Let’s go for a walk, Iris suggests at the gate to the zoo, when we’ve already said goodbye and are about to head our separate ways. Tomorrow we have a day off, it’s the first time we’ve both been free at the same time. We can go to the river, she says and I open my arms, embracing the idea without really knowing what Iris means by river.
Too early, she comes to el Buti to pick us up for our excursion. Because Simón is still asleep and I take a while to dress him and force breakfast down him, we make her wait some twenty minutes for us. That’s probably why, for the blocks separating us from the main avenue and almost the entire bus journey, Iris remains silent, ignoring us, as if she wasn’t with us. Just in case, to spare myself a reproach, I don’t ask. Iris definitely has a strange sensitivity, unfathomable, capable of taking offence at the slightest thing. Yet at the same time she is always generous, or not so much generous, more like needy, with an urgent compulsion to share.
The bus limps forward. Along the back seat, Iris, Simón and I, in that order, receive a blast of air up our legs which, no matter how we twist our necks, we are condemned to inhale. Suddenly, we gain some speed for a few blocks only to be paralysed again in another traffic jam. Although she’s still annoyed, at least now Iris is glancing over her shoulder at me, furtively, almost friendly. No one complains, no one rebels, no one gets off to walk. Nor do we, beginning to drift off to the hum of the engine and the movement of the bus which rocks as if we were sailing.
Very suddenly, without ceremony, because we have reached the end of the route, the driver shouts from the wheel: Post office. He doesn’t exactly say post office the way anyone would say it, he aggravates and prolongs the o of office into a wild cry. We get off rather dazed, as if landing from another galaxy. Iris, who is quickest to come to her senses, leads the way to a supermarket opposite a dark plaza crammed with dwarf trees. I make out an ombú tree that must be a century old perched at the top of a slope; there are also eucalyptus, which are the tallest, a lime and a row of silk floss trees with very swollen trunks. Canetti’s lessons are still fresh in my mind. Iris takes care of the purchases, we wait for her outside, Simón making a pile with some broken floor tiles, me, my gaze lost in the distance where the trees end and everything else begins.
Cheese, bread, apples and Coca-Cola, Iris reels off as she leaves the supermarket with a plastic bag in her hand. And a salami, she adds after a pause, rather aggrieved. We return to the point where the bus dropped us, we skirt the post-office building, cross a small, bare plaza without a single tree, the antithesis of the last one. We stop at the foot of an avenue with heavy traffic: lots of buses, lorries with trailers, containers. Waiting for the lights to change, Iris covers her ears with her hands, leaning slightly so Simón can see her. Her mood has finally changed. Iris isn’t one for joking, in fact it’s an effort for her not to be serious, except when she comes undone and explodes. That must be why Simón is observing her warily.
We pass two narrow train tracks disguised by tall weeds that no one has cut for a long time; we are confounded by a roundabout with no traffic lights which we dash across, until we reach the bridge straddling the canal. A white, modern bridge with steel cables of increasing lengths just like the strings of a fabulous harp. To the right, between the old renovated docks, a group of very high towers dispute their supremacy, some of them finished, the majority still under construction. A world of cranes, scaffolding and cement mixers. There are twin buildings separated by a clearing of sky and linked by high walkways. One of those flats must be Axel’s, the one Débora is decorating for when they live together. Eloísa has been there, she described it to me drawing the shape in the air, like a semicircle with windows to the floor, the city on one side, the river on the other. She says she was returning from the casino once, with Axel and his friends, Berni, Andy and someone else, the time Axel lost something like three thousand dollars at roulette. She says that when they reached the flat they were all pretty drunk and they called Cohen, a guy who had been a tutor at Axel’s school and who is now the group’s dealer. He showed up with three girls who didn’t even look like whores who stayed until seven in the morning for two hundred pesos each. Eloísa only did drugs, she took crack from a never-ending rock, but she didn’t screw anyone, nor did Axel. How’s he going to screw if he’s a total poofter? He had two girls on top of him and still couldn’t get it up. His friends, meanwhile, Cohen and the others, fucked them frontways, backways, left their hair full of milk. Eloísa watched, she took photos, filmed little videos, that’s what she called them, little videos, and masturbated a bit. At most she touched someone’s tits. But always staying outside the game: it wasn’t worth it.
By the time we reach the ecological reserve, Simón is already hungry. Iris complains, she says we’re going to have our picnic by the riverside. He can’t wait ten minutes, she mutters between clenched teeth. It’s not a question, nor is it directed at me, it’s a statement loaded with irony. I appease Simón with a banana I’ve brought squashed in my pocket and we push on. On one side there’s a dry lake sprouting with reeds and a few swamped ducks, on the other, an embankment with commercial premises installed under an arcade. Almost all of them are shut, only a few have their grilles raised and one man is lighting up a barbecue still empty of meat, his stomach on show. There is also a group in their sixties wearing shorts and bikinis, forming a semicircle, their skin shiny, oily, tanning themselves even though they don’t look like they could get much browner.
After a brief exchange of glances, we decide to take the path to the right, a wide, muddy trail populated by cyclists, explorers, pensioners and a parade of strange characters ranging from loners to exhibitionists. Suddenly the city falls silent and the illusion of nature begins. Along the path, between the flame bushes, is a series of platforms with coin-operated telescopes like standing machine guns. Simón climbs each one and tries to manoeuvre the device. Come on, Iris will repeat, nothing but impatience.
A very slim boy, his ribs clearly visible, emerges from the reed bed scaring mosquitoes away with a white T-shirt. His face is red, too inflamed to be just from the heat. Feeling he’s being watched, for fun, he sticks out his tongue and jogs off exaggerating the movement of his arse. I seek out Iris’s eyes, she averts her gaze to the pampas grass. After twenty minutes’ walking, we turn left, uphill. With no trees to protect us, we are the inevitable target of a sun that is gradually becoming cruel.
The slope unveils the river in layers. There’s no breeze, or anything resembling one, the heat won’t back down. The water is an immobile sheet, like brown cement, cocoa paste, with no waves, not even the merest fold. Searching for a spot in the shade to settle down in, stepping among the people who arrived before us, Iris grabs me by the arm at the same time as she forces out a sentence, staring at the ground: I can’t believe it, she says twice. The second time she also swears in her own language.
It’s Yuri and Olga, uncle and aunt of Draco, Iris’s boyfriend who went to the south and never returned. Yuri overplays his surprise, Iris and Olga sink into their chests, unashamedly externalising their unwillingness for this meeting to occur. They glance at each other, mutually accusatory, as if one of them had planned it. It is impossible to avoid them, and we approach. Iris greets them with three kisses, cheek to cheek. She introduces me, I say hello with my hand and go after Simón who is running off towards the riverbank.
Squatting on this beach of rubble, debris and hardened litter, I catch a glimpse of a future that’s bad but not terrible. I allow my gaze to roam, from the horizon to my now bare feet, from my feet to a regatta of sailing boats crowded near the middle of the river and back, right here, to a group of boys bathing amidst the twisted iron. I turn my head for an instant and the cut-out of the city, blurred behind the vapours exhaled by the earth, gives the impression of another future, more typical, without much mystery.
Simón goes to play by the water’s edge. I half close my eyes: voices, shouts that sound like pleas for help, a ship’s horn and the hum of the particles in the air which I imagine to be shaped like tiny embers. I turn round again to look for Iris. She’s still standing, with a weary expression, staring straight ahead. Like a young girl being scolded by her parents. I think about Draco, the story of the separation, whether she’ll be telling them how it all happened, or the opposite, whether they will be providing her with details. A crossroads of recriminations. Iris will reproach them for her boyfriend fleeing, they’ll complain that she didn’t accompany him southwards. She’ll talk about the cold, that’s why they are now measuring her up from under their brows as if saying that’s no reason to leave someone and inside they’ll be thinking: Abandonment for the sake of it; after everything, it’s fair enough. Iris has already seen me, I feel as though she’s about to call me over, she’ll want to include me in the conversation, I swiftly flick my gaze back to the chocolaty river. I wonder how you say abandonment in Romanian.
Simón has taken advantage of those seconds of distraction to escape from my sight. He’s hiding or being hidden by the landscape. One of the two is using the other. I’m not going to shout, I wouldn’t know how. I wait, to see if he appears, surely he’ll appear, but he doesn’t appear. I stand up and walk without alarm, accommodating my flip-flops between the holes and the stones. I look both ways, nothing. I’m no longer looking for Simón but for the green of his T-shirt. Any green. I let myself be deceived by false clues, but they don’t offer the right measurements, always the wrong width or height.
Left or right. I choose the bank, I take fifteen paces and I should be starting to worry, admit that he’s lost and ask for help, and then it’s almost as though someone places their hand on my shoulder, calling me. I turn my head and discover Simón next to a bush five metres from where I was sitting. I walk over to him. He doesn’t say anything or look at me with reproachful eyes. His face merely suggests a: Where were you going? I’d explain but best not to, it’s like Iris with Draco or Draco with Iris. You don’t know who left whom, who is the mother of the blame.
Simón guides me behind the bush and between two pieces of concrete rubble and some remnants of bricks rounded by the water, the wind and everyone’s footsteps, he shows me a small cemetery of beheaded dolls. Three, four centimetres long, made of ceramic, some with old-fashioned dresses, Egyptian, Asian, others naked, an army of little mutilated dolls awaiting burial or reanimation. Legs, arms, loose limbs as well. I think that someone must have reunited them, the river couldn’t put them together so painstakingly. Simón fills his arms with dolls and I don’t know why I censure him, I tell him not to grab so many, Not so many, I order, but I offer no reason. And he answers me with a look that says: Poor things. Yes, poor things.
I check that Iris is still with Draco’s aunt and uncle, but her attitude of ten minutes earlier, so fed up at having met his relations, is now one of happiness. In fact, she sees me and calls me over, arms open, almost euphoric. Yuri and Olga barely speak Spanish and when they do it takes quite some effort to understand them. Olga is ash blonde, with slim legs, freckled skin and severe eyes. Very similar to Iris, the antithesis of Yuri who never stops joking and laughs hard. I witness a litany of anecdotes and complicities which I try to guess from their expressions. Simón entertains himself with the little dolls, building them a cave in the sand. Hunger grabs us. Without consulting me, Iris decides that we’ll share lunch with them. Two picnics in one. We contribute our cheese, bread, salami and Coca-Cola. From them, hard-boiled eggs, pâté, more bread and a bottle of pineapple cider which they have brought in a foil cooler. Yuri tells us that it’s hullabaloo every night in the hotel where they live. He says hullabaloo with an incredible accent, as if he were beating his tongue against the skin of a drum. Always something, he says, and I think I understand him saying that a few weeks earlier a woman fell from a balcony on the building and embedded her head in the roof of a taxi. Olga, who as I will find out later is Yuri’s second wife, he has at least twenty years on her, laughs with her hand over her mouth. Iris pulls a disgusted expression.
We scoff everything in minutes. We toast with the pineapple cider, which despite the thermal bag is warm when it reaches my mouth. The conversation continues but I throw myself down with my face to the sky, the voices reach me without translation, in a strange but transparent register, in which words are beyond meaning. At one point I could swear Iris is telling them the story about the fat woman who got jammed in the hanging walkway in the subtropical rainforest. The phrasing, the highs and lows, the exclamations, remind me of the way she told me.
The sun changes position and leaves us without protection. We react in unison, forced into movement by the glare. Simón? Right here, burying the little dolls. A moment of indecision: over there, further this way, in that little wood, I suggest. In the end, Yuri and Olga go their own way. The goodbye is short and cold, as if resentment has finally won over. We take a path cutting through the reed bed as far as a flowering ceibo tree. Canetti again, and his catalogue of trees. Simón doesn’t take long to fall asleep. We lie on the grass, feet up on a bench, blood on a steep slope to the brain. In silence, we are bewitched by the network of leaves and flowers that separates us from the sky, until our eyes close. In my dream, brief, very brief, a small, flattened bird appears to me, its feet separated from its body. And yet it moves, dragging itself like a reptile.
The need to pee cuts short my siesta. I walk a few metres along a trail, I lower my trousers and knickers, squat and release an effervescent stream of piss that smells of pineapple cider. Through the pampas grass, I see the smudge of an animal passing, making the ground crunch, a chinchilla, a rat or a weasel. I can’t make it out. Closer to me, a hole, the burrow. I don’t lie down again, I sit next to Iris, who is still sleeping, her skin tattooed by a thousand nervous filigrees: all the shadows of the ceibo. I observe those features of hers, from other lands. I start caressing her head, I use my fingers as a comb to clear her face of hair. I smooth her eyebrows, I measure her lashes and notice those tiny hairs magnified on her lips, a little blonde moustache, microscopic. I stay like this for a while. Suddenly, frightening me, as if instead of waking her I had set fire to her, her eyes open, she looks straight at me. She smiles when I jump and I pass my hand over her forehead again. She lets me do it. That night at Christmas and some fantasies come to my mind, and very naturally the need rises in me to kiss her. She sees it coming and doesn’t stop me. She reacts belatedly, when our lips are almost brushing. She moves my mouth away brutally, gripping my jaw. It disconcerts me, not the rejection, but the fact that it was expressed like that. So violently.