Iosi Havilio - Open Door

All this time, the fire had made and unmade a thousand things. It was impossible to reconstruct the path of the flames. Of some thin branches that I remembered from before, nothing remained but confused traces with no identity. They had become embers, and the embers ashes. The fire, which by now was looking a bit lifeless, needed to be fed. Order needed to be imposed to restore the calm.

I was getting up to do just that when a strange, living weight, from another world, dropped onto my right shoulder and looked me in the eye. And now there was no doubt. There it was, clinging to my body like a fairground parrot, a country rat in flesh and blood. And it was so different from the picture I’d had in my mind, so big and solid, it was anything but a rat. But how had it landed on my shoulder? I’ll never know. The truth is that it was on me for a very short time, a fraction of a second, which at that moment seemed like a year and a half. Just long enough to look me in the eye, then it jumped.

Jaime let out a gruff shout, like a caveman. He threw a half brick, I don’t know where he got it, and when he thought he’d cornered the beast, he began to shoot, point-blank, like a madman. He shot, reloaded, shot, reloaded again and shot, I lost count how many times. I closed my eyes, on reflex, and like that, with my eyes tight shut, it felt just like being caught up in a shootout in a film. Blindly, I had gone into the kitchen, either instinctively or because Jaime had pushed me there, I can’t remember. I sat down, opened my eyes carefully and observed the scene with my mouth half open and my fists clenched close to my neck to support my head. I watched what I could, what the angle and frame of the door would allow me to see. Finally the last shot rang out, followed by that humming stillness that comes after the firing subsides.

I peeked out. The armchair was destroyed and near the chimney there is still a hole today, about the size of a grapefruit, the source of which no one will ever guess. Jaime poked through what remained of the chair with the tip of the gun and discovered the decapitated rat in a corner. He was dripping sweat and I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t been crying a bit too.

Embarrassed, Jaime went to the kitchen to get a shovel without looking at me. He scooped up the animal, covered it with rubble and went out of the house with the shovel in his hand. He took it far away. And he stayed outside, he must have been thinking or smoking, because it took him half an hour to return.

I went back to the fireside and managed to revive the flames just before they went out. It was going to be a long night.

In the same way that Boca’s gruff shouts a few days ago had woken us to the fire devouring half the stable, not so much a loss for Jaime as a way to bury the horse for good, Eloísa was dragging us from our sleep by clapping her hands on the veranda. This time it was during siesta, a longer siesta than usual.

Jaime had brought out a box full of photos, which we had begun to look through as we lay on the bed. Old photos, almost sepia, from when the two Jaimes were young. At the racetrack, in the colony, at the stable door, by the side of the road. Jaime was a young man, not yet forty, with a moustache and ridiculous sideburns, his hair slicked back tightly with gel or pomade. He had an intense gaze, proud and macho. We came across a blurred photo of Jaime and a very pale woman with a kind face, raising their glasses in a restaurant with hams hanging down from the ceiling. Jaime and his wife, the wife he never mentions. He held the photo between his fingers for three long seconds without speaking. Perhaps he was waiting for me to ask about her, but the truth is I didn’t particularly want to find out. He kept passing me photos, in colour or black and white, every single one he had, photos of men posing with their arms around each other, Jaime in the middle, the countryside always there in the background. Afterwards, before he did, I fell asleep.

Eloísa clapped again and the echo of her hands colliding made the sheets vibrate. It was quarter to eight. Jaime stretched towards the window without getting out of bed, raised the blinds, and was met by Eloísa’s face in close-up at the window. A slightly out-of-focus Eloísa, seen through the mosquito net, tinted yellow by the light of the veranda. Poor Jaime, silently exasperated, flopped back onto the mattress.

‘It’s for you,’ he said, after a very theatrical pause.

I was always touched by the way that Eloísa, in spite of everything, in spite of herself, maintained certain customs of the countryside, such as clapping to announce her presence when she arrived at someone’s house. The thing is that Eloísa, deep down, was a simple country girl, and sometimes she forgot that.

I went into the kitchen, switched on the light, pushed open the door with my naked toes and felt the damp bricks of the veranda cold against my soles. Barely visible, standing with her back to me at the edge of the shaft of light, Eloísa lit a cigarette. Hi, she said and half turned, playing mysterious but betraying herself with that smile, crude, sweet and perverse all at once. She was wearing an outfit of black leather, half trashy, half cowboy, decorated with tassels, also leather, which fluttered at her sides. She liked me looking at her that way, with a mixture of amazement and complicity, and she widened her smile to reveal all her teeth, releasing a mouthful of smoke.

‘I’ve got the motorbike,’ she said. ‘Guido lent it to me for a few hours, until one.’

When I went back into the kitchen, Jaime was shaking up a fresh gourd of maté next to the kettle, which was engulfed in flames. Waiting for me to say something, playing dumb. I didn’t say anything, I went into the bathroom and peed quickly, splashed my face with cold water to wake me up, avoiding the mirror, and took two small jumps into the bedroom to put on the first thing I could find, without switching on the light.

‘You’re off out, then,’ Jaime confirmed, testing the maté with a few preliminary sucks at the straw.

‘For a while,’ I said, ‘just for a ride.’

And I added:

‘Her brother lent her the motorbike.’

Jaime overemphasised a sigh, his eyes loaded with irony, as if he were obliged to be happy about it too.

The motorbike’s headlight suddenly hit me face on. I felt my way forward a few metres, dazzled by the ring of light that refused to be eclipsed by my body.

‘Are you going like that?’ Eloísa complained from the darkness.

‘What do you mean, like that?’

‘With that blouse.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘I don’t know, it’s a bit strange, a bit old.’

She was right, this fabric printed with red and yellow roses didn’t go very well with her attire. I hadn’t noticed, but now that I could see myself properly, it did look a bit strange, as if from another era, a bit American Midwest. Let’s go, I said, it’s night-time, who’s going to notice?

Eloísa offered me the only helmet she had. I put it on without thinking. We drove through the village at full speed, without exchanging a single word. I let her take me, putting my arms around her waist, my head compressed, my feet almost constantly in the air, unable to stay put on the footrests for long.

We came out onto the main road. Eloísa livened up. She drove safely, a bit madly, but safely. Several times she overtook the cars in front, so that those coming in the opposite direction flashed their lights at us. Pure adrenaline.

In the middle of nowhere, who knows where, Eloísa stopped the motorbike on the verge.

‘How’s it going? All right back there?’

I nodded the helmet. Eloísa took out a pre-rolled joint from one of the pockets of her leather suit. She looked like a guy.