Sitting beside her, I saw what was happening just like everyone else did, only from close up. We all saw it, and we were scared and astonished. It started with her trembling, which wasn’t trembling so much as startled jumping. She shook her hands in the air as if to scare something invisible away, as if she were trying to keep something from hitting her. Then she started to cover her eyes and shake her head no. The teachers saw it, but they tried to ignore it. We did too. It was fascinating. She was shamelessly breaking down right in front of us, and it was us, the other girls, who were embarrassed.
Not long after that she started pulling out her hair from the front of her head. Whole locks of it piled up on her seat, little mounds of straight blond hair. After a week you could see her scalp, pink and shining.
I was sitting next to her the day she got up and ran out of the classroom. Everyone watched her go; I followed. After a while I noticed that my friend Agustina had come out behind me, and so had the girl who had helped in the bathroom that time, Tere. We felt responsible. Or we wanted to see what she would do, how it all was going to end.
We found her in the bathroom again. It was empty. She was crying and screaming like a child having a tantrum. The bandage had fallen off her face and we could see the stitches in her wound. She was pointing toward one of the toilet stalls and shouting, “Go away, leave me alone, go away.” There was something in the air, like too much light, and it smelled more than usual of blood, piss, and disinfectant. I spoke to her:
“What’s wrong, Marcela?”
“Don’t you see him?”
“Who?”
“Him. Him! There in the stall. Don’t you see him?”
She looked at me, anxious and scared but not confused; she saw something. But there was nothing on the toilet, just the beat-up lid and the handle, which was too still, abnormally still.
“No, I don’t see anything, there’s nothing there,” I told her.
Disconcerted for a moment, she grabbed my arm. She’d never touched me before. I looked at her hand; her nails still hadn’t grown in, or maybe she pulled them off as they grew. You could only see the bloodied cuticles.
“No? No?” And, looking toward the stall again: “But he’s there. He’s there. Talk to her, say something to her.”
I was afraid the handle would start to move, but it stayed still. Marcela seemed to be listening, looking attentively toward the toilet. I noticed that she had almost no eyelashes left, either. She’d pulled them out. I figured that soon she’d start in on her eyebrows.
“You don’t hear him?”
“No.”
“But he’s talking to you!”
“What’s he saying? Tell me.”
At this point, Agustina butted into the conversation, telling me to leave Marcela alone, asking me if I was crazy, didn’t I see no one was there? “Don’t play along with her, I’m scared, let’s call someone.” She was interrupted by Marcela, who howled, “SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING BITCH.” Tere, who was pretty posh, murmured in English that it was all just too much, and she went to find help. I tried to get the situation under control.
“Just ignore those morons, Marcela. What did he say?”
“That he’s not going anywhere. That he’s real. That he’s going to keep making me do things and I can’t say no.”
“What does he look like?”
“He’s a man, but he’s wearing a communion dress. His arms are behind him. He’s always laughing. He looks Chinese but he’s tiny. His hair is slicked back. And he makes me.”
“He makes you what?”
When Tere came back with a teacher she’d persuaded to come into the bathroom (later she told us that there’d been around ten girls gathered at the door, listening to everything and shushing each other), Marcela was about to show us what the man with slicked-back hair made her do. But the teacher’s sudden appearance confused her. She sat down on the floor, her lashless eyes unblinking as she said, “no.”
Marcela never came back to school.
I decided to visit her. It wasn’t hard to find her address. Though her house was in a neighborhood I’d never been to, it was easy to reach. I rang the bell with a trembling hand. On the bus there I’d rehearsed an explanation for my visit to give her parents, but now it seemed stupid, ridiculous, forced.
I was struck dumb when Marcela opened the door, not just by the surprise that she was the one to answer—I’d imagined her drugged up and in bed—but also because she looked very different, with a wool cap covering her head that was surely bald by now, jeans, and a normal-sized sweater. Except for her eyelashes, which hadn’t grown in yet, she looked like a healthy, normal girl.
She didn’t invite me in. She came outside, closed the door behind her, and the two of us stayed in the street. It was cold; she wrapped her arms around herself, and my ears stung.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“I want to know.”
“What do you want to know? I’m not going back to school; it’s over, forget the whole thing.”
“I want to know what he makes you do.”
Marcela looked at me and sniffed at the air around her. Then she looked off toward the window. The curtains had moved a little. She went back into her house and, before she slammed the door, she said:
“You’ll find out. He’s going to tell you himself one of these days. He’s going to make you do it too, I think. Soon.”
On the way back, sitting on the bus, I felt the throb of the wound I had cut into my thigh with a box cutter the night before, under the sheets. It didn’t hurt. I massaged my leg gently, but hard enough that the blood as it spilled drew a fine, damp line on my light blue jeans.
No Flesh over Our Bones
I saw it as I was about to cross the street. It was lying in a pile of garbage, abandoned among the roots of a tree. Dentistry students, I thought, those soulless and stupid people, ignoramuses who think only about money and are steeped in bad taste and sadism. I picked it up with both hands in case it fell apart. The skull was missing its jaw and every one of its teeth, a mutilation that confirmed it was indeed the work of the proto-dentists. I looked around the tree and went through all the garbage. I couldn’t find the teeth. What a shame, I thought, and I walked to my apartment just two hundred meters away, holding the skull in my hands like I was processing toward a pagan forest ceremony.
I put it on the living room table. It was small. The skull of a child? I’m ignorant of all things anatomical and osseous. For example, I don’t understand why skulls don’t have noses. When I touch my face, I feel my nose stuck to my skull. Maybe the nose is cartilage? I don’t think so, although it’s true they say it doesn’t hurt when it breaks and that it breaks easily, like a weak bone. I examined the skull more closely and found it had a name written on it. And a number. Tati, 1975. So many possibilities. Could be its name, Tati, born in 1975. Or its owner could be a Tati, who came into existence in 1975. Or maybe the number wasn’t a date but had to do with some kind of classification. Out of respect I decided to baptize it with the generic name Calavera, which means “skull” in Spanish. By the time my boyfriend came home from work that night, she was already just Vera.
He, my boyfriend, didn’t see her until he took off his jacket and sat down on the sofa. He is a very unobservant man.
When he saw her, he gave a startled jump but didn’t get up. He is also lazy, and he’s getting fat. I don’t like fat men.
“What is that? Is it real?”
“Of course it’s real,” I told him. “I found it in the street. It’s a skull.”
He yelled at me then. “Why would you bring it here?” he shouted at me in a somewhat exaggerated manner. “Where did you get it?” It struck me that he was making a scene, and I ordered him to lower his voice. I tried to explain to him calmly that I had found her discarded in the street, abandoned under a tree, and that it would have been totally indecent on my part to act with indifference and just leave her there.
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe so,” I told him, and I brought Vera into my room.
He waited a while then, in case I came out to make him dinner. He doesn’t need to eat anything else; he’s getting fat. His thighs already rub against each other and if he wore a woman’s skirt he would always be chafed between his legs. After an hour I heard him curse me and call to order a pizza. How lazy. He’d rather get delivery than walk downtown and eat in a restaurant. It costs almost the same.
“Vera, I don’t know what I’m doing with him.”
If she could talk, I know she would tell me to leave him. It’s common sense. Before I go to sleep I spray my favorite perfume over the bed, and I put a little on Vera, under her eyes and along her sides.
Tomorrow I’ll buy her a little wig. To keep my boyfriend out of the room, I turn the key in the lock.
My boyfriend says he’s afraid and other nonsense like that. He sleeps in the living room, but it’s not a sacrifice because the futon I bought with my money—he doesn’t make much—is of excellent quality. “What are you afraid of?” I ask him. He sputters inanities about how I spend all my time locked in with Vera, how he hears me talking to her.
I ask him to move out, to pack his things and leave the apartment, to leave me. His expression is one of profound pain; I don’t believe it and I almost push him into the bedroom so he can pack his suitcases. He screams again, but this time it’s a scream of fear. He’s seen my pretty Vera, who is wearing her pricey blond wig made of natural hair, fine and yellow, surely cut in some ex-Soviet village in Ukraine or the steppes (are Siberian women blond?), the braids of some girl who still hasn’t found anyone to take her away from her miserable village. I find it very strange that poor blondes exist, which is why I bought her that one. I also bought her some necklaces with colored beads, very festive. And she’s surrounded by aromatic candles, the kind that women who aren’t like me put in the bathroom or the bedroom while they wait for some man among flames and rose petals.
He threatened to call my mother. I told him he could do what he wanted. He looked fatter than ever, with his cheeks hanging down like a Neapolitan mastiff’s, and that night, after he left carrying his suitcase and with a bag slung over his shoulder, I decided to stop eating much, to eat very little. I thought about beautiful bodies like Vera’s, if she were whole: white bones that shine under the light in forgotten graves, thin bones that sound like little party bells when they hit against each other, frolicking in the fields, doing dances of death. He has nothing to do with the ethereal beauty of those naked bones: his are covered with layers of fat and boredom. Vera and I will be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthy; beautiful, the crusts of earth enfolding us. Hollow, dancing skeletons. Vera and I—no flesh over our bones.
A week after giving up food, my body changes. If I raise my arms my ribs show through, although not much. I dream: someday, when I sit on this wooden floor, instead of buttocks I’ll have bones, and the bones will poke through the flesh and leave bloodstains on the floor, they’ll slice through the skin from inside.
—
I bought Vera some fairy lights, the kind people use to decorate Christmas trees. I couldn’t keep seeing her there without eyes, or rather, with dead eyes, so I decided that in her empty sockets some little lamps would shine. Since they’re colored I can alternate them, and one day Vera can have red eyes, another day green, and another day blue. While I was lying on the bed and contemplating the effect of Vera with eyes, I heard some keys opening my apartment door. My mother, the only person who had a key, because I’d made my obese ex give his back. I got up to let her in. I made tea and sat down to drink it with her. “You’re thinner,” she said to me. “It’s the stress of the separation,” I replied. We fell silent. Finally she spoke:
“Patricio told me you’re into something strange.”
“Into what? Please, Mom, he’s making things up because I kicked him out.”
“He says you’re obsessed with a skull.”
I laughed.
“He’s crazy. With some of my girlfriends we’re making costumes and scary decorations for Halloween; it’s just for fun. I didn’t have time to buy a costume, so I put together a voodoo tableau and I’m going to buy some other things: black candles, a crystal ball, to set the scene, you know? Because we’re having the party here at my house.”
I don’t know how much she understood, but she thought it was a reasonable bit of nonsense. She wanted to meet Vera, and I showed her. She thought it was morbid that I had her in the bedroom, but she totally believed the story about decorating for the party, even though I’ve never thrown a party in my life and I detest birthdays. She also believed my lies about Patricio’s vindictiveness.
She was reassured when she left, and I know she won’t be back for a while. That’s quite all right with me; I want to be alone. Vera’s incompleteness has put me on edge. She can’t stay like that, with no teeth, no arms, no spine. I’m never going to find the bones that went with her head when she was alive, that’s obvious. I’ll have to study anatomy to find out the names and shapes of the bones she’s missing, which are all of them. And where should I look for them? I can’t desecrate graves, I wouldn’t know where to start. My father used to talk about common graves in the cemeteries of Buenos Aires that were open to the sky like pools full of bones, but I don’t think those exist anymore, not these days. And if they existed, wouldn’t they have guards? He told me that medical students used to go there to find skeletons to use for studying. Where do they get them now, the bones for anatomy classes? Or do they use plastic replicas? It seems to me it would be difficult to walk through the streets carrying a human bone. If I find one, I’ll carry it in the big backpack that Patricio left, the one we took camping when he was still thin. We all walk over bones in this city, it’s just a question of making holes deep enough to reach the buried dead. I have to dig, with a shovel, with my hands, like a dog. Dogs always find bones; they always know where they’re hidden, where they’ve been abandoned, forgotten.
The Neighbor’s Courtyard
Paula looked at her hands, reddened and scored from carrying several big crates of books, while Miguel paid and said good-bye to the moving men. She was hungry, she was tired, but she loved the house. They’d been very lucky. The rent wasn’t high and they had three bedrooms: one would be the study; another, their bedroom; the third would probably be for visitors. In the yard, the previous tenant had left behind simple and very pretty plants, a large cactus and a tall, healthy climbing plant of a strange, very dark green. And the best part was that the house had a roof terrace, with a grill and space to set up a covered picnic area if the owner didn’t mind—and Paula thought she would let them make any reasonable modification they wanted. On one hand, she’d seemed like a very friendly and easygoing woman (“In the contract it says that you can’t have pets, but just ignore that, I love animals”), and on the other, Paula thought she seemed anxious to get the place rented. She’d accepted them with only one co-signer—Miguel’s mother; usually, landlords asked for two—and with only one salary, also Miguel’s, because Paula was temporarily out of work. Maybe the landlady needed the money, or she wanted the house to be occupied before it started to deteriorate from lack of upkeep.
Her attitude had made Miguel a little suspicious, and before signing the contract he had asked if they could visit the house one more time. He hadn’t found anything troubling: the bathroom worked perfectly, although they’d have to change the shower curtain because it was mildewed. The house had a lot of light, it wasn’t noisy even though it looked out onto the street, and the neighborhood with its lines of low houses seemed quite calm, but busy, with a lot of people in the shops along the street and even a modest bar on the corner. He had to admit he’d been paranoid. Paula, on the other hand, had trusted from the start in the house and its owner. She already knew where the desk and the books would go, and she was looking forward to studying outside in the courtyard, buying a comfortable chair so she could sit out there with her p
apers and a cup of coffee. Her plan was to finish her degree, take the three exams that she still needed to graduate, all within a year, and then go back to work. Finally she was setting a timeline, planning the months to come, and the house seemed ideal for her mission.
They unpacked boxes and stacked books until the mess became unbearable and they ordered a pizza. They ate in the courtyard with the radio on. Miguel hated the first few days in a new house, when there was still no TV or Internet, and he was in an anticipatory bad mood thinking of the calls he would have to make before everything was in order. But he was too tired to worry. After smoking a cigarette, he went inside to lie down on the mattress, still without sheets, where he fell asleep. Paula fought sleep a while longer and brought the radio up to the roof to listen to a little music under the stars. She could see the buildings along the avenue very close by; in a few years, she thought, houses like hers—she already felt it was hers—were going to be bought and demolished to put up tall buildings. The neighborhood wasn’t in fashion yet, but it was only a matter of time. It wasn’t too far from downtown, it had a subway station nearby and a reputation for being quiet. She’d have to enjoy it as long as the rest of the city remained indifferent.
The terrace was edged by low walls, but it also had a fairly high mesh fence. Likely the owner had once had a dog there—that was why she’d mentioned her love for animals—and the mesh was to keep it from escaping. In one corner, though, the mesh had fallen. From there it was possible to look over and just see a sliver of the neighbor’s courtyard, four or five red tiles. She went downstairs to find a light blanket to cover herself in bed: the night had grown cool.
—
Things We Lost in the Fire Page 11