Ghosts (8 page)

The development of “real” architecture, that is, of the decorative
elements, is directly linked to the possibility of accumulating provisions for
the workers or the slaves who do the building, and don’t have time to go hunting
or gathering food. Such accumulations result in inequalities. There is a
mechanism for reducing excessive accumulation, and regulating wealth (without
regulation there would be no wealth):
potlatch
, the festivity that involves squandering food and drink and
other sorts of goods in a brief, crazy splurge, and so reducing the stocks to a
satisfactory level. By staging a grand and brilliant spectacle, comparable to a
temporary or perishable work of art, the festivity performs the function of
attracting the greatest possible quantity of people. The size of the audience on
the day is crucial, since this artistic manifestation will not endure in time.
Art, in all its forms, has an inherent economy, and this case is no
exception.

The
potlatch
, of course,
belongs to the prehistory, or the genealogy, of festivities and partying,
because with the passage of time, an alternative must arise at some point:
instead of more and more people being present, a subtler form of sociability
limits attendance to special people, the people that matter. The logical
conclusion of this process is the single-person party, and the best
model for that is dreaming.

In Patri’s dream the building on the Calle José Bonifacio was under
construction. Standing still yet seized by an interior, interstitial movement.
Suddenly a wind, a typical dream-wind, so typical that dreams might be
said to consist of it, arose and blew the building apart, reducing it to little
cubes the size of dice. This was the transition to the world of cartoons. The
building was reconstructed somewhere else, in another form, its atoms
recombined. Then it disintegrated again, the wind scattering its particles, one
of which came to rest on Patri’s open eye, and in its microscopic interior, an
entire house was visible, with all its rooms and furniture, its candelabras,
carpets, glassware, and the little golden mill that spins in the wind from the
stars.

Two hours after going down, Elisa Vicuña came back up the stairs,
laden with bags full of shopping. The heat had not eased off in the least; on
the contrary. It was the time of day when one suspects the climate of
malevolence. She climbed the last flights of stairs on her own, because Juan
Sebastián and Blanca Isabel went to get the toy cars they had left behind and
resumed their games; not that they really wanted to go on playing, but they were
still scared that their mother would put them to bed. There was no danger of
that any more, because the hour of the siesta had passed, but just in case, and
out of sheer willfulness, they ran away. They had been to an ice-cream
shop with air conditioning, where they had stayed a fair while. The cool
interlude had refreshed them a bit, but the contrast when they came out made the
persistence of the heat all the more terrible. Elisa saw that her eldest
daughter was asleep. She didn’t wake her up. She went to the kitchen, and took
the shopping out of the bags, but didn’t put anything in the fridge, because
they didn’t have a fridge. Then she started washing. They didn’t have a washing
machine either, but that didn’t bother her too much, although she would have
liked one. In fact she enjoyed washing, and spent quite a lot on soaps and
special products, as well as the bleach. Oddly, for someone who was so fond of
this pastime, her hands were not ruined. So what if those two brats didn’t want
to sleep. She hadn’t taken a siesta today either; she didn’t feel like it. For
various reasons, the washing had built up. She filled the two washbowls and the
two plastic buckets, and began to make a mixture of various products, which she
always finished off with a healthy squirt of bleach. She started scrubbing some
of the kids’ little T-shirts. She felt depressed, because of the heat,
because of all the work she had done already that day, and what remained to do,
because of the end of the year, and her husband, and so on, and so on. It wasn’t
a momentary low. She was going through a period of depression due mainly to the
fact that they hadn’t moved, as she had hoped, or rather planned. Her husband
had been tempted by the special bonus they had promised him if he stayed until
the building was finished. By now, she thought, she should have been in the new
place. Not that it was better, but she had got used to the idea, and no one
likes having to give up an idea, even, or especially, if it doesn’t have have
any intrinsic merit. She would buy something with the extra money, but it
wouldn’t be the same: money and new things, they were explicable, whereas her
idea of moving before the end of the year was beyond explanation; it belonged to
the world of whim. Anyway, it was Raúl’s decision, and today he would get to hit
the booze twice. He often scored a double: lunch and dinner. What a liver he
must have! thought his wife. It’s incredible, it must be made of iron. Drunks
were tougher all round, or in a different way from normal people; she liked the
feeling of being protected by that superhuman vigor. What other protection did
she have? She liked a lot of things about her husband and had no desire to
complain about him, not even in the privacy of her ruminations. For example, she
couldn’t imagine herself married to a sober man.

As she put some of Patri’s clothes into the wash, Elisa’s thoughts
turned to her daughter: now
she
was a
more serious worry. Elisa had never known such a mixed-up girl. No one
could say how she would turn out, least of all her mother. It was partly her age
of course, but even so, she was a particularly worrying case. She never stuck at
anything; she had no perseverance, as if she didn’t really know what she liked.
If only she would fall in love! Proceeding mechanically through the washing,
Elisa set out the problem point by point. Like many Chileans, she had the secret
and inoffensive habit of addressing long, casuistic explanations to an imaginary
interlocutor, or rather a real but physically absent person. In her case it was
a friend she hadn’t seen for years, not since she had come to Buenos Aires, even
longer, in fact. Nevertheless, it was to this friend that she explained the case
of her eldest daughter. Look, she didn’t even stick with the karate; that was my
husband’s bright idea, typical! But at least it was something. And those
mother-of-pearl buttons she used to polish so nicely, she
gave that up too, even sooner. I can’t really blame her for that, though,
because we moved here. OK. But what about school? Same again: she refused to sit
the equivalence tests. She wanted to be an electrician. Crazy!
I’d
have as much hope of doing that. As
Elisa explained to her absent friend, the fundamental problem and the source of
all the others, was Patri’s frivolity. Was there ever a more frivolous girl in
the world? It was hard to imagine. She didn’t take serious things seriously
because she was always serious about something else. She was a little dreamer,
living in a looking-glass world. Not that she wasn’t intelligent; but
her frivolity made her come across as silly. She had talent, and plenty of it.
She was a talented seamstress, for a start. She could have been earning a living
already from her sewing, if she’d wanted to. There was some hope, then, for the
future, faint though it was, because sewing was a frivolous occupation. All that
mattered was the result, not the intentions, which could be supremely whimsical.
And Patri’s whims were limitless. For example, six years ago, when Blanca Isabel
was born, she had prevailed against Elisa and insisted on choosing the baby’s
name. It was the name of a famous fashion designer: an Argentinean woman, but
the daughter of a Chilean, who in turn was the daughter of a woman who had been
the godmother of Raúl Viñas’s grandfather. Elisa’s heart had been set on
baptizing the child Maruxa Jacqueline, a desire she had partially satisfied
later on, with her youngest girl.

Her soliloquy was interrupted by a feeling she often had, the
semi-epileptic impression that someone was passing behind her. There
was no one behind her in the kitchen, and no room anyway, but through the open
door she could see a band of ten ghosts watching her from the terrace, between
the apartment and the stairs. What were those floury clowns doing there, she
wondered crossly. She didn’t like it when they interrupted her conversations
with an intimate friend, all the more intimate for being in her mind and nowhere
else. (Elisa didn’t know it, but a few months earlier, a horrific derailment in
Concepción had claimed her friend’s life.) Anyway, it wasn’t their normal time.
Were they going to start showing up around the clock? Or was there something
special happening because it was the last day of the year? That could have
explained why they were staring at her with their round eyes open wide in their
stupid faces. As if they had something to propose to her. It was odd, because
they were meant to be seen rather than to see. And since she was in the
relatively dark interior of the kitchen, she may not have been visible from
outside. But she couldn’t be sure about that, because even if the shadows hid
everything else, her thick, twelve-diopter spectacles could reflect or
condense enough light to make them visible (she had been caught out like that
before): two shining circles, like the eyes of an owl suspended in the night. In
any case, she could see
them
, and
that must have been their way of watching. But was she really seeing them, or
was it a waking dream? Ah, that was another question. Seeing ten naked men with
their dicks dangling while washing clothes in the kitchen wasn’t exactly the
most realistic experience. Although for a married woman like her, the scene had
a special significance, not a promise but a confirmation: men were all the same
in the end. They had nothing to hide. It wasn’t just that all men had the same
bits; they also had the same value. Which was, admittedly, considerable, but it
was shared out among a multitude that was almost beyond the grasp of the
imagination, like the idea of “everyone.” The only thing that bothered her was
the bad influence the ghosts might have on her children, particularly on her
frivolous elder daughter. Since Patri was given to building castles in the air,
certain chimerical spectacles could lead her to the utterly misguided belief
that reality is everywhere. It was just as well that the family would soon be
leaving the building site. They would have left already, if her husband had
listened to her. Meanwhile those jerks were still staring at her. Or was it the
other way round? She turned away and went on with the washing, trying to
concentrate; what with the distraction she’d probably gone and put in too much
bleach. She was always doing that.

She was nearly finished when the apparition of Patri at her side gave
her a start. Heavens, I didn’t see you come in, she said, to hide her agitation.
A little sleep and look at me, said Patri, displaying her arms, shoulders and
neck, covered with sweat. They spent a moment complaining about the heat. Hey,
I’d like to have a shower, said Patri, if that’s OK with you. Of course, said
her mother; I’m just about finished anyway, see. Just wait till I rinse this
out.... there.... just the sight of that cold
water running.... I’ll have a shower, too,
after.... and this one.... there we go. She
turned off the faucet. All yours; careful not to wake the kids. They had to take
all these precautions because when water was coming out of one faucet, it
wouldn’t come out of another, and if they turned on two at once it didn’t come
out of either. It was something they had discovered simply by living there. No
doubt some problem with the plumbing, or rather with the general design of the
building, which would have disastrous consequences for its occupants later on.
Raúl Viñas felt it was best not to tell the architect. Why did he need to know?
So he could get uptight about it? The Chilean builder regarded the problem as
insoluble, so what was the point? As for them, they managed all right, turning
off one faucet before they opened another, politely asking permission. It
wouldn’t be so simple when the apartments were occupied, but they would be gone
by then. Patri went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Elisa heard the
beatific murmur of the water. She took the buckets full of rinsed and
wrung-out washing and went out to where she had strung up a line on
the terrace, in front of the big frame for the games room and the pool. The
sun’s force was brutal, even though it had begun to go down. The clothes would
be dry in a flash, she thought. Pity there wasn’t the slightest breeze. The
ghosts were still hanging around. They had scattered now, but there were more of
them. Some were sitting on the sharp edges of the parabolic dish, as they liked
to do; it was a bit of a shock to see them there, but of course they didn’t feel
the sharp edge. And even to say they were sitting was a fiction as Elisa could
tell by the way they were “seated” all around the edge, even on the bottom, that
is, upside down. Perhaps because there was something different about them at
that hour of the day, she was vaguely troubled, for the first time, by a serious
concern: they were
like
men, and you
couldn’t help seeing them as such; but there was also the possibility of seeing
them as
real
men, while knowing they
were images. As she hung out the washing, it struck her that with so many men
available, the key was to choose the right one. But how? She discussed it with
her imaginary friend. It’s not that there’s a shortage of men, she said, with a
chuckle that was imaginary too, but they’re never there when you need them. The
sun was already making her feel faint and giving her a headache, so she finished
hanging out the washing and went straight back inside without even glancing at
those creatures, leaving the dining room door slightly ajar in the hope that
some air would flow through. She went to the bedroom to have a look: Raúl Viñas
was sleeping soundly, the two little one as well. She half-closed that
door too, and switched on the television, with the sound down low. Patri came
out of the bathroom with wet hair, fresh and smiling. Do you feel better now?
Sure, see the difference? I could have spent hours under that shower. Well, when
we fill up the pool, you can splash around in it all day long, huh? Has it
started already? asked Patri. I don’t know, I just put it on; OK, let’s see,
it’s about to start, I think.