‘You can’t have such rigid opinions on everything,’ a former colleague said to her, back then, at a get-together of former colleagues. Carla, her name was. She worked at the University of Texas and her career path, seen in perspective, resembled that of a feral cat clawing its way up a skyscraper. ‘Why can’t I?’ Lucía replied. The others looked at her in silence, bulging with morbid fascination. ‘Because you sound like one of those women who see motherhood as the primary, hypertrophic drive of female existence,’ Carla retorted. Lucía looked at her, expecting her to elaborate further, but Carla simply added, ‘It’s not a good look.’ Lucía replied, ‘Anyway, it wasn’t an opinion, just a close analysis of myself.’ ‘Anyway,’ said Carla, ‘how is it possible to have 1.8 children?’
The others laughed, their teeth all smeared with salmon and cream cheese, olive tapenade and pâté. Sickly tongues. Poisonous eyes.
In the hospital cafeteria she bought herself a Diet Coke. At the checkout there was a selection of children’s books and she chose one for Tomás. She liked buying books for them in Spanish, to reinforce the language. Rosa didn’t like reading, she preferred sports. And food – she was a six-year-old girl with the appetite of a sixteen-year-old boy.
On her way to Pablo’s room, she examined the book. It was about a boy who dreamed he went travelling in his spaceship and got lost in between galaxies. She suspected it might have been designed as a gift for children in hospital. She wanted to return it, but by then she was already in the lift. She pressed the button. As soon as the doors opened, she saw the outline of Kelly J., who stood looking out of the window. Along with the plaid skirt, she was wearing combat boots and glittery thigh-high socks, all no doubt purchased with loose change at a garage sale. It was 8:15 on an unusually cold Saturday morning. The wind banged against the windows like the screams of a heavy metal singer hitting Lucía’s eardrums.
2
For Pablo, it had all started a year earlier. One weekend when Lucía and the kids had gone with her parents to visit a bear park. For the old folks, seeing a bear was like seeing a dinosaur, and they were super excited about the plan. Pablo wasn’t even invited; Lucía said there was no room in the car. His in-laws’ car was parked outside, meaning there were two cars available. Pablo decided not to point out the obvious.
He had zero interest in seeing bears.
Or in spending time with his in-laws: a pair of old codgers addicted to enchiladas and Pepto Bismol, who belched up burning balls of gas, and considered it appropriate to talk about their gastritis at every opportunity. Gastritis was a nice euphemism for rotten guts. Their breath alone – not to mention their farts – was enough to strike down a whole army of anosmic soldiers.
When he said goodbye to the kids, he handed each of them a face mask through the car window, and they started giggling. With things like that, and anything scatological, his children had a cosmic connection with him. Lucía simply shook her head and shot him a disapproving look in the rear-view mirror. The grandparents, not getting the joke, were delighted at the kids’ laughter.
‘What’s so funny?’ said the old woman.
Pablo, serious as a monk, replied, ‘It’s just that yesterday, they recorded gas emissions in this area that shattered the state’s Geiger counter.’
Rosa coughed like she was having a fit. The old lady patted her on the back and said, ‘Oh! Is it dangerous?’
‘Pablo, that’s enough,’ said Lucía.
‘It can cause immediate loss of consciousness,’ replied Pablo.
‘Gosh, Luchita, is it still safe to go?’ said the old man.
The children laughed so hard they were practically convulsing.
‘I’d say that you two are immune,’ said Pablo.
Lucía had to get out of the car to fetch Rosa some water.
Finally, the car pulled away with a roar that subsided as they disappeared around the corner, and the street was plunged into the deafening silence to which Pablo was now accustomed.
At around 5 p.m. he received an email from Gonzalo and Elisa – [email protected] – inviting them over for a barbecue. They lived next door and they saw them often but were not particularly close friends. He bumped into Gonzalo most days when they each took out the rubbish to the bin they shared, halfway between the two houses. The bin for recycling was a bit further away, so they walked that stretch together as they discussed the news, usually about terrorism. They talked about Isis, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and the FARC as if discussing the performance of different soccer teams. He couldn’t recall how this had become their go-to subject, but they’d kept it up for years. This was handy for Pablo, because it allowed them to dance around more delicate subjects such as the fact that Gonzalo, a while back, had stuck his hand up Pablo’s sister’s skirt.
The email said that they had some Argentinian friends visiting, and they’d organised a get-together for them. They would expect them from 8 p.m. and offered their son Danny’s bed for Tomás and Rosa, as they’d done previously, so that the kids could go to sleep when they wanted. On these occasions, Danny – who was nearly fourteen and couldn’t bear to be around six-year-olds – hid away in the attic room where he had a projector connected to a laptop with hundreds of videos and movies. Gonzalo said that Danny wanted to be a film director. In response to this, or to any other remark by Gonzalo, Danny said nothing. He gave him a look of contempt which, just to witness, burned your skin like the lash from a whip. If Danny were their son, Pablo and Lucía had once remarked, the first sign of an expression like that would have received swift punishment. What kind? They had opposing stances on that. They both started off with a caring conversation, but along the way their choices diverged. Lucía ended up with the boy in the office of a renowned New York psychoanalyst. Pablo ended up with the boy – unconscious – in the intensive care unit of Yale New Haven Hospital.
He replied to the email: Thanks! Great plan!
He decided not to clarify that he was on his own. He decided to surprise them because, he thought, for his neighbours it would be a relief seeing him turn up without his brood who, in one way or another, required additional effort. He took a shower. After a while, he found himself in a surprisingly good mood as he shaved in front of the mirror. He’d been to plenty of barbecues at Gonzalo and Elisa’s house, and they were never very joyful occasions. Perhaps because Gonzalo was from Argentina and was always comparing gringo barbecues to the asados in his own country: he launched into rambling digressions about feedlot versus grass-fed cattle, or Napa versus Mendoza wine. He tainted everything with a feeling of unbearable melancholy. Plus, the children soon got bored and Pablo had to set them up in the bedroom belonging to Danny – who was about as friendly and gracious as a dead rodent – and persuade them to share the only iPad in the house, which generally involved much sobbing and scratching. Lucía thought it was poor taste to bring their own devices with them – ‘they’ll think we plug them in to those things so we don’t have to take care of them’ (and that was exactly what they did, thought Pablo) – but she didn’t think it was poor taste for them to hijack someone else’s. Anyway, the main reason Pablo probably felt uncomfortable was because Gonzalo, unburdened by rubbish bags, would talk exclusively to Lucía and they would monopolise the conversation. They shared that nerdy, shallow and closed-minded attitude of pretentious Latinos, of Ivy League scholars. It didn’t matter if they hadn’t won a big scholarship: a six-month stay in one of those universities was enough for them to proudly sport the fusty coat of arms. That left Pablo to contend with the vacuous Elisa, her constant griping about the United States – the ignorance, the obesity, the consumerism, the