Trafalgar (24 page)

But, obviously, by fourth grade he could clearly see that it was impossible to keep Eritrea in school. Not only did she do all that the vice principal had told him, but she sweet-talked or led her classmates in trying to get the punishment reduced for a girl who had been rebellious or to protest because they didn’t let them play soccer (that’s not for girls!) or to go to school in costume (pirates, ghosts, Russian princesses and odalisques were the favorites).

Trafalgar took her home, improvised a study room beside the library, brought in Juan Grela, who lived quite close by, once a week to teach her painting, and sent her to the Cosettinis’ school and everyone was happy.

ADOLESCENCE

I met her when she was already an adolescent, because all of the foregoing happened almost in secret (Trafalgar was embarrassed to have a daughter) and punctuated by his trips as he came and went, leaving the girl with Crisóstoma, who seemed like the grandmother and Rogelio, who was grandfather, chauffer, advisor, butler, and errand boy all at the same time.

She was a beauty. She’s still a beauty but now she’s a woman, sensational. Sometimes I think the vice principal was right.

At that moment, after the surprise, the fainting and so forth, she was tall and thin, with two enormous eyes like coals they were so, so black. Hair almost chestnut (like her mother, Trafalgar told me much later, on a day of modest confidences), a powerful nose, both straight and fine, large mouth, and a neck that allowed her to raise her head like a swan. Gorgeous. Trafalgar was crazy about her and just like Jorge, said he had already bought the shotgun and had it under the table ready to fill the first mother’s son ¡#%!!+°=¡!#~*
grrr
who might get close to his girl full of lead. She laughed.

“You won’t even find out,” she said.

“It’s a joke,” he told me, but he was plenty uneasy.

She passed, Eritrea Perla, all her exams with perfect scores all the way through high school and then Trafalgar asked her what she wanted to study.

“I want to be a gardener,” she said.

“Kindergarten teacher?”

“No! Gardener, gar-den-er, take care of gardens, cure trees that are sick, plant flowers, prune, cut the grass, grafting and layering, all that. Besides, I always liked playing with mud.”

“Where did you get that silly idea?” asked the indignant father.

“I read it in
Kalpa Imperial,
what of it? It says gardeners are wise people because they see the world from where one ought to, from below, in contact with the earth. And that they are always good humored. And the garden at this house is a mess and Atilio doesn’t even know how to water much less put each plant where it goes and I want strelitzias, lagerstroemias, and gypsophila.”

There was a kind of family conflict, a generation gap and all the rest; arguments and tantrums, no, because Eritrea was never one for tantrums, but bribes and blackmail, yes. And, of course, the girl became a gardener. At the beginning, a little on her own, and later more seriously, taking the courses from the municipality with a doctorate offered at Juan’s place three times a week from nine to twelve. She worked in their own garden and in all the gardens in the neighborhood. Winter was especially cold that year.

“Take me with you,” she said to him one horribly windy, cold day after having covered all the plants to protect them from frost.

“Not even if I were crazy,” said Trafalgar.

He took her.

They went to Susakiiri-Do with a cargo of reels and reams and tons of paper of every kind, thickness, and color. Susakiiri-Do was a land of earthquakes and a few years back had had one of the strongest, so strong it almost finished off the world, and the aftermath had unleashed plagues and fires. The population had been recovering, but there were no libraries or bookstores left and there was nowhere to get wood to make paper, let alone rags. Memory had been preserved, because like a good, civilized people, that of Susakiiri-Do included some who knew the old books (and the new ones, too) word by word and sum by sum. But they had to be written down and for that reason Trafalgar went there punctually every six months taking the paper on which they could be reproduced.

There the Maestre General, who was sort of like a president of the whole world, awaited them: Susakiiri-Do is a small and peaceful world. With one president, who is elected every I don’t remember how many years but it’s not very many, and a kind of Council of Elders and Notables, that’s enough. They housed Trafalgar and Eritrea in the presidential palace. He stayed at the clunker to supervise the unloading and she went sightseeing. They took her to see the parks, the narrow, peaceful river that crossed the city, the monuments to something or someone, the elegant streets, and the library-in-progress, which was in an enormous building but still had very few books, magazines, pamphlets, all those things a library has.

In the evening, she was invited to dine with the Maestre and his wife. They ate agariostes with czor sauce (agariostes are a kind of rabbit smaller than ours and that like ours are a plague and so no one feels bad about eating them and they have a white, spicy, tender meat; the czor is like a carrot but green and much softer and with a flavor almost, almost like a leek) and for dessert cream of curí with zyminia seeds and they drank a rather sweet white wine that Eritrea didn’t like at all but she faked it as much as she could, which, it has to be said, is never much.

In the middle of dessert, Eritrea jumped up and said, “Where is my father?”

“There, there honey, he’ll come,” said the Maestre’s wife. “He must have been delayed with the unloading.”

“He should have been here by now,” said Eritrea, and she ran out.

The Maestre and his wife sat there astonished, their spoons in the air as if frozen and unable to go on eating.

Without looking back and without caring a bit either what her hosts were doing or what they would think of her, Eritrea ran, ran, ran. She heard voices that she left behind her but she didn’t stop running.

“Miss, listen miss!” someone shouted while she was running.

But that someone was in a vehicle and caught up with her almost immediately.

“Where are you going? It’s nighttime. This road doesn’t lead anywhere.”

It was a great big man dressed in orange and green (on Susakiiri-Do everyone wears loud colors) and with a scarlet cap with black pompoms. Even as she kept running, she managed to see it was all very respectable.

“Ah,” the man with the pompoms recognized her, “you’re the daughter of the merchant who sells us the paper. Come, climb in and I’ll take you.”

“Not back, not back!” she said.

“No, no, of course not! I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Come on, climb in.”

Eritrea said to herself, in the midst of her desperate hurry, that the best thing to do would be to climb into the vehicle that was a kind of huge, square car and that way they would arrive faster although she wasn’t very sure where or in what direction that place might be.

“This way, this way, I’m almost sure it’s this way,” she said, “that we left the clunker for the unloading.”

“I know, I know, everyone’s talking about that, it’s a big event when the paper arrives. I know where it is.”

Quickly, quickly and silently, they went toward the place. The owner of the vehicle was worried about the road, which wasn’t exactly a smooth, straight route with no obstacles but rather just the contrary. Large rocks impeded their passage and smaller, rough stones jumped when the wheels bit them. She didn’t know what it was. Maybe ruins from the last earthquake, or an abandoned road as the man with the car said. But they had to continue that way, she was sure of that.

“You can see something over there,” the man said. “A light.”

It wasn’t a light, it was only a reflection, barely the faint glow of something that rose up from the ground. Eritrea told him to hurry.

“I’m doing what I can, miss,” said the man, who jumped in his seat and set the pompoms swaying over his forehead every time they went over a rock that was larger than the others.

The light was like a wound. It looked like a wound, a brilliant gash. A wound in the earth. But all that mattered to Eritrea was that Trafalgar was lying—unconscious, it appeared—with his eyes closed, his hands slack, one foot touching the wound of light in the ground.

“Help me,” she said to the man.

They jumped down and between them, dragging him, lifting him as much as they could, they carried him to the vehicle. Getting him inside it was another thing again. It was impossible even between the two of them to lift the weight of the weak body that they couldn’t manipulate. What they did was sit him down on the ground with his back supported by the mudguards that almost completely covered the wheel. Better backrest, impossible. When Eritrea saw that Trafalgar was breathing well and trying to open his eyes and move his hands, she left him to the care of the man and ran toward the light. The man with the car yelled at her to come back but she didn’t pay any attention.

Without running now, deliberately, carefully, she approached the light in the ground and leaned over. Leaned over is saying a lot: she tried to lean over but she wasn’t able to because it flashed so brightly that it hurt her eyes. She moved her head back and then little by little, with her eyes closed and barely separating the lids, she tried to look. It was like looking at the sun. She closed her eyes again and retreated again and did that several times until she was able to see something. The sun under the ground: she wanted to laugh but the urge went away immediately because there was something there in the deep sun. Shadows, it seemed to her, they were moving in the light down below. Far below.

“It can’t be,” she said.

She picked up a stone from the ground and let it fall into the crack of light. There was a confusion below, like something boiling in which dark waves moved; no, not dark because it wasn’t possible that there be dark in that light. Waves that shone less than that which surrounded them.

The man yelled at her to come back. Trafalgar opened his eyes and said, “Eritrea?”

“Let’s go back,” she said.

She sat beside Trafalgar and the vehicle backed up (it seems like a jeep, Trafalgar said), turned around, and returned to the road.

“It’s over,” she said.

“What is?” Trafalgar wanted to know.

“What made you fall in the light. It’s passed but we have to tell them.”

“Eri, I don’t understand anything,” said Trafalgar, his voice hoarse, the words unsteady.

“Don’t worry. I do understand.”

Trafalgar turned stony. Lousy snot-nose, he thought, who does she think she is? I’m the one who’s used to explaining, practically no one ever understands anything and then I go and I explain and now along comes this kid who’s not even twenty years old and it turns out she’s the one who explains, come on. She was right, of course, but he consoled himself thinking that with the fainting (what was it that had made him lose consciousness? He remembered nothing, except feeling heat, a heat that rose up from his ankles to his neck, an unbearable heat) he was still a little dazed and couldn’t think straight.

In the palace, the Maestre and his wife and a few officials were waiting for them. Everyone had a worried face and everyone sighed with relief when they saw them arrive.

“My friend, my friend,” said the Maestre and he took Trafalgar’s hand between his own and shook it up and down and down and up.

“How are you, you sweet thing, how are you?” asked the Maestre’s wife, unable to bring herself to take Eritrea by the hand or embrace her or anything like that.

The man with the jeep and the pompoms got out with them and stayed there, close by, and as no one paid any attention to him, either to kick him out or to shake his hand, he decided not to move until he found out what was happening and why that girl was doing what she was doing.

Eritrea asked the Maestre General to gather the Council and all those who had any authority on that world. Trafalgar, sitting very tense, very serious in an armchair, witnessed the whole spectacle. The Maestre wasn’t going to pay attention just like that to a girl who asked him for such a thing, but Trafalgar was a respected person in Susakiiri-Do and people believed what he said.

“Fine,” said the Maestre, “they’re on their way.”

“The earthquakes,” said Trafalgar, “aren’t just movements of the earth. There’s something down there below.”

“But that’s just a tall tale,” protested one of the elders, “a legend for gullible old women.”

“Oh, really?” said Eritrea. “They’re not legends. I saw them.”

And she told what she had seen.

“The firewellers exist? That’s impossible!”

“I don’t know what they’re called, but they exist,” she said.

“So, sir,” said Trafalgar, “tell us.”

“They say, ahem, ahem, uhh, well, that there are some beings, some animals—they’re not people, right?—they don’t speak nor do they dress or have tools or bury their dead, they’re animals that lived on Susakiiri-Do before we arrived and when we arrived and they realized they couldn’t get rid of us, they took refuge underground. They eat fire, that’s what they say, not that I believe it, they eat fire and they produce fire. And when the fire floods the subterranean caves, it starts to come out and that causes the earthquakes. Tall tales, like the good Maestre said.”

“Well, no,” said Trafalgar.

THE END (FOR NOW)

Eritrea told what she had seen:

“At first I thought it was hell,” she said, “but no horned devil with tail and trident came out of there, so it wasn’t that. The heat was like hell, that’s true. No, of course, I was never in hell but it was a cold heat, like swords. I know what I’m saying isn’t very coherent, but try to imagine it: an atrocious heat but not from fire, on that I agree with all of you, they eat fire and produce fire. No: it’s heat and the fire of red-hot iron
at the moment it becomes steel. And it gets into your bones, like cold.”

Trafalgar was delighted, because that was exactly what he, even without leaning over as Eritrea had done, just getting very close, had felt before he lost all notion of time and space and had fallen backwards—luckily, not forward.

The Maestre General and his wife and the big men of the Council listened rapt but both Trafalgar and Eritrea saw they didn’t believe them. She, who hasn’t lived as much as Trafalgar and hasn’t yet learned to keep quiet when it is necessary to say nothing (she will probably never learn) began shouting: “But why don’t you believe us? Are you idiots or what? Aren’t you going to do anything?”