Iosi Havilio - Paradises

When I’m almost done, I shake the mouse but the arrow stays still. I ask the chubby boy, who comes back around the counter again. If I may, he says, then types and types but nothing happens. It’s crashed, he tells me, you opened too many windows at once. They opened themselves, I defend myself, and he looks like he doesn’t believe me. And because Simón is impatient, but mainly because the idea of starting from scratch drives me mad, I give up. I’ll come back later, I say out loud. Ok, he says, I’ll try and save it. We eat on the street on the way back to the guesthouse, pork in bread rolls sold to us by a woman sweaty from the grill of her tiny stall under the bridge. Going through my head for the rest of the day: Garibaldi poom, Garibaldi poom.

In the evening, Iris forces me out again. She says I have to hurry and send my CV because there are public holidays coming up that will complicate things. Because Simón is sleeping, she’ll wait for me in the courtyard in case he wakes. I retrace that morning’s steps and reach the cyber cafe. The entrance is now lit by a neon arrow. I’m served by the same boy in the same T-shirt, but he doesn’t recognise me, I have to remind him. The CV, I say. Ah, yes, I managed to save it but I don’t have any machines free up here, I’ll send you down to number thirty-three. So I go downstairs, where a never-ending basement opens out with fifty-odd compartments separated by curtains. I get settled and in the centre of the screen an icon called CV is flashing. Magic.

After a while I realise that I’m caught in crossfire. They’re playing to the death. Initially it sounds as though there are two of them, one on either side of me, but as the minutes pass, the war cries multiply. Occasionally, because they’re wearing earphones, someone will let out an ill-tempered, uncontrolled cry, which makes me shudder. What are you doing, you bastard, you shot me in the back. Stick your machine gun up your arse, dickhead. I go to the zoo’s website and have to upload my CV three times before it’s accepted. I don’t want to go back too soon, so I start browsing. I scroll through an online newspaper. I find out about the death of a singer I’ve never heard of, goals, a multiple collision on the coast road and an archaeological discovery in Palestine that could change the history of Christianity. An advert appears for a car that operates without fuel. I close everything and a page pops up with women in bikinis or underwear, framed by endless little windows. They show their tits, their arses, they blow kisses. Some reveal their faces, others have their eyes pixellated. The crème de la crème, says the slogan. Astrid, Marina, Perla, Natalí, Kiara, Casandra and many more, each with a telephone number below their picture. I click on Mona, facing the camera, posing on all fours, enormous tits, erect, like foam rubber, and nipples like corks, with some kind of Hindu decoration in the background. I watch her for a while, my gaze distant, resting on the furthest point, trying to guess where this girl came from, where she’s going, why her and not me.

Sunday morning. The songs, hallelujahs and applause from the Evangelical church drive me out of bed. I’m beginning to suspect that it shares a wall with my room, I should go up to the hotel roof to find out. Up too early, in order to prevent Simón from waking the rest of the guesthouse with the tears of boredom I can see coming, we go to the plaza. A local plaza that takes up a whole block, surrounded by bars, ice-cream parlours and clothes shops; there are early risers like us and others who are still resisting the idea of going to bed.

We install ourselves in the sandpit. As I push Simón on the swing from the other side of the railings, I see a blond coffee seller, Russian or Romanian like Iris, surrounded by a group of taxi drivers, some in uniform, even wearing ties, others more informal. The guy serves coffee and hands out croissants with the gravity of a civil servant, without raising his eyes, meticulous and slow. During the lulls, he changes round the flasks, the silver for the red one, the red for the green, a mysterious operation. Trade secrets, superstition, who knows. Despite the seriousness, it looks fun. He doesn’t take part in the conversation, as if he only understands the language of requests, which he interprets with emphatic blinks and fulfils with an ostentatious nod. Almost reverential. Nor is he affected by the peals of laughter, not even when two customers have a play fight very close to him. I lift Simón down from the swing so that he can keep playing in the sand with an empty plastic bottle. Without saying anything, I leave, I turn round and approach the coffee seller. I wait my turn and ask for a black coffee. Hearing my voice, the man is surprised, he’s used to dealing with a different clientele, but he hides it by interchanging the flasks and serves me the coffee in a polystyrene cup. Before he hands it to me, he shows me a lid and mimes covering it. No, no, it’s fine like this. It strikes me that this man could be doing anything else, anywhere, but no, he’s here, unhurriedly serving coffee. I move away a few steps and put myself in his place, a coffee girl like Iris, why not. I’d have to find another plaza, another corner. A freelance job where I could bring Simón along without having to ask anyone’s permission. Iris’s cart is still in her room. Although I’m not sure whether she still has the flasks. Coffee, pastries, sandwiches, fruit salad. I talk myself into it.

Back at the hotel, I spot Iris from the corridor, sunbathing in a corner of the courtyard, the only wedge of light that isn’t blocked by the surrounding buildings. I never would have imagined that she was into tanning. I’m about to say: Do you still have the cart? And the flasks? Because I was thinking … But as soon as she opens her eyes and sees us, she waves and gets in ahead of me: I was looking for you for ages, she says. Her expression is radiant, she builds the suspense, she has some news for me. I think about Draco, her boyfriend, who must have returned from Patagonia. I could swear that’s it. No. She says that on Friday the people at the zoo left me a message on her mobile asking me to go in on Monday. I just heard it yesterday, Iris apologises and starts pressing her phone. Aren’t you happy? Yes, I say, and swallow my other idea.

Five minutes before twelve on Monday, the sun as hot as it could be, I knock on the human resources door again. Yes, they’re expecting me but I have to wait for forty minutes in a tiny reception in front of a gigantic map of the zoo’s attractions. A last-minute meeting, the freckly boy explains. Iris has the day off, so she’s stayed with Simón in the hotel. I make the most of the time to familiarise myself with the place a bit, the layout of the cages, the food stands, the toilets. If it occurs to the person conducting the interview to test me, ask me for example what was behind the Hindu temple where the elephants live, I would be able to answer: The Bengal tiger.

When the door finally opens, the person inside, still invisible, says: Come in. I enter a small room with an oblong window close to the ceiling, just like a doctor’s surgery. My first feeling is of having opened a fridge, and it will stay that way the whole time I’m there. A dry, artificial winter. The man is dark, thirty-something, with leathery, porous skin, his hair spiked up with gel like a porcupine. He has a little gold chain round his neck, a cross with no Christ figure, camouflaged against his chest hair. As the minutes pass, I come to realise that his hairstyle is a perfect reduction of the other parts of his body: his small, nervous mouth; fidgety hands, which cross and uncross at least a hundred times during our meeting; strong shoulders, as if he lifts weights between sentences. I’m listening, he begins. I open my mouth without much conviction and say the little I have to say. Nothing spontaneous, I recite with middling fluency what I wrote a couple of days ago on my CV, in more or less the same order. When I mention my years of studying veterinary medicine, he interrupts me, waving his hand in the air like a traffic policeman. We have more than enough vets here, he says.