

Between the primeval swamps and the Buenos Aires of today, centuries have passed, but time is the most relative of all measurements. (I believe all time occurs simultaneously.) We are still shapeless creatures, as shifting as the muddy coastline. We are still creatures of mud, God's breath still fresh in our cheeks. We are still amphibious, on land we long for the sea, and longing for land we swim through the dark waters.

The
quinta
papá had borrowed was on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It had a kidney-shaped swimming pool surrounded by flagstones. The water was not exactly what you might call clean. It had a Citroën-green tinge, and the surface of the water and bottom of the pool were covered with leaves that had fallen from the trees. Getting the leaves off the surface was easy. There was a net with a long handle specially designed for the purpose. The leaves on the bottom of the pool were a different matter; they had rotted into a slimy gloop we had to walk on.

As soon as we arrived, I asked papá if I could go for a swim. Papá, obviously, glanced at mamá. She made a disgusted face. What the swimming pool contained was not water, but something like a soup of bacteria, microorganisms and decomposing vegetation. But that afternoon, the April sun was still beating down and mamá owed me one because of the whole Bertuccio thing.

I didn't have a swimsuit with me, but I dived in anyway – in my underpants. The water was cold and slightly soupy. When I tried to stand on the bottom, my feet slithered around as though the bottom was covered in cream. It was better to keep swimming, even if all I could do was doggy paddle.

I had never really been interested in style. Most boys learn the front crawl so they can race, or they learn something showy like the
butterfly so that they can splash people on the side of the pool. But what I liked best was staying underwater. I'd hang on to the bottom of the ladder and exhale all the air in my lungs, bubble by bubble, until there was nothing left and then lie on the bottom with my tummy pressed against the tiles for a few seconds before shooting back to the surface for air.

The things my mother thought were disgusting about the pool were exactly the things that most fascinated me. The green tinge, the shifting rays of light, made it easy to pretend that I was at the bottom of the ocean. The leaves and the branches suspended in the water gave a sense of depth to my underwater adventure, the long-legged insects diving like me but with more grace. There were curious formations all along the waterline, countless clusters of tiny translucent eggs. And the dark slime at the bottom – a mixture of moss and decaying leaves – added to the feeling of being at the bottom of the sea.

People say that being underwater stirs memories of the place where we were conceived and spent our first nine months. Being surrounded by water rekindles sensations we first felt in our mothers' wombs: the weightlessness, the languid, muted sounds. I'm not about to argue with this reasoning, but I prefer to believe that the pleasure of being underwater has another explanation, less Freudian and more in keeping with the history of our species.

When, at the dawn of life, our ancestors left their aquatic environment, they took the water with them. The human womb replicates the water, the weightlessness, the salinity of our erstwhile ocean habitat. The concentration of salt in the blood and in bodily fluids is the same as that in the oceans. We abandoned the sea some 400 million years ago (by my chronology), but the sea has never abandoned us. It lives on in us in our blood, our sweat, our tears.

When he said the house was ‘mysterious', papá set my imagination racing. I had imagined a dark, dank, two-storey English manor house, walls shrouded in thick ivy, hiding thousands of longlegged spiders. I imagined looking up as we arrived and noticing a boarded-up window high up near the chimney stack – a secret room that no staircase in the house led to. I imagined a neighbour nodding sagely and confessing that the window was a mystery, then asking ominously if I had heard what had happened to the previous tenants, a strange family …

The actual house was very different. It was a simple, low-rise square box with a tarred roof. It looked more like a compromise with reality than with architecture. The walls had been whitewashed, though the job looked half-finished.

I wandered into the house half-naked, wrapped in a huge towel with the price tag still attached. I was wet and my whole body itched from the pine needles. Papá and mamá were coming and going, bringing in shopping bags and going out to fetch more. In an attempt to keep the Midget occupied – he was more dangerous when he tried to help with family chores than when he skived off – they had sat him in front of the TV, an ancient Philco with a rabbit-ear aerial; the knobs fell off as soon as you touched them.