Iosi Havilio - Open Door

It’s New Year next week. In the countryside you barely notice. Meanwhile, here, in the city, the year is coming to an end all around. In the faces, in the scents, in the speed of things.

I’m in a bar, sitting by the window. Yasky should be about to arrive. We arranged to meet at half twelve. There are five minutes to go. It had been several months since he called. His voice was different, more serious, hardened. Can we see each other tomorrow? It’s important, he said. It’s to do with your friend.

I didn’t say anything to Jaime. He would have wanted to come with me and I preferred to go alone. Recently, we’ve barely been apart for a minute. What with his retirement, Jaime has begun to work less. He hardly goes to the hospital any more, he says there’s no cure for that nursery. He doesn’t know what to do with his time. Neither do I. I never go out. I spend my time in bed, now and then I read something and I watch a lot of television.

I’m going shopping in Luján, I told him. The same lie as usual. Take the truck, he said. And before I left, seeing me off at the gate: Drive carefully.

On the road, I try to think about Aída, but I can’t. Every time I bring her to mind, she escapes me. After everything that’s happened, it’s an old and faded story. And more than anything, it’s very complicated. Why am I going?

Yasky gets out of a taxi. He’s let his hair grow long and he’s fatter. He looks my way, I signal to him, but he doesn’t see me. I go out onto the pavement and now he does, we wave. He crosses the street, and as he approaches he can’t conceal his surprise. He looks at my stomach. I smile, I’d forgotten too. Our telephone conversation was very brief, and the truth is that it hadn’t occurred to me to tell him. For me, it hadn’t been a novelty for quite a while. I didn’t know, says Yasky, prolonging the last vowel until he runs out of breath. He seems different, both euphoric and drawn, with new dark circles around his eyes. We start walking. He takes my arm. With the sounds of the street, I’m unable to pay him much attention, and anyway, what I hear doesn’t surprise me. At a corner, a traffic light brings us to a halt.

‘From the photos, it seems very likely that it’s her, although we can’t confirm it one hundred per cent.’

We cross the street. We pass a square. I recognise this route, we’re a block and a half from the morgue and we’re heading in that direction. I don’t protest, I let myself be led by Yasky, who hasn’t let go of my arm. The weather is very humid, sticky. We walk in silence. When we’re almost there, Yasky stops short, gives a serious, elaborate pause and, all at once, without releasing his breath, squeezes my arms at the elbows, arches his brows and looks at me straight on. There’s something else, he says, something that doesn’t make sense. Another pause and he comes out with it: the autopsy says that she died two days ago. It’s inconceivable, but there it is, he concludes, and his mouth stays open.

Yasky lets go of my arms and his stubby hands hesitate in the air for a few seconds until they make bold and clutch mine. He’s waiting for me to speak, to answer him, to cry or break down. He’s waiting for me to embrace him, waiting for something that I don’t give him and he moves away sadly.

The equation is obvious but even so it surprises me: Yasky is still in love with me. And once again, he’s used Aída to be able to see me. This time, by devising an impossible tale. He turns his back to me, he can’t look at me again, he knows I’ve found him out and so he goes on with the farce.

We enter the morgue. Like the first time, I follow close behind him. We walk to the end of the corridor. Yasky knocks on the office door, fulfilling his role as court clerk to the last. The enormous ginger guy from the first few visits isn’t there; an extremely thin man appears in his place. Yasky introduces us, the man glances at me and makes a grimace with his lips that doesn’t quite manage to be a smile. Now they take a couple of steps aside and exchange a few words in low voices. Yasky nods, the other man goes ahead and enters the room, gesturing for us to follow.

We stand around the middle trolley. Yasky looks at the floor, avoiding my eyes. The other man is impatient, he grinds his teeth, swallows saliva and without preamble, lifts the plastic sheet covering Aída’s body.

On the way out of the morgue, Yasky asks whether I’m all right and whether I wouldn’t like to go for a coffee. I nod, still a bit dazed. It makes no sense, I repeat to myself, and the absurdity of the situation makes me chuckle. I hang my head and the irregularity of the floor tiles ends up disconcerting me. It’s as though it’s all just a trick of Yasky’s. But no, he’d never go that far. And, I’d almost forgotten, it was Aída, slightly changed, but it was her. And it was precisely that which perturbed me most: that she’d cut her hair and plucked her eyebrows, that all those months when I thought she was dead she had been somewhere, she’d rented another flat, she’d gone to a hotel, to a friend’s, or wandered through the city, perhaps she’d even had a job, it was madness, to think that Aída had been alive all this time, and so close.

We go into a bar, we sit down at a table set for lunch. I have to say something, I have to express my bewilderment somehow, but Yasky beats me to it.

It’s a bit like going back to square one, he says. But so far as our involvement goes, it’s case closed. They’ll have to open a new investigation. I can’t bring myself to ask him anything. Not who found her. Or how. Or where. I stay silent, my mouth half open. Yasky talks, to cover the void. Poor girl, he says.

Beba took care of everything, all the procedures, the funeral director, the cremation and arranging a priest to give the urn extreme unction. She travelled from Asunción as soon as she heard the news. I don’t know why she didn’t come before, why it was me instead of her who had to come and meet those unknown corpses so many times.

In all these months we hadn’t been in contact once. The truth is she looked great, her skin younger than ever, and she had dyed her hair a furious red. She arrived in a funeral car, the only one in the cortège. She was accompanied by a man who was much too young to be her husband and yet embraced her with evident tenderness.

It was a quick goodbye, without tears. The circumstances in which everything had happened discouraged any spirit of a wake. The time that had elapsed, the supposed suicide, Aída’s clandestine life, the deceit, the confusion, everything that made this story an episode more delirious than traumatic, gave rise to an unusual funeral, not to mention the fact that it had been decided to cremate the body. I don’t know who had taken that decision, whether it was Beba or the judge, Yasky, or Aída herself in the will I never saw.

Jaime insisted so much that in the end I let him accompany me. But I asked him to wait for me in a bar opposite the cemetery. During the half hour that the ceremony lasted, Beba didn’t say a word to me, she looked at me only once in passing, but I’m not even sure it was intentional. I didn’t really understand the reasons behind her indifference. The only thing I would have wanted to ask was who had ended up with Diki, the crippled dog that Aída had left orphaned.

Yasky, on the other hand, was by my side the whole morning. After the initial shock, a paternal instinct seemed to have awoken in him, or something like it, because he didn’t stop referring to my stomach and the closeness of the birth.

Beba and her young boyfriend took a taxi. Yasky said goodbye quickly as he had a hearing in fifteen minutes on the other side of the city, demanding that I promise to let him know when I had news.