The first thing I hear when I come through the sliding door and into the kitchen is Mariela and the kids deciding what film to put on in the next room – my room, now my father’s study. Mum, still in sunglasses, is on the sofa in front of the muted TV. She stares at the screen for long moments, then down at her hands in her lap. As soon as she sees me, she raises the right one, showing me her mobile phone in a strange gesture, as though in greeting, while she grips the remote control with the other hand.
‘Could you send a message to Alejandro?’ she asks me. ‘I’ve been trying, but I can’t see the keys.’
Alejandro’s not there, I tell her. How could I possibly send him a message?
‘Write: Ale, tell me it’s not you, Mum,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’s not him. Maybe they made a mistake.’
And then I’m kneeling before her and taking the phone from her hand, our heads practically at the same level. I explain to her, as though speaking to a deaf person, seeing myself reflected in the lenses of her dark glasses, that Ale’s friends had called. It was Dwarf who found him, a guy who works with him, who sees him every day.
‘If he was hit by lightning, maybe he was unrecognisable,’ she says.
Just then, Mariela emerges from the hallway with the landline phone to her ear. She realises something strange is happening and she tells the person at the other end to hold on. She covers the mouthpiece and her yellow eyes bore into me.
Mum wants me to text Alejandro, I explain.
Mariela thinks for a moment, then tells me to send the message.
Text him? You want me to text Alejandro?
‘Send it and it’s done,’ says Mariela, and she goes back the way she came. We hear her close the door to the master bedroom. On the porch, no one seems to be paying attention to us. Some of them have gone down to the grass to sit in the sun. Then it occurs to me that I could call him. I can call my brother and see who answers. I make the mistake of saying it out loud. Mum grows desperate.
‘No!’ she says. ‘Don’t call him, don’t call him!’
Why not? We’ll save time if I call him.
‘Just send him the message, give me the phone, and forget about it, if it bothers you so much.’
But I won’t be able to forget. I’ll be just like her, waiting for someone to answer the message and hoping that whoever does is my brother, who no longer sees or hears, or has a voice, or fingers to work his iPhone.
‘Text him and give me the phone, please,’ says Mum.
As soon as I send the message, Mum takes the phone from my hands. She says: ‘You didn’t write what I told you to.’
I love you, cocksucker, I’d written.
‘You think that’s cute?’ says Mum when she reads it.
Without warning, I feel the first tears of the day. With her silence, which I can practically lean against, Mum sounds out my pain, but my pain isn’t mine. As if through divination, unable to prevent it, my mind forms the image of Alejandro still alive. There’s no chance, but I picture him coming back from some girl’s house, getting to work late, tired and hungover. Mum seems relieved that we’re now drinking from the same miserable puddle.
‘When we were outside,’ she says then, delicately, ‘I didn’t mean that I would rather it were you instead of Alejandro. I would never say something like that. You misunderstood me.’
Don’t worry. If there were ever a day to go crazy, it’s this one.
She says she’s going to take a minute and lie down.
Not long ago, in September, Mariela buried her baby daughter, Milena, so she knows exactly what needs to be done. She has all the numbers saved in her contacts, and she takes charge of making the necessary phone calls. Her partner Mauro, equally trained, offers his car to take Dad and Marcos to Rocha.
Sitting at the kitchen table, with the sound of the kids’ film on the background, and Mum trying to sleep in her room, Mariela spells out the process: ‘At the morgue they’re going to open him up to see how he died. It was probably electrocution, but they have to rule out all the other possibilities. Tomorrow at eleven, the body will go to the Salhón funeral home, next to the shopping centre. We, the family, will have two hours to be with him there.’
She says it as though it had already happened.
‘We’re going to invite people to come from one to three. The procession leaves at three, and there will be a service at the same cemetery where we buried the baby. Whoever wants to say something will be able to. Instead of a burial, Dad and Marcos say Ale would have wanted to be cremated and to have his ashes thrown out on the beach.’
Thrown out?
‘Is that OK with you? We’ll take him to La Paloma and toss them there.’
It’s OK, but you don’t throw them out. You scatter them, return them, bequeath them.
I remember how the conversation was affecting my stomach. I remember burping and then saying: he died, he’s dead. I remember repeating it. Then Mariela starts reheating the stroganoff. It was already close to noon and the kids hadn’t eaten. As she looks through the fridge, cousin Timoteo taps on the sliding door, comes in carrying the thermos and asks us to boil more water. He hands the thermos to Mariela and goes back outside.
Mauro and Mariela waited fifteen years before they tried for a sibling for Catalina. Mariela wanted to finish university. Then do a postgraduate degree. Then the period when Mauro went on antidepressants after he lost his job. Then they separated for a time, Mauro living with his mother, Mariela teaching, researching and working on her doctorate. When Mauro was finally offered a job just like his old one at a new financial consulting firm, it was Mariela’s turn to have a nervous breakdown, and she was forced to re-evaluate everything. She cut down on her work hours, discovered yoga, took up swimming again, and only then, after they’d got their stability back, did they start trying for the little boy Mauro always wanted. None of Mariela’s examinations during the pregnancy revealed that the baby would be born without an immune system, due to a genetic failure that would also deprive her of all other normal reactions. They found out something was wrong only during the birth itself, when the baby didn’t make any effort to be born and let Mariela do all the work. Milena couldn’t latch onto the breast, her little fingers didn’t grasp, she never returned a smile. But some communication was possible. I sang to her when I held her and her eyes stopped wandering. Sometimes you’d wonder if you were imagining it – and that doubt left you utterly alone – but the baby did listen. Sometimes she seemed to smile a sweet, crazy smile. Her temperature had to be taken every four hours, her oxygen had to be regulated, she received food and antibiotics through a tube. Mariela and Mauro personally carried out the nursing duties. During the nine marathon months of her daughter’s life, Mariela’s eyes turned yellow, forever changing from their usual honey colour.
‘Idiot,’ says Mariela while she fills the kettle with water. ‘Going into the lifeguard hut during the worst storm.’
He had faith in the hut. Apparently he went there a lot. According to Aunt Laura, it wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night there.
‘I know, I talked to him. He didn’t worry much about taking care of himself.’
He didn’t give a shit.
‘He didn’t have kids. What was it Mum wanted?’ she asks. ‘For you to text him? Poor woman.’
After a few minutes of talking about who knows what, if we even talk at all, I ask Mariela if she doesn’t think it should have been me who died instead of Alejandro. Mariela looks at me disconcertedly from the other end of the kitchen while she stirs