Iosi Havilio - Open Door

‘I think I’m pregnant,’ I say quickly, to relieve myself of the burden.

I did another two tests, different brands this time, always following the instructions to the letter, always with the first pee of the morning, and the stick always comes out the same: two pale pink stripes, nice and clear, one on top of the other. Sometimes the upper stripe isn’t quite as intense as the lower, but there’s no getting away from it, the leaflet promises that two lines are an unmistakable sign: 99.9 % reliable. But it can’t be true, there must be some mistake. It must be a dream, bad but fleeting.

Yasky sent a telegram: NO NEWS ON THE CASE . It’s the only thing he puts. He doesn’t mention ghosts. He’s stopped phoning me, he must be embarrassed, after everything. Aída hasn’t appeared again either, she obviously felt intimidated. Or it could be that I’m not calling to her anymore.

Three days with no sign of Eloísa. Guido says he thinks she went to visit a cousin who lives on the coast, but he’s not sure. She went just like that, without letting me know. I’m dying to know where she is, who she’s with, if she’s laughing, if she’s thinking of me, if she’s horny, if she’s fucking, if she’s like that with everyone. I can’t take it. Just five minutes of relief and then long, endless, delicious hours, filling my mind with Eloísa.

Jaime doesn’t show up either. He left suddenly, with no explanation. One afternoon as he returned from the hospital, he parked the truck outside the front door, came in without even registering me, and locked himself in the bathroom until the following morning. Four days passed like that, just like the first. He would arrive, lock himself in the bathroom until the next day and leave at dawn. On the fifth day, a Friday, at about six, the telephone rang. It was Boca. He said that Jaime was going to be late because a job had come up on a ranch near Luján. A small job that would take them a few hours, so he told me. A week has already gone by, with no word from Jaime. He’s a big boy. I don’t need to worry about him.

The food runs out, only half a bag of self-raising flour left in the cupboard. I have neither the cash nor the will to go out and buy anything. Without really thinking about it, I begin scraping the wall behind the headboard with my nails and bringing to my mouth pieces of plaster, which peel off without too much difficulty. It’s pure inertia. I suck them unenthusiastically, the edges scratch the roof of my mouth. Now I feel able to do a bit more, and I start chewing them. Inside my mouth, the slivers of plaster break into smaller and smaller pieces, and eventually dissolve in contact with the hot saliva. The sensation is strange but pleasant. A bit like eating consecrated wafers, I don’t know, I’ve never tried them, it just occurred to me.

Without Jaime and without Eloísa, the days become long and nights empty. I feel useless, with no desire to do anything. As if the only truth were this country house that destiny made mine, these old sticks of furniture, the loonies prowling too close by, the village turning its back on me in its eternal siesta, and this solitude. Like a bad dream that I’ve always been here, waiting.

In the meantime, I smoke all the remaining cannabis with unfamiliar voraciousness. Tired, horny, moving from the bed to the kitchen, bouncing, leaning on the walls or crawling. Suddenly, without warning, a stabbing pain in my stomach makes me double up. I don’t make it to the bathroom and halfway there, spattering the bedroom wall, I bring up all the plaster. I find it so disgusting that I have to spend a long time spitting up a kind of transparent cream, and it leaves me limp.

I spend the whole day dozing in bed, in the dark. Outside it must be raining, or cold: it’s always inhospitable outside. I’m starting to like all of this less and less. I spend the day alone. I don’t move and at times, because I’ve smoked so much weed, as they call it in the country, my head just goes, I lose all sense, I’m spaced. Everything becomes dark, dense, gelatinous, it all goes through my fingers, which scratch at my skin, hard, they seem to pass through my flesh and, right there, I stop being, I stop acting, I let myself be taken, lying down, standing up, my stomach pressed against the basin of thick, cold, Pampas-style porcelain, and I don’t stop, I laugh alone, I dance about, I shiver slightly, and my fingers don’t stop, as if they weren’t mine, rubbing my clitoris, my button, twisting the hairs that cover my cunt, rubbing and putting themselves inside me, one, two, three, as many as can fit, I’m sweating like mad, and the other fingers go into other parts, massaging my arse, moistening my anus with the juice that slides down the crease, and a little ochre pool, pretty and transparent, spreads over Jaime’s sheets, which swallow what he won’t, what disgusts him, and the smell of the country, of wet grass, of fireflies, of dry vines, the newly cut privets, and the fruit trees, the medlars, kumquats, figs, the smell of wet mud, the smell of pollen, all those smells, native smells, mixing with mine, boiling, like those of a cat on heat, a mad cat, unhinged, a cat who can’t take any more, who crawls, who comes for the umpteenth time, wildly, with misty eyes, undone by myself.

At some point the phone rings. I don’t have the strength to answer. I pull myself upright as best I can and pick up the receiver. It’s Yasky, he says that he has to see me. I don’t let him finish, I hang up. In a minute the phone rings again, I assume it’s still Yasky, offended, but I hear a silence filled with street noise and then Jaime’s choked voice, coughing before speaking. I’m in the capital, I’m with Boca, he says. And I tell him the truth: I don’t feel too good, I woke up with an upset stomach. I hear the sound of the city again, competing with Jaime’s breathing, which sounds like the puffing of a thoughtful animal. He’s about to say something but hangs up instead. He doesn’t call again.

I dream of toads, skirts, orgies and horses.

Eloísa reappeared after two weeks, as if nothing had happened. She’d been in Buenos Aires, staying with a guy she had met in the bar in Pilar, the same place she took me that time. A respectable boy, well-off, who lives with his parents in one of the gated communities, but who acts the hard-man, the druggy, and plays bass in a rock group with four guys just like him, a bit full of themselves, but pretty cool. That’s how Eloísa describes him. This boy took her to a squat, or what she thought was a squat in Calle Estados Unidos, where some six or seven girls and boys lived. According to Eloísa there were a lot of drugs going about and she’s not sure, but she thinks they were cutting cocaine in a room at the back by the utility room. She didn’t go in.

‘There were two older girls, your age, who wandered round topless all day. They made me think about us, I was dying to be close to you, to touch you,’ says Eloísa.

We spend all afternoon smoking in the store shed behind the shop. Between joints, we have sex: wild, violent, without pleasure.

Eloísa asks me whether now that I’m pregnant we’re going to stop seeing each other. She looks at my flat stomach. She strokes it. I think it’s great, she says, although I’m quite shocked. Do you think it’s all right, what we’re doing? It’s the first time that Eloísa has asked whether something is right or wrong, I thought it was only me who wondered about that kind of thing. But she immediately laughs and pinches my bum. It’s a joke, she says. She does what she likes with me, she plays with my body and my thoughts. She’s a little bitch.

‘I don’t understand what you’re doing with that old man. It doesn’t make sense,’ she says, soaked with sweat, her mouth still tasting of sex. ‘It’s madness. If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were wrong in the head.’