Matias Nespolo - Seven Ways to Kill a Cat

‘But we’ve got a radio,’ I say to cheer him up. ‘Want me to put it on?’

‘Naw … Leave it. There’s never any good tunes this time of day. It’s just random shit.’

‘Your call, viejo ! But you’re pretty random yourself.’

He doesn’t reply. We sit in silence for a bit. I make some more mate . Sweet for him, bitter for me. Quique gets up and goes to the door, still clutching the mate , pushes aside the strip curtain and stands staring out at the rain.

‘Hey, loco , that thing’s not a baby’s bottle.’

He hands me back the mate and starts nosing round the place. I don’t know what he’s looking for. Hardly matters, there’s not much here he’d be interested in.

‘Got a pack of cards?’

‘On the mantelpiece next to the cockerel.’

The glass figurine of a cockerel has been sitting on the mantelpiece covered in dust for a thousand years. Someone — I don’t remember who — brought it back from a holiday on the coast. It’s a bit tacky but at least it’s useful. Its tail feathers change colour with the weather. I’m not sure whether it’s the humidity or the pressure but the cockerel is never wrong. A blue tail means clear skies. Purple means changeable, so even if the sun is peeking over the horizon, I know it’ll be drizzling by the end of the day. Right now it’s pink.

Quique reaches up and takes down the pack of cards. He gets the deck out of the box and checks it carefully. Looking for marked cards, I suppose. He doesn’t find any. He gives me a wink, sits down again and starts shuffling. He’s certainly not clumsy.

‘Cut,’ he says to me, slapping the pack down in the middle of the table.

I cut.

‘What do you want to play?’ I ask. ‘ Casita robada ?’

‘That’s for little kids,’ he says.

‘We can’t play truco . With only two people it’s more boring than sucking a nail,’ I say as he deals the second card.

Quique gives me a smile and keeps dealing. Five, six, seven cards. He puts the pack in the middle of the table and turns over the top card. This is the last thing I need. I hate chinchón . It’s a wanker’s game. I spent a whole fucking summer playing it while I was trying to get into La Negra Fabiana’s knickers. Chinchón was the only way I could think to spend time with her. She was obsessed with it. We spent whole afternoons playing never-ending games and I never got anywhere with her. Afterwards I’d jerk off furiously under the bridge by the river.

‘Bluff, Gringo. Don’t you know how to play Bluff?’ Quique says, seeing I’m confused.

‘I think so, let’s see if I remember …’

‘You have to discard sets of trumps or cards of the same value,’ he explains, ‘and if you think the other player’s lying you shout Bluff! The first person to get rid of all their cards wins.’

I call trumps: cups. Quique puts down three cards and picks up a card from the pack. He doesn’t look like he’s bluffing. Me, I’m lying like a politician. And he’s letting me. I’m down to only two cards when Quique shouts Bluff. He turns over my last card and I have to pick up the whole discard pile. We start again. Swords are trumps. I use a four to change suit to coins. It seems like a good idea since I picked up the discard pile, but it doesn’t turn out that way. Quique discards two, as if the trumps he didn’t have earlier have magically multiplied. He has only one card left. I call Bluff and Quique gives me a devious smile. He wasn’t lying. He had to be bluffing earlier, even when he picked a card up from the pile and looked disappointed. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. We keep playing and he keeps picking up cards and then on the fourth discard he wins the hand.

I’m annoyed now, so I start really playing, but it’s useless. Quique wins three hands in a row and just as I’m about to win the fourth, he snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. I’ve never been good at lying, which means when I do lie there’s a sort of logic to it. Quique’s lies are random and there’s no tic, no sign he’s doing it. It’s impossible to catch him at it because he always keeps a scrap of truth up his sleeve in case he’s challenged.

He’s more devious than I thought. The kid’s giving me lessons now, and that really does bust my balls. Then something occurs to me. Half an hour later the water for the mate is cold and I use that as an excuse to throw in the towel. It’s still overcast, but it’s stopped raining.

‘You hungry?’ I ask, putting the kettle on the hotplate again.

‘Bit.’

‘Why don’t you go and get yourself a choripán at Fat Farías’s place? I’ll give you a couple of pesos. Hang around with the other kids for a bit, keep your eyes peeled and your ears open, then come back later and tell me everything.’

‘Is this some kind of deal, Gringo?’

‘Some kind, yeah,’ I say and give him a five-peso note.

‘Done deal,’ he says, waving the money.

‘And I want to know everything. Who’s there, who goes in, who comes out … what they’re doing …’

‘You smoke, don’t you?’ he says just as I’m about to spark up my first cigarette of the day.

I give him a cigarette and Quique heads off.

I go outside and watch him walk down the street. The wet ground gleams like it’s wrapped in plastic. Quique moves slowly, avoiding the puddles so he doesn’t slip. The wind is still blowing hard. It’s cold.

I PROWL THE house like a cat in a cage. There’s no reason for me to stay at home, but I’ve got nowhere to go either.

I pick up the whale book and sit in the kitchen reading. I grip the pages tightly so the money and the note with Toni’s address don’t fall out. That’s where I leave them. I still don’t know what I’m going to do.

I suspect Ishmael’s a bit of a queer, but I kinda like the guy anyway. While he’s waiting to get a position on a whaling ship, he spends a couple of nights at an inn in Nantucket. He shares a bed there with a wild man, a harpooner. A cannibal from the Pacific islands with tattoos all over his body. Queequeg his name is. This guy prays to a little wooden god he keeps in a box, and sleeps with his harpoon. It’s difficult to work out what the harpoon would look like, because Ishmael describes it as a huge tomahawk pipe. Thing is, Ishmael and the cannibal share a smoke, get friendly and maybe get frisky because the book says they’re like this cosy loving couple.

Eventually they find the Pequod , a whaling ship preparing to set sail, and they sign on. The bit about all the preparations goes on and on. Obviously, in those days, a ship could be at sea for years at a time, so you had to prepare for everything. If you ran out of salt or mate in the middle of the ocean, you were fucked. It’s not like you could pop down to the corner shop and buy some more. I suppose it makes sense but I’m getting a bit pissed off with all these preparations. I’ve been reading for over two hours and no one’s even mentioned a fucking whale.

My stomach starts to rumble, but I go on drinking mate . I can’t face food. I spark another cigarette and go on reading.

Anyway, finally, they set sail. The first week, the old captain — his name’s Ahab — doesn’t show his face. He spends all day every day shut up in his cabin. By the time he finally decides to come on deck under cover of darkness, they’re out on the open sea. He rants away on the poop deck for a while and throws his pipe overboard. The old guy’s fucked in the head. You can see it in his eyes, in his face. He’s got this scar that runs right across his face from his forehead to his jaw. Got it from an axe wound. And he’s got a peg leg. Made of ivory, Ishmael says. From the jawbone of a whale. Where were we? Anyway, the story is that Moby Dick, the great white whale, bit off his leg and the old guy is looking for revenge. He’s completely obsessed.