‌

‌( )

I didn’t know where I was when I woke up. Where, or in whose bed of which room in which hotel of which city. Paloma was asleep next to me with no cover. Her legs lay diagonally, pushing me to one corner of the mattress. Her mouth was half-open and her eyelids were flickering, as if a very faint light had dazzled her in her sleep. I watched her for several minutes, suppressing the desire to ask her about what had gone on in the bar toilet. I could just about recall a few snippets of our journey home, us two staggering our way down a street, perhaps, and so I decided to wake her up. I placed my hand on her shoulder and was surprised to feel the most paper-thin, almost impalpable skin. She didn’t move, so I tapped and then shook her a little. Only then did I notice my hands were still numb, the feeling lost in some hidden corner of that bar (parts being erased, subtracted piece by piece).

Felipe was watching us from the foot of the bed looking very serious. He hadn’t realised I was awake (or that I could spy on his loner face, his sad face, his grown-up face), but our eyes soon met.

‘You little minx!’ he cried, winking at me and pointing at Paloma, who also sat up suddenly on the edge of the bed, startled by Felipe’s excessive outburst. Felipe began to clap his hands and dish out instructions for how we should tackle the day.

‘Come on, girlies, time to get up,’ he ordered between claps, while everything around me returned to its place: the sheets, the paintings, Paloma’s back unfurling, straightening out, moving away and off towards the bathroom. I also returned to my body, although now it felt all wrong, like an outfit that was too tight around the back. I rubbed my eyes until I’d snapped out of my stupor and only then was I struck by a new sensation. I felt surprisingly fine. I was fine and I was a long way from home.

Felipe paced from one corner of the room to the other, chivvying us along, telling us we should hit the road before it got too late. He knocked on the bathroom door twice and when he finally managed to lure out Paloma – less than impressed and still sleepy, her arms stretched above her head and her hair all matted – he announced that he had a surprise.

‘But first let’s make a deal, Fräulein. You give me a little bit more of your mother’s potion and I’ll tell you my little secret.’

Paloma didn’t even grace him with eye contact. Instead, she put on yesterday’s clothes and sat on the bed looking gaunt. She told Felipe she had one more bottle, just one, a small one she’d rather keep for that night, once we’d found her mum and gone back to Santiago to bury her. She told him it wasn’t easy getting hold of that kind of thing, and not to push it. Felipe didn’t insist, but the moment Paloma went back to the bathroom he opened her suitcase and began rifling among her socks. Having ruled out several, he eventually found a pair which he shook triumphantly by his ear.

‘To keep out the cold,’ he said with a wink, and he slipped it into his pocket.

We went down to reception at just past noon. The woman with the black nails interrupted whatever she was doing to wish good luck to Felipe, who just carried on towards the door.

‘You must be heading back to Chile today?’ she asked, handing me our receipt. I remembered her from the bar, talking to Felipe, dancing with him, whispering in Paloma’s ear, and I replied, a little testily, that we still weren’t sure; we’d almost certainly be staying in Mendoza for a couple more nights, we weren’t in a hurry. She insisted on giving me the receipt and making us pay before we left.

‘Isn’t today the funeral?’ she asked, pointing to the doors. Felipe had stopped in his tracks and from the entrance, visibly upset, he leant his head in and mumbled at me.

‘Come here, Iquela, quick, move your arse.’

I went over to him. For a moment I was worried the ground outside would be covered in ash. But there was no ash this time. Instead, I found wreaths of white carnations, freshly picked loose marigolds and daisies festooned all over the roof of the General and on the pavement around it (the flowers like an omen, an amulet).

Paloma pushed her way between us and walked over to the hearse, peering suspiciously through the back window, as if an imposter might be sleeping in the rear compartment. Felipe followed her and together they circled the vehicle; two untrusting animals inspecting the windows and doors for clues.

‘Who did all of this?’ he asked.

Paloma shrugged her shoulders and stood on her tiptoes to reach a wreath of roses in the middle of the roof. She stretched out her arms, took it and hurled it at the ground. Then she did the same with the remaining hydrangeas and a handful of calla lilies. Thrashing her arms wildly, Paloma gradually cleared the hearse of all the funeral paraphernalia, while Felipe and I looked on, at a loss as to what to do beyond gawping at her increasingly red face. Red with envy. Because it was envy she was feeling; not rage, or sadness or pain. A single phrase betrayed her once we were on the road. Paloma slammed the door shut and her words went on ringing through the hearse.

‘This is my funeral,’ she said. And that was the last we heard from her the whole way.

The engine groaned with the force of the accelerator and the sickly smell of flowers vanished within a few metres. Paloma entertained herself by plucking a daisy that had fallen onto her seat, and she didn’t look up from those petals until we were on the motorway. Felipe mumbled instructions to himself as he drove, instructions he debated until he arrived at a private conclusion we weren’t privy to, but which translated into a long silence. He kept forgetting to move off at traffic lights and we would be left there, the hearse seemingly stunned before the green light. At no point did I tell him to put his foot down, and I didn’t even ask where we were going.

A road sign told me how much further it was to the airport and after a while I let myself be lulled by the distant hum of turbines. After all, it wasn’t my mother who’d gone missing, so I wasn’t the one disappointing anyone. My own mother was no doubt fine. She had always, in her own way, been fine; she’d learnt how to survive. And her disappointment in me would also be alive and well. It all felt very far away.

We drove up to the security cabin where we’d failed the previous day, and immediately the same guard appeared in his orange overalls and brought down the barrier. Paloma sighed and accused Felipe of making us waste time instead of just going through the established procedures (the proper processes, the regular means, the normal channels). Felipe ignored her and slowed down to a stop right beside the cabin. Everything happened very quickly. The guard poked his head out of the window, surveyed our faces, nodded with satisfaction, and, holding one hand firmly to his temple, saluting the General like a soldier, he raised the barrier and pointed right.

With almost no preamble, as swiftly as the shift from wakefulness to sleep, we found ourselves in the middle of the tarmac, a huge area watched over from afar, on one side, by the immense air traffic control tower. I was surprised by the dimensions of the place and the deafening noise of the turbines, and I asked Paloma to close her window. We drove along a narrow path, parallel to the runway, and headed towards the very edge of the tarmac, where it gave way to a bone-dry plain. There, at the edge of the concrete, lined up like cells, two long rows of hangars appeared before us; great stores housing planes, fuel, spare parts, perhaps. Each hangar was marked with a number on the front. To our right, the even numbers, and in front of us the odds, which is where Felipe headed, muttering a kind of mantra as he went.

‘Seven, seven,’ he repeated, and the hissing of his ‘S’s only stopped once we’d parked up.

Felipe jumped out of the car and Paloma and I followed suit. She still seemed resigned or incredulous, and I myself was highly sceptical. He walked ahead of us, in time with that infuriating muttering, and Paloma scurried to catch up with him. Only then, once they were shoulder to shoulder, did her interrogation begin. Paloma wanted to know why that hangar and not another, how did he know, why the airport instead of the consulate. I could hear the anger in her voice and noticed that her cheeks were flaming. Felipe’s single-mindedness was driving her mad, as was not knowing where they were heading. Being left out of the search plans infuriated her. It was her funeral, after all. I, on the other hand, didn’t even want to know what we were doing there. As far as I knew or cared, her mother might be in one of those hangars, or would show up one day at the morgue in Santiago, or was flying over the Andes at that very moment. She might simply be back in her room in Berlin, or even still at that rally in her white blouse (white, or cream or yellow), locked inside the photograph hanging on the wall of my mother’s dining room.

Felipe ignored Paloma’s questions and carried on his way, heading up our strange funeral train: a line of mourners led by him, with Paloma huffing and puffing in the middle, and me bringing up the rear, happy to waste all the time in the world (contemplating the cordillera in the distance and counting the raw words that I’d left behind).

The doors to hangar number seven were locked with a chain and an enormous padlock. I made one final attempt, more desperate this time. We stopped in front of the lock and I told them it made no sense to go looking in there, that we should do something else, make the most of the trip. I don’t even know if they heard me. Felipe took the metal chain with both hands, gave it a tug and the padlock came away without a problem. The doors swung open an inch and all three of us froze before whatever it was that those doors would offer.

Inside, there wasn’t a soul to be found, and there were a few signs of neglect that suggested nobody had set foot in there for some time. The air was cold and, despite the place having been totally shut up, it was pleasant, almost refreshing, although I soon felt a vinegary smell waft over me, a sour aftertaste which coated the roof of my mouth (the tubes, the syringes, the dressings). Neither Felipe nor Paloma commented on it. She charged in decisively but soon stopped and became rooted to the spot, as if she’d forgotten what we were there for. Felipe, on the other hand, buried his hands in his pockets, picked himself up and began to stroll about the place with perturbing calm.

It didn’t take me long to adjust to the dark. A few rays of sunshine had made it through the hangar doors, but the sheer size of that place meant the light only spread so far as to create a scarcely penetrable darkness. I was surprised by the height of the ceiling, designed to store giant things, not the hundreds of everyday objects that looked even smaller for having been abandoned there. To my left I saw several trolleys of suitcases, bags and rucksacks; mounds of luggage covered in a fine layer of dust (suitcases old and new, hard and soft, bags mounting up in easy, soothing lists). Each trolley had a label on it with the name of an airline, the number of the cancelled flight, its origin and a date. They were all planes that hadn’t been able to land in Chile. She couldn’t even fully own that tragedy (her disaster, her funeral, I repeated in my head).

Paloma began to read out the labels on the trolleys, but she wasn’t able to get very far. Felipe gave her a pat, almost a caress, on the back.

‘We’re not going to find your mum here,’ he said, ‘not unless you put her in a suitcase.’

Paloma abruptly shrugged off that hand and told him she was only looking for the luggage from her mother’s flight, to work out if the other suitcases from that flight were there. Even she seemed smaller now, like a little girl as she rummaged through them. Felipe, on the other hand, strutted about the warehouse, as if at last he’d found his true home.

Lined up in a row at the back of the hangar, a dozen containers formed a metal wall. I went over, convinced I’d find the coffin there, but, opening a few, I only found boxes, armchairs, beds, lamps and bicycles; houses dismantled to be put back together somewhere else. You don’t ship coffins in those kinds of moves. It made no sense to move country with paintings, cars, clothes and your dead. The idea of finding a coffin there was as ridiculous as finding one adorning a dining room, and it was that image (a decorative coffin, an ornamental coffin) that suddenly seemed funny to me. I stifled a shy giggle but it rang out in that hangar like a church bell. I sensed Paloma’s presence behind me. She was following me. As per usual, I was following Felipe, who had paused on the right-hand side of the hangar, and was calling out to me in a broken voice, almost begging me to come.

I could see him standing stock-still with his torso bent forward, his body almost snapped in two (his eyes getting ahead of the rest of him). He went on begging me to come.

‘Ique, come and see them, look at them.’

I approached with caution (my pulse climbing up inside my ears: two, four, six seconds wasted in desperation). Every step I took was smaller than the one before; every breath shorter (breathing in the bare minimum). I didn’t want to know what Felipe had found. I wasn’t ready for it, but I carried on approaching regardless, suppressing my desire to run away and never come back. I stopped beside him and out of the corner of my eye I saw his face, five hundred years older. Paloma came and stood beside me in silence. Our procession line had fallen out of its strict order and we remained like that, overawed like children seeing the sea for the first time, or realising the true magnitude of a death.

There were dozens of them. No. Many more than that. Hundreds of coffins waiting, one on top of the other and stacked together in endless rows, in coffin-lined aisles: an immense labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling plastic coffins, coffins protected in cardboard, small wooden coffins, big wooden coffins, wide and slim, dark and pale. Dozens of perfectly parallel aisles. Hundreds of dead men and women wanting to return, to go back for good, to be repatriated (and I tried to make a quick list, an improvised inventory of corpses: fifteen in pine coffins, twenty boxed in chipboard, eight in their poorly varnished caskets).

‘Incredible,’ Felipe whispered after a long silence. ‘Just incredible,’ he repeated, and his voice seemed to claw its way up from the deepest part of him, from faraway, from before, from an imprecise and dark place, a dusty voice that had waited patiently to come back and had been kept especially for that moment. A voice identical to the one I’d heard years before.

‘Incredible,’ he’d said that day as we hid in the blackberry bushes in Chinquihue, on the one and only trip my mother and I made down south, when his Grandma Elsa asked us to go and collect him so he could stay with us that winter; all of a sudden the grief had become too much for her.

‘Come quickly and get him.’

He and I were kneeling behind the branches and from there, from down on the ground, we spied on them. His grandma was looking at my mother with her tiny eyes, her eyelids thick like bandages. My mother, on the other hand, wasn’t looking at his Grandma Elsa; she was staring towards the sky, as we were. Because what was suspended up there in the air was beyond belief: a little lamb hanging upside down from the branch of an oak tree. A soft, squidgy fruit, just about to break away and fall. Felipe and I looked on, shielded by the blackberries. We watched the blade of the knife slice through the neck of that animal. We watched the blood fall in a sticky stream and then gradually slow into a trickle of thick, shiny drops.

‘Incredible,’ Felipe said agog, while that mucky white cloud spilt its innards, spewing out a pitcher’s worth of red, which filled a saucepan containing coriander and merquén.

‘Patience,’ his Grandma Elsa said to my mother, shaking the pan to spread out the liquid. ‘Patience, Consuelo, you have to wait for the blood to congeal, wait a second.’

Because the blood then congealed and changed. It transformed into a different, darker substance, a new material which his grandma cut into soft slices to dissolve in their red mouths.

‘Incredible,’ Felipe repeated as if he were presiding over a miracle, while I looked at that little animal and then at him, wanting to cover his eyes, to hug him and tell him to close them tight. Felipe, don’t look, don’t listen, don’t say a word, just shut everything, I’m going to be your great-great-great-grandmother and your grandma; I’m going to be your dad. But I found I couldn’t promise him anything. All I could do was listen to that word which had returned now, in the hangar.

‘Incredible.’

Paloma didn’t or perhaps couldn’t say a word, but she walked off with intent, as if she’d given herself an order: move. She took a deep breath, held in the air and made off towards the first row of coffins, as methodical as ever. Felipe started from the second row.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They’re so tidy, so ordered, Iquela. And there are so, so many of them.’ His voice faded into a distant hum and soon they both disappeared.

I drifted in and out of the aisles muttering the same two words, ‘Ingrid Aguirre, Ingrid Aguirre,’ as if with that name I could fix something irredeemably broken: my father’s mistake (Rodolfo’s, Víctor’s), Ingrid’s death (or Elsa’s or Claudia’s or the deaths of their doubles or aliases), delivering that corpse as if it were an offering that would finally set me free. I inspected every single row keenly, convinced that this was it, my chance to find her and do something important, something vital, something key. Something I could own. As if I myself had designed that maze and only I knew how to get out of it, I combed those coffins with extraordinary calm.

I paced up and down those rows like you might browse aisles of books in a vast library, trying to extricate some kind of logic: alphabetical, chronological, thematic (the dead organised by cause of death, ideology, height; corpses classified according to their eagerness to return, or their degree of nostalgia). I wandered among dozens of numbers and names, familiar surnames and unknown origins: Caterina Antonia Baeza Ramos, 1945, Stockholm-Panitao, Jorge Alberto Reyes Astorga, 1951, Montreal-Andacollo, María Belén Sáez Valenzuela, 1939, Caracas-Castro, Juan Camilo García García, 1946, Managua-Valdivia, Miguel, Federica, Elisa, 1963, 1948, 1960, Til-Til, Arica, San Antonio, Curicó, Santiago, Santiago, Santiago.

By the sixth or seventh row, having covered what felt like a hundred countries and every province of Chile, right in the middle of a very long aisle, with two coffins on the bottom row and one propped on top, her name appeared to me: Ingrid Aguirre Azocar, 1953, Berlin-Santiago. I stopped in front of her. The label was written in blue ink and with a careful hand (words that were identical in Spanish and German: mirror-words). The label was stuck carefully to the plastic, and that plastic covered the wood, which held the body which didn’t hold anything (or perhaps grief, resentment, boundless nostalgia).

I touched the paper and reread each one of those words (until they dissolved into syllables, and the syllables into letters, and the letters into indecipherable dashes; a blue stain, merely a doodle). I stood there before that piece of paper, a simple label, easily peeled off and slipped inside my pocket, a note that I could erase just like that, prolonging Paloma’s search for years, for the rest of her days, in that way offering her a cause. She would never have to go looking for anything else because her fate would be tied to the story of her lost mother (and our parents and all the things they had ever lost). I considered removing that piece of paper and replacing it with another one: any old name and surname, a code name, perhaps (Víctor, Claudia, an arsenal of embodied names). And then I imagined how I would lie to Paloma’s face; she would have to go on searching for her mother for the rest of her days, I was so, so sorry. I could effectively bring Paloma’s life to a standstill right there and then, erase Ingrid and pick up the telephone straight away, call my mother and tell her that she’d lost her friend for a second time, that I wasn’t even capable of doing something as simple as finding her.

I felt a fresh wave of deep unease, as if everything were burning, as if I could no longer sit comfortably in my own skin, as if there were nothing but voices and static and emptiness. Everything that followed was a blur. Not even aware of what I was doing, I withdrew my hand from the label and retreated until my back was resting against the opposite wall of coffins. My two hands formed fists and my nails dug into my palms, and there I stood for a moment, paralysed, unable to piece together a single thought. All the letters of my alphabet were frayed on the floor. Heavy, broken words abandoning me, leaving me terribly alone; alone and with a stupid urge to cry. But instead of crying I took a deep breath, held in that thick air (thick and spent, expired, used up) and let my voice burst out, breaking something inside of me.

‘I’ve found her.’

And I repeated those words lest I start to regret them.

‘I’ve found her.’