Iosi Havilio - Paradises

Come here, girl, closer, I won’t bite. I obey. As I approach, I take in the true proportions of this immense woman, wrapped up in spite of the heat. I find it hard to imagine how she gets out of her chair, to eat, to sleep, not to mention to go out anywhere. Sit here, she points to the bed. She’s about to say something else, but instead pulls a face. Ow, she complains and squeezes that limitless belly. Holding on to the arm of the chair for propulsion, she stands up. I make as if to offer her a hand but she scares me away with a sharp gesture of contempt. Incredibly, she manages by herself.

Tosca goes to the bathroom, she walks leaning on a stick. For a while I’m left sitting by the boy with the Cyclops head, index finger in his nostril. Benito is wearing blue overalls, like a mechanic or a painter, too tight for him. On the muted television, lottery numbers are filling up an electronic scoreboard. Next to me, on the bedside table, is a colourful bust of Jesus and a bronze cross, two compartmentalised pillboxes, precariously balanced piles of medicine boxes and an old mobile phone with a broken screen. Above that, an image of a Virgin Mary with a burning heart in the middle of her chest. I stretch my neck to better see that symmetrical red organ connected to the body by an artery that perforates the skin. A fantasy heart, but one with vital functions.

Sweet Virgin of Syracuse,

wipe away the tears caused by

hate and violence

in so many regions of the World,

in particular the Middle East

and the continent of Africa.

Still just a shadow, Tosca releases a Tsssk, and although I’m not sure whether it was directed at me, I straighten up quickly. At the same time, accepting responsibility for the scolding, Benito removes his finger, still digging, from his nose. The woman advances very slowly, like a sea lion out of water, tongue slack, rocking. At the foot of the armchair, she collapses. Thirty-six with the head of a nine-year-old, she says, presumably referring to Benito.

So, girl, you know how to give injections. Yes, I say. I need two a day, when I get up and before I go to bed. All right? Before I can reply, she asks again. It wasn’t Mercedes who sent you? I shake my head and show by my expression that I don’t know any Mercedes. Look, I have to take these, she says and shows me some long, amber-coloured glass phials: Morphine 10mg. The pain keeps on hurting, I just use it so I can forget for a while, so that it hurts somewhere else, she says. I nod in silence, with a minimal smile, and since I don’t ask, she becomes impatient and explains: A tumour, girl, here, at the back, she says, indicating the nape of her neck with her thumb over her shoulder. A peach of a tumour. She coughs, laughs, both at the same time. But don’t worry, it’s nice and tame, if you behave yourself, I’ll introduce you one day. Are you sure you know how to do this? Beni, come here, orders the woman and the huge boy obeys. She looks me in the eye: Let’s see, inject this into his arm. She gives me a syringe and a bag of saline solution. I hesitate, but she encourages me with her hands. I fill half the tube, I ask for his arm, I feel it, I look for the vein, I press down and prick. Uh, protests the boy and the woman asks him: Did it hurt? No, he replies, a bit. Ok, continues Tosca, someone’s coming today, but not tomorrow, so I’ll expect you at eight, or better, seven thirty. Agreed? Yes. When I’m already on my way out she wants to know how much I’ll charge. I shrug, I haven’t thought about it. Well, tell me later, but don’t go crazy.

Outside, Canetti comes towards me, emerging from the gloom. He guides me towards the door with his arm extended. And? Fine, I say, she seems like a good woman. Yes, fierce but good, he replies contentedly, almost proudly, as if speaking about himself. We go out to the street and it looks like he’s planning to see me home. Let’s go, he says, and I leap in first: You don’t need to come with me, I can find the way myself, I lie. But he insists on taking me the block and a half that separate us from the main avenue. Then I understand, the check shirt, the combed hair, the clean-shaven face, it wasn’t altruism, he’s expecting something in return for finding me this little job, as he called it this morning. It’s not clear. I glance at him for a good few seconds, trying to guess his intentions: will he want to invite me for coffee to continue telling me his woes, or will he expect me to ask him to my hotel room. Just in case, and to prevent a return journey filled with tedious questions, I only take drastic action when we reach the corner: I’d prefer to go back alone, thanks for everything. Canetti stays silent, with a disappointed expression, as if I’d tricked him, and I hurry to cross before it occurs to him to follow me.

Venturing down new streets on the way back to the hotel, I immediately forget about Canetti. In my mind, he becomes less and less offensive, just a man with real, incurable loneliness. Instead, Tosca occupies all my thoughts, that impossible woman. I think about the Virgin Mary in her shrine, about the macrocephalic son, about the silent television, the piles of medicine boxes, about her swaddled cancer, but also about Jaime, the truck that ran him over, the driver who carried on pretending not to have noticed, how could he not have seen? I’ll never know.

Illnesses, accidents, pills, gunshots, the sea. I make a mental list of all the ways of dying that occur to me at that moment. I wonder which will be destined for me.

Hotter and hotter: enveloping, sticky, like a distant relative, invisible and giant, the kind that bears down and won’t stop hugging you. After injecting Tosca’s morning dose, I return to the hotel and spend the morning watching Simón make a thousand attempts to climb the cistern that never was. The Spaniard has resigned herself and no longer reprimands him. The rest of the day unfolds in more or less the same way as the previous day: at two, handover with Iris at the entrance to the zoo, that world of children and reptiles until half six, when I return to the guesthouse, prepare some food, put Simón to bed before ten, back to Tosca’s and a night-time walk in solitude. By virtue of repetition, all the things that just a few weeks ago seemed absurd now feel completely normal to me.

Yessica treats me better now, there are even days when she speaks to me as an equal. Over the course of an afternoon, she often asks me to take her place so she can escape to the toilet. Cover for me a while, that’s what she tells me. She doesn’t say as much but I know she’s going to retouch her make-up, which has melted in the heat, exaggerating her features. She comes back looking like new, healthy, her cheeks red with a double flush, from the powder and the temperature. Sometimes she slips off when her mobile rings too. She has lots of boyfriends, or none, I haven’t worked it out yet.

Today she confesses. A different, almost tender Yessica is looking me in the eye: I’ve been out with guys, she says, waving her phone, but this is different, he’s not just anyone. I’m totally hooked, just imagine if I fall in love. And what do you like about him, I ask just for the sake of it, to sound friendly. Everything, the way he is.

Apart from her and Canetti, I often run into the boy who takes care of the polar bear, I don’t know his name, to me he’ll always be the boy who takes care of the polar bear. He’s a friendly guy, who stares at me intensely, to see if I notice.

When it’s quiet, I make the most of the time to study the plaques above the animals. Sometimes I question Esteban, who always answers hurriedly, as if he doesn’t believe I’m really interested. Yesterday, for example, seeing that the Indian python was unusually active, coiling and uncoiling itself around the petrified trunk, I remembered the artificial mouse nursery Iris’s aunt had set up in her Moscow apartment and I asked him what the snakes ate. Without stopping, eyebrows arched, surprised by my curiosity, my ignorance, he said twice: Rabbits, rabbits. He enunciated clearly, almost soundlessly, as if it were a secret, or just obvious. Assuming they eat them live, I would have liked to ask him what he knew about the technique of tying mice up by the tail to make them easier to eat, whether the same was done with rabbits, but he’d already moved away.