Iosi Havilio: Open Door

It’s one forty-five. The bus driver told me that instead of returning to Pilar I’d be better taking a local bus to Luján, and from there catching the train or the Luján coach service.

Are you hungry? asks Jaime and comes back round the horse. We go outside and the harsh sunlight hurts our eyes, just like the blinding light in cinema foyers when the film ends. In the sky, a tiny light aircraft crosses the horizon and leaves a soapy trail that fades at the tip. A white foam, whiter than the clouds. It’s like being somewhere else.

He used to race cuadreras , says Jaime as he cuts salami into thin slices, gesturing towards the stable with his chin. Now I can see him up close: the flat face, clean-shaven, and the very hairy neck and chest. Jaime must be married, he must have a wife and two or three children, but there’s no sign of them.

An oblong window covers a good part of the kitchen wall and looks out onto open country. My eyes close. I resist for a while, until I begin to doze. I come and go, between sleep and the green world on the other side of the window. Jaime stays quiet, he doesn’t intervene. I can feel his presence nearby but it’s as if he weren’t there.

At some point a dull thud rouses us and forces us to pick up the conversation. He talks, I listen.

Jaime tells me that he has a scythe and, now that he doesn’t have a fixed job anymore, he’s devoting his time to weeding the plant nursery at the colony. I have no idea how many years it’s been abandoned, it’s practically a forest, he says. I wonder what the colony could be but Jaime changes the subject:

‘It’s carnival next week. We still celebrate it here,’ he says, and I smile.

It’s gone five and I don’t understand how it got so late. Jaime takes me to the Luján bus station in his truck. So that you’re not too late, he says. Where the dirt track meets the road Jaime turns left and a few metres on, he slows down. There’s the entrance, the nursery is over there at the back, he says, pointing out a large iron arch with a sign in the middle: Dr Domingo Cabred’s Psychiatric Hospital Colony . It’s like a village within a village, says Jaime with a half-smile on his lips, the first I’ve seen him give.

We pass the rest of the journey in silence, the lights of nightfall staining the windscreen. Before saying goodbye, I ask Jaime why he didn’t call a local vet. He shrugs and climbs back into the truck, which purrs away again as it did at midday.

From a public telephone in the bus station, I call Aída’s number. I didn’t have a good day, I’m low, she says from the other end. She wants to talk, to chat. I tell her that I want to go to the cinema like we said. She hesitates, I insist. We arrange to meet at quarter to eight in the bar on the corner of Avenida Córdoba and Montevideo, half a block from her house.

The return journey seems quick, drifting in and out of a sleep that mingles with flashing images of the motorway: a shopping centre that looks like a mock spaceship, a service station just like the shopping centre, various toll barriers so similar that I get confused, and a silver-coloured tower that flashes past too quickly for me to work out what it is.

Aída is waiting at the door of the bar. She sees me arriving, I’m about fifty metres away, diagonally across the street. Aída looks the other way and lights a cigarette, pretending not to notice.

‘You have to be honest with me …’ she begins to say, but she’s interrupted by the waiter. We order a beer. Aída is about to speak again, but I cut her off with the first thing that comes to mind. I tell her the hamster story, a true story. Aída lights a fresh cigarette, looking like she has something to say, but she resigns herself, swallows two aspirins, and listens to me.

It was a few weeks ago, at the end of December, a Saturday morning, and the owner of the surgery had gone away for the weekend, between Christmas and New Year. It was almost one o’clock and since I was alone, I closed up a bit early. I’m dealing with the till, the cash, the receipts and all that, when I hear someone shaking the door handle trying to get in, I play dumb and hide behind the counter, so that they don’t see me. I’m not about to open up. I count to thirty. They’ve gone, that’s it, I get back to what I’m doing. But soon I hear a knock at the door. Hard, desperate knocking. I go to answer it, I have no choice. On the other side of the grille, there’s an old woman with a tiny face staring at me. I tell her that we’re already closed. I don’t care, she says rather hoarsely. I want to see the owner, she says. I tell her that the owner isn’t here, to come back another day. That won’t do, it has to be now, she says and it’s as if her voice is giving out. From her small, old-lady’s handbag, she produces a package wrapped in newspaper. She opens it slightly, just enough for me to catch a glimpse of hamster, stiff, rather crushed, on its back. I’m revolted, by the animal, by the old woman, and most of all by that little package, and I tell her that it would be best for her to come back on Monday and speak to the owner. But it’s too late, the old woman gets mad. Some kind of spasm takes hold of her, her eyes cloud over, her veins swell up, she looks like she’s about to explode. And she shouts: The lousy thing didn’t even last a day. I try to calm her, but that makes it worse. Drop dead, cheap bitch, she says to me and sticks her hand through the grille, dangling the hamster in the air.

Aída bursts out laughing, coughing a bit between drags. We compose ourselves and look at each other again. She says: See, we have a laugh together, don’t we? And I nod, to humour her.

Afterwards we went to the cinema and saw a really bad film.

We ate in a Creole fast food restaurant of the most decadent kind and got drunk on the worst wine possible. We slept together, naked and embracing.

The next day, Aída disappeared.

In the dark, Aída looked a certain way. In the daylight that look changed and she became sad again. The light exaggerated the angles of her face and her natural pallor. In the half-darkness, as she was when I met her, surrounded by other bodies, Aída struck me as an attractive woman, tall, sinuous, with bony shoulders and a wide forehead. When I saw her up close, as she spoke to me, I began to focus on her details: the tip of the sharp nose, the slightly uneven teeth, the broken, desperate eyes. Aída almost didn’t have skin it was so fine, like silk paper, laying bare her veins.

We met by chance in a bar on Calle Reconquista on the first day of the year. I had gone in without planning to, partly because of the rain and partly because I’d been wandering for quite a while and was starting to get bored. I ordered a glass of wine and settled myself at a corner of the bar, right in front of the till. In a while, a foreigner with a heavyset face and freckly nose sat down next to me and offered to buy me a couple of drinks. He was twenty-something and smiled a lot, too much. He wasn’t bad, but definitely not my type. In a moment, he said in that kind of bad Spanish that some foreigners speak: ‘ Acá, todavía es mejor .’ I laughed, of course, and he stared me in the eye, almost serious. I’m going to the toilet, he said in English and didn’t return.

The rain had stopped and I’d decided to move on when Aída appeared, elbowing me so hard that I spilt what was left of my wine down my blouse. I also took a little bite out of the glass. A strange sensation, rather unpleasant. Aída whipped round quickly, appalled, slightly drunk, and I think she spilt some of her drink on my trousers too. From that moment on, Aída didn’t stop talking. How awful, was the first thing she said. She grabbed my hand and led me to the toilets, barging her way though the crowd. She took a cotton bud from her handbag, wet it with alcohol, and brushed it several times across my lower lip, which was only bleeding slightly. It’s nothing, just a tiny cut, she was saying. She offered me a cigarette and we smoked in front of the mirror. Me, sitting on the edge of the toilet with my legs swinging; her, leaning against the wall. She asked me everything at once and I replied to some of her questions.