Kamchatka (24 page)

We talked about how pointless most of the things we learned at school were, and discussed the things kids should be taught. Wouldn't students be better off if they were given the opportunity to discover the book that would change their life? Shouldn't we have to listen to the best music, to sing and dance? In learning Geography, shouldn't they start by teaching us how to find our way around? (Nobody much used a compass any more, as though we couldn't get lost.) And as for history, wouldn't it make more sense to start with the present day? If we couldn't make sense of what was going on around us, how could we learn from the experience of those who had gone before us?

(Every now and then, when he recounted more recent memories, Lucas would let slip a plural – ‘we were', ‘we ran', one time ‘we saw' – which made me think that he had also been forced to leave a Bertuccio behind, or a Midget, but obviously I couldn't ask him any questions.)

We discussed our experiences with the female of the species; his, which were many and varied – although he still denied that the girl in his wallet was or had ever been his girlfriend – and mine, which were limited to Mara, the daughter of friends of my parents who was in my after-school English class, whose mere presence made me want to do stupid things. I suspect I made a rather feeble case for the sensitive, intelligent man.

We also talked about comics and TV shows and movies. Lucas asked if I'd ever read a comic called
El Eternauta
, which he was sure I'd love, given how much I loved
The Invaders
. I told him I'd try and find a copy. I remember a Mona Lisa smile lit up his face and he told me that, these days, asking for a copy of
El Eternauta
at a newsstand was also the wrong question. All roads seemed to lead to the wrong question. Back then, we felt as though we were condemned to silence.

I don't know whether Lucas started the game or I did. I suspect it was me. Being the son of the Rock and a fervent disciple of Houdini, I felt a feverish desire to flout, or at least mock, the constraints imposed on me; I wouldn't say I was blind to my conditioning, but I was getting a little short-sighted. Since asking the wrong questions was prohibited, I began to rack my brains to come up with the right ones, questions that could be spoken aloud, in the light of day. I bridled at being told what I could and could not do: people start by forbidding you to ask certain questions and you end up not being able to ask any at all, and a man who has stopped asking questions is a dead man. Pretty quickly, we hit the mother lode. There were basic, obvious questions to which we didn't know the answers. Why is the sky blue? Why is the Earth shaped the way it is? Why is water wet? Why did nature evolve spicy food? Why does helium give you a high-pitched voice like Benny the Ball from
Top Cat
? Why is air transparent? How do LPs store music? Why are saints always shown with haloes? (This was the Midget's contribution.) Why did dead languages die? Why
don't people sing rather than talk? How hot is the surface of the sun? – a question that, in the dead of winter, provoked an exquisite nostalgia for summer. The questions kept coming.

We would slump on the grass, our backs against a tree, indifferent to the cold, and sit there for a long time, saying nothing. To the casual observer, it might seem as though we were doing nothing, whereas in fact our senses were working overtime. We could feel the rough bark at our backs, in spite of our thick jackets, feel the smoothness and the damp of the ground we were sitting on. As we breathed in the icy air, we could follow its course through our bodies as it became lukewarm, only to lose it when it became a part of us. Sometimes I thought I could see windows melting. (Glass is a super-cooled liquid; it's just that our perception is like a video recorder set to ‘Pause'.) Then one of us, it didn't matter who, would ask a question – Are the hairs on our head antennae? – and the other would come up with another one – Why do we have five fingers on each hand rather than three, or seven, or twelve? – and after that they'd come thick and fast, our breath like white clouds, making us seem like friendly dragons, because everyone knows that good dragons belch white smoke.

Lucas and me didn't even bother trying to answer these questions. Mostly because we didn't know the answers, except for a few that Lucas could explain: for example, he was the one who told me about aquifers. Aquifers are reservoirs or layers of water under the ground that collect rainwater and somehow manage, by rivers and streams, to get it back to the sea; everything is connected. Sometimes he'd come up with an answer that was funny or poetic – saints have haloes so that God doesn't lose track of them when he's looking down on them from above, or, if books were feathers, there'd be no birds, there'd be flying libraries, things like that – but only sometimes, because the game was about the questions. It was about proving that there was no such thing as a wrong question, only wrong answers.

In the days before we left for Dorrego, I hardly saw him. One day he'd leave five minutes after I came home from school and wouldn't get back until long after I was asleep, another day he'd get back early but he'd claim he was exhausted and would go to bed without any dinner. I don't think he wanted to talk to anyone, he was pale and he looked as though he felt like zipping his sleeping bag over his head, returning to the womb, smelling his own smells to make sure he was still alive. I felt frustrated. Like an ant, I felt I needed to store up affection for those times when there would be none, I wanted to have days when there was lots of Lucas to compensate for the shortage of Lucas in Dorrego. It's possible to stockpile affection and carry it around like the huge leaves you see ants carrying around on their tiny little bodies. But I couldn't do it. On Friday night, I waited up as late as I could, but Lucas didn't come back in time.

I did see him for a minute, on Saturday morning. We made so much noise getting ready to leave – I was particularly noisy – that he woke up and came to say goodbye. The Citroën had already set off when he suddenly seemed to remember something and he ran after the car on his long spidery legs.

‘Nine thousand, nine hundred and thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit,' he said, his breath misting my window.

‘What is?'

‘The temperature on the surface of the sun.'

‘Look after the toads for me,' said the Midget.

‘Don't worry… we'll keep each other company.'

Papá and mamá said goodbye again and we drove off.

While we were in Dorrego, I didn't have Lucas, but at least I had something. Every time I thought about him, I pictured him in a trench coat, looking mysterious, enigmatic, darting through the shadows from one doorway to another, his eyes small and bright – like the marbles we played with one time – alert to the possible presence of the enemy. I imagined Lucas trying to make it to a vast,
shadowy building without being spotted. Once inside, he took off his trench coat and, protected by his orange T-shirt, he forgot about his secret mission for a while, forgot the danger that awaited him outside, and striding in his seven-league boots, he'd walk up to the desk and say: ‘Good evening,
señora
, could you tell me where I might find out the temperature of the sun?'

Noun.
the science of stars and heavenly bodies.

The gate rose up in the middle of nowhere. That's how it appeared to my child's eyes, the path wound endlessly around the wire fence until it came to the gate right in the middle of infinite nothingness, because you went through the gate and on the other side there was nothing, nothing but fields and a curved horizon, a green sea on which Christ could have walked in his sandals. Even in the Citroën we had to drive for quite a bit before we reached anywhere. First we saw the olive grove – the trees were only a couple of years old and were hardly as tall as me. (Me and the Midget liked playing in the olive grove, it made us feel like giants.) Then came a thicket and beyond that the tilled fields and the livestock and from there, in the distance, we could make out the mill; the house was close now.

It was nice but it was simple, a one-storey house with a red tiled roof, a living/dining room with huge windows and a fireplace, where, family legend had it, I ate half a beetle when I was a year old. There was a long corridor that led to the bedrooms, to grandpa's study and to the kitchen, which was so huge that me and the Midget played handball against the back wall. We called it the Chickendrome, ever since papá, determined to prove that he was a real farmer, tried to kill a chicken by wringing its neck. The poor bird fell on the tiled floor as though it was dead, then suddenly got
up and started scurrying around the kitchen, its neck forming a perfect right-angle, flapping its wings wildly.

There was no swimming pool in Dorrego, but there was a big rainwater tank we bathed in with the Salvatierra kids; if we wanted a proper swim we went down to the lagoon, though even on the hottest days of summer the water was freezing. But for adventure, the lagoon was unbeatable: we fished from the pier or out of boats, we practised ducks and drakes, skimming flat stones across the water, we lashed reeds together to make rafts that we never completed and we patrolled the banks of the lagoon searching for nature's endless surprises: lizards, dead fish, bare bones for which we invented macabre origins. (‘We thrive on bones,' writes Margaret Atwood, ‘without them there'd be no stories.')

The Salvatierra kids were identical Russian dolls of various sizes. There were two boys, the oldest and the youngest, but the middle child, Lila, was by far the bravest of the three. They were quiet but friendly, with permanent smiles, dazzling as the sun, shining out of tanned faces. They had a sixth sense for devilment, and could sniff out an opportunity for a practical joke as if it was sulphur. Wherever there was something that might be dangerous – quicklime, axes, bulls, a sow with her piglets – we would find them hanging around, waiting for the right moment. Their father would invariably end up hauling them home by the ears. Given that he didn't have hands enough to drag all three of them, Lila had to grab the littlest boy by the ear, and off they'd go, all four of them, like a human daisy chain.

When I was little, their father asked Lila to teach me how to ride a horse. I remember how nervous I was, especially since Lila's horse seemed to want to break into a gallop at any minute. I spent my whole time tugging on the reins to try and get him to stop, until eventually I saw the shadow on the ground that explained why he was in such a hurry. Sitting behind me, Lila was digging her heels
into his flanks, trying to goad him. Every time I stopped the horse, she'd dig her heels in again, trying hard not to laugh.

But underlying all the games, I felt an unspoken hostility towards me, an outsider coming from a different world and attempting to annex their territory. With almost animal instinct, they insisted that I prove myself worthy to join their gang and, like a bull faced with a red cape, I blindly tackled every dare – some successfully, others disastrously – and while no blood was shed, there were a few broken bones. And still they kept drawing imaginary lines in the sand which I continued to cross, determined to prove myself worthy at any cost: scratches, threats, plaster casts, I didn't care. But whenever I went back to playing with my city things – my trading cards and my books – they kept their distance, as though afraid to expose themselves to the effects of a magic whose rules they did not understand. They only got involved when they saw me playing at being someone else – a cowboy, or Robin Hood or Tarzan. Playing characters in a story I made up came naturally to them and they threw themselves into the roles with an energy and an imagination that surpassed my meagre stage directions: they were born actors.

I still bear the scars of the ordeals the Salvatierra kids subjected me to. Strangely, I don't remember ever feeling any pain, but I do remember the joy I felt the first time I beat Lila in a horse race – we were riding barefoot and the stirrups rubbed my instep raw – or when I got the highest walnut from the walnut tree, flaying the skin from my hands in the process. On the map of my body, these scars mark out the course of an initiation for which I feel nothing but gratitude. In their own way, the Salvatierra kids understood the Principle of Necessity. If they had not created the conditions that forced me to change, I would still feel like an outsider in Dorrego, an intruder, a stranger.

The trip to Dorrego passed without incident, given that the Midget slept almost the whole way. There was a reason he was so tired. Mamá had got him up to pee three times the night before so that he wouldn't wet the bed. Unaware of this, I had also got him up to go to the toilet when I happened to wake up in the middle of the night, and papá, not knowing mamá and I had already done so, also took him to the toilet twice. The Midget had done more walking in his sleep that night than he usually did during the day.

Hardly had the racket of the Citroën announced our arrival than our grandparents came out to greet us. Grandpa was as fat as ever; I remember the vicuña poncho he was wearing. Tall and thin, grandma had a natural elegance. She looked like a number 1 standing beside the chubby 0 that was grandpa; together they formed the binary system on which my entire universe was based.

Awake now, the Midget gave grandpa his first present: a box of Romeo y Julieta. I followed, with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black
Label. These were presents that never disappointed: we knew that grandpa would enjoy them. But even so, he managed to needle papá.

‘Would you look at this?' he said, showing grandma the whisky and the box of cigars. ‘I don't know whether they're trying to spoil me or bump me off!'

Papá glanced at mamá, as if to say ‘You see?!'