Sleep is impossible. The bed is beginning to sink in the middle from so much tossing and turning and I’m going with it. The hours pass, the fatigue grows, as does my state of awareness. The only parts that manage to drift off, very much in spite of me, are my arms and legs, in turn, left arm right leg, right arm left leg. In search of sleep, I masturbate. Gentle strokes, lethargic, more consolation than masturbation. Nothing, the insomnia remains unscathed. I sit up in bed, my feet dangling, invisible in the darkness, I count to ten and feel my way out of the room to entertain my wakefulness.
I go into the kitchen without turning on the light. I get myself a glass of cold water, then another, and a third. In the half-light, I distinguish the outline of the furniture, still strange to me. When I’m about to leave, I see a pack of cigarettes on top of the fridge and I grab it without hesitating. It’s a box of Jockey Lights with a small lighter held in place by the cellophane. It occurs to me to try smoking, just to see. In passing, I notice the wall clock with its aged phosphorescent hands: three twenty.
In the courtyard, I sit on the bench under our bedroom window. I remove a cigarette, sniff it, bring it to my lips and light it. I take one, two, three drags but it sickens me immediately, a rancid taste invades my mouth, followed by nausea. I can see that once you lose the habit, you lose the taste for it. I stub out the cigarette in the dry soil of the flower bed next to me and look at the scant piece of sky cut out between the buildings, a geometric, pathetic sky. Not a single star. Suddenly, a movement between the leaves. From the creeper at the back, a swift mouse climbs to the gutter. I can see it clearly because, once it has stumbled through the foliage and attracted my attention with the noise, it passes through a stretch of yellow light. Country rats are definitely much fatter and more ungainly. Finally I fall asleep. I have a very strange dream about Iris, gnomes and pianos.
I wake to Simón beating at my knee as if it were my front door. I open my eyes and we exchange bemusement; he won’t understand what I’m doing outside, sleeping sitting up, and I can’t explain how he has managed to get up, leave the room and find me without causing a scene. It’s starting to get light, I reckon it must be between five and six. Simón offers me his hand, it takes me a few moments to accept it, and I let him lead me towards bed, his bed, which we’re going to share for a few more hours. First, without entering the kitchen, I lob the pack of Jockeys I’m still clutching. I make the shot and the cigarettes land on top of the fridge, not far from their original position.
A hot morning follows, although not quite as bad as the last few days. A tumultuous breakfast: shouts, arguments about a bar of soap, a chorus of sirens passing at top speed and a whistling kettle that no one silences. We take Simón to the little plaza round the corner from the hotel. A small island of cobblestones and palm trees contained between two streets. On one of the benches, a drunk with flowers. He is wrapped up to his nose as he sleeps, a real drifter. At his feet, a mattress of long-stemmed roses in full bloom with loosening petals. Florists’ rejects or stolen from the market. There are also carnations, chrysanthemums and several others I can’t identify. It’s as though the previous night, before his latest inebriation set in – two wine crates remain as proof – the man had arranged his own homage, a foretaste of his funeral. Simón watches him too, we share the interest and intrigue.
We take refuge in a small children’s play park with a sandpit, a slide and a tubular frame. There’s an inescapable smell of urine. In the corners, on the cement, on the railings too, I can see traces of piss, its ochre stamp. Simón pulls a disgusted face but doesn’t complain so I resign myself, thinking that it will be fifteen, twenty minutes at most, and that it’s just a matter of getting used to it. In a while, another boy arrives with an arsenal of outdoor toys, different types of spades, rakes, moulds and three different sizes of bucket. He is accompanied by a lady wearing a lot of make-up, hair the colour of fire; I assume she’s his grandmother. The boy lays out all his tools and starts digging a well. Simón prowls around him, not daring to make friends until the other boy throws him a spade, which almost catches him in the eye, a form of invitation. The exchange doesn’t last long. Not two minutes pass before the woman, who had been hovering at the sidelines smoking a long, thin cigarette, bursts into the play area and starts gathering up all the toys, complaining about the smell. This is a sewer, she says, throwing me a glance over her shoulder, I’m not sure whether seeking assent, so that we too will withdraw, or blaming us, as if we were the ones that had peed everywhere.
We have hard-boiled eggs and rice with peas for lunch. Simón eats the whites, I always preferred the yolks. There is a lot of traffic in the kitchen this lunchtime, like breakfast but even busier. A never-ending rotation of people, noises and smells. In addition to the Spaniard, who comes in and out all the time, very nervous, a notebook in one hand and her mobile in the other, people I’ve never seen parade past: one opens the fridge, another turns on the grill for a steak, a third sits at the table to do sums on a calculator with giant buttons. The radio is constantly on in the background. The news of the day is that a helicopter went off-course near Magdalena and has now disappeared off the radar. At one o’clock we go out and at half one I meet Iris at the entrance to the zoo to swap over. Next to the photographer with the pony, as always, as if we had agreed on it. Simón doesn’t complain, he appears to have adapted quickly to the new routine.
The worst is about to come, prepare yourself, Yessica tells me in lieu of a greeting. And I don’t need to ask her why, she immediately points towards the entrance, sweeping the terrace with her index finger in the air. It’s the start of the holidays. But despite Yessica’s foreboding, the constant mechanical activity, the hundreds of tickets I check and the many faces I see without really looking at any of them all distract me. You hear the children, but after a while you tune them out and their shouts seem natural.
So far, in the week and a bit I’ve been working, I haven’t had any major difficulties. Only small issues. It’s been hard to familiarise myself with the walkie-talkie system: when someone speaks to me I can’t hear it, and when I manage to respond, they’re looking for someone else. The only incident takes place with a group of corpulent Brazilians who don’t want to understand that the ticket they bought doesn’t include entry to the reptile house. I point out a hut where they can buy the supplementary ticket but as they move on, their hand gestures tell me to go to hell. Yessica shows solidarity, she hates foreigners. They really rile me, that’s what she says.
It becomes a habit to take my break with Canetti. An enforced habit, the guy comes looking for me, he latches on to me and I can’t avoid it, I’m a new arrival. He’s a strange man, with many problems. As well as his limp and his lazy eye, from time to time, without warning, maybe because of nerves, maybe it’s the heat, he is gripped by a trembling in his fingers that prevents him from holding his broom. He has to wait for it to pass, then he shakes out his hands, rubs them against the grass or the bark of a tree. Localised epilepsy. After-effects, he tells me on one of the first days; I am intrigued. An accident, a brain haemorrhage, the war? I don’t know, it could be any of them, I can’t work it out. We usually sit on a bench behind the photographers’ booth. He smokes a cigarette, sometimes two, and I listen to him in silence, looking straight ahead towards the lake. Some days the jets of water are turned on, other days they aren’t, it depends. I don’t understand the logic behind it.
One afternoon Canetti tells me his story with a bag of crisps in his hand, which he offers me every so often and which I refuse every time. He says he shouldn’t be working any more, he retired nine years ago but he doesn’t get a peso. Canetti was a treasurer in an important bank, he stresses the word important with a raised eyebrow. Twenty-eight years grafting in the same office, from the age of nineteen. I was office junior, clerk, account executive, then cashier and finally head of the treasurer’s office. He had his own property, which he had bought with a special credit for bank employees, quite a nice little flat in the city centre with a balcony and garage, occasionally he got away to the seaside or into the hills with his wife, he couldn’t complain. Cinema, theatre, restaurants, always some little outing on a Friday night. Until his mother died and he was overcome by terrible depression. My world came tumbling down, I wasn’t ready for anyone to die, especially not Mum. Listening to him, I don’t understand why he’s telling me all this, given that we barely know each other, but I can’t stop him, he’s getting sentimental. The thing is that he started to drink, boozing he says, he went to bed late, missed work, didn’t wash. Really bad, basically. So, wanting to help him, his wife put him in touch with a psychologist she knew from school. The guy sees him a couple of times in his office and suggests that it’s not his mother he’s stressed about but his job. Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced, it was clear to Canetti that taking a holiday would be good for him in his condition and he went along with it. But they became bolder and what was initially going to be a request for stress-related leave eventually resulted in an application for early retirement due to psychological incapacity. The man told him treasurers are under a lot of pressure because they deal with such large quantities of money and he reckoned Canetti could claim a decent amount of compensation to cover the costs of treatment and retirement. The arrangement was that he would give a percentage to the psychologist as his fee. Despite his state, but also largely infected by his wife’s enthusiasm, Canetti allowed himself to be led. Worst mistake of my life, he says, lighting a fresh cigarette, but the move had already been played. So the preparations began for him to pass the medical exams. I had to arrive at the interviews in the most broken state possible for them to believe me. He spent six months barely working, devoted to turning to shit, that’s what he says. He barely slept, he was mixing drugs, tranquillisers, cocaine, alcohol, he slashed his face, he burnt his palms with lighters. He shows me some scars. This was all part of the plan to convince the psychiatrists from the insurance company. And in spite of his doubts, it all went quite well. He even managed to get admitted to a clinic for a couple of weeks, to make the situation more believable. He appeared before the various insurance committees without raising suspicion. One of those sleepless nights after going too far, I slipped in the shower, I damaged myself permanently, he says, showing me the leg that drags when he walks. The fact is that after a multitude of tests, sessions, clinical analyses and about twenty doctors along the way, his incapacity was certified.
Everything went ok, I received the first two instalments, I paid the guy his share, I even took a trip to the coast, but in two weeks I was sent a registered letter, an official one. The lawyer from the insurance company had discovered that the psychologist was involved in a lawsuit for having given a false diagnosis. Confronted with the evidence, Canetti confessed, accusing the man of having incited him to commit the crime, but they had no sympathy. That’s what he says, his mouth full of smoke: They had no sympathy. They threw me out of the bank without paying me a single peso and started criminal proceedings for fraud, which are still going on. When she found out, my wife wanted nothing to do with it and I didn’t have the will to keep fighting. And the worst thing is that, I don’t know how he managed it, but the guy went and moved to Brazil. I was fucked, truly fucked, he says. As Canetti falls silent and I look into his eyes, sad, broken eyes like an orphaned, tortured cat’s, I don’t know what to say to him, I’m left hanging on the last word he said, that Brazil that echoes through me, carrying distant memories. I sympathise in silence, with my eyebrows, all the words of consolation that occur to me turn out to be impossible to articulate. He realises this and must feel a bit disappointed.
Suddenly, because it’s a certain time, or in order to receive the last wave of visitors, or because whoever operates them happens to be in the mood, the jets of water in the centre of the lake are turned on, more powerful than ever. Flicking it hard with his index finger, Canetti throws down the stub of his cigarette, which lies smoking in the grass. Annoyed, he stands up and limps to the ember, which he stamps on, twisting his shoe. Then he turns round and says to me: Do you know how to give injections? I shrug, believing that I know, or rather that I would be able to do it. He insists: But you’ve done it before? I answer Yes, assuming that he’s talking about animals: dogs, cats, horses. Even a hamster. Well, says Canetti, it must be the same, flesh and bone, yeah? He explains two drags of a cigarette later. Where he lives, a building some ten blocks from the zoo, there’s a lady, the building manager or something along those lines, a very ill old lady who needs two injections a day. Are you up for it? Canetti presses me: It could be a few extra bob. If you like, we’ll go there together tomorrow afternoon and I’ll introduce you, then it’s between the two of you. Somehow I accept, I can’t see why not. On the way to the reptile house, I glance at him. He moves away, dragging the broom towards the bower. He whistles and limps in a regular counterpoint; in fact, everything about him is harmoniously disjointed. When he’s not talking, I’m starting to realise, Canetti is smoking or whistling. I struggle to imagine him in his former life, in the bank, counting notes, married, with his wife, armchair and holidays. Even harder to imagine all the effort he put into passing as insane.
In the evening, in the dark of the room, I trip over the huge tome with the reptile engravings. Simón, behind me, pauses in the threshold, alert to the fall that never happens. We settle down together in my bed, the ceiling fan on full, and start flicking through the engravings.
LOCUPLETISSIMI
RERUM
NATURALIUM
THESAURI
As I read I try to decipher a long list of Latin words on what must have been the original cover of the book, which dates from 1735. Simón is eager and I’m forced to turn the page. There’s Albertus Seba, author of the catalogue: curly wig, purple robe in a fabric with many folds which I suppose is silk, and a handkerchief knotted round his neck. He poses with a commanding air, gazing straight ahead, tense, not particularly convinced by the setting chosen for his portrait. As if he were doubtful of the painter’s skill. The man is in his study in front of a shelf filled with glass bottles: insects, corals, fossils. He is holding a jar containing a foetus in formaldehyde. With his free hand he is pointing to a notebook with illustrations of apes and trees, as well as a collection of molluscs displayed on a green cloth. In imitation of Seba, Simón stretches out his arm and points his finger at something in between the monkeys and the shells, several centuries later, but with the same intention.
The volume consists mainly of illustrations of reptiles, amphibians and plants. Snakes of all colours and sizes, fat, stripy, hunting and hunted. Also some frogs, lizards and an inexplicable swan that is completely out of proportion. I turn the pages and realise that the animals have very human shapes. There are lizards with the features and posture of a man, snakes with women’s faces. Sometimes slightly android. Somewhere between scientific and grotesque. Simón observes them with interest but in general he hurries me to turn the page, he wants to see what comes next. A boa scoffing a rat will keep him absorbed for longer. I think about Iris and the story about her aunt Lena and the python. The most striking thing about the picture isn’t the hunt so much as the fluidity of the action.
As I progress through the pages, I can’t help noticing the pattern of fungus fattening out the book. Like a mountain chain in profile. Simón falls asleep; tiredness still hasn’t touched me. I go back over some of the figures and discover others that passed me by in the first flick-through. This one, for example, of a ferret sitting on its hind legs biting a pear, or the dissection of a toad with its veins on show and its parts numbered.
I return to the start and find the embossed stamp of the Ladislao Holmberg Library: Buenos Aires, 1899. I wonder who he was. I run the tip of my thumb over the protuberances of the paper, it’s a nice sensation, almost tickly.