after him. A hammock had been slung between a couple of the trees, and he subsided into it, gun on his stomach, the other hand hanging down. He stroked the head of one of the dogs, until eventually his hand hung slack as a bunch of bananas. His snoring rang out as the million-starred sky looked on blithely, quite indifferent to terrestrial concerns. Charly went back into the house. My husband put out the lamp and sat a little while longer. One by one the crickets started up again, until the night was full of their song once more.
The next morning, straight from the shower, his wet hair swept back, Franio put on an exaggerated air of innocence. Helping himself to a third cup of coffee, he popped a succession of chipá rolls into his mouth and cracked jokes, most of which were about Paraguayan women cuckolding their men. My husband sat at the table and listened. Franio was due to leave shortly for Asunción in his private jet: he was the pilot. My husband needed to go to the city as well but said nothing. He would rather the seven-hour journey in the back of the milk truck than be shut in a cockpit with his father-in-law. Charly wasn’t there to say goodbye; he had gone out riding early.
The situation soon turned sour. Franio had seen the obvious: they were too soft, and too hippyish, to keep the place in check. They also began to squabble, and Charly getting high on a daily basis didn’t help. My husband threw in the towel at the end of the year and went back to Buenos Aires. Cecilia went to Asunción. Charly stayed on at La Serena, and Franio began to visit more frequently, which troubled my husband. He called Charly up to convince him to come back too, but he said he’d grown to like it there. Like the aguará guazú, he had found somewhere in the undergrowth to hide, a place where he and his demons could have it out.
A year after they had separated, and nearly ten years after they first met, Cecilia rang my husband from Asunción. Franio had died a month before, she said, and she was worried about her brother. He had been found wandering around naked on the mountainside a few days after the death, and it was now ten days since she’d heard from him. “Even in his really bad periods, he always calls every two or three days.” She said she would have asked the local farmers, but she was concerned that people would start to talk. Would he go, please? She begged him; the family would cover his costs.
My husband arrived at La Serena at night. The beams of the car headlights swung across oranges rotting on the branches. Weeds were growing up between the veranda flagstones, and the jungle seemed poised, ready to take back this strip of land that men had toiled so long to clear. The only people left were a handful of locals; he found them perched in the palm trees in the moonlight, cutting down the leaves they used to thatch their huts. Nobody had seen anyone come out of the main house for days, but neither had they felt much like going inside. My husband crossed the veranda and pushed open the door. It was the same inside as when he had left: the smell of whiskey and ash, the armchair decorated with cigarette burns, and the Sony cassette player positioned next to the fireplace. He called out, and got no answer, though when he strained to listen he could make out a low wheezing sound somewhere inside the house. He established that it was coming from the main bedroom, the door to which he found ajar. Looking in, he found Charly sitting on the stripped wooden floor, the strings of his guitar wrapped around his neck, chewing on something. Moving closer, my husband saw cassette tapes scattered around, the tape unspooled: this was what Charly was chewing. My husband looked into his eyes. They sparkled but at the same time looked vacant, like those of a stuffed animal.
Charly was taken to Asunción and committed. For the next few years he was in and out of various rest clinics.
Every now and then the phone will ring in the middle of the night. I happened to be awake the last time it did, having been trying to get comfortable in bed for hours, my mind buzzing, and my bladder, with the baby pushing on it, forcing me to make several trips to the toilet; the due date was a few weeks away. My husband opened his eyes and immediately shook his head. He knew who it would be. I picked up, and was greeted by Charly’s slurred voice. I had only ever heard it at this hour; perhaps that accounts for it seeming so distinctive. Music was playing in the background.
“I’m listening to the record that shithead next to you made. I know he’s there, and I know he’s ignoring my calls. Know what, though?” He laughed. “I don’t care if he doesn’t want to speak to me.”
“He’s fast asleep, Charly. Bombs could be going off.”
I’d usually cut the conversation short, always feeling like an intruder in their relationship, but now a nighttime confidant was exactly what I needed. I’d never met Charly in person, we were two voices in the night: perfect for the speaking of truths.
“You know you married a fucking madman, right? I always told him he had a screw loose.”
I smiled. Charly knew my husband in ways I didn’t. He started talking about when they were young, the time they spent in Paso Curuzú, and there was something comforting in hearing it; no bitterness in his voice. Then, suddenly, he said he had to go:
“Doubtless you won’t believe me, but someone here needs the phone.”
He was right, I didn’t believe him. A vague stab at politeness as he went to hang up, leaving a woman alone with her insomnia. It was then that he asked:
“Things okay there?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’re pregnant.”
I tried to sound happy, radiant even, like the women in magazines. But I wasn’t fooling Charly. Eventually I gave in:
“I don’t know, Charly. I’ve been feeling like I might not be ready.”
Then, out of the oceanic night, I heard him sigh and say “Little lady”—final proof that he didn’t know me, because truly I was far from little. But I liked the way he said it, and decided not to correct him. And, as though he knew, he said it again:
“Little lady . . . None of us is ever prepared for anything. That’s what’s so funny, right?”
He laughed to himself, a flash of teeth in the darkness.
“What do I know, but anyway that’s how it seemed to me then.”
He didn’t say when he was referring to, or where, but something told me he meant during his time in the jungle. He hung up, and I sat thinking about what he’d said. His meaning wasn’t entirely clear, a little like if you ever read your horoscope or look at a fortune cookie, but it didn’t matter, he had still given me a lift. As the first rays of sunlight began to filter through the shutters, and with the receiver resting on my belly, I murmured, “Thank you, Charly.” It was then, hearing myself speak, that I remembered this was the catchphrase of the three heroines in my favorite TV series as a child. I’d tell him, I thought, the next time he called. Then again, I wasn’t sure if Charly would know what I was talking about, being that much older than me. A different generation entirely.
You spent the first half of your life rich, the second poor. Not in penury, but always needing to be careful, always forgoing possible little treats, and often being forced to borrow when unanticipated costs arose. Hence the Silver Spoon syndrome that has always marked you out: the indestructible sensation that the money will come from somewhere. It isn’t that you delude yourself into thinking the coffers are overflowing, rather it’s like an unshakable inner security—yet another illusion, of course, only in your case a very convincing one. You belong to a class generations deep in the assumption that there will be a hot meal on the table every night. A blessing, very much so, but also something of a curse: never experiencing hunger has made you idle. (The reverse happens with rich people who grew up poor; it is a commonplace that the cold and the constant sensation of there never quite being enough enter a person’s bones, like a never-ending toothache.) You have the ability to get by on rice for long periods, partly because bad fortune never seems set to last; a better time is sure to come. And you do always try to steer clear of another of the pathologies that attends comfortable upbringings: Poor Little Rich Girl syndrome. That, to you, is not to be entertained.
Yeats