Seven Ways to Kill a Cat

DRAWING A BLANK

I PROWL THE house like a cat in a cage. There’s no reason for me to stay at home, but I’ve got nowhere to go either.

I pick up the whale book and sit in the kitchen reading. I grip the pages tightly so the money and the note with Toni’s address don’t fall out. That’s where I leave them. I still don’t know what I’m going to do.

I suspect Ishmael’s a bit of a queer, but I kinda like the guy anyway. While he’s waiting to get a position on a whaling ship, he spends a couple of nights at an inn in Nantucket. He shares a bed there with a wild man, a harpooner. A cannibal from the Pacific islands with tattoos all over his body. Queequeg his name is. This guy prays to a little wooden god he keeps in a box, and sleeps with his harpoon. It’s difficult to work out what the harpoon would look like, because Ishmael describes it as a huge tomahawk pipe. Thing is, Ishmael and the cannibal share a smoke, get friendly and maybe get frisky because the book says they’re like this cosy loving couple.

Eventually they find the Pequod, a whaling ship preparing to set sail, and they sign on. The bit about all the preparations goes on and on. Obviously, in those days, a ship could be at sea for years at a time, so you had to prepare for everything. If you ran out of salt or mate in the middle of the ocean, you were fucked. It’s not like you could pop down to the corner shop and buy some more. I suppose it makes sense but I’m getting a bit pissed off with all these preparations. I’ve been reading for over two hours and no one’s even mentioned a fucking whale.

My stomach starts to rumble, but I go on drinking mate. I can’t face food. I spark another cigarette and go on reading.

Anyway, finally, they set sail. The first week, the old captain — his name’s Ahab — doesn’t show his face. He spends all day every day shut up in his cabin. By the time he finally decides to come on deck under cover of darkness, they’re out on the open sea. He rants away on the poop deck for a while and throws his pipe overboard. The old guy’s fucked in the head. You can see it in his eyes, in his face. He’s got this scar that runs right across his face from his forehead to his jaw. Got it from an axe wound. And he’s got a peg leg. Made of ivory, Ishmael says. From the jawbone of a whale. Where were we? Anyway, the story is that Moby Dick, the great white whale, bit off his leg and the old guy is looking for revenge. He’s completely obsessed.

Another night, the old guy gathers all the crew on deck and gives this long speech, telling them they’re going to sail right round the world to find this whale if they have to. And he takes out a gold doubloon and nails it to the mainmast and promises it to the first sailor who sights the whale. Anyway, the crew go apeshit and they’re all up for hunting Moby Dick. All except one. Starbuck, the first mate, rebels and gets up in the old guy’s face. Ahab intimidates him and eventually the guy backs down. Ishmael makes him sound like a wimp, but I figure Starbuck is right. They’re out there to hunt whales, not just chase one particular whale round the world, and a motherfucker of a beast to boot. It’s all about making money. It’s not worth risking everything just so some old guy can get his revenge.

Anyway, just when the story’s getting good, Ishmael goes off on one. He’s done this to me two or three times already. Makes me want to wring his fucking neck. When they first set sail, he went into this whole riff about whaling and what life at sea is like. And when we meet old man Ahab for the first time, he started listing all the types of whale there are in the ocean: Greenland whales, sperm whales, killer whales and I don’t know what all. Now he’s going on about what colour Moby Dick is. It’s good on one hand, because you learn a lot of stuff. Like for instance that they boil whales and turn them into barrels of oil. Or that what brought in the most cash was whale spunk. Back when they didn’t have electricity, they used it in lamps like it was kerosene. What he doesn’t tell you is how the fuck they extracted the spunk. It’s not like they could give the whale a handjob … Be pretty difficult anyway, seeing as the whale would be dead.

Problem is, it takes him like twenty or thirty pages to tell you all this shit and you lose the thread of the story.

Anyway, at this point, Ishmael is banging on about the whiteness of the whale and talking so much bullshit you want to end the little fucker. According to him, what’s scary about Moby Dick isn’t the whale’s size, or the hulking wrecks of ships it leaves in its wake — what’s scary is the fact that it’s white as milk. He’s not freaked by the fact the whale’s a vicious motherfucker. What terrifies him is the opposite: that it looks so innocent. Pure as a baby lamb.

I give up on Ishmael’s ramblings and go hunting for something to snack on. But there’s nothing in the place. Half an onion, an empty pack of polenta and a packet of rice that’s almost full. I boil up a couple of handfuls of rice with the onion and eat it out of the saucepan. It burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth. With a bit of tuna or a tomato it would be tasty, but on its own it tastes of nothing. White rice is good for one thing and one thing only: killing your hunger.

I laugh at this, because it’s like Ishmael’s bullshit ramblings are rubbing off on me. My mind is blank. Like it’s full of smoke. All I can think about is white. I remember how blindingly white the Portuguese guy Oliveira’s house used to be in the sunshine just after it had been whitewashed. It stayed that way for a while. Me and a bunch of kids used to sneak into his garden when he was having a siesta and eat his plums. We’d throw the maggoty ones against the wall. Some little shit even smeared DIRTY PORTUGUESE on the back wall in cowshit.

I think about Albino too, a bull mastiff that belonged to Zaid the Turk. Beautiful animal but vicious. Zaid always had him muzzled, but that didn’t stop the dog mauling every living thing it came across. Didn’t matter whether it had feathers, scales, fur or a baby’s dummy, Albino would go for it. Even Zaid, who fed him, wasn’t safe. The dog tried to chew his hand off a couple of times. He was seriously dangerous. But he made Zaid a packet in the dog fights. He was champion of Zavaleta. People would come for miles to see him fight. In the end he had to be put down. He chewed the arm off some kid in the barrio. It was lucky they managed to pull him off when they did, or he would’ve eaten the kid whole.

White was also the colour of our school smocks. Especially on Monday mornings when we’d show up all smart, hair combed, smocks freshly washed. The weird thing was the kids with the whitest smocks were usually the ones who were starving. It was like you could eliminate poverty with bleach, scrub out stigma with soap. Whiten it in the sun with salt and lemon juice if necessary. My school smock was only ever white until I got into a fight, and I got into fights pretty much every day. Later on, when some moron ripped one of the pockets and Mamina gave me a good slapping, I got in the habit of taking my smock off before lashing out.

I give up on Gringo’s ramblings too, as I swallow the last mouthful of rice, and I head out. It’s getting dark. It’s drizzling. Since Quique hasn’t come back to give me the lowdown, I head straight along the alley towards the station, cross the bridge over the riverbed and come out onto the narrow street by Fat Farías’s bar.

About fifty yards away from Farías’s place I see Quique hanging with a gang of kids. Five or six budding delinquents sitting under the eaves of Tita Cabrera’s shop sheltering from the rain, passing round a beer can. I know that what’s in the can isn’t beer, but still I say to the one cradling it in both hands, ‘Hey, give me a swig.’

‘A swig!’ shouts some kid sitting next to Quique who’s clearly off his face and that sets off a belated peal of laughter.

I humour them for a couple of minutes, then jerk my head for Quique to follow me. We move away a couple of feet and then suddenly I start coming on like a parish priest. Like a big brother. I regret it the minute I open my mouth.

‘What the fuck are you doing sniffing that? Smoke spliff if you want to. Don’t you know glue fucks up your brain cells?’

Quique looks at me seriously, closes one eye so he’s not seeing double, or triple, then with one finger he draws a circle in the air around my face then points it at my nose. I know this trick; you do it to get things to stand still when you’re tripping.

‘Life fucks up your brain cells, Gringo,’ he says in slow motion. ‘Quit busting my balls …’

I light a cigarette as he stands there, swaying on his feet, his bottom lip hanging down like a ventriloquist’s dummy. All that’s missing is the drool.

‘Find out anything for me?’

‘Something and nothing.’

‘What?’

‘Round noon Rubén and El Jetita had lunch with the police commissioner from Zavaleta,’ Quique says slowly, chewing every word, his tongue thick and furry. ‘Farías cooked an asado and the daughter served. Kicked everyone out of the bar — even El Negro Sosa, who got a bit mouthy, and that skinny guy who’s always hanging with Rubén.’

‘So what did they talk to the Fed about?’

‘No idea. You think they let me stick round for decoration?’

He’s right. Stupid fucking question. Though he’s talking in slow motion and his eyes are blank, Quique sounds more articulate than ever.

‘What else?’

‘In the middle of the afternoon, the Fed left and everyone else came back. El Jetita played cards with his mates and Chueco came by a couple of times to talk to him. The second time with that dark-haired girl he hangs with.’

‘Pampita?’

‘Yeah, that’s her. I didn’t see her come out.’

‘What about Chueco?’

‘Dunno.’ He scratches his head, closes his eyes like he’s concentrating. ‘He did some kind of deal with El Jetita, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were too far away. After that I saw him hanging around out here. Looked like he was dealing …’

‘Weed?’

‘Coke, too.’

‘You sure, Quique?’

‘What the fuck’s with you?’ he says to me. ‘It’s like your face is made of plasticine.’

‘So the other girl, she’s still in there?’ I say, changing the subject.

‘Who?’ he asks, confused.

‘Yanina.’

‘Nah, she fucked off about half an hour after the cop left.’

Quique closes his eyes again and brings a finger to his temple like he’s putting two and two together, or trying to work out some code. After everything he’s told me — ‘Something and nothing,’ he said — I’m starting to think sniffing glue has turned him into a prophet or a medium. I’m wired now and I ask him what he makes of everything.

‘What the fuck do I know, Gringo?’ he says. ‘My mind’s a fucking blank …’

And just as the prophet seems about to come out with a revelation, Quique spirals into glue psychosis and starts coming out with all sorts of shit, telling me that the puddles and the street lights have been sending him messages and they’re not good.

‘I just give you the gen. You have to work out the conclusions,’ he says finally.

And that’s the last more or less coherent thing I get out of him.