Iosi Havilio - Open Door

‘I’ve got something for you,’ she says and hands me a photocopy. ‘I thought you might be interested.’

I read it out loud, for both of us:

‘Today is a memorable day in the annals of public healthcare for the insane in our country, as we comply with the National Law of October 2nd, 1897, which orders the creation of an asylum for the mentally ill, according to the Scottish system known as open door, destined to fundamentally alter the care of these patients.

‘We pray, then, Señor Presidente, ladies and gentlemen, that this establishment, the first and most advanced in South America, might open its doors as soon as possible for the scientific treatment of patients from the entire Republic who currently lack this care, achieving as such a progression worthy of the social culture of our nation.’

Words of the inaugural speech of the National Colony for the Insane, spoken by Dr Domingo Cabred on May 21st, 1899.

Some way from the house, on the other side of the fence, Eloísa and little Martín, Boca’s nephew, pass by. They walk side-by-side; I can make them out clearly in spite of the distance. I wonder whether they’ll see me. Now they disappear behind the pampas grass, heading towards the lake.

There are nights when I flop on my back in the grass and the sky leaves me speechless. It’s a feeling that lasts for a few minutes and is then undone, either through distraction or sadness. In a second, I come and go from this state of almost pure amazement to a kind of complicated introspection. These things happen more in the country than in the city: this is what happens to town folk when they go into the countryside.

Jaime had gone to bed early, he wasn’t feeling very well. I was in the middle of my star-gazing when Eloísa took me by surprise, scaring me a bit. She said that she’d come to get me to go for a wander. Of course, I didn’t mention the episode in the stable, although I couldn’t get it out of my head, try as I might.

In spite of the rain over the last few days, an unexpected heat had arrived, with mosquitoes and everything. We were on the veranda and Eloísa tried to convince me to borrow the pick-up for a couple of hours.

‘He’ll never find out, if nobody tells him, he’s got no reason to find out,’ she says.

‘It’s lunacy,’ I reply, just to say something.

But she doesn’t give in, she annoys me, she plays the capricious teenager. It’s quarter to twelve and the air is still, stagnant, like a low storm cloud skimming the ground, crawling with fireflies and crickets, synchronised in a mathematical counterpoint, a precise second separating the sparks of some from the screeches of others. No, I tell her. No, and stop bugging me. I want to make her understand my reasons but it’s impossible:

‘He’ll have a fit if he hears the engine,’ I say.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s go and have fun for a while, then we’ll come back, there’s nothing wrong with that.’

Eloísa stays quiet, watching me, like an obedient dog, and her last words ricochet gently through my mind. Come on: her eyes repeat. And that gaze hypnotises me, makes me feel like a nail caught in a magnetic field, with those furious eyes of a perverse child. That’s it, an obedient dog with furious eyes. Everything changes in a fraction of a second with that short, simple sentence, ‘let’s go and have fun for a while,’ it runs through my body like a potent drug, it becomes a perfect logic, a duty. That’s the way it goes, it’s stupid, things reveal their other side, their imminent side. Like that brat, who appeared at just the right time, that uncouth little brat, beautiful and elemental, who I can only think about touching, touching and touching, and yes, we need to have fun, let’s go and have fun for a while and then we’ll come back.

‘Let’s go,’ I say and between us we come up with a brilliant idea to avoid waking Jaime. We need to push the truck as far as the gate and start the engine there.

Eloísa waits on the veranda rolling a joint while I enter the house on my tiptoes and slink with catlike movements towards the bedroom. I use two fingers to half open the door, keeping my breathing to a minimum, three short steps to the bedside table on Jaime’s side, I skim my hand across the surface with the greatest of delicacy, identify the bunch of keys, pick it up in three silent beats, and retrace my steps. Jaime snores softly with his trousers on, unconscious. I get dressed in the dark, using the doorframe for balance, I put on jeans, a white t-shirt and grab the two pairs of rubber boots that are always in the corner of the wardrobe. Now that I’m outside, as I wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, I peek through the keyhole: nothing, utter darkness, nothing to indicate that Jaime has found out. I feel like the perfect thief.

Outside, Eloísa has already smoked half the joint, but you can’t tell, she’s impervious to it, so she says. I put on Jaime’s yellow boots, Eloísa wears mine. Both of us find them too big.

Eloísa grabs the keys of the truck from me. I take a few moments to draw in what’s left of the joint and catch up with her. Eloísa releases the handbrake and moves the gear lever into neutral. She knows what she’s doing. Without closing the door, she clings onto the window frame and signals for me to push.

Reaching the gate is an odyssey full of mud, slips, falls and laughter, stifled to avoid waking Jaime. It’s madness, it’s pointless, I repeat in my head, laughing to myself a bit. The joint is certainly having an effect on me.

We can’t go on, we run out of strength a few metres from the gate. By mutual agreement we lie down in the back of the pick-up, facing the stars. The sky has cleared but the moon can’t be seen. Eloísa takes out another joint. We smoke in silence, two drags each until it’s finished. And now, I can’t move. I close my eyes, whatever happens, happens.

Eloísa finds energy from somewhere; she always has something left. I can’t see her, but I know that she gets up and starts jumping on the floor of the truck, making my head explode. Then she calms down, she moves about, she intrigues me.

A minute or an hour later, a cool breeze makes the hairs on my legs stand on end. I can’t remember the last time I shaved them, not to mention further up. I’m not wearing my trousers any more, or my knickers. I’m about to open my eyes, but Eloísa gives me no time, with her tongue she wets those hollows that hide between my cunt and the top of my legs, the right and the left, first one, then the other. She moves away slightly, pauses, and blows, filling me with her fiery breath, she moves away again: she’s becoming an expert. She has method. But then she loses herself and charges with everything she has, like an animal, licking me from my arsehole to the tip of my clitoris, hungry, disoriented, and she puts her fingers inside me, one, two, as many as she can fit. Another pause, and she asks me sarcastically: Do you want me to go on? And I turn into a single inarticulate plea, incapable of saying a word. We’re in the middle of the countryside. Then she continues, more frenetically than before, and there was I thinking there couldn’t be any more. She swallows me, eats me, tears me to pieces. I open my eyes and finish off howling like a madwoman.

At dawn, the rain returned and erased the tracks that the tyres had left between the house and the gate. Jaime tried to find a way to explain the truck’s mysterious journey.

‘Perhaps I’ve caught something with all those loonies around me, but I could have sworn that I left it right here,’ he said and we both laughed.

When I wake up, Boca is already doing the barbecue. He’s with a girl of around Eloísa’s age. But later, throughout the day, during the meal and as we chat afterwards, he treats her as if she were his wife. Where on earth does Boca find his teenage girlfriends?