Talking to Ourselves: A Novel (11 page)

Mum calls again. I guess she’s missing us a lot. We’ve spoken three times today already. When we got up. When we stopped for lunch at Santa María de la Reina. And now we’re arriving at Salto Grande with the delivery. I miss her as well. But not when she asks me. Funny, that.

Oh my angel, Mum says, no, nothing, are you all right?, are you having a good time?, are you eating some fruit?, what about dad?, hasn’t he driven enough for today?, why doesn’t he take a nap?, how much further is it?, is the weather still nice?, do you know how much I love you, honey?, do you?

Mum makes noises like she’s blowing her nose. Ma, I say, are you crying?

Me? she answers laughing, no, son, what makes you think that!, it’s just a silly cold, all this air-conditioning!, well, no,
nothing
, I was just calling to, I saw the time and thought, bah, you’d be there already, where’s the delivery again?, in Santa María de la?, wait, no, that was at noon, well, I just wanted, how about salads? (yes, almost every day, I lie), well, all right, but it should be every day, okay? (of course, Mum, I answer), anyway, when
you eat hamburgers and things like that at night you don’t sleep so well, they’re very hard to digest, do you understand, my love?, that’s why, do you know what the best thing would be?, if you ordered at most (we overtake a black VW and return to our lane, the VW accelerates, overtakes us, and pulls back in front of Pedro, Dad swears under his breath, brakes and puts the indicator on again to overtake), is something wrong, angel?, what’s wrong? (nothing, Mum, nothing, I say), are you sure, honey? (I swear, I answer), well, as I was saying, I don’t want to be a pain, really I don’t, but I’d prefer it if for dessert you (we overtake the black Volkswagen again, and this time Dad stays in the other lane and accelerates, he accelerates a lot, until the Volkswagen grows small in the mirror and disappears, wow!, awesome!, Pedro’s super fast even though he’s big!, and suddenly the clouds start moving, they’re going away, it must be because we’re driving much faster now), sounds good, my love?, do you promise? (I promise, Mum, I say, I love you tons).

Mum asks me to pass her over to Dad. He slows down and takes the phone. He’s holding the wheel with one hand. I don’t understand why he never plugs the phone into Pedro’s speaker. That’s what Uncle Juanjo does. Why do Mum and Dad really like doing the things they tell me people shouldn’t do? Dad only says, yes, no, well, aha, I see, later. It’s hard to tell what they’re talking about. I hope they’re not fighting.

I straighten my cap in the mirror. It’s a bit big for my head. But it looks awesome. The magician said I’d changed. And it’s true with the cap on I look different. More like I’m ten or more. Maybe that was the trick. One thing’s for sure. This cap is
special
. I wish I could’ve asked the magician where he got it. It’s a lot like the one Stallone wears in, what’s that movie called? The one on TV at the motel the other day? In that movie Stallone is a trucker like Uncle Juanjo. Well, not like Uncle Juanjo. Driving
a truck is much more exciting in the movie. In real life it’s okay. But sometimes you get bored. Or your back hurts. Stallone’s back never hurt. Of course he trains all the time. And his back muscles are super strong. In the movie he stops to arm wrestle fat guys with moustaches. And he beats all of them. That’s what I like about Stallone. He always beats bigger and taller guys. And he teaches his son. At first you think he’s a sissy. But in the end he learns. I wish I had a Dad like that. I mean, my Dad’s awesome. But I wish he’d teach me how to arm wrestle the jerks at school. I don’t think he can now. He gets more tired because of the virus. Stallone doesn’t get ill. But Dad still has loads of strength.
Totally
. I tried to lift his backpack yesterday. Oof. No way.

I imagine we’re in the school gym. I’m arm wrestling the jerks and I’m wearing my cap. I twist their arms. Lift them up in the air. I make them look ridiculous. Lying on the floor. Crying like wimps. And my friends all clap like crazy. I try to imagine it and I can’t. The images go all fuzzy. My mind goes blank in the middle of the arm wrestle. Or else suddenly I see they’re winning and they’re bending my arm back and making fun of me. This image is really clear. Them making fun of me. Kicking me. Spitting at me. Then I imagine something else. I imagine a huge truck honking its horn loud. It smashes through the school fence. Destroys the gym. Drives over everybody. Squashing their heads. One by one. Crack. Crack. Crack. And I feel better. And I look in the mirror. Hey, says Dad, aren’t you going to take off that horrible cap?

The delivery takes forever. I thought when we got there, we unloaded and that was it. The guy Dad knows isn’t at the warehouse. It’s a different guy. And he complains about how late we are. Dad raises his voice. The other guy threatens to make him come back tomorrow. And to send a complaint or something. Dad gets furious. He looks like he might hit the guy even. I’d
love that. Then he calms down. He tells me to wait in the truck. And he gets out. I wait for a bit. Dad takes ages. This bit of the warehouse is dark. I can hardly see anything from up here. Just piles and piles of crates wrapped in plastic. I look for the phone to play mini-golf. Too bad. I think Dad’s taken it. Oof. I’m bored. I press the horn. Two workmen look at me from a freight lift. They keep going up. And they disappear. The freight lift sounds like a normal lift. It makes more noise when it goes up than when it comes down. The workmen go down again. After that, I don’t know. Suddenly I hear the truck door. I open my eyes. I see Dad arranging some papers. I stretch my arms. Everything okay? I ask. Bah, he sighs, money talks.

It’s getting late. We drive past industrial units. We can see Salto Grande in the distance. Sometimes we pass other trucks. We say hello turning Pedro’s headlights on and off. There’s a ton of machinery. Cranes. Bulldozers. Diggers. Just like the ones on TV only dirtier. We stop at a traffic light. I can see a crane hook inside the sun. It’s like a claw on a sticker. If they lower the crane it’ll get dark all of a sudden. Dad’s phone rings. He doesn’t
answer
. We speed up.

We circle the outskirts of the town. Dad asks me if we should look for a motel or start driving home. What if we go in for a bit? I say. In where? he asks, the town? Best not, son, there are too many hills. So what? I say. So nothing, he answers, I’m a bit tired that’s all. But it’s right in front of us! I complain, what if I never come back? Dad stays silent. He stares at the road. He blows air through his nose. He crinkles his face. I think he’s going to say yes.

It was time we got out of that cab! The town is awesome. White. Totally white. With tons of shadows. Full of tiny streets and steps. It’s like a maze in 3-D. Sometimes you don’t know if
you’re going up or down. Dad’s lazy today. He doesn’t want to lose another race so he suggests we play the step game. These are the rules. When we pass some steps I have to guess how many there are. Run and count them as quickly as I can. And come back and tell Dad exactly how many. If I’m right to within ten steps I get a point. If not, he gets a point. The first to get ten points wins. It must be really cool living here. I run. Count steps. Go up. Come down. I’ve already got seven points. It’s not so easy. Sometimes I cheat. Not much. Just a bit. I leave out two or three steps. Never more. The walls are very pretty, they turn red. Orange. Pink. It’s quite windy now. Dad calls me from the bottom of the steps. I can’t hear him properly. I go up, and down. I run, I count. I try not to trip over. I’ve got nine points so far.

We sit down at some plastic tables. There are old people and kids with dogs in the square. I’m pouring with sweat but super happy. Dad coughs. I order a Coke with a slice of lemon. He asks for a bottle of mineral water. And he takes an allergy pill. I drink my Coke in one go. I ask Dad if I can order another. I’m sure he’ll say no. He doesn’t like me having too many fizzy drinks. But this time he says yes. Mum would be angry. Dad keeps coughing. He tells me the air in Salto Grande is full of pollen. I tip my glass. The ice cubes bounce off my nose. I imagine I’m a spaceship and they’re meteorites crashing into me. Is there ice in space? Or is space made of ice? I saw a documentary about
glaciers
the other day. But if so, then how do spaceships fly? Or maybe they drill through space as they fly? My tummy is full of bubbles. My tummy could do with a drill. I burp and laugh. I ask if we’re leaving yet. Dad says he prefers to stay here a bit longer. I fold my arms. I’m starting to feel bored. I look around. I see a poster with the Internet sign. I ask if I can go. Dad can’t see the poster I’m pointing to very well. He looks at all the people
around us. He hesitates. He tells me on no account to go off
anywhere
else. He’ll be watching the door. And he gives me a few coins. Cool! He’s soft today.

I go into my e-mail. There’s a message from Mum in the
inbox
. Another from Edu with photos. And a ton of spam. I delete the spam and read the messages. I reply to Mum. I look for Edu in chat. He’s not there. I look for Pablo. For Rafa and Josema. They’re not there either. I guess they’re all on holiday. I think of trying to find Marina. I like Marina. And she’s almost got tits. She loves writing in chat. She says our classmates are all stupid and don’t even know how to say hello properly. I should practise first. I’ll try another day. I sign out of e-mail. I start listening to stuff on YouTube. The sound sucks. I get up and ask for some headphones. They tell me they’re all in use. I sit down again. What do I do now? Suddenly I remember the movie. What was it called? I type: stallone + truck. It comes up almost straight away. I find out something totally weird. In some countries it’s called
Falcon
. In others
I am the Falcon
. And in English it’s called
Over the Top
. Not that I know much English. But
top
definitely isn’t falcon. And
over
isn’t either. What have falcons to do with trucks? Maybe Stallone transported birds in his truck. I don’t think so. Actually you never know what he transports. The only thing he takes with him is his cap. And his sissy of a son. I go into Google Translate. I type: ober the, no, over the top. Two results.
Sobre la tapa
and
por encima
. The truth is the English title doesn’t make much sense either. Even though I’ve seen it several times. Who decides what movies are called?

Polyglot lizard, I hear as someone pulls my cap over my eyes, time to go? I push my cap up. I turn round. I ask Dad: What’s a polyglot? He gives me a kiss and says: Search.

The 15th at 19.50h.

The 15th, 7:50 p.m.

The fifteenth at ten to eight.

Do these numbers mean anything?

Do I understand what has happened if I say “the 15th” or “19.50h”? Was reality different at 19.49h? Did the world change during that minute? Why do I reread these figures over and over, I read “the 15th”, I read “19.50h” and I still don’t understand what they mean?

I was going to write, but didn’t.

No desire to read.

Not today either.

It happened like this.

I had just had a shower. I was dressing to go to spend the night at the hospital, when the phone rang. It was Juanjo. He spoke quickly or I understood slowly. The monitor. The serum. The oxygen. The two nurses who had just come in. He couldn’t get his words out. He was having great difficulty breathing.

I hung up. I’ll never be able to forgive myself for the first thing that entered my head.

I thought about finishing drying my hair.

My hair. My head.

I ordered a cab. It didn’t come. I didn’t wait. I walked out of the house. I crossed in the wrong place. I thrust myself between a lady and a cab for hire. The lady ticked me off. I took umbrage. I muttered something about artificial respiration. I climbed into the car. It drove off. There was traffic everywhere. We were going slowly. Sometimes no faster than the pedestrians. I saw the
numbers
changing on the taximeter. Suddenly I got out. I got out of the car and I ran. My phone rang. I nearly passed out. I answered terrified. It wasn’t Juanjo. It was the cab company. They wanted to know where I was. The driver had been waiting for me for some time outside my house. I yelled at the woman from the cab company. I kept yelling at her as I ran. I poured abuse on her. People stared at me. The woman hung up. I kept running. I was dripping with sweat. My legs were stinging. My entire body was throbbing. A mix of burning and cold rose up my throat. I thought I was about to spit out a lump of something. Something that rattled. As I ran I thought about Mario. At last. Completely. Only about him. His mouth. His nose. His breath. His breathing. I tried to help him. I tried to breathe with him. I choked. We choked. I
imagined my mouth on his mouth. My lungs and his. I imagined I was blowing. Blowing hard enough to raise him off the bed, to propel me to the hospital.

In the end I arrived in time.

We never arrive in time.

That is what happened on the day of the fifteenth before ten to eight. The night was worse.

Someone had to call the funeral home to buy the coffin. And the newspapers to dictate the death notice. Two simple,
inconceivable
tasks. So intimate, so remote. Buying the coffin and
dictating
the death notice. No one teaches you these things. How to get sick, care for, declare terminally ill, say goodbye, hold a wake, bury, cremate. I wonder what the hell they do teach us.

First it was the funeral parlour. Or, to be precise, the funeral parlours. Because there are many. A great many. All offering
different
deals. The hospital itself furnishes you with the contact numbers. As if this were part of the treatment. With the same efficiency with which they give enemas.

One parlour charges less for the coffin, but extra for the
transport
to the cemetery. Another gives you free transport to the cemetery, but charges more to hire the venue for the wake.
Another
gives you a discount on the venue, but doesn’t carry a cheaper range of coffins. Yet another seems more costly, but their price includes taxes. Then you realize the other prices that seemed more reasonable didn’t include tax. And you are back at square one. And the queues of widows and orphans come and go. If dying is just another procedure, I prefer the rituals of any exotic tribe.

As you dial number after number, enquire, write down, have misgivings, and hang up, you never cease to feel, not even for a
second, like the stingiest creature on earth. Incapable of offering the person you love, the person you didn’t save, a decent repose. You suspect you are committing an atrocity, bargaining at a moment like this. That it would be nobler to bow to this extortion in silence and allow yourself to grieve. But, at the same time, as though you were being stabbed in the back, you resent the crass opportunism of this business, the bloodthirsty profiting from your loss. So you try again to find a figure that seems reasonable (how much is a reasonable death? what is a costly corpse?), a price, let’s say, that doesn’t oblige your corpse to claim riches he didn’t have. And you are back to square one with the phone calls, while the lines of widows and orphans keep coming and going.

In the end, in the middle of a call to one of the parlours, I felt bad about all my bartering, and signed up to the first deal they offered, I gave them my personal details, my credit card number, thanked them, hung up, and instantly regretted having accepted a price Mario never would have accepted.

Dictating the death notice was no easier. Dictating it:
announcing
the death of a loved one in the third person. Imagining someone is reading it as you are drafting it. Pretending you don’t know your husband has died, and that you are finding out from this announcement. He, in the third person, your beloved, in the second person, who will never exist in the first person again. Grammar doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Literature does.

I must dictate the death notice straight away, they told me, or I’d have to wait another day, they explained. If I didn’t have the text prepared, they lamented, there was no choice but to do it on the spot. The newspaper was closing, they informed me. There was enough time to insert a normal death notice, a religious one, they corrected themselves, one that prays for the soul of the, and so on, they recited. But there isn’t time, madam, they said hurriedly, to start reinventing the format.

As I improvised the text of the first death notice, I was tempted to give my name in place of Mario’s.

I had to dictate the final death notice to a trainee with a twang, because everyone in the office had gone home. And it was a question, he said, of
middits
. If we didn’t send it off straight away, the notice wouldn’t
get enderred
. When the trainee said
get enderred
, I heard
interred
. The notice wouldn’t get interred. Afterward, he offered to read it back to me, to
bake
sure the text was
coddect
. I listened to it delivered in his voice, in the twangy voice of someone who was probably the nicest of all those who had answered me that night, I listened to my death notice full of apparent
misspellings
and impossible blunders. Then I went into paroxysms of laughter, a succession of muscular contractions over which I had no control, as though I had become tangled up in an electric cable, and the trainee with the twang asked me if I was all right, and I said yes and became electrocuted with laughter, and one of my brothers-in-law handed me a glass of water and a sedative.

I went outside to get some fresh air. I noticed no difference between outside and inside. I called my parents’ house. First I spoke to Lito. I told him we would see each other very soon. That in a few days’ time, Mum was going to drive over and pick him up, and that on the way home we were going to stop and eat a double hamburger. I didn’t do a very good job of pretending. Then I asked him to let me speak to his grandma. When my mum took the receiver, I cried for a while. We didn’t speak. Even when she is silent, my mum knows what to say. I won’t make old bones knowing as much as she. Or I won’t make old bones. Afterward, I called my sister. Because of the time difference, I woke her up. She gave me her condolences in a voice thick with sleep, and talked to me about flights, stopovers, dates. Then I called a few women friends. They found the right words to comfort me. Two of them took taxis over. Suddenly it occurred to me that
they were able to comfort me so effectively because they’d been practising what they would say to me for months. That made me feel worse. Then I thought about Ezequiel. I sent him a text message and turned off my phone.

My brothers-in-law were waiting for me at the entrance to the crematorium. They were arguing when I got there. The undertakers had just arrived, but there was a problem: they had brought us a casket with a Catholic cross. An enormous crucifix stretching the whole length of the lid. I assured them I had
ordered
a plain one. In fact I wasn’t so sure. I had the feeling I was dreaming every conversation. Juanjo thought the casket with the crucifix was perfect, just what their parents would have wanted. His younger brother disagreed. The middle brother thought I should be the one to decide. What should we do, then, Madam? the employee from the funeral parlour asked. I replied without thinking, as though someone were dictating to me: Let God’s will be done. Juanjo took it as sarcasm and walked off. I heard him murmur: And on top of everything else, she blasphemes.

I prefer not to think about the wake. Silence. Family. Crematorium.

I look up
wake
in the dictionary. The third entry is absurd: “Spend the night watching over the deceased.” As if, instead of watching over our guests, we were attending to the dead.

Absurd and precise.