The last thing on Oscar’s mind when he picked up the phone was that, in a few hours, he would be extracting his Uncle Agustín’s corpse from the modest flat where he had spent the last fifty years.
He’d not seen him since that day four years ago when the old man had asked Oscar to return the spare key to his security box. He was going to take his money out of the bank.
‘What will you do with it all?’ he’d asked.
‘I’m going to spend it.’
‘You old shit,’ thought Oscar. His uncle had a good pension, no family and almost never left his house.
They’d not spoken since.
When he received the call from a neighbour alarmed by the smell from the old man’s flat, that money came to mind once again. He thought about it and wanted it as he might desire a beautiful woman. Then he fantasized endlessly about the pile of cash. A flat and a nice windfall would come just right to help him break up with Malena and start afresh. He might even be able to leave his office job and open the wine shop of his dreams. His children had grown up.
He switched the sombre, tetchy expression he adopted when working at his window at the National Car Registry for a beaming smile that he paraded through the office, several underground stations and the three blocks he had to walk. A few metres before reaching the building where the old man lived he rehearsed a look that went from worried to sad. He cut diagonally across the road towards the corner of the street and bet a few pesos on number 47: the dead man.
When he finally arrived, he was met by the distraught neighbour and two policemen who gave their condolences and told him they’d have to move the body to the morgue. Oscar dealt with the formalities with the sangfroid of a butcher and, once the police returned the body to the family, they buried it in the Chacarita cemetery.
Oscar moved into the flat that same weekend. He’d not been inside for years, but he could remember everything in minute detail. It was a two-room ground-floor flat with a gallery, the large windows of which overlooked an inner courtyard. The spacious living room had suffered an invasion of angular, brown armchairs that matched the wallpaper striped in different hues of maize yellow. A modular furniture unit stocked with sets of glasses filled the whole wall opposite the main armchair.
The bedroom was less out of the ordinary, the walls were painted white and it had a large wrought-iron bed with an elaborate headboard Oscar thought would fetch a good price, a smallish wardrobe stuffed with clothes, and a bedside table with two drawers he checked straight away – an unloaded revolver, some cash, boxes of pills and two valuable watches he pocketed there and then. Oscar counted 1,200 pesos. He didn’t immediately decide what to do with the weapon. He left under the window a photo of his uncle and his mother he knew they’d taken one summer in the seventies in Mar del Plata.
The kitchen looked new; the thinnest layer of dust covered the huge granite top that extended to the first-rate cooker. He imagined the old man probably didn’t cook very much. In one corner, envelopes with unpaid bills and a few advertising flyers. In the fridge, an empty carton of milk, some eggs and half a kilo of ham that was beginning to turn green. Newspapers from the last two years were piled up in the tiny utility room.
Oscar started to get rid of the furniture. He sold the practically unused kitchen furniture and the crockery from the modular unit in the living room to a trader from the flea-market to whom he promised the bed, once they moved out for good. He gave away some worn-out clothes. He decided to keep back for himself a dozen pristine shirts and trousers.
It took him two weeks to find an important stash of money. He found it in an empty tin of paint in the utility room. He counted the money in just a few minutes – almost $70,000; they’d been stuffed inside a stiff brown-paper envelope. He experienced the mean, calculating satisfaction of someone who lays a bet and knows he’s going to win something at every attempt. He immediately thought that wasn’t enough, that there must be more, but even so he rapidly bought a flat in a block about to be built in the leafy area of Barracas. That same day, before night fell, he placed the bet he’d been wagering on for years; 100 pesos on 32, money. He kept the rest back for a blow-out and a bottle of good wine in a bar he usually went to with Malena.
A week later, when things had begun to go badly with his ex-wife, Oscar left the flat he had rented in Colegiales and moved into his uncle’s place for good. He still hadn’t found a large slice of his money. He had a hunch. And when he had a hunch, he was never wrong. He didn’t let anyone help him and, after his first painstaking search, he started tapping on every single kitchen and bathroom tile. He removed the skirting boards, dismantled furniture and opened and inspected every box his uncle kept in the trunk room.
The place was soon a complete mess. Dust darkened the furniture and added a brownish filter to the windows that let in less and less light. He heaped up everything he couldn’t sell in the middle of the living room. He bolstered the pile with books, lamps and other small things, and in no time a mountain of items divided the room into four. Rubbish, papers and objects of no value would end up in the street.
Within days Agustín’s place looked like a building site in reverse. Oscar laboured away every night with destructive energy, as if starting from zero again. He spent his day-time at the office in a state of exhaustion. He let his beard grow, didn’t eat properly and slept in two-, three- or four-hour siestas; one in the evening and one at dawn.
Oscar went along with what they said at work; he agreed that he looked poorly. He couldn’t recognize what he saw in the small bathroom mirror every morning. High, scraggy cheeks, blue bags under his brown eyes, and a white, elongated tongue he stuck out completely when he was cleaning his teeth. His thin neck was hard put to support a head that had more hair than anything else. But he wouldn’t relent on the missing money, and believed that once it did appear – which he calculated would be any minute – he’d be able to give up work and take a much-deserved holiday on a southern beach where he could recover his energy.
But the money didn’t appear.
At the end of the month they cut off the electricity and gas because he hadn’t paid his bills. Then Oscar sharpened and applied his five senses like a wild animal. He stopped going to work, which wasn’t the result of any rational decision, he simply couldn’t get up after spending the night searching for clues. He inspected everything so carefully he could soon identify individual rats nesting in the box for the shutters of the window that looked over the yard, and the three cockroach nests he discovered after leaving bait in different parts of the house and vigilantly waiting for them to appear. He didn’t bother to poison the rats or kill the cockroaches even though the old man had kept supplies of poison; it sufficed to know that nothing was hidden in those small hollow spaces.
A week later he collapsed and slumped down on his bed; his skin was yellow and his liver shattered. He didn’t need the fingers of one hand to count the number of times he got himself up. The same neighbour who had found his uncle’s corpse called the ambulance after hearing Oscar’s terrible wails. Analyses diagnosed advanced pancreatic cancer. He barely had time to talk to his children, decide who would inherit his flats, and finalize a will detailing all the goods that they found in Agustín’s house. His last wish was a huge bet on 17, misfortune. Malena, his ex, decided to keep that money.
Oscar was buried some thirty metres from the old man.
Malena quickly refurbished the flat. She gave what clothes were left to the church, removed the carpets and had a new bathroom fitted. She decided to rent out the flat while her children were at university, and eventually, Emilia, one of her second cousins who’d just come to the city, moved in.
Emilia was a nurse: every day she left the house early and the moment she got back she had a hot shower and watched television in bed with the huge cat with shiny fur she’d inherited from her mother. She was pleased with the flat; she bought a garden set and filled the yard with plants she organized according to size and colour.
She also liked the neighbourhood; it was quiet by day, even though it was central; everyone seemed to be just passing through. At dusk when the sky was turning into a purple awning, people opened the enormous windows of their low houses, and you could smell what they were cooking or watch the game on the television through their wrought-iron bars.
Emilia invited Malena to lunch on her first free day. Her children were on an excursion so they could talk at their ease and catch up. Malena brought a bottle of wine to accompany the stuffed joint Emilia was going to roast in the oven. She had yet to cook a meal in the flat and decided she ought to celebrate her occupancy of her new home.
It was a cool, sunny day but they were both happy to sit in the yard and use the plastic furniture for the first time. In a way, though neither said as much, both felt they were starting afresh. They had a laugh over the news about the duty doctor who’d invited Emilia out and that was probably why they didn’t notice the thick black smoke issuing from the kitchen. The smell reached the yard, and Emilia leaped from her chair like a jack-in-the-box, while her cousin felt tempted to laugh. You could hardly open your eyes in the kitchen. Emilia was furious. It was the first meal she’d cooked in the house and that wasn’t a good sign.
She struggled to switch off the oven and then opened the kitchen doors and windows to ventilate the space. A few minutes later she extracted the tray with the roast. It was covered in black dust, but still looked raw.
The oven was slow to cool down. She took out the roasting tins and cleared out the inside. She found it was carpeted with oddly shaped bits of green paper it took her until nightfall to empty out with a spatula.