1503933547
Authors: Paul Pen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 Paul Pen
Translation copyright © 2016 Simon Bruni
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as
El brillo de las luciérnagas
by PLAZA & JANES in Spain in 2013.
Translated from Spanish by Simon Bruni.
First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503933545
ISBN-10: 1503933547
Cover design by David Drummond
For my father, who gave me my first insect book.
For my mother, who turned the veil of her wedding dress into a butterfly net.
CONTENTS
SIX YEARS EARLIER
1
On the night I asked my father the question, my family had been five years in the basement. Five years since the fire. It hadn’t been quite so long for me. I was born just after they went down there.
“Why can’t we go out?”
Dad amended the wall calendar and sat at the table, the large one we had in the main space, where living room, kitchen, and dining room merged.
“What would you want to go out for?” he replied. “All your family’s here.”
Mom lowered her head, her chin touching her chest. I think she also shut her eyes. There wasn’t much light down there, just the bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes I thought of them as suicide victims, glass bodies hanged and swinging from a cable.
“Come here, son.” Dad pushed his chair back and slapped his knee a couple of times. I walked over to him, dragging my feet. I could feel the cold of the floor through a hole in the heel of my pajamas. I still wore the type with feet. Dad took hold of me under the armpits, lifted me up, and sat me on his lap. As I often did in the early days down in the basement, I held my hand to his face. I liked the feel of his burned skin. From his left eye to the corner of his mouth, the irregular folds of his deformed features were appealing to a child’s touch.
“Stop it,” he complained, lowering my arm. “I want you to look around you. At your family.” My mother, brother, and grandma turned to me. Everyone except my sister, who was looking away.
“And the one who’s not facing you,” said my father, “she’s part of this family, too.” The white mask turned on its neck then, and fixed its eyes on me.
“See them?” Dad asked. “Them, you, and me, we’re all we need. There’s nothing worthwhile up there. Do you remember when your mother splashed you with hot oil when she was cooking?”
It had happened a few weeks earlier, while Mom was making breakfast. The darkness of the basement and the shadows that danced around, distorting reality with each gentle sway of the lightbulbs, made some tasks difficult. The morning she splashed me with oil, I’d gotten between her legs and made her trip. It was actually my fault.
“Do you remember how much the blister hurt? The one you had here?” my father went on. He opened my hand to examine the back of it. He pointed at the exact place where the blister had been. There was no trace of it anymore.
“You’re covered in drool. When’re you going to stop sucking your fingers?” He barely moved his head, but looked at my mother for a second.
“Do you remember how much that little bubble of liquid hurt?” he asked again, pinching the back of my hand. “Well, the world up top is made of bubbles like that. But not little ones like yours.”
He pinched harder with his fingers, making it hurt as if the blister had grown back again.
“Up there, outside, the bubbles are a hundred times bigger. You wouldn’t be able to stand the pain.” He began twisting with his fingers. “Pain that would finish you off as soon as you set foot outside this basement.”
I opened my mouth but said nothing. I was stopped by the pain on the back of my hand, much worse than I’d felt from the blister when it was still there, and the pain in my wrist, which my dad wasn’t aware he was crushing. I remember the snotty sound in my throat, the dampness of my cheeks.
“Stop, please.” It was Mom who said it, her voice barely a whisper. Dad let go. The pain lasted a while longer.
“See how you don’t want to leave this place? If you can barely stand that, what would happen to you out there?” He stroked my wrist and kissed the spot where the blister had been, reddened again by the pinch. “There, there, little soldier, it’s not so bad. Daddy doesn’t want to hurt you, he just wants you to understand. You have to learn that this is the best place you could be. The best place in the world. Do you want to touch my face?”
He moved my hand to his scars and let me stroke them. He knew I liked it. He managed to calm me down. I used to linger on a line of hard hair that sprouted from a fold across his cheek, a place where Dad couldn’t shave. It was like a scar of hair. I liked running my fingertips down it.
“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head and moving my fingers away, “who said you can’t go out?”
My grandmother snatched her hands back from the table. I saw them disappear underneath. Something changed in the posture of my siblings, too. They straightened up, their backs rigid. Mom kept her head bowed.
“The door’s there,” my father continued, gesturing at it. With the other hand he grabbed my head and forced me to look at it. “It’s a few steps away. And it’s open. It’s always been open. Who told you otherwise?”
In silence, he looked around the table.
“Was it your mother? Your brother or sister? Was it her?” He tipped his chin at my sister. “She likes to talk too much. Because I don’t think it would have been Grandma, she knows full well the door’s always open.”
My father grabbed me under the armpits once more to lower me from his knees and leave me standing on the ground. I felt the chill of the tiles.
“Come on.” He gave me a slap on the backside. “Go over to the door, see for yourself.”
I wanted to look at my mother, but Dad held my head and made me look straight ahead.
“Go on, leave if you want.” The second slap on the buttocks was harder, so that I had to take a step forward to stop myself from falling. “Open that door and go. That’s what you want, isn’t it? So do it. Leave and forget about us. We’d rather stay here.”
Behind me I heard a chair scrape along the floor, as if someone was about to get up. But nobody did. I took another step. The basement smelled of carrot. I loved that smell. It was the smell of night. The only thing that told me it was day or night was the patch of sun that went from one side of the living room floor to the other, and seeped through some crack in the ceiling. The smell of carrot always came when the patch disappeared. If I left the basement I would never have Mom’s carrot soup again. An unexpected feeling of loss stopped me in my tracks. I had an urge to return to Dad’s lap and scratch my fingers down his hair scar.
“Are you still there?” he yelled. “Come on, run to the door. Open it and go. Leave this basement if you’re so keen to know what’s out there.”
I walked toward the door without stopping. I’d never been so close to it. A door loses its meaning if you don’t ever go through it. It becomes a wall. Standing in front of it, I began to suck my fingers. I was sweating. I observed everyone at the table. Mom had looked up again. There was a glisten in her eyes now. Dad was sitting with his legs open, turning in his chair. He raised a hand and waved me good-bye.
Dribble was running down my forearm. I looked at the door again. I took my fingers out of my mouth and reached up to the handle, several inches above my head. The first time I tried to grab it, the spit made my hand slip off. I dried my fingers on my pajama legs and held my breath so I couldn’t smell Mom’s carrot soup, and to fill the void I felt in my stomach with air.
I tried again.
This time I managed to grip the handle.
THE PRESENT
2
There were two windows in the basement. One at the end of the hall and another in the kitchen. On the other side of them there were just bars, and after that, another wall. When I was ten years old, if I pushed hard and put up with the pain in my shoulder, I could stick my arm through two of the bars and, with my middle finger, touch that wall. It was just more concrete. It was the same at both windows. It was as if the basement was nothing more than a box inside another bigger box. Once, I positioned the mirror from the bathroom in the space between the bars and the wall outside. All it reflected was more darkness. Another black ceiling. A box inside another box. Sometimes I would stick my face between the bars to stare at the blackness that for me was the outside world. I liked to do it because the draft of air caressed my face. Air that had a different smell from anything there was in the basement.
“Can’t you hear your sister screaming?” my father said to me the day the baby was born. “We need you in the kitchen. And close the window. Now.”
He opened the door to his room with the key he always kept hanging from his neck. It immediately closed behind me. I blinked several times to moisten my eyes. They were dry from the draft. Then I heard my sister. I must have been totally absorbed by the breeze from outside not to hear those screams. They seemed to come not from the throat, but from the stomach. From somewhere deep inside the body. The door opened again, and this time my father grabbed me by the arm. He dragged me down the hall to the living room.
“Stand there,” he said. “Hold that leg.”
My sister was lying on the table, naked from the waist down. I recognized the sheets from her bed under her. Mom was sitting where her head was, squeezing her daughter’s fist in her hands. My sister was looking down at her crotch through the mask, all white and expressionless. Just three holes showed her eyes and mouth. My brother, clinging on to one of her legs, was also peering at whatever was happening in my sister’s groin. My grandmother was boiling water in two big pots. She held a hand over the stove plates to feel how hot they were. Dad went to her and gave her two towels.