Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

  The rescue mechanics arrived an hour later. As I’d imagined, they chastised Juan Martín for having the radio on. He sputtered excuses. The mechanics got to work and Juan Martín acted like he was supervising them. I got out and took Natalia’s hand.

  “You can’t even imagine what a hottie the trucker is. One of those Swedes from Oberá. I mean this guy is smoking. He’s going to spend the night in Clorinda, and I think I’ll stay with him. If the car gets going, that idiot husband of yours can take you to Corrientes,” she said to me in a low voice.

  But the car didn’t start and they had to tow the three of us to Clorinda. The car stayed in the city’s automobile club branch, but the mechanics very kindly took us to the hotel Natalia directed them to, pompously called The Ambassador. It was white and had colonial arches, but I knew, just from looking at it from outside, that it was going to smell of damp and maybe wouldn’t have hot water. It had a restaurant, though, or more like a grill, with white plastic tables where a family and several solitary men were sitting. “We’re going to shower,” I told Juan Martín, “and then let’s get something to eat.”

  As they were handing us the hotel keys, a man who could only be the trucker came into the reception area. Natalia went skipping over to him like a teenager. The guy was two heads taller than her, and had muscled arms and blond hair cut very short. “Hello,” he said to us, and he smiled. He seemed charming but he could be anything, a degenerate, a wife beater, a rapist—since he was extremely good looking, any girl would rather see him as a golden prince of the highway. I greeted him; Juan Martín took the key and looked at me so I would follow him. I did. Natalia called after me that we’d meet up in an hour to eat and I thought: how tragic, she gets an hour with that sweet-smiling Viking, while I spend an hour tolerating my husband.

  Juan Martín yelled at me: “Not once, not even once did you take my side, do you realize? Not about anything. All day long.” He shouted that Natalia was a whore, that she went off with the first guy who crossed her path. He shouted that I was a whore too because I’d been making eyes at the goddamn blond barbarian. I told him that blond barbarian had rescued us on the highway, and that at the very least he could have thanked him. “You’re rude,” I yelled. “You’re coarse.”

  “I’m coarse? You fucking little brat,” he shouted, and he went into the bathroom and slammed the door. From there he shouted more and cursed because there was no hot water and because the towels reeked of mildew, and finally he came out and threw himself on the bed. “You have nothing to say.”

  “What do you want me to say?” I answered.

  “You may want to leave me now,” he said, “but you’ll see when we get back to Buenos Aires, things will be better.”

  “What if they aren’t?” I asked him.

  “You’re not going to leave me that easy,” he said, and he lit a cigarette. I took a cold shower and thought that maybe, when I came out, he would have fallen asleep and the cigarette would have lit the sheets on fire and he would die there, in the Clorinda hotel. But when I came out, cold and wet, my blond hair dripping and pathetic, he was waiting for me dressed and perfumed to go to dinner.

  “I’m sorry,” he told me. “Sometimes I’m impossible.”

  “Let’s go eat,” I said, and I put on a loose dress and barely dragged a comb through my hair. I wanted the blond trucker to see me like that, freshly bathed and a bit disheveled. When Juan Martín tried to kiss me, I turned my cheek. But he didn’t say anything—he resigned himself.

  In the grill there were only two men, my cousin, and the blond trucker left. A dark-haired girl asked us what we wanted and said there was only short ribs, chorizo (she could make sandwiches), and mixed salad. We said yes to everything and ordered a cold soda. I was more thirsty than hungry, even though at the entrance to Clorinda I’d bought a grapefruit Fanta that was nice and cold. It was my favorite soda; for some reason you couldn’t get it anymore in Buenos Aires, but it still existed in the interior—maybe they were old bottles, or maybe they still produced it there. Things took longer to disappear up there in the north.

  The men were telling ghost stories. Natalia was sitting very close to the blond guy, and they were sharing a cigarette. He had opened his white shirt a little; he was tanned, he was marvelous.

  “Something really strange happened to me not long ago,” said the splendid blond.

  “Tell us, buddy, no one’s sleeping here!” shouted another one of the truckers, who was drinking beer. Was he going to get back on the road like that, half drunk? There were always accidents out on these roads, and this was probably why. My uncle Carlos, for example, never got behind the wheel if he was wasted, but he was an exception among his friends and even in our family.

  “Should I tell it?” asked the blond, and he looked at my cousin. Natalia smiled at him and nodded.

  “Okay,” he agreed, and he told us that he came from Oberá province, he lived in Misiones, and that around twenty kilometers away there was a town called Campo Viera. A creek ran through it, the Yazá. “One afternoon, the middle of the day, right? Don’t get the idea I imagined this because it was night. I wasn’t drunk, either. So, one afternoon I went out there in the small truck, just to run an errand was all, and as I was driving over the Yazá bridge I saw this woman run across the road. I didn’t have time to swerve, I would’ve killed myself, and I felt the bump from her body, man. I jumped out of the truck and ran to her, cold sweat all down my back, but I didn’t see anyone. No blood, no dented fender, nothing. I went to the cops and they took my statement, but they were in a shitty mood about it. I had to run the errand another day, and when I was in Campo Viera I told the story just like I’m telling you. They told me that the military had built that bridge, and they’d put dead people in the cement, people they’d murdered, to hide their bodies.”

  I heard Juan Martín sigh. He didn’t like this kind of story.

  “You shouldn’t fuck around when it comes to things like that,” he told the blond guy.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I’m not fucking around. The military is perfectly capable of hiding their corpses that way.”

  Our food came and Juan Martín started to eat. They brought us wooden plates. I’ve always preferred those to ceramic ones for eating barbecue. The flavor is richer and the oil on the salad is absorbed better and doesn’t reach the meat. It was delicious.

  The blond guy said that in Campo Viera they’d told him a lot of other things about the bridge and the stream. “That whole area is strange,” he said. “You see car headlights but the cars never come, like they’ve disappeared down some road. But there are no drivable roads, it’s all jungle.”

  “Speaking of cars that disappear, here’s a funny one,” said one of the other truck drivers, smiling, maybe to clear away the heavy atmosphere and my husband’s antipathy. I felt ashamed again and I smiled at the blond truck driver, who had a delicious dimple in his chin, and he smiled back at me. Hopefully he’d become Natalia’s boyfriend, and then she’d get bored with him like she did with all of them and then he would realize that always, from the very first moment when we’d looked into each other’s eyes in the hotel lobby, he’d been in love with me.

  “And it happened right here! Well, at the grill off the highway, ten blocks from here. So this guy comes with his mobile home, a real pretty little house. He was with his family, two kids, they told me, and his wife and mother-in-law. So they went to eat some barbecue and they left the mother-in-law in the mobile home. She didn’t feel good or something like that.”

  “Then what?” asked the third truck driver, who looked sleepy.

  “Someone swiped the mobile home with the old lady in it!”

  Everyone laughed hard, even the waitress, who was tending the fire as it died down. The guy had been desperate; he’d run to the police and he spent about a week in Clorinda, with his wife having a nervous breakdown. There was a massive search all over Formosa and they found the mobile home, but it was empty. Everything had been stolen, incl
uding the mother-in-law.

  “How long ago was this?” Natalia wanted to know.

  “Hmm…must be a year ago now. Time sure flies. A year. It was a crazy case. I’m sure the thieves got into the mobile home and they didn’t realize the old lady was inside and maybe she died on them from the fright, and then they tossed her. Around here you can just toss anyone, there’s no way in hell they’ll find you.”

  “The man still calls all the time,” the girl from the restaurant broke in. “But the woman never turned up.”

  “The thieves didn’t either,” added the trucker. “Poor gal, what a way to go.”

  They went on for a while talking about the mother-in-law’s disappearance, and Juan Martín, annoyed, excused himself and went up to the room. I’ll wait for you, said his look, and I nodded. But I stayed there until very late; my hair dried and the girl gave us the key to the fridge so we could go on taking out beers. Natalia even told the story about the burning house she’d seen from her boyfriend’s plane, although she said he was her cousin. Then she yawned and announced she was going up to sleep. The blond trucker followed her. I went after them to the reception desk and asked for another room. I told the girl that my husband was very tired and that if I went in at that hour, I’d wake him up. Then the next day, if the mechanic brought the car, he would have to drive to Buenos Aires badly rested, because he had a hard time going back to sleep when someone woke him up. “Sure,” said the woman at reception—it was all women at that hotel, apparently—“we hardly have any guests, it’s the low season.”

  “Low season is right,” I told her, and when I laid my head down on the pillow, I fell asleep immediately and had nightmares about an old woman who was running, naked and engulfed in flames, through a house that was collapsing. I saw her from outside, but I couldn’t go in and help her because a beam was going to fall and hit my head, or the fire would get to me or the smoke would suffocate me. But I didn’t run for help, either; I just watched her burn.

  —

  The auto club brought our car in the morning. They explained the problem, but in very general terms, taking it as given that neither Natalia nor I would understand anything. The only thing we wanted to know was if it would make it to Corrientes, and he told us sure, it was only three hours away. We’d still need to take it in to get a more permanent fix, but any mechanic would realize the problem right away and if not, we should call them. We thanked them and went to have breakfast. There was only toast and coffee—not even a croissant—but it was fine. The blond trucker had left two hours earlier. He’d promised to call Natalia and she thought he would come through. “He fucks like a god,” she told me. “And he’s the sweetest guy.”

  I envied her. I choked down the half-cold coffee with my tears and went to find Juan Martín. But when I went into the room, he wasn’t there. The bed wasn’t even unmade, as if he hadn’t slept there. I couldn’t be sure he had gone back to the room; I hadn’t even seen him go into the hotel. I went back to the breakfast room and asked Natalia. “I definitely saw him go inside,” she said. The girl at reception assured us he had taken the key with him. At least, she definitely didn’t have it hanging on the key rack on the wall.

  “Maybe he went for a walk,” she murmured.

  But, of course, she hadn’t seen him come down. I got nervous and my hands started shaking. I told Natalia we had to call the police, but she put her hair back into a ponytail like she’d done in the market and told me no. “Don’t be silly. If he left, he left,” she said.

  She stood up and went to her room to get her purse and the bags with yesterday’s purchases.

  “You look spooked, babe.”

  It was true. I was disconcerted. I went back to the room where Juan Martín should have slept, and I didn’t see his bag or his toothbrush that he always placed meticulously in the bathroom when we traveled. The shower was dry. The still-damp towels were the ones I had used the night before.

  —

  “It’s going to rain,” said the front-desk girl as she waved good-bye. “That’s what the radio says, but it sure doesn’t look like it, the sky’s all clear.”

  “I hope it does. This sticky heat is something awful,” answered Natalia.

  “What about your friend’s husband?” she asked as if I weren’t right there.

  “Oh, there was a misunderstanding.”

  I settled into the passenger seat. Before leaving Clorinda we stopped at the service station. Natalia needed cigarettes and I needed another grapefruit Fanta. One of the truckers from the night before, the one who’d been sleepy and barely listened to the others’ stories, was gassing up. He waved to us, asked how we were, and looked into the backseat. He was probably looking for Juan Martín, but he didn’t ask about him. We smiled and waved good-bye, and headed out to the highway. On the horizon along the river, you could already see the black clouds of the gathering storm.

  End of Term

  We’d never really paid her much attention. She was one of those girls who don’t talk much, who don’t stand out for being too smart or too dumb and who have those forgettable faces. Faces you see every day in the same place, but that you might not even recognize if you ever saw them out of context, much less be able to put a name to them. The only striking thing about her was how badly she dressed. Ugly clothes, but something else, too; it looked like she deliberately chose clothes that would hide her body. Two or three sizes too big, shirts buttoned up to the very top button, jeans so loose you couldn’t guess at the figure beneath them. Only her clothes caught our attention, and only long enough for us to comment on her bad taste or declare that she dressed like an old lady. Her name was Marcela. She could have been a Mónica, a Laura, a María Jose, or a Patricia, any one of those interchangeable names that the girls no one notices tend to have. She was a bad student, but her teachers rarely failed her. She missed school a lot, but no one mentioned her absence. We didn’t know if she had money, what her parents did for a living, what neighborhood she lived in.

  We didn’t care about her.

  Until one day in history class, one of the girls let out a little shriek of disgust. Was it Guada? It sounded like Guada’s voice, and she sat near Marcela. While the teacher was explaining the Battle of Caseros, Marcela was pulling the fingernails off her left hand. With her teeth. As if they were press-on nails. Her fingers were bleeding, but she didn’t seem to feel any pain. Some girls threw up. The history teacher called in the principal, who took Marcela away; she was absent for a week and no one explained anything to us. When she came back, she wasn’t the girl we ignored anymore—she was famous. Some girls were afraid of her, others wanted to be her friend. What she had done was the strangest thing we’d ever seen. Some girls’ parents wanted to call a meeting to address the case, because they weren’t sure it was a good idea for us to be around an “unbalanced” girl. But they found a compromise. There wasn’t much time left in the year, and then we’d be out of high school. Marcela’s parents assured everyone she would be OK, that she was taking medication, going to therapy, that she was under control. The other parents believed them. Mine barely paid any attention; they only cared about my grades, and I was still the best student in the class, just like every other year.

  Marcela was fine for a while. She came back to school with her fingers bandaged, first with white gauze and later with Band-Aids. She didn’t seem to remember the episode of the torn-off fingernails. She didn’t make friends with the girls who tried to get close to her. In the bathroom, the ones who’d wanted to be Marcela’s friends told us it was impossible because she didn’t talk. She listened to them but never answered, and she stared at them so intently that it scared them.

  It was also in the bathroom that everything really got started. Marcela was looking at herself in the mirror, in the only part of it where you could really see anything, since the rest was all peeling, dirty, or covered in marker or lipstick graffiti: declarations of love or obscenities scrawled after some fight between two furious girls. I was wit
h my friend Agustina; we were trying to resolve an argument we’d had earlier. It had seemed like an important discussion, until Marcela took a razor from who knows where (her pocket, I guess). With exacting speed, she sliced a neat cut into her cheek. It took a second for the blood to come, but when it did it practically gushed out, drenching her neck and her shirt that was buttoned all the way up, like a nun’s or a dapper man’s.

  Neither of us moved. Marcela went on looking at herself in the mirror, studying the wound, showing no sign of pain. That was what most impressed me: it clearly didn’t hurt her—she hadn’t even flinched or closed her eyes. We reacted only when a girl who’d been peeing in a stall opened the door and cried out, “What happened?!” and tried to use her scarf to stop the blood. Agustina looked like she was about to start crying. My knees were trembling. Marcela’s smile, as she looked at herself and pressed the scarf to her face, was beautiful. Her face was beautiful. I offered to go with her to her house or to a doctor so they could stitch her up or disinfect the wound. She finally seemed to react then, shaking her head and saying she’d take a taxi. We asked her if she had money. She said yes and smiled again. A smile that could make anyone fall in love. She was absent again for a week. The entire school knew about the incident; no one talked about anything else. When she came back, we all tried not to look at the bandage covering half her face, but no one could help it.

  Now I tried to sit near her in class. The only thing I wanted was for her to talk to me, to explain it all to me. I wanted to visit her house. I wanted to know everything. Someone told me they were talking about putting her away. I imagined the hospital with a gray marble fountain in the yard, and violet and brown plants, begonias, honeysuckle, jasmine—I didn’t picture a mental hospital that was sordid and dirty and sad, I imagined a beautiful clinic full of empty-eyed women staring off into the distance.