Tender is the Flesh(11)
He thanks her for letting him know and says he’ll stop by at some point. He hangs up and lies in bed thinking he doesn’t want the day to begin.
Once he’s put the kettle on the stove, he gets dressed. While he takes the first sip of mate, he calls the game reserve. He explains that he has a family emergency, says he’ll call back to reschedule the visit. Then he calls Krieg and tells him that he’ll need more time for the meat run. Krieg says that he can take as long as he needs, but that he’s waiting for him to interview two job applicants.
After thinking it over for a few seconds, he calls his sister. He tells her that their father is doing fine and that she should visit him. She says she’s busy, raising two kids and running the house takes up all her free time, but she’ll go soon. It’s harder for her to get to the nursing home from the city, she says, it’s so far away and she’s afraid about getting back after curfew. She says this with contempt, as though the world were to blame for her choices. Then she changes her tone of voice and tells him that they haven’t seen each other in forever, says she wants to have him and Cecilia over for dinner and asks how she’s doing, whether she’s still staying with her mother. He says he’ll call back at some point and hangs up.
He opens the door to the barn. The female is lying on the blankets. She wakes with a start. He picks up the bowls and returns with water and balanced feed. Then he sees she’s found a spot to relieve herself. When he gets back, he’ll have to clean it up, he thinks tiredly. He hardly looks at her because she’s a nuisance, this naked woman in his barn.
Once he’s in his car he drives straight to the nursing home. He never lets Nélida know ahead of time when he’s coming. It’s the best and most expensive facility in the area that he’s paying for, and he feels it’s his right to show up unannounced.
The nursing home is located between his house and the city. It’s in a residential area of gated communities. Whenever he goes to visit his father, he makes a stop a few kilometres before the home.
He parks and walks towards the entrance to the abandoned zoo. The chains that locked the gate are broken. The grass overgrown, the cages empty.
Going to the zoo is risky because there are still animals loose. He knows this, and he doesn’t care. The mass killings took place in the cities, but for a long time, there were people who clung to their pets, unwilling to kill them. It’s said that some of these people were killed by the virus. Others abandoned their dogs, cats, horses out in the country, in the middle of nowhere. Nothing’s ever happened to him, but people say it’s dangerous to walk around alone, without a weapon. There are packs of animals, and they’re hungry.
He walks to the lion’s den. When he gets there, he sits down on the stone railing. He lights a cigarette and looks out into the empty space.
He thinks of the time his father brought him here. He didn’t know what to do with the boy who didn’t cry, who hadn’t said a thing since his mother died. His sister was a baby, she was looked after by nannies, oblivious to it all.
His father took him to the movies, to the plaza, to the circus, anywhere that was far from home, far from the photos of his smiling mother holding up her architecture diploma, the clothes still on their hangers, the Chagall print she’d picked out to place above the bed. Paris Through the Window: there’s a cat with a human face, a man flying with a triangular parachute, a colourful window, a dark couple and a man with two faces and a heart in his hand. There’s something that speaks to the craziness of the world, a craziness at times cheerful, and cruel, even though all of them are serious. Today, the print hangs in his bedroom.
The zoo was full of families, caramel apples, cotton candy in shades of pink, yellow, blue; laughter, balloons, stuffed kangaroos, whales, bears. His father would say, “Look, Marcos, a tit monkey. Look, Marcos, a coral snake. Look, Marcos, a tiger.” He would look without speaking because he felt his father didn’t have any words, that the ones he said weren’t really there. He intuited without being certain that his father’s words were about to break, that they were held together by the thinnest of transparent threads.
When they reached the lion’s den, his father stood there watching and didn’t say anything. The lionesses were resting in the sun. The lion wasn’t there. Someone had a biscuit to feed the animals and tossed it into the den. The lionesses looked on with indifference. They’re so far away, he thought, and at that moment, all he wanted was to leap into the den, lie down with the lionesses and go to sleep. He would have liked to pet them. The children shouted, growled, tried to roar, the people piled close together, said “excuse me”. But then suddenly everyone went silent. The lion came out of the shadows, out of a cave, and slowly ambled along. He looked at his father and said, “Dad, the lion, the lion’s over there, do you see it?” But his father’s head was down, he was fading among all those people. And though he wasn’t crying, the tears were there, behind the words he couldn’t say.
He finishes his cigarette and tosses it into the den. Then he gets up to leave.
Slowly he walks back to his car, his hands in his trouser pockets. He hears a howl. It’s in the distance. He stops and looks around to see if he can make anything out.
He arrives at the New Dawn Nursing Home. It’s a large house surrounded by well-kept grounds with benches, trees and fountains. He was told that there were once ducks in a small artificial pond. Today the pond is gone. The ducks are too.