Free Ghosts by César Aira Page B

contrary. It was the time of day when one suspects the climate of
malevolence. She climbed the last flights of stairs on her own, because Juan
Sebastián and Blanca Isabel went to get the toy cars they had left behind and
resumed their games; not that they really wanted to go on playing, but they were
still scared that their mother would put them to bed. There was no danger of
that any more, because the hour of the siesta had passed, but just in case, and
out of sheer willfulness, they ran away. They had been to an ice-cream
shop with air conditioning, where they had stayed a fair while. The cool
interlude had refreshed them a bit, but the contrast when they came out made the
persistence of the heat all the more terrible. Elisa saw that her eldest
daughter was asleep. She didn’t wake her up. She went to the kitchen, and took
the shopping out of the bags, but didn’t put anything in the fridge, because
they didn’t have a fridge. Then she started washing. They didn’t have a washing
machine either, but that didn’t bother her too much, although she would have
liked one. In fact she enjoyed washing, and spent quite a lot on soaps and
special products, as well as the bleach. Oddly, for someone who was so fond of
this pastime, her hands were not ruined. So what if those two brats didn’t want
to sleep. She hadn’t taken a siesta today either; she didn’t feel like it. For
various reasons, the washing had built up. She filled the two washbowls and the
two plastic buckets, and began to make a mixture of various products, which she
always finished off with a healthy squirt of bleach. She started scrubbing some
of the kids’ little T-shirts. She felt depressed, because of the heat,
because of all the work she had done already that day, and what remained to do,
because of the end of the year, and her husband, and so on, and so on. It wasn’t
a momentary low. She was going through a period of depression due mainly to the
fact that they hadn’t moved, as she had hoped, or rather planned. Her husband
had been tempted by the special bonus they had promised him if he stayed until
the building was finished. By now, she thought, she should have been in the new
place. Not that it was better, but she had got used to the idea, and no one
likes having to give up an idea, even, or especially, if it doesn’t have have
any intrinsic merit. She would buy something with the extra money, but it
wouldn’t be the same: money and new things, they were explicable, whereas her
idea of moving before the end of the year was beyond explanation; it belonged to
the world of whim. Anyway, it was Raúl’s decision, and today he would get to hit
the booze twice. He often scored a double: lunch and dinner. What a liver he
must have! thought his wife. It’s incredible, it must be made of iron. Drunks
were tougher all round, or in a different way from normal people; she liked the
feeling of being protected by that superhuman vigor. What other protection did
she have? She liked a lot of things about her husband and had no desire to
complain about him, not even in the privacy of her ruminations. For example, she
couldn’t imagine herself married to a sober man.
    As she put some of Patri’s clothes into the wash, Elisa’s thoughts
turned to her daughter: now she was a
more serious worry. Elisa had never known such a mixed-up girl. No one
could say how she would turn out, least of all her mother. It was partly her age
of course, but even so, she was a particularly worrying case. She never stuck at
anything; she had no perseverance, as if she didn’t really know what she liked.
If only she would fall in love! Proceeding mechanically through the washing,
Elisa set out the problem point by point. Like many Chileans, she had the secret
and inoffensive habit of addressing long, casuistic explanations to an imaginary
interlocutor, or rather a real but physically absent person. In her case it was
a friend she hadn’t seen for years, not since she had come to