Our Share of Night
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Editor’s Letter
Praise for Mariana Enriquez
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Advance Reader's Copy — Not for Sale
OUR SHARE OF NIGHT
A Novel
Mariana Enriquez
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Tentative On-Sale Date: February 7, 2023
Tentative Publication Month: February 2023
Tentative Print Price: $28.99
Tentative Ebook Price: $13.99
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Publicity Contact:
Hogarth
An imprint of Random House
1745 Broadway • New York, NY • 10019
By Mariana Enriquez
By Mariana Enriquez
Things We Lost in the Fire
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Our Share of Night
Epigraph
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land
I
The Claws of the Living God
January 1981
I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.
ADOLFO BIOY CASARES, The Invention of Morel
I cried, “Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!”
W. B. YEATS, The Wanderings of Oisin
There was so much light that morning and the sky was so clear, its warm blue marred by a single white smirch, more like a plume of smoke than a cloud. It was already late and he needed to go and that hot day was going to be just like the next: if it rained and he was hit with the river’s humidity and the stifling Buenos Aires heat, he would never be able to leave the city.
Juan swallowed a pill dry to stave off the headache he wasn’t feeling yet and went into the house to wake up his son, who was sleeping under a sheet. We’re leaving, he said as he shook him gently. The boy woke up right away. Do other children have such shallow, vigilant sleep? Wash your face, he said, and carefully cleared sleep from the boy’s eyes. There was no time for breakfast, they could stop on the way. He loaded the already-packed bags, and debated a while among various books until he decided to add two more. He saw the airplane tickets on the table: they were still a possibility. He could lie down and wait for the date of the flight, some days later. To ward off inertia, he tore up the tickets and threw them in the trash. His long hair made his neck sweat: it was going to be unbearable under the sun. He didn’t have time to cut it now, but he got the scissors from the kitchen drawer and stashed them in the same plastic box where he kept his pills, the blood-pressure monitor, the syringe, and some bandages, basic first aid for the trip. Also, his sharpest knife, and the bag full of ashes he would use later. He packed the oxygen tank: he was going to need it. The car was cool; its leather hadn’t absorbed too much heat during the night. He loaded the picnic cooler, filled with ice and two bottles of cold soda, into the front seat. His son had to ride in the back; Juan would have preferred to have the boy beside him, but it was illegal, and he couldn’t risk any problems with the police or the army, who kept a brutal watch over the highways. A single man alone with a child could be suspicious. The repressive forces were unpredictable, and Juan wanted to avoid any incidents.
Gaspar, he called without raising his voice too much. When he received no answer, he went inside to look for the boy. He found Gaspar trying to tie the shoelaces of his sneakers.
“You’re making a mess of it,” he said, kneeling down to help. His son was crying, but Juan couldn’t console him. Gaspar missed his mother—she had done these things automatically: trimmed his nails, sewn his buttons, washed behind his ears and between his toes, asked if he’d peed before leaving, taught him how to tie his shoelaces in a perfect bow. Juan missed her too, but he didn’t want to cry with his son that morning. You have everything you want? he asked. We’re not going to come back for anything, I’m warning you.
He hadn’t driven so far in a long time. Rosario always insisted that he drive at least once a week, just so he didn’t get out of practice. The car was too small for Juan, like almost everything: pants were too short, shirts too tight, chairs uncomfortable. He checked to be sure the Auto Club’s guide was in the glove box, and they set off.
“I’m hungry,” said Gaspar.
“Me too, but we’re going to stop for breakfast at this great place I know. In a while, okay?”
“If I don’t eat, I’ll throw up.”
“And my head hurts when I don’t eat. Be strong. It’s just a little while. Don’t look out the window or you’ll get even dizzier.”
He himself felt worse than he wanted to admit. His fingers were tingling, and he recognized the erratic palpitations of arrhythmia in his chest. He adjusted his sunglasses and asked Gaspar to tell him the story he’d read the night before. At six years old, the boy already knew how to read quite well.
“I don’t remember it.”
“Yes, you do. I’m in a bad mood, too. Let’s try to change it together. Or are we going to be all pissy for the whole trip?”
Gaspar laughed at Juan’s use of the word “pissy.” Then he recounted the story of the jungle queen who sang while she walked through the trees. Everyone liked to listen to her. One day some soldiers came and she stopped singing and became a warrior. The soldiers caught her and she spent a night locked up, and then she escaped, but to escape she had to kill the guard keeping watch over her. No one could believe she was strong enough to have killed him because she was very thin, so she was accused of being a witch and they burned her at the stake—tied her to a tree and set fire to it. But in the morning, instead of a body, they found a red flower.
“A tree of red flowers.”
“Yeah, a tree.”
“Did you like the story?”
“I don’t know, it scared me.”
“That tree is called a ceiba. There aren’t many around here, but when I see one, I’ll show you. There are a lot of them near your grandparents’ house.”
In the rearview mirror he saw Gaspar frown.
“What do you mean there are a lot?”
“That story is a legend. I’ve explained what a legend is.”
“So the girl isn’t real?”
“Her name is Anahí. Maybe she did exist, but the story about the flowers is told to remember her, not because it really happened.”
“So did it really happen or not?”
“Both. Yes and no.”
He liked to see how Gaspar got serious and even angry, how he bit the side of his lip and opened and closed a hand.
“Do they burn witches now, too?”
“No, not anymore. But there aren’t very many witches now.”
It was easy to get out of the city on a Sunday morning in January. Before he knew it the tall buildings were behind them, and then so were the low houses and tin lean-tos of the shantytowns on the city’s outskirts. And suddenly the trees of the countryside appeared. Gaspar was asleep by then, and Juan’s arm burned in the sun just like any regular father’s on a weekend of pools and picnics. But he wasn’t a regular father, and people could tell just by looking into his eyes or by talking to him for a while. Somehow, they recognized the danger: he couldn’t hide what he was. It wasn’t possible to hide something like that, at least not for long.
He parked in front of a café advertising hot chocolate and croissants. Time for breakfast, he told Gaspar, who woke up immediately and rubbed his enormous, slightly distant blue eyes.
The woman who was cleaning the tables gave the impression she owned the place, and of being friendly and gossipy. She shot them a curious look when they sat down far from the window and near the fridge. A boy with his little toy car and his father, who was two meters tall and had long blond hair down to his shoulders. She wiped their table with a cloth and wrote their order on a notepad, as if the café were crowded with customers whose orders she had to keep straight. Gaspar wanted a hot chocolate and croissants with dulce de leche; Juan ordered a glass of water and a cheese sandwich. He took off his dark glasses and opened the newspaper that was on the table, though he knew the important news never appeared in the papers. There were no articles about clandestine detention centers or nighttime clashes, no pieces on abductions or stolen children. Just stories about the “Little World Cup” being held in Uruguay, which didn’t interest him at all. Sometimes he had a hard time faking normalcy when he was distracted, when he was so hopelessly sad and worried. The night before, he’d tried to communicate, yet again, with Rosario. He couldn’t. She wasn’t anywhere, he couldn’t sense her; she was gone in a way that he found impossible to understand or accept.
“It’s hot,” said Gaspar.
The boy was sweating, his hair wet and his cheeks flushed. Juan touched his back. His shirt was soaked.
“Wait here,” he said, and went out to the car to get a dry shirt. Then he led Gaspar to the café’s restroom to wet his head, dry his sweat, and change his shirt, which smelled a little like diesel.
When they got back to the table, their breakfast and the woman were waiting for them; Juan asked for another glass of water for Gaspar.
“There’s a lovely campground near here, if you want to cool off in the river.”
“Thanks, but we don’t have time,” said Juan, trying to sound friendly. He unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt.
“You boys traveling alone? My goodness, the eyes on this child! What’s your name, son?”
Juan wanted to say Gaspar, don’t answer, but the boy told her his name and the woman pounced, asking in an insincere, childish voice:
“And where’s your mommy?”
Juan felt the boy’s pain in his entire body. It was primitive and wordless, raw and vertiginous. He had to clutch on to the table and make an effort to break away from his son and that pain. Gaspar couldn’t answer and looked to his father for help. He’d only eaten half a croissant. Juan thought he would need to teach the boy not to cling like that, not to him or to anyone else.
“Ma’am.” Juan tried to control himself, but it sounded threatening. “What the hell do you care?”
“I was just making conversation, that’s all,” she replied, offended.
“Oh, well, that’s just great. You get mad because you won’t get to have your idiotic conversation, and we have to put up with the stupid prying of a gossipy old lady. You really want to know? My wife died three months ago. She was hit by a bus that dragged her two blocks.”
“I am so sorry.”
“No. You’re not sorry, you don’t feel anything, because you didn’t know her and you don’t know us.”
The woman started to say something else, but then she walked away, sniffling loudly. Gaspar was still looking to Juan, but his eyes were dry. He was a little scared.
“It’s okay. Finish eating.”
Juan himself nibbled his cheese sandwich; he wasn’t hungry, but he couldn’t take his medication on an empty stomach. The woman came back looking contrite, her shoulders hunched forward. She was carrying two glasses of orange juice. On the house, she said, and apologized. I certainly never imagined such a tragedy. Gaspar was playing with his red toy car, a new model with doors and a trunk that opened—a gift from his uncle Luis, sent from Brazil. Juan made Gaspar finish his hot chocolate and then got up to pay at the counter. The woman was still apologizing, and Juan felt drained. When she reached out to take the money, he held on to her wrist. He thought about marking her with a symbol that would drive her mad, that would put the idea in her head to skin her grandson’s feet or cook her dog in a stew. But he held back. He didn’t want to tire himself. Keeping the secret up around this trip with his son was already wearing him out, and there would be consequences. So he left the woman alone.
Gaspar was waiting for him in the doorway, wearing his father’s dark glasses. When Juan tried to take them off him, the boy ran outside laughing. He caught up with him near the car and picked him up: Gaspar was light and long, though he would never be as tall as his father. Juan decided they would find a place to have lunch early, before the long stretch to Entre Ríos.
The day had been exhausting despite the utter ordinariness of the journey: light traffic, a delicious lunch at a roadside grill, and a nap in the shade of the trees, the banks cooled by a breeze from the river. The grill’s owner had also been curious and tried to make small talk, but since there were no questions about his wife, Juan had decided to chat while he drank a little wine. After his nap and during the whole drive to Esquina he’d felt bad: the heat was extreme. But now, as he asked for a room and tried to make the front desk worker understand that he needed a double bed for him and another single one for his son and money was no object, he realized that it was also possible he would need assistance. He paid up front and let someone else carry the bags up the stairs. Once in the room, he turned on the TV to entertain Gaspar and lay down on the bed. He recognized his symptoms: his arrhythmia was out of control. He could hear the murmur, that sound of effort, and felt the nausea of confused valves. His chest hurt, and it was hard to breathe.
“Gaspar, hand me the bag,” he said.
He took out the monitor and checked his blood pressure; it was low, which was good. He lay diagonally, the only way his feet could fit on the mattress. Before taking his pills and trying to rest—to sleep, if possible—he pulled a sheet of paper from the hotel pad on the bedside table and, using a pen that said on the side “Hotel Panambí—Esquina,” he wrote down a number.
“Son, listen closely. If I don’t wake up, I want you to call this number.”
Gaspar’s eyes widened, and then his face crumpled.
“Don’t cry. This is just in case I don’t wake up, that’s all, but I am going to wake up, okay?”
He felt his heart skip as if it were accelerating with a gear change. Would he be able to sleep? He brought his fingers to his neck. One-seventy, maybe more. He had never wanted to die as much as he did now, in this provincial hotel room, and he had never been more afraid of leaving his son alone.
“That’s your uncle Luis’s number. You have to press nine and then you’ll hear a dial tone, and only then you call your uncle’s number. If I don’t wake up, shake me. And if I still don’t wake up when you shake me, you call him. Him first, then the man downstairs in the lobby, understand?”
Gaspar said yes, and he clutched the number in his fist as he lay down beside Juan—close, but far enough away not to disturb him.
Juan woke up sweaty from a dreamless sleep. It was nighttime, but the room was dimly lit: Gaspar had turned on the bedside lamp and was reading. Juan looked at him without immediately stirring: the boy had taken his book from the bag and seemed to be waiting, the paper with the phone number on the pillow beside him. Gaspar, he called, and the boy reacted with care: he put the book down, crawled over to Juan, and asked if he was okay. Just like an adult, just like he’d heard so many adults ask him when they took care of him. Juan sat up and waited a minute before answering. His heart had returned to a normal rhythm, or to what was relatively normal for him. He wasn’t agitated, wasn’t dizzy. I’m okay, yes, he said, and he sat Gaspar on his lap, hugged him, caressed his dark hair.
Gaspar pointed to Juan’s watch.
“What time is it?”
“You know how to tell time, you tell me.”
“Twelve-thirty.”
There wouldn’t be anywhere to eat still open in that town. Sure, he could walk downtown, break into some closed shop or restaurant, and take whatever he wanted—opening locked doors was very simple. But if anyone witnessed him doing it, he would have to deal with them. And all those small acts built up until they became a long and exhausting chain of footprints to erase, eyes to shut, memories to make disappear. He’d been taught this years ago: it was better to try to live as normally as possible. He could do things that were impossible for most people, but every conquest, every exercise of will to achieve what he desired came with a price. In matters of little importance, it wasn’t a price worth paying. Now, he just had to convince whoever was working on the night desk to fix them some food. He didn’t feel hungry, and surely Gaspar didn’t either. But the boy hadn’t eaten, Juan had forgotten to take the sodas out of the car, and he had to behave like a father.
However, he needed to have a wash before he could leave the room—he stank. And maybe also to cut his hair a little. Gaspar could use a bath too, though it wasn’t as urgent. He got up from the bed with the boy in his arms and carried him to the shower. He turned on the hot water and waited a while until his suspicion was confirmed.
“No way, not with cold water!” cried Gaspar.
“Come on, it’s hot out! No? Okay then, I’ll clean you off with a towel after I’m done.”
Juan got into the shower and Gaspar sat on the toilet lid and told him about what he’d been reading and what he had seen from the hotel window. Juan heard his voice but didn’t pay attention. The showerhead was too low and he had to bend over to wash his hair, but at least the hotel provided shampoo and soap. Then, with a towel around his waist, he stood in front of the mirror: his wet hair came down past his shoulders and there were dark circles under his eyes.
“Bring me the scissors, they’re in the small bag.”
“Can I cut it? Just a little?”
“No.”
Juan stood looking at his reflection, his broad shoulders, the dark scar that ran down the middle of his chest, the burn on his arm. Rosario had always cut his hair, and had also shaved him sometimes. He remembered her big earrings that she never took off, sometimes not even when she slept. He remembered how she’d cried once, kneeling naked on the bathroom floor, over the weight she had gained during pregnancy. How she crossed her arms when she heard something she found stupid. He remembered her shouting at him in the street, furious; how strong she was when she hit him with her fists in a fight. How many things did he not know how to do for himself? How many had he forgotten, how many had he never learned because she always did them? He combed his hair and then cut it as neatly as he could. He left one lock longer in front and used the hairdryer to see if it was a disaster. The results seemed acceptable. He had a little stubble, but it was only noticeable because he was so pale. He gathered up the cut hair, which he’d let fall on to a towel, and flushed it down the toilet.
“Let’s go see if we can find something to eat.”
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