Kamchatka (23 page)

I closed the door and got back into the bath.

For the next dive I played out the story again, right up to the Super–Ultra battle. I didn't get to find out the end that time either. I don't think I ever found out how it ended.

As with all really simple things,
milanesas
are hard to make properly. If you don't believe me, you only have to take mamá's efforts as an example.

Mamá did everything wrong. For a start, she didn't cut off the fat or the little bits of tendon, which meant that as soon as you put the meat into the frying pan it shrivelled into a ball – Quasimodo
milanesas
were her speciality – and as a result they weren't evenly cooked. And she never sieved the breadcrumbs, leaving big lumps in with the crumbs so that her
milanesas
looked like they were dipped in rocks. Sometimes, you'd get a piece of eggshell in your teeth that had fallen in when she cracked the eggs.

‘
Milanesas
are better if you tenderize the meat,' I said, making a dash for the cutlery drawer. I'd seen one of the spiky wooden hammers for tenderizing meat in there somewhere.

She looked at me suspiciously as she busied herself with the frying pan, the oil, the cooker. As far as mamá was concerned,
there were no gradations, no such thing as ‘low' or ‘medium': she always turned the gas up as high as it would go.

I found a chopping board and got down to work. The idea is to pound the meat so it becomes tender, that way you don't end up cutting through the breadcrumbs to find shoe leather inside.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

‘It tastes better if you put some stock in with the beaten egg,' I said, still hammering. ‘It gives it flavour.'

‘Why are you hitting the meat?' yelled the Midget. Sitting on the kitchen counter wrapped in a huge towel, he looked like Humpty Dumpty. ‘It's already dead!'

‘Where did you learn all this from?' asked mamá, intrigued. ‘Have you been watching Doña Petrona?'

The Midget laughed. Doña Petrona was a fat woman with knobbly fingers who did cooking on women's programmes on TV. She had an assistant called Juanita and she had a really funny way of talking: she didn't say ‘Juanita'; she pronounced it ‘Whaa-Nee-Tah', stressing every syllable.

‘Bertuccio's mother taught me.'

‘Did she now?'

‘What's wrong with that? Bertuccio's mother is a genius.'

‘You've got a strange concept of what a genius is. Aristotle, Galileo, Einstein and Bertuccio's mother!'

‘You're burning the oil!'

Mamá quickly tossed in the first
milanesa
, which spattered furiously in the pan.

‘Bertuccio's mother is a fat slob who doesn't know her arse from her elbow!'

‘Firstly, she's not fat, she's thin. And secondly, she knows lots of things. She helps Bertuccio with his homework all the time!'

‘And why would I help you? You never need any help. I've got a clever son!'

‘And she's at home when Bertuccio comes home from school.'

‘When you get home from school, you switch on the TV and I can't get a word out of you. Whenever I ask you how school was, all you ever say is “fine”. What do you need me to be here for?'

‘You're burning it!'

‘Oops…'

Too late. The
milanesa
was no longer Quasimodo; it now looked like London after the Great Fire.

As mamá was staring at her pitiful attempt, I managed to turn the heat down to low.

‘How about you try?' she said. ‘I have to go.'

I had been expecting this. The phone conversation I had overheard had prepared me for this contingency, and I'd decided to resist it.

‘What do you mean you have to go?'

‘I have to go.'

‘Where?'

‘A meeting at work.'

‘What work? They fired you!'

‘I got fired from the lab, but that doesn't mean I don't have other things to do.'

‘What things?'

‘Things. You know.'

‘Things that are more important than us?' (I was prepared for anything.)

‘Nothing is more important to me than you two.'

‘Well then, stay here.'

‘I can't.'

‘Stay, just this once. You can go some other day!'

Mamá took the frying pan off the heat, then rested her hands on my shoulders. She looked me in the eye, bringing her face close to mine (almost close enough for us to rub noses like an Eskimo kiss) and hit me full force with the Devastating Smile.

‘Don't ask me to do a bad thing. Not you.'

Mamá, one. Harry, nil.

The
milanesas
were delicious. They were succulent and tender. Papá and Lucas showered me with praise, relieved for once to be spared the bland, often inorganic meals that were mamá's speciality. I must have eaten too many because after a while I had a stomach ache and eventually I threw up.

When I went to bed, mamá still wasn't home.

She arrived back a little later. Papá and Lucas were still up. I heard them talking about roadblocks. Then papá mentioned that I'd had a stomach ache and a second later she was opening the door to my room.

I pretended to be asleep, but it didn't matter. She talked to me like she knew I was faking it – even though I was brilliant, I kept my eyes closed, my body still, my breathing deep and regular, nothing to give me away. She obviously didn't want to wake the Midget because she whispered. I can clearly remember her warm breath on my left ear, telling me not to worry, that everything was going to be OK, that she would always be there (by my side, or in my ear?), that she loved me very much, that of all the scientific experiments she'd done in her life, I was the one that had turned out best. She said she didn't care whether I could hear her prattling on; didn't care that she was dribbling into my ear; didn't even care – get this – that she was behaving like Bertuccio's mother.

She probably twigged because I was smiling.

No one who did not have mamá's persuasiveness, which, though based on her keen intelligence, owed much to her natural air of authority (some, shrewdly, called it seductiveness), could have persuaded papá to go to grandpa's birthday. Since the beginning of the world – which, in this case, means for as long as I could remember – papá and grandpa had never got along.

Relentless hostility was the basis of their relationship. Just as the duellists in Conrad's short story symbolize a constant in a world of change, so papá and grandpa fought whenever and wherever they met – at parties, family reunions, Christmas and christenings – with the inevitability of ritual. Grandma insisted that they had not always been like this, but every time she made this claim, mamá and I would exchange a sceptical glance. Whatever harmony had existed between them dated back to Eden before the Fall; the last time they had hugged was long before Adam asked Eve if there was anything for dessert and she said: ‘Wouldn't you prefer a nice piece of fruit?'

They invariably argued about the same things – the car, for example. Grandpa thought the Citroën was little more than a go-kart with a bit of fancy bodywork. Mortally offended, papá took this as his cue to unleash every weapon in his arsenal. They argued about the farm. If grandpa started talking about the harvest, or the livestock or some new fertilizer he was trying out, papá would interrupt him and try to change the subject, but he could never manage to get in before grandpa asked the question he always asked: ‘Have you never thought of coming back to live in the country?' And every time Papá would reluctantly answer. There were two answers, one for mixed company and one that included the word ‘fuck'.

The most sensitive subject, however, was Argentina. Aside from the name of the country and the colours of the flag, there was nothing on which papá and grandpa agreed. They argued about the army, censorship, the economy, the disappearances, the bombings, the newspapers, the repression, petrol, while grandma heaved loud sighs and mamá took papá's side, though she was more measured than he was – it was important not to crush grandpa and ruin things completely. I found these conversations deathly boring. Broadly speaking, it pretty much boiled down to the fact that grandpa thought the Peronists were a bunch of shits and papá thought they were good people, or some of them at least – not López Rega obviously, or Isabelita, or Lastiri who wore all those different ties, or some of the union leaders like Casildo Herrera, the guy who left Argentina, saying: ‘I'm out of here'.

Papá would say grandpa was a gorilla – that's what people called anti-Peronists. The Midget would stubbornly argue that grandpa was a gentleman so as to tease him; papá would say grandpa was worse than Magilla Gorilla in the cartoons. Sometimes, when papá wasn't around, the Midget would pretend to be a monkey in front of grandpa, who thought it was funny, though he had no idea what it actually meant, or why the Midget suddenly stopped monkeying around when papá showed up.

I didn't think politics was anything to take seriously. It seemed to be something that got people all worked up about nothing, a sport that was as loud as it was pointless, a bit like football. Although I wasn't really interested in sport, in theory I supported Boca and Bertuccio supported River Plate, but even then we never fell out, except for the day after a
clásico
– derby games when Boca played River – when one of us would flay the other red raw until the bell rang for first break and it was time for more important things: trading cards, comics, playing Titanes, the usual stuff. This was why I suspected that there was something else at the root of papá and grandpa's endless feuding, something more than the Citroën or the farm or even Peronism, something so important that it had them facing off at dawn, staring down the pommels of their swords. Maybe it was the typical father/son stuff people talk about – the stuff that papá and I would go through when the time came – the conflict between a father's plans and his son's need to assert his own identity, rough edges that are worn away by time if and only if no outside force interrupts the normal sequence of events, if and only if nothing – no country, no person, no sword – intervenes.

In spite of what papá thought, to me grandpa was the best grandfather in the world. You could tell just by looking at him: fat, friendly, given to explosive bursts of tango (‘
decí por Dios qué
me
has dao, que estoy tan cambiao
…'
)
and always eager for an opportunity to play with us. Grandpa had a moustache as white as the hair he plastered down with Brylcreem as soon as he got out of the bath so as to temper its natural curliness. He didn't smoke cigarettes, but he liked cigars, Romeo y Julietas, and he'd give me the empty boxes when he was finished with them to put my trading cards in. (I think I liked Orson Welles before I ever saw an Orson Welles movie because he had the same look, like a smoking bear, that I associated with my grandfather.) Any time he saw me with a
Superman
comic he'd say: ‘When are you going to stop reading that rubbish? You're a big boy
now!' I'd tell him I'd stop reading comics the day he stopped reading pulp westerns by Silver Kane and Marcial Lafuente Estefanóa, the sort of lurid novels you can buy at newsstands, and when we next passed a newsstand, we'd laugh, call a truce and buy another two, three, five….

Sometimes I'd see him doing something strange. Whenever he got worked up about something, he'd laugh and cry at the same time. He knew it was weird: he tried to explain it to me. He'd be watching
Sábados Circulares
, for example, and the presenter, Mancera, would introduce a choir of poor blind kids and grandpa would listen to them singing like angels and he'd start laughing and crying at the same time. It's not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot more practice than Houdini's four minutes underwater. The difference is, for the four-minute trick, you have to learn to do it, you have to take it seriously, practise like a professional, whereas laughing and crying at the same time is something life teaches you without you even noticing. If life was a movie and someone asked you what kind of movie it was, the best answer would be: it's a movie that makes you laugh and cry at the same time. Grandpa knew that.

We never found out what mamá did to persuade papá, because the news that we were going to Dorrego superseded all other considerations. Me and the Midget immediately started daydreaming. Dorrego meant our grandparents, whom we hadn't seen since the Christmas holidays, but it also meant the farm, horses, the tractor, animals, the library, papá's old toys, the lagoon, the boats and – last but not least – the Salvatierras, the foreman's children, with whom we were always getting into scrapes. One time we found some pots of paint and it occurred to us that, when he got up after his siesta, papá would be thrilled to see the Citroën (the one before the one we had now) painted a brilliant white. I'll leave the rest of that story here to the reader's imagination.

In my mind Dorrego meant something else, something that I didn't mention to the Midget – it meant leaving the
quinta
and therefore leaving Buenos Aires. It meant that mamá would not be going anywhere on her own. And it was a way of reconnecting with our own story, which had been in a state of suspended animation since the day mamá had unexpectedly come to school to collect us. Dorrego would not be our house, but it was the nearest thing to it we had left. A place where we would be surrounded by familiar sounds, by the people we knew and loved.

It was a pity Lucas couldn't come.

It didn't take long for Lucas and me to reach the limits of what we could say to each other. In the time we spent together, we talked until we were hoarse about everything we were allowed to talk about, given the rules of the game. We talked a lot about the Beatles, our four evangelists; it was Lucas who pointed out to me that there was a Beatles' song for every possible mood (even the most bleak, like ‘Yer Blues').