August October Read online

  Contents

  COVER

  AUGUST, OCTOBER

  COPYRIGHT

  PART ONE MEMORY OF AUGUST

  PART TWO MEMORY OF OCTOBER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Hispabooks Publishing, S. L.

  Madrid, Spain

  www.hispabooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing by the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Copyright © 2010 by Andrés Barba

  Originally published in Spain as Agosto, Octubre by Anagrama, 2010

  First published in English by Hispabooks, 2015

  English translation copyright © by Lisa Dillman

  Design © simonpates - www.patesy.com

  ISBN 978-84-943658-1-2 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-84-943658-2-9 (ebook)

  Legal Deposit: M-17220-2015

  AUGUST, OCTOBER

  The author would like to express his gratitude for the grant received from the HALMA network during the editing phase of this novel, and to thank to the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Cervantes Institute, the Het Beschrijf literary society in Brussels, and the Translators’ House of the Hungarian Ministry of Culture.

  For Eduardo Lostao

  PART ONE

  MEMORY OF AUGUST

  It would start on the way from the beach to the house, walking back with his parents and his little sister. Arousal that was more like discomfort than pleasure. He’d take off his bathing suit and masturbate in the bathroom before showering, conjuring up vague images he’d seen on the beach a few minutes earlier or on the walkway that led from the beach to the house his parents had rented for the summer, images that were almost abstract, of girls his age or a little older, sixteen or seventeen. Rather than any one specific body, what he saw when he closed his eyes and began touching himself was an indistinct amalgam of imaginary bodies whose contours were, at the same time, somehow disturbingly concrete. The crease of a girl’s hips when she sat, for example, or the slope of breasts in profile, or those strange, circular, dimple-like indentations at the base of a back. He didn’t feel attracted to those things, it was more an enthralled sort of revulsion, as if the images somehow merited awe and yet were simultaneously preposterous. Sometimes he actually found it difficult to recall specific bodies he’d just seen, or he could recall them but not tell them apart. He’d have the whitewashed image of a girl in a bikini walking along the water’s edge as if her hip hurt with each step, or a girl’s back, a skinny back, like that of a sickly old man, or a pair of arms crossed over a chest and an almost amphibian whiteness, full of little, blue veins. He wasn’t even thinking about them, exactly, when he masturbated. It felt more like being underwater, like something abating and then welling up, and then receding without having been even remotely resolved. He’d breathe in and out, in and out. Then wipe himself off with toilet paper, wipe the floor, look in the mirror.

  “You’ve changed so much this year,” Aunt Eli had said the minute she saw him that summer. “You’ve become a man all of a sudden.”

  He’d become a man all of a sudden. In the past six months he’d had such a growth spurt that half his wardrobe no longer fit. His father attributed it to the fact that he’d gotten involved in sports, and he himself was so fascinated by the transformation that ever since his father had made that comment, he’d redoubled his interest in physical activity. His face had grown sharper, his lips had stopped being so fleshy and gotten thinner—like his mother’s—his cheekbones protruded, too, as did his chin, which, together with his round, childlike eyes, gave his face a frightened-boy look. He was aware of this effect and so, over the course of that year, had developed the nervous habit of narrowing his eyes when spoken to, as though displeased or mulling something over. His arms had gotten longer, and his legs, but exercise had made them sinewy. He was proud of his arms, but less so his legs, since they were still thin and in all likelihood—at least judging by his father’s anatomy—would remain that way for the rest of his life. His chest seemed stuck in an inexplicable, childlike state despite all the exercise, a bit sunken in. Taller than average, he was wiry, though not noticeably so. He knew he wasn’t objectively good-looking but also knew that his solemnity and silent demeanor made him seem attractive. Plus, that year he’d become a strong person. Strong in a way that perhaps not even he had imagined he ever would be. He’d borne his scrawny childhood and adolescence like some sort of Biblical plague. In the same way an ugly girl looks in the mirror and thinks crossly this is not me, he had looked in the mirror for years and felt a sort of furious discord between what he was and what he saw. A month after turning fourteen, he realized, astonished, how much he’d changed, and he felt as if a dull fury were subsiding, as if some nebulous clot had dissolved, and he clenched his j aw.

  “And that’s not all,” his mother said. “If you could see how organized he’s become . . .”

  Aunt Eli had given him a babyish cuddle and a noisy smack, provoking his instant displeasure. Order and cleanliness were actually like overspill from his physical change. He’d become methodical and meticulous, as if he felt the need to follow a step-by-step plan to the letter.

  “I don’t know what happened to him. You know how messy he used to be, and then from one day to the next . . .”

  He hated that about his mother, the relentless habit she had of talking about him to other people as if he weren’t there, and the fact that she was doing it with Aunt Eli irked him especially. Maybe it was his mother’s uncanny ability to make him revert into a five-year-old with a single look, or maybe it was the objective shame of someone feeling constantly on the verge of being exposed that drove him crazy. Aunt Eli sat down beside him and scooted in close. He felt her enormous breasts spilling over his shoulder, and this time he couldn’t help but be disgusted. He pulled away, grimacing involuntarily. Not even in illness had she been able to lose weight, but she had become very pale, and the result was that rather than a real person, she now resembled an enormous wax figure, white and doughy.

  “So, you’re a young man now, huh? Don’t even want to cuddle. Or you do, but not with your Aunt Eli . . .”

  “I’m going to my room,” he said, bouncing up like a spring, and before he’d even managed to leave the room, he heard his mother offering feeble excuses and Aunt Eli empathizing.

  “Oh, it’s normal, dear . . .”

  Each summer they rented a different house, and that summer’s was the nicest one they’d had in a long time, an old, two-story bungalow very close to the beach. It had four bedrooms upstairs—which meant that for the first time he didn’t have to share a room with his sister for the summer—and a huge, wrap-around balcony with bamboo blinds that could be rolled up with little cords and then tied to the balcony’s supporting columns. When they walked in the first day, it was all he could do to keep from shouting in glee. It looked like an African house, an explorer’s refuge. The first floor was open-plan, designed the way houses on the estuary often are, on stilts to avoid flooding. They were old fishermen’s quarters that had been renovated into luxury vacation homes for city folks—carefully restored inside, though the decorators had cleverly preserved some of the “original charming inconveniences” (Mamá). They spent the first few days enjoying the house with almost angst-ridden delight. Deep down they were a childish family. Just as some families were melancholy, or happy, or destructive, theirs was a childish family. They got overexcited at the drop of a hat, then grew sad for no reason. They needed swift kicks for motivation, especially in the summer, and then felt their joy simply wither and rushed on, with bold and terrifying logic, to another form of entertainment, as if the whole point of summer were to flee the tedium of their previous hobbies. They were as disorderly in the summertime as they were orderly in the winter. The rest of the year, his father ran a banking firm, his mother, a pharmacy in the city center, and he and his sister went to school; they were reasonable and hardworking, not overly emotional, and a bit reclusive, but there was a healthy air of calm at home. Summer, though, was the time for anarchy. They all got a little impatient, a little selfish, were lively and happy most of the time, but also more prone to disappointment and tantrums. They fought more, but also confided in each other more and enjoyed spending time together. Summer was also the season of every moment of genuinely transfixed joy he could recall, of dinners when all four of them would suddenly fall silent as if something were bubbling up inside them, or propelling them forward in life, their voices growing deep and calm. He’d always yearned for summer with real excitement, and it seemed strange to him that it had been different that year. The month before their trip, for the first time in years, his father brought up the possibility of going someplace new for their summer vacation. The issue was discussed at dinner over the course of a couple of weeks, but then Aunt Eli got sick and that was the end of that—they’d go the same place as always. He felt affronted more than anything by the fact that no one had asked his opinion, but the affront quickly morphed into a strange and still-new feeling, a sort of disillusionment with his parents, a resentful disappointment; they struck him as simpletons, as doormats. Then came a very bitter dinner, two weeks before they were to leave, during which they fought intensely. Their argument lasted several minutes, growing progressively louder, and culminating in his calling Aunt Eli “a sick cow.” He knew that
what had provoked his insult wasn’t animosity toward his aunt—whom he really did love sincerely—but a sort of impetuous urge; the desire to call Aunt Eli a sick cow right in the middle of a family dispute was too new and compelling to go unheeded. In a fraction of a second, fleeting and almost irresistible thoughts darted through his mind, and in the end he was unable to resist the impulse to see what result a comment like that would have. More than insulting Aunt Eli, he wanted to incite the aftermath of the insult. He half-stood, hands on the table, and said, “I’m not spending my summer taking care of some sick cow.”

  He remembered the words flowing from his mouth like liquid, something thick yet fluid. He might have been shocked at how easy it was. He wanted to be risky, to jeopardize everything. His father banged a sonorous fist down on the table, and he himself marched out of the dining room. The conclusion was even sorrier. His mother came into his room, acting as a mediator, and asked with concern why he’d said that, begged him to apologize to his father. He remembered that he’d been sitting on his bed and his mother had sat down beside him and stroked his neck, and that without wanting to, he’d blushed. He got up and returned to the dining room, apologized without looking his father in the eyes and without knowing whether he felt humiliated or just tense, and when he looked up he saw them both—his father still glowering at him, his mother standing beside him, looking startled. He wasn’t sure why, but he stopped seeing them, then, as he’d seen them his whole life, they were no longer symbols of authority, were no longer bathed in the benevolent glow of childhood, no longer superior beings; they, too, had been strangely degraded somehow. It was as though he’d discovered in them phony, unsophisticated attributes. They looked, there in the harsh light of normality, like a couple of milksops, full of fear or repressed passions.

  The fight was soon forgotten, and that also disappointed him a bit; he’d become stubborn that year. They were in good moods on the train ride down, and when they arrived at the house they’d rented, their happiness made them relaxed and chatty for a few days, and then the troubling phase set in. They’d go to the beach in the morning, and on their way back to the house for lunch, he’d scan the pine trees lining the walkway, the dunes, the bodies of girls his age and of older women.

  He went for a run on the beach almost every day. He loved running by the sea. At times he felt his body was a machine over which he had some sort of total control; it was a way to release the shame he was overcome by again and again and for no reason. When he got back to his parents’ beach umbrella, he’d toss his T-shirt down and go in the water, by the rocks where his mother and sister hunted for crabs. On their fifth day of vacation, when he came back from his run, he dove into the water as he did every day and felt a strange temptation—he’d plunged in without taking a big breath first, but once underwater he decided to swim to a rock about ten feet below the surface, where he saw something that looked like coral. He took two or three erratic strokes, but then halfway down he reached out for the side of the rock and grabbed hold of it. And once there, he decided to hold his breath for as long as he could. The rock was rough and black, and when he lodged his shoulder beneath its ledge to keep himself from floating back to the surface, he found he had almost no air left and knew he couldn’t last more than three or four seconds. And then he felt as if something were breaking—some resistance maybe, or fear—and it occurred to him that he could die there, and the idea didn’t frighten him in the slightest. He recalled the muffled, silent sound of the water during those seconds, and that he’d kept his eyes open. The seafloor, which must have been about thirty feet down and had first looked clear, turned a bit blurry. Looking up he saw the water’s luminous surface. He had almost no air left, and it looked staggeringly beautiful, as if it had turned into impenetrable glass. Then he felt like the water was getting thicker, thick as oil, and darker, too. Having surpassed what he thought was the limit of his resistance, he was flooded with a strange, mysterious sense of relief, as though his blood had reoxygenated. How much time had elapsed? He had no way of knowing, but that brief euphoria was followed by an immediate weakness and the feeling that everything was about to turn white, that the darkness of the seafloor would light up with a sinister glow. He wrenched his shoulder from beneath the rock ledge and with the last of his strength took a single stroke toward the surface. When he burst through the water, he gulped the air furiously, not knowing whether what filled his chest was pleasure or pain, and realized he was going to lose consciousness. He didn’t know how he managed to get back to the top of the rock. He fainted there. The next thing he remembered was being at the Red Cross clinic, and when he opened his eyes, he saw his father standing beside him.

  “You gave us a real scare,” he said.

  His father’s face was contorted, as though he’d had an unthinkable fright. He was very pale, and when he stroked his face—an act he began with confidence and then became embarrassed by for some reason—he could feel his hand trembling.

  “Your mother and sister are outside. Everything’s OK. It’s a good thing this fellow here saw you.”

  “Manuel,” said an impressively athletic young man who looked about thirty, standing beside his father with a satisfied expression.

  “Manuel, yes, I’m sorry.”

  Manuel seemed to feel the need to make some sort of statement, and since no one thanked him, he did it himself, mentally, and then answered aloud.

  “It was nothing. What matters is that you’re OK.”

  That episode was followed by a melancholy afternoon. What had happened? A thing with no name. His breathing was a bit labored, and he felt weak. Anita was solicitous, as if she were the older sibling for a day and he the younger one. He lay in the hammock on the balcony and watched her come and go, asking every fifteen minutes if he wanted a glass of water or anything. She was wearing a red summer dress from which her pudgy little legs stuck out like two reeds. It was almost heartbreaking. For several hours he seemed to have lost the ability to have normal emotions proceed one after the other. He felt drowsy but had sudden fits of unease, or anguish, he couldn’t pay attention to anything and yet there was a sort of constant thought or sound or music there, something almost intangible, a sort of fear assaulting him from outside, fear of the thing he’d almost done and that he still didn’t fully understand.

  His parents spent all evening encouraging him to go to the beach club the next day to see if any of his friends from previous summers had arrived yet. They seemed unconvinced that what had happened on the beach had simply been an accident, especially his father, and it was as though they’d conspired to ensure he wouldn’t be on his own for even a minute.

  “We can both go tomorrow, together, if you want,” he said.

  And then his mother, “But what happened, exactly? You suddenly got dizzy, that’s it? Maybe we should take you to the doctor, you’ve never had dizzy spells in your life!”

  And Anita’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears; she’d been holding them in all through lunch, staring at him with strange, dreamlike intensity, and when his mother brought up the doctor, her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry convulsively, as if someone were shaking her body, making it jerk. She took a tiny step toward him, longing to be touched, but it was her mother who hugged her.

  “It’s all over now, silly. Why would you cry now? Can’t you see your brother’s fine?”

  But he was the only one who seemed to realize how much it bothered Anita to be called silly, how her forehead scrunched up in something that wasn’t pain, or a release of tension, but wounded pride, pure and simple—diminutive pride, wounded, in that diminutive body.

  “I’m not silly,” she said.

  Anita.

  Their summers had a strangeness to them, a tendency to be compartmentalized, filled with identical activities, there was a sort of routine to their relaxation into which new and extravagant plans were sometimes introduced (“How would you like to try water skiing?”—Papá), white noise, bedrooms they’d never again inhabit but which for that one month took on all the easy-going languor of intimacy, almost like a whisper, so it was as though they’d already been in those exact same circumstances countless times, and yet they were entirely new, the pine trees looking different depending on the view from the house, and also the dunes that hid their view of the shore from the balcony; only occasionally did their wintertime lives occur to them at all, and even then it was a struggle to recall them. Sometimes the sensation of summertime was purely auditory—an inflection in the air that made them breathe a certain way, slower—or it was the easy lethargy of their movements at mealtimes, as though they couldn’t be bothered to complete any of their gestures. If he stopped to consider all the summers of his life and compared them to that one, he could immediately see that there was a before and after with regard to the episode at the beach. Up until that day, that particular summer hadn’t seemed much different from the others; afterward, it had taken on unprecedented velocity.