Ghosts by César Aira Read Free Book Online Page B

The sixth floor seemed endless. Her
chances of finding anything in that void perpetually full of air were minimal,
given the terrible brightness, which she had grown so used to, living up there
as summer set in, that her pupils had shrunk permanently to
pin-points. She didn’t understand the arrangement of the rooms, which
wasn’t clear at that stage of the construction; but she felt there were too many
of them. The trend toward having more and more rooms was, she felt, absurd. A
family couldn’t observe the protocol of a royal court. If people started
multiplying rooms by their needs, they could float away into the infinite and
never touch the ground of reality again. One for sewing, another for embroidery;
one for eating, one for drinking, one for each activity, in short. The same room
reproduced over and over, each one fulfilling some silly requirement, as if in a
perpetually receding mirror. Her mother had put it very well, except that she
hadn’t gone far enough in her generalization. Because the illusion of
exhaustivity affected things as well as people. In any case, the children
weren’t there.
    When she went down to the fifth floor, she was already tired and her
eyelids felt heavy, which surprised her slightly, since she didn’t like the
siesta—she was still a child in that respect. Having washed the lunch
dishes and left the miniscule rooftop apartment impeccably clean and tidy (in so
far as they could, given that it was still under construction), she and her
mother had watched television. She would have liked to go on watching, but the
time slot for the kind of show they preferred had come to an end, and the ones
that were starting required a different kind of attention.
    It might seem odd that at lunchtime, when Abel Reyes came up, his
cousin Patri had greeted him with a kiss. A kiss on the cheek was a normal
enough greeting; what might seem odd is that they needed to greet one another,
when he had been working in the building since early that morning. But, as it
happened, they hadn’t seen each other, which was not unusual, because she hardly
ever went down. Her mother did the shopping, and rarely needed help. Patri went
down once a day, if that. She helped a lot around the apartment, watched
television, and looked after her half-brothers and -sisters.
She was pretty much a homebody, like all Chileans, except when they are tireless
travelers (she was a bit of both). She was fifteen; her surname was Vicuña, like
her mother’s, because she had been born when her mother was single. Very quiet,
very serious, pretty hands.
    They weren’t on the fifth floor either, as she was able to
verify (or so she thought), by checking from the front to the back, room by
room. The children weren’t there, but the other characters, those bothersome
ghosts, were legion. They were always around at that time. To see them, you
just had to go and look. Although they kept their distance, with an air of
unaccountable haughtiness. For some mysterious reason, they had started
shouting, bursting into thunderous peals of laughter that shook the sky.
Patri wouldn’t have paid them any more attention than usual, if not for two
rather particular circumstances. The first was that there weren’t just two
or three or four ghosts, as one might have expected, given their
characteristic and constitutive rarity, but a veritable multitude, appearing
here and there, then moving away, laughing and shouting all the while like
exploding balloons. The second circumstance was even more remarkable: they
were looking at her. Normally they didn’t look; they didn’t seem to pay
attention to anything in particular, or even to have attention. They were
like that now too, except that they seemed to be making an exception for
her, as if she were the object of their ostentatious, senseless amusement.
She didn’t take offence, because it wasn’t serious. It was more like a
flying puppet show, an out-of-place, unseemly kind of
theater. She had seen