Going against his usual urge to dismantle, Benito fixes up a sound system he found discarded on the street. Almost in a good mood, with unfamiliar enthusiasm, Tosca makes me go through her papers in search of a little disc, that’s what she calls it, of the best arias in history. Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Mozart and Bizet. I have one of the real ones, too, but I outlived it, she says and nods towards a record player covered in screws, nuts and all those strange pieces that Benito collects. As I prepare to inject her, Tosca asks me to get on with it, she wants to listen to her favourite aria. Put on number eight, she says. Do you know it? Yes, I lie, then check myself: I’m not sure. I like it, I don’t know whether it’s the music or seeing Tosca offer me her inner arm with unusual sweetness, more than sweetness, tragicomedy, in an overacted trance. I break the phial, fill the syringe, eyes on the needle sucking up the yellow liquid, and I’m transported when Tosca recites, out of time: La vita è inferno all’infelice.
Beni, play it again, says Tosca and carries on talking, this time about singers. She delays the moment of injection, she’s babbling, the happiest I’ve seen her. Not Gigli, not Caruso, not Di Stefano, Tosca points out where she keeps her shellac and vinyl records. I get up and move towards the box under the television: That one, she says, that one there. Tito Schipa. He was a friend of my father, from school. The Yanks loved him. She hands the record back to me: I don’t play those any more, they’re beautiful but not very practical. She also tells me about someone in her village who sang at funerals. La voce dei morti, that’s what they called him. A certain Vito Potenza. Potenza, Potenza, she says twice, her eyes on the ceiling, as if summoning him, as much as her swaddled neck will allow.
As well as a music lover, Tosca’s father was, in all: inventor, fascist, herbalist, businessman, Commendatore, Mason and a violent man. He was also a frustrated artist, says Tosca, rolling her ‘r’s, dramatising the word. An arrrtist. For him, listening to one of his records was a ceremony. He did it in a room at the back of the house in Flores, which they bought when they arrived in the country. An enormous house, stretching from one street to the next, never-ending. He would shut himself away, naked, or covered in a sheet, Roman-style, and spend hours with the volume up. Occasionally with a friend or relative, but almost always alone.
Mussolini was a superman, Tosca tells me her father used to say to her. Almost a Garibaldi. Poom. Ahead of his time, a martyr, a genius who kept bad company. And she searches in the drawer for a portrait she always keeps there of her father, just graduated from military school on the day the Duce visited. She says: Il Duce. She can’t find it. The drawer falls out, Tosca swears. Mixed in with the photos I’m picking up from the floor there are crumbs, rings, coins, sulphate batteries, a Cantonese restaurant menu, a lottery ticket and various knobs of used denture adhesive.
Instead of Mussolini, her father appears next to an Argentinian president to whom he was advisor. She can’t remember his name, I don’t recognise him either. Something to do with foreign trade, exporting grains. Two bald men, pale and heavy browed, in evening dress, white suit, black bow tie and with decorations pinned to their chests. Tosca becomes enthusiastic and shows me more photos, hurrying through some, lingering on others, and I’m curious to see what’s coming next. Most are of her father: boarding the corvette Esperanza, at the foot of a warplane, at a community dinner, at the wheel of a racing car, eating an ice cream in Plaza Flores. She makes no comment about the women; I’m left to wonder whether one of them could be her mother, she doesn’t even mention her. Next to a teenage Tosca, already fat, poses her sister Violeta, identical but slim, both dressed for a party in a park lit up at night. Did I tell you about Violeta, she asks and I nod, although she reminds me of the doctors and the metastasis anyway. Poor thing. The hair was the least of her troubles, she looked great in the wig, more beautiful than ever. She looked like an actress.
There are photos of Benito as a boy, the exaggerated head announcing his deformity. In an amusement park, hugging a ball, on the beach buried in the sand, sepia photos, colour prints, Polaroids. She never tells me anything about her life, whether she married or not, about Benito’s father, and I don’t dare ask. I sense something difficult, tragic, and if not tragic then sad at least. Among the photographs there’s a little picture card of the Virgin of Syracuse, a miniature replica of the poster hanging above the headboard of the bed. She tells me again about the tears, the miracle, the woman who became blind before giving birth, I don’t interrupt her or mention that she’s already told me.
Switch it off, she shouts to Benito. Without music, the void makes itself felt. Too many memories, says Tosca and spits on the floor near my feet. It’s not the first time I’ve seen her do it. At the start, I thought it was all in my mind. But no. Long, fast gobs, like a llama, like transparent vomit.
Once the drug is injected, instead of sinking into her usual lethargy, she speaks again after a minute, as if the will to keep telling stories is stronger than the depressant effect of the morphine. She stumbles over her words, confused, until, breaking off suddenly in the middle of a sentence, she drops. She asks me for another half dose, Don’t make me beg, all these anecdotes have consumed her strength. Then yes, she closes her eyes without preamble or progression, in a few fractions of a second, like a light being switched on and off. I stay for a second watching her: her brow furrowed with deep wrinkles, the fleshy nose, the cheeks merging with the jowl, the lips withered, the chin reddened as if she’s just shaved. She has a hairy mole next to the corner of the mouth, three black, erect hairs, one white and fine. The face of an old, spent woman, all her years weighing down on her. And I can’t help travelling back to the girl who was, with that dark opera-aficionado of a father, a devotee of miracles. The same woman as now, her grimaces perfected by repetition, the same flesh, minus some teeth or dentures.
Distracted by a screech of brakes outside, I look behind me. On the television, always silent, there’s a black-and-white cowboy film. A duel in the middle of the desert. They meet under a tree and take their paces with their backs to each other. A half turn and they are face to face, hands on hips, holding their belts, they weigh up the right moment to move their hands to their pistols. Bam, bam. The man who remains standing lowers his weapon and contemplates the horizon, expressionless. He returns to the tree, leans against the trunk and in two steps, without hesitating, puts the barrel of the gun in his mouth and shoots. Another bam. The screen becomes black: The end.
Tosca is sleeping deeply, breathing like a cat with a cold. It’s late. Benito has been invisible for a while. He must have gone to bed. I stand up and check in passing that the walkie-talkie is still on and transmitting that hum full of interference that surrounds Simón’s sleep. I stick my head out into the hall, no sign of Benito, the bed is empty. I enter the bathroom holding the beheaded phial firmly in my hand so that none is spilt. I sit down on the toilet and without hesitating inject myself with what remains of the morphine. Oof, my body turns into a lava flow. From my brain to my feet.
Where were you, Tosca will say and I’ll smile, for the first time I’m the one to disconcert her. A smile that comes from inside me, roaring. I’m going, I don’t know whether I say goodbye, my legs are weak as anything. Rubbery. In the corridor someone passes in front of me, challenging gravity, in slow motion. Someone the half-light won’t allow me to see. I smell a strong scent, sickly and intoxicating. The smell of soapy sex. Eva again, I suppose; she delights in the mystery and pauses before going outside to receive the full light of the streetlamp: her naked, grainy back, endless arse, the blonde wig covering her shoulders. I follow without seeing her face. She takes a step forward and closes the door with her heel. I linger where I am for a moment longer, hearing the strident clash of the chains against the corrugated iron. Afterwards, the silence of this place.
I turn round and face the staircase in a warm nebula. I place a foot on the first step and feel as though a pile of soft people is bearing down on me. I advance clumsily against this unfamiliar density. Agitation forces me to stop and take a breath. I raise a hand to my forehead and am surprised by the sweat. As I rest on the first step, I breathe deeply and tell myself that such a tiny amount can’t have caused this much confusion. I forge on and immediately suffocate, my cheeks feel like balls of fire. I reach the flat on all fours.
Lying on my back, the ceiling runs away from me. Simón too, increasingly far from my feet. I close my eyes and my head starts spinning. Everything becomes a bottomless tank the colour of morphine, a yellow sea, dirty and bubbling. I touch the arm I injected but I can’t feel it, not the arm, or the injection, or the vein, nothing. Just a prolonged sleepiness and a multitude of particles coursing through my blood at the speed of light.