Kamchatka (3 page)

Bertuccio was my best friend. It might sound like bull, but I swear that by the age of ten Bertuccio was reading Anouilh's
Becket
and claiming he wanted to be a playwright. I had read
Hamlet
, because I didn't want to be outdone, and because we had a copy of it at home (we didn't have a copy of
Becket
) and even though I didn't understand a word of
Hamlet
, I wrote an adaptation that I planned to perform with my friends in the alcove between the kitchen and the patio, which would make a fantastic stage if mamá moved the washing machine.

But I was only trying to seem grown up; Bertuccio actually wanted to be an artist. He had read somewhere that an artist questions society and ever since he had been questioning everything, from the cost of school fees and the point of wearing a white smock in the morning and a grey one in the afternoons to the veracity of the story about French and Beruti handing out blue and white ribbons to the rebels of the revolution of 1841. (How could they have known that Belgrano would make the Argentine flag blue and white? What were they, psychic?)

Bertuccio was forever embarrassing me. One time we went to the cinema to see
Gold
, which was over-fourteens only and the guy on the ticket desk asked us for ID. Bertuccio admitted that he was underage but said that he had read the book and hadn't found anything liable
to deprave or corrupt in it and informed the guy that no one had the right to presume that he was too immature to see a movie. When the ticket seller tried to interrupt him, Bertuccio solemnly announced that he, my dear sir, had already read
Becket, The Exorcist
and
Lady Chatterley's Lover
(or parts of it, at least) ‘which is more than many adults can say, or are you calling me a liar?'

Whenever he got me into this kind of mess, I was the one who came up with the solutions. When Bertuccio got tired of talking and the guy on the ticket desk couldn't stand it any more, we went up the marble staircase to the first floor of the Rivera Indarte Cinema and hid in the toilets, waited until the usher had punched all the tickets for the Pullman seats, then, when he went into the cinema to show a latecomer to his seat, we snuck in behind him and hid behind the curtains. We'd missed the first fifteen minutes, but at least we got to see the film.

Gold
was shit. There weren't even any naked women in it.

On this particular morning, while Bertuccio was challenging Señorita Barbeito over the very foundations of the temple of science, I was looking for a pencil and some paper to play Hangman.

Señorita Barbeito sighed and told Bertuccio that of course there was a principle that explained everything: cell division, cells combining so as to develop complex functions, creatures leaving their aquatic environment, developing colours and fur, seeking new sources of energy, evolving paws, moving about and standing erect. Mazzocone was getting upset now because he realized he would have nothing to eat at lunchtime; a thread of drool was trickling down Guidi's chin; Broitman was explaining to me that his Action Man cost $6 million and I was thinking how cool it would be to actually throw up and splatter the screen while Señorita Barbeito was explaining to Bertuccio that this principle that explained how an organism develops and adapts to changing circumstances is the principle of necessity.

Bertuccio wanted to stand his ground; he was determined not to let Señorita Barbeito twist his arm on this, so I twisted his arm, literally. He asked what I wanted and I said would he like to play Hangman. He looked as though he was considering the possibility; his philosophical debate could always be resumed later. (I had
come up with a word with lots of Ks that I knew would baffle him.) Bertuccio agreed but only if he could have the first go. He marked out an eleven-letter word while I was drawing the gallows. I said ‘A' and he started filling in the blanks. There were five As in Bertuccio's word.

‘You're crazy', I said.

‘Just wait,' he said, ‘you'll see,' theatrical as ever.

I said ‘E' and he drew the head.

I said ‘I' and he drew the neck.

I said ‘O' and he drew one arm.

I said ‘U' and he drew the other arm.

This is hard, I thought. An ill-fated ‘S' earned me the body and after a suicidal ‘T', I was hanging by a thread.

Then there was a knock at the door and mamá came in.

The only thing I learned from the whole cell business: people change because they have no alternative.

We used to call mamá the Rock. In the
Fantastic Four,
a Stan Lee comic, one of the Four is this guy made of rocks called ‘The Thing'. That was where we got the idea. Mamá wasn't exactly thrilled about being compared to some bald, knock-kneed guy, but she was flattered that the name acknowledged her authority. She was happy as long as it was only me and the Midget that used the nickname. When papá called her the Rock – and papá did it more than we did – it was like everything was happening in Sensurround, the effect they use in disaster movies where all the seats shake.

To us, mamá had always been blonde, but from old photos we could see that she had become blonder over time. She was slim and full of life, the complete opposite of the Thing. When I was little, she liked movies and doing crosswords. There was a photo of Montgomery Clift on her bedside table from back when he was still handsome, before the car crash smashed his face up. She was a Liza Minnelli fan too. Every morning she would wake us with the soundtrack from
Cabaret
. Mamá had a good voice and she knew all the words by heart from ‘Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!' at the beginning to ‘Auf wiedersehen, à bientôt' just before the cymbal crash at the end. Given the stars she idolized, it seems
obvious I was supposed to grow up to be gay, but that's just one of the things that didn't pan out.

I thought mamá was beautiful. All boys think their mothers are beautiful, but in my defence I have to say that mine had the Searing Smile, a superpower Stan Lee would have paid good money for. Whenever she knew she was in the wrong – like the time I asked her to give me back the birthday money she'd asked me to lend her – she would use the Searing Smile and something inside me would melt and I would suddenly feel too weak to insist. (Actually, she never did give me that money back.) Papá said we were the lucky ones; he said that in the bedroom she used the Searing Smile for sinister purposes but refused to say anything more, leaving the details to our feverish imaginations.

But her other powers, the powers that earned her the nickname the Rock even the Thing would have envied. Mamá could wield the Glacial Stare, the Petrifying Scream and, in exceptional circumstances, the Paralysing Pinch. Worse still, if mamá had an Achilles heel, we never discovered what it was. No kryptonite worked on mamá. This, however, did not stop us from trying her patience every day, exposing ourselves to the Stare, the Scream and the Pinch. Weaklings that we were, we always succumbed. There was something atavistic about our confrontations. They were like battles between man and wolf, between Superman and Lex Luthor, a larger-than-life struggle that we played out over and over, aware that it was a drama written to delight some deity with Elizabethan tastes. We fought because fighting defined us, one as much as the other. Because, in conflict, we
were
.

Mamá had a doctorate in Physics and worked as a professor at the university. She always claimed that she had actually wanted to study biology and that the blame for her changing courses and studying the laws of the universe lay with her equally intractable mother, grandma Matilde. You'd have to know grandma Matilde
to realize how ridiculous that was. I don't think my grandmother was much concerned with mamá's future beyond her ability to ensnare a man of good pedigree. (Another expression that tickled the Midget: was this the same Pedigree you feed to dogs?). This was a dream grandma Matilde had to give up once my father appeared on the scene – papá had a pedigree all right: mongrel. But I don't think grandma Matilde cared a hoot whether mamá studied biology, physics or acupuncture. Besides, I couldn't imagine mamá falling in with grandma Matilde's master plan anyway. I don't know where this primal family legend came from, but what I do know is that my love of science, what the Mexican narrator referred to as the mystery of life, I owe to mamá.

That, and my passion for Liza with a Z. Got a problem with that?

When mamá met papá, she was already engaged to some other guy. Breaking off the engagement caused a huge scandal in the family. But mamá, who was not yet the Rock but the stone in David's slingshot, was not one to give up easily.

Not long after, she organized a dinner to introduce papá to the clan. Legend has it that mamá's family had adored her previous fiancé. But papá went one better. He arrived, all serious, set on playing the part of the lawyer with a promising future (which is, incidentally, exactly what he was). Papá carefully dropped references to his ‘cases' into the conversation and mentioned the offices he had just opened in Tribunales. By the time dessert was served, everyone had relaxed and mamá and her cousin Ana got up to dance a
cueca
or a
samba
, some dance that involved them flicking handkerchiefs. Papá shouted, ‘Watch where you're flicking that snot!' It was this comment that finally tipped the scales. Mamá's family breathed a sigh of relief. Papá was one of them.

They married the same year. I showed up a year later. If the stories are to be believed, I was born after a ten-month pregnancy. Mamá's due date was 1 January. The 10th (her birthday) came and went and still nothing. The 20th: still nothing. Regular check-ups revealed that I was perfectly healthy: I was still breathing, still growing normally. Nevertheless, by the end of January, the doctors decided to induce labour.

Papá claimed that the whole thing was just a mix-up, that the obstetrician had simply got the dates wrong – a logical explanation – but whenever mamá disputed this, papá would get nervous as somehow he sensed that all that separated him from the unthinkable was a piece of card and a doctor's illegible scrawl.

As for me, the story of my birth gave me a taste for stories of other extraordinary births. According to tradition, unusual births are noteworthy. Julius Caesar, for example, was ‘born by the knife' (cut from his mother's belly, hence the term
caesarean
), and died by the knife on the Ides of March. Pallas Athena was – literally – the product of the worst headache Zeus ever had. I suppose I could have tried to come up with some reason for my refusal to be born, but something always stopped me. Midwives say that no one ever knows anything until the time is right and that is the tradition I respect above all others.

Five years later, the Midget showed up. According to papá, the Midget was the result of a wild night celebrating a win on the horses at the Hipódromo de Palermo. According to family legend, it was papá's first time at the races – he'd been dragged there by colleagues from the law office in Tribunales and rapidly developed a taste for gambling. Having picked two winners on his first night, he suddenly thought he was an expert. I don't remember him ever winning again. This was probably why the Midget was the only brother I had.

For a long time, I thought there was some kind of connection between fate, fortune and children (I liked to imagine I was the son
of a professional poker player and consequently of royal birth) and, more specifically, a fateful connection between my little brother and racehorses. I stoically endured him breaking my Matchbox cars, tearing my comics, breaking my Airfix models, because I believed his actions were dictated by fate. His bestial behaviour was something that was written in the stars, a theory supported by the fact that he was born on 29 April, World Animal Day. My brother was born under the sign of the beast.

It was about then that mamá began working as a professor and started some group at the university, something to do with trade unions, and ended up winning elections. It was because of mamá that papá devoted his career to defending political prisoners: mamá found new cases for him every week. A lot of the ‘uncles' were mamá's political friends or from the union; some had been in jail. Tío Rodolfo, for example.

At first papá wasn't too keen on all this politics. He used to tease mamá, saying he was happier when she was reading trashy novels by Guy des Cars rather than political pamphlets by Hernández Arregui and
El Descamisado
and huge tomes with titles like
Instability and Chaos in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
, but he didn't mean it. Whenever they talked about politics, I could tell he was just as passionate as she was. Papá was the sort of man who screamed at the news on TV as though the newscasters and politicians could hear him. People say Shakespeare's soliloquies are contrived but what's the difference between Hamlet talking to a skull and papá talking to the TV?

For a while, during the time of the ‘uncles', they used to drag the Midget and me along to any protests and demonstrations they went to. We loved this, because there was always an ‘uncle' who'd sit us on his shoulders or give us a piggyback. People would buy us drinks or sweets, and we'd learn songs with words like ‘
policía federal la vergüenza nacional!
' (‘federal police, a national disgrace!'), which
made us popular in school the day after. Besides, everyone seemed to know everyone else at these demonstrations, so everyone was happy and it's well known that happiness is contagious.

In the beginning, papá was none too happy about mamá's open-door policy but, in the end, he gave in. It was partly because mamá kept nagging him, calling him a ‘reactionary shyster' and a ‘pencil-pusher'; but at least he was true to his pretentious, little-rich-boy roots, she used to say, a
niño bien
just like in the tango. But actually papá gave in because he believed in what she was doing and because he genuinely liked the uncles. They'd drink beer and he'd talk about the races, about his ‘sure things'. He'd get angry if one of them was having trouble with the police or the Triple A (in books it says it stands for the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance, but papá always called it the Argentine Assassins Alliance) when they were thrown in jail or beaten up.