Iosi Havilio - Open Door

‘Now there are no furious lunatics, except in cases of acute crisis,’ Dr Cabred explains to me. ‘It is the old method of treatment that made them mad. Instead of being on top of each other, getting worked up, over-excited, here they are free to come and go, to be alone, to work, to walk about; they don’t think about escaping (we have only one breakout per hundred patients), nor rebelling, nor shouting, nor fighting: they are free!’

At first Boca’s shouts are in my dream, but they don’t say anything, nor do they belong to Boca. They are deformed shouts, filled with fury, the cries of someone running out of air and on the point of suffocating. The voice becomes flesh, too close. Boca shouts as hard as his throat will allow, from the other side of the wall: Fire, fire, fire. Jaime gives a start, elbowing me in the stomach. I half open my eyes. Boca’s shadow is moving like a madman from one side of the veranda to the other and he howls fire three times again. Jaime gets up as best he can without switching on the light and heads for the kitchen. I’m trembling. Without moving from the bed, in the dark, I hear the sound of the bolt being drawn back and the door opening. A long silence follows, Boca’s face must say it all. Jaime comes back into the room, sits on the edge of the bed and hesitates for a few seconds before putting on his trousers and boots, just in case someone comes to tell him not to bother, to lie down again, that it’s not true. He speaks in the dark, in a low voice so as not to wake me:

‘He says the stable’s on fire.’

Eloísa came to see me with a bunch of gigantic hydrangeas and a discoloured rose, a wild bouquet, gathered on her way.

‘I picked them for you,’ she says. ‘Do you like them? Let’s put them in some water.’

We have lunch together, without Jaime, and we stay in the kitchen playing cards for a long time.

Later it began to rain and we had to close the shutters because water was coming in all over the place. At the kitchen table, clutching a maté gourd, Eloísa doesn’t stop talking, she tells me everything. Is this your room, she asks and by the time I catch up with her she’s already going through the wardrobe. I sit on the edge of the bed, while Eloísa takes down as many hangers as she can hold and embraces my few clothes, which are mixed up with a suede bag belonging to Jaime. She examines them, enthusing over some, criticising others, making a thousand gestures with her eyebrows and lips, until she chooses one, letting the rest fall to the floor.

‘Can I try it on?’

I smile. Eloísa undresses. She wants to impress me.

It must be the coldest day of the year, everyone has a scarf tied round their neck. Some are wearing hats, even gloves. The morgue looks different in the winter, it becomes less drastic. This is the third time I’ve been here in less than three months. I hope this will be the end of it. Yasky summonsed me at short notice because Monday is a bank holiday, which complicates everything as far as the police are concerned, he explained on the phone. Jaime wanted to give me a lift, but a small job came up, so he said, at the last minute.

The procedure is quicker than usual because the administration office has already closed for the weekend, which speeds up the bureaucracy. I had come mentally prepared to continue the game with the ginger man and to see how far it would go but it will have to wait for next time, although perhaps there won’t be a next time, yeah, I hope not.

The man on duty uncovers the body and I can’t help spitting out a laugh which is more like a sneeze: the corpse has a beard and a moustache. Yasky releases a shout that disconcerts the poor man.

‘What is this?’ says Yasky in a voice louder than I thought him capable. The man hurries to cover the body and Yasky grabs him by the arm, leading him out of the room. They leave me alone with a collection of corpses, which must be signalling to me in silence. I’m not needed here, I leave before one of them decides to talk to me.

Coffee in hand, standing by the counter in a student bar where a radio is blaring rock music at full blast, Yasky attempts to explain the inexplicable.

‘There was a mix-up,’ he says biting the rim of the plastic cup, between sips of coffee. ‘Someone put a cross in the wrong place, they marked f instead of m , it’s outrageous. I don’t understand how no one realised. The weekend comes around and their heads are all over the place. I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire career, I’m going to open an investigation first thing on Tuesday. I don’t know what to tell you.’

I tell him not to worry about me, that all this business has made me immune. Yasky relaxes, his mood changes and he asks me if I wouldn’t like to go for a drink in another bar, somewhere less noisy. He asks me in the negative, as many men do. OK, I say, let’s go. On the way there it hits me: Yasky wanted me to come just to be able to see me again. He fancies me, or worse, he’s fallen in love with me. He summonsed me because that way I couldn’t refuse to come, I’m duty bound, and because this is our place, the place where we meet. I humour him.

In the second bar, we sit at a table at the back and order a beer. After exchanging a few comments about this winter, which arrived without warning, overnight, Yasky leaves a long pause, takes a slug of beer, tipping up his pint until it’s empty, and starts speaking about his brother Julio. He talks as though he owes me an explanation about that as well. His eyes are glistening.

‘Sometimes I think that it could just as easily have been me, these things don’t depend on the individual, it’s pure chance. I’ve often wondered what the reasons were, whether there was a trigger, some episode that I missed, but it doesn’t change anything, I always just end up tying myself in knots. And don’t forget that Julio and I are the same age.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘you look like twins.’

‘Not just twins, we’re identical twins, but it makes no difference, we go through the same things.’

With Yasky, time passes very slowly. Even so, night falls and I don’t want to return to the countryside. I’m scared of running into Eloísa.

‘It’s late’ says Yasky. ‘Can I take you anywhere?’

‘Is your place far?’ is the first thing to come out of my mouth and Yasky is eager.

It’s a two-room flat, facing away from the street, decorated without enthusiasm, a pastiche of furniture and tasteless objects, lots of glass and lots of wicker. Yasky asks me where I want to sleep. It’s your house, I say.

‘My room’s a disaster, I’d better not even show it to you. A bachelor pad,’ he says, and laughs. We laugh. In the living room, there’s a polka-dot sofa-bed. Yasky unfolds it and starts to extol its virtues: the cushions are built in, the mattress is queen-size, more comfortable than a lot of beds. It’s as though he wants to sell it to me. I wonder when he’s going to jump on me.

Next to the head of the sofa-bed there’s a black telephone with keys that light up when I unhook the receiver. I call Jaime and tell him that I’m staying in Buenos Aires, at a girlfriend’s house.

‘It got late, I’ll be back early tomorrow.’

‘And the girl? Was it her?’

I stay mute, as does Jaime. He murmurs a sad goodbye before hanging up.

Yasky brings out some blue sheets patterned with shooting stars and apologises for them:

‘I’ve still got them from when I was a teenager.’

And although he says it in reference to the sheets, Yasky is talking about himself, he’s confessing, behind the court clerk there’s a teenager with problems. He goes into the bathroom, leaving me alone, I don’t know what I’m doing here.