She reached the platform the boys had been thrown from. She looked down at the stagnant black river and couldn’t imagine falling from up there toward that still water, couldn’t fathom how the drivers of the cars passing intermittently behind her hadn’t seen a thing.
—
She left the bridge and walked down the embankment by the abandoned building. As soon as she set foot on the street that led into the Villa, she was disconcerted by the silence. It was terribly quiet. That silence was impossible. The neighborhood—any slum, even this one, where only the most idealistic or naïve social workers dared to tread, even in this dangerous and shunned place—should have been full of varied and pleasant sounds. That was how it always was. The different rhythms of music mixing together: the slow, sensual cumbia villera; that shrill mix of reggae with a Caribbean beat; the always-present cumbia santafesina, with its romantic and sometimes violent lyrics; the motorcycles with their exhaust pipes cut, roaring as they got going; all the people who came and bought and walked and talked. The sizzling grills with their chorizos and chickens, their skewers of meat. The slums always teemed with people, with running kids, with teenagers in baseball caps drinking beers with dogs.
The Moreno Bridge slum, however, was now as dead and silent as the water in the Riachuelo.
As she took her phone from her back pocket, she had the feeling she was being watched from the alleyways that were darkened by electrical wires and clothes drying on lines. All the blinds were drawn, at least along that street that edged the water. It had rained, and she tried not to step in the puddles so she wouldn’t get muddy as she walked—she could never stand still when she talked on the phone.
Father Francisco didn’t answer. Nor did Emanuel’s mother. She thought she could find the small church without a guide; she remembered the way. It was near the entrance to the Villa, like most parish churches. In the short walk there she was surprised at the utter absence of shrines to popular saints—the Gauchito Gils, the Yemojas, even some virgins who usually had a few offerings. She recognized a small yellow-painted house on one of the villa’s corners and was comforted to know she wasn’t lost. But before she turned that corner, she heard faint steps that squelched—someone was running behind her. She turned around. It was one of the deformed children. She realized it immediately—how could she not? Over time, the face that was ugly on babies had become more horrible: the very wide nose, like a cat’s, the eyes wide apart, close to the temples. He opened his mouth, perhaps to call her; he had no teeth.
His body was eight or ten years old, and he didn’t have a single tooth.
The boy came up to her, and when he was beside her she could see how the rest of his defects had developed; the fingers had suckers and were thin like squid tails (or were they legs? She never knew what to call them). The boy didn’t stop when he reached her. He kept walking toward the church as if guiding her.
The church looked deserted. It had always been a modest house, painted white, and the only indication it was a religious building had been the metal cross on the roof. It was still there, but now it was painted yellow, and someone had decorated it with a crown of yellow and white flowers; from afar they looked like daisies. But the walls of the church were no longer clean. They were covered in graffiti. From up close Marina could see that they were letters, but they didn’t form words: YAINGNGAHYOGSOTHOTHHEELGEBFAITHRODOG. The order of the letters, she noticed, was always the same, but it still made no sense to her. The deformed boy opened the church door; Marina shifted her gun to her side and went in.
The building was no longer a church. It had never had wooden pews or a formal altar, just chairs facing a table where Father Francisco gave his sporadic masses. But now it was completely empty, the walls covered in graffiti that copied the letters outside: YAINGNGAHYOGSOTHOTHHEELGEBFAITHRODOG. The crucifix had disappeared, as had the images of the sacred heart of Jesus and Our Lady of Luján.
In place of the altar there was a wooden pole stuck into a common metal flowerpot. And impaled on the pole was a cow’s head. The idol—because that’s what it was, Marina realized—had to have been recently made, because there was no smell of rotting meat in the church. The head was fresh.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she heard the priest say. He had entered the building behind her. When she saw him she was even more convinced that something was horribly wrong. The priest was emaciated and dirty, his beard was overgrown and his hair was so greasy it looked wet. But the most startling thing was that he was drunk, and the stench of alcohol oozed from his pores. When he came into the church it was as if he’d poured a bottle of whiskey over the filthy floor.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he repeated, and then he slipped. Marina noticed the trailed drops of fresh blood that led from the door to the cow’s head.
“What is this, Francisco?”
It took the priest a while to answer. But the deformed child, who had stayed in a corner of what had once been the church, said:
“In his house, the dead man waits dreaming.”
“That’s all these stupid shits know how to say!” the priest cried, and Marina, who had reached out her arm to help him up from the floor, recoiled. “Filthy, defiled retards! So they sent that whore they got pregnant to talk to you, and that was all it took to get you to come? I didn’t think you were that stupid.”
In the distance, Marina heard drums. The murga, she thought, relieved. It was February. Of course. That was it. The people had gone to practice the murga for carnival, or maybe they were already celebrating in the soccer field over by the train tracks.
“He’s holed up in one of the houses back behind the tracks. He lives there, with his friends.” But how did the priest know about the pregnant girl?
It was the murga, she was sure. The Villa had a traditional troupe and they always celebrated carnival. It was a little early, but it was possible. And the cow’s head must be a gift from one of the neighborhood drug dealers, meant to intimidate. They hated Father Francisco because he reported them to the police or tried to rehabilitate the addicted kids, which meant taking away their customers and employees.
“You have to get out of here, Francisco,” she told him.
The priest laughed.
“I tried. I tried! But there’s no getting out. You’re not going to get out either. That boy woke up the thing sleeping under the water. Don’t you hear them? The cult of the dead? Don’t you hear the drums?”
“It’s carnival.”
“Carnival? Does that sound like carnival to you?”
“You’re drunk. How did you know about the pregnant girl?”
“That’s no carnival.”
The priest stood up and tried to light a cigarette.
“You know, for years I thought that rotten river was a sign of our ineptitude. How we never think about the future. Sure, we’ll just toss all the muck in here, let the river wash it away! We never think about the consequences. A country full of incompetents. But now I see things differently, Marina. Those people were being responsible when they polluted that river. They were covering something up, something they didn’t want to let out, and they buried it under layers and layers of oil and mud! They even clogged the river with boats! Just left them there, deadlocked!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play dumb. You were never stupid. The police started throwing people in there because they are stupid. And most of the people they threw in died, but some of them found it. Do you know the kind of foulness that reaches us here? The shit from all the houses, all the filth from the sewers, everything! Layers and layers of filth to keep it dead or asleep. It’s the same thing, I believe sleep and death are the same thing. And it worked, until people started to do the unthinkable: they swam under the black water. And they woke the thing up. Do you know what Emanuel means? It means ‘God is with us.’ The problem is, what God are we talking about?”
“You’re talking bullshit, that’s the problem. Let’s go, I’m getting you o
ut of here.”
The priest started to rub his eyes so hard Marina was afraid he would tear his corneas. The blind, deformed child had turned around and now had his back to them, his forehead against the wall.
“They set him on me to guard me. He’s their son.”
Marina tried to piece together what was really happening: the priest, hounded by those who hated him in the Villa, had gone crazy. The deformed child, who’d surely been abandoned by his family, followed him everywhere because he had no one else. The neighborhood people had taken their music and their barbecues to the carnival festivities. It was all frightening, but it wasn’t impossible. There was no dead boy walking around, there was no death cult.
But why were there no religious images? And why had the priest talked about Emanuel when she hadn’t even asked?
It doesn’t matter, we’re leaving, thought Marina, and she grabbed the priest’s arm so he could lean on her to walk, since he was too drunk to do it alone. That was a mistake. She had no time to react; the priest was drunk, but his movement when he grabbed her gun was surprisingly fast and precise. She couldn’t even fight back, nor did she see that the deformed child had turned around and started screaming mutely. His mouth was open and he screamed without a sound.
The priest pointed the gun at her. She looked around, her heart pummeling her ribs, her mouth dry. She couldn’t escape; he was drunk, he might miss, but it wasn’t likely in such a small space. She started to plead, but he interrupted her.
“I don’t want to kill you. I want to thank you.”
And then he wasn’t pointing the gun at her. He lowered it and then quickly raised it again, put it in his mouth, and fired.
The shot left Marina deaf. The priest’s brains now covered part of the nonsense letters, and the boy repeated: “In his house, the dead man waits dreaming.” He had trouble with the r sound, though, and he pronounced it “dweaming.” Marina didn’t try to help the priest; there was no chance he’d survived the shot. She took the gun from his hand and couldn’t help thinking that her prints were everywhere, that she could be accused of killing him. Shitty priest, shitty slum, why was she even there? To prove what, and to whom? The gun was trembling in her hand, now covered in blood. She didn’t know how she was going to go home with her hands all bloodied. She had to find clean water.
When she emerged from the church she realized she was crying, and that the Villa wasn’t empty anymore. Her deafness after the gunshot had made her think the drums were still far away, but she was wrong. The murga was passing right in front of the church. Only it was clear now that it wasn’t a murga. It was a procession. A line of people playing the same loud snare drums as in the murga, led by deformed children with their skinny arms and mollusk fingers, followed by women, most of them fat, their bodies disfigured by a diet based on carbs. There were some men, just a few, and Marina recognized among them some policemen she knew; she even thought she recognized Súarez, with his dark hair slicked back and wearing his uniform, violating his house arrest.
After them came the idol, which they were carrying on a bed. That was what it was: a bed, complete with a mattress. Marina couldn’t see the figure clearly; it was lying down. It was human-sized. She had once seen something similar during Holy Week, effigies of Jesus just taken down from the cross, blood on white cloth, something between a bed and a coffin.
She moved closer to the procession, though everything told her she should run in the opposite direction. She wanted to see what was lying on the bed.
The dead man waits dreaming.
Among the people walking quietly, the only sound came from the drums. She tried to move closer to the idol, craning her neck, but the bed was very high, inexplicably high. A woman pushed her when she tried to get too close and Marina recognized her; it was Emanuel’s mother. She tried to stop her but the woman murmured something about the barges and the dark depths of the water, where the house was, and she pushed Marina away from her with a head butt right when the people in the procession began to shout “yo, yo, yo,” and the thing they were carrying on the bed moved a little, enough for one of its gray arms to fall over the side of the bed. It was like the arm of a very sick person, and Marina remembered the fingers in her dream, the fingers falling from the rotten hand, and only then did she start running away with her gun drawn. While she ran she prayed in a low voice like she hadn’t done since she was a child. She ran between the precarious houses, through labyrinthine alleys, searching for the embankment, the shore, trying to ignore the fact that the black water seemed agitated, because it couldn’t be, because that water didn’t breathe, the water was dead, it couldn’t kiss the banks with waves, it couldn’t be ruffled by the wind, it couldn’t have those eddies or the current or that swelling, how could there be a swelling when the water was stagnant? Marina ran toward the bridge and didn’t look back and she covered her ears with her bloody hands to block out the noise of the drums.
Green Red Orange
It’s been almost two years since he became a green or red or orange dot on my screen. I never see him, he won’t let me. He won’t let anyone else, either. Every once in a long while he’ll talk, at least with me, but he doesn’t turn on his camera so I don’t know if he still has long hair and the thinness of a bird. He looked like a bird the last time I saw him, crouched down on the bed, his hands too large and his nails long.
Before he locked his bedroom door from inside, he’d had two weeks of so-called brain shivers. They’re a common side effect when you stop taking antidepressants, and they feel like gentle electrical discharges inside your head. He described them like the painful cramp you feel when you hit your elbow. I never really believed he felt them. I used to visit him in his dark room and listen to him talk about that and twenty other side effects, and it was like he was reciting from a medical book. I knew a lot of people who took or had taken antidepressants and none of their brains short-circuited; they just gained weight or had weird dreams or slept too much.
“You always have to be so special,” I told him one afternoon, and he covered his eyes with his arm. I remember I thought how sick I was of him and his whole soap opera. That day I also remembered the time when, after drinking half a bottle of wine, I’d pulled down his pants and his underwear and I licked and caressed his dick. Then, surprised and a little angry, I wrapped my hand around it and started to stroke it with the rhythm I knew was irresistible until he put a hand on my head and said, “It’s not going to work.” I left, furious, after dumping the rest of the wine over his sheets, and I didn’t go see him again for a week. We never talked about what had happened, and I never saw any red stains. I wasn’t in love with him anymore, I’d just wanted to show him that he was exaggerating that sadness of his for no reason. It was no use, though, just like it was no use getting angry or accusing him of lying.
When he locked himself in for good—his room had its own bathroom, with a shower—his mother thought he was going to kill himself and she called me in tears to ask me to come try and stop him. Of course at the time, neither she nor I knew his seclusion would be permanent. I talked to him through the door, I knocked, I called him on the phone. His psychiatrist did the same. I thought that in a few days he would open the door and start moping around the house as usual. I was wrong, and two years later I wait for him every night—green red orange—and I get scared when he’s gray for too many days. He doesn’t use his name, Marco. He just goes by M.
—
Sad people are merciless. Marco lives in his mother’s house and she cooks his four daily meals, and now she leaves them outside his closed door on a tray. She started doing that because he told her to, by text message. He also told her: Don’t wait for me or try to see me. She didn’t listen, of course. She waited for hours, but he has a freakish resolve. Marco can handle hunger. His mother tried letting him go for days without eating. She also tried, on the psychiatrist’s advice, cutting off his Internet service. Marco managed to steal the neighbor’s Wi-Fi until his mother felt guilt
y and got the connection back for him. He doesn’t thank her, or ask her for anything. His mother invites me to their house sometimes but I almost never accept—I can’t stand the thought of him listening to our conversation from his room. We go to a café near my apartment and all the conversations are the same. What can she do, he refuses treatment, she can’t kick him out, he’s her son, she feels guilty even though nothing ever happened to Marco, neither she nor her husband abused him, he was never molested, there are photos of seaside vacations and the world’s sweetest boy who dressed up as Batman and collected soccer cards in an album and liked sports. I always tell her that Marco is sick and it’s no one’s fault, it’s his brain, it’s chemical, it’s genetic. “If he had cancer,” I tell her, “you wouldn’t think it’s your fault. It isn’t your fault he’s depressed.”
She asks if he talks to me. I tell her the truth: yes, or more like he chats—because he talks less and less, he’s disappearing into the Internet; Marco is letters that titillate, and sometimes he just disappears without waiting for an answer—but that he never tells me what’s going on, what he’s feeling, what he wants. It’s horribly different from how it was before the lock-in. Before, he talked obsessively about his therapy, his pills, his problems concentrating; about when he’d stopped studying because he couldn’t remember anything of what he read; about his migraines; about not feeling hungry. Now, he talks about whatever he wants. In general, about the deep web and the Red Room and Japanese ghosts. But I don’t tell his mother that part. I lie and say we talk about books and movies that he watches and reads online. “Ah,” she breathes, “I can’t cut off his Internet then, it’s the only thing that connects him to life.”
Things We Lost in the Fire Page 15