Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras Page B

the price tag still attached. I was wet and my whole body itched from the pine needles. Papá and mamá were coming and going, bringing in shopping bags and going out to fetch more. In an attempt to keep the Midget occupied – he was more dangerous when he tried to help with family chores than when he skived off – they had sat him in front of the TV, an ancient Philco with a rabbit-ear aerial; the knobs fell off as soon as you touched them.

    The house was full of mismatched cast-offs and second-hand furniture in different styles and colours. The living room alone had a fake Louis XV sofa, two wooden chairs – one pine, one mesquite. The coffee table was made of wicker and the TV stand was orange Formica.
    Papá stood, captivated before a broken grandfather clock. He slipped his hand inside the case and ding, dong, ding sounded the chimes – a little ominous, a little magical.
    All houses retain something of their former residents. People shed traces of themselves everywhere they go, the way we constantly shed and renew our skin without even noticing. It doesn’t matter how efficient the movers were, or how thoroughly the house was cleaned. The floors might smell of wax polish and the walls might be freshly whitewashed, but a vigilant eye will still detect the clues left by history: the floor, worn where it has been walked on, a dark groove on the windowsill where someone set down a cigarette as they gazed out at the gardens. Marks on the floor indicated where the original furniture had once stood.
    We didn’t know anything about the people who owned the house. All papá told us was that it had been lent to some people and they were now lending it to us. Maybe this was where the mystery lay. What was the logic behind such generosity? Were these cigarette burns made by the owner or by one of the brief tenants of the house? Why were there so many signs that the house had been recently occupied: a jar of mayonnaise in the fridge that was still within its best-before date, the March issue of a magazine? Who were the last tenants here, how long did they live here and what had forced them to leave?
    Still dripping wet, I started to look for hidden clues. Mamá said I looked like a ghost in my big white towel and told me to dry myself right away before I dripped water all over the house.
    First I explored the living room and dining room, opening all the cupboards and all the drawers. I didn’t find any personal items. Oneof the drawers was lined with a piece of paper that fascinated me, it was covered with a magician’s props: top hats, white rabbits, magic wands. I thought of Bertuccio’s word, the game of Hangman and I wondered where I’d put the piece of paper he had scribbled the word on. I thought I remembered stuffing it into my trouser pocket and that calmed me.
    There was an old radiogram with a record-player that looked even cheaper than the cabinet it was in. The bottom shelf was full of singles. There was nothing I liked, it was mostly stupid instrumental stuff by Ray Conniff and Alain Debray, along with a bunch of singers I’d never heard of like Matt Monro and some guy with a name like a tongue-twister called Engelbert Humperdinck. It was Engelbert’s record that slipped out of its sleeve and fell to the floor.
    I bent down to pick it up and noticed something odd underneath the radiogram. It looked like a scrap of paper that had slipped down behind the cabinet and got stuck between the skirting board and the wall.
    It was a postcard of Mar del Plata: a typical photograph of the
rambla
. It was dated that summer, the summer of ’76. The sentences were simple and the handwriting was terrible. ‘
My dear little Pedro, we hope you are having a lovely holiday. It’s good to have fun once in a while. Tell your mamá you can come and stay with us for a few days if you like. If you need anything, just call. You can both come and stay. You know how much we