Ghosts (6 page)

She leant out over the front balcony and looked down at the empty
street. A car whizzed past. She went through the apartment, searching for the
children, until she reached the back, and looked down from there as well. The
sun was beating in; it was an oven. She thought she saw a body falling, even
faster than they normally do, the naked body of a ghost, covered with fine,
white dust. It might have been an optical illusion, but she knew it wasn’t when
she heard another volley of guffaws, a great choral outburst of laughter so loud
it was almost desperate. When she turned back toward the stairs, they were there
again, or had just appeared, some swinging back and forth stupidly, like
garlands, others perfectly balanced—they all were, in fact, it was
just that they were using different methods. A quick movement behind her and a
touch that felt particularly real made her swing around suddenly. It was Blanca
Isabel, looking at her with a fading surprise. She was a pretty girl, an
exception in the family, lively, and very intelligent according to her parents.
Although she was startled and must have guessed why her sister had come
downstairs, a smile was hovering around her lips: she thought she had caught
Patri peeking at a forbidden sight. She looked as if she were about to start
humming. Patri didn’t feel that she had been “peeking” at the ghost’s genitalia,
not at all. Their laughter proved her innocence. “Now we’re going to take a
nap,” Patri said energetically, although she too was disconcerted. It was a bad
tactic, because Blanca Isabel didn’t feel like a nap, and ran away. She reached
the stairs before Patri, and started going down, whispering something to the
others, who must have been nearby. Patri knew she had to hurry if she wanted to
catch them, but she was half-hearted about it. It was too hot, and she
was tired. So she listened, helplessly, as they scattered. Nevertheless her
momentum carried her to the stairwell. Juan Sebastián was looking up at her from
the next landing, ready to go down to the third floor. “Let’s go,” she said, “or
Mom will come and get you.” “Why?” he replied. Children always ask why. “Because
you have to take a nap.” “I don’t know how. How do you do it?” “Where are the
others?” “How should I know?” Patri started going down and the boy took off. He
was already down on the next floor. She’d be able to corner him eventually, if
he went all the way down. But the rascal knew hiding places with two escape
routes, so the chase could go on forever. It was no good. She raised her voice
again hoping to scare him into submission. She was irritated and couldn’t
understand why he had to run away. She wasn’t going any further. What a stupid,
childish thing to be doing, chasing kids around at siesta time! If they didn’t
want to sleep, why should they? It made no difference to her, or to their
health, why would it? But since she had come down to the fourth floor, she could
fetch the baby girl, at least.

Luckily for her, little Ernesto was there, looking at her with his
beautiful big, dark eyes. Hi, he said, as if hiding something. There was a wet
patch on the wall, at a height that indicated clearly what had happened. The
children were forbidden to urinate anywhere inside the building, but they did it
anyway. She shook her head disapprovingly. I took out my weenie and did it, said
the boy. I know how it works, but your dad’s going to tell you off. My dad did
it too. Here? she asked him. He looked around, mildly perplexed. He seemed to
mean two things: first, “all the floors look the same to me” and, second, “they
all take out their weenies.” He was letting his thoughts show in that gentle,
docile way because sleepiness was overcoming him irresistibly. And both aspects
of his excuse were reasonable, in a way. The mood of summery exhibitionism
prevailing on the site, accentuated perhaps by the imperfect, deceptive
repetition from one floor to the next, didn’t shock Patri (even she wasn’t that
naïve) so much as intrigue her. She’d seen the gangs of ghosts shaking their
sturdy members and aiming the jets of urine at the sky, showering it over the
first-floor patio (their favorite place for this sport) until rainbows with
a metallic sheen appeared in the siesta’s white glare. The day the big satellite
dish was installed on the terrace, they spent hours doing it, perched on the
edge.

You get to bed, or Mom’s going to smack you, she said. Compliantly,
half-asleep, Ernesto headed for the stairs. Where’s Jacqueline, she
asked? The two youngest children were never far apart. He shrugged his
shoulders. Patri called her. I’m going, she said finally. She followed the
little boy up the stairs. When she was half way up, Blanca Isabel appeared
behind her, with the baby girl in her arms, intending to move her to a safe
place on the third floor. Patri turned around and started back down. The
movement was enough to make Blanca Isabel deposit her sister and take off alone,
jumping down the stairs three at a time. Jacqueline burst into tears. As soon as
Patri picked her up, she calmed down. She put her arms around Patri’s neck and
rested her head on her shoulder. She weighed nothing at all. Amazingly, she was
still the size of a doll at the age of two. But, in fact, it was like that with
all children. They might be relatively big or small for their age, but, compared
to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another
scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression
that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream. As Ernesto
had said a moment ago: the weenie. That must be why children were always playing
with scaled-down models of things: cars, houses, people. A miniature
theater, with its doors opening and closing, over and over again. The previous
night, on television, they had seen
The
Kiss’n Cuddle Love Show
, in which two puppets, a frog and a bear
recited the names of the birthday boys and girls, and those who had written in.
They never missed the show, although they had never written in themselves.
Anyway, the puppets appeared on a tiny scene, with two window shutters instead
of a curtain, which opened when their act began, and closed again at the end. In
the course of normal distracted viewing, Patri had assumed that the shutters
opened on their own, as they seemed to do, or were pushed from the inside, or
something like that. But last night a problem with the lighting or the general
clumsiness of the production had allowed her to see that the white shutters were
opened by hands in white gloves, which were supposed to be invisible. The
children didn’t realize, but she did. Her mother noticed too, and although they
said nothing, both she and Patri thought of the ghosts. They said nothing
because it wasn’t worth the effort of opening their mouths. But now, in
retrospect, Patri felt that the incident had a sexual significance, or
connotations at least.

She asked Ernesto what game they had been playing. We were pretending
that the people who came this morning were our parents. She sighed in
disapproval. Appalling! That must have been the older two children; they were
always coming up with ideas like that, the little devils.

The third floor was the same, yet different; it wrapped the three of
them in a fresh layer of silence. They say that silence increases with height,
but Patri, who lived at altitude most of the time, wasn’t so sure about that.
Anyway, if it was true, and if there was a gradual increase, the difference
between one floor and the next should have been perceptible, at least for
someone with a sensitive enough ear, a musician, for example, listening in
reverse, as it were. As she went from the fourth to the fifth floor, she felt
the silence thicken, but that didn’t prove anything, because the data of
reality, as she had observed in the past, were produced by chance, or rather by
an inextricable accumulation of chances. Also, since it’s well known that sounds
rise (which must be because “they’re lighter than air,” as the saying goes, or a
lighter kind of air), you should hear more noise as you go up; it should be
quiet on the ground. True, sounds fade progressively as they rise, because
height is a kind of distance. But under normal circumstances, human beings are
at or near ground level. If a man were placed at a great height, and he looked
down, somewhere near halfway he would see two corresponding limits, floating
like magnetized Cartesian divers: the limit of the sound as it passed into
imperceptibility, and that of his own hearing range. But those
divers.... men floating in the air.... she
knew what
that
was about. And
speaking of noise (and magnetism too, come to think of it), the most clamorous
and disturbing noises she had heard in her months on the site had been made by
cats. The neighborhood was populated by strays. Their survival and proliferation
were favored by the gardens of the Theological University, the car bodies that
the police left permanently parked all along in front of the station, the square
a hundred yards away, the convent school’s enormous park (the size of a whole
block) with its luxuriant foliage, and, above all, the empty buildings, each
with its clientele of old witches who came twice a day to put out milk and
hamburger steak. The way the cats howled was beyond belief. At first she had
thought they were children gone crazy. But that wouldn’t have been so bad. The
inhumanity of the cats’ screams gave them something extra. And their speed,
because those sounds were produced in the course of races and escapes, as
opposed to the karateka’s shout, which issues from a still body. (Patri had
taken karate lessons in Chile, on the advice of her stepfather. For various
reasons, including her innate distaste for perfection, she had neglected to sit
the exam which would have given her a blue belt. Even though blue was her
favorite color.) The astonishing activity of the cats, obscene as it was,
reminded her of the ghosts, who manifested themselves as the opposite of
obscenity, as a kind of innocence.

In fact, they were manifesting themselves at that very moment. They
were emerging from the light, from transparency: they were opaque, definitely
opaque, but because of the whiteness of the cement dust, they were hard to
distinguish from the light. Where could their covering have come from? It was
true that everything was dusty on the building site, but the strange thing about
the ghosts was how evenly covered they were with that white dust, every square
inch of them. And there was quite a lot to cover because they were tall like
Argentineans, and solidly built, even chubby. Although well proportioned in
general, some of them, the majority in fact, had big bellies. Even their lips
were powdered; even the soles of their feet! Only at odd moments, from certain
points of view, could you see the foreskin at the tips of their penises parting
to reveal a tiny circle of bright red, moist skin. It was the only touch of
color on their bodies. Even birds fluttering around in ashes don’t achieve such
a uniform result. Patri traversed the air through which they had flowed,
unworried by the thought of her breath mixing with theirs. She was walking on
the ground. What a destiny: unwittingly, unwillingly thrust into the midst of a
nudist colony.

Tired and annoyed, she paid them no attention. She was sleepy too;
since she was barely out of childhood herself, she still needed quite a lot of
sleep. She felt she had wasted time, but, on the other hand, it was time that
was good for nothing except being wasted. That was in the nature of
siesta-time. The mysterious men were watching her from a certain
distance, but she couldn’t really be bothered returning their gaze. The
laughter, at least, had dissipated. There was something aloof and severe about
those insubstantial gangs. They were simply there.

Elisa was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. What about the
others? was the first thing she asked. Ernesto started to explain, but Patri
shrugged her shoulders. I couldn’t catch them, she said. They got away. Mother
and daughter were silently resigned. Elisa took the children inside. It’s so
hot! said the boy, yielding to the truth. She put them in the bedroom, where
their father was snoring. She didn’t even wash their feet; in a few seconds they
were perfectly quiet. In the dining room, Patri saw the bags left out, and
remembered that there was shopping to do. When Elisa came out of the bedroom,
she offered to go and do it, with a list. No, said her mother, I have to do it
myself this time, because I still haven’t worked out exactly what I’m going to
buy; it’ll depend what’s there. No one made a fuss about meals in that family,
as long as they were nutritious and tasty. On the way, Elisa added, I’ll look
for the other two and take them along. That was a good idea. But then she said:
Since they’re not going to sleep, I’ll take them for ice cream. Patri frowned as
if to say: Well that’s a great way to punish them for misbehaving.
She
didn’t get any ice cream, even
though she loved it. You lie down too, said her mother. I guess that’s what I’ll
be doing, she replied. Elisa put on her shoes and picked up the bags. Back in a
bit. See you, said Patri.

Off she went. Patri removed the crochet rug with which she covered the
sofa that was her bed. She pushed the chairs up against the table. She took off
her dress and got under the sheet. It was uncomfortable, because of the heat,
but it was the prudent thing to do, because that room was the entrance to the
little apartment, and anyone could have come along. It was boiling hot. The
silence had deepened and was almost complete, with a just a vague echo of
cackling, which made her even sleepier. She shut her eyes straight away. And
fell asleep.

She dreamed of the building on top of which she was sleeping, not as
it would be later on, not seeing it finished and inhabited, but as it was now,
that is, under construction. It was a calm vision, devoid of troubling portents
or inventions, almost a verification of the facts. But there is always a
difference between dreams and reality, which becomes clearer as the superficial
contrast diminishes. The difference in this case was reflected in the
architecture, which is, in itself, a reciprocal mirroring of what has already
been built and what will be built eventually. The all-important bridge
between the two reflections was provided by a third term: the unbuilt.