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I really don’t like being stuck indoors, no, what I like is to keep moving, on foot, by bus, or, last but not least, in the General, but never stopping, if I wanted to stop I’d be better off crossing the cordillera on the back of a donkey like that poet they just dug up; no sir, I like moving, even more so at night, yeah, cos it’s lovely roving around at night, your thoughts all clear in the cold, because our thoughts come out better at night, everyone knows that, the sad thoughts blend in with the black, that’s why I take my walks so late at night, in the deepest depths of night, ever since the first time I walked out of Iquela’s house, when we were kids and my Gran Elsa left me in Santiago for a few days, just a few days, son, I’ve some important things to do, she said, and I repeated, im-por-tant, because I liked separating words into their syllables, especially words I didn’t understand, or im-por-tant things, yeah, and my gran left, at first for a long time, but in the end for far too long a time, and the house in Santiago began to feel small; in fact I couldn’t breathe in there, that’s it, I had no oxygen, because back then Rodolfo was still in the sickroom and I couldn’t stand his sweet and sour smell, the smell of rotten fruit, of chemicals, which crept right up your nose and down into your belly, and as that smell spread, everything around me began to rot and become sad, that’s what I thought, cos in that house even the ficus plants were weeping, which is why I left, the smell was killing me and I didn’t want to die, no siree, so I grabbed my things and snuck silently down the hall, crossed the front garden and that was that, but even three or four blocks from the house I couldn’t shake that feeling of having sand in my throat, as much as I swallowed and spat it wouldn’t go away, no, and I was scared that the smell had infected me and that it would circulate in my bloodstream forever, and that’s why I began to pull up flowers, roses at first, which I pressed against my nose to snort up all their scent, sniff them dry, yeah, fistfuls of roses that I used and then threw on the ground before going after the acanthus, with their long white tongues and sweet perfume, so delicious I would suck on them like flutes, and so I went about gorging on nectar as I picked the city flowerless, snatching dismembered petals, petals that I tore from the sepals and the stamens and the corollas and the anthers and the receptacles, which I left floating in the gutters, there among the tadpoles I abandoned those shredded flowers, white canoes in the muddy water for the tadpoles to paddle with, pistils floating with their ugly bug captains, and there I was, winding my way through Santiago munching on the stems and pollen and hanging my thoughts out on the electrical cables to see if they’d light up, like those trainers you often find dangling up there, suspended white planets in the dark sky, that’s what I was aiming for, to leave Santiago totally flowerless and to rule over it; I wanted all the pigeons, all the mosquitoes and those long-tailed meadowlarks to be mine, yeah, and I wanted to own the dogs too, to be lord and master of all the stray mutts in Santiago, to be their father and their mother, to open their little mouths, their reeking muzzles offering me their silvery slobber, the thick, bubbling slobber for me to store, the rabies from all the mutts dripping into a plastic bottle, that’s what I wanted, and then to put that bottle against my own wet muzzle, to sniff it and try it and gulp down every last drop and leave Santiago happy, a calm, disease-free capital, and I wanted to be lord and master, king of the mollified mutts, that’s what I was thinking as I strolled along a wide, flowerless street, when suddenly I felt an awful shiver run through me, the prickle of a bad thought, because I thought about Iquela rotting in the smell of Rodolfo, I pictured her sitting alone on the thick woollen Chilota rug my Gran Elsa had given her, telling me not to go back to the countryside, she didn’t like being left alone with her parents, telling me to stay, pretty please, and it was this thought that made me change my mind and go back to her, cos it was no fun being the king of Santiago with Ique rotting alone back there, cos we were going to live together, she and I, that’s what we’d promised each other, let’s live together for ever and ever? let’s be cousins? I proposed, and she told me no, I’m going to be your dad, and she drew a black, revolutionary moustache on her top lip and covered herself in the white sheet that I used to put on, and she handed me the pinkish dress that she hated, and we played at mummies and daddies; I was the mummy and she the daddy, of course, but after a while she stopped liking that game too and I told her I preferred being her pet, or, better still, her plant, I wanted to be the pollen, a part of the whorl, because we were learning the parts of the flowers and I wanted to be a pistil or a stem or, OK fine, we can be related, but distant relatives, OK? like great-great-great-grandparents, that’s it, let’s be great-great-great-grandparents!, I cried, because each of us had four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents and thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents! let’s be great-great-great-grandparents!, and she explained that to be great-great-great grandparents we had to have children, and those children had to have children, and they too and then the next lot, but she and I didn’t want children, absolutely not, over our dead bodies, how were we supposed to have children when we were the children? great-great-great-grandparents, no chance! Ique said, and thank God she did, cos popping out babies would only further complicate things, complicate the maths with more and more tots hell-bent on being born, insisting on being added to the count when what we need is to take people away; babies, no sir!, and so we agreed we wouldn’t be relatives, why would you want more family, more blood, anyway? and then she asked me to promise that we’d live together forever, that’s what she said, that we’d swear on all the atoms, on my parents and the swallows that we would stick together, and I’d tell her, no, Ique, I can’t swear on those things, because those things don’t exist, and besides, I had a job to do, I had to look after all the animals and plants in Santiago, that’s why I couldn’t live at Consuelo and Rodolfo’s place, so I told her no, Ique, it’s best if we live together-apart, like me and my gran, together but not tied at the hip, and she moaned at me for a while but eventually gave in and swore that there’d always be a place for me at hers, even when we were grown up she’d keep a sofa bed for me; but how could Iquela have me stay with her insides poisoned? that’s what I thought as I tried, in vain, to make my way back to the house, because the night was black and my thoughts had got lost, had flown off somewhere far away and were nowhere to be seen, and I was thinking I needed a convertible car, not like the General, no, more like the Popemobile, to let a bit of air in, yeah, that’s what I wanted, Pope but never Pop, that’s me! because I wanted to be a lamb of God, to wander around grazing, wrapped in my woolly cloud, and to lie down on the grass there in Chinquihue and drink from the river, that’s what I wanted when I was a boy, that was until I saw that bleeding lamb hanging upside down, cos after I saw that I no longer wanted to be a lamb, oh no, but I did want a Popemobile to go and pick up Ique so we could steal flowers together, nibble on parsley roots and loquat shells, but I didn’t know how to get back, because my thoughts run away from me at night and I can never seem to steer them back, cos they’re as dark as night and they act like those frogs in the jungle, or like stones and ash, camouflaging themselves, that’s what dark thoughts in the black night are like, and that’s why I couldn’t find my way back and I got lost, yeah, cos Santiago was big, like big big, and there was no coast to get my bearings, and at that point I did get a little afraid, but just a little, because next thing I came across a stray dog, a pup with a black and white and brown coat, and I could see that he had ringworm and rabies and I thought maybe he could be my brother-pup, cos that mutt with his rabid face walked alongside me, loyal as anything, while I munched on acanthus, and we walked a lot of blocks together he and I, a lot, and we peed on street corners and my mutt licked my pee and then day broke and I still hadn’t gathered my thoughts, they were still lost in the night and everybody knows that the daytime thoughts and the night-time thoughts never find each other again, no, and I don’t know how much time passed, a week maybe, when one day the pigs stopped me while I was drinking from a fountain at La Moneda, the little pup sticking his tongue in the spring and me copying him, just bending over for a sip of water, but the pigs didn’t like that and the chubby one said they would lock me up, and I said, lock me up, never! I like to roam free!, but he grabbed me by the arm and threw me into the police van, and there was dried blood on the floor, thick and dark blood in a puddle that my mutt lapped right up, and the station was packed with people and even the cells stank, but not a Rodolfo kind of stench, no, it was more tangy, the smell of armpits and captives, that’s what I thought, and I looked at the faces through the bars, eyes brimming with vengeance and pity that made me bow my head, and there, on the ground, was my pup, literally shitting himself with fear, his tail tucked between his legs, his cold little muzzle pressed against my ankles, and the pig asked me what’s your dog called, kid?, and I replied, Augusto José Ramón and he’s got rabies, and the pig looked shocked and said, you might want to rename him, kid, and I shrugged my shoulders and he launched into an inventory of questions like what was my surname, my ID number, my date of birth and address, and I told him I lived in the gutters with the mutilated petals and the tadpoles, in the corollas of flowers, between the sweet yellow suns of the acacia, and he stared at me and asked, when was the last time you ate, you stupid prick?, and I thought, who does this guy think he is? I’m the king of Santiago and the acanthus, but I didn’t say any of that, I just replied with my name, Felipe Arrabal, and he wrote it down really slowly, as if he were learning the alphabet, all in big letters, big like the German, and I really don’t like capital letters, or capital cities or capital punishments, but I didn’t tell him that because he picked up the phone and rang the sergeant and repeated my name down the line, affirmative, Sergeant, Arrabal with Bravo, and I just sat there while he thumbed through files and forms with a clueless look on his face, scrunching up his forehead like a bulldog, the spitting image of Don Francisco, and then he hung up and said, impossible, and then in a gruff, angry voice, I wasn’t born yesterday, sunshine, don’t mess me about, what’s your name? to which I replied, Arrabal with B for Bear, for Beast, for Bigmouth, with B for Brute, I said, Arrrrrrrabal, and he looked me up and down with a big frown drawn across his brow, his face deformed and his mouth moving like a dog’s but without the drool, well that’s just not possible, so tell me your real name or I’ll knock it out of you, you little shit, I’ll bang you up in that cell where no one’s getting you out, and I repeated, Felipe Arrabal, my name is Felipe Arrabal, and there was Augusto José Ramón slobbering all over my shoes, and the smell of lonely people, and the pig’s booming voice, his red voice coming from his red face, which was bursting as he said, Felipe Arrabal is presumed dead, and I said nothing, and there were the pistils and the petals and the calyx and the drool bubbling away in the bottle of rabies, and there I was swallowing down the sand in my throat, eking out my quiet reply, whispering the words so I didn’t lose them there in that prison, so they didn’t turn grey and blend into all that metal; there I was, speaking slowly, looking him in the eyes, feeling the rabies-sodden muzzle against my ankles, and I said, to myself, which is how I used to say all the really important things, I said, pre-sum-ed-dead, and I shot out of there so fast they didn’t see me for dust.