Sex and Death (19 page)

He seemed to think that Johan was somebody else. ‘Did you take the empties?' he asked, then blinked rapidly in confusion. ‘Oh, hell, it's you,' he said.

‘
Ja
, Pa.'

‘Just like that.'

‘
Ja
, Pa.'

They were speaking Afrikaans to each other; it was their language. An earlier self had immediately reclaimed Johan.

‘I thought you were dead,' his father told him.

‘I've been sending money. I wrote a few letters.' He put the suitcase down on the floor and rubbed his throbbing arm. ‘Did you not get them?'

His father made a sound and looked away. He had become an old man – in such a short time. Or perhaps he'd been old before.

‘You didn't tell me you were coming,' he said eventually.

It was all unbearable, like a pain building up that only a scream could release. Instead the silence was nearly complete, underlined by the sibilant sound of wind in the dry grass, the rustling of the old tree in the yard.

His room had been stripped down, all his things packed away, out of sight. The marks of Prestik on the wall where his Christian posters had been. Hooks in the ceiling where his model planes had hung. He'd left most of his clothes behind, but they were gone too, only empty shelves and hangers in the cupboard. It was the bare bones of a room, just the bed and the desk and chair, the faded orange curtains on the window. But it was enough to begin with, or would be when he'd got it cleaned up.

Everything was dirty, veneered in dust, but so was the rest of the house, all of it ignored, overlooked, slowly piling up or subsiding. His father had used to work for Telkom, installing telephone lines the whole day, and then coming home and drinking at night. But he'd retired seven years before, around the time Johan had gone, and now he just drank.

He'd always been an aggressive and accusing drunk and he got stuck into Johan while they sat out on the back stoep that night, downing boxed red wine out of tin mugs. An old scene, one he'd run to Cape Town to escape, but here they both were again, speaking their lines. Though Johan was mostly quiet, sometimes interjecting, then falling silent again. It was his father who talked,
on and on, a fervent sermon, the moral of which was that he, Pa, had always known – had always pointed out, in fact – and yet was still amazed by, the utter lack of talent or promise that constituted the character of his son. He wasn't even a disappointment, because that would be something, and he was a nothing. It was his mother's side, a useless family with weak blood. It wasn't Johan's fault. He'd been born that way and couldn't change it. He was a nothing. He'd gone away for years and years and now he'd strolled back in again and what did he have to show for it? Nothing.

‘That isn't true,' Johan said. ‘I've been places. I've done things.'

‘Pah.'

‘You didn't see. You don't know.'

‘What have you done?'

‘I've been working in Cape Town.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Different jobs. I was the maître d' at a famous restaurant. I worked at an art gallery. Then I was an assistant to a fashion consultant. One of the clients really liked me and took me on—'

‘Pah.'

‘I did these things,' he said, suddenly close to tears. ‘Pa, believe me.' And in that moment he almost believed it himself. All these other vocations, these ghostly identities, he'd heard talked about in casual, throwaway phrases by the men he'd been with. He knew nothing whatever of the world behind the words, though he'd learned to try on its language, in the same way you might put on a hat.

‘Pah,' his father said again, though less certainly this time. He gathered his rancour for one last judgement. ‘When you left, you said you'd never come back. Now here you are, with your tail between your legs, after five years. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?'

‘Seven.'

‘What?'

‘I've been gone for seven years. Yes, Pa, I'm ashamed.'

The shame did burn, a faint red glow, like cheap wine.

His father got to his feet and as he lurched off inside Johan fought again the need to cry. More than that: to weep, to howl.
I am in bad trouble, Pa. I have nowhere else to go
. Instead he stayed on alone, weary and drunk. In the morning, he knew, the conversation would finish, but it would be his father who'd weep. He would take Johan's hand and ask for forgiveness, for what he'd done and also for what he'd said about Johan's mother. She was a fine woman, one of God's angels, and he, Pa, was the bad person, who had driven all of them away . . .

This, too, was an old story.

Yes, he had nowhere to go, but he also couldn't stay. That was what it came down to. And wherever he went, how long could he keep in one place? No matter how many names and other identities he took on, it was always possible that somebody might be on the case, following up. Following him.

An old couch had been abandoned in the corner of the yard, near the tree and the swing. After a while he got up and wandered over. It exhaled a smell of damp as he sat down. With his head tilted back, he could look into the massive frieze of stars. Great coldness and vastness, so that he knew the smallness of his warmth. It was oddly consoling: in only fifty years, nothing would matter.

*

He must have fallen asleep, because then he woke. Into a soft, pre-dawn whiteness, everything very still and exactly placed. He was calm and cold inside, as if the white light had touched him too.

Something had woken him, a soft, repetitive creaking sound. He turned toward it, knowing already what he would see. There
was no shock, no alarm, though the white figure in the swing was a weird sight. Rocking gently backward and forward, the only thing moving.

‘Corrie.'

The head didn't turn. With the hood and the gloves, no skin showed; perhaps nobody was there.

Johan felt nothing. His inner mood was joined to the numb white light outside, so that he was empty, maybe even asleep. Except he knew he was awake. He was sitting on the old sofa, it was almost daybreak, he was talking to a dead person in the swing.

‘I'm sorry,' he heard himself say.

Then the old man did turn his head and look at him, those horrible spectacles framed by the encircling hood. Why was he wearing the white outfit when he was dead? Did the dead also know nothing?

‘I'm sorry for walking away and leaving you,' he said.

‘It's all right,' Corrie said.

‘If I'd stayed I would have got into trouble. I
am
in trouble.'

‘It's why I came to see you.'

‘Because I'm in trouble?'

‘Because you didn't stay.'

Johan brooded on this.

‘I have to say goodbye to somebody,' Corrie explained. ‘It's the rules.'

Johan had no idea what rules were being referred to. This entire conversation was only possible, he thought, if all the rules had been broken.

‘I don't have anybody else,' Corrie told him. ‘Even if you don't like me. It's all right,' he said, when Johan started to protest. ‘Lots of people don't like me. Didn't, I should say. You lied to me about everything.'

‘Yes.'

He looked at the crooked little house and shook his head. ‘A lawyer in Johannesburg. What's the matter with you?'

Johan gazed at his feet, dark against the pale ground. ‘I don't know,' he said.

‘Well, I don't know either.' He shook his head ruefully. ‘It isn't going to work out, is it?'

‘What isn't?'

‘Your life.'

They looked at each other and for an instant Corrie was like a face glimpsed in a crowd, somebody he'd known once and couldn't place, passing before he could speak.

‘There's still time.'

‘I have to go now.'

‘Wait,' Johan said, and he felt a strange pain and sadness. ‘Stay with me.'

But the old man was out of the swing already and moving away. He took a few steps and was gone, as if he'd walked through a door. Somewhere else entirely, if he was anywhere at all.

*

He must have fallen asleep, because then he woke. Arms wrapped around himself, shivering. The white light was the first paleness in the sky, objects gradually becoming visible. The swing hung down, inert and empty.

A dream after all. A dream of being awake, though the soreness was real, almost physically so.

‘There's still time,' he said again aloud.

It was the coldest hour, just before dawn, everything bunched together against the coming sun.

Before he died, my uncle Frank spent three weeks in hospital. I found out about his stay at the clinic due to a coincidence, or what the surrealists used to call ‘objective chance', to describe those fortuitous events that seem dictated by our destiny. Around that time, my best friend Verónica's mother was suffering from very advanced cancer and had been admitted to the intensive care unit. That morning, my friend asked me to accompany her to the hospital and I didn't feel I could refuse. We left university, situated in the same neighbourhood, and instead of going to our Latin etymology class, we caught a bus. As I wandered through the corridors waiting for Verónica to visit her mother, I entertained myself by reading the names of patients written on the doors. I just had to see his to realise he was a relative of mine, but it took me a while to figure out exactly who he was. After a few baffling minutes – a sensation comparable to when we come across a tombstone in a graveyard with our own surname on, without knowing who lies buried there – I figured out that the person in there was Frank, my mother's older brother. I'd heard of him but didn't know the man. He was the outlaw of the family, as it were, a man almost no one spoke of out loud, never mind in front of my mother. In spite of the curiosity I felt at that moment, I didn't dare go in, afraid he might recognise me. An absurd fear, as it happens, since as far as I could recall we'd never met.

I stood there for quite a while, not knowing what to do, focusing
on my heartbeat, which only grew faster, until the door opened and out of the room came two nurses. One of them was carrying a breakfast tray with dirty plates on it.

‘That guy eats more than a St Bernard. You'd never think he was so ill.'

I was amused to discover that the nurses joked about their patients, but also at the possibility that my uncle was an imaginary invalid like Molière's, who we were reading in drama class.

On the bus ride back to university, I told Verónica about my discovery. I also told her everything I knew about Frank. Like my mother, he had received a religious education, first at a Marist school and then at a Jesuit one. He had obtained brilliant marks from primary school all the way through to the final year of the baccalaureate, as well as the admiration of his teachers. His repu tation at school was impeccable and for this he was always able to count on the collusion of my grandmother – so I had heard my mother say – who glossed over his absences from class just as she did his misdemeanours at home. After completing the first year of an engineering degree, he left university to devote himself to the arts and, later on, to drifting about all over the world. His vices and addictions were spoken of too, although I never heard anyone specify what these were, exactly. He was never present at big family occasions, such as my brother's graduation from college or the coming-out ball the nuns organised for my fifteenth birthday, events where, as if by spontaneous generation, clusters of relatives would appear to whom I had to introduce myself several times. All my aunts and uncles, except for Frank. From time to time, I would hear old friends of my parents enquire about him with morbid curiosity, the way we ask about someone when we know the answer will be outrageous. It was impossible – at least for me – not to notice my mother's discomfort when she replied to these questions about the whereabouts of this brother of hers. ‘I do know he's in Asia,' she would say, or, ‘He's still with his
girlfriend, the sculptor.' The things I knew about him I had heard in passing, in conversations with other people such as this one, but at that time Frank's life didn't matter a great deal to me.

The following day I was the one who asked Verónica if I could go with her to the hospital. This time we missed our ethno-linguistics class, the most boring one of all. We got to the hospital around noon. When my friend went to her mother's room, I waited a few minutes and, after making sure there were no nurses in there, I knocked at Frank's door and went in. It was the first time I had stood before his bed, where I was to return countless times. My uncle was a thickset man with a full head of grey hair who, sure enough, did not have the look of someone unwell. What he did have was a set of features very similar to my own. His expression, unlike that of other patients, such as Verónica's mother, was lucid, and he was aware of what was going on around him. A catheter connected his left arm to a drip, which was full of various drugs, but beyond this, and a slight paralysis to the left side of his face, he looked ready to leap out of bed.

‘We don't know each other,' I said. ‘I'm Antonia, your niece.'

For a few seconds I felt that, rather than being a pleasant surprise, my presence had scared him. It was a fleeting sensation, the merest flash of intuition, but as unmistakable to me as the shock I'd felt the previous day outside the door to his room. Before he replied, a seductive smile played across his face, the same smile he would give me every time I went to visit him.

I have always found it strange the way we establish a familiarity with someone we don't know as soon as we find out we are related. I'm sure it has nothing to do with an instant affinity but rather with something as artificial as culture, a conventional loyalty to the clan or, as some people say, to a surname. Nonetheless, this wasn't what occurred between my uncle and me that morning. I don't know if it was because of the irreverent reputation he enjoyed in my family, or because of the disobedience that talking
to him entailed; the fact is, I felt a sense of wonderment similar to that inspired in us by characters from myth.

He asked how I'd found him and asked me not to tell anyone. I explained, so as to ease his mind, that it had been by accident. I told him about Verónica and her mother, and assured him he could count on my silence.

Back then I found the smell of hospitals and their patients intolerable. So instead of sitting in the visitors' chair, situated by his bed, I stationed myself on a little concrete ledge by the window, through which a pleasant breeze blew. I sat there for over an hour, answering the questions my uncle asked me about university, my literary tastes, my political opinions. It was the first time someone in my family took seriously the fact that I was studying literature, without assuming that my choice was down to a lack of any particular talent or that it was a degree designed for women who expect to devote their whole lives to marriage. I was surprised, too, by how much he had read. There wasn't one writer I mentioned that morning whom he hadn't read at least one book by. Then Verónica knocked and, from the doorway, motioned at me to leave.

I didn't kiss him goodbye. I walked towards the door without looking him in the eye, with a shyness he clearly found amusing.

‘Come back soon,' he said.

On the bus, my friend began interrogating me. ‘He's still really good-looking,' she commented, excitedly. ‘He must have been quite a catch when he was younger. Be careful, though. There's a reason he's not liked in your family.'

It was a Thursday. We were in the middle of the rainy season, and I arrived home dripping wet. My mother and brother would be out until late, and so the kitchen and all the other rooms were in darkness. Only in the living room was the last of the evening sun filtering in, illuminating the furniture with a dim light. I put down my schoolbooks and, without wasting any time, went
straight to the study to look for the box where my mother kept her childhood photographs: two carefully ordered albums covering the first few years of her life. There she was with my uncle Amadeo and an older boy with huge brown eyes, who could be none other than Frank. In several of these images I saw them smiling quite happily in a swimming pool, a park and out on my grandparents' patio. A couple of pages in, the little boy mysteriously disappeared. Aside from those albums, there were a few other photographs scattered at the bottom of the box. In these, Mamá must have been around thirty. Her clothes were uncharacteristically bohemian: traditional Mexican blouses, skirts with indigenous-style embroidery, flares. Occasionally, my brother and I appeared in our parents' arms, wearing pyjamas or in our underwear. In the most recent ones I was probably around five or six years old. Many of these photos had been systematically cut. I suspected, and I don't believe I was mistaken, that what had been erased was in fact the head or the entire torso of Uncle Frank. Probably, in some long-ago period, he had lived with us, a fact neither he nor my mother had ever mentioned. Looking at the way the photos had been cut, it was easy to imagine some furious scissor action. What could he have done to deserve such a vigorous attack? And in any case, why not get rid of the childhood photos too, where brother and sister appeared so close? I thought of Juan, my own brother, three years my senior. Ever since he'd become a teenager we'd been living in the same house as each other with a complete lack of camaraderie. The closeness we'd developed at some point during childhood had been forgotten a long time ago. Even so, it would never have occurred to me to entirely remove his silhouette from our family photos. I heard the key in the lock. My brother had come home from university with a couple of friends, and they went to sit in the dining room. I put the box back on the bookshelf and returned to my room without a sound.

The next morning, I went back to the hospital. As soon as I walked into his room, I saw a satisfied expression on my uncle's face. This time I was the one who asked the questions. I asked him to tell me his story, starting with the time he lived in my grandparents' house, what his childhood had been like and his time at university. His story did not contradict the one I had heard my family tell, but he added a dose of ridicule and a sense of humour that made it far more enjoyable. In his version, family dramas became comedy and the reactions of relatives a faithful caricature. In almost twenty years he hadn't forgotten any of their personalities, and could mimic them uncannily, making me laugh out loud several times. The only one who escaped his barbs was my mother. That week I found out about a few family secrets: of my aunt Laura's first love, which had led her to seek an abortion, of my father's obsessive jealousy, of the mysterious death of a neighbour, which some people blamed on my grandfather . . . If they all had some dark episode in their history, why was he the only exile?

I asked him in the most tactful way I could and he replied that he had been the one who chose to cut all contact so as not to feel judged by each one of his acts and choices.

‘But don't you miss the support of a family?'

‘If I liked families, I would have started one myself, don't you think?'

My eyes must have grown wider than expected because my uncle burst out laughing.

‘Don't make that face! One day you'll see that I'm right. You're not like them. I've known that ever since you were very little.'

His comment sent a shiver down my spine. I was flattered that Frank thought me smarter than the rest of our relatives, in whom I too could see countless defects, but I was also afraid to be different. Even though I liked literature, even though I was attracted to transgressive, eccentric types like him, I did want to get married
and have children. I worried an awful lot about never achieving these things and, in particular, about finding myself in hospital one day, without the support of anybody.

‘So you already knew me?'

By way of a reply, Frank took my hand. It was the first time he had touched me – at least in my memory – but in spite of the circumstances, I felt in his warm, protective palm an indisputable intimacy. Somewhere, probably in one of those medical magazines that floated around in the hospital and to which I had become instantly addicted, I had read something about the trace left in our memory by the people we have contact with in our first few years of life. Imprinting, I think they call it. According to the article, family ties are based on this initial physical impression. We stayed like that for a few more minutes, his huge hand enclosing mine. Not even the presence of the nurses made us let go of each other. To me it was a silent pact, the tacit promise that I wasn't going to leave him there to his fate.

It was the start of the weekend. Even with accompanying Verónica as a pretext, it was going to be tricky to slip out of the house without anyone noticing. In any case, we had a wedding to go to on the Saturday and a dinner party to host on the Sunday.

When I told him this, my uncle asked me to at least try to call him on the phone.

‘I was all right before you showed up. Now, after seeing you every day, I've got a feeling I'm going to miss you.' I assured him I felt the same way.

That afternoon, before going back to the university, I asked to speak to his doctor. The specialist wasn't there at that moment, but the doctor on duty explained a few things to me: he'd had a tumour in his brain for several years and there was no longer any possible treatment for him. They were administering palliative care so that his final few days wouldn't be so bad.

I had to hide in the toilet so Verónica wouldn't see me crying.
My friend had been trying with all her might to stay afloat while her mother lay dying – what would she have thought if she'd seen me crying my heart out for a man I barely knew?

The time I spent in the company of my family yet far away from him seemed endless. During the wedding, I had to try hard not to laugh as I remembered the imitations he'd done of them all. I would far rather have been in his hospital room with its smell of disinfectant than listening to those dull, repetitive conversations. I thought of how different all of our family celebrations would have been if he had been present. The reasons one falls into disgrace with one's own family are strange. Over the years I have seen all kinds of cases and I've come to believe that they are never related to moral questions or principles, but rather to internal betrayals, perhaps invisible to everyone else, but unforgivable to the clan they belong to or, at the very least, to one of its members. On Sunday afternoon, as I helped my mother prepare the food, I tried to bring the subject up.