The Cart
Juancho was drunk that day. He was getting belligerent as he walked up and down the sidewalk, although by that point no one in the neighborhood felt threatened, or even unsettled, by his drunken antics. Halfway down the block, Horacio was washing his car like he did every Sunday, in shorts and flip-flops, his prominent belly taut, his chest hair white, the radio tuned to the game. On the corner, the Spaniards from the variety store were drinking mate with the kettle on the ground between the two folding recliners they’d brought outside because the sun was nice. Across the way, Coca’s boys were drinking beer in the doorway, and a group of girls, freshly bathed and overly made-up, were chatting as they stood in the doorway of Valeria’s garage. Earlier, my dad had tried to say hi and start a conversation with the neighbors, but he came back inside as always, downcast, a little annoyed, because he was a good guy but he didn’t know small talk—he said the same things every Sunday afternoon.
My mom was spying out the window. She got bored with the Sunday TV, but she didn’t feel like going out. She peered between the half-open blinds, and would occasionally ask us to bring her a cup of tea, or a cookie, or an aspirin. My brother and I usually spent Sundays at home; sometimes, at night, we’d take a spin downtown if Dad would lend us the car.
Mom saw him first. He was coming from the direction of Tuyutí’s corner, walking in the middle of the street and pushing a loaded-down supermarket cart. He was even drunker than Juancho, but somehow he managed to push that pile of garbage in the cart—all bottles, cardboard, and phone books. He stopped in front of Horacio’s car, swaying. It was hot that day, but the man was wearing an old, greenish pullover. He must have been around sixty years old. He left the cart at the curb, went over to the car, and, right on the side where my mother had the best view, he pulled down his pants.
She called to us to come see. We came to the window and all three of us peered through the blinds with her: my brother, my dad, and me. The man, who wasn’t wearing underwear under his filthy dress pants, shat on the sidewalk: soft shit, almost diarrhea, and a lot of it. The smell reached us, and it stank as much of alcohol as it did of shit.
“Poor man,” said my mom.
“A person can come to such misery,” said my dad.
Horacio was stupefied, but you could tell he was about to get mad, because his neck was turning red. But before he could react, Juancho ran across the street and pushed the man, who hadn’t even had time to stand up, or pull up his pants. The old man fell into his own shit, which spattered onto his sweater and his right hand. He only murmured an “Oh.”
“Black-ass bum!” Juancho shouted at him. “You vagrant son of a bitch, how dare you come here and shit on our neighborhood, you uppity cocksucking scumbag!”
He kicked the man on the ground. Juancho was wearing flip-flops, and his feet also got spattered with shit.
“Get up, you bastard, you get up and hose down Horacio’s sidewalk—you can’t fuck around here—and then get back to whatever slum you crawled out of, you son of a motherfucking bitch.”
And he went on kicking the man, in the chest, in the back. The man couldn’t get up; he seemed not to understand what was happening. Suddenly he started to cry.
“It’s not worth all that,” said my dad.
“How can he humiliate the poor man like that?” said my mom, and she stood up and headed for the door. We followed her. When Mom got to the sidewalk, Juancho had gotten the man up, whimpering and apologizing, and was trying to shove into his hands the hose Horacio had been using to wash the car, so he could wash away his own shit. The whole block stank. No one dared approach. Horacio said, “Juancho, leave it,” but in a low voice.
My mom intervened. Everyone respected her, especially Juancho, because she would give him a few coins for wine when he asked her. The others treated her with deference because though Mom was a physical therapist, everyone thought she was a doctor, and that’s what they all called her.
“Leave him alone. Let him go, it’s fine. We’ll clean up. He’s drunk, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, there’s no cause to hit him.”
The old man looked at Mom, and she told him, “Sir, apologize and be on your way.” He murmured something, dropped the hose, and, still with his pants down, tried to push the cart away.
“The doctor saved your life, you asshole, but the cart stays here. You pay for your filth, dirty-ass trespasser, you don’t fuck around in this neighborhood.”
Mom tried to dissuade Juancho, but he was drunk, and furious, and he was shouting like a vigilante, and there was nothing white left in his eyes, only black and red, the same colors as the shorts he was wearing. He stood in front of the cart and he wouldn’t let the man push it. I was afraid another fight would break out—another pounding from Juancho, really—but the man seemed to give up. He zipped up his pants—they didn’t have a button—and walked off, in the middle of the street again, toward Catamarca; everyone watched him go, the Spaniards murmuring how awful, Coca’s boys cackling, some of the girls in Valeria’s garage laughing nervously, others with their heads down, as though ashamed. Horacio cursed under his breath. Juancho took a bottle from the cart and threw it at the man, but it missed him by a long shot and shattered against the concrete. The man, startled by the noise, turned around and shouted something unintelligible. We didn’t know if he was speaking another language (but which?), or if he was simply too drunk to articulate. But before running off in a zigzag, fleeing from Juancho, who was chasing him and shouting, he looked straight at my mom, fully lucid, and nodded twice. He said something else, rolling his eyes, taking in the whole block and more. Then he disappeared around the corner. Juancho was too wasted to follow. He just went on yelling for a long time.
Everyone went inside. The neighbors would go on talking about the episode all afternoon, and all week long. Horacio used the hose, all grumbling and “Fucking bums, fucking bums.”
“What can you expect from this neighborhood,” said Mom, and she closed the blinds.
* * *
—
Someone, probably Juancho himself, moved the cart to Tuyutí’s corner and left it parked in front of the house Doña Rita had left empty when she died the year before. After a few days, no one payed it any attention. At first they did, because they expected the villero—what else could he be but a slum-dweller?—to come back for it. But he never turned up, and no one knew what to do with his things. So there they stayed, and one day they got wet in the rain, and the damp cardboard disintegrated and gave off a smell. Something else stank amid all the junk, probably rotting food, but disgust kept people from cleaning. It was enough to give the cart a wide berth, walk real close to the houses and not look at it. There were always gross smells in the neighborhood, coming from the greenish muck that flowed along the gutters, or from the Riachuelo when a certain breeze blew, especially at dusk.
It all started around fifteen days after the cart arrived. Maybe it started before that, but there had to be an accumulation of misfortune for the neighborhood to feel like something strange was going on. Horacio was the first. He had a rotisserie downtown, and it did well. One night, when he was balancing the register, some thieves came in and took it all. These things happen. But that same night, after filing the report—useless, as in most robberies, among other reasons because the thugs wore masks—when Horacio went to the ATM to take out money, he found out he didn’t have a single peso in his account. He called the bank, made a fuss, kicked in doors, tried to throat punch an employee, and he took things to the branch manager, and then to the regional manager. But there was nothing for it: the money wasn’t there, someone had taken it out, and Horacio, from one day to the next, was ruined. He sold his car. He got less for it than he expected.
Coca’s two boys lost the jobs they had in the auto repair shop on the avenue. Without warning; the owner didn’t even give them explanations. They yelled and cursed at him, and
he kicked them out. Then, to top it off, Coca’s pension didn’t come through. Her sons spent a week looking for work, and after that they set to squandering their savings on beer. Coca got into bed saying she wanted to die. No one would give them credit anywhere. They didn’t even have bus fare.
The Spaniards had to close the variety store. Because it wasn’t just Coca’s boys, or Horacio; every one of the neighbors, all of a sudden, in a matter of days, lost everything. The merchandise at the kiosk disappeared mysteriously. The taxi driver’s car was stolen. Mari’s husband and only support, a bricklayer, fell off a scaffold and died. The girls had to leave their private schools because their parents couldn’t afford them; the dentist had no more clients, neither did the dressmaker, and a short-circuit blew out all the butcher’s freezers.
After two months no one in the neighborhood had a phone anymore—they couldn’t afford it. After three months, they had to tap the electricity wires because they couldn’t pay their bills. Coca’s boys went out to pickpocket and one of them, the most inept, got caught by the police. Then one night the other one didn’t come home; maybe he’d been killed. The taxi driver ventured on foot to the other side of the avenue. There, he said, everything was fine as could be. Up to three months after it all started, businesses on the other side of the avenue gave credit. But eventually, they stopped.
Horacio put his house up for sale.
Everyone locked their houses with old chains, because there was no money for alarms or more effective locks; things started to go missing from houses, TVs and radios and stereos and computers, and you’d see some neighbors lugging appliances between two or three of them, hoisted in their arms or loaded into shopping carts. They took it all to pawnshops and used-appliance stores across the avenue. But other neighbors organized, and when the thieves tried to knock down their doors, they brandished knives, or guns if they had them. Cholo, the vegetable vender around the corner, cracked the taxi driver’s skull with the iron he used for grilling. At first, a group of women organized to ration out the food that was left in the freezers, but when they discovered that some people lied and kept supplies for themselves, the goodwill went all to hell.
Coca ate her cat, and then she killed herself. Someone had to go to the Social Services office on the avenue for them to take away the body and bury it for free. One of the employees there wanted to find out more, and the neighbors told him, and then the TV cameras came to record the localized bad luck that was sinking three blocks of the neighborhood into misery. They especially wanted to know why the neighbors farther away, the ones who lived four blocks over, for example, didn’t show solidarity.
Social workers came and handed out food, but that only led to more wars breaking out. At five months, not even the police would come in, and the people who still went to watch TV on the display sets in the appliance stores on the avenue said that the news talked of nothing else. But soon the neighbors were totally isolated, because when the people on the avenue recognized them, they were shooed away.
The neighbors were isolated, I say, because we did have TV, and electricity, and gas, and a phone. We said we didn’t, and we lived as battened down as the rest; if we met someone on the street, we lied: we ate the dog, we ate the plants, Diego—my brother—got credit at a store twenty blocks from here. My mom managed things so she could go out to work, jumping from roof to roof (it wasn’t so hard in a neighborhood where all the houses were low). My dad could take out his pension from an ATM, and we paid our services online, because we still had internet. No one sacked our house; respect for the doctor, maybe, or very good acting on our part.
One day, Juancho was sitting on the sidewalk drinking wine straight from the bottle that he’d stolen from a distant supermarket. He was the one who started to yell and curse: “It’s the fucking cart, the villero’s cart.” He yelled for hours, spent hours walking the street, banging on doors and windows: “It’s the cart, it’s the old man’s fault, we have to go find him, let’s go, you pieces of shit, he put some kind of macumba curse on us.” Juancho’s hunger showed more than the others’ because he’d never had anything before, he lived off the coins he collected every day, ringing doorbells (people always gave him something, out of fear or compassion, who knows). That same night he set the cart on fire, and the neighbors watched the flames out their windows. And Juancho was right about something. Everyone had thought it was the cart. Something in it. Something contagious it had brought from the slum.
That same night, my dad gathered us into the dining room for a family meeting. He told us that we had to leave. That people were going to realize we were immune. That Mari, the next-door neighbor, already suspected something, because it was pretty hard to hide the smell of food, even though when we cooked we took care to seal the openings around the door so the smoke and the smells didn’t waft out. Our luck was going to run out; everything went bad. Mom agreed. She told us she’d been spotted jumping over the back roof. She couldn’t be sure, but she’d felt eyes on her. Diego too. He said that one day, when he raised the blinds, he’d seen some neighbors running away, but others had stayed and stared at him, defiant; bad ones, crazy by now. Almost no one saw us, we stayed locked in the house, but to keep up the charade we would have to go out soon. And we weren’t skinny or gaunt. We were scared, but fear doesn’t look the same as desperation.
We listened to Dad’s plan, which didn’t seem very reasonable. Mom told us hers, and it was a little better, but nothing out of this world. We all agreed on Diego’s: my brother’s way of thinking was always more simple and matter-of-fact.
We went to bed, but none of us could sleep. After tossing and turning, I knocked on my brother’s door. I found him sitting on the floor. He was really pale from lack of sun—we all were. I asked him if he thought Juancho was right. He nodded.
“Mom saved us. Did you see how the man looked at her, before he left? She saved us.”
“So far,” I said.
“So far,” he said.
That night, we smelled burnt meat. Mom was in the kitchen and we went in to reprimand her—was she crazy, putting a steak on the grill at that hour? People were going to catch on. But Mom was trembling beside the counter.
“That’s not regular meat,” she said.
We opened the blinds a crack and looked up. We saw the smoke coming from the terrace across from us. And it was black, and it didn’t smell like any other smoke we knew.
“Damn old ghetto son of a bitch,” said Mom, and she started to cry.
The Well
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
SYLVIA PLATH, “ELM”
Josefina remembered the trip—the heat, the crowded Renault 12—like it was just a few days ago, and not back when she was six, just after Christmas, under the stifling January sun. Her father drove, barely speaking; her mother was in the passenger seat and Josefina was in back, stuck between her sister and her grandma Rita, who was peeling mandarins and flooding the car with the smell of overheated fruit. They were going to Corrientes on vacation, to visit her aunt and uncle on her mother’s side, but that was only part of the larger reason for the trip, which Josefina couldn’t even guess at. No one spoke much, she remembered. Her grandmother and her mother both wore dark glasses, and they only opened their mouths to warn of a truck passing too close to the car, or to beg her father to slow down; they were tense and alert and waiting for an accident.
They were afraid. They were always afraid. In summer, when Josefina and Mariela wanted to swim in the above-ground pool, Grandma Rita filled it with five inches of water, and then sat in a chair in the shade of the patio’s lemon tree to keep watch over every splash, so she’d be sure to get there in time if her granddaughters started to drown. Josefina remembered how her mother used to cry and call in doctors and ambulances at dawn if she or
her sister had a fever of just a couple degrees. Or how she made them miss school for a harmless cold. She never let them sleep over at their friends’ houses, and she hardly ever let them play on the sidewalk; when she did, they could see her keeping watch over them from the window, hidden behind the curtains. Sometimes Mariela cried at night, saying that something was moving under her bed, and she could never sleep with the light off. Josefina was the only one of the family’s women who was never afraid; she was like her father. Until that trip to Corrientes.
She couldn’t remember how many days they had spent at her aunt and uncle’s house, nor if they had gone to the waterfront or to window-shop on the pedestrian walkways. But she remembered the visit to Doña Irene’s house perfectly. The sky had been cloudy that day but the heat was heavy, as always in Corrientes before a storm. Her father hadn’t gone with them; Doña Irene’s house was near her aunt and uncle’s, and the four of them had walked there with her aunt Clarita. They didn’t call Irene a witch; mostly they just called her The Woman. Her house had a beautiful front yard, a little overfull of plants, and almost right in the center there was a white-painted well. When Josefina saw it, she let go of her grandmother’s hand and ran, ignoring the howls of panic, to get a closer look and peer in over the edge. They couldn’t stop her until she saw the bottom of the well and the stagnant water in its depths.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Page 3