The Happy City Read online

  When his father had finished washing, it was his turn. His mother filled the bath, undressed him, and put him into the water. Wrapped in a towel, he looked at himself in a large mirror that covered half the wall, while his mother showed him two new T-shirts and some orthopedic-looking sandals with very wide straps. He had to roll up the bottoms of the pants—a pair of jeans that were worn out at the knees, passed down from his brother—so they wouldn’t trip him. The whole family was waiting around the kitchen table, and there was a new person who was introduced as his step-grandmother, of whom Chi-Huei had never received any photos. His step-grandmother was carrying a dish in which big pieces of chicken were swimming in oyster sauce, and after placing it on the table, she came over to say hello to him. He stayed in the doorway, his mother behind him gently nudging him with her knee to get him to cross the threshold. He looked at the old woman’s white legs sticking out from beneath a gray skirt, legs noticeably thick in comparison to her torso, which was flat-chested and skeletal.

  “Look how big you are!” his step-grandmother said, as if she had had something to compare him to before. “So handsome! So tall! And so like your grandfather!”

  And Chi-Huei couldn’t remember the old woman ever talking about a step-grandmother, but it was possible he hadn’t been paying attention or that the old woman had mentioned her in passing; although, on the other hand, the old woman didn’t usually speak to him about his family in Spain that much and instead would just say how he was going to learn and play and work “lots” over there when he was older, and how he was going to love his parents and his brother “lots”. This “lots” that the old woman used in order to talk to him about what awaited him had always meant something vaguely synonymous with “better,” in likewise vague contrast to how little they lived on, or perhaps what little happened to them. When Chi-Huei asked her, “What about you, why don’t you come?” she replied, as if the question were an impertinent remark, “Me? I’ve got nothing to do now, and even less over there. There’s nothing left for me now.”The old woman alleged this nothingness into which she was settled, a nothingness that was nevertheless full of chores that didn’t leave her a moment’s peace until nightfall and was the opposite of the “lots” that awaited Chi-Huei from the moment he went to live in Spain. From this he had set up oppositions in order to construct his own picture of it all, which was ultimately also nothing—pure smoke, pure projections—since he had been able to imagine that “lots” however he liked; and as for that nothingness full of chores for herself and him in which the old woman was settled, he understood only the literal part (he, for whom it was still possible to go and make a den underneath a table). Perhaps the literal was the only thing there was to understand, although when the old woman said “I’ve got nothing to do now,” the words resonated like pure mystery.

  They ate the huge pieces of chicken swimming in oyster sauce, as well as vegetables and rice. Their voracious hunger kept them quiet, and there seemed to be a fierce battle between Chi-Huei’s grandfather and his father to grab the tastiest bits of the chicken, while his step-grandmother chided them, as she didn’t like people using their fingers to carry those grotesque, greasy chunks to their plates—the chopsticks were too flimsy, and pieces of chicken were falling onto the table. His step-grandmother waved her fork around every time his father and grandfather’s hands stretched out toward the platter of chicken.

  “There are forks here!” she cried. “Use your forks!”

  After eating, they all hurried out into the street (everyone except his step-grandmother) carrying some buckets of rice Chi-Huei had seen earlier in the kitchen. His grandfather was saying that it had gotten late. The clouds, which just a few hours earlier seemed to have never existed in this bright, clear sky, had now formed a dense layer, bristling with electricity above the buildings and their heads, and the entire atmosphere was fast becoming oppressive. It was August and the streets were practically deserted. Chi-Huei ran holding onto his mother’s hand while she strode along with the bucket of rice over her shoulder, scolding her other son, who was swaying his bucket back and forth as if it were a swing. His brother was claiming that the rice would stay inside the bucket even without the lid because of centrifugal force. Chi-Huei breathed in the mild smell of gutter water without paying too much attention to his brother, for reality was reaching him as if muted. He kept expecting to go back home to his aunt any minute, and neither reason nor imagination played any part in this expectation but rather something undefined that rejoiced in remaining stubbornly out of reach. He had said almost nothing since he’d arrived—merely a few monosyllables, a few obligatory, diffident greetings—and his urgency to return made him run faster than his mother, as if by speeding up he could resolve matters in his favor. Despite this, his rejection of his family and his strange feelings toward them didn’t diminish the curiosity he felt at the new city and the places they were passing through, which now, on foot, looked bigger. Many businesses were closed for vacation and almost all of them had dirty blinds and shabby signs. They crossed a pedestrian avenue that had a few gleaming shops with gaudy window displays. They were taking almost the same route as they had in the car, walking down the same streets, the ones that were very old and shored up, and the ones that had been restored and whose buildings shone in yellow, in orange, in blue … After walking for twenty minutes, they stopped in front of a pair of roll-down metal security doors that his father and grandfather quickly pulled up. Outside the premises, which were crowned with a neon sign that announced “ROAST CHICKENS”, there was a palm tree. His mother plugged in some enormous rotisserie machines filled with semi-cooked birds, flooding the space with a monotonous whine like a fridge or fairground rides heard from a distance. Nudging open a door with his foot, Chi-Huei entered another room, spacious and dark, in which a freezer hummed loudly. He stood quite still in the darkness, observing his family. He vaguely remembered his father’s boasts in the old woman’s house, the infinite number of things he had said there were in the restaurant, and he looked around at the nearly empty space without picking up on the lie, merely noting a sort of error in his expectations to which he attached no further importance, as his attention lay not there but in a tense wait.

  3

  The weeks that followed were all a slow series of preparations. In the mornings he had to learn the alphabet and do writing exercises, and from eight a.m. until midday he would sit opposite his brother, who would supervise his clumsy, half-hearted scribbles while working on math problems and dealing with long sentences. For that long month of August, his grandfather had bought a stack of exercise books for the two boys. During those four agonizing hours when they would sit in the back of the premises, illuminated by the weak light of a single bulb, his brother was under orders to speak to him exclusively in Spanish. Especially at first, his brother would speak to him in Spanish and then repeat the same thing quietly in Chinese when he sensed their grandfather wasn’t near, although the old man did as best he could to keep a close eye on them the whole time.

  “It’s very important for you to be able to get by in the new language by the time you start school so you don’t fall behind with your subjects,” his grandfather told him. “We understand it’s natural for you to be a bit behind until you can speak the language properly, but after that we expect you to get good grades. Everything is harder for us over here, and you can’t afford to drop the ball.”

  Chi-Huei had no idea what his grandfather meant about not being able to afford to drop the ball. The tone these words were spoken in made them simply terrifying. Still, for the first few days, he kept himself busy with his alphabet and writing exercises, but then he began to grow bored, and he remained bored for the rest of those long August mornings as he slowly and monotonously traced out letters, interested only in the meaning of a few obscenities his brother explained to him, which were the words he learned the most easily, along with greetings, since their neighbors and a few customers were always saying “Hello” and “Goodbye” to him. At twelve on the dot they would eat the lunch their step-grandmother brought down from the apartment on a little trolley, sitting at the same sturdy wooden table he and his brother had been at all morning, and from one o’clock onward the place began to fill up with customers, most of whom were coming to take a roast chicken home. With every chicken sold, they included a free portion of special fried rice, which they scooped out of the tubs his mother and step-grandmother had prepared in the apartment. They heated the rice up in a microwave. They hadn’t even dared to buy a stove, because they lacked the proper infrastructure and worried that the neighbors would complain about the strong smell of the oil. All they had were the rotisserie machines—which gave off only a discreet odor—the fridge, the microwave, and two freezers.

  When the few tables were full, his grandfather would make him go and observe the customers so he could immerse himself in the language. “Go over there, but don’t let them see you,” his grandfather would say, giving him a pinch on the arm as if hinting at what would happen if the boy didn’t obey. Chi-Huei would go over and the customers would smile at him and ask him his name and age, and then his grandfather would appear behind him, translating for him and telling him in Spanish what he should reply, and Chi-Huei would respond. Then his grandfather would lead him away, pretending it had been the boy’s silly idea to go over and bother them, and the game would start all over again at the next table. This bizarre trick of making Chi-Huei go up to each table to get people to speak to him and then pretending he had a nosy grandson seemed to amuse his grandfather. He believed that he was getting a little bit more out of the customers this way, to the advantage of his grandson, for whom it was imperative to learn the language as soon as possible; and the fact is that right away, Chi-Huei did start to understand the endless questions he was asked—“What’s your name?” “How old are you?” “Do you go to school?”. Chi-Huei would look enviously over at his brother, who by now had already taken possession of the deserted midday street—cars crossing in front of him, their throbbing engines and air-conditioning giving off even more heat—and when occasionally he managed to slip away from his grandfather, he would play a guessing game with his brother about which of the passers-by would go into their restaurant, which ones would step into a nearby doorway, and which would disappear around the next corner.

  He had established a relationship of mutual understanding with his brother almost immediately. His brother was tall for his age, nervous and skinny, and he had an accent from the north, just like the rest of his family, as before coming to Spain, in that period Chi-Huei couldn’t remember, they had lived in B. Chi-Huei, meanwhile had grown up with the old woman in the south of China on the outskirts of the city of Y., at the base of the mountain G., where they spoke the H. dialect and a thickly-accented Mandarin. This was the language his aunt had always used when she spoke to him and the one they used at school, although the predominant language in the streets, the one his aunt used to talk to her friends and neighbors and also the one Chi-Huei used to speak to Mr. Chao Li before he died, was the H. dialect. The fact that his mother, father, brother and grandfather spoke with an accent from the north meant that, shortly after his arrival, he had started to draw out his words and only got his accent back when he spoke to the old woman on the phone. When he heard the first word his aunt spoke, and without at first being entirely aware of the abrupt change in intonation, he would go back to his old lilt, as that was the sound they understood each other with; even if they said nothing important to one another it was through that curt tone that he entered into true communication with her, communication that was not based on filling the silence with things that had happened, although his aunt did ask him what any other distant relative would have. Nevertheless, everything flowed more simply with her, there was no need for either of them to know a thing about the other; the rhythm in the sound of their voices was enough for them to feel immersed in mutual understanding. In the same way, it was probably the contact with his brother that had contributed to him quickly adopting the accent his whole family spoke with, which he would have ended up speaking anyway, given that he was a child. He could sense himself short-circuiting when, for example, he chatted to his aunt and then carried on using this same accent to speak to his mother, which made him feel strange and become abruptly aware, thanks to a feeling of slight embarrassment, of some sudden inappropriateness, of a subtle variation in his identity. All at once he sounded false and felt ridiculous when he changed, as if inexplicably taking off his clothes in front of everyone and then putting on new ones that didn’t suit him either. That whole first month was like this, until eventually he didn’t have to make any effort at all but simply grew used to changing how he spoke without it throwing him off balance.

  His brother dressed in baggy, knee-length shorts, black T-shirts, and sneakers and was the only member of the family who didn’t seem to be affected by Chi-Huei’s presence. When he was with him, Chi-Huei was unaware of anything abnormal or peculiar about his own presence, contrary to what surfaced when he was with his mother or his father or his grandfather, but particularly with his mother or his grandfather. They always treated him in relation to this abnormal, peculiar thing which was, Chi-Huei felt, he himself, yet without knowing what this “he himself” consisted of other than the way he was in front of his grandfather and his mother, and so he was aware of himself all the time. His mother would put on a white blouse and a black skirt for work and it was she who waited on the few tables in the restaurant, and in between doing this she would spring the same question on him again and again—“What are you doing?”—which made him feel as if he were always about to be told off, as this inquisitive “what are you doing?” presupposed some kind of naughtiness he might be about to commit. “What did you two do this afternoon?” she would also ask, in exactly the same tone of voice, when he and his brother got home after wandering the streets lugging around a soccer ball they only played with when one of his brother’s friends—neighborhood kids—turned up, as his brother found it boring playing soccer with Chi-Huei, and anyway they preferred to roam around aimlessly and spend the bit of money their father had given them on going to an internet cafe. Only when they spent a long period of time with their mother on their own, like on Monday afternoons when she took them to the beach, would her distrust be replaced with a calm, caring presence, which in Chi-Huei’s case came on as excessive, savage attention. With his mother, there was no transition between the most absolute distrust and unlimited love, between her total devotion on the afternoons at the beach (when she was out of reach of his grandfather and the rotisserie, clad in a black swimsuit and navy blue cap, constantly looking at the time and, despite this, engulfed in an atmosphere of carefree joy) and her anger and ferocious, impending criticism. Throughout the morning, while his mother went back and forth between the restaurant and the apartment, loaded down with the tubs of rice she and their step-grandmother had been preparing since the early hours, and when he saw her crossing the road with her habitually tense expression, as if time were going to devour her or as if something awful were going to happen from one moment to the next (his mother’s nerves were permanently on edge, and so she always thought something catastrophic was about to happen), he and his brother would nip behind the counter and growl at her, and his mother would say to his brother, “You’re a bad influence on him,” referring to Chi-Huei, who would bare his little teeth and jump up and down, dying of laughter. In the mornings, his mother’s tense nerves would allow for a little humor; by midday, when the place was overflowing with customers, there was no room for jokes, and that was when it most felt like the restaurant was on the point of bursting into flames or going through a great crisis, although only he, his brother, his father, his grandfather, and his step-grandmother were aware of it, as this mass of tragic expectation and energy translated, in front of the customers, into an exaggerated degree of efficiency that most people appreciated. His mother’s extreme politeness made the customers leave good tips, which meant that they all had to be grateful for the frayed condition of her nerves, which kept them all in a permanent state of alert. She moved in a way that was part agile, part brusque, and when she was alone she sang Teresa Teng songs in a genuinely beautiful voice, full of power and passion. These songs seemed to help her sustain the powerful, unsettling energy that was the tenor of her life. His mother had been orphaned at the age of fourteen and had worked making clothes in a factory in China, and she said that she hadn’t walked with a stoop before that, although his father claimed that she had always had a slight hunchback ever since she was a teenager, which happened to lots of young women when they grew breasts in adolescence—they hunched over in embarrassment.