When the fog rolled in, the port turned into a swamp. Shadows fell across the plaza, filtering between the trees and leaving the long marks of their fingers on all they touched. Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too. If I didn’t have Mauro, I’d spend all day wandering around, guided through the fog by the neon sign flickering in the distance: PAL CE HOTE. The missing letters hadn’t changed, though it wasn’t a hotel anymore; like so many other buildings in the city, it had been taken over by squatters. What day was that? Sometimes I can still hear the neon, its electric hum and the crackle of another letter on the verge of shorting out. The squatters kept the sign lit, but not out of laziness or nostalgia. They did it to remind themselves they were alive. That they could still do something arbitrary, something purely aesthetic. That they could still transform the landscape.
If I’m going to tell this story I should choose a starting point, begin somewhere. But where? I was never any good with beginnings. The day I saw the fish? Certain details leave their mark on time and render a moment unforgettable. It was cold, and the fog condensed into droplets on the overflowing dumpsters. I don’t know where all that garbage came from. It seemed to consume and excrete itself. And how do you know we’re not the waste? Max might have said something like that. I remember turning at the old corner store, with its windows boarded over, and how the greenish-red light of the hotel sign washed over me as I stepped onto the rambla.
Mauro would be back the next day, bringing with him another month of confinement and work. Cooking, cleaning, monitoring his every movement. Each time they came to collect him I spent a whole day catching up on the sleep he threatened or interrupted. This endless vigil was the reason Mauro’s parents paid me the exorbitant salary they knew would never compensate me. Breathing in the stale air of the port, prowling the streets, visiting my mother or Max—these were the luxuries I afforded myself on the days my time didn’t carry a price. If I was lucky, that is, and there was no wind.
The only people on the rambla were fishermen with the collars of their jackets pulled up around their ears, their hands red and cracked. The water stretched wide in all directions, an estuary where the river became a shoreless sea. The fog blurred the horizon. It was ten o’clock or eleven or three under that flat, milky light. The algae floated nearby like bloodshot phlegm, but the fishermen seemed not to care. They rested their buckets next to their beach chairs, baited their hooks, and gathered the strength of their brittle arms to cast their lines as far as they could. I liked the sound of the reels spooling out: it reminded me of summers spent riding my bicycle in San Felipe, no brakes, knees angled high to avoid the pedals. That bicycle contained my whole childhood, just like those beaches that would later be cordoned off with yellow tape the wind would periodically destroy and a few policemen in face masks would rehang. KEEP OUT, it said. Why? You’d have to be crazy to want to go like that: infected, exposed to a nameless disease that didn’t even promise a speedy death.
Once, long before I married Max, I saw fog as dense as it was that day. It was in San Felipe, just before dawn, sometime in early December. I remember because the beach town was still empty, except for the few of us who had been summering there all our lives. Max and I walked slowly along the road, not looking at the black sand of the beach, accustomed to the rhythm of the breaking waves. That sound was like a watch to us, a certainty of all the summers to come. Unlike the tourists, we didn’t go to San Felipe to get away from it all. We went there to affirm the continuity of something. It was pitch-dark except for Max’s flashlight, but we knew the way. We stopped near the lookout, where lovers often hid, and leaned over the white wooden banisters. Max pointed his flashlight at the beach and through the fog we saw a swarming mass of crabs. The sand seemed to breathe, to swell like a sleeping beast. The crabs gleamed in their halo of light, they gushed from cracks in the boardwalk. Hundreds of them, tiny. What did Max say? I don’t remember. I think we
were both shaken, as if we had just been alerted to the existence of something incomprehensible, something bigger than ourselves.
In winter along the rambla, though, there was no sign of so much as a mullet. The fishermen’s buckets were empty, their bait waiting useless in plastic bags. I sat down near a man wearing a Russian-style hat with earflaps. My hands trembled from the cold, but I didn’t do anything to still them. Unlike Max, I didn’t view a person’s will as independent from their body. This belief had led him to dedicate the last few years to extravagant experiments: purges, privations, weights hooked through his skin. The ecstasy of pain. The fasting organism is a single vast membrane, he would say, a thirsty plant left too long in the dark. Maybe. But Max was after something else: to separate himself from his body, that indomitable desire-generating machine, which knew neither conscience nor limits—repugnant but also innocent, pure.
The fisherman sensed I was looking at him. With my feet dangling over the water, my maskless face, and my backpack, which seemed to be loaded with stones, he must have thought I was another lost soul ready to jump into the river. Maybe my whole family was dead, admitted one by one to the critical care wing at Clinics, never to emerge. The water barely made a sound as it lapped against the seawall and the air was completely still. How long could this calm last? Every war had its cease-fires, even this one we fought unarmed.
The line suddenly tensed, and I watched the fisherman cinch and reel in until a small fish popped into the air. It arched weakly, but the glint off its silvery scales brought a smile to the man’s face. He grabbed it with his gloveless hand and removed the hook. No one could know what death and what miracle that animal held within it, and the two of us admired it accordingly. I expected the man to drop it into his bucket, even if just for a little while, but he threw it back immediately. It was so slight that it made no noise as it broke the surface. The last fish. One minute later and it would be far away, immune to the dense seaweed, to the death trap of algae and waste. The man turned to look at me, gesturing with his hand. This is the starting point I choose for my story, its false beginning. I could easily make an omen of it, justify it as a sign of things to come, but I won’t. That’s all: an hour like any other on a day like any other, except for the fish that soared through the air and fell back into the water.
Once upon a time.
There was what?
Once upon a time there was a time.
That never was?
That never again.
The few taxis along the rambla drove slowly with their windows up. They were trolling for an emergency, for some poor creature who’d just collapsed in the middle of the street and needed to be dropped off at Clinics. It was worth the risk: the Ministry of Health paid the fare plus a contaminant fee. I tried to wave one down; it honked at me but kept going. I removed my backpack and rested it on the ground. It was full of books. The epidemic had given us back what we’d thought was lost forever: a country of readers nestled far from the sea, the wealthy in their hilltop estates or mansions, the poor overflowing the small cities we used to mock for being empty, lacking, dim.
Two more taxis passed before I had any luck. As soon as the driver greeted me, I could tell he was one of those who never miss a chance to show you how streetwise they are.
‘You’ll draw attention with that backpack,’ he said.
‘They won’t find much inside.’
I set the backpack on the seat beside me and gave him my mother’s address. Through the window I caught a glimpse of the Masonic temple across the avenue, blurred by a grimy curtain of fog.
‘Los Pozos. You live out there?’
‘I’m visiting someone.’
He bragged that he knew Los Pozos like the back of his hand because he’d spent his childhood at his grandmother’s house there. I told him I knew it, too, but that was a lie. After the evacuation, my mother had decided to move into one of the neighborhood’s abandoned mansions. The owners, with that special pride of aristocrats who have fallen on hard times, were renting them out for a song to keep life flowing through them. They wanted to keep their elegant gardens pruned, their meticulously draped windows unboarded, their bedrooms free of drifters. It was this gilded past that gave my mother a sense of security, not the distance she’d put between herself and the algae. My mother had a blind faith in sturdy materials and might even have believed that the contamination couldn’t pass through a good wall, solid and silent, or a well-constructed roof with no cracks for the wind to sneak into. The contamination wasn’t as bad in the inland streams as it was along the coastline, but a horrible stench of garbage, silt, and chemicals permeated the neighborhood.
As we were about to pull up to the house, we saw someone rummaging around in a dumpster.
‘You see? It’s them who’ll rob you,’ said the taxi driver. ‘They don’t give a damn about the red wind, or about any damn thing.’
The man’s legs wriggled like an insect’s as he tried not to fall headfirst into the trash. The fog wasn’t any thinner; sheltered from the wind, Los Pozos was even more of a swamp. It was as if the clouds formed there, exhaled by the earth itself, and you could feel the moisture on your face, as slow and cold as a slug’s trail.
‘You know what I call the people who live out here?’ the driver asked.
‘What?’
‘Kindasortas. Kinda crazy, but also sorta not.’ He laughed. ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’
I opened the front gate and headed straight for the garden. Why bother announcing my arrival? If she wasn’t there, she was probably visiting the schoolteacher, who had refused to leave town because she didn’t want to abandon her grand piano. They spent hours like that: my mother reading and the schoolteacher playing something sublime, or pretending she was. Sometimes other old people from the area would join them, and my mother and the schoolteacher would play hostess in a city in ruins. Their guests would ask my mother for reading recommendations and she’d talk about the characters in books as if they lived in the neighborhood: oh, but what do you expect from him; steer clear of her, she’s a live one; oh, that dear woman; that poor devil.
I found my mother in the garden with her feet sunk into a flower bed, pruning the plants with a large pair of shears. The crunch of my steps alerted her to my presence; when she saw me, she removed one of her gloves, which were filthy and too big for her.
‘Come look at this,’ she said.
She showed me the new buds on the plants. She saw them as a miracle, as life triumphing over this death of acid and darkness. I told her there were more animals than ever in Chernobyl; even species that had been endangered before were reproducing in the absence of humans. My mother didn’t see the irony—she took it as yet another triumph of life over death.
‘Human, Mom. Over human death.’
‘Details,’ she said, and gestured toward the kitchen door. ‘Are you hungry? I made scones.’
On the marble counter I found bread, cheese, orange marmalade, and even an avocado. Probably better not to ask where she got the avocado. A white cloth was draped over the scones. It was like a feast. With Mauro, I inhaled a few bites whenever I could; eating when my body asked for food had become a foreign concept, an impulse I’d learned to ignore. I needed to forget my own needs, to synchronize my hunger with Mauro’s or wolf something down while he slept to avoid another tantrum. Tricks, strategies I’d learned over the months.
I put everything on a tray and went back out to the garden.
‘We should make the most of this reprieve,’ I said as I set the clinking tray on a glass table with lightly rusted iron legs.
Two scones, butter, marmalade, a cup of tea, cutlery specific to each task. I strained to hide my joy at these banalities: separating the scone with my fingers and hearing the dry crack as it broke in half; slicing thin pats of butter with a round-tipped knife that looked like a toy; stirring my tea with a silver spoon that weighed more in my hand than all my spoons combined. The luxuries only a disaster could have afforded us. We were taking tea in a garden in Los Pozos, the fog swirling around us like strips of chiffon.
‘You cut your hair,’ said my mother. ‘And it’s curlier now.’
‘The humidity does that?'
‘It looked better long. Shinier. You look more alive with long hair.’
‘I like it this way.’
‘Just doing my job,’ she replied with a shrug. ‘If your own mother doesn’t tell you these things…’
‘You’re honest, I’ll give you that.’
‘Better to be honest than cynical, dear. Candor is a virtue in times like these. Besides, I’m only talking about your hair. Hair grows, doesn’t it?’
She gazed off into the distance, toward the garden of the house next door, with its shutters closed and black holes in the roof where tiles were missing. Other houses behind it, blurred by the fog, were boarded up and eaten away by neglect and by the gases in the air.
‘Resignation is not a virtue,’ she said. ‘You have to fight for what you want.’
‘Tell me something, Mom. Why are you still here?’
On the table, her gardening gloves looked like the amputated hands of a giant.
‘I could ask you the same thing. What are you trying to prove? That you were hurt so badly you don’t care anymore whether you live or die?’
‘Max has nothing to do with this.’
‘Have you heard from him? What’s he up to these days? You can tell me.’
‘No, not a word.’
‘You did what you could,’ she sighed. ‘But that marriage was cursed.’
‘Cursed? And do you remember who cursed it from the start?’
She leaned over, eyes on the ground between her feet, and propped her elbows on the edge of the table to cradle her head in her hands. Her curls fell forward, covering her face. It’s too much, I heard her say. It’s too much. I steadied myself for the biting comment, ...
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