Ghosts by César Aira Page A

too. Here? she asked him. He looked around, mildly perplexed. He seemed to
mean two things: first, “all the floors look the same to me” and, second, “they
all take out their weenies.” He was letting his thoughts show in that gentle,
docile way because sleepiness was overcoming him irresistibly. And both aspects
of his excuse were reasonable, in a way. The mood of summery exhibitionism
prevailing on the site, accentuated perhaps by the imperfect, deceptive
repetition from one floor to the next, didn’t shock Patri (even she wasn’t that
naïve) so much as intrigue her. She’d seen the gangs of ghosts shaking their
sturdy members and aiming the jets of urine at the sky, showering it over the
first-floor patio (their favorite place for this sport) until rainbows with
a metallic sheen appeared in the siesta’s white glare. The day the big satellite
dish was installed on the terrace, they spent hours doing it, perched on the
edge.
    You get to bed, or Mom’s going to smack you, she said. Compliantly,
half-asleep, Ernesto headed for the stairs. Where’s Jacqueline, she
asked? The two youngest children were never far apart. He shrugged his
shoulders. Patri called her. I’m going, she said finally. She followed the
little boy up the stairs. When she was half way up, Blanca Isabel appeared
behind her, with the baby girl in her arms, intending to move her to a safe
place on the third floor. Patri turned around and started back down. The
movement was enough to make Blanca Isabel deposit her sister and take off alone,
jumping down the stairs three at a time. Jacqueline burst into tears. As soon as
Patri picked her up, she calmed down. She put her arms around Patri’s neck and
rested her head on her shoulder. She weighed nothing at all. Amazingly, she was
still the size of a doll at the age of two. But, in fact, it was like that with
all children. They might be relatively big or small for their age, but, compared
to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another
scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression
that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream. As Ernesto
had said a moment ago: the weenie. That must be why children were always playing
with scaled-down models of things: cars, houses, people. A miniature
theater, with its doors opening and closing, over and over again. The previous
night, on television, they had seen The
Kiss’n Cuddle Love Show , in which two puppets, a frog and a bear
recited the names of the birthday boys and girls, and those who had written in.
They never missed the show, although they had never written in themselves.
Anyway, the puppets appeared on a tiny scene, with two window shutters instead
of a curtain, which opened when their act began, and closed again at the end. In
the course of normal distracted viewing, Patri had assumed that the shutters
opened on their own, as they seemed to do, or were pushed from the inside, or
something like that. But last night a problem with the lighting or the general
clumsiness of the production had allowed her to see that the white shutters were
opened by hands in white gloves, which were supposed to be invisible. The
children didn’t realize, but she did. Her mother noticed too, and although they
said nothing, both she and Patri thought of the ghosts. They said nothing
because it wasn’t worth the effort of opening their mouths. But now, in
retrospect, Patri felt that the incident had a sexual significance, or
connotations at least.
    She asked Ernesto what game they had been playing. We were pretending
that the people who came this morning were our parents. She sighed in
disapproval. Appalling! That must have been the older two children; they were
always coming up with ideas like that, the little devils.
    The third floor was the same, yet different; it wrapped the three of
them in a fresh layer of silence. They say that silence increases with height,
but Patri, who lived