The Skating Rink Read Online Free PDF Page A

who didn’t live on the site. The other two, Rosa and
Azucena, who came from the outskirts of Barcelona, slept in a two-room family
tent, next to the main shower block. They were widowed sisters, and topped up
their wages with cleaning jobs for an agency that rented out apartments. That
was their first year at Stella Maris; the year before they had worked for
another campground in Z, which had fired them because, with the various jobs
they were doing, they couldn’t be relied on to be there when something urgent
came up. Although they both worked an average of fifteen hours a day, they still
found time to have a few drinks at night, by the light of a butane lamp, sitting
on plastic chairs by the front door of their tent, brushing away the mosquitoes
and chatting about this and that. Mainly about how filthy human beings are.
Their nightly debriefings always came around to shit, in its various forms, as
if it was a language they were struggling to decipher. Talking with them I
learned that people shat in the showers, on the floors, on either side of the
toilet bowl, and even on its edges, which is no mean feat, requiring a
considerable degree of balance and skill. People used shit to write on the doors
and to foul the hand basins. Shit that had to be shat and then shifted to
symbolic and prominent places: the mirror, the fire extinguisher, the faucets.
Shit gathered and daubed to make animal forms (giraffes, elephants, Mickey
Mouse), or the letters of soccer graffiti, or bodily organs (eyes, hearts,
dicks). For the sisters, the supreme offense was that it happened in the women’s
bathroom too, though not as often, and always with certain tell-tale features
suggesting that a single culprit was responsible for those outrages. A “filthy
delinquent” they were determined to hunt down. So they joined forces with Miriam
and mounted a discreet stake-out, based on the dull and stubborn process of
elimination. That is, they kept a close eye on who was using the bathroom, and
went in straight after to check on the state of the place. That was how they
found out that the fecal disgraces occurred at a certain time of night, and the
principal suspect turned out to be one of the two women I used see on the
terrace of the bar. Rosa and Azucena complained to the receptionists and spoke
to El Carajillo, who told me, and asked if I might have a word with the woman in
question, politely, without offending her, just to see what I could do. Not a
simple mission, as I’m sure you’ll understand. That night I waited on the
terrace until everyone had gone. As usual, the two women were the last to leave;
they were sitting on the far side, opposite my table, half hidden, under an
enormous tree, whose roots had broken up the cement. What are those trees
called? Plane trees? Stone pines? I don’t know. I went over to the woman with a
glass in one hand and my watchman’s flashlight in the other. I got within a yard
of their table before they showed any sign of having noticed my presence. I
asked if I could sit down with them. The old woman chuckled and said, Of course,
be our guest, cutie-locks. Both of them had clean hands. Both seemed to be
enjoying the cool of the night. I don’t know what I came out with. Some
nonsense. They were enveloped and protected by a curious air of dignity. The
young woman was silent and plunged in darkness. But the old woman was up for a
chat, and she was the color of the flaking, crumbling moon. What did we talk
about that first time? I can’t remember. Even a minute after leaving them, I
wouldn’t have been able to remember. All I can recall, but these two things I do
recall with the utmost clarity, are the old woman’s laughter and the young
woman’s flat eyes. Flat: as if she was looking inwards? Maybe. As if she was
giving her eyes a rest? Maybe. Maybe. And meanwhile the old woman kept talking
and smiling, speaking enigmatically, as if in code, as if everything there, the
trees, the irregular surface of the