The story really was impressive. No cause for such a fuss, he thought, but it was pretty brutal. It had happened on March 7, 1912. A five-year-old girl, Reina Bonita Vaínikoff, daughter of Latvian-Jewish immigrants, was looking in the window of a shoe store near her house on Avenida Entre Ríos. The girl was wearing a white dress. The Runt approached her while she was absorbed in the sight of the shoes. He was holding a lit match in his hand. He held the flame to her dress and it caught fire. The girl’s grandfather saw her from across the street as she was engulfed in flames. The grandfather ran desperately to reach her, but he never even got near the girl: mad with fear, he hadn’t noticed the traffic. A car ran over him and he died. Very strange when you consider the slow speed of cars in those years.
Reina Bonita died too, but only after sixteen days of agonizing pain.
Poor Reina Bonita’s murder wasn’t Pablo’s favorite crime. He liked—because that was the word, what can you do?—the murder of Jesualdo Giordano, three years old. Without a doubt, that one inspired the most horror in the tourists, and maybe that’s why he liked it: maybe he found it pleasant to tell the story and wait for the reaction of his audience—they were always shocked. Plus, it was the crime they’d caught the Runt for, because he committed a fatal error.
As was his habit by now, the Runt brought Jesualdo to an empty lot. He strangled him by winding the rope thirteen times around his neck. The boy fought back with all his strength, he cried and screamed. The Runt told the police that he’d struggled to keep the boy quiet because he didn’t want to be interrupted as he’d been on other occasions: “I grabbed that kid with my teeth right here, near his mouth, and I shook him the way dogs do with cats.” That image distressed the tourists, who squirmed in their seats and murmured “my God” under their breath. But they never asked him to stop the story. Once he’d strangled Jesualdo to death, the Runt covered him with sheet metal and went out to the street. But something kept tormenting him, an idea burning in his mind. So after a while he went back to the scene of the crime. He was holding a nail. He drove it into the boy’s skull, though Jesualdo was already dead.
He committed his fatal error the next day. Who knows why, but he attended the wake of the boy he had killed. Later on he would say that he wanted to see if the nail was still in the head. He confessed this desire when they brought him in to witness the autopsy, after the dead boy’s father had pointed the finger at the Runt. When the Runt saw the cadaver, he did something very strange: he covered his nose and spat as if he were disgusted, though the body had not yet begun to decompose. For some reason—the police records of the time don’t explain it—the medical examiners made him remove his clothes, and the Runt had an enormous erection. He had just turned sixteen.
Pablo couldn’t tell that story to his wife. Once, he’d tried to tell her about how the tourists reacted to the Runt’s final crime, but before he could even begin the story he realized that she wasn’t listening to him. Instead, she started complaining, demanding they move to a bigger house when the baby was older. She didn’t want him to grow up in an apartment. She wanted a yard, a pool, a game room, and all in a peaceful neighborhood where the boy could play in the street. She knew perfectly well that such a place barely existed in a city the size and intensity of Buenos Aires, and moving to a rich and tranquil suburb was far beyond their means. When she finished listing her desires for the future, she asked him to get a new job. “I won’t do that,” he said. “My degree is in tourism, things are going well for me. I’m not going to quit—it’s fun, the hours are good, and I’m learning.”
“The salary is pitiful.”
“No, it’s not pitiful.” Pablo was getting angry. As he saw it he was earning good money, enough to decently maintain his family. Who was this woman, this stranger? Once upon a time she had sworn that as long as she was with him, she could live in a motel, in the street, under a tree. It was all the baby’s fault. The baby had changed her completely. And why? He was a charmless kid, boring, all he ever did was sleep, and when he was awake he cried almost nonstop. “Why don’t you go to work if you want more money?” Pablo asked his wife. At that she seemed to bristle, and she started shouting like she’d gone crazy. She screamed that she had to take care of the baby—what was he thinking, that she could just dump him with a babysitter, or with his crazy grandmother? My mother isn’t crazy, thought Pablo, and to avoid another shouting match he went out to the sidewalk to smoke. That was another thing: since the baby had been born, she wouldn’t let him smoke in his own apartment.
The day after the argument, the Runt came back to the bus. This time he was closer, almost right next to the driver, who clearly couldn’t see him. Pablo didn’t feel any different, just a little uneasy; he was afraid one of the tourists would be able to see the ghostly Runt and would cause chaos on the bus.
When the Runt appeared, holding his rope, they were almost at the end of the tour, at the house on Calle Pavón. That was where one of the Runt’s oldest victims had been found, after one of his strangest attacks. Arturo Laurora, thirteen years old, had been strangled with his own shirt; his body was found inside the abandoned house. He wasn’t wearing pants and his buttocks were bruised, but he hadn’t been raped. While Pablo told this story, the ghost of the Runt, standing beside him, appeared and disappeared, trembled, faded, as if he were made of smoke or fog.
For the first time in many nights someone had a question. Pablo smiled at the curious man with all the insincerity he could muster. Pablo thought the tourist must be Caribbean, judging by the way he pronounced the word clavo, nail. The man wanted to know if the Runt had driven a nail into any of his other victims’ heads. “No,” replied Pablo. “We only know of the one.”
“It’s very strange,” said the man, and he ventured that if the Runt’s criminal career had been longer, maybe the nail would have become his trademark, his signature. “Maybe so,” Pablo answered politely as he watched the spectral Runt disappear completely. “But I guess we’ll never know, huh?” The Caribbean man scratched his chin.
Pablo went back to his house thinking about the nail, and then about a math teacher he’d had in school. When he got a problem right she’d say, “Pablito! You hit the nail on the head.” Then he thought about a tongue twister his mother had taught him when he was little: Pablito clavó un clavito. / ¿Qué clavito clavó Pablito? / Un clavito chiquitito. He opened the apartment door to find the tableau that had become so common in recent months: the television on, a plate with Ben 10 cartoons on it smeared with the remains of pureed squash, a half-empty bottle, and his bedroom light turned on. He looked in. His wife and son were sleeping on the bed, together.
Pablo walked to the room that he himself had decorated for his son before he’d been born. It was so empty he felt cold. The inert crib was dark. It was like a dead child’s room kept untouched by a family in mourning. Pablo wondered what would happen if the boy died, as his wife seemed to fear. He knew the answer.
He leaned against the empty wall where months ago, before the birth, before his wife turned into a different person, he’d planned to hang a mobile: a universe that would spin over the baby’s crib and keep him entertained during the night. The moon, the sun, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, the planets and satellites and stars shining in the darkness. But he had never hung it because his wife didn’t want the baby to sleep in his crib and there was no way of changing her mind. He touched the wall and he found the nail still there, waiting. He yanked it out with one tug and put it in his pocket. He thought it would make a great prop, adding to the dramatic effect of his story about the Runt. He would take it from his pocket right when he was telling about Jesualdo Giordano’s murder, at just the right moment, when the Runt came back and drove the nail into the dead boy’s head. Maybe some naïve tourist would even believe it was the very same nail, perfectly preserved a hundred years after the crime. He smiled as he imagined his small triumph, and he decided he’d lie down right there on the living room sofa, far from his wife and his son, the na
il still clutched in his hand.
Spiderweb
I t’s harder to breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can turn from limpid blue to stormy black in minutes. You start to struggle right away when you arrive, as if a brutal arm were wound around your waist and squeezing. Everything is slower; during siesta the bicycles only rarely go by along the empty street, the ice cream shops seem abandoned in spite of the ceiling fans that spin for no one, and the chicharras shriek hysterically in their hiding places. I’ve never seen a chicharra. My aunt says they’re horrible creatures, spectacular flies with pulsating green wings and smooth, black eyes that seem to look right at you. I don’t like the word chicharra; I wish they were always called cicadas, which is only used when they’re in the larval stage. If they were called cicadas, their summer noise would remind me of the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees along the Paraná, or the white stone mansions with their staircases and their willows. But as it is, as chicharras, they make me remember the heat, the rotting meat, the blackouts, the drunks who stare with bloodshot eyes from their benches in the park.
That February I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Corrientes because I was tired of their reproaches: “You got married and we haven’t even met your husband, how is that possible, you’re hiding him from us.”
“No,” I laughed over the phone, “how could I be hiding him, I’d love for you to meet him, we’ll come soon.”
But they were right: I was hiding him.
My aunt and uncle were the custodians of the memory of my mother, their favorite sister, killed in a stupid accident when I was seventeen. During the first months of mourning they offered to have me come live with them in the north. I said no. They came to visit me often. They gave me money, called me every day. My cousins stayed to keep me company on weekends. But I still felt abandoned, and because of that solitude I fell in love too quickly, I got married impetuously, and now I was living with Juan Martín, who irritated and bored me.
I decided to bring him to meet my aunt and uncle to see if other eyes could transform him in mine. One meal on the wide porch of their big house was enough to dispel that hope: Juan Martín squealed when a spider brushed his leg (“If they don’t have a pink cross, don’t worry,” my uncle Carlos told him, a cigarette between his lips. “Those are the only poisonous ones.”), drank too much beer, spoke with zero modesty about how well business was going, and commented several times on the “underdevelopment” that he saw in the province.
After we ate he sat with my uncle Carlos, drinking whiskey, and I helped my aunt in the kitchen.
“Well, child, it could be worse,” she told me when I started to cry. “He could be like Walter, who raised his hand to me.”
Yes, I nodded. Juan Martín wasn’t violent; he wasn’t even jealous. But he repelled me. How many years was I going to spend like that, disgusted when I heard his voice, pained when we had sex, silent when he confided his plans to have a child and renovate the house? I wiped away my tears with hands covered in soap suds; they burned my eyes and I cried even harder. My aunt pushed my head under the faucet and let the water wash my eyes out for ten minutes. That’s how we were when Natalia came in. Natalia was my aunt’s oldest daughter and my favorite cousin. Natalia, tanned as always, wearing a very loose white dress, her hair long, dark, and disheveled. I saw her through the fog of my irritated eyes, which I couldn’t stop blinking; she was carrying a flowerpot and smoking. Everyone smokes in Corrientes. If anyone ever dared to hint that it wasn’t healthy, they’d stand looking at the heretic, confused, and then give a little laugh.
Natalia placed the flowerpot on the kitchen table, told my aunt, her mother, that she had planted the azalea, and she greeted me with a kiss on the head. My husband didn’t like Natalia. He didn’t find her physically attractive, which was practically insane on his part—I had never seen a woman as beautiful as her. But on top of that, he looked down on her because Natalia read cards, knew home remedies, and worst of all, communicated with spirits. “Your cousin is ignorant,” Juan Martín told me, and I hated him. I even thought about calling Natalia and asking her to give me a recipe for one of her potions, maybe a poison. But I let it go, like I let every petty little thing pass while a white stone grew in my stomach that left very little room for air or food.
“Tomorrow I’m going to Asunción,” Natalia told me. “I need to buy some ñandutí cloth.”
To earn money, Natalia had a small business selling crafts in the city’s main street, and she was famous for her exquisite taste in choosing the finest ñandutí, the traditional Paraguayan lace that the women weave on a frame, spiderwebs of delicate, colorful thread. In the back part of her shop she had a small table where she read cards, Spanish or tarot, according to the customer’s preference. They say she was very good. I couldn’t say for sure because I’d never wanted her to read cards for me.
“Why don’t you come with me? We can take your husband. Has he been to Asunción?”
“No—as if.”
Natalia flip-flopped her way to the patio and greeted Uncle Carlos and Juan Martín with kisses on the cheek. She poured a whiskey with a lot of ice and stretched her toes. I emerged from the kitchen with swollen eyes and Juan Martín asked how I could be so dumb. “If you’d injured your corneas we’d have to rush back to Buenos Aires by plane.”
“Why?” asked Natalia, and she shook the ice in her glass so it sounded like little bells in the afternoon heat. “The hospital here is very good.”
“It doesn’t compare.”
“Well, aren’t you a citified little prick.” And after she said that, she invited him to Asunción. “I’m driving,” she told him. “You can buy stuff if you have money, everything’s cheap. It’s three hundred kilometers; we can go and come back the same day if we leave early.”
He accepted. Then he went to take a nap and didn’t even suggest I join him. I was grateful. I stayed with my cousin out on the hot porch, she with her whiskey, me with a cold beer. I couldn’t drink anything stronger. She told me about her new boyfriend, the son of the owner of the province’s largest supermarket chain. She always had rich boyfriends. This one mattered to her as little as the others, emotionally speaking, but she was interested in him because he had a plane. He’d taken her up in it the week before. “Beautiful,” she told me, “except it shakes a little. The smaller the plane the more it shakes.”
“I didn’t know that,” I told her.
“Me either. Aren’t we dumb, cousin, because it makes sense.
“Something terrifying happened to me while I was up there,” she went on. “We were flying over fields to the north, and suddenly I saw a very big fire. A house was burning, bright orange flames and a black cloud of smoke, and you could see the house collapsing in on itself. I stared and stared at the fire until he turned the plane and I lost sight of it. But ten minutes later we passed over the spot again and the fire had disappeared.”
“You must have gotten the place wrong. It’s not like you’re up in planes all the time and you can recognize the terrain from above.”
“You don’t understand, there was a patch of burned earth and the ruins of the house.”
“It went out, then.”
“How? Did the firefighters get there in five minutes? We’re talking wilderness here, babe, and the flames were really high when I saw them, and it wasn’t raining or anything! It could never have been put out in ten minutes.”
“Did you tell your boyfriend?”
“Sure, but he says I’m crazy, he never saw any fire.”
Our eyes met. I almost always believed her. Once, Natalia had stopped me from going into my grandmother’s room because she was in there, smoking. Our grandmother had been dead for ten years. I listened to her: I didn’t go in, but I smelled the penetrating odor of the Havana cigarillos that were her favorites, though there was no smoke in the air.
“You have to find out, then, ask aroun
d.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know if the fire already happened, or if it’s going to happen.”
—
It was still dark when we left, five in the morning. Juan Martín almost let us go alone, because according to him he’d barely slept at all, thanks to the heat and the power outage that had left him without a fan. But lying in the darkness, awake, I had listened to him snoring and talking in his sleep. He lied and complained, and every day was the same as the one before. Natalia had a Renault 12, the most common car there was during the eighties. When the sun started to come out over Route 11, I saw that, trapped under its windshield wipers, were the bodies of many dead damselflies. A lot of people get them confused them with dragonflies, but the damselfly is different, though they’re in the same family. They’re less graceful, their horrible eyes are farther apart, and the body, that straight and vaguely phallic body, is longer. They’re lazier, too. I was always afraid of both of them and I never understood when they came into fashion years later with teenagers, who tattooed themselves with sentimental designs, dolphins and butterflies, and but also those horrible dragonflies with their blind eyes. Some people call them aguaciles—from the word agua—because bands of them tend to show up before it rains, when it’s really hot. That word makes me think of alguacil—sheriff—and I think a lot of people call the insect that, as if it were the police of the air.
The road to Asunción is boring and monotonous; at times it’s palm trees with marshlands, other times jungle, and much more rarely a small city or a village. Juan Martín slept in the backseat, and sometimes I looked at him in the rearview mirror: he was attractive in his privileged way, with his elegant haircut and his polo shirt with the Lacoste crocodile. Natalia was smoking her long Benson & Hedges, but we didn’t talk because she was driving very fast and the noise would have forced us to shout. I wanted to tell her more things about my marriage. Like how Juan Martín constantly chastised me. If I took too long to serve the table I was useless, just “standing there doing nothing, as always.” If I took too long to choose something, I was wasting his time—he was always so decisive and detached. If I deliberated for ten minutes about what restaurant to go to, it meant a night of his sighing and contrary replies. I always apologized so we wouldn’t fight, so things wouldn’t get worse. I never told him all the things that bothered me about him, like how he belched after eating, how he never cleaned the bathroom even though I begged him to, how he was always complaining about the quality of things, how when I asked him for a little humor he always said it was too late for that, he’d already lost his patience. But I kept quiet. When we stopped for lunch I split a polenta with my cousin while Juan Martín ate the same steak with salad he ate every day. He never wanted anything else. At most he’d try cutlets or shepherd’s pie. And pizza, but only on weekends.
Things We Lost in the Fire Page 8