Kamchatka (16 page)

‘No, my name's not really Lucas,' he said. I thought he was about to reveal his identity. This was the moment of truth, like in the movies. But I was wrong. ‘And your name isn't really Harry, is it?'

I didn't answer, just went to my room. To be honest, I was angry with myself. I had given up whatever advantage I'd gained from looking through his wallet. I'd allowed him to catch me unawares. How did he know I too had a secret identity? The only thing for me to do was to stay poker-faced and deny everything. But I didn't know how. I slammed the door and threw myself down on my bed.

I was woken by a loud noise, it sounded like rain. Then I heard the Midget shouting. It seemed unlikely that it was actually raining since I could still see the sun shining through the window. And the Midget was howling with joy, the voice echoing through the corridors of the
quinta
.

When I opened the door, I saw him splashing around like Gene Kelly in
Singing in the Rain
. The house was flooded. The corridor was full of water, pouring through the drain in the bathroom floor. The house was obviously built on a slope so that the water was flowing towards the dining room.

The tank was overflowing and Lucas didn't know how to turn it off. Papá and mamá had gone out of their way to tell me how, because I was little, so obviously wouldn't already know, but they hadn't realized that Lucas, even though he was trapped in a giant's body, didn't necessarily know all the stuff that grown-ups know. So the tank was overflowing (that was the ‘rain' I had heard) and Lucas had rushed outside and was turning all the taps he could find and that's when the Midget yelled ‘It's flooding' and went into the bathroom and tried to stop up the grille in the floor with a mop, so the water
started flooding out of the toilet. In desperation, Lucas had rushed back inside and started twisting all the taps and levers he could find, and by now the Midget was enjoying the whole mess – ‘What a glorious feeling/I'm happy again'– and that's when I showed up.

I turned off the stopcock like mamá and papá showed me. Then me and the Midget went out to the swimming pool to see how the reverse diving board was working (it looked promising, there were no dead toads), leaving Lucas alone in the house.

Life may not be fair, but it has its moments.

That night wasn't too bad. Papá and mamá brought back my game of Risk, my sketchpad and the
Dennis Martin
comic I hadn't had a chance to read on the last night before we left. Dennis Martin was a bit like James Bond, but I liked him better: he was Irish, he had long hair and he always gave girls yellow roses. The Midget got his cuddly toy Goofy back, his red plastic cup with the teat (which he wasn't allowed to use, at least at night, as he had made a solemn promise) and the pyjamas he said gave him sweet dreams. No one remarked on the state of the house, which suggested everything was fine, although I overheard papá say to Lucas that there were roadblocks on the roads and that they'd have to change their route every time.

Over dinner, we all laughed about the water tank overflowing. The Midget made out it was worse than it was, saying that the water had been up to here and that he'd been swimming and everything. Lucas blushed red as a tomato, half-ashamed and half-amused and confessed that I'd saved his life. Then he tried to grab the salad bowl, but I got there first.

Maybe because they thought we were going to flood the house again, or maybe because they were afraid that next time we'd set fire to it, papá and mamá decided that me and the Midget should go back to school. This would have made me happy, except they wanted to send us to a different school.

Their argument – against which anything I said was futile – was that they didn't want us to get out of the routine of going to school. In that case, I insisted, I want to go back to the same school, the same year, the same class.

‘That's not going to be possible yet,' they told me, ‘it's too dangerous.'

‘It's not dangerous for me,' I said, ‘I didn't do anything.'

‘Roberto didn't do anything either and look what happened to him,' said papá, going all psycho on me.

It was a long drawn-out battle and of course I lost. I offered to study at home at the
quinta
: nothing doing. I screamed, I sobbed: nothing doing. I gave them the cold shoulder: nothing doing. When
mamá and papá agreed on something, they were immovable, like a brick wall with no cracks. They were determined that we should not turn into little savages.

To make matters worse, San Roque turned out to be a Catholic school. The weekend before the fatal Monday was spent giving us an intensive course in Christianity. It was one thing to fake it during mass, which, even if it felt like an eternity, only happened on Sundays, but it was something else entirely to fake it from Monday to Friday, for hours at a stretch. First thing Saturday morning, we practised the prayers we'd already learned and after that mamá started explaining Catholicism to us.

‘God created the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested.'

‘How can he rest if he's God?' the Midget wanted to know.

‘Then he created Adam, the first man. He made him out of mud.'

‘Wouldn't it have been easier to use plasticine?'

‘He breathed on the mud, a magic breath, and Adam was alive. But God did not want Adam to be alone and decided he should have a mate.'

‘I get it, “Here comes the bride”'.

‘Stop being silly. So God created Eve.'

‘Eva Perón?!'

We spent all of Saturday afternoon trying to commit to memory stories that sounded like titles from a B-movie festival: Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath, the Ten commandments. The Midget loved the bit where Moses brought down the plague of frogs and he forced mamá to admit that if God had really asked Noah to save two of every animal on Earth, then there had to be a stuffed Goofy and a plastic Goofy on the Ark.

On Sunday we went to mass and realized that everything we'd learned was from Book One, which was called the Old Testament.
After that came Book Two, the New Testament. It was a lot less interesting than the Book One (Brothers killing each other! Burning bushes that talked! Prophetic dreams! Floods! Seas that parted! Lots of special effects!) but it was more moving. Jesus was the son of a carpenter and he preached love and peace and understanding among men. He was against violence and he despised money because the Earth had riches enough so that all men might eat, have shelter and live well: it was just a matter of getting things organized and learning to share. His ideas made a lot of people nervous – politicians and economists and religious leaders – because Jesus didn't respect their authority and they were afraid their followers would lose respect for them and stop obeying them. So they killed him – in a horrible way. Exactly like the picture I'd set fire to. And to make matters worse, it was pointless, because what Jesus said still made sense even after he was dead.

The rest of the stuff about Christ was a bit pernickety and seemed pretty random – about priests being more important than nuns, for example. (The Midget wanted to know why religious orders had fathers and brothers, but no uncles or cousins.) About priests not being allowed to get married. About not being interested in worldly things. And the whole business about the Host: every time you eat it, you're eating the body of Christ, which is pretty much like being a cannibal. I know it's only a gesture or a symbol – mamá explained that a thousand times – but it still sounded a bit simple-minded to my mind, like the primitive tribes that eat their victims' hearts thinking they can absorb their wisdom. Grandpa used to say that there's no slower process on Earth than the getting of wisdom. The two things that take ages to get, he'd say, are wisdom and a phone line.

Mamá ironed our school smocks (mine was blue like the cards in Risk), papá and Lucas went out to get pizza, and me and the Midget sat on the edge of the swimming pool watching a toad swimming round and round, too stupid even to realize that salvation was at
hand in the form of the reverse diving board. We shouldn't have got involved, because the whole idea was that the toads were supposed to learn for themselves, but we were touched by all the effort it was making and in the end we scooped it out with the net and put it on the board.

We all need a helping hand sometimes.

We got to the school early. Papá and mamá introduced us to Father Ruiz, the headmaster. He seemed nice enough, though pretty shortsighted, given the thick glasses he wore. He already stank of BO even though it was still early. He led us out into the playground and told us to wait there until the school bell rang. The Midget went over to look at a mural depicting the life of San Roque and I sat on a concrete bench while papá and mamá moved off a little way with Father Ruiz to talk. I heard some of what they said, thanks to my auditory powers, heightened by hours and hours spent hiding in wardrobes; Father Ruiz was explaining that we'd be included on the register and in the daily roll call, but that they didn't need to send any documentation to the Department of Education, so there was nothing to worry about.

When the bell rang, Father Ruiz went to find the Midget and mamá sat down next to me. She lit up a Jockey, the last one in the pack and, in her best ‘Rock' voice, asked me: ‘What's your name?'

‘Vicente,' I said, dully.

‘And why are you only coming to school now?'

‘Because we've only just moved to the area.'

‘What does your papá do for a living?'

‘He's an architect. He works for a construction company called Campbell and associates.'

‘What about me?'

‘Housewife.'

Mamá exhaled a large cloud of smoke. She looked tired. She had never been much of a morning person. When she spoke again she didn't sound like the Rock any more.

‘It's not that bad. You'll make new friends.'

‘I don't want to make new friends, I want my old friends. The ones you took away from me!'

At that moment Father Ruiz reappeared and I got to my feet. As I walked over to him, I heard mamá scrunch the pack of Jockeys into a ball.

When Father Ruiz opened the door to my new classroom, none of my classmates was there. They were all up in front of the blackboard, huddled down like a rugby scrum, killing themselves laughing.

Father Ruiz launched himself into the scrum like a bulldozer, shouting ‘Get back to your seats' over and over, pinching their sides. It was obvious he'd had a lot of practice breaking up crowds. He bulldozed until there was only one person left – a skinny boy in a windcheater, a green scarf and a woolly hat, who refused to budge.

‘Did you hear what I said?' Father Ruiz barked. ‘Get to your seat.'

The only answer he got was gales of laughter from the rest of the class.

The ‘boy' was actually the school's model skeleton dressed up to look like one of my classmates. At least it was definitely a skeleton. I wondered just how far Catholics took this cannibalism thing.

Father Ruiz blushed, then finally burst out laughing. (He was obviously more short-sighted than I'd thought.) He pulled the clothes off the skeleton and thanked my classmates for their generous donation of old clothes. Most of them booed, except for the ones who owned the clothes, and they simply turned pale.

He stood me at the front of the class and explained that I was new to the school. He gave a little welcome speech, emphasizing how
awkward people feel arriving at a new school where everyone knows everyone else and asked them to open their hearts to me. His words were received in a respectful silence. Headmaster or not, Father Ruiz was a good man and everyone who had dealings with him clearly knew that. But the atmosphere of calm he had managed to instil shattered into a million pieces when, at the end of his speech, he announced: ‘May I introduce Haroldo Vicente.'

Haroldo! A yelp came from somewhere at the back of the class.

I closed my eyes. I wanted to die.

This was something I hadn't foreseen. With a respect for my wishes, my parents had tried to preserve the name ‘Harry' In the world of my new school. ‘Harry' is a diminutive of ‘Harold', which in Spanish is ‘Haroldo' – a stupid name which, as someone at the back of the class worked out, happens to rhyme with all sorts of rude words. Soon, thirty little monsters in blue uniforms – like the Blue Meanies in
Yellow Submarine
– were all pointing and laughing at me, even though I'd never wanted to be Haroldo. I wanted to be Harry but now they'd all got in on the act and started rhyming everything I said. It was like I was in a musical with no music, with everyone speaking in rhymes. All we needed now was for the school skeleton to get up and dance on the walls and the ceiling like Fred Astaire in
Royal Wedding
until someone pulled him down by the green-striped scarf.

I felt like one of those characters in comics that have a little black cloud floating over their heads that follows them around and every now and then shoots out bolts of lightning. I spent the whole day playing Hangman by myself, not paying attention to anything that was said in class. I'd always been a good student, but right now I was prepared to boycott the whole thing: I wanted to get a Fail in every subject so papá and mamá would have no choice but to take me out of this school. Eventually, the kid I was sharing a desk with noticed me playing Hangman, a boy called Denucci who couldn't figure out the rules (how could I guess the wrong letter in a word when I already knew the answer?) and couldn't figure out why I hanged myself in game after game after game.

After school, papá and mamá were waiting for us. We all walked back to the
quinta
together because they wanted to show us the way. The Midget ruined my perfect bad mood by babbling on enthusiastically about his day: he loved the new school.