Cesar Aira - Ghosts

This reminded the master builder of certain regrettable episodes from the past; some of the men present had been working with him for quite a few years, and they joined in the reminiscing. There was the time they had put up a building, like this one, or even bigger, with materials and tools that were hopelessly inadequate, especially the tools. You know the way there’s always some liar exaggerating outrageously, he said. Well, it was really like that. But in this case, the witnesses, including Carlitos Soria (The Bullshit Artist), were not going to let him get away with lying. Which building? they asked him. The one on Quintino Bocayuva. Oh, that one! They all remembered how terrible it had been. Torture. Instead of…. just about everything, really, they had had to make do with, well, anything at all, whatever came to hand. Instead of wheelbarrows, they used some old baby carriages they found dumped in a vacant lot. Instead of buckets, flowerpots (they had to block up the hole in the bottom). And it was the same with everything else: a truly abject scramble for makeshift solutions, which had scarred them for life.

In less than an hour, and the time flew by because of the interesting conversation, every last mouthful of food disappeared, including the bananas and the peaches and the bread. There was really nothing strange about that: the whole idea was to eat it up. With the wine, however, it was different. In a sense, drinking it was not the whole idea. And yet that is what they had been doing, and they continued: instead of coffee after the meal, they had a glass of wine, or two. The drinking, in fact, had become absolute. Inevitably, though, some drank more than others. The three adult Chileans (young Abel Reyes was drinking Coca-Cola) were the quickest, and so attained the highest level of stupefaction, to the point where they could hardly say a coherent good-bye when the others began to leave. And yet they still had some more drinking to do. They did it sitting down, staring into space, smiling vaguely. The others finally vanished, and the three of them underwent a kind of collapse. They felt as if they had imbibed the whole world, but in tiny doses, or as if a joy outside of them had begun to spin, sweeping them up. And, what is more, although they were off their faces by now, it seemed they could go on drinking, go on filling the glasses and lifting them to their lips. At least they still had that feeling, like a giant smile inside each one of them.

At four in the afternoon, just after the last of the builders had gone, Elisa came down to see what state her husband was in. She had to look around twice to find him, slumped as he was. She wasn’t too alarmed, but she did check to see if there were any others left. And sure enough, the other two Chileans were there. As it happened, Pocketman emerged from a brief spell of unconsciousness and volunteered to help get her husband upstairs. She accepted: Raúl Viñas had come around sufficiently for the two of them to suffice. Almost restored to his normal lucidity by the climb, Pocketman offered to chain up the gate from the outside, although he wouldn’t be able to lock it. After saying good-bye, he went back down. The remaining Chilean, Castro, was still sleeping, but when Pocketman gave him a shake, he woke up completely, if in a bad mood, and since they were both going in the same direction, and a fair way (they had to take the train), they headed off together, placidly, though not entirely steady on their legs. Pocketman kept his promise of chaining up the gate, so unless someone took the trouble of looking for the absent lock, the building appeared to be securely shut. It wasn’t really, but there weren’t any passersby. It was siesta time, the quietest and most deserted time of day, and the hottest. The silence was complete.

When the man of the house was peacefully unconscious in bed, covered only with a fine sweat of wine, Elisa asked Patri if she could do her a favor, a big favor (she stressed these last words with a certain irritation), and go fetch the children, who shouldn’t have run off in the first place. Patri, who was a model of good manners and respect, repressed a “huh!” but couldn’t quite stifle a sigh, which made her feel immediately ashamed, although it had been as faint as a breeze in the far heights of the sky. Elisa, who was deeply Chilean in this as in all other respects, could perceive the subtlest shades of an intention. So she added a comment, to compensate for the unfortunate tone of her request — or, at least, to unhinge it and let it swing loose beyond, where the real words are, which have no meaning or force to compel. It was amazing, she said, that even in this heat they still had the energy to run off. Playing excited them so much they just couldn’t get enough. It was the equivalent of “living” for adults: you’re not going to decide to die when night comes just because you’ve been living all day. Patri smiled. Also, they had been up early, said her mother; and lack of sleep, which makes adults slow and drowsy, makes kids restless. But they’d have to take a nap, or they’d be unbearable at night. Patri couldn’t promise that she’d be able to get Juan Sebastián to go to bed, or even his buddy Blanca Isabel. The older boy hated the siesta. Elisa thought for a moment. She had, in fact, seen them when she was coming upstairs with her husband. She regretted not having told them to follow her. Each time they saw their father in that state, they thought he was sick and about to die; she could have exploited that momentary terror and shut them away in the dark. With a bit of an effort, they could get to sleep. If they ran off, it was hopeless. Luckily there was no danger of them getting out into the street. For some reason, that danger didn’t exist. There was the possibility of a fall, from any of the floors, since the building was still a concrete frame, with just a few internal walls in place, not all of them, by any means. But neither mother nor daughter mentioned that possibility; it didn’t even enter into their private reflections. They had once said that an adult was just as likely to fall as a child; there was no difference, because the planet’s gravitational force worked in the same way on both. It was like asking which weighed more, a kilo of lead or a kilo of feathers. And that’s why they were vaguely but deeply revolted by the way the owners of the apartments took such care not to let their children approach the edges when they visited, like that morning. If that was how they felt, why were they buying the apartments in the first place? Why didn’t they go and live in houses at ground level? “We’re different,” they thought, “we’re Chilean.”

But there was an easier way to do it after all, said Elisa, and that was to take away the toy cars. Without them, there would be no reason to remain at large. If she knew her children, and she was sure she did, it was bound to work. It had sometimes worked for her in the past. Patri said they would hide them. Her mother bent down calmly (they were at the door of the little apartment, talking in hushed voices, unnecessarily, since Viñas was sound asleep), and picked up the cardboard box full of toys. With an expert hand, she began to rummage through it. She knew every one of her children’s toys. “The big yellow one, the red one, the little blue truck….” She calculated that exactly four were currently in their possession. She even told Patri which ones. But Patri wasn’t paying much attention. She didn’t think it would be possible to recover all the cars, and so bring in the children. As long as they still had one, just one, Juan Sebastián would stay awake all through the siesta, the little devil.

She went downstairs to the sixth floor. The quickest way to do it was to check the floors one by one, room by room. If they heard her, they would try to hide. She set about it systematically, but it was hard to concentrate because the heat and the time of day had dazed her. The sixth floor seemed endless. Her chances of finding anything in that void perpetually full of air were minimal, given the terrible brightness, which she had grown so used to, living up there as summer set in, that her pupils had shrunk permanently to pin-points. She didn’t understand the arrangement of the rooms, which wasn’t clear at that stage of the construction; but she felt there were too many of them. The trend toward having more and more rooms was, she felt, absurd. A family couldn’t observe the protocol of a royal court. If people started multiplying rooms by their needs, they could float away into the infinite and never touch the ground of reality again. One for sewing, another for embroidery; one for eating, one for drinking, one for each activity, in short. The same room reproduced over and over, each one fulfilling some silly requirement, as if in a perpetually receding mirror. Her mother had put it very well, except that she hadn’t gone far enough in her generalization. Because the illusion of exhaustivity affected things as well as people. In any case, the children weren’t there.