Iosi Havilio - Paradises

Without a phone, which had been cut off by a fallen pole or lack of payment, I never knew which, the biggest effort was gathering the momentum to call the agent. One horrible morning, when everything seemed to be falling irreversibly apart, I got myself together and we went to the entrance to the hospital, where I remembered there being a phone box. Half an hour’s walk, only part of which Simón did on foot. He travelled on my shoulders for the longest stretch. The booth was there, but not the phone. It was removed a while ago, one of the guards informed me. And he risked adding: Nowadays no one uses public phones, what with mobiles and everything. He also pointed out a phone box at the service station.

The agent’s voice sounded like someone shouting from one riverbank to another. Hello, hello, I hear in the distance. I leave it a few minutes, assuming that he’s busy or unable to speak, and I dial again. Ah, it’s you, he says. Yes, yes, good, you’re doing the right thing calling me, he continues, and adds: The thing is that it’s a bit late now, I did warn you. I wanted to interrupt but the guy was in full flow: I made it quite clear, these people don’t mess around, it’s just like I told you. A pause, a bit of interference and he continues: All the same, I’ll see what I can do. Shall I arrange a hired van for you? What for, I manage to ask. For the move. No, no, I say, nothing in the house is mine. It’s just the two of us and a couple of bags. A taxi, then. What day is it today, he asks and answers himself: Tuesday the thirteenth, well, it would be within a fortnight. I’ll be calling you, but I have to go now, he says and leaves me thinking about Tuesday the thirteenth, I would never have known.

The eviction order arrived, but there was no eviction. Very early on 30th November, a white car was waiting for us on the other side of the gate, very similar to the one that had taken us to Jaime’s wake. Guarding it on either side, in a V formation, there were two other cars, the agent’s and a four-by-four. When everything is stowed in the boot of the taxi, the tall man approaches me, leans down and says softly: It’s a shame things had to be this way. I did my part, he says, and puts an envelope in my hand: Don’t mention this to anyone, take it as a gift. On the way to Luján, I tear open the envelope and count 1,500 pesos. Enough to survive for a month or two.

We arrived in the city along with the floods. We got out in Pacífico at around midday. A short while earlier, we had heard the barrage of hail on the roof of the bus and the complete darkness passing by the window. In fact, it was only me who heard it, as Simón was still sleeping unawares. The deluge must have lasted half an hour, long enough to turn avenues into rivers and streets into streams. We got out at a bus stop in the centre of a labyrinth of cars pointing in all directions. Car horns managed to do what the hail hadn’t: they woke Simón, who opened his eyes in the midst of all the chaos but didn’t cry; the noise was bigger than him, as was the atmosphere of uncertainty. We walked a few blocks along the middle of the street, the only island of tarmac in the stream of waves lapping over the drains. To cross the road we followed a line of people guided by a rope tied from one pavement to the other. Further along, some men in fluorescent jackets were using a boat to rescue an elderly lady and her dog.

Without much choice in the matter, we took refuge in a bar crammed full of people. Squeezed in at the counter, we shared a ham and cheese sandwich and a 7UP. As Simón chewed, he swivelled his gaze from side to side like a mechanical doll, from the madness in the street to a giant television screen replaying footage of the old lady navigating between cars with her dog. He observed the panorama without astonishment, the way you accept dreams.

We must have stayed there a good hour, until the situation outside seemed to calm down slightly. We moved away from that rehearsal of apocalypse, hugging the side of a walled enclosure that hid the gardens of an endless building. Two blocks further on, water up to our ankles, we came across a hotel. With no time to hesitate, I rang the bell. But the Hotel Lyon, as it was called, didn’t allow children or pets. We were attended by a woman in a hairnet, her legs swollen with fat varicose veins, who was quite friendly despite the restrictions. As she spoke, she was holding her sandals in one hand and a hairdryer in the other. You’ve got another one on the far side of the avenue. It’s not that expensive and it isn’t bad either, she said. What I can’t tell you is whether they’ll have room. She saw us off, raising the hairdryer as if it were an extension of her arm.

I walked a few blocks along the pavement with Simón in my arms and the bag over my shoulder, my trousers quickly succumbing to the soaking. It was quite an effort to find the Hotel Fénix, in fact I walked past it twice without realising. It was a three-storey house, the front covered in graffiti, slogans and remnants of posters. The name was etched on a bronze plaque, the kind used by dentists and notaries in small towns.

Another bell, another woman opens the door to us, wringing out water. But this one is smoking. She has a wrinkled face and a button nose, and she looks us up and down distrustfully. I ask for a room. I’ve only got one left, without bathroom, she says in a very marked Spanish accent, the kind you hear in films, and adds: Payment up-front. She lets us in. We follow her down a long, dark corridor that leads out to a flooded courtyard. Barred windows, lumpy walls and a statue of the Virgin Mary built into an artificial cave. In the centre, there’s a cement drum, a cistern that’s half buried or was never finished. All around, ferns. Hanging, on the tables, in pots, climbing the cables. The place is reasonably well cared for and yet exudes a feeling of irredeemable sadness. The woman disappears and returns shortly with a bunch of keys. She shows us our room, long and narrow like a coach: two beds, a bedside table in between and a wooden wardrobe that takes up half the space. Here’s the kitchen, she signals to me and explains: You use it, you wash up and you clean it. To get to the bathroom you have to cross the courtyard, she tells me. We’re used to that, the last month at Jaime’s was the same. She raises her chin to ask whether I like it, whether we’ll stay. It’s fine, I say, and pay for a week. I feel extremely relieved.

The room has a window that takes some effort to open, with its old, iron latticework. When I finally manage, it isn’t really worth it — more floods and flowerpots. In addition to the ferns, I discover a bed of thistles.

No sooner have we arrived than we meet the first challenge. In a moment of distraction, Simón, who hasn’t lost that intrepid attitude he’s adopted since Jaime’s death, climbs up onto the fake cistern and jumps. The Spaniard, which as I’ll discover later is what everyone calls her, sticks her head out of a window identical to ours on the other side of the courtyard and gives two violent tsks, as if shooing away a cat. Simón pays no attention and the woman seeks me out with her gaze and purses her lips, reproaching my lack of care. Get out of there, I say, and Simón does as I tell him.

In the afternoon, as the water level drops, but with the flood still making itself felt in the whirr of sirens and the traffic jam in the background, we go for a stroll around the neighbourhood. The hotel is on a street with no traffic lights, which is impossible to cross because of the speed of the passing cars. On the same block as the Fénix there is a row of old town houses, small mansions from another era, some of them camouflaging their abandonment behind clusters of bougainvillea and climbing figs that don’t understand the concept of dividing walls, others laying bare their decay. Opposite, across the lanes of traffic, a construction site split by two jibs pointing in opposite directions. At the foot of the embankment, a few shacks are holding their ground: corrugated-iron roofs, walls made of canvas and cardboard. Without crossing the street, there’s also a mechanic’s workshop, a warehouse and, half a block down, in premises that still have a sign saying Grills to Go , an Evangelical temple.