Cesar Aira - Ghosts

Meanwhile, Patri was busy setting the table. First she spread a pretty white table cloth, and the rest happened almost automatically: plates, forks, knives. As for the glasses, which the men had left on the floor, she had a supernatural knack for guessing who they belonged to, and she never made a mistake. In the kitchen, Iñes Viñas and her two sisters-in-law were preparing the salads, and of course chatting. The main topic was Roberto, considered from various points of view, but one in particular. The unspoken question behind all the remarks, which were magically transformed into preemptive replies, was: How did Inés Viñas avoid getting pregnant? She seemed to be wondering too, as if she didn’t trust her own thoughts or her life.

Elisa had put a melon into a tureen full of ice cubes, to cool it down. Inés had made an innovative suggestion: wrap it in wet newspaper first, then cover it with ice, so it would cool more quickly. The result was sensational. The green and white rind was frosted. Elisa worked out when the chickens would be done. When it came to timing, she was an expert and she liked the courses to follow one another fairly rapidly; the children were happier that way, and it meant her husband had less idle time for drinking.

Well, now they could begin. Carmen Larraín went out to ask the men if they were ready. Of course they were, ready and waiting! Just one thing: there were no napkins. She came back to the kitchen with the message, and Patri raised a hand to her forehead: how could she have forgotten? She always did. Her mother told her to check on the children once she had put the napkins out. Meanwhile Elisa was serving the melon, with the help of Inés Viñas, placing the slices on a long platter, and covering each one with a sliver of ham. Carmen and Patri went to quiet the children down. Juan Sebastián, who had been appointed head of the table, was barking despotic orders, mainly at his siblings (he was slightly afraid of his cousins, with their disciplined air).

The melon arrived, and the cook sat down: the meal was beginning. There were two slices each for the grownups, and one (cut in two) for the children. It wasn’t real sustenance yet, just a treat to whet the appetite. It’s important to remember that, for this family, food was not a major concern. They gave it almost no consideration. The melon was perfectly ripe; had they eaten it a day later (or a day earlier), it wouldn’t have been the same. The sweetness, with all its exquisite intensity, did not detract from the particular flavor of melon, which was not, in itself, sweet at all. And the ham was perfect too; it had a kind of salty warmth that contrasted aptly with the icy sweetness of the fruit. After the melon came the salads, and then, almost immediately, the chickens: perfectly golden, crisp, and moderately seasoned. To accompany the poultry, Raúl Viñas had put aside some bottles of aged Santa Carolina, which he bought at a good price from his favorite wine store. Chilean wines are so dry! they all said, sipping it, with a touch of nostalgia, which they reined in so as not to spoil the evening. They’re so dry, so dry! Paradoxically, that dryness filled their eyes with tears. But overall, the meal was a thoroughly joyful occasion; sometimes, in order for joy to be complete, a discreet trace of sadness is required. In any case, the children were well behaved.

The only one who had a secret thought was Patri. Less an idea than a feeling: she felt that she still had to do something; that there was some unfinished business. What she really wanted was to stop thinking. She didn’t like feeling that she was a mechanism performing a function, but since she had told the ghosts that she “had to think about it,” she felt obliged to do so. By nature she was particularly taciturn, but this predicament helped her to see the usefulness of speaking. When you speak, you automatically stop thinking; it’s like being released from a contract. Or rather, as she said to herself, it’s like those stories in which an especially handsome man appears, to whom the virile protagonist feels inexplicably attracted, which he finds disturbing, understandably, until it is finally revealed that the handsome man is in fact a woman in disguise. Such is the dialectic of thinking and speaking. But having reached this point in her reflections, Patri wondered if she wasn’t herself (and this was the secret of all her thought) a woman in disguise, brilliantly disguised…. as a woman. But she didn’t go down those mysterious passageways, preferring to remain on the surface of her frivolity, because there was also a dialectical relation between thought and secrecy. Or, more pertinently in this case, between thought and time. It simply wasn’t possible to go on thinking all the time. It would be like a painter who has to delay the completion of a picture for technical reasons, say to allow certain thick layers of color to dry, and meanwhile is assailed by new ideas — a figure, a mountain, an animal, and so on — which go on filling up the painting until the pressure of multiplicity makes it explode.

The children kept escaping from their little table. Stunned by the bliss of the meal, their parents let them be, except when they strayed out of the circle of variably feeble light shed by the globe, because the darkness beyond hid the irrevocable edges of the void, and those of the deep swimming pool, which were dangerous if not so terrible. When they did stray, one of the women would volunteer to go and bring them back, or frighten them into submission with a scolding if that was sufficient. Patri, lost in thought while all the others had gone rounding up the children, was the last to take her turn. There had been a veritable exodus, and some stern words from Elisa had failed to bring them all back to their places, so Patri pushed her chair back and went into the darkness to see what she could see. She walked toward the back of the terrace, to the left of the pool, until she heard the older children running around the right side to get away. But she went all the way to the back anyway, to make sure there were none left. There were no children, and once she was close to the edge, she could see more clearly, because of the light coming up from the houses and the streets. She stopped on the brink, but was not in any danger, because of her pensive mood: she was continually stopping to think, and that moment was no exception. Some ghosts appeared, floating in the air two or three yards away. Night had made them majestic, monumental, perhaps because they were illuminated from below by the glow coming from the Avenida Alberdi on the other side of the block, and they looked like foreshortened figures, barely a few golden lines in the darkness. They seemed more serious too, but there was no way to be sure. In Patri’s eyes, at any rate, they had entered a spacious domain of seriousness. For her, those volumes swimming in shadow, those volumes reduced to lines, as if to suggest that they existed in a dimension of aggravated unreality, seemed strangely, almost incredibly, solemn. The shadows served a different function for the ghosts, since they had “nothing to hide” (because they weren’t alive). I accept the invitation, said Patri. A minute before midnight I’ll jump off here. Here? asked one of the ghosts, as if he had not heard. Yes, here. Ah. It’s more practical, said Patri, feeling obliged to explain. Then they nodded; and that simple movement, indicating that they had heard, made them seem less serious. One of them said: Thank you for the confirmation, young lady. Everything is ready for the feast.

When she came back to the table, she noticed that her mother was looking at her strangely, and wondering briefly what she was thinking. Over the chicken bones and empty salad bowls, the diners were speaking of this and that. By a curious coincidence, all of them, without exception, had been born in the city of Santiago, the most beautiful city in the world, as they readily agreed, having already made up their minds. The way they praised Santiago, they could have been employed by a travel agency.