On the twenty-fourth, with the sun still a long way from disappearing, we go to the hotel to pick up Iris. First, I inject Tosca with an especially strong dose; I feel better that way, she says. Drop in when you come back, you can give me another if I need it. Iris suggested walking for a while to work up an appetite and get our money’s worth out of the food. That’s how she put it, she let out a cackle and I thought it a good idea. Simón walks on the way out; on the way back we take turns carrying him on our shoulders. We go to the large plaza, we pass the corner where el Buti stands, I point out our window, we stop at a kiosk to buy 7UP, we go into a shop filled with Chinese merchandise, miniatures, plastic flowers, handheld fans; Simón is fascinated by a miniature samurai sword. When we start to feel our legs, we head for the restaurant.
In the little square that smells of urine, we join the sparse audience watching a live nativity scene. I’m not sure, but I get the impression the event is organised by the evangelical church next to the Fénix. Around a shack improvised loosely from cardboard boxes and canes, a series of sinister characters is parading, trying to pervert a naive young girl. It’s actually a woman who’s well into her thirties wearing a school uniform, white blouse and kilt, which detracts a fair bit from the credibility of her role. Among the demons hounding her, there’s a man dressed in leather trying to seduce her with a bunch of flowers, and when he doesn’t succeed, he pounces, groping her, just like a monkey. Now another man appears, bald with bulging eyes and a revolver tucked in his waistband, who flings a shower of banknotes at her. He is followed by a rather primitive-looking woman who tempts her with a piece of raw meat. Finally, she is approached by a punk swaying with a bottle of beer in his hand. Besieged by all the sins surrounding her and forming a kind of tribal dance, the girl is about to kill herself when out of the shack emerges a strange Jesus wrapped down to his feet in a tunic, no crown of thorns or beard, who throws himself on top of her to protect her from the vices, which flee from his presence in terror. Iris gives in to temptation and runs off laughing into her hand; Simón can’t believe his eyes.
We get to the buffet restaurant at around half nine. The place is already full. Two or three large families, several couples alone and a group of young boys whose features, gestures and tans betray them as foreigners – Australians or North Americans. They are the quietest at the start of the night, the most uninhibited by the end. We sit by the window, a bit of a squeeze, but it’s fine. The tables are decorated with streamers, paper serviettes with Christmas motifs, rubber mistletoe and a tiny tree that keeps falling over. For the duration of the meal, Iris or I will keep trying to stabilise the little tree by propping it up in every way possible, using breadcrumbs as a base, spearing it to the tablecloth with toothpicks, wedging it between two glasses. Later on, as the alcohol takes effect, the toppling or perhaps just twisted pine becomes a source of amusement rather than annoyance. We see who can keep it standing for longest until Iris comes up with the ultimate solution: sticking it to the table with a bit of gum which she chews rapidly between courses.
The food is arranged in two large display counters facing each other. On one side, all the hot food, on the other, the cold cuts and salads and, a bit further along, the desserts. The abundance, the shape of certain items and the colour of some of the sauces is amazing at times, even repulsive. There’s lamb, rabbit’s foot, frogs, squid rings, octopus tentacles, all kinds of schnitzels, an obscene amount of chips. I wonder where they got the frogs, whether they have a breeding tank out back. I eat with relish, like never before. Steaks, a colourful cabbage salad, whitebait and a cheese roulade, palm hearts and olives. I help myself to seconds as if I had been fasting for a week. Iris is more daring: without hesitating she fills her plate with half a dozen frogs, piled in a pyramid. Simón, on the other hand, doesn’t want to experiment at all, he limits himself to some cheese and ham empanadas and, three times, makes me bring him a stainless steel dish of red jelly cubes. We drink white wine; Iris takes it upon herself to order one bottle after another.
Without saying much, we devote ourselves to chewing, to joking about the decorations, laughing at people, that’s how our Christmas Eve unfolds. When we can’t go on, Iris releases a burp which Simón laughs at and attempts to imitate. A very young waitress in leggings that reveal the line of her arse and the folds of a camel-toe – May as well be naked, Iris says – collects our empty dishes, a mountain of bones and cartilage.
We start chatting about people from the zoo. We criticise almost everyone, we share gossip, we list physical defects, as work colleagues tend to do when others aren’t there. I talk about the few I know, Yessica, Esteban, the polar-bear keeper, the old woman in the office and the guy from human resources. He’s a troglodyte, says Iris and I can’t believe she uses the word troglodyte, I don’t know where she can have learnt it and even less how she manages to pronounce it. We also mention Canetti, she gets to her feet to imitate him, lame and stooped, mouth twisted, just like Quasimodo.
Iris is out of control, almost euphoric. She takes a breath and hurries to empty her glass; she has another anecdote, something she’s never told me. On her second day of work she almost died. That’s what she says: I almost died. It seems that a woman, a fat lady, she explains and mimics her by spreading out her arms, got her footing wrong as she was crossing the hanging walkway in the subtropical rainforest; she broke a plank in two and got her leg stuck between the wires. In mid-air, she says, and continues describing the scene, which provokes one of her distinctive cackles, shaking the table and beyond. Iris recomposes herself and tells me how she almost had a fit, the plump lady swearing from on high and herself unable to move for laughing. I thought they’d throw me out right then and there, she says. I’ve never been in the famous rainforest, I’ve only seen the building from a distance, so I have to imagine the situation from Iris’s descriptions. The vines, the tarantulas, the recorded monkey shrieks and a woman trapped in the middle of this artificial jungle. And of course, I can’t help laughing along with her. Apparently, because of the risk of the bridge collapsing, they had to bring in a stepladder to rescue her. When they finally got her down, Iris disappeared, she hid in the bathroom until everyone left.
Midnight arrives. The countdown begins at the tables to either side, there are arguments over who has the exact time, one taps the glass of his wristwatch with an index finger, another shakes his mobile as if it were a rattle. The waiters, some Chinese, some of Hispanic descent, hand out plastic flutes among the tables. You can see the chips in them; they aren’t new, they’ve been used for some other celebration, last Christmas or a birthday party. We make a toast. Iris and I with our extremely light glasses, Simón with his fist clenched. But I can’t drink much, the champagne is acidic, like old-fashioned cough syrup. Either it’s really bad or I’m just not used to drinking and it’s a matter of taste.
Surprise, says Iris and takes a bag containing two packages out from beneath her chair. One long and curved, for Simón, the other small and narrow, for me. We unwrap them at the same time: for me, a fan with dragons on it, for Simón, amazed, the samurai sword from the Chinese shop. Thanks, I say, and it’s inevitable that I feel inadequate. It didn’t occur to me to buy any presents, not that anyone is going to reproach me for it.
After the toast, there’s a commotion. People are abandoning their tables and congregating by the entrance, some out of anxiety, others just following the crowd. The door becomes a bottleneck. Although my plan is to stay where I am and watch through the window, Iris and Simón force me to get up. The fireworks, Iris chides me. Sure enough, the restaurant staff have prepared a small fireworks display that puts a silly smile on every face.
Once the excitement is over, after the arsenal of rockets brought out by one of the Chinese men, the eldest, who spent all night behind the till, everyone apart from the teenagers and the foreigners sits down again. Simón stays outside, on the window sill, back leaning against the glass, legs dangling. Another bottle of white wine and I’m not sure whether it’s the second or the third. In her drunkenness, Iris passes from euphoria to melancholy in minutes. First she tells me she met a man online. A systems analyst. A strange guy, solitary type, with a moustache. They saw each other once, they went to the cinema, then to a motel, says Iris and in her mouth the word motel sounds deep and serious, like a mythological character. When they were in the room she asked him to take a shower and the guy slipped getting out of the bath and split his septum on the towel rail. He spent the rest of the night with a piece of toilet paper stuck in his nose to stop it bleeding. They slept together that once and never called each other again. Then her tone changes and she returns to telling me more details about the story I heard the first day, how she met Draco, what a great time they had over there in spite of everything, how he convinced her to come here, how difficult it was at the start, the uncle and the tyre business, the way he was gripped by racehorse madness, the fights and the separation. The whole time, it looks as though she’s going to cry but she never cries, it’s deeper than that; at times the sadness turns to hate and she looks like she’s on the verge of throwing a chair across the room. Until the calm arrives and it’s all held back in her watery eyes.
Ok, I say before she loses it, it’s an old story, it’s in the past. My words must have some effect because she proposes another toast. We drink. Iris is pensive, gazing outside, with the whistle of the last rockets in the background. And what about you, she throws at me suddenly, coming off her cloud, do you fancy anyone? I shake my head and smile; she does too, as if saying she doesn’t believe me at all.
On the way out of the restaurant, Iris wants to walk me to my building. I pick Simón up when he starts dozing off after ten steps. We take it in turns to carry him, one block each. On the way, at corners, in front of bars, in the square where the nativity scene was, people are getting together, beeping horns, two men are shouting from one car to another, their heads sticking out. Come here and say that to my face, arsehole, shouts one who is driving in a Father Christmas costume. The other replies by threatening him with a fist. The light turns to green and they both shoot off at the same time. I can’t work out whether they were genuine insults.
Three blocks further on we cross the avenue and turn down a passageway the celebrations haven’t reached. No noise, no shouts, no firecrackers. Because Iris can barely stand, it’s me who ends up carrying Simón most of the way, and if at first it feels like he’ll break my back, I adapt as we go and that annoying kick between the ribs becomes just another part of my body. Like everything, once the novelty has passed, things stop hurting or making you happy.
At one point, Iris stops short, using a tree trunk to prop herself up, she doubles over, mouth open, as if she’s going to vomit but she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath, rearranges herself and as she starts walking says: She won’t be able to look after him any more. She says it like that, in the third person, as if she were talking about someone else. Five disconcerting seconds before she explains. She’s been offered shifts at the zoo, manning the cash desk for the sea-lion show in the afternoons. I won’t be able to look after the boy any more, she says and stumbles on a broken paving stone. She looks at me askance, gauging my reaction. She’s going to work ten- or eleven-hour shifts, depending on the day. It seems like a lot to me, but I say nothing, all the same she justifies herself. She says she wants to buy a plane ticket so her father can come and visit her. She makes some calculations, babbling figures: in five months she’ll have enough to pay for the trip. I tell her I think it’s really great, not to worry. The thing is that from the second of January, I won’t be able to count on her any more. I’m sorry, she says, and starts crying all of a sudden, like a child, not because of this, of course, but because of so many other things I couldn’t even begin to suspect. With Simón on my back, I can’t hug her as I would have liked to. I pat her on the back, she leans her head against my free shoulder and the tears fall harder.
The building’s entrance is occupied by merrymakers. Iris stays at the fringes, she wants nothing to do with it. I tell her to wait for me a moment, I’ll take Simón to bed and walk with her for a few blocks. She shakes her head: No, no, no, she says, I’m fine. I insist: I’ll be back in a minute. Entering el Buti, there’s a commotion in the corridor, I push my way through carrying Simón. Tosca’s door is open, I try to pass undetected but if she can’t see me, she can smell me. Come in, girl, she murmurs. I’m about to feign deafness but somehow I can’t and I go back. I lean in, wave with my free hand and show her Simón sleeping on my back. Put him to bed here, come and drink a toast, girl, she insists. Later, later, I promise. On the staircase I bump into some familiar faces, we exchange silent greetings, without stopping. Canetti too, who invites me into his flat for a drink. I’ve got chilled cider, he says quietly, so as not to wake Simón. I tell him maybe later.
When I finally put Simón to bed and open the window to let in a little air, I remember Iris. I go downstairs quickly, dodging bodies. I walk to the corner, nothing, not a trace. I wait for a while in case she comes back, unable to decide whether to follow her steps back to the Fénix. In the end, neither happens. Back in el Buti, I linger at Tosca’s; she’s very animated, with a bottle of spumante on the desk. She pours me some, we clink glasses: You think I’ll make it to the end of the year, girl? Let’s bet on it. And Benito? I ask. He’s with his father’s family, that’s how it is every Christmas. It’s going to be a struggle to get out of here, she doesn’t want to be left alone. To keep me there she constantly refills my glass with that delicious wine. A touch more? And she talks ceaselessly. She also sings opera arias, a trio of tarantellas and the Italian national anthem.
I won’t be able to sleep with the unstoppable racket in and outside the building, the cumbia music, the shouts, the explosions. I think about Iris, about her extremely pale face like an old-fashioned porcelain doll’s, about her eyes always full of amazement, about her fortitude and fragility, about how if Jaime hadn’t died, if what happened with the house hadn’t happened, if we hadn’t arrived on the day of the floods, if we’d been accepted at the first hotel we tried, I would never have met her – it makes no sense. The idea saddens me. The alcohol is getting the better of me too. If it hadn’t been for Simón in my arms, instead of consoling Iris with those cold pats on the back, I’d have given her a real embrace. And a kiss. It would have been the most natural thing to do.