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Something strange was going on and it wasn’t the wine or Paloma or the maddening heat hounding us all the way from my mother’s house to mine. It felt like the calm before the storm. A rising pressure. But I couldn’t be sure. And what did I know? All I wanted was to escape from that mugginess and all the words swimming around in my head. I couldn’t forget my mother’s final comment, whispered in my ear as I left.

‘Sleep well,’ she’d said to Paloma with a pat on the back, trying to match the frosty greeting she’d been given. Then, cupping her hand around the back of my neck, pulling my head in towards hers and hugging me (brushing against me with her rough, broken skin, her skin that was getting closer to her bones by the day), she’d whispered: ‘I want you to know that I do all this for you.’

The sweltering air drove me on towards my apartment. Paloma was dragging her suitcase lethargically as if it weighed a tonne, or as if she were already regretting not having spent the night at my mother’s. I turned back several times to check she was still with me. There she was, a metre behind, just far enough for me to pluck up the courage to ask her about her mother. I wanted to know if Ingrid, like my dad, had died surrounded by syringes and dressings. I wanted to know what the chemicals on her skin had smelt like, what her final words had been and in which language she’d died (in as far as there could be a language in which one died). The rumble of the suitcase wheels stopped. Paloma had stopped. On the other side of the street a man emerged from his house and unravelled an enormous tarpaulin, which he then picked up and pulled over his car.

‘Always prepare for the worst,’ he muttered, arranging the tarp over the bonnet. We moved on and Paloma continued to straggle a couple of metres behind. She would only speak to me from there, as if the story itself predated me and therefore had to be told from a distance.

She told me that she and Ingrid had stopped speaking German when Hans walked out. And so, slowly but surely, listening in to her mother’s conversations, those phone calls she would make at odd hours, Paloma gradually began to recognise those silent ‘S’s in Spanish, and the nouns that shrink things (‘Paloma’, ‘Palomita’; ‘mamá’, ‘mamita’; ‘cuestión’, ‘cuestioncita’). Slowly she began picking up other words, too, the ones that tripped her up, the ones that meant one thing to her and another to her mother and mine. To all our parents. Because to them a ‘cover’ wasn’t a ‘lid’ and a ‘rat’ wasn’t a ‘rodent’; a ‘movement’ wasn’t an ‘action’, and ‘the front’ wasn’t the opposite of ‘the back’. It was also quite another thing to ‘infiltrate’, ‘fall’ or ‘squeal’, but Paloma knew nothing of that.

She made light-hearted jokes as she told more stories. Of trips to Istanbul, Oslo, Prague. Paloma took photos for a travel magazine. And not just any kind of travel: culinary tourism. She photographed dishes but never tried any of them. Instead, she toyed with the food, rearranging the meat to find an elegant – less grotesque – angle, slathering the whole plate in oil to make it shiny (lustrous dishes, mannequin dishes, totally inedible dishes). Only when Paloma got to the part about Berlin did her tone become a little more serious. She picked up her pace to walk beside me.

Six months between diagnosis and death. She was travelling in Italy when she received an email from her mum. The email’s subject: ‘theyve found’, and the content: ‘an abnormal mass in my right breast. love you, m’. Paloma had taken the next flight back to Berlin, going over the email all the way. She could recite it to me by heart. It was written in small letters and the ‘m’ was for ‘mum’. She told me as much when I asked – assuming it was a code name – what the ‘m’ stood for (and my blunder made me want to scramble even faster from my mother’s house).

Paloma had found the subject line – ‘theyve found’ – strange, and on opening the email two thoughts had crossed her mind. First, that someone from Chile had found her: a member of the family, a friend, one of the pigs, an old comrade (a faction, a cell, a unit), or any number of people from Chile, because Paloma had always suspected her mother was hiding from someone there. Second, and only once she’d read the rest of the email, her mind had pictured a cluster of nuts, and, as she tried to relay this to me, she stumbled over the word ‘cluster’, so I interrupted her.

‘Cluster,’ I said, imagining a cluster bomb growing on the edge of her chest. From that cluster of nuts to her death: six months. One failed attempt to remove it (to harvest it, I thought) and three weeks of chemotherapy (to fumigate it, poison it). Ingrid had only been dead five days, but Paloma’s account sounded older, like a story that begins ‘back then’. Nobody had stayed with Paloma as Ingrid lay dying. She had sat by her mother’s side and watched as she stopped breathing, as her heart stopped beating.

‘Almost like a pause,’ she said.

Not a silent stupor, not a breathless cry; a pause. A simple death. The long list of obligatory calls came later: several numbers were no longer in service (after all, Paloma was dialling numbers from another time), and then, at the back of the little phone book, written in blue ink, she found my mother’s name and number, and with them the conviction that Ingrid must be buried in Chile.

‘Which cemetery?’ I asked to fill the silence. Paloma didn’t know yet. She’d made the arrangements for the body to be brought to Chile but still hadn’t decided where to bury her, as if another pause had opened up between her mother’s death and her burial; as if Paloma had somehow anticipated the trip we would take, our unusual mission.

With her bags packed, all set to leave for the airport to catch her flight to Chile, and with the coffin due to be shipped in a few hours and the particulars settled with my mother, Paloma had felt a sudden urge to repack, this time to include the entire contents of her mother’s room: her clothes, each and every one of her books, her slippers, her sheets, her cushions, and the gilet she would wear each night (and which still held her shape, refusing to let go of it); she wanted to travel with all her mother’s papers, her towels, to bury her with her computer, cosmetics and creams, to lay her to rest with her tweezers, her records, her cotton buds, paintings and mirrors, reflections and all. Paloma felt an urge to gather together absolutely everything, but the only thing she ended up taking was a faded blouse with shoulder pads. She put the rest in black bags, a tangled heap of clothes to throw out or donate. Finally, she gave the plants a good long watering (her mother dead and Paloma watering pot plants, gardens, drenching entire parks).

I opened the main door to the building and directed Paloma to the stairs (exactly forty-four reliable steps). Only once we’d reached my floor, as I looked for the keys in my pockets, in my bag, in my own hands, only then did I notice the light escaping from under the door. I was sure I’d switched it off before leaving. The door was ajar. Nervously, reliving the old feeling of coming home from school to find the white van parked up on the corner, I placed the tips of my fingers against the wood. And just as I used to do with the spare room at home as a girl, I pushed the door hoping to find Felipe sitting on the floor, moaning at me for having taken so long, motioning me to jam something against the door so we could finally play at dressing up. I would enter that room without so much as a hello, and I never bothered to ask him how many days he was staying, fully committed to whatever his visit would offer, to whatever scraps of time he could give me, and I would sit down in front of him for us to call out, in unison, the character the other one was to play.

‘Your dad,’ I would say.

‘Felipe,’ Felipe would say, and he wouldn’t waste a second in stripping off – jumper, T-shirt, trainers, trousers, even his pants – and then I would undress too and put on his still-warm jumper and his musty socks which smelt of soil and dirt under your nails. Next, standing stark naked, baring his scrawny legs and gangling arms, Felipe would leap onto the bed, whip off the bedclothes and pull them over him, covering his entire body. He played his father and haunted me around the room, wrapped in white sheets. And it fell on me to play Felipe and ask him questions, waiting for his made-up replies: about journeys to the moon and to the earth’s core. We would play like that for ages, until we grew bored of each other (of our characters), at which point we’d put our own clothes back on, make the bed and unblock the door. Then we would sit on the wool rug, staring into each other’s eyes with that sadness that comes at the end of all children’s games.

I pushed the door and went in. Sitting barefoot on the armchair, his body bent over to allow him to reach the soles of his feet and paint the pads of his toes with a marker, there was Felipe (and around him a trail of toe prints: Felipe-shaped smudges decorating the walls).

In the background, an irregular buzzing sound was coming from the poorly tuned radio, lending the apartment an air of absurd drama. Felipe looked up and peered at me suspiciously (eyes that saw straight through me). There was something strained about our encounter, as if he’d already guessed Paloma’s motives, and mine, as if he already knew about Ingrid’s death, as if a predetermined dénouement had been set in motion, although surely it was nothing, or nothing so dramatic, I told myself as I flung my bag at the armchair and surrendered to the final throes of my drunken state. Felipe ducked to avoid my missile and sat taking in Paloma, raising his eyebrows ludicrously high above his eyes, pulling a silly face, playing the joker.

‘And who’s this?’ he asked, flashing his brilliant white teeth. ‘A new toy, you sly dog?’

Paloma pretended not to hear him, or perhaps she really didn’t. The wine had taken its toll on her, too: I noticed she had the same dry mouth and tired, bloodshot eyes, the same desire for the night to be over. But in fact, without the least intention of taking herself to bed, Paloma went over to the radio, tuned in a station playing Eighties pop and sat down in the chair directly opposite Felipe, surveying the chaos around her: pieces of paper covered in toeprints stuck to the wall, drinks left dotted around the room, the translation error on my computer screen.

‘Nice place,’ she said over Cyndi Lauper, who was singing away in the background. ‘Did you move in recently?’ she asked without taking her eyes off a box with DICTIONARIES written across one side: legal dictionaries, medical dictionaries, dictionaries of geography.

I’d been living there a while, sure, but to say I’d ‘moved in’ was a bit of a stretch. Felipe had bought the apartment with his reparation money (‘compensation, expiation,’ he’d say with a chuckle) and my slow relocation there had begun with me staying over occasionally, and then gradually moving my things from my mother’s house. Leaving without leaving. A half-measures move.

The story of my indecisive relocation didn’t seem to interest Paloma. Not like the dictionaries, which she got out one by one, flicking through each before dumping them back in their box. She asked if I translated.

‘Something like that,’ I replied. ‘I take on the odd job to earn a little cash.’

I translated foreign advertisements and, if I was lucky, the occasional second-rate script of some shitty, Sunday night movie. Paloma, engrossed in lighting her cigarette, gave a blasé nod before walking up to me and unhooking the camera I’d forgotten was still around my neck. She took a few shots of the apartment but soon abandoned the camera on the table and asked if we had anything to drink. She was exhausted, she said. The time difference had really knocked her out, but she needed to unwind before going to bed.

‘Is Consuelo always that intense?’ she asked, exhaling a puff of white smoke. Paloma needed to relax, as if she’d heard the line that was still ringing in my head: ‘I want you to know that I do all this for you.’

Felipe said we had some pisco and he couldn’t think of a better way to round off a night spent in that time capsule of a house than with a delicious nightcap. Paloma removed her shoes and hugged her legs, tucking them beneath her on the armchair. I sat next to her, very close, as close as possible. Felipe served three glasses of pisco and knelt down in front of us, his eyebrows knitted together and his eyes wide open.

‘Have your tits grown?’ he asked me out of nowhere, gawping at my chest. ‘They’re bigger, aren’t they? Pointier, that’s it, like little cones,’ he went on, pinching his own nipples.

Paloma looked at my breasts and I snuck a peek at hers: her see-through bra under her white top, her breasts bigger or rounder than mine, less conical.

‘I’d love a perky pair like that – much nicer than the German’s,’ Felipe said, and Paloma burst out laughing and nodded, repeating ‘cone tits’, ‘conical’ – memorising the words without taking her eyes off my chest.

I told Felipe to stop fucking around and I tried to change the subject but there was no need. Felipe was already off on one about maths, real and fake numbers and the importance of arithmetic, and I let my mind wander to save me from his neurotic dead people chat – the story of the dismal body he’d found that afternoon, the corpse that, according to him, would change everything.

‘Thirty-one, almost the same age as me. Are you listening, Iquela? Don’t you get it?’

Paloma was staring at him, either distractedly or indifferently. She flitted between taking photos, commenting on Santiago and answering Felipe’s questions, when she would reveal a very different kind of dialect: one she must have picked during her travels in Europe, but which she couldn’t distinguish from the Chilean she’d picked up from her mother.

‘Let’s see now, Fräulein Paloma,’ Felipe began, ‘what do we call sports shoes?’

And Paloma fell into the trap.

‘Sneakers.’

‘Trainers,’ he corrected her. ‘Iquela, where did you pick up this textbook foreigner?’

And Paloma, fighting back the giggles, reeled off a list of words she knew:

‘Diaper … sidewalk … restroom …’

And Felipe went on correcting her.

‘Nappy, Fräulein, we say nappy and pavement. And don’t get me started on restroom … it sounds like a place old people go to die.’

Soon everything was making us laugh, and we raised our glasses and drank as Felipe cracked joke after joke – ‘This German’s one schnitzel short of a picnic,’ – and in fits of laughter I translated for Paloma from Chilean Spanish to her Spanish, honing in on the gaping gaps in the language that Paloma was so convinced she spoke to perfection. She was knocking back the pisco. Only her eyes betrayed her exhaustion and drunkenness. We sat there for a long time talking about this and that until, out of nowhere, Felipe asked Paloma what her mother had died from.

‘Cancer?’ he asked. ‘It’s all the rage,’ and he waited for a reaction that didn’t come.

Paloma sunk back into her chair and made a sort of sideways pout with her mouth, a gesture I recognised: she was biting the insides of her cheeks, that slippery, hidden skin. She’d chew until she felt some relief, until she tore the skin away and got rid of that infuriating smoothness, scoring new paths for the cool metal of her tongue barbell, the silvery tip gliding across that raw surface. It wasn’t unlike my occasional tic for listing the objects around me, in that it allowed her to zone out of whatever situation she was in. Felipe had shown me the listing trick when he was a boy and didn’t want to think about sad things: he’d taught me how to count objects so that they became associated with a perfect, seamless figure.

‘The objects turn into digits, which fill the different compartments of your mind,’ Felipe would say, ‘so that the sad thoughts don’t have anywhere to live and we’re just left with the numbers. The bad thoughts become homeless,’ he’d say, pulling a knowing face, an absent face, a sad, blank face.

I thought about apologising to Paloma for Felipe, but the truth was he was right. My mother regularly called to tell me about this or that friend who had been diagnosed with cancer. That’s what she would say, ‘they’ve diagnosed him’, as if it were the only diagnosable disease. Bone cells attacking your pancreas, invading your lungs and lymph nodes, distending your uterus, your prostate, your throat. (Bad cells, confused cells, after everything.)

‘Habemus cancer,’ Felipe said. ‘It’ll be our turn next.’

He got up off the floor and began pacing around the room, all the while staring at Paloma, looking for some vital clue.

‘So she died in Berlin but you want to bury her here, in Santiago?’ he scoffed, his footsteps out of sync with the sugary, pop beat of ‘Time After Time’, his fingers counting and his face forlorn.

Paloma nodded. Of course, what with Ingrid being Chilean, there was no issue with her being buried in Santiago, but for that she’d had to be returned. ‘Be returned,’ Paloma said, but I realised that this wasn’t what she meant. She was looking for the exact word, but it had escaped her, and I was primed to jump in.

‘Repatriated,’ I said.

‘Repatriated, that’s it,’ she repeated, relieved and grateful (and I began to wonder if only the dead could be ‘repatriated’).

Felipe couldn’t believe his ears.

‘That’s all I need,’ he said, burying his face in his hands and letting out a pained sigh that slipped entirely from my mind as we moved on to our second or third round of pisco.

He was still pacing around the room muttering and jotting down phrases in a notebook when, eventually, he announced that he was leaving. He was always doing this: upping and leaving without warning. And I always wanted to know where he was going, and why, and how long he’d be. But there was something about Paloma that was stopping him, holding him back. It must have been her eyes, because the only thing she did was stare at us and smoke.

‘Cigarette, Iquela?’ she asked, inhaling deeply (perhaps remembering, perhaps not).

Felipe eventually came out with the question he really wanted to ask.

‘Hey, Fräulein,’ he said, already halfway out of the apartment, his hand on the door handle, ‘why didn’t you just burn her?’

I looked at him agog, certain, now, that Paloma really would lose her cool, and I immediately corrected him as if to protect her from that word: ‘burn’.

‘The correct term is “cremate”, Felipe.’

But Paloma didn’t bat an eyelid. Felipe opened the door to go wherever it was he was going, and from there, standing on the threshold, he turned to me and, with a smile, a wink, two chuckles and a shrug of his shoulders, he said:

‘Tomaytoe, tomahtoe …’