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Cloudburst 100 The Tortoise’s Hole The tortoise that had long shared the family mansion with me dove into the bottomless hole in the garden on the same day that John-John Kennedy’s light aircraft plunged into the depths of the Atlantic. Now that I’m down here with time on my hands, I think I can explain this coincidence. Who John-John was needs no explanation. Hola magazine devoted an entire issue to him, to which I refer. The tortoise— a kilo and a half, black and yellow, and quite slow—was brought to the garden by my great-grandmother sometime around 1900. In the garden, the tortoise watched the twentieth century go by with indifference, dividing its time between hibernating and hunting for snails. When a slimy snail passed nearby, the tortoise would stick out its four little scaly legs with calm ferocity and rush into a pursuit that could last for weeks. The snail would hurry toward the garden walls, but had to fall back into the security of its shell when the tortoise caught up. The latter, knowing that time was on its side, would also withdraw into its shell and wait. Unfailingly, this duel of immobility ended with the snail being extracted from its shell and devoured. The garden that the tortoise and I shared is at the back of my old family mansion. Built at the end of the nineteenth century on a hill, today the streets dug into its feet have turned the house and garden into a private Montmartre, a hortus conclususwith walls that look from the outside like the ramparts of a fortress. A holm oak is the only tree in this pleasant jungle, which is not dark and does not harbour leopards, lions, or peacocks, only the tortoise and the snails whose destiny is to be devoured. In these hanging gardens of Babylon, I would often sit under the oak on summer evenings to nibble on an apple. The tortoise would then leave the snail that it was stalking and come over to me, dragging itself through the labyrinthine flowerbeds. When it reached my feet, it would retract its four reptilian legs into its shell, leaving only its small scaly head out, and wait for me to toss it the apple core. Enrique Fernández 101 On the rare sunny days of winter when I would go out to the garden with my apple, I would exhume the tortoise from its voluntary winter burial. But no matter how much I tempted it with delicious exotic fruits carefully extracted from syrupy jars, it never deigned to come out of its shell. I would solemnly bury it and go back inside the large house where I lived comfortably alone, with no need to work thanks to the compound interest of my thrifty ancestors. Then I would stroll through the rooms with narrow windows and high arched ceilings, where, seated at the foot of one of the many high sombre wardrobes, I would nibble on my apple. But this, my bucolic existence, began to fall apart in my hands during the month of July 1999. A few days before John-John plummeted to the bottom of the Atlantic, in a corner of the garden I noticed a small hole in the earth. Paying no attention to it, I attributed it to the endemic cave-in of a gallery in the coal mine, a gigantic blind worm that for a century has drilled on through the subsoil of the town. I shovelled in some earth and filled the vortex that threatened to swallow up my garden of delights. The next day, the night rain had opened the hole again. Though I filled it in once more, a day later the black hole in my universe had opened up again. I then thought that instead of shovelfuls of ephemeral earth, I would fill up that hellish mouth with tougher materials. I started by throwing in calendars from the turn of the century covered in plump, dark-haired young ladies, bundles of old black and white photos of mustachioed ancestors, and rolls of the Kaiser’s unredeemable war bonds. This documentary abundance is due to the fact that each generation has striven to attest to its passage through the house by means of conscientious archival labour. In the wardrobes, trunks, closets, and sideboards of the many rooms, thick piles of paper gather dust. On rainy afternoons I used to classify them sometimes by year, other...

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