Cesar Aira: Ghosts

When they had finished the grapes, the children escaped, without shoes, and went to play in the empty swimming pool, which was in full sun. But they loved it, almost as if the pool were full and they were splashing about in cool water. The three older children were always playing make-believe adventure games, and the baby girl tagged along. She was always there, and was sometimes useful, as a victim, for example, a role that didn’t require much skill, or none at all. After various days of other scenarios, they had returned to car racing. They had a number of little plastic cars. Their childish instincts had alerted them to the silence below, where the builders had stopped working, so they ventured down the stairs to the sixth floor, and then to the fifth. The cars went down the stairs in little hands and parked in the farthest rooms. Excited to have the whole building to themselves, or at least the upper floors, the children complicated their game, leaving a car on one floor and going down to the next, then coming back up to look for it, taking unfamiliar routes. A building site was the least appropriate place for a car race (although ideal for hide and seek), and yet the adverse conditions made the game special, giving it a novel, impossible flavor, which made them forget everything else. They felt they had gone straight to the heart of truth or art. Jacqueline kept getting lost and crying. Ernesto, who was specially attached to her, went to the rescue, up or down, depending on where he was. The only interruption occurred when Abel said, Careful not to fall, and continued on his way down to the ground floor. When he was two floors below them, they began to call out “Mophead!” Then they resumed their game with the toy cars, going up and down. A breeze was blowing over those superposed platforms, but it was slight and not very refreshing; in any case the heat would probably begin to ease off once the sun began to go down. The light must have been changing, gradually, but it wasn’t noticeable; the brightly-colored toy cars were the light-meters in the children’s game. They went down to the third floor, but didn’t dare go any further, because they could hear the men’s voices.

All the builders had, in fact, gone downstairs a fair while before, and since they wouldn’t be returning to work, had washed and changed, to make themselves more comfortable for lunch. The radicals among them had hosed themselves down and dried off in the sun, out in the back yard. They had taken off their work clothes, which, once shed, were so many dusty, torn and mended (or not even mended) rags, and packed them away in their bags. Clean now, hair combed, they sat down around a table made of planks to wait for lunch. They had put the table as far away as possible from the grill, where Aníbal Soto was checking on the progress of the meat. There were ten of them in all. As well as Viñas and Reyes, there were two other Chileans: Enrique Castro and Felipe Rojas. Rojas was known as Pocketman because he was in the habit of keeping his hands in his pockets, even when he was sitting down. It was a pretext for endless jokes. Now, for example, he was sitting with a glass in his left hand and his right hand in his pocket. Next to him was the fat guy from Santiago del Estero, who although by no means an ingenious joker, could get a laugh by dint of sheer ingenuity. He put his hand into the Chilean’s pocket to find out what was so nice in there, as he put it. This made all the others laugh, and gave Pocketman a start, making him spill a few drops of wine, which he complained about. The master builder, a short man with grey hair and blue eyes (he was Italian) was convulsed with laughter, but he knew how to change the subject in time. They had all served themselves a glass of wine and were drinking it as an aperitif. Luckily it was cool down there; it was almost like having air conditioning. They drank a toast, and so on. The meat was soon ready, but they had clean forgotten to make a salad. Reproachful gazes converged on young Reyes, who almost always forgot to buy something or other. But, since it was the last day of the year, it didn’t matter. Anyway, the meat was first-class.

As well as the Chileans, there was another foreigner, a Uruguayan called Washington Mena; he was an insignificant person, without any noteworthy characteristics. The other one with long hair was a young Argentinean, about twenty, called Higinio Gómez (Higidio, actually, but he said Higinio because it was less embarrassing), who was spectactularly ugly: he had what used to be called a “pockmarked” face, due in fact to a case of chronic acne, as well as that long hair, almost as long as Abel’s, but curly. Then there was one they called The Bullshit Artist behind his back, although his name was Carlos Soria. While the others laughed at the fat guy’s joke, he just mumbled and ended up making openly sarcastic remarks. The joker from Santiago del Estero turned out to be the most curious character of them all, partly, in fact mainly, because he was spherically fat. That transformed him. He also fancied himself as a wit and even a Don Juan. His name was Lorenzo Quincata; he spoke very little and always gave careful consideration to what he was going to say, but even so, no one would have mistaken him for an intelligent young man.

Soria started running down Santiago del Estero and its inhabitants. They let him talk, but teased him all the while. He said that in Santiago they drank hot beer. Really? How come? He’d been there, of course, passing through; nothing could have persuaded him to stay on those sweltering plains. One day, in a bar, he had sampled that strange beverage (strange for him, anyway). They used a wheelbarrow to bring the beer in from the yard, where it had been sitting in full sun; it was hot like soup, he said. Someone asked him: Why the wheelbarrow? To bring the cartons in, of course, what else could they use? How many cartons, they asked, suspecting him of exaggerating. First he said thirty-six, then he said eight, but it wasn’t really clear which number he meant. He pointed out that there had been twenty people drinking. Some of the builders were laughing so hard they cried. That’d have to be a record, wouldn’t it, they said. If he drank thirty-six cartons of hot beer all on his own.

Only in Santiago del Estero…., said Raúl Viñas, laughing too. He clinked his glass with Quincata. Viñas was a Santiago man himself, he explained, but from Santiago de Chile, which made all the difference.

Soria pointed out once again that there were twenty people drinking, a whole team of road workers. The cartons of bottles were sitting in the yard, out in the sun. Did they know what his belly was like, after drinking it? Well, round, of course. As for how it felt, best not to imagine that, or even try. And yet they did.

Castro reminded Viñas about a famous liar they had known in Chile, a man who, whenever he met someone, would say that that he had just crossed the Andes from Argentina, braving extremely risky or at least unusual conditions, coming through unlikely passes, or right over the mountain peaks, crossing snowfields, always on foot, alone, setting off on the spur of the moment. Each time he ran into someone he knew, he came out with the same story, or rather, a variation. But sometimes he ran into the same person again quite soon afterward, and then he had to invent the opposite journey, since he couldn’t always be crossing from Argentina into Chile, without crossing back the other way at least occasionally, indeed just as often, even in the world of the imagination with its somewhat flexible laws. It was a pretext for doubling his lies.

“Lorenzo”, they felt, was an incongruous name. They all thought it suited its owner, but at the first stirring of doubt, they flipped over to the opposite opinion. It was the same with “Washington,” and again with “Higinio,” and so on through the names, even the commonest ones, like “Abel,” “Raúl” and “Juan.” It would have been absurd to claim that people looked like examples of their names, and yet, in a curious way, they did. The worst (or the best) thing was that in any given case you could convince yourself of a name’s appropriateness or inappropriateness simply by listening to the other person’s arguments, and if that became the norm, even within a small community of friends or colleagues, it would be like seeing ghosts emerge. They were pouring out wine for familiar ghosts. (The real ones had disappeared a while before, as they did every day when the smell of meat rose from the grill, as if it were detrimental to them. But they would reappear later on, more active than ever, at siesta time, which was the high point of their day, in summer at least; in winter, it was dusk.)