Iosi Havilio - Paradises

In the flat, Herbert and Simón are playing at torturing a moribund beetle on the bathroom floor. When he sees me, Herbert blushes. He moves, as if wanting to hide what they’re doing. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to reprimand him for. I ruffle their hair in greeting and with that they are forced to uncover the insect, pinned by three toothpicks. I don’t censure them; I don’t see anything bad in it — dirty, perhaps, but not bad.

I lie down to rest. The ceiling reflects the network of tree branches and the movement from the street at a speed I’ve never seen before. I make an effort to distinguish outlines, but abstraction always defeats me. Wanting to imitate that very quick, animated sequence, I try to blink in synchrony: completely impossible. I give in. The original landscape is disintegrated by this inverted projection and a new one created. A brief siesta and it’s eight o’clock.

Herbert is still in the flat; they’ve abandoned the beetle, now they’re entertaining themselves scratching each other’s heads, in turn. Aren’t you leaving, I ask. I’m in no hurry, I’m not training today. I wash my face and begin to hear the first bangs. Iris is arriving soon; I ask Benito to let her in, I can’t be bothered going down, in fact I’d like to be able to sleep a little longer. It was a struggle to convince her but she eventually agreed. She tried to insist that we eat in the hotel, but I had already decided. The truth is that she doesn’t like this building at all. She arrives loaded down with bags: fried chicken, olives, cheese, crisps, chocolate-coated peanuts and two bottles of cider. She’s taken aback when she sees Herbert, not for any particular reason, she just doesn’t like surprises. At half nine, Sonia appears, scolding her son from the door. What are you thinking, staying this late. I’m about to leap to his defence, say that I invited him, but I close my mouth. It’s a matter for mothers.

Before eating, we smoke the half joint that Eloísa left me. Iris refuses twice and finally accepts. It has an immediate effect on her. Her eyes narrow and she enters a state of childishness close to stupidity. A long way from her usual extremes, exultant or ill-humoured, for a while she becomes almost autistic. The joint overshadows me too. We devour without pause, no chatting, everything we have.

At half eleven, we go out onto the street. At the entrance to the building there’s a long table and by the kerb, a barbecue with steaks and a heap of flaming coals. Bottles of cider pass from hand to hand. A whole host of people I’ve never seen before and never will again come in and out of the door. A broad-shouldered woman with sequins stuck to her body moves off diagonally without showing her face. I could swear she’s the famous Eva, but there’s no one here I know who could confirm it. Firecrackers and gunshots, it’s hard to tell which is which, mingle in the air. On the next block, the Ecuadorians, as they’re known in the neighbourhood, are holding their own party. Tosca is the only one who doesn’t show her face, she stays in her hovel. The rest, in varying degrees of joy and lethargy, parade unceasingly in front of us: Benito, Sonia, Canetti, Mercedes, Herbert, Perico and the hard kids, in a gang. Simón trots after one of the little girls with Asian faces. The layers of reality, all I can see, lead me to a hallucinatory, acid-trip limbo. A firecracker, and I fall to the ground all at once.

Iris, a better drunk than at Christmas, less melancholic and more fun, insists that we go up close to see the Ecuadorians’ dummy being burnt. We stay there a good while in the heat of the bonfire, which I see in duplicate, like a miniature, in Simón’s pupils.

The snake nightmares return. This time just one, a python with a man’s head and luminous eyes that pursues me, fattening the pipes of el Buti. I wake up on the verge of asphyxiation, almost with the dawn. I find the antidote in insomnia. The remedy in obsession. To combat snakes: more snakes. Sitting up in bed, I grope for the big book by Albertus Seba. Making myself comfortable, as I leaf through, I feel something pricking my groin. A pencil with zoo animals on it, I don’t really know how it came to be in my pocket. Everything is linked. I go back through the pages and one of the illustrations is covered by a transparent sheet that triggers an immediate impulse. I start tracing a snake that occupies a whole page, the Corallus hortulanus or garden tree boa. That’s how the year starts for me.

Third of January. Dawn breaks, sticky and oppressive; it couldn’t be more humid. I go to the bank to pick up my first pay cheque. They gave me a card but the cash machine swallowed it. Iris, who’s on a day off, will stay with Simón in the hotel. Before I leave, she gives me instructions: how to get there, where to get off, not to queue twice, and above all to avoid being served by the cashier with the moustache who always manages to find a problem. The ID, the signature, the system, there’s something new every time. Best to arrive half an hour early and queue in the street. It’s worse later, so she said.

I take the subway at Pacífico. Progressively, as I descend underground, first at the ticket window, then crossing the turnstiles, on the escalator leading to the platform, the viscous heat at ground level doubles, triples, until it reaches its peak inside the carriage. Without being quite full, there are a lot of people and as we approach the city centre we are increasingly crushed together. Someone comments: It must be about fifty degrees in here.

There are three people around me with whom I can’t help maintaining physical contact. In front of me, behind me, arms, back, even the head of a boy with endless dreadlocks who will spend the entire journey rearranging his hair and scratching everyone else’s faces with it. There are men in suits, ladies with bags, a down-and-out, a group of percussionists who don’t really know where to put their drums. There’s a girl who’s unbelievably dressed, the seams of her trousers on the verge of bursting, a fat man sleeping, his cheek plastered against the window, and a very pregnant woman who provokes a ripple of sympathy as soon as she gets on. Strong garlic breath wafts through this atmosphere, impossible to identify which mouth it comes from. I breathe as best I can; I hope it’s over soon.

Between Callao and Tribunales, more or less halfway, the train stops dead. Not violently, but still forcing us into a swaying motion that continues until we find our balance as a mass. Two minutes pass and the thing that causes irritation, ill humour, in some cases anxiety, is not knowing what’s happening, or how long we’ll be left stranded. Some accept it with resignation and, as well as sighing, they adopt bored expressions, checking the time on their mobiles with no hint of rebellion. Others, because that’s the way they are, a matter of temperament, start talking loudly, sound off about the subway workers, speculate, swear at no one in particular.

One man, the most agitated, he must be about forty with lots of curly grey hair, overplays his annoyance and, clearly without thinking about it, bangs his fist against the emergency box and pulls the red lever which peals out a shrill alarm, extremely high-pitched, as if to scare off rats. The man is met with synchronised disapproval. His intended heroism, the fact that he assumed his anger on behalf of the rest, makes him the target of all eyes. The hell is almost eternal. Fifteen minutes of enclosure, siren and sweat. Just about at the limit of what we can tolerate, just before someone carries out the threat of fainting, those standing next to the windows notify us of a movement of torches at the edge of the tunnel, they calm us down. Here, here, repeats one man and taps at the glass with his finger, fearing they’ll pass us by, the way it happens in dreams.