My Documents (19 page)

To Martín, the existence of that door is fantastic—he’s only ever seen one like it in Tom and Jerry cartoons. He almost asks how they got it, but then he thinks that maybe Santiago is full of pet doors and he’s just never noticed before.

“Sorry,” he says at the wrong time. “What did you say about our parents?”

“What?”

“You said something about ‘our parents,’ I think?”

“Oh, that this door is like when our parents gave us the keys to the house.”

The laughter lasts for two seconds. Martín goes out to smoke and sees an empty area in the yard: two and a half meters of disheveled grass where there should be a few plants and maybe a bush, but there’s nothing. He flicks his ashes furtively onto the grass, puts out the cigarette, and wastes an entire minute thinking about where to throw it: in the end he leaves it under a yellowed weed. He looks at the house from the threshold, thinks that it isn’t so big, that it’s manageable, though it seems full of nuance. He tentatively observes the shelves, the electric piano, and a large hourglass on the end table. He remembers that when he was a child he liked hourglasses, and he turns it over—

“It lasts twelve minutes,” says the little girl, who then, from the top step where she is trying to hold on to the cat, asks him if he’s Martín.

“Yes.”

And if he wants to play chess.

“Okay.”

The cat wriggles out of the girl’s grasp. It’s an uneven gray color, with short, dense fur, a thin body, and fangs that protrude slightly. The little girl goes up and down the stairs several times. And the cat, Mississippi, seems docile. He goes up to Martín, who wants to pet him but hesitates: he’s not so familiar with cats, has never lived with one before.

Sofía comes back, she’s in her PJs now and she walks clumsily in her big slippers from Chiloé. Consuelo asks her to not bother them and to go to her room, but the girl is carrying a heavy box, or a box that’s heavy for her, and she sets up the chessboard on the living-room table. She is seven years old, and she has just learned how to move the pieces, as well as the game’s mannerisms or affectations: she looks cute with her brow furrowed, her round face in her hands. She and Martín start to play, but after five minutes it’s clear that they’re getting bored, him more so than her. Then he proposes to Sofí that they play at losing, and at first she doesn’t understand, but then she explodes in sweet, mocking laughter—the one who loses wins, the goal is to give up first, to leave Don Quixote and Dulcinea unprotected, because it’s a Cervantes chess set, with windmills instead of rooks, and courageous Sancho Panzas as pawns.

How idiotic, thinks Martín. A literary chess set.

The pieces on the board look tarnished, tasteless, and although
he’s not one to form quick impressions, the whole house now makes him a little anxious and annoyed, but not because of anything he sees: the placement of each object surely answers to some obscure theory of interior design, but an imbalance persists nonetheless, a secret anomaly. It’s as if the things don’t want to be where they are, thinks Martín, who is nevertheless grateful for the chance to spend some time in this luminous house, so different from the small, shadowy rooms he tends to live in.

Consuelo takes the girl upstairs and sings her to sleep. Though he listens from afar, Martín feels that he shouldn’t be eavesdropping, that he is an intruder. Bruno offers him some ravioli, which they eat in silence, with a phony masculine voracity. Something like, Well, there are no women around—let’s not use napkins. After the coffee, Bruno pours a couple of vodkas on the rocks, but Martín opts to keep downing the wine.

“What’s the name of the city where you’re going to live?” asks Martín, to have something to say.

“Saint-Étienne.”

“Where we played?”

“Who’s we?”

“The Chilean soccer team, France, ’98.”

“I don’t know. It’s an industrial city, a little run-down. I’m going to teach classes on Latin America.”

“And where is it?”

“Saint-Étienne or Latin America?”

The joke is so easy, so rote, but it works. Almost without trying, they draw out the after-dinner conversation, as if discovering some belated affinity. Upstairs the little girl sleeps, and they can also hear what might be Consuelo breathing or snoring slightly. Martín discovers that he’s been thinking about her the whole time he’s been in the house, from the moment he saw her in the doorway.

“You’re going to be here four months,” Bruno tells him. “Make use of that time to have a go with one of the neighbors.”

I’d much rather have a go with your wife, thinks Martín, and he thinks it so forcefully he’s afraid he has said it out loud.

“Enjoy it, cousin,” Bruno goes on affectionately, slightly drunk, but they aren’t cousins. Their fathers were, though: Martín’s has just died, and it was at the wake that they saw each other again for the first time in years. To treat one another like family now makes sense, it’s perhaps the only way to build a hasty sense of trust. The idea had originally been to rent out the house to someone who wouldn’t change it too much. But they couldn’t find anyone suitable. After a lot of finagling, some of it pretty desperate, Martín was the most reliable person Bruno could find to housesit. They’ve seen each other very little over the course of their lives, but maybe they were friends at one point, when they were still children and were compelled to play together on some Sunday afternoon.

Bruno lays out for him again what they’ve already talked about over the phone. He gives him the keys, they test the locks, he
explains the doors’ quirks. And again he lists the advantages of being there, although now he doesn’t mention any neighbors. Then he asks if Martín likes to read.

“A little,” says Martín, but it’s not true. Then he turns overly honest: “No, I don’t like to read. The last thing I would ever do is read a book.” After a pause he says, “Sorry,” and looks at the overflowing shelves. “It’s like I’ve gone to church and said I don’t believe in God. Plus, there are a lot of worse things. Even worse than the things that’ve already happened to me.” He gives Bruno a placating smile.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bruno says, as if approving the comment. “A lot of people think the same thing, but they don’t say it.” Then he picks out some novels and puts them on the end table beside the hourglass. “Still, if you ever feel like reading, here are some things that might interest you.”

“And why would they interest me? Are they for people who don’t read?”

“More or less, ha.” (He says this,
ha
, but without the inflection of laughter.) “Some of them are classics, others are more contemporary, but they’re all entertaining.” (When he says this last word, he doesn’t make the slightest effort to avoid a pedantic tone, almost as if he were making air quotes.) Martín thanks him and says good night.

He doesn’t look at the books, not even at their titles. Lying on the couch, he thinks: Books for people who don’t read. He thinks:
Books for people who have just lost their fathers and had already lost their mothers, people who are alone in the world. Books for people who have failed in the university, in work, in love (he thinks this: failed in love). Books for people who have failed so badly that, at forty years old, taking care of someone else’s house in exchange for nothing, or almost nothing, seems like a good opportunity. Some people count sheep, others recite their misfortunes. But he doesn’t sleep, sunk too deep in self-pity, which, in spite of everything, is not a suit he is comfortable wearing.

Just when sleep is about to overcome him, the alarm clocks go off; it’s five in the morning. Martín gets up to help the family with their suitcases. Sofí comes downstairs, sulking, but right away she finds, who knows where, a surge of energy. Mississippi is nowhere to be seen and Sofí wants to say good-bye. She cries for two minutes but then stops, as if she has simply forgotten she was crying. When the taxi arrives she insists she wants to finish her cereal, but then leaves the bowl almost untouched.

“Kill all the robbers,” she tells Martín before getting into the car.

“And what should I do with the ghosts?”

“Martín is joking,” says Consuelo immediately, throwing him a nervous look. “There are no ghosts in the house—that’s why we bought it, because we were guaranteed there were no ghosts. And not in France either, in the house where we’re going to live.”

As soon as they are gone, Martín stretches out in the big bed, which is still warm. He searches in the sheets for Consuelo’s perfume or
the smell of her body, and he sleeps facedown, breathing deeply into the pillow, as if he’s discovered an exclusive and dangerous drug. The noise of the street starts up, the commotion of people going to work, the school buses, the motors revved by drivers anxious to avoid the traffic. He dreams that he’s in the waiting room of a hospital and a stranger asks him if he’s gotten his results yet. Martín is waiting for something or waiting for someone, but in the dream he doesn’t remember exactly what or who and he doesn’t dare ask, but he knows that what he’s waiting for isn’t test results. He tries to remember, and then he thinks, It’s a dream, and he tries to wake up, but when he wakes he is still in the dream and the stranger is still waiting for an answer. Then he wakes up for real and feels the immense relief of not having to answer that question, of not having to answer any questions. The cat is yawning at the foot of the bed.

He unpacks his suitcase in the master bedroom, but there’s not much room in the wardrobes. There are several plastic bags and boxes full of clothes meticulously packed up, but there are also some unboxed garments. He finds an old Pixies T-shirt with the cover from
Surfer Rosa
on it. “You’ll think I’m dead, but I’ll sail away,” he thinks—of course, that’s from a different album, he’s got it wrong. He tries to picture Consuelo in that shirt and he can’t, but it’s a medium so it must be hers and not Bruno’s. In any case, he puts it on—he looks funny, it’s too tight on him. Wearing only the T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, he heads out to the nearest
supermarket, where he buys coffee, beer, noodles, and ketchup, plus some cans of horse mackerel for Mississippi, because he’s hatched a demagogical plan, thinking the cat will see the situation like this: they’re gone, they left me alone with a stranger, but I sure am eating great. He comes back practically dragging the bags: it’s several blocks away and he knows he should have taken the car, but he’s terrified of driving. Back in the house, as he’s putting away the groceries in the kitchen, he looks at the cereal and milk the girl left behind. He finishes what’s left of the girl’s bowl, while thinking that he can count on the fingers of one hand the times he’s eaten cereal. Men from my generation don’t eat cereal, he thinks—unless their children eat it, unless they are fathers. When did they start selling cereal in Chile? The nineties? Suddenly, this question seems important. He sees an image of himself as a child, drinking a glass of plain milk, like he always did, and then rushing off to school.

Afterward, he inspects the second floor, where Bruno’s study is—a large room, perfectly illuminated by a skylight, with books in strict alphabetical order, countless desk supplies, and degrees on the wall: undergraduate, master’s, doctorate, all hanging in a line. Next he takes a look at the girl’s room, full of drawings, decorations, and, on the bed, some stuffed animals with their names written on tags. She’s taken some of her animals with her, but they’ve made her store others in her closet or chest; she left five on her bed and insisted on giving them name tags so Martín could identify them (one brown bear wearing sports clothes catches his attention—its name is Dog). Then he finds, in the upstairs bathroom, in with a pile of magazines, a pamphlet with sheet music
for beginners. He goes downstairs and sits at the electric piano, which doesn’t work; he tries to fix it, with no luck. Still, he reads the music and presses the keys. He has fun imagining that he is an impoverished piano player, one with no money to pay the electricity bill who has to practice like this, by touch.

The first two weeks pass uneventfully. He lives just as he had planned. At first the days seem eternal, but gradually he fills them with certain routines: he gets up at nine, feeds Mississippi, and, after breakfast (he goes on eating cereal after he discovers a love for Quaker Oatmeal Squares), he goes into the garage, starts the car’s motor, and plays a bit with the accelerator, like a pilot waiting for the signal to take off. At first he moves the car timidly, but then he dares to take it out for a spin, for multiple spins, each one longer than the last. When he comes back, he tunes the radio to the news, opens the window in the living room, and turns the hourglass upside down; while the grains, the minutes, fall, delicately and decisively, he smokes the day’s first cigarette.

Then he watches TV for a few hours, and the effect is narcotic. He comes to feel affection for the rhetoric of the morning shows, of which he becomes something of a scholar; he compares them, considers them seriously, and he does the same with the celebrity shows. Those take a bit more effort, because he doesn’t know the characters—he’s never paid attention to that world—but eventually he comes to recognize them. He eats his lunch of noodles with ketchup in bed, always watching TV.

The rest of the day is uncertain, but it tends to be spent walking. He has a rule not to go to the same café twice, or to buy his cigarettes from the same corner shop, in order to avoid building any sense of familiarity: he has the vague impression he is going to miss this life, which isn’t the life he’s dreamed of but is a good life nonetheless; it is a beneficial, restorative time. But all of that changes the afternoon he discovers that the cat has disappeared. It’s been at least two days since he’s seen Mississippi, and the bowl of food is untouched. He asks around with the neighbors: no one knows anything.