The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

103 Epiphany 1949

I considered going home but then pictured the kids in the café by the lake in Reykjavík. Even they were so limiting in their conversations that I could reveal only 33 per cent of myself. Maybe I wasn’t a wreck in the way that Dad was, but the war had shifted me over to the other side of the wall of what you can call normal life. I had lived through things that others don’t see until that wall comes down. In a ‘group of good friends,’ I therefore never sat at the same table as them but to the side, down in a smouldering bomb crater.

Here at La Quinta de Crío, on the other hand, I was trapped in a temporary setup I could see no end to. Dad was sinking into misery and had even stopped contacting employment agents in the capital. Should I have just left him to his fate? Headed out into the unknown over the Andes, got a sailor’s diploma in Chile, sailed across the Pacific, and ended up as a governor on Easter Island? My life was just beginning; his seemed to be over. No, I couldn’t leave him behind. But head to the capital, maybe? No, I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging that zombie from one curtainless guesthouse to the next. So what were the options, then? While I was ruminating on all this, I got the strangest idea of my life. It could be argued that it was insane, but so was the situation that had generated it.

There were many German immigrants in those parts, and an Oktoberfest was being held in a nearby town. I managed to get the Bennis’ permission to go and sat at a long outdoor table with some of the local kids. It was strange to be sipping German beer and eating pretzels under the eyes of green parrots. But you get used to everything, even waking up to the chirping of beetles on Christmas Day. At the next table some fatsos in leather shorts were chanting Munich beer songs. At the end of the first beer, I traipsed into the bar hut that housed the toilets. In the doorway I bumped into an odd couple: a young Germanic-looking girl and a real Argentinian cowboy, a gaucho. That sight triggered an unexpected idea, a solution to my and my father’s future in Silver Land. Its execution required a great deal of dedication, but if it succeeded we could hope for better days before long.

A short while later I planned a visit to the doctor in the capital. ‘It has something to do with my uterus,’ I said to the people in the house, and I wasn’t lying. Dad promised to take care of Héctor in the meantime.