Ghosts (12 page)

Absorbed by the sight of the ghosts, Patri had come almost too close
to the edge. When she realized this, she took a step back. She observed them in
the half-light, although they were a little too high, relative to her
line of sight, for her to study them in detail. She could tell that they were
the same as ever; what had changed was the light. She had never seen them so
late in the day, not in summer. The unreal look they had in the saturated light
of siesta-time, at once so shocking and so reassuring, like idiotic
bobbing toys, had evaporated in the dramatic half-light of evening.
They rose up in front of her quite slowly; but, given her previous experiences,
Patri had reason to believe that their slowness was swarming with a variety of
otherworldly speeds. Seen from the right distance, what seemed almost as slow as
the movement of a clock’s hand could turn out to be something more than mere
high velocity; it could be the very flow of light or vision.

In this new, late apparition, their bodies had become
three-dimensional, tangible; and what bodies they were, such depth and
strength! The dust that covered them had become a splendid decoration; now that
it didn’t have to absorb tremendous quantities of sunlight, it allowed the dark
golden color of their skin to show through, and accentuated their musculature,
the perfection of their surfaces. Here were the bulging pectorals she thought
she had seen in normal, living men, the well-proportioned arms, the
symmetrically sculpted abdomens, the long smooth legs. And their genital
equipment, somewhat curved, but also slightly raised by the sheer force of its
own bulk (it’s true she was looking from below), was different from anything she
had seen, as if more real, more authentic.

They watched her as they rose, since they were rising and moving
forward, toward the fifth floor, at the rear of the building. They looked down
at her and smiled an indecipherable smile.

Who’s throwing the party?

We are.

They were no longer laughing as if possessed. They were speaking, with
warm voices and words she could understand, in a Spanish without accent, neither
Chilean nor Argentinean, like on television. They were speaking to her, and it
was like being addressed by television characters. She was even more surprised
by the way they seemed to be rational. Her surprise crystallized the feeling
that had made her come downstairs; that vague, indefinite worry and alarm were
becoming a specific torment, a pain, which was indefinable too, but for
different reasons, as if it were impossible for her to touch the most genuine
reality, the reality of a promise that eluded her grasp. Not that the ghosts had
aroused her desires; that was, of course, impossible; and yet, in another sense,
they had. Some desires, while less exact and practical, are no less urgent, or
even less sexual. She told herself she shouldn’t have heeded her curiosity, she
should have resisted. But it was useless. She would do it again, a thousand
times, as long as she lived.

They had disappeared over her head. The last she saw of them were
their heels. She had tipped her head so far back that when she reassumed her
normal posture she felt dizzy and teetered perilously on the brink, which she
had approached again unawares. She turned around and headed for the stairs,
intending to go up. In the darkest part of the apartment, at the front, a ghost
appeared before her, moving diagonally (which seemed to be the fashion) and
upward. It reached the roof before she came near and began to pass through it
head first, slowly. So slowly that it seemed to stop halfway through the process
(mutations within the movement transferred the velocities to other dimensions).
When Patri got there, the bottom half of the ghost’s body was hanging from the
concrete ceiling, like some dark, nondescript object. She climbed the stairs and
went to the rear of the building again, where she had a feeling they would be
gathering in greater numbers. And as it turned out, a large group was waiting
for her, or seemed to be, by the edge, but outside, in empty space, bathed in
the last light, against a background of intense,
end-of-evening air. Within the dark visibility of that air
they were waiting for her, specifically for her, because one of them called her
by name. What? asked Patri, stopping three yards away.

Don’t you want to come to our party tonight?

If you invite me....

That’s what we’re doing

A silence. Patri was trying to understand what they had said. Finally
she asked:

Why me?

She was bound to ask that. They didn’t answer. All things considered,
they couldn’t. They left her to work it out for herself. There followed a
somewhat longer silence.

So?

I’m thinking it over.

Ah.

There seemed to be something ironic in their attitude. They began to
withdraw, without making the slightest movement, like visions affected by a
shift in perspective. Nevertheless they withdrew, treating the innocent explorer
to a sight that could not have been more extraordinary. As if inadvertently,
they were entwined by a kind of luminous helix, enveloping them in invisible
yellow. The dust on their skin was barely a hint now, a down. At the sight of
those men, Patri could feel her heart contracting.... as if she
were truly seeing men for the first time. Stop! cried her soul. Don’t go, ever!
She wanted to see them like that for all eternity, even if eternity lasted an
instant, especially if it lasted an instant. That was the only eternity she
could imagine. Come, eternity, come and be the instant of my life! she exclaimed
to herself.

Of course you’ll have to be dead, said one of them.

That doesn’t matter at all, she replied straight away, passionately.
Her passion meant something apart from her words, something else, of which she
was unaware. But it also meant exactly what she had said.

They seemed to be very still as they watched her. But were they?
Perhaps they were traveling at an incredible speed, traversing worlds, and she
was in a position from which that movement could not be perceived. That didn’t
matter either, she thought. In any case, they slid fluidly down to the next
floor, leaving her there looking out into the emptiness, where the big city was,
and the streets with their lights coming on.

Since she found that spectacle uninteresting, she turned around and
went back to the stairs. But when she reached the landing, she realized that she
didn’t know whether to go up or down to find them again. It was as if, having
accomplished their mission, they had disappeared. Anyway, there was no point
chasing them up and down the stairs. It would just tire her our and make her
legs hurt. You had to really watch your step on those bare cement stairs without
banisters. She’d already had plenty of exercise for one day. And, with every
passing minute, the exercise of going up and down was becoming more dangerous.
The first dense shadows, still shot with glimmers of transparency, were
occupying the building.

A shudder ran through Patri’s body. Her legs were shaking, but not
because of the stairs, or even because of the thickening darkness. She felt
dazed. She went down two steps, then sat. There was something she’d been meaning
to reflect on, and after sitting for a moment, she was able to give it some
serious thought. Except that since she was, as her mother said, “frivolous,” she
never thought seriously about anything. And in this case her frivolity was
exacerbated by the subject of her would-be serious reflections, which
was something quintessentially frivolous: a party.

But in a way parties were serious and important too, she thought. They
were a way of suspending life, all the serious business of life, in order to do
something unimportant: and wasn’t that an important thing to do? We tend to
think of time as taking place within time itself, but what about when it’s
outside? It’s the same with life: normal, daily life, which can seem to be the
only admissible kind, conceived within the general framework of life itself. And
yet there were other possibilities, and one of them was the party: life outside
life.

Was it possible to decline an invitation to a party? Patri
wondered. Leaving aside the specious argument according to which, if an
invitation, like the one she had just received, came from outside life,
simply to hear it was to accept, it clearly
was
possible to decline. People
did it every day. But how many such invitations could you expect to receive
in a lifetime? As well as the vertical stratification of life into layers or
doors through which one could “enter” or “exit,” there was a “horizontal” or
temporal axis, which measured the duration of a life. Invitations to a magic
party with ghosts were obviously going to be very rare. There might be
another chance, but for Patri that was beside the point. She was wondering
how many such invitations there could be in eternity.
That was a different question. Repetition in eternity was not
a matter of probabilities, no matter how large the numbers. In eternity, as
distinct from “in life” or “outside life,” this party was an absolutely
unique occasion.

All these questions came to her wrapped in another: Why not simply
accept? And that was where life came back into the picture, denser than ever.
Life had an annoying way of setting dates for everything, using time to hollow
things out, until what had been compact became as diffuse as a cloud. For a
frivolous girl like her, life should have been a solid block, a chunk of marble.
Even thought could take on that quality, if the gaps between the elements of the
proposition were eliminated. Frivolity is saying four is four. Seriousness is
gradually deduced, fraction by tiny fraction, from such moderately useful
statements as “two plus two is four,” until one arrives at “Columbus discovered
America.” Frivolity is the tautological effect, produced by
everything
(because you can’t be
selectively frivolous: it’s an all-or-nothing affair). It’s
the condition of knowing it all in advance, because everything is repetition of
itself, tautology, reflection. To be frivolous, then, is to go sliding over
those repetitions, supported by nothing else. What else was there? For Patri,
nothing.

And yet she hadn’t lied when she had said that she was “thinking it
over.” Thinking is also opening a gap, but, in her case, it was inevitable; she
considered herself almost as an object of thought, someone else’s thought, of
course, and someone remote at that. The ghosts put her in a position where she
had to think, had to attend to thinking.

But not because there was something to think over: as always, the
decision had already been taken, automatically. Of course she would go. And they
must have known she would, which is why they stuck to the essentials and
dispensed with the customary practice of praising the party in advance. She
would go. She didn’t even feel the need to make a list of all her reasons for
going.

The sound of footsteps interrupted her reasoning; she couldn’t tell if
they were coming from above or below. She lifted her head, but couldn’t see
much; night had fallen. The voices of her family up on the terrace carried
clearly, as if they were within arm’s reach. The steps sounded almost like
whispers. Finally she realized that someone or something was coming up the
flight of stairs immediately below the one on which she was sitting. She got to
her feet, but didn’t have time to turn around and go up, as she had intended,
because a shadow appeared on the landing and began to climb, apparently still
unaware of her presence. It was only when that shadow reached the midpoint of
the flight of stairs that the light coming in through the hazardous gaps in the
flooring around the staircase allowed her to see more clearly. It was a man
about thirty years old, and the best-looking man she had ever seen in
her life: white T-shirt, white moccasins, cream-colored trousers with
well-ironed creases, gold watch and necklace, a ring with a red stone,
bulging biceps emerging from his short sleeves, a ponytail but the rest of his
hair trimmed fashionably short, in a South American “pudding bowl” cut, with no
sideburns, aerodynamic wrap-around sunglasses, and a cigarette in the
corner of his mouth. He smiled at her languidly:

You must be Patri.

She couldn’t even open her mouth. She had no idea who this gentleman
could be, or how he knew who she was.

I’m Roberto.

Roberto? she asked, as she would squirm to remember later on: it was
such an impolite question, almost as bad as saying: What Roberto?

But he wasn’t offended. He chuckled, stepped forward, took her by the
arm, and up they went. Inés Viñas’s boyfriend, he said. Ah, Roberto, cried
Patri, blushing so deeply that, if not for the darkness, she would have looked
like a tomato—but this individual, with his sunglasses, could probably
see in the dark. Am I late? No sir, I don’t think dinner has been served yet. He
laughed again, and asked her please not to be so formal. Call me Roberto, he
said.

It was nine. There were various signs that dinner was imminent,
including the smell of roast chicken and its effect on the guests. In the
absence of a miracle, it had, predictably, turned out to be one of those
oppressively hot Buenos Aires nights, exactly like the day, but without light.
The children had restricted the ambit of their games and cries to the lighted
area, with occasional escapes and chases into the darkness, from which they soon
returned to the center of their fun. This made them more annoying than before,
but also gave the whole gathering a more joyful and intimate feel, as if they
were all enclosed in a room without walls. In the darkness, the red and blue toy
cars looked the same. A bare light globe over the dining-room door was
all the lighting they had, and all they needed. A few mosquitoes and moths
traced their paths through the zones of light. Raúl Viñas remarked that one
advantage of living so high up was that not many flying critters came to visit.
There were none of the insects that precede a storm. The conversation continued,
fluidly, in grand style. Conversation was paramount. The presence of men changed
its nature, not so much because they focused on particular themes; it was more
that they altered the form of the exchange, with their emphatic affirmations and
deeply misguided ideas about everyday matters. Generally, the women acknowledged
this difference, and appreciated it, especially since they had so few
opportunities to talk all together: only at family gatherings like this one, or
meetings called to resolve a particular issue, but in that case they weren’t as
free to change the subject. Still, the women went on speaking amongst
themselves, under cover of the general conversation, even sending each other
subtle signals, which were received with little smiles here and there.