Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras Page A

looks just like a huge frog, they even smell the same. You’re lucky you have a big brother to explain all this stuff to you.’
    As a rule, reality and all its trappings are more improbable than any fiction. What writer would have dreamed up the Komodo dragon, or tonsils or the weird way we go about reproducing? What imagination could have thought of having coral reefs made by tiny animals excreting calcium from their bodies? Who would have the nerve to create a world like ours, ruled over by the descendants of toads and frogs and salamanders and newts?
    During the digging and the burial, the Midget said nothing; he listened to what I was saying, a gleam of suspicion in his eyes. But in the end, something I said must have got through to him, because after we had levelled off the grave, he placed stones on the little mound and asked me if toads go to heaven too.

28
A PEACEABLE INTERREGNUM
    The weekend slipped by peacefully. An outsider watching us would merely have witnessed the Vicente family in blissful
dolce far niente
, making the most of the sunshine, the grounds, the swimming pool and enjoying the gastronomic holy trinity of the Argentine middle class:
asados
(barbecued meat), pasta (store bought, obviously, since mamá never set foot in the kitchen) and
facturas
(pastries).
    A more attentive eye would probably have noticed that mamá and papá left the
quinta
with bizarre frequency for periods of no more than fifteen minutes, sometimes in the Citroën, sometimes on foot, but never together. (When they needed to phone someone, it was safer to use a payphone rather than the phone in the
quinta
.) And if this attentive eye were accompanied by a keen ear, it might decide that the Vicente family’s habit of constantly asking each other blatantly obvious questions (What’s your name? When were you born? What are your parents’ names? What’s your brother’s name?) was some private family game whose rules were incomprehensible to the general public.
    Of the events that took place during those days, a few deserve to be recorded; for example, Papá started to grow a moustache. After three days he had a perceptible shadow on his upper lip which, to me and the Midget, looked like a respectable moustache, but mamásaid it looked like papá had been drinking the Midget’s Nesquik and forgotten to wipe his mouth. On Sunday morning, the three men of the house stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Papá David declared himself satisfied with his moustache and, taking a pair of scissors, began to shape it. Harry, his first-born, bewailed his own smooth face and declared his desire to grow a thin moustache in the style of Mandrake the magician as soon as possible. Simón, the younger son, pronounced himself perfectly content with his freshfaced, clean-shaven appearance, in keeping with his television idol, Simon Templar, and asked why Templar was the only saint he’d ever seen who didn’t have a beard or a moustache.
    There had been three games of Risk, the results of which require no comment. I had time to reread the book about Houdini and to come up with some ideas about my future, which I’ll talk about later.
    The Vicente family’s visit to the local church for midday mass was an event in itself. As far as I could remember, I had never been in a church in my life, except for baptisms and weddings. Consequently I knew nothing whatever of the peculiar rites of the Catholic mass. Worse still, what might have been an adventure became a sort of torture as soon as we started to get ready. Mamá had got it into her head that the Vicente family was very devout, so she had us repeat the words of the Our Father, the Creed and the Hail Mary both in the
quinta
and again in the car, because as soon as we got to the church we had to be able to pretend to follow the ceremony with the confidence of committed believers.
    Both my parents had been raised Catholic and both, in time, had