Cesar Aira - Ghosts

When she went down to the fifth floor, she was already tired and her eyelids felt heavy, which surprised her slightly, since she didn’t like the siesta — she was still a child in that respect. Having washed the lunch dishes and left the miniscule rooftop apartment impeccably clean and tidy (in so far as they could, given that it was still under construction), she and her mother had watched television. She would have liked to go on watching, but the time slot for the kind of show they preferred had come to an end, and the ones that were starting required a different kind of attention.

It might seem odd that at lunchtime, when Abel Reyes came up, his cousin Patri had greeted him with a kiss. A kiss on the cheek was a normal enough greeting; what might seem odd is that they needed to greet one another, when he had been working in the building since early that morning. But, as it happened, they hadn’t seen each other, which was not unusual, because she hardly ever went down. Her mother did the shopping, and rarely needed help. Patri went down once a day, if that. She helped a lot around the apartment, watched television, and looked after her half-brothers and — sisters. She was pretty much a homebody, like all Chileans, except when they are tireless travelers (she was a bit of both). She was fifteen; her surname was Vicuña, like her mother’s, because she had been born when her mother was single. Very quiet, very serious, pretty hands.

They weren’t on the fifth floor either, as she was able to verify (or so she thought), by checking from the front to the back, room by room. The children weren’t there, but the other characters, those bothersome ghosts, were legion. They were always around at that time. To see them, you just had to go and look. Although they kept their distance, with an air of unaccountable haughtiness. For some mysterious reason, they had started shouting, bursting into thunderous peals of laughter that shook the sky. Patri wouldn’t have paid them any more attention than usual, if not for two rather particular circumstances. The first was that there weren’t just two or three or four ghosts, as one might have expected, given their characteristic and constitutive rarity, but a veritable multitude, appearing here and there, then moving away, laughing and shouting all the while like exploding balloons. The second circumstance was even more remarkable: they were looking at her. Normally they didn’t look; they didn’t seem to pay attention to anything in particular, or even to have attention. They were like that now too, except that they seemed to be making an exception for her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious, senseless amusement. She didn’t take offence, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a flying puppet show, an out-of-place, unseemly kind of theater. She had seen naked men before, of course (although not many); she didn’t find that especially frightening. But there was something implausible about it, since you wouldn’t normally see men without clothes except in particular situations. The way they were floating in the air accentuated the ambivalent impression. She had occasionally heard them speak, and wondered about it afterward, for a while. It seemed easy enough to take them by surprise, to slip past behind them. But perhaps it wasn’t so easy.

She leant out over the front balcony and looked down at the empty street. A car whizzed past. She went through the apartment, searching for the children, until she reached the back, and looked down from there as well. The sun was beating in; it was an oven. She thought she saw a body falling, even faster than they normally do, the naked body of a ghost, covered with fine, white dust. It might have been an optical illusion, but she knew it wasn’t when she heard another volley of guffaws, a great choral outburst of laughter so loud it was almost desperate. When she turned back toward the stairs, they were there again, or had just appeared, some swinging back and forth stupidly, like garlands, others perfectly balanced — they all were, in fact, it was just that they were using different methods. A quick movement behind her and a touch that felt particularly real made her swing around suddenly. It was Blanca Isabel, looking at her with a fading surprise. She was a pretty girl, an exception in the family, lively, and very intelligent according to her parents. Although she was startled and must have guessed why her sister had come downstairs, a smile was hovering around her lips: she thought she had caught Patri peeking at a forbidden sight. She looked as if she were about to start humming. Patri didn’t feel that she had been “peeking” at the ghost’s genitalia, not at all. Their laughter proved her innocence. “Now we’re going to take a nap,” Patri said energetically, although she too was disconcerted. It was a bad tactic, because Blanca Isabel didn’t feel like a nap, and ran away. She reached the stairs before Patri, and started going down, whispering something to the others, who must have been nearby. Patri knew she had to hurry if she wanted to catch them, but she was half-hearted about it. It was too hot, and she was tired. So she listened, helplessly, as they scattered. Nevertheless her momentum carried her to the stairwell. Juan Sebastián was looking up at her from the next landing, ready to go down to the third floor. “Let’s go,” she said, “or Mom will come and get you.” “Why?” he replied. Children always ask why. “Because you have to take a nap.” “I don’t know how. How do you do it?” “Where are the others?” “How should I know?” Patri started going down and the boy took off. He was already down on the next floor. She’d be able to corner him eventually, if he went all the way down. But the rascal knew hiding places with two escape routes, so the chase could go on forever. It was no good. She raised her voice again hoping to scare him into submission. She was irritated and couldn’t understand why he had to run away. She wasn’t going any further. What a stupid, childish thing to be doing, chasing kids around at siesta time! If they didn’t want to sleep, why should they? It made no difference to her, or to their health, why would it? But since she had come down to the fourth floor, she could fetch the baby girl, at least.

Luckily for her, little Ernesto was there, looking at her with his beautiful big, dark eyes. Hi, he said, as if hiding something. There was a wet patch on the wall, at a height that indicated clearly what had happened. The children were forbidden to urinate anywhere inside the building, but they did it anyway. She shook her head disapprovingly. I took out my weenie and did it, said the boy. I know how it works, but your dad’s going to tell you off. My dad did it too. Here? she asked him. He looked around, mildly perplexed. He seemed to mean two things: first, “all the floors look the same to me” and, second, “they all take out their weenies.” He was letting his thoughts show in that gentle, docile way because sleepiness was overcoming him irresistibly. And both aspects of his excuse were reasonable, in a way. The mood of summery exhibitionism prevailing on the site, accentuated perhaps by the imperfect, deceptive repetition from one floor to the next, didn’t shock Patri (even she wasn’t that naïve) so much as intrigue her. She’d seen the gangs of ghosts shaking their sturdy members and aiming the jets of urine at the sky, showering it over the first-floor patio (their favorite place for this sport) until rainbows with a metallic sheen appeared in the siesta’s white glare. The day the big satellite dish was installed on the terrace, they spent hours doing it, perched on the edge.

You get to bed, or Mom’s going to smack you, she said. Compliantly, half-asleep, Ernesto headed for the stairs. Where’s Jacqueline, she asked? The two youngest children were never far apart. He shrugged his shoulders. Patri called her. I’m going, she said finally. She followed the little boy up the stairs. When she was half way up, Blanca Isabel appeared behind her, with the baby girl in her arms, intending to move her to a safe place on the third floor. Patri turned around and started back down. The movement was enough to make Blanca Isabel deposit her sister and take off alone, jumping down the stairs three at a time. Jacqueline burst into tears. As soon as Patri picked her up, she calmed down. She put her arms around Patri’s neck and rested her head on her shoulder. She weighed nothing at all. Amazingly, she was still the size of a doll at the age of two. But, in fact, it was like that with all children. They might be relatively big or small for their age, but, compared to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream. As Ernesto had said a moment ago: the weenie. That must be why children were always playing with scaled-down models of things: cars, houses, people. A miniature theater, with its doors opening and closing, over and over again. The previous night, on television, they had seen The Kiss’n Cuddle Love Show , in which two puppets, a frog and a bear recited the names of the birthday boys and girls, and those who had written in. They never missed the show, although they had never written in themselves. Anyway, the puppets appeared on a tiny scene, with two window shutters instead of a curtain, which opened when their act began, and closed again at the end. In the course of normal distracted viewing, Patri had assumed that the shutters opened on their own, as they seemed to do, or were pushed from the inside, or something like that. But last night a problem with the lighting or the general clumsiness of the production had allowed her to see that the white shutters were opened by hands in white gloves, which were supposed to be invisible. The children didn’t realize, but she did. Her mother noticed too, and although they said nothing, both she and Patri thought of the ghosts. They said nothing because it wasn’t worth the effort of opening their mouths. But now, in retrospect, Patri felt that the incident had a sexual significance, or connotations at least.