Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras Read Free Book Online Page B

have been my own.
    In a hushed whisper, papá told mamá to try to sleep for a while, even if it was only a couple of hours, because she would need to be clear-headed in the morning. It was going to be a long day, there was a lot to do and then there was us. ‘We have to try not to spook the boys.’
    Mamá nodded and lit another cigarette. The harder she puffed on the cigarette, the brighter the tip glowed. I thought she’d gone crazy, because she leaned across to the blind and kissed it. Actually, she was just blowing her smoke out through the crack in the window. She didn’t want the room to get full of smoke.
    I felt like getting up and going over to them. Hugging them, saying something stupid, joining their vigil, peering through the blinds and, when the church bells chimed, saying ‘Three o’clock and all is well,’ like they used to when Buenos Aires was still a colony.
    I think I wanted to protect them – for the first time. But I figured papá would probably say the same thing to me he had said to mamá. He’d give me a little lecture on the salutary effects of a good night’s sleep and send me back to my thin eiderdown and my aching bones.
    I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and in the end I dozed off again.

Playtime
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    Can I view thee panting, lying
    On thy stomach, without sighing;
    Can I unmoved see thee dying
    On a log
    Expiring frog!
    Charles Dickens, ‘Ode to an expiring frog’,
    The Pickwick Papers

Second Period: Geography
----
    Noun.
1. Science concerned with the physical features of the Earth’s crust and as a habitation for man.
    2. The topographical features of a region: ‘The danger extends across the entire geography of Argentina.’

19
‘OURS WAS THE MARSH COUNTRY’
    For centuries, no one wanted to settle the land where Buenos Aires now stands.
    The native peoples turned their backs on it, preferring the green pampas to the insalubrious air of the marshes, this zone that is neither sea nor land, nor anything. When the Conquistadores arrived by sea, the natives attacked them more out of curiosity than anything else and finally left them to their own devices, knowing well how things would turn out for them. Locked up in their fortresses, the Europeans succumbed to plague and starvation until they were finally forced to eat each other. The land on which the city stands retains the memory of these cannibals. I’m not sure whether this was an isolated incident or whether it was a sign of destiny.
    When they aspired to glory, the indigenous peoples of the continent chose the other ocean, the Pacific. Lima was the golden city of the Incas while Buenos Aires was still a swamp. And when Europeans set up military outposts in South America, they too preferred the line that runs from México with the Peruvian highAndes. Buenos Aires was a last resort, a city beyond the pale, the last bastion of civilization standing on the frontier of barbarism. Or was it beyond that frontier, capital of a savage kingdom?
    All we know for certain is that no one wanted to live in Buenos Aires. Even the name was like a tasteless joke. The air was unhealthy, heavy and humid. It was like breathing water. Oxen and carts sank into the mud. This oppressive weather still reigned when, in 1947–48, Lawrence Durrell, in his letters from Buenos Aires, described the area as ‘large, flat and melancholy … full of stale air’, where the powerful fought over meagre resources and ‘the weak are discarded … Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity is trying to get away from here – including me.’ Lest there be any doubt about the malign influence the city had upon his soul, Durrell also wrote: ‘One’s feelings don’t rise in this climate, the death-dew settles on me …’
    To the imperial powers of the eighteenth century, Buenos Aires looked – on paper – like a marvellous opportunity. It was the