Cesar Aira - Ghosts

As she put some of Patri’s clothes into the wash, Elisa’s thoughts turned to her daughter: now she was a more serious worry. Elisa had never known such a mixed-up girl. No one could say how she would turn out, least of all her mother. It was partly her age of course, but even so, she was a particularly worrying case. She never stuck at anything; she had no perseverance, as if she didn’t really know what she liked. If only she would fall in love! Proceeding mechanically through the washing, Elisa set out the problem point by point. Like many Chileans, she had the secret and inoffensive habit of addressing long, casuistic explanations to an imaginary interlocutor, or rather a real but physically absent person. In her case it was a friend she hadn’t seen for years, not since she had come to Buenos Aires, even longer, in fact. Nevertheless, it was to this friend that she explained the case of her eldest daughter. Look, she didn’t even stick with the karate; that was my husband’s bright idea, typical! But at least it was something. And those mother-of-pearl buttons she used to polish so nicely, she gave that up too, even sooner. I can’t really blame her for that, though, because we moved here. OK. But what about school? Same again: she refused to sit the equivalence tests. She wanted to be an electrician. Crazy! I’d have as much hope of doing that. As Elisa explained to her absent friend, the fundamental problem and the source of all the others, was Patri’s frivolity. Was there ever a more frivolous girl in the world? It was hard to imagine. She didn’t take serious things seriously because she was always serious about something else. She was a little dreamer, living in a looking-glass world. Not that she wasn’t intelligent; but her frivolity made her come across as silly. She had talent, and plenty of it. She was a talented seamstress, for a start. She could have been earning a living already from her sewing, if she’d wanted to. There was some hope, then, for the future, faint though it was, because sewing was a frivolous occupation. All that mattered was the result, not the intentions, which could be supremely whimsical. And Patri’s whims were limitless. For example, six years ago, when Blanca Isabel was born, she had prevailed against Elisa and insisted on choosing the baby’s name. It was the name of a famous fashion designer: an Argentinean woman, but the daughter of a Chilean, who in turn was the daughter of a woman who had been the godmother of Raúl Viñas’s grandfather. Elisa’s heart had been set on baptizing the child Maruxa Jacqueline, a desire she had partially satisfied later on, with her youngest girl.

Her soliloquy was interrupted by a feeling she often had, the semi-epileptic impression that someone was passing behind her. There was no one behind her in the kitchen, and no room anyway, but through the open door she could see a band of ten ghosts watching her from the terrace, between the apartment and the stairs. What were those floury clowns doing there, she wondered crossly. She didn’t like it when they interrupted her conversations with an intimate friend, all the more intimate for being in her mind and nowhere else. (Elisa didn’t know it, but a few months earlier, a horrific derailment in Concepción had claimed her friend’s life.) Anyway, it wasn’t their normal time. Were they going to start showing up around the clock? Or was there something special happening because it was the last day of the year? That could have explained why they were staring at her with their round eyes open wide in their stupid faces. As if they had something to propose to her. It was odd, because they were meant to be seen rather than to see. And since she was in the relatively dark interior of the kitchen, she may not have been visible from outside. But she couldn’t be sure about that, because even if the shadows hid everything else, her thick, twelve-diopter spectacles could reflect or condense enough light to make them visible (she had been caught out like that before): two shining circles, like the eyes of an owl suspended in the night. In any case, she could see them , and that must have been their way of watching. But was she really seeing them, or was it a waking dream? Ah, that was another question. Seeing ten naked men with their dicks dangling while washing clothes in the kitchen wasn’t exactly the most realistic experience. Although for a married woman like her, the scene had a special significance, not a promise but a confirmation: men were all the same in the end. They had nothing to hide. It wasn’t just that all men had the same bits; they also had the same value. Which was, admittedly, considerable, but it was shared out among a multitude that was almost beyond the grasp of the imagination, like the idea of “everyone.” The only thing that bothered her was the bad influence the ghosts might have on her children, particularly on her frivolous elder daughter. Since Patri was given to building castles in the air, certain chimerical spectacles could lead her to the utterly misguided belief that reality is everywhere. It was just as well that the family would soon be leaving the building site. They would have left already, if her husband had listened to her. Meanwhile those jerks were still staring at her. Or was it the other way round? She turned away and went on with the washing, trying to concentrate; what with the distraction she’d probably gone and put in too much bleach. She was always doing that.

She was nearly finished when the apparition of Patri at her side gave her a start. Heavens, I didn’t see you come in, she said, to hide her agitation. A little sleep and look at me, said Patri, displaying her arms, shoulders and neck, covered with sweat. They spent a moment complaining about the heat. Hey, I’d like to have a shower, said Patri, if that’s OK with you. Of course, said her mother; I’m just about finished anyway, see. Just wait till I rinse this out…. there…. just the sight of that cold water running…. I’ll have a shower, too, after…. and this one…. there we go. She turned off the faucet. All yours; careful not to wake the kids. They had to take all these precautions because when water was coming out of one faucet, it wouldn’t come out of another, and if they turned on two at once it didn’t come out of either. It was something they had discovered simply by living there. No doubt some problem with the plumbing, or rather with the general design of the building, which would have disastrous consequences for its occupants later on. Raúl Viñas felt it was best not to tell the architect. Why did he need to know? So he could get uptight about it? The Chilean builder regarded the problem as insoluble, so what was the point? As for them, they managed all right, turning off one faucet before they opened another, politely asking permission. It wouldn’t be so simple when the apartments were occupied, but they would be gone by then. Patri went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Elisa heard the beatific murmur of the water. She took the buckets full of rinsed and wrung-out washing and went out to where she had strung up a line on the terrace, in front of the big frame for the games room and the pool. The sun’s force was brutal, even though it had begun to go down. The clothes would be dry in a flash, she thought. Pity there wasn’t the slightest breeze. The ghosts were still hanging around. They had scattered now, but there were more of them. Some were sitting on the sharp edges of the parabolic dish, as they liked to do; it was a bit of a shock to see them there, but of course they didn’t feel the sharp edge. And even to say they were sitting was a fiction as Elisa could tell by the way they were “seated” all around the edge, even on the bottom, that is, upside down. Perhaps because there was something different about them at that hour of the day, she was vaguely troubled, for the first time, by a serious concern: they were like men, and you couldn’t help seeing them as such; but there was also the possibility of seeing them as real men, while knowing they were images. As she hung out the washing, it struck her that with so many men available, the key was to choose the right one. But how? She discussed it with her imaginary friend. It’s not that there’s a shortage of men, she said, with a chuckle that was imaginary too, but they’re never there when you need them. The sun was already making her feel faint and giving her a headache, so she finished hanging out the washing and went straight back inside without even glancing at those creatures, leaving the dining room door slightly ajar in the hope that some air would flow through. She went to the bedroom to have a look: Raúl Viñas was sleeping soundly, the two little one as well. She half-closed that door too, and switched on the television, with the sound down low. Patri came out of the bathroom with wet hair, fresh and smiling. Do you feel better now? Sure, see the difference? I could have spent hours under that shower. Well, when we fill up the pool, you can splash around in it all day long, huh? Has it started already? asked Patri. I don’t know, I just put it on; OK, let’s see, it’s about to start, I think.