Kamchatka (15 page)

The afternoon Lucas arrived (or ‘Lucas Just-Lucas' as the Midget called him) all I could hear was my own heart beating. It was like a train hurtling along a track, the engine about to explode. My chest hurt as though a fist were thumping on my ribs from the inside. I was furious! I felt I had been tricked by my parents and betrayed by the Midget. I decided that I would repel the intruder, even if I had to do it alone. I wanted to think about how I would go about it, but I couldn't concentrate. My heart was making too much noise.

Señorita Barbeito says that the heart is a muscle. It expands and contracts. As it beats it makes the sound ‘b-b-buh-bum'. No, it's not ‘buh-bum', it's ‘b-b-buh-bum'; the ‘b' that starts it off is slower; as with any machine, the initial motion is the most difficult and therefore lasts longer. According to Señorita Barbeito, the fact that it is a muscle suggests that it can be controlled. But the heart is a complicated muscle and has a tough job to do. Most muscles respond to direct, conscious commands, but the heart is automatic rather than manual, like the cars they have in America. You have to work out how to shut off the automatic switch and set it to manual, if only for a short period. It's a difficult thing to learn, because the body doesn't come with an instruction manual (if it did, it would save us a lot of time and trouble), and there's no off switch or key or lever to switch from one system to another. It's like
Airport
– the book, not the film (I haven't seen the film, but mamá lent me the book): the plane is in danger, the real pilot is unconscious and you have to take over the controls even though you've no idea how to fly a plane, and let yourself be guided by the voice of the guy in the control tower, or, in my case, by the (imaginary) voice of Señorita Barbeito. Books about planes in trouble were very popular back then. There was
The President's Plane Is Missing
, in which, at some point, the hero says you should always look carefully at a girl's mother before getting hitched, that way you know what she'll look like in twenty years' time and decide if she's worth it. This seemed to me a perceptive remark and
I jotted it down in my mental notebook, intending to make use of it when the time came.

By the time I thought about it, my heartbeat had slowed. I wondered if that was because I hadn't been thinking about my heart, because I was thinking about something else. You think about something else, you get distracted, you follow the thought and while you're doing it you forget that you were panicked, and when you forget to panic, you calm down again. It was like the thing that worked for me with my breathing, when my chest felt tight and it felt like I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. I thought I was suffocating and that made me suffocate all the more. So I'd turn on the TV or make myself a
café con leche
or read a book and drift off to Oz or Neverland or Camelot and after a while I'd discover I was breathing normally again. You had to pretend to ignore the problem if you were to get through it, otherwise it was like surrendering. It had worked with my lungs; now it was working with my heart. Well done, said Señorita Barbeito's voice inside my head. An almost perfect landing. Now, you can climb out of the cockpit and everyone will be cheering and clapping. You're a hero, Harry. (I called myself Harry even when I was thinking. Papá had been very clear – our real names had to be kept safely under lock and key. The slightest slip could be fatal. We weren't even allowed to use our real names with each other. Papá called me Harry. Mamá called me Harry.)

Houdini must have been a claustrophiliac too. Or maybe there was a lot of stuff going on around him that made him panicked or angry and he had to climb inside trunks and vaults and glass boxes so that he could think about something else – something silly – until he could calm down and decide to come out and face the world again.

That night I got up to go for a pee (I thought about taking the Midget with me, but it was too late, he'd already wet the bed) and nearly killed myself. Lucas was lying right in the middle of the path in his sleeping bag. Since the sleeping bag was too small, or he was too big, the only way he could fit inside was by rolling into a ball. He looked like a (giant) baby kangaroo inside the pouch of his (giant) mother.

Stepping around him, I noticed he'd left his clothes on a chair. The moonlight streaming through the Venetian blinds gave his orange T-shirt an otherworldly glow. I dared myself to touch it. The motorbike and the writing that said ‘Jawa CZ' felt weird, not like fabric, it was sort of rubbery. I'd never seen a T-shirt like it. I squinted so I could read the label inside. ‘Made in Poland.' What had Lucas been doing in Poland? It was a weird place to go, even for tourists who go to Europe. Tourists go to Madrid or Paris, or London or Rome, but Poland? It would have been better if it read ‘Made in Transylvania', because at least then it would have made sense. Lucas would be Renfield, Dracula's one acolyte who hadn't yet been turned into a vampire. But Poland was just mysterious. It sounded like spies and double agents and zither music, like Anton Karas's music for
The Third Man
. (My knowledge of central European geography was sufficiently vague back then that I was capable of getting Poland and Austria mixed up.)

And what about the light blue Japan Airlines bag? How could Lucas be so young and have travelled so much? And why did he always go to weird places? Japan was a case in point. I couldn't think of a single reason why anyone would want to go to Japan, except maybe if you were James Bond and M sent you on a mission and you were in the book called
You Only Live Twice
. (Grandpa had a complete set of Ian Fleming's books in his house in Dorrego, in editions that had photos from the Bond movies on the covers.) Was Lucas some kind of secret agent? And if he was, did papá and mamá know, or had he tricked them the same way he was trying to trick me? I needed to know more.

And there was Lucas's wallet, sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans. I waited a couple of seconds (well, not too many, I was about to piss myself) to make sure that Lucas was sleeping soundly. Then I carefully took his wallet out of the pocket.

Not much money. No ID. I expected this: Lucas would want to conceal his true identity, he wouldn't want anyone to know his real name wasn't Lucas Just-Lucas, or Lucas Thingamajig. There were a couple of bus tickets and a programme for a cinema on the Calle Lavalle. The programme was dated 1973. Why would Lucas keep such an old programme? The answer was in the film itself:
Live and Let Die
with Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto and Jane Seymour. The first movie with Roger Moore as James Bond. Lucas was keeping this as a reminder of his own initiation as a spy – he was soppy.

Just then he moved in his sleep; he was dreaming. I hid the wallet behind my back. When you're about to be caught doing something and you need an explanation, you never come up with anything plausible. The only excuses I could think of were rubbish, like I was going to wash his jeans to welcome him or that I was looking for change for a 100 peso note (at 3 a.m.!) but luckily, I didn't need an explanation. Lucas went on sleeping.

That was when I found the photo. The girl was wearing a white miniskirt, and a black blouse that she held open with both hands so I could see her boobs as she stared tenderly out at me. If proof were needed to confirm my suspicion that Lucas was a sentimental spy, this was it. This girl could have been a Bond girl in any of the movies. Lucas wanted something to remember her by during his missions so he'd come up with the cunning idea of printing her photo on the back of a calendar from Kiosko Pepe, Santa Fe y Ecuador. Simple, but brilliant. Grown-ups do really weird things to hide their sex stuff. Mamá's cousin Tito used to hide his copies of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
in a pile of
Hot Rods
and car magazines. Papá, who only read newspapers, law books and the
Palermo Rosa
for the racing form, had a copy of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
in his office. If Bertuccio, with his obsession with books for grown-ups, hadn't alerted me, I wouldn't even have noticed that he had that dirty book stuck between his volumes of the penal code.

I put the wallet back where I'd found it and rushed to the loo. OK, if I'm being honest, I wrestled for ages with the temptation to keep the photo for myself, but in the end I thought it was better if Lucas didn't notice anything out of the ordinary (in any case, I could take it any night I wanted to) so I put it back in his pocket. This way, Lucas wouldn't know that I knew; now I had the upper hand again.

Someone should invent toilets with slanted sides. Women are always complaining because we splash but aiming your thing is harder than it looks.

Papá and mamá left early the next morning. To make up for going away, they promised to swing by our house and pick up some of our stuff. We bombarded them with requests. We wanted the whole world and then some. Mamá tried to impose some sort of limits on what we could have, but papá intervened, clenching his fist to make the sign of the Rock so she would relent. He tried to hide it but I saw it. When she gave in to our demands, we were so happy we rocked the car. (If anyone still doubts my description of how flimsy the Citroën was, it was the sort of car that could be jiggled like a cocktail shaker by a ten-year-old boy and his five-year-old brother.) But even this sudden joy didn't entirely compensate for the feeling that we were being abandoned, left in the enemy's clutches.

The plan was to steer clear of Lucas. At first it was easy, because we had stuff to do. While mamá was taking a shower, I took the Midget's mattress outside in a stealth manoeuvre so that it could dry in the sun. Mamá noticed anyway and asked what it was doing there but we told her we'd taken it outside to do somersaults. She gave us a suspicious look, but she said nothing more. I let the Midget know mamá was getting suspicious and that he had to take extreme precautions. From now on, there were to be no more drinks before bed. Not a drop. ‘No Coke?' said the Midget. No coke, I confirmed.
‘What about water?' No water, no soft drinks, I said. ‘No milk?' ‘Not with or without Nesquik,' I said, believing I had exhausted the full range of beverages the Midget drank. It wasn't a joke, I explained, mamá was on to him and if he wasn't careful, he was in for the Glacial Stare, the Petrifying Scream and the Deadly Pinch. So there wasn't even a peep out of him when I told him to wash the sheets, thereby eliminating the evidence of his crime.

As for me, I'd decided to begin a regimen of intense physical training. I needed to get fit so that I could start my career as an escape artist as soon as possible. This was easy to say, but for me it amounted to a real achievement. Let's just say I'd never been particularly sporty. At school, when they made us run, my chest would tighten and I'd feel as though I was suffocating, and every breath sounded like a train whistle in my chest. I didn't even like football – Argentina's national obsession. My relationship with the ball was cut short at an early age. Once, while I was kicking a rubber ball in the street, I cut my ankle on a broken bottle: I had to have six stitches and still had the scar. A couple of months after that, in Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, I kicked my first proper football into the air and it hit a branch with a beehive on it. That was the end of my interest in sports and the beginning of my unshakeable empathy for cartoon characters who fell off cliffs, had pianos land on their heads and were chased by angry swarms of bees: this was why I always preferred Wile E. Coyote to the Road Runner; Sylvester to Tweety Pie and Daffy Duck to Bugs Bunny. When I got lectures about the importance of sport, I remembered the blood and the scratches and I said to myself however healthy sport is, claustrophilia is healthier.

My plan of action included several laps of the grounds of the
quinta
, working on my biceps and sit-ups. To help motivate myself, I had drawn up a graph with the exercises marked on the x axis and the date on the y axis, beginning today. All I had to do was mark down which exercises I'd done, and how many.

I survived the first lap of the grounds pretty well. As I passed the laundry room I saw the Midget, rubbing soap on the sheets where the stain was, looking appropriately serious and determined.

The second lap was agony. The Midget was still rubbing soap on the same spot.

I never finished the third lap. Seeing that the Midget had abandoned his task was a small comfort, but it was a consolation. Almost joyfully I rinsed out the sheet.

Lucas grilled steaks, and he let us eat in front of the TV. To be fair to him, his steaks were better than mamá's. There was no fat, even around the edges.

That afternoon I made another attempt at exercising, but by then I'd lost my motivation. Looking at my graph, I was ashamed to see how little I'd actually done. Two and a half laps around the grounds? Eight sit-ups? There were worms out there fitter than I was and they probably had bigger biceps. I felt flushed and twitchy, my whole body ached and tingled with pins and needles; I went back to the house in the worst possible mood.

And found Lucas reading my book about Houdini.

I must have looked daggers at him, because he shut it carefully and gingerly set it down on the table as though it were a flask of nitro-glycerine or one of the little crystal animals that grandma Matilde was always so careful with.

‘You interested in magic?' he asked, trying to cover up by seeming curious.

‘Houdini wasn't a magician. He was an escape artist. Magicians are just liars. They pretend they've got magic powers but they haven't,' I snapped at him as I angrily snatched up my book. But obviously I wasn't particularly happy with my comeback because, halfway to my room, I turned around and said. ‘Your name's not really Lucas, is it?'

In the silence that followed my question, Lucas dropped the innocent air he'd had while talking to me, like someone taking off
a disguise. A new gleam lit up his eyes, something cunning. Until then, I'd thought I was dealing with a kid trapped in a body that was too big for him. Now he looked like an old man trapped in a brand-new, hardly used body.