Eladio Rada and the Sleeping House

The house was several stories high. It was a country mansion bordering on vast stretches of deserted beaches where, here and there, trees or burglars would come into view. On the ceilings new spiderwebs grew every day that would set in motion the highest-reaching feather duster in the house; the furniture and the sheets that had been stored like plants in a dark winter garden smelled of freshly harvested corn.

It was as cold as winter in the empty house, but Eladio the caretaker didn’t notice the seasons by how cold or warm it was outside. He never looked at the sky. The only way he noticed the changing of the seasons was by the arrival or absence of the family. When he would begin to hear the shouting of his name all around him, coming from all sides, adult voices, children’s voices, calling him: “Eladio! Eladio!” he knew that the good weather was coming and that the family would be invading the house soon. He knew that then the beds had to be covered every night by mosquito nets, that the white sheets had to be removed from the furniture, that the floors would need to be waxed for the children to skate all over them, scuffing them with bright opaque streaks.

Then, and only then, he would hear the crickets in the garden and would no longer dare to look at the nude statue in the foyer.

But now it was the middle of winter; the house belonged to him alone and to the four dogs in his care. He had to prepare all the food himself, cooking on a Primus heater that hissed quietly in the silence of midday and at night. He might have had time to take a siesta and to think about the woman he wanted to marry, if it hadn’t been for his fear of burglars.

There were unexplored places in the house, where noises could be heard at night, waking him up. He’d get out of bed, grab the rifle the owners had given him and peek through the shutters, but he never made it to that mysterious distant place, to where the night noises that set the dogs barking came from. This was why Eladio Rada would sleep during the day on the garden benches, and the children would make fun of his silly face.

In a big box full of nails, newspaper clippings, and old pieces of wire, Eladio kept his girlfriend’s photograph. She was a hard worker who was good at doing the laundry, and her cooking was even better. They had gone out together several times, and it seemed like these were the only memories of his life. Eladio didn’t know how to go about asking her to marry him, and each time he tried to say it he made the face of an angry dog, pushing her along when they crossed the streets. However, Angelina didn’t notice a thing and wasn’t offended by his pushing; they’d hug good-bye on street corners, and she’d laugh along with the gardeners watching them.

Eladio spent the winter hours with his head bent, looking down at the tiles in the hallway. Angelina had disappeared. He wasn’t sure if the girlfriend with whom he had been photographed at the zoo one memorable day spent touring Buenos Aires was a dream. Angelina had leaned on his arm that day because she was tired; she was wearing a new dress. He had no other memory. And when he walked across the hall he would stop, looking out the corner of his eye, to stand next to the nude statue. Was that how a woman’s body was? When she took a bath in the morning, perhaps naked, Angelina must have been three times prettier, three times plumper.

In those moments when Eladio’s mind furrowed through the hallways where his lost girlfriend Angelina walked, he invariably heard the sounds of invisible burglars making the dogs bark, and he would check every corner of the deserted house to test every one of the shutters, which multiplied throughout the house.

One day Eladio Rada will die, and at the moment of dying, on his deathbed in the hospital, with his eyes gazing blankly at sections of the ceiling, he will rise to check the house’s shutters and doors where angels come into view.