Morteros flooded easily and without apparent reason. On certain days, in certain years, the fields would fill with water and, without anyone really knowing why, Morteros would transform into a floating town: cows, cars, dogs, bicycles, and flowerpots all floated, benches from the town plaza floated, the railroad crossing floated, and so did the shooting range. One year, the dead floated too. The image isn’t easy to recall, though it’s unforgettable: ninety coffins, all floating, all following the same path, moving in single file from the cemetery to the monument at the center of the town plaza. A few, as they passed the train station, got caught on the barriers. But this was only discovered the next day by the conductors coming from the north, when on the San Francisco-Suardi route, they passed through Morteros and saw that the barriers had borne a coffin.
It was Children’s Day and we were in the square in front of the church, waist-deep in the water, having fun. When the grown-ups saw the caskets appear, their shouting drowned out any hint of rationality, and we immediately saw that this was going to be a great adventure. Our parents started to swim, trying to identify the coffins with their loved ones’ remains. Meanwhile, we had organized a game of naval battleships atop the final resting places of our ancestors. Navigating down the boulevard like privateers, like pirates, like floating children born in Morteros.
Our mothers were having nervous breakdowns. Our fathers were, too, though they were better at hiding it. Forty children aboard forty coffins, and over the next few hours, we played at being battleships, at the Titanic, at killing each other, and at dying.
I sailed alongside Martín Mattioli and Mínima Suárez, and between the three of us, we attempted to sink Fede Fenoglio, who had an advantage, as he’d managed to tame two wooden steeds, holding them on either side of him with his long legs, making it all the more difficult for us to throw the captain overboard.
I remember that Pía Tonetti was on top of a white coffin, lovely, and that behind her, clinging tightly to her waist, was Toti Liteli. They were the only ones sailing as a pair. First we played every man for himself, and when we got tired of that, someone proposed that we form armies.
“The brown coffins against the black coffins,” said Martín Mattioli.
“And the white coffins are the judges,” said Pía Tonetti.
And so it was.
At the end of the battle, someone suggested a race, and we turned our bows to the starting line that was, without any discussion, the monument that served as a roundabout at the only intersection of main roads in the entire region.
“The finish line is the Cristo Rey School,” said Rafa Capellino, the only child who had seen extraordinary things during the year he was taken far away on legendary vacations. Rafa Capellino had gone so far away that he’d seen something that not even all of the children from Morteros thinking together like a shoal of imaginative children, imagining in unison, could have imagined. The plains, said Rafa when he came back from his trip, can go up high. Sometimes, he said, they’re taller than the clouds. If the plains are really high up, the grass becomes white at the top, he said. The strange formations in those far away places, those vertical plains, they’re not called vertical plains. They’re called mountains, he said. Mountains, we all said together that day. And the white grass is called snow, said Rafa Capellino the day he came back from his trip. And while all the children of Morteros went, “Oooooh,” I thought to myself that it couldn’t be that there were words that existed that I didn’t know, because that meant things existed that those words named that I didn’t know about either. And that was a terrible thing because, then, everything one believes in, everything one trusts, everything one stands for could be undone by somebody else who knows things that one doesn’t know. By somebody who had seen things that one hadn’t heard of, who pronounced words that one wouldn’t pronounce, hadn’t ever pronounced, would never pronounce.
I was on the verge of screaming out of the panic I felt when realizing for the first time the possibility that the world beyond Morteros, the world past our fields, past the SanCor dairy plant and the monument that welcomed you to our town, which was the furthest place we had ever gone, was not identical to ours, to our beliefs and our landscape; and, on top of that, our words might not be all the words that ever were, or ever would be, and so, consequently, in this way, in conclusion: the capital T Truth might not be true in itself, but rather only in me.
In us.
I didn’t have time to scream because Rafa Capellino was telling us the best part of all of the parts of his trip to the vertical plains called mountains. That one afternoon, when he was sitting at the entrance of the highway motel while his parents were taking a shower together in the bathroom, he felt as if the asphalt and air began to vibrate. They vibrated more and more and more and more and more and suddenly, instead of a cyclone, what appeared was a part of the word: a motorcycle without the clone, he said. A motorcycle without the clone that could make a man’s heart tremble, he said. And a woman’s, Nina Boturi corrected him. And then it passed right before his eyes and parked next to him, said Rafa Capellino. And the man driving, said Rafa Capellino, when he saw Rafa Capellino looking back at him with wide eyes, smiled and spoke to him in a language that was not ours, a language that sounded like the words of a Hank Williams’ song. And here came the reason we all revered Rafa Capellino: the man, he said, not only let Rafa get on his motorcycle without the clone, but also took him for a ride, and they went as far as halfway up the vertical plains called mountains.
Rafa Capellino said he saw a river that, instead of being horizontal, like the Laguna Mar Chiquita and the water in the gutters, fell vertically between the rocks. And that in the middle of the rainfall, there was a rainbow. A rainbow is the sign that God made to remind himself of the promise he made to Noah to never again flood the earth, to never again shipwreck us, to never again exterminate us, Rafa Capellino said that Noah said God said. Amen, said all of the children of Morteros and, with our tiny hands held up in prayer, we recited: Genesis 9, verses 1 through 16. Immediately afterwards, as if this all wasn’t already sufficiently extraordinary, Rafa Capellino told us that the mountain road wasn’t straight, but rather curved. One curve after the other. So many, dozens, hundreds of curves, said Rafa Capellino. And we all rubbed our eyes, because the only curve in our plain and flat lives being children from Morteros was the roundabout by the Larguirucho supermarket, the roundabout that intersected the boulevard with the Pachamama monument, and the slightest bend in the road, just before you reached Suardi, the next town over. Rafa Capellino said that it’s impossible to describe the way it feels to be on a motorcycle without the clone: the wind in your face, the freedom, the landscape passing by at the speed of your hand accelerating. I told him that my Fantic, the motorbike that my parents had given me for my sixth birthday, also let me feel the wind in my face, that I also knew how to accelerate with my little hand. And as for the landscape and the way it passes by at a certain speed while we move through it, I asserted that this was true because things move backward while we move forward and that everything is done with total freedom because one can choose their path. You go to the garbage dump, or to the aero club tarmac, I told him. And he smiled at me with tenderness and pity. Rafa Capellino said that the cover of the air filter on the motorcycle without the clone was chrome and had a skull engraved on it. That the leather saddlebags had two skulls engraved on them. That the keychain was a skull. And that all of the skulls on that bike had two red stones that shone as if they were real eyes. We all applauded, because if there was anything children from Morteros liked, it was skeletons. Rafa Capellino said that written on the gas tank, instead of the name of the motorcycle, was the first and last name of the man who talked exactly like the way Hank Williams’ songs sounded. The man who was now his friend: Harley Davidson, he said. Harley Davidson, we all repeated, as if we were invoking the Holy Spirit during Sunday mass. And from this, he had deduced, and asked us if we could deduce with him to confirm or rule out the conclusion, that Harley Davidson’s motorcycle was from the brand Without The Clone. Without The Clone we all said, to demonstrate to Rafa Capellino that we had deduced this with him without suggesting otherwise. And to finish his explanation, Rafa Capellino told us that Harley Davidson, after taking him on a ride to the vertical plains called mountains, had spoken with our same words, in our language, in an accent that was odd but intelligible. “Hasta la vista, baby,” Rafa Capellino said that Harley Davidson had said, and so then he, Rafa, had written down the name of our town and had drawn a map of the Pampa Húmeda so Harley Davidson wouldn’t get lost when he came to visit him. Rafa said that he was sure he would come. And that he would bring us all on rides to the aero club tarmac. Or the garbage dump, I added.
With such a résumé under his belt, nobody could argue with Rafa Cappelino’s decision when he said that the finish line of our battleship race was Cristo Rey school. He was the most experienced out of all of us. He had traveled on a Without The Clone motorcycle that sounded like a cyclone, driven by Harley Davidson, a man who had put stones on skulls’ eyes and spoke like the words of Hank Williams’s songs. He had ridden along curves that brought him to the vertical plains called mountains where there were rivers that fell between rocks right at the spot where God made a rainbow so he wouldn’t forget to make the rain stop in case he was tempted to drown us again. We, on the other hand, could only ride coffins. And none of the coffins had our name engraved on them.
Lali Farías, who hadn’t managed to get on board any coffin, climbed up a tree in the plaza and shouted:
“On your marks, get set, go!”
With our bows against the wind, we used our arms and legs as paddles.
After five hours of fun, laughter, shouts, cries, and torments, our ancestors returned to the cemetery and our ships went back to being coffins moored in their bays. A few days later, while the grown-ups were still trying to figure out the cause of the sudden flood, I set out for the cemetery, opened the door to a tomb, grabbed an axe, and struck the iron latches of a coffin to free the captain of my ship. I found rags, but not a trace remained of his soul. And where his eyes should have been, there was emptiness, absence. Nothing.
“Dead people can’t read,” I said, while reaching my fingers into the skull. And I thought about how I would tell Mínima Suárez about what I had just discovered. Not because death did away with reading, but rather because Señorita Susana, our language arts teacher, had lied to us when Mínima and I asked her how dead people could read. She answered that they read backwards, like you can through the mirror, because they were face-up. So we, Mínima and I, concluded that, then, they should have books written in reverse, so that the dead could understand the stories they were being told. And, therefore, there could be writers who un-told a story instead of telling it. Ending. Climax. Introduction.
And so, while I was working out our teacher’s ploy, I thought about Harley Davidson, the man who spoke with words we didn’t know. I thought about the existence of other ways things could be, even how plains and rivers could be. I thought that, if everything was just so, so relative, it could very well be possible that lies were just another way of explaining the world. That lies were, possibly, the best version of a story. A tailor-made truth.
Nothing more.
I closed the coffin, ran to my motorcycle, and accelerated to make the landscape pass through me at the same speed as I passed through it. And I went to the town’s limits, to the place where us children from Morteros gathered each day to look at the long, straight line that reached to the end of the horizon, so we didn’t miss the exact moment that Harley Davidson would appear with his skulls that had red stones for eyes, driving his motorcycle, Without The Clone.
Translated by Rose Bialer
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