The Houses (English version)

 

THE HOUSES

Ricardo Gabriel Curci

 

PROLOGUE By Alberto Ramponelli

 

The good reader reads for the most plausible, ancient and justified reason: to enjoy what he reads, Jaime Rest once said. Whoever indulges in this enjoyment is usually a sensitive and intelligent reader at the same time. A demanding reader, without a doubt, who when opening a book of stories harbors the intimate desire to find, first, stories that deserve to be told; and second, constructed in the way that best suits said stories. The fiction writer must, therefore, respond to this double requirement. If you want to aspire to intelligent and sensitive readers, of course.

 

This set of stories by Ricardo Curci reveals this aspiration.

 

They combine good narrative tradition and a personal voice, with their own accents.

 

The successive stories introduce us to a strange world, inhabited by singular characters whose purposes frequently besiege excess, moving in a dense, almost always hallucinatory atmosphere. I said "a world", I said "an atmosphere", because although the stories are several, they actually constitute a saga, anticipated from the title of the volume. The environments are reiterated, the characters reappear, although with the inevitable modifications that the passage of time entails. What is not modified, what endures in the change and gives unity to the whole, is that outstanding feature of abnormality that the central, leading characters denote. This abnormality is manifested through delusional projects, in some cases sordid or sinister, carried out against all sanity, all logic, all morality, even facing the risk of losing one's own life or sacrificing that of an innocent person in the desire to consummate them. . From this perspective, we find ourselves faced with a surprising collection of behaviors where the excessive attempt to equate the human will with some supernatural power, whether of divine or diabolical origin, seems to underlie. An attempt, of course, condemned to fail again and again, with dire and irreparable consequences, which paradoxically reveal the smallness of man, the ridiculousness of his excess. This component makes a certain tragic wind run through the cracks and twists and turns of this world built with a solvent hand from each of the stories that capture it.

 

Let's look at some of those delirious projects: Walter, an architect, wants to build a house like a cathedral, and he tells his wife: "I am a god, Griselda, I am the god of this neighborhood."

 

Gustavo Valverde, in a rudimentary laboratory next to a river, crosses water animals looking for a superior being. Even as a boy, he had a reputation as a witch in his town. The grocer Costa tries to preserve the ghost of his dead son. The Benítez twins exchange identities to fulfill a sinister purpose. Valverde himself, who became a pharmacist, collects fetuses in jars of formaldehyde and aims to stop the effects of death.

 

In other cases, the characters' purposes are reduced to less excessive but no less sordid or disturbing attempts: several friends hatch a cunning plan to humiliate a woman who is elusive to them. An old politician, decadent and shady, operates machinations and deceptions to maintain his position. Two twin brothers settle the unhealthy competition that confronts them from the same mother's womb through the son of one of them.

 

There are stories, furthermore, where abnormality is transferred to the relationships established by certain characters with objects or animals, relationships marked by the trace of the sinister or diabolical.

 

I think this quick and partial overview is enough to highlight the imaginative flight put into play by the author. With respect to the way of narrating, Curci also deploys various resources on this level. For example, it alternates between an external narrator, in the third person, with internal voices coming from protagonists or witnesses, both singular and plural (in this case, the "we" articulates an anonymous and group voice). This variety of narrative points of view enriches with nuances but does not break the climate of unity that binds these stories.

 

According to Borges, the prologue borders, in the sad majority of cases, on after-dinner oratory and is a subaltern form of the toast. I am going to dare to contradict the great 6 teacher, I would like in this prologue to toast the success of the preceding book; I think it meets the essential conditions to deserve it. When I say success, I mean finding that sensitive and intelligent reader who knows how to appreciate it. If this happens, the old passion,

always renewed and always the same, of telling stories for the joy of those who tell and those who listen or read will be satisfied.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Why, I wonder, why, if we have nothing more than this precarious life, does a group of strangers appear to have occupied it more than ourselves?"               

                                                                              Eduardo Mallea

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE CONSTRUCTION

 

Walter told his wife to come closer, and extended his hand to her while his eyes remained fixed on a distant and vague point. Griselda looked everywhere looking for the object that attracted her, something very high judging by her gaze, absorbed, fixed on the sky.

 

She climbed over the fence carefully; the pregnancy caused sudden nausea. Walter took her shoulders and caressed the back of her red hair. The cold of that autumn had already settled definitively at six in the afternoon, and the light was decreasing.

 

"Look, look over there!" He said suddenly, pointing up, behind the low houses, the three- story buildings and the leafy trees. The breeze moved the branches and the leaves flew to that land. The huge, deserted lot, a desolate wasteland next to Costa's warehouse.

 

"What do you see?" she asked.

 

-The Cathedral. Get on your tiptoes.

 

Then Griselda leaned on her husband's shoulders and he lifted her by the waist.

 

-What a view, by God! -He said smiling ecstatically, with a joy that she had rarely seen. - Isn't it beautiful? The triumph of architecture, the perfect fusion of art and technique.

 

She hit his chest gently, sharp, innocent taps that she always gave him when he didn't want to let her go.

 

-Put me down, I'm dizzy. Will the workers come tomorrow?

 

Walter was looking forward to them, he couldn't waste any more time. The construction of the house was going to take at least six months. They talked about the plans that were still unfinished, about how many rooms they were going to have, what color she mentioned for the walls, what trees they would plant in the garden. Sometimes Griselda would remain silent, overwhelmed or overwhelmed by her husband's drive and knowledge.

 

They emerged from the terrain covered with thick grass, clover, and wild, neglected bushes. It was night and there was only one house on the entire block, the "New Warehouse" store, with its lantern illuminating the corner, swaying in the night breeze.

 

They went to bed when they got to the apartment, but Walter didn't sleep. The ideas came without pause, his mind was not able to stop. Something or someone sent him those images, those plans that he had to draw. That's why he got up every night to sit in front of the board and make, under a weak lamp, those indecipherable, chaotic sketches that had often amazed him when he saw them with the exquisite cruelty of the morning light.

 

That night he reviewed the plans, comparing the different sketches made months before, and saw that the measurements and proportions did not match. It was necessary to use the universal pattern proposed by Le Corbusier a long time ago.

 

It was six o'clock in the morning. He opened the curtains thinking about the truck that at

that moment had to leave the materials yard.

 

"Griselda, get up!" He shouted from the bathroom. The sound of water, the toothbrush, and the creaking of the door woke her up.

 

"Make me a coffee, I have a thousand things to prepare before I leave." After buttoning up his shirt and pants, he rolled up the plans. He put on the loafers hidden under the bed and went to the kitchen.

 

Griselda served the cups with half-closed eyes and an exasperating slowness.

"The solar plexus, my love, the solar plexus!" He said while drinking his coffee with milk. Then he grabbed his things in a hurry and left the house with an expression of euphoria, like a new Archimedes on the threshold of the great revelation.

 

"But what is that, dear?" She asked him from the door, while she watched him get into the

car.

 

-Half the height of a man with his arms outstretched.-And he stood in the morning sun stretching his arms to the sky, the helmet on his head, the glasses hiding the color of his eyes,

 

and a beard that protected from the cold.

 

"Do you understand me?" he later asked the foreman, trying to explain the new construction regulations.

 

-Just say, and we'll do it. "You pay for the house," the man answered.

 

This was how the day began when they began to set the foundations in the pit. The excavator cut off traffic for two hours, demolishing the fence that separated the sidewalk from the vacant lot. The neighbors watched all afternoon, and the boys, upon returning from school, sat down to watch the bulldozer work.

 

When Griselda arrived at four, she saw Walter driving the machine. She didn't know, like so many other things she had discovered lately, that he was capable of handling her. He waved an arm at her, smiling excitedly like a child behind the wheel. He had taken off his helmet; The frizzy hair was messy and dirty. He stopped and got off the machine. He had the smell of sweat on his shirt, a smell of dry earth and lime.

 

-I am a god, Griselda, I am the god of this neighborhood.-The plans fell from their hands.

 

A week later the pillars and floor were finished. It was a Saturday. Half of the bricklayers had free time. At eleven in the morning people surrounded the perimeter of the construction.

 

The workers seemed like machine-men creating a new world, which Walter directed from the top. Now that the work was progressing, he could see the cathedral without straining to look up.

 

-How is everything going?-Costa, the grocer, asked him one afternoon, when almost

everyone had already left. He had one hand on his forehead as a visor, and with the other he was holding his six-year-old son's arm.

 

-Perfectly!-Walter answered.

 

-He looks like Hercules, my friend! Hercules on Olympus!-Costa shouted.

 

Walter rolled up his shirt sleeves showing his muscles, and then something happened.

No one knew how it started, no one was paying attention. The sun was still shining, and nothing seemed to herald worry or misfortune. Suddenly, the platform collapsed. The new floor and four pillars collapsed, destroying the basement. A cloud of dust rose along with the

 

deafening roar and screams. The neighbors scattered in fear. Some dared to enter the field, while others pushed the children away to the opposite sidewalk.

 

A swarm of new people left their homes. The dust continued to rise, until it stopped in a suspended cloud, which settled again very slowly. Only the sound of isolated screams could be heard for a long time. The firefighters arrived, the police and ambulances began to surround what until that moment had been the most peaceful block in the city.

 

Among the rubble they heard a call, the voice of the architect speaking to the firefighters as saviors from hell.

 

"Quickly, I can see them from here, under this column!" Walter said with a weak moan.

 

Griselda found him in the hospital with a cast on his leg and a strange smile. They hugged each other closely, without saying anything.

 

Construction had been delayed for almost three months, and he decided to leave the hospital without permission.

 

-I have survived.-It was the only thing he said to his wife and the doctors.

 

Upon returning to the construction site, he reviewed the damage and asked for a pencil and paper to make new sketches.

 

In the morning the bricklayers came, and he went with each one to all the sectors of the work, to explain in detail the removal of the rubble and the modifications.

 

"Hello Costa, here I am again," he said when he saw his neighbor who opened the business at nine in the morning. The schoolchildren crossed the street, frightened by the memory of the disaster.

 

-He's crazy, Walter. Architect or not, he is crazy to continue with this.

 

-Maybe, but gods must be gods to be gods. Otherwise, nothing could be created.-Costa then made an obscene gesture, and Walter laughed.

 

When two more months had passed and the ground floor and first floor were almost finished, Griselda went to see the work, walking among the piles of bricks and wood.

 

-Go up, look at the view from here.

 

-I'm coming, Walter.-But she found it difficult to climb the narrow and fragile staircase, although the scaffolding did not cause her fear, as if her husband's dizzying will had infected her.

 

-We are two creators, my love. You have the child, you are doing it day by day. Me too?

Look at this.

 

He placed the plans against the evening sun, in front of the still unfinished wall of the first floor open to the street and the roofs of the other blocks. The paper became transparent, and she could see the shape of the house that her husband had proposed to build. He followed Walter's hand as it pointed to the sun, its reddish halo hiding behind the world, and saw the cathedral.

 

He listened to the stones of the church, smelled the incense, savoring the aroma in his throat like a wafer.

 

"Stretch your arms," she told him, and when she did, he knelt down to measure the height of her body from the floor to below her breasts.

 

-The exact measurement. The house will be built to the measurement of your body.

 

Two days later, he was troubled by strange dreams, completely unrelated to his projects. He had seen two small wings, and it occurred to him that the house needed two symmetrical rooms on each side. On the first Monday he had the external walls torn down. The foreman initially opposed those changes.

 

-This is not the cathedral of La Plata, architect.

 

Then Walter hit him. He didn't know why he did it. The guy was old and would have easily given in with two kind words. But he hit him with a punch that knocked him down, stunned, while Walter looked at him calm and omnipotent. The pillars of the second floor rose beside him like flowering spikes, surrounded by car horns and the cold of winter. No one dared to deny him anything anymore.

 

-Throw down the walls. "We are going to build the peripheral wings," he ordered.

 

From that morning on, the hammering could be heard every day throughout the neighborhood, until almost ten at night. It echoed through the streets from that center illuminated by gloomy lamps, that skeleton that caused panic every time it moved. And one night, at nine and fifty minutes, a new roar was heard that brought to mind the previous one,

 

 

 

like a memory recreated in reality. That's why some didn't get scared right away. Then, upon seeing the reddish dust in the night air, the smell of lime and bricks filling the street and the windows of the houses, they went out to curse the architect, creator of that monster that he called his future home.

 

At nine forty-eight, Costa's son had left with his bicycle. A minute later, he was crossing the vacant lot that always prevented him from traveling two extra blocks. The collapse of the 12 sides of the house did not take into account the run of the child, the six-year-old son of the grocer on the corner. The walls fell mercilessly on everything in their path.

 

A siren suddenly sounded, but the ambulances arrived late. The neighbors, like shadows in pajamas, filled the street with words of punishment and dishonor. The headlights of the fire engine illuminated the area. There was red and white dust everywhere, clogging people's mouths and noses. They looked for Walter and the five workers.

 

Costa appeared at the door of the business in his boxers, agitated, holding onto the frame as if he needed it to stay upright. His bristly chest swayed like that of an asthmatic on the verge of life.

 

"Guille!" He shouted, running down the sidewalk, while looking at the disaster and the house illuminated by the car headlights.

 

"Here's another one!" The firefighters warned each other, and every ten or fifteen minutes they rescued a man. But they didn't find Walter.

 

-He was on the other side of the building.-Said those who believed they had seen him run at the last moment towards that sector for no reason. Then they went to the left wing, the one closest to the warehouse.

 

-Guille!-Costa entered the field, the scene of the collapse and the blood of mutilated bodies.

 

People watched him go from one place to another like crazy.

 

The rubble was removed brick by brick throughout the night. The last beams were removed around six in the morning, when the sun began to rise slowly and shamefully. Griselda waited on the sidewalk, surrounded by looks of extreme sorrow and resentment.

 

At half past five they had to take her to the hospital, the baby seemed to have moved forward.

 

 

 

At five minutes past six they found Walter. His same leg was crushed as last time, but he was alive and lucid, although silent. When he loaded him into the ambulance he only said:

 

-The boy, Costa's son... I saw him pass and I wanted to warn him, shout at him... They closed the door. Costa stopped sweating and desperate in front of the ambulance.

 

They tried to stop him, but he hit the sheet metal of the vehicle with impotent fury. When he opened it he knelt next to the stretcher.

 

-Architect! Where did you see my son? -I yelled at him.-Walter answered.-I warned him not to pass, and suddenly, for God's sake, ten seconds before, I swear, I saw the wings of my dream. The wings of an angel on the boy's back.

 

 

 

THE CREATURES

 

Gustavo hides wherever he can, among the green and thorny bushes, avoiding the swamps and streams. Flee towards the hut to protect it. He is not sure who reported him. The old woman perhaps, or Don Anselmo her neighbor, the one with the farm two kilometers from hers.

 

But on this night of the full moon, when the crickets chirp as if frightened, you can hear the bubbling of water that seems to boil from the river bed. That's where everything comes from, he knows it. And the countryside also knows it, which hears the noise of its creatures.

 

-Where was the first animal born, pa? -He asked once five years ago, while with his father they were dredging the lagoon. It was getting dark and they stayed working late. The sun was hiding behind the poplars and its golden reflections reflected in the water. With each scoop, thousands of small beings came to the surface, and Gustavo watched them, absorbed and intrigued.

 

-From the water.-The father told him after a while.-That's what those who know say.

Everything was born from water.-And he continued shoveling, with his back defeated and his hands hard.

 

It was then that he heard her low, hoarse cry of suppressed pain. They immediately looked at each other, and the old man fell on the shore clutching his injured hand. Gustavo ran towards him, but he didn't have time to see the other scorpion that was already on its own

 

 

feet. Very soon he was going to turn as red as his father's hand. However, he didn't dare say anything to her. The old man's face was torn.

 

-Look for the knife, it's there. Then you're going to cut me right here, do you understand? - He explained slowly, sweating, wet from the weak cold waves that hit him.

 

There was almost no light, and in the darkness he began to feel his way around the grass. With his hands in the mud, he separated the piles of uprooted reeds, and entered the water, sweeping the bottom with his arms. But he couldn't find it.

 

-Dad, I can't find it! "What do I do?" He said, moaning. He received no response. His father was just a shadow that blended into the rising tide. Everything was an abyss, bottomless darkness. And Gustavo stayed there until morning, clinging to that motionless body like an anchor.

 

There are screams everywhere, cries that he cannot distinguish if they come from the bush or from his hut.

 

It must be almost midnight, so he keeps running to close the distance between him and his creatures.

 

"This way!" He hears the gendarmes say, and accelerates his steps. His left foot hurts, the same one he thought he lost five years before. 14 When they came to look for them, the morning sun had just risen, and he saw the mother and his brothers approaching where he was sitting, with the old man's body on his legs.

 

"The foot, Gustavo!" She shouted, looking at the leg, red and swollen like a shapeless mass. But he didn't feel anything.

 

-The scorpion.-He repeated again and again.-The scorpion escaped, the murderer... He was delirious for seven days, and on the eighth he woke up without fever, although weak. The foot had no traces of disease, only a dotted red spot. The doctor could not explain what had happened. The neighbors, who knew how people died from that bite, began to fear him.

 

-That boy is a witch.-Said the old women in the town store.

 

From then on Gustavo was no longer afraid. At night he entered the reeds of the delta, sinking up to his neck in the water, defying snakes or spiders. I saw the bats hanging from the branches of the willows, the owls with their eyes open like two green moons in the middle of the windy night. Thus, his primary idea was also born from water: the creation of his own world.

 

 

 

"I am proof that one can become immune to the elements and poisons," he said one afternoon from his seat in the classroom, shouting about his immortality. Everyone laughed at him, and Gustavo ran away crying towards the river.

 

Everyone laughed except Rosa, Gustavo remembers, while the pain in his foot attacks him, as it always happens on nights of effort and humidity. Rosa always believed him, although she could never bring herself to show him her projects. They always went for a walk to the dock, while the mosquitoes flew over her serene face.

 

"They don't do anything to you?" He complained, amidst the sound of palms being struck to crush them.

-Animals are my friends, one day I will show you.-But doing so was a mistake, think now. He's finally arriving, almost crashing into the door because of the darkness. He opens it,

and the screams from inside increase and stun him.

 

"Stop it, it's me!" He shouts, and all the animals remain silent. Doesn't turn on the lights. He just closes it and crouches under the window, waiting. He steps in the excrement of his creatures and shouts obscenities.

 

From the remains of animals, from their fresh corpses rescued from the water, he created the first specimens. He looked for containers to put water from the lagoon, and there proliferated thousands of shapeless parasites that devoured each other to give rise to stronger creatures.

 

Their brothers called them monsters when they saw them, and their mother only screamed, hitting the fish tanks with the broom until they were destroyed. Gustavo was eighteen years old, and looked like a child crying over his dead pets.

 

 

"You're strange, son, very strange!" She reproached him from the kitchen. Gustavo picked up the babies, listening to the noise of the pots intermingled with his mother's cries, similar to the screams of a woman in labor. Suddenly, he had a new idea: he was going to use the old mountain hut as a laboratory, an ancient creation kitchen.

 

The dim glow of the moon allows him to see the tables used for experiments, the closet, and the old sink. The creatures move slowly around him, they sense something but they are not scared yet. Their shadows sneak among other shadows, projected on the wooden ceiling. It is too hot.

 

There was one summer when he finally succeeded. At the pharmacy he bought the material that appeared in a catalog. Then he went to the doctor's office.

 

-Doctor, can animals interbreed with other breeds?

 

The doctor looked at him strangely; He remembered having treated him two years before for that scorpion sting.

 

-There is no compatibility between the secretions.-He answered.-They would be rejected.

 

-I think I can avoid that.

 

The doctor laughed, and continued laughing as Gustavo left the office with his arms loaded with books.

 

He cleaned the hut and built the necessary furniture. Rosa believed she was doing it for them.

 

-Let me see how it's going.

 

"Not yet," he answered. They were both lying on the grass, looking up at the stormy sky, surrounded by the flight of dragonflies.

 

-They are beautiful, so perfect.

 

"They look like ugly bugs to me." And then Gustavo stopped caressing her, removing his hands from her warm thighs.

 

For three months, Gustavo locked himself in the hut. They brought him food when they saw light at night, and if not he would get food for himself. Smellless smoke of various colors came out of the chimney, and the townspeople began to avoid the road that led there. The nearby farms began to be looted by night thieves, who stole pigs and rabbits. Isolated shots were heard in the delta, and the wild animals suddenly fell silent for seven nights in a row. As if everyone had disappeared or had agreed to live in absolute silence.

 

At the end of October the first warm days arrived. The nights were clear and cloudless.

 

The morning on the banks of the river began to take on a tone exactly opposite to the previous weeks. A growing bustle filled the area; The animals seemed to have reproduced with unusual fecundity. The sound of the awakening of the beasts opened the undergrow

 

spreading between the streams and the clear sky.

 

On the last Sunday of the month, Gustavo left the hut, shielding his eyes from the sun, and stretched after so many restless nights. After diving into the lagoon, he shaved with the razor and washed his clothes. When it was dry at the end of the afternoon, he dressed and put a white flower on his shirt. Then, after entering the cabin again, he came out with a leash at the end of which was an animal, one of the many that remained locked up.

 

He began to walk the path that led to the town, walking with that creature. It was neither a dog nor a rabbit. Not even a close relative to a weasel or a ferret; He had the shape but not the gait, the face but not the fur. He jumped, squealing weakly. The tail served as momentum, a long, bare rodent tail. It was strange, something the town had never seen. Gustavo Valverde walked proudly, clean and shaved, with those green eyes that often made the old gossips talk.

 

"The eyes of an owl, that's what they are, and look what a strange creature he has," they said, looking out of the windows and doors, while he went straight to his girlfriend's house.

 

They saw him arrive down the street, surrounded by boys who were running around the animal. The bustle preceded them, and Rosa came out when she saw them.

-Gustavo, what is this?-And as he extended his hand to caress the beast, he felt the bite. "He bit her, he bit her!" the people shouted. The voice spread through the streets, it took

them as its own until it became street and voice, a single thing with an independent and uncontrollable soul.

 

Rosa had bled, and Gustavo checked her hand saying that there was no danger, that he had been careful to vaccinate them all.

 

"But how many do you have?" She asked, and they entered, moving away from the crowd of boys that gathered at her door.

 

-When you see them you will understand me. I created different beings, free of diseases, immune like me to poisons.

 

Rosa looked at him amazed and nervous because of the wound that was hurting more and more. Then she kicked the animal and the beast cried.

 

"No!" Valverde shouted.

 

He left his girlfriend's house angrily, pushing his way through the people. They followed

 

him, but he ran. A smell of urine came from the animal's fur, which trembled in fear, clinging to its clothes with its claws.

 

He went from one place to another throughout the afternoon, without daring to return to the hut. Then a shot was heard, very close, and the animal jumped from his arms without him being able to stop it.

 

-Valverde!-A voice called through the foliage.-There are complaints against you, boy, we just want to see what you were doing.

 

Gustavo fled, with the shadow of the night on his heels. With the weight of time stopping him with every meter he advanced.

 

"Close the door and prevent the invasion," he repeated over and over again. And so,

running, he arrived at the cabin to defend his creatures.

 

Footsteps, yes, they are footprints and the animals raise their heads. The knocks on the door continue without interruption, with fists and weapons on the wood. The beasts scream and moan, the blows fade for a moment, but are renewed, insistent.

 

The animals approach Gustavo, surround him, run to the door and jump out in anger. The movement of their tails raises the aroma of dirt, dust and humidity. Everything is scandal and crying, desperate screams from each side of the door. Gustavo knows that they will take her down.

 

-Open, we want to know what you do! And the door collapses. The lanterns are a particular sun, a small sun ready to reveal the monsters. The animals jump and crouch against the walls. The people surrounding the soldiers scream in amazement. They have remained still for a long time, observing, passing the light through the bright eyes of those beings.

 

The animals do not attack, they do not defend themselves, they only run to meet Valverde. The flashlights illuminate him and people see his hunched back, they see him kneeling, covered by his creatures.

 

They protect him, covering him like a shell, glaring at intruders with furious eyes and claws ready. Willing to do anything to protect their father from danger.

 

 

 

 

THE WINDS

 

Rodrigo Casas arrived in the city when he was sixteen years old. Walking through the neighborhood, the first thing that caught his brown-eyed gaze was the old, almost prismatic and lonely warehouse premises. It occupied the corner with its carefully molded friezes, the tiled eaves, the windows open to each of the streets, and the enormous door with two leaves of iron and glass. A green layer of mold rose up the wall from the tiles.

      On the threshold there was a dog with unmistakable signs of mange, and next to it a man in his forties, sitting with his face in his hands. The fringed curtain swayed in the midday breeze.

      -I'm looking for a room, sir. Do you know where there is one available? -He asked her.

      The other looked at him before answering. Rodrigo noticed the thick, gray beard, the sparse and frizzy hair. His abdomen fit the apron. There was a sign on the door, above the dog curled up and sleeping.

      “Help needed,” he said. And at the top he read: “New warehouse, by Francisco Costa.”

      -If you want, I'll give you a quarter and a job. Where do you come from?

      -From Tandil, Mr. Costa.

      -Come in and I'll show you the business.

      Rodrigo was going to touch the dog, but a “no!” The man's hoarseness scared him.

      -You better not touch him, you're just going to feed him. Another thing... -he told her, pointing to the old construction next to the premises. - ...don't go in there, it's going to collapse at any moment.

      Then the boy looked at that unfinished house, built up to the first floor and with the pillars of the second pointing to the sky.

      The business inside was dark. It had two rows of counters arranged in an L shape. Behind them were shelves full of boxes of cookies, cans of oil, and bags of flour.

      -I need someone to replace me when I go to the wholesaler or do paperwork. Also for replacement. Do you understand? You're going to be my right hand. Come and take you to your room. Here is the bathroom, that is my bedroom and this is yours.

      The room seemed to have been inhabited by a child. There was a bed under the window and a closet with old, moth-eaten clothes. The smell of mothballs and humidity was almost unbreathable. In one corner, there was a trunk with as many toys as could be accumulated during an entire childhood. Costa stood by while Rodrigo explored his new room.

      -For tomorrow I'm going to take these things out. They were my son's, you know? Now I would be your age.- Then he closed the door, and Rodrigo undressed to rest for a while.

      He didn't know how long he was asleep, but the dog's howling slowly woke him up. It was already dark, and it must have been almost nine at night. He went out into the hallway, washed his face in the bathroom and, seeing the open door to Costa's bedroom, decided to go in. The window looked out onto the neighboring land, where the dog was howling on top of a mountain of rubble, with its muzzle and blind gaze directed towards the ruins of the house.

      Then he saw Costa entering that place, even against his own advice, until he stood next to the dog. Man and dog walked together towards the crumbling walls, entering the darkness, and everything seemed to sink into silence.

      Rodrigo started looking for something to eat in the kitchen. The refrigerator held two bottles of wine, some ham and two pieces of meat. He cooked the meat, preparing everything for when his boss returned. At twelve at night he had fallen asleep, with his arms resting on the table. Suddenly he felt the dog touch his leg to wake him up, barely touching him, cautious and submissive, as if he knew his illness and was afraid of infecting it. Costa arrived later and stroked his head.

      -To bed, old man. My dear child.- Rodrigo was sleepy, and later he could not remember if he had really heard that phrase or if he had only dreamed it.

 

      The work was not too hard. The neighbors began to know him, to treat him in such a friendly manner that he was surprised at first. It was true that he did his job, got up early and was polite to people. But that kindness almost bordered on melancholy, as if everyone had known him before.

      -People love you.- Costa told him.- Appreciate good kids. Mine was like that, everyone loved it. He rode his bicycle everywhere, and the neighbors shouted greetings to him. His mother died when he was still a baby, and I think that's why they felt sorry for him.

      "What happened to his son?" He asked, while pouring the flour into a jar, and the dust remained frozen in the air, suspended, also waiting for an answer that did not come.

      The dog started howling at the same time every night. The two looked outside. The nine o'clock light was poor. Costa, in a hurry, went to the street. Rodrigo decided to follow him. For a whole month he had seen him do the same thing, and he could no longer resist his curiosity.

      The darkened silhouette and something Costa's hunchback entered through the remains of the house's wall, followed by the animal. The boy went after them as stealthily as possible, however tripping over the wood and bricks that had been piled up for years. He entered through the same opening and saw the staircase that led to the first floor, where the other, crying, spoke to a shadow projected on the wall. A figure of imprecise shape, which could come from any door, window or remains of that house that had lost its original shape, or had never had one. The light from the street or the moon falling on the ruins was unpredictable and capricious. The figure on the wall did not move. Only Costa and his lips did it, talking non-stop for half an hour. The dog whined very quietly, as if he didn't want to interrupt his owner.

      Rodrigo later learned, by asking the clients, the old neighbors of the neighborhood who had known the entire life of its inhabitants, that the animal had been the pet of Costa's son. They both walked through the streets of the neighborhood under the summer sun, while the father, still young, beardless and thinner, watched them from the warehouse door. Until that night when the house collapsed, crushing the boy, who with his short legs had tried in vain to escape on his bicycle.

 

      One morning, very early, Rodrigo heard some noises. It was Costa, showering and shaving before the usual time.

      -I need you early today. Take care of business, I have to receive the bricklayers.

      At seven thirty the truck with the material arrived at the neighboring field. For the next few days, Rodrigo snuck in every free moment to watch the construction, actually the completion of the house. He didn't know that Costa owned him.

      -He bought the land five years ago in a judicial auction.- The neighbor across the street told him.

      -And why do you want to finish it? -Asked the boy while he cut the length of ham on a piece of cellophane and wrapped it with wood paper.

      -If you don't know, dear... - The old woman answered. -Twenty cents, right?- And while she paid him, he stayed thinking.

      For the next few nights, the vibrancy and noise of the days contrasted strangely with the abrupt silence of the darkness. They both knew it. Eating slowly, they waited for the time when the dog howled to go home.

      -Do you want to accompany me?- Costa invited him one night.

      They left the kitchen lights on and the door open. The lonely path hid his steps until the land. The animal followed them weakly, with an asthmatic moan. They climbed the wooden stairs, and Costa rested his right arm on the boy's shoulders. On the landing on the first floor they saw that still, shapeless shadow again. The dog howled louder. The lime dust and sawdust from the day's work had not fully settled, floating in the scant light coming in from the street. But the shadow was still silent, and Costa murmured.

      -Listen, do you understand what he says?

      Rodrigo didn't hear anything, no matter how much he forced his attention. A minute later the shadow began to spin without stopping. Sometimes fast and sometimes slower.

      "He's riding his bicycle around the house!" Costa shouted, grabbing Rodrigo by his arm, almost dragging him towards a window.

      -Do you see it?- And what they saw was a shadow spinning across the land. Something or someone spinning to the rhythm of the wind, which had risen a few minutes before.

      -He lives here, and that's why I built him the house.

      Rodrigo believed him, scared and with his soul sticking out of his throat.

      The next morning, he spoke with Costa.

      -I'm afraid, I don't like this.

      -Stay until the house is finished. A few months. I promise to get you the location for the bakery you want to set up.

      He agreed because he treated him like a child, and he liked feeling like a baby again or a boy who enjoyed the world. From that day on they spoke little, and Costa no longer stayed there except to sleep. Young Casas, as the clients began to call him, replaced his boss in all of his tasks. He took care of the business and was even able to offset the losses generated by the construction. However, everyone asked about Costa, despite seeing him every day in the field, listening to him speak to the workers in an iron but tired voice.

 

      The work was completed in five months, and finally the entire neighborhood could see the house rising with its two floors towards the sky, as if wanting to reach it.

      And that's what he told the neighbors, when the bricklayers left and the wooden fence was already built around the garden. People, amazed, crossed the street to observe it from the front: The windows and balconies, the carved wooden finishes, the complex roofs. They asked him what he was going to do with that house alone.

      -For Guille.- He answered.- So that he can store his bicycle and rest.

      The people retreated in slow silence. Some murmured, and some former neighbor patted him on the back, as if consoling him. But for Rodrigo there was no space or need for consolation. Costa's face showed happiness, without that melancholic smile with which she had met him.

      From the door of the warehouse, from that corner now scorched by the midday sun, wearing gray pants, no shirt, and the apron that his boss had given him, Rodrigo walked to the sidewalk. The dog was still lying at the door of the business.

      -Beautiful, as much as a beautiful woman, isn't it?

      Costa laughed.

      -It's true.- And they stood looking at the house, the same one that was going to be inhabited by a dead child.

      "They think I'm crazy, I think," he said later.

      They felt that something was blinding them, intermittently, an intense light that circled in the sky in broad daylight. They rubbed their eyes, covering their eyes from the sun with their hands. But that reflection continued to bother them. Suddenly, Costa ran towards the garden, and seemed to be looking for something everywhere, as if he expected to see the boy appearing from some corner with his bicycle. And for a moment Rodrigo also waited for him. At least until he discovered the weather vane that turned in the breeze, the rusty compass rose built ten years before in a corner of the second floor, and forgotten since then.

      Rodrigo didn't think about it anymore, he simply did it because the ridiculous figure of Costa, waiting there desperately, was unbearable. He grabbed one of the many pieces of rubble scattered on the ground and threw it towards the house. The stone hit the weather vane, which, being so old, fell docilely into the garden.

       The reflection disappeared. Costa no longer had that shine, that piece of sun spinning in his face, and he was left looking at the inert pinwheel on the grass.

 

 

 

SUBSTITUTES

When the Benítez twins got into their father's Valiant on their seventeenth birthday, no one could see which of them sat behind the wheel. They got up earlier. But instead of walking to school, they entered the garage very quietly, in the cold darkness of six-thirty that winter morning. They didn't pick me up like they did every day, but rather they took the car, waited for the engine to warm up, and left directly for school.

      The frost was slowly melting on the windshield. I'm sure they were freezing inside too, even with their hand-knitted scarves and expensive coats their parents brought them from abroad. They smoked, and the smoke mixed with the vapor of their warm breaths in contact with the unbearable cold of that day. The smell of gasoline permeated the air until it almost drowned them in their agitated stupor, in that anxiety they must have felt before the crime.

      Then they saw Miss Inés, the school director, who had made them repeat the same high school course twice.

      -She got into it with us, she has us between her eyebrows.-Jorge had told her parents once. Daniel claimed that she was an old, resentful spinster who could no longer control anyone at school, and that was why she took out her anger against them. Many times, the Benítez parents were on the verge of changing schools, but the boys had refused. It was a war they wanted to win at all costs.

      Two years before, Miss Inés had received the harshest chalk shooting of her life. Like someone condemned to death, she stayed in front of the blackboard, with her back to the class, but we had hurt her, I know. When we got tired, the Benítez twins continued without stopping until the recess bell rang. The young lady, tall, with a skinny face and big thighs, with dyed red hair and two pearl earrings, did not cry. She turned around, looking at us with an expression that mixed anger and sadness. That face made me remember what the other teachers said, the rumor that was almost a legend at school. It was said that, when she was young, she had been deceived by a man. The guy was married and had been lying to her for two years. I once heard one of her teachers say that he came to pick her up from school a few times during that time. “He made a horrible noise with the soles of his shoes, it was impossible not to recognize him,” she said, as if it were the only important thing about her.

     As I was standing at my desk after the mess we made that day in the classroom, Miss Inés yelled at me.

      -Julián Santos, he is reprimanded! You and the Benítezes go to the Directorate immediately! - Her voice broke, she sank into an abyss from which she would not emerge until two hours later, in the office of the person who was then the director.

      "Miss Inés," she told him. "They are rebels, young people are rebels by nature." Forgive them this time.

      We put on innocent faces. The Benítezes, so alike, my God, as exact as two drops of water, laughed secretly, and I saw the helplessness of both women to challenge them. “Jorge,” they were going to say, “Daniel,” they corrected themselves; and faced with the possible injustice of punishing one because of the other, they abstained.

 

      At a quarter past seven they saw her get off the bus. She had been walking with difficulty for several months before. Her hips hurt, she always complained. She sat in her office almost all the time, and the teachers and students came to her desk as if before a throne. Because she began to rule from there like a despot. She no longer went to the classrooms or the playground. A senile secretary gave her reports of every minute detail that happened at school, and she decided and ordered. “What did the Benítez's do today?” She asked every morning, and her face did not seem to calm down until she saw them running in the yard.

      Her red hair was now faded and graying, and her thick glasses obscured her eyes.

      "You're going to see what's going to happen to you, you old piece of shit." Daniel threatened in a whisper.

      -The time has come.-Jorge said.

      And one of them accelerated. I would like to know which one, but I don't think it matters anymore. They were both one, they acted as one.

      Miss Inés crossed the street. She surely saw in the light of dawn, with the sun peeking over her side street and on the cobblestones wet with dew, that car with the lights on and the engine complaining. But she didn't pay attention to him.

      Suddenly, she had the machine on her. The bumper touched her legs and the trembling of her body echoed up to the back of her neck. Then she must have felt oblivion as she looked at the sky, which was spinning. The buildings were spinning around her, and her head seemed to be crushed against the sheet metal of the big white car. A smell of blood and mud filled the street.

      Maybe at that moment she remembered the Benítez twins. I'm sure that through the windshield she discovered her satisfied faces, and that smile that characterized them.

      Until he was fourteen, Jorge was smaller and shorter, shy compared to his brother. At that time both were abrupt, violent. Sometimes extremely vivid and subtle. They formed a world apart in the class, surrounded themselves with few friends and caused destruction everywhere. They fought among themselves, competed, arguing and fighting each other. However, after repeating those two courses, after the almost bloody battles with Miss Inés, from which they emerged with an increasingly greater and more contained anger, one day they began to change.

      Jorge grew, his body increased in robustness, and Daniel adapted to him, reducing his strength and the leadership he had until then. Their differences disappeared.

 

      Miss Inés survived. She was admitted to the same clinic where Jorge was taken for his broken leg against the dashboard of the car. They took Daniel to the police station, but he did not want to answer which one he was driving.

      "It was an accident, officer, we are not going to accuse each other," the two said when questioned separately.

      The fingerprints on the steering wheel belonged to both of them, the mud stains on the pedal came from the shoes of both brothers. There were no traces of sweat on the steering wheel. The witnesses contradicted each other without being able to confirm whether one or the other had gotten into the driver's seat. There was also no blood in the dent in the dashboard.

      -For the last time, guys, who was driving? If the old woman dies, they go straight to the juvenile reformatory. -The commissioner threatened them, adjusting his cap and sweating. -You and your shitty lawyers are going to drive me crazy.

      Two weeks passed like this. Jorge was hospitalized two floors below Miss Inés's room. Daniel was released on bail and a lawyer for his father advised him day and night. In the afternoon he was going to visit his brother, who had his right leg in a cast.

      I went to see them regularly and found them conversing secretly, with their faces so close that they seemed to merge into each other. His stubble grew like a whirlwind, destroying all pious expression. At that moment, more than ever, the twins had locked themselves in a circle that no one could enter.

      "Daniel, here's the painkiller, dear," the nurse said as she entered the room. I looked at her confused, because at first I thought she had made a mistake. But they didn't correct her.

      -What joke are they doing to the mine? -I asked them.

      -None. Don't say anything, but I'm the one who is fractured, not Jorge.-Daniel answered me from the bed.

      -Then the one who was driving...

      "It doesn't matter who, the fracture is here," he answered, touching the cast.

      They scared me. Because it was not simply a foolish or childish revenge that I discovered in his expression, but the surreptitious suspicion that they were an instrument or a means for something more.

      In the following days, I was the only one they decided to tell about their visits to Miss Inés' room.

       Jorge was the first to go up to see the teacher.

      -Daniel Benítez!-She said, thinking that it was Jorge who was in bed.- I was wondering how long it would take you to come see me?

      -It was an accident, miss, we were trying dad's car for the first time. -The boy wanted to justify himself.

      She then tried to calm down.

      -It's okay, it's over. Now that I think about what I was saved from...

      They began to talk about the kids from elementary school and the classmates who were no longer here.

      "You were always the leader, Daniel, and now I see that by not getting hurt you are still the strongest." While she stroked his hair she began to think, as if she remembered having seen that face in some other time or place.

      The visits were made later each day. He sometimes went to visit her after dinner, when the nurses' shift changed.

      One night the teacher saw the one with the cast enter.

      "Jorge, for God's sake, how did you get up?" She shouted.

      -I'm Daniel, miss.

      -Come on..., enough of the jokes.

      -I'm Daniel, I swear. My brother pretended to be me for a few days. If only he knew how many times we fooled them all.

      The teacher couldn't believe him.

      -But not to the doctors, the fracture exists, right?

      -Yes, it's true, but I'm Daniel. - They talked, repeating the same memories. Miss Inés remembered with nostalgia her beloved time as a young teacher.

 

      "It was a different time, dear, and I fell in love only once," she told the Benítez who came in the next night.

      -I'm Jorge, miss, Daniel was playing a joke on you. He paid a nurse to make a cast for him.

      -Am I being kidding! Out! -And he sent the doctors to come, demanding to see the x-rays.

      "It's impossible for the boy to go up with this cast," they told him. "Maybe he's having nightmares."

      Daniel swore that he had not seen the teacher since the accident, and that he never visited her at night. The nurses on the ward confirmed that he had not left the room. The parents decided to watch them and they took turns staying in the room. But Miss Inés continued to wake up distressed every morning, saying that the boys were visiting her.

      On what was to be her last morning, she told what one of them had asked her that night. She no longer dared to call them by her name.

      -Do you remember what her boyfriend's name was?

      -My boyfriend? I don't remember, it's curious. He had long hair and a soft beard, he was left-handed, I do remember that. Very tall and thin. His face looked so much like you, that every time I saw you at school I remembered him. - Then she caressed him, crying. -The day I discovered that he was married I had the idea to go get the knife from the kitchen and kill him.

      The boy left the room, and the other came. The one who had a cast and was firmly hitting the rungs of the ladder. The teacher began to shake without knowing why. The footsteps sounded louder and louder on the mosaic staircase. The clinic was almost dark, and the other Benítez had turned off the light in the room when leaving. The footsteps continued to echo and they were already at the threshold. They made a noise very similar to the soles of the shoes of someone he had known, but who had been dead for many years before.

      -I'm sure, good God, I'm sure he wasn't breathing...! She - She said out loud, and covered her mouth fearing that someone had heard her.

       The door opened, and against the light of the hallway a human figure stood out, only a shadow, but wearing a cast on its right leg and a crutch on the same side. “The Benitez?” she asked herself.

      "Who is it, Jorge, Daniel?" She said in a low voice, trying to see in the darkness. However, that shadow had a great size.

      The shadow remained still for a moment that must have seemed infinite to Miss Inés, because doubt was easily turning into fear.

      -No, it's not them... but yes, I see the plaster, and they are capable of anything to deceive me.

       For a second she felt calm, relieved, until she saw him approach, dragging her leg. The sound of footsteps could be heard thunderous between the walls of the room, and a metallic reflection illuminated Miss Inés's face, and she then clearly saw the long, sharp weapon in the visitor's hand.

      The teacher screamed with a scream of unbearable fear, and this time her crying was heard everywhere. The Benítez mother woke up with a start, and upon seeing that her son was sleeping, she ran to the hallway. The doctors on duty went up quickly. She followed them and stopped at the door of the room. The old woman screamed, jumping convulsively on the bed. Two men were holding her down to inject her with a sedative. As she calmed down, she managed to tell what she saw that night. Suddenly, she seemed to have a heart attack. The Benítez mother told us the things that Miss Inés had said before she died.

      -It was a heart attack, it seems to me, because they brought one of her devices and gave her an electric shock. But it was useless. Poor girl collapsed on the bed with a panicked face. She had one arm around her neck and the other extended forward with her fist clenched, as if she wanted to protect herself from something invisible.

      With the natural death of the teacher, the charges against the twins were dismissed, but we never found out who drove that white car.

      We only have the words of Miss Inés screaming at the shadow in the middle of the night. To that figure who, according to her, was wearing a cast and a crutch, and in her left hand a weapon very similar to a scythe.

 

 

 

 

THE INVASION

 

Rosa and Gustavo were nervous, the train guard had already passed by three times looking at them threateningly. From the canvas bag hidden under the seat came a high- pitched, shrill scream.

 

"Not long away," Gustavo murmured as the train left the last station before La Plata. A hand-knitted hat covered his ears, as if the morning cold of the countryside survived on his body. He was shivering, and the movement of the bag passed to his legs to shake him even more.

 

With her arms crossed, Rosa adjusted her coat over her chest. But his right hand, always bandaged since an animal had bitten it months before, was beginning to hurt with the cold, and he no longer knew how to protect it. A constant sore increased over time, along with the

transparent suppuration that drove her crazy with its penetrating smell.

 

-Your remedies no longer work for me. Let's go to the city to see if they can cure me. She asked him many times.

 

Then he had to resign himself to that truth, that he couldn't or didn't know how to stop the ulcer on Rosa's hand. He, who studied so much and healed his neighbors in the town, had to accept it, and they decided to move to the city. He had in his pocket the rental contract to open a pharmacy in the suburbs.

 

From afar they saw the hangars of the central station, a huge iron monument that dazzled them as they entered the platform. People began to get up, pick up their suitcases and approach the doors. The clatter of the train ceased, and the noise of the crowd grew.

 

"You should have sedated him more," Rosa protested.

 

"How would I know that we would be so late," he said, and grabbed the bag that was shaking incessantly. There was almost no way to hide the presence of the creature. People looked at them as they walked through the corridors of the carriage. The train finally stopped, and despite the noise of the station, the cries of the animal stood out, similar to the joyful moan of someone waking up after a sleep of several hours.

 

Gustavo wanted to open the bag.

 

"He's going to suffocate with this agitation," he murmured in his wife's ear.

 

"Are you crazy?" She told him, holding back his hand that was about to untie the knot. "Later, when we get to the business." -But he put his hand in the bag to caress the creature and calm it, while the animal played with his fingers, biting them gently.

 

     When they got off, the platform was a compact mass of people walking slowly towards

the exit turnstiles, so slowly that they both began to sweat under their coats. And the beast, desperate, finished undoing the knot and escaped from the bag.

 

He tried to stop her by grabbing her tail, but he heard her squeal and saw her flee among the people, amazed at that strange animal that fleetingly passed by her. Rosa stood still, not knowing what to do.

 

"Good God," he murmured. "And now how are they going to cure me?" Bringing her was her idea, even though he didn't want to. Rosa thought that if the doctors studied the animal they would discover what germs were infecting it. Gustavo, powerless to refuse, agreed. He gave the animal several doses of sedatives, and put it in a bag with holes. He knew that the strange creature was not going to be accepted in the regular animal van.

 

When they left the station, they found themselves lost, and waited for the crowd to dissipate a little.

 

-Did you see an animal loose? -They asked people on the street.

 

-A dog? Yeah...

 

-No, no, it's like a rabbit, but with short ears, short hair, it's... -And they didn't know how to describe it.

 

They decided to go to the place and rest. The business was already set up, the pharmacy they were going to serve was already prepared to open. For a week they took turns searching the surrounding wastelands and parks. The neighbors brought them abandoned puppies of the same color as their child, but the Valverde spouses patiently rejected them.

 

Gustavo began to be known and respected for his masterful recipes. He attended emergencies and deliveries more frequently than the neighborhood doctor. His wife stayed locked in the back room, only going out from time to time to walk near the station, with her hand bandaged.

 

"They gave me medicine," she said one day when she returned from the hospital. "They asked what animal bit me." "A very strange one," I answered and I started crying, because I'm going to lose my hand, Gustavo, they told me so.

 

Two months later, Rosa began to suffer from a persistent fever. He spent all day in bed, and at night he went outside sweating to breathe fresh air. The smell of his hand enveloped the bed and the house. Gustavo treated the ulcer every morning, but that hand was no longer anything but a shapeless, almost liquid mass. He removed the larvae that reproduced during the night, and kept them in a jar with alcohol.

 

Some time later a neighbor told him:

 

-Do you know, Valverde? The other day I found the strangest bug in my garden. He was eating the plants, and I hit him with a shovel and left him dead right there. Similar anecdotes spread throughout the area. The neighbors talked about the strange

animals that appeared at dawn in the streets and gardens. The news spread on local radio and television. The newspapers warned of the potential danger of a group of exotic beasts emerging from the drains to feed. The journalists interviewed the people of the neighborhood, and everyone responded by recounting their exploits against the invasion.

 

"Was she pregnant?" Rosa asked him one afternoon, while they were listening to the news on the radio, from bed. -Why did you not tell me? -Could we do anything else?

 

They paid attention to the new measures against the plague. "The municipal government will receive support to fight..." Days later, shots began to be heard during the night, or cars braking, which in the morning left the corpse of an animal crushed against the asphalt.

 

The fumigation trucks traveled the streets of the neighborhood twice a day, distributing white, odorless smoke, imperceptible to the human nose but deadly to the plague. The creatures then came out of hiding places.

 

The streets had to be closed for an hour each morning to remove the bodies.

 

Gustavo stood on the corner, watching the mechanical shovels drag the white corpses under the cloudy winter sky. The constant and pitiful drizzle did not disturb him. He no longer felt cold like before, he was getting used to the city's climate.

 

One morning he got up before dawn, while she was still sleeping. He opened the pharmacy and went to watch the morning removal of the bodies. Thinking about Rosa, he decided to go in to wake her up. He called her from the premises, looking into the hallway

that led to her room, but she did not answer him. In the room, he found her still lying down, but forever motionless, with her sick hand resting on the bed. He stifled a sigh. He then covered the body with a sheet and wrapped the hand with several cloths.

 

After carrying it to the laboratory, he immersed it in the pool of formaldehyde. The corpse of the beast collected in the street days ago sank, rising again next to Rosa's body.

 

They were both floating face down.

 

At noon, a mountain of animals appeared around the corner, ready to be removed by bulldozers, exposed to the harshness of rain and cold. Valverde went to look and stayed for a long time suppressing the desire to extend his hands towards the pile of corpses, as if he wanted to rescue them all. But he hid them in his pockets when he heard someone talking to him.

 

 

"It's getting wet," a neighbor told him, who had come to look next to him. "It doesn't matter," he answered.

-And your wife, how is she today? -He went on a trip this morning.-He said without leaving his gaze absorbed in the street.-He returned to the field, you know? She can't live without her animals.

 

 

 

 

 

THE GAME

 

Clara has returned to marry me. As if the humiliation or resentment had disappeared, and the only thing left was something more like remorse than love. The truth is that we barely saw each other, neither of us wanted to remember the afternoon when it all started.

      It was near the end of the year. The school kids left at five in the afternoon. With my friends Santos and Valverde we met at the door of Aníbal's father's mechanical workshop. We were three prosperous merchants, I think embarrassingly prosperous for that time. We smoked while sitting on the trunk of a car, watching the teachers who had just left high school, shy and serious, walking to the bus stop to return home. One of them in particular captured our attention for more than a year: Clara Palacios. Little by little she was losing her measured indifference. Every afternoon she greeted us with a strange and beautiful look. Because she was the most beautiful of all the teachers at school, we had to have her, possess her in any way.

      I think that then the germ of that other idea must have emerged, even if we were not aware of it, seeing her walk with her precise and rhythmic clicking of her heels, with the soft movement of her brown hair over her duster. The intoxicating eucalyptus perfume that left its trail on the sidewalk seduced us to the point of going crazy. And everything can be summed up in that, it seems to me, madness and perdition.

      We tried to win her over, each one of us separately, but we completely collided with her refusal.

      "I can't have dinner with you, Gustavo," she said to Valverde that afternoon, holding the books with her arms over her chest, as the sun set early behind the city. My friend watched her walk away from her to the bus stop, resentful, knowing he was attractive and yet rejected for the first time. He returned murmuring words to which I did not pay attention at the time, and which turned out to be prophetic.

      -You'll see what awaits you.- He threatened with a blow of his fist on the car's sheet metal. We took him to Santos' bar to calm him down.

      A few days later, Santos told us:

      "This time I'll try it." He took off his blue apron and opened his shirt a little to show the hair on his chest. Smoothing his mustache, he began to wait at the door.

      From the cafeteria we saw the teachers pass by surrounded by children, distracted in their private world, separated from ours as if there were an abyss between the sidewalk and the bar. Valverde and I helped ourselves to beers and salted peanuts while we watched Santos.

      At five o'clock Clara passed by. She was going alone. He greeted her and they talked. She was doing the same movement as always. A negative gesture with her perfect head, her face similar to that of a nymph or a goddess. Some boys passed by laughing secretly. Clara left.

      Our friend stood for a while in the doorway, behind the window with the name of the business. He entered, adjusting his shirt inside his pants, and sighing.

      "I don't know why we bother so much," he said with restrained anger. "She is a very common teacher."

      -Come, old man. Sit down and forget her.- We invite you to drink her own drinks until we're sick. Shouting obscenities and confused, unavowedly perplexed.

      One night we went to the workshop, and Aníbal, who was in his last year of high school, offered us a raffle for the end-of-year party.

      -We raffle a dinner in Buenos Aires, with a guided tour of the entire city.

      -Go to hell...- The three of us said, but then we each bought several numbers. Then the seed of that primal idea sprouted there, that night, among dismantled cars, the smell of gasoline, tools and dirty cards. We all look, without planning it, without thinking why, at the almanac photo on the wall. That naked and inaccessible girl pushed us towards the ravine from which we would no longer get out. Valverde suddenly said: “I came up with a plan,” and it was not his alone, but a collective expression of four excited and inconsolable bodies.

      "Before we took women without questions," he continued saying. "We dragged them into the darkness without knowing what happened before or after." And what's wrong with that? I have a theory: men are animals, and women are humans. That is why our voracity must surpass their intelligence.

      Thus Valverde established an irrevocable position, and he was the mentor of the game we invented.

 

      A week later, my meeting with Clara was unplanned. I saw her appear at the door of the bakery with her little gray suit and salmon-colored blouse, crossing her knees with each rhythmic step, in a back-and-forth that was a pleasure to watch. She would have stayed there, leaning on the counter, without time passing, admiring her eternal beauty like that of a sphinx.

      "Good morning, Casas," he told me, and started looking behind me with his eyes.

      -What do you need, Clara?

      -Invoices, this afternoon I'm taking the kids to the plaza.

      Then she told him I spoke without thinking, I threw myself into the encounter of chance without plans or strategies.

      -Can you let me accompany you?

      She looked at me curiously, neither upset nor scared. Her hair danced in the air from the ceiling fan as she looked at the baskets of freshly baked bread. The aroma of yeast wafted through her nose, and she reached out a hand to grab a piece of candy from the candy jar.

      -As many as you want, Clara.- She invited her, separating the lid from her. Our hands crossed, they touched as if skin were not skin, but a path with no return.

      That afternoon we had no witnesses other than the boys in his class, and children don't see if they don't suspect. That's why my friends didn't know about our meeting, nor about those who followed it for six weeks until December. She arrived at the bakery half an hour before entering school. I went to look for her when everyone had left, and she stayed in the empty classroom, waiting for me.

      "Forgive me," she told him then. "I had a lot of work today."

      Afterwards we would go away talking, where the neighborhood was different, and the people were almost unknown. I think I started hiding it at that moment, when things became irreversible.

      Once we crossed paths with Aníbal. He greeted us with a worried look.

      -Hello, Miss Clara, Mr. Casas.

      -How are the raffles going?- She asked him.

      He and I looked at each other in silence, thinking that silence was a wall that could protect us from guilt.

      "Well, they sell well," he answered, and ran in the direction of Valverde's pharmacy.

 

      December 10th was the end of the year party. It was an annual dinner where the kids sang on stage, and a small hired band performed tangos for the parents to dance to. At twelve at night the draw was held.

      We all went, the entire neighborhood. The costumed children reviewed their actions, and those who would not perform went to steal food from table to table, then sneak to where the grill fire was glowing. The smoke from the barbecue rose in front of the mercury street lights.

      It was a splendid and warm night. Several times I told Clara, before she left, that she had things to do, that I wasn't feeling well, that I wasn't going to go. But she insisted.

      Her eyes, by God, her eyes of immense beauty moved me, urged me to face what I knew was going to condemn me. I put on the suit stored with mothballs in the closet. She hugged me without caring about that smell, smiling, and I felt like a fallen angel, a demon under the skin of a baker.

      "I'm pregnant," she told me just before entering the school door, and looking at me out of the corner of her eye she covered my mouth. She got into the hustle and bustle of the party without giving me a chance to speak to her. We had arrived together, not holding hands, but together like two who ten minutes before had been lying in the same bed. However, everyone seemed blind. When her classmates surrounded us, they only looked at her.

      -How beautiful, Clara, how beautiful you are! -And they took her to her group.

      I went with my friends, who ate like animals. The aroma of stale wine rose from the dozens of bottles scattered in a corner of the patio. The children trampled us all the time in their runs, and the music sounded strident through the worn-out loudspeakers.

      "We are going to lower the air of superiority to that mine," Santos told me, drunk and with his beard dirty with grease.

      Valverde observed everything calmly, controlled, like a vivisector who regulates his task with meticulousness. The men, my friends and other strangers, winked at me as they looked at me. “Complicity is perhaps the most indestructible bond in the world,” I thought out loud, but they didn't listen to me.

      The music suddenly stopped. The director went up to the stage and asked a girl to help her draw the prizes. From a red bag they took the winning numbers from the tables served and at the end the number from the trip. This lasted almost half an hour; People looked everywhere with each number sung. But I felt the anxiety, the expectation that, like a ghost, hovered over the environment tired of heat and smoke.

      Then Valverde took the stage. Some did not know what it was about, and were silent. Clara looked there, without surprise, without any suspicion. I grabbed Valverde by the seat of his pants.

      -No! .- I told him.- No! .- But he broke away and I couldn't stop him anymore.

      -Now the final draw, with a big surprise. Please, Clara, do us the favor of coming to the stage.- And she extended her hand towards where she was. We looked at her, silent, as she went up, intrigued.

      Those who knew us did not understand at first. The children continued playing without paying attention. Hannibal ran away, to hide, I think. Some voices spoke timidly.

      -This is the most anticipated award-. Valverde said-. The prettiest teacher in the school.

      For thirty seconds everything was confusion. Then C Lara began to cry without moans, without noise, in a silence similar to the cry of a dead person. And I, so far away, so mute now, I kept my mouth shut and didn't stop the drama.

      -Forty!- Valverde shouted. It was my number. That pink checkbook paper stung my suit pocket. I looked for it, I wanted to destroy it, swallow it, get rid of the evidence of the crime. He needed the rain or the moon to destroy him right there with his legendary magic. I heard my name.

      -Rodrigo Casas is the winner! - Everyone watched me. I was sweating, and without looking at her, I knew what Clara was doing at that moment.

      She gave a small, barely audible scream, like a soul-consuming implosion. Her eyes swiveled from one place to another, without stopping. Her chest heaved with jerky movements. She then got out, and she ran into the darkness, beyond the spotlights, where the light from the party couldn't reach her.

      But I didn't follow her. I knew that she was tied to me in an unspeakable way, and that one day she was going to return. I saw her neat hair swaying in the night, the gold chain around her neck, and her flat shoes thundering on the tiles, like the judgmental hammering of a judge.

 

 

 

 

 

THE FUGITIVES

 

The house was already old when Pablo and María Cortéz moved in. They had left the Mar de Ajó apartment shortly before, at the end of that summer when she became pregnant. In the city they were told that the owner of the bakery was renting an abandoned house, and they toured the neighborhood with old Rambler. Finding it, they walked along the only path that led to the main door. It had a vague European style, with huge windows facing the front, and moss on the walls.

 

"Is that okay with you, María?" Pablo asked her.

 

-Yes.-She only answered, because above all things she wanted to stop running away. It didn't matter what the house looked like, the only thing that was essential was to stop and hide.

 

María waited for him at the door with the suitcases, while he locked the car. Upon entering the first thing they noticed was the wood covering the entire interior. The floor was tarnished, the stairs and railings were splintered, the ceiling was eaten away by insects. She left her luggage in the hall without daring to continue, he saw her look of sad disappointment and had to take her arm and push her gently.

 

-Couldn't you see her in your dreams? -He asked. But he knew that if he had discovered something bad, he would have told her right away.

 

They went up to the upper floor, from where they contemplated the entire area of the neighborhood, quiet, asleep on that Sunday afternoon, and beyond, near the cathedral, it was

 

waking up from its nap. The floor of the room echoed loudly under their footsteps, so they remained on the balcony, thinking about the beach. Maria was the one she missed the most, she had lived there since her birth. But shortly after meeting Pablo it became necessary to escape; He still kept the memory of his two years in prison too vivid.

 

"This is the only place I'm free." I had told him many times, on the beach. But after a while he began to have the new feeling that the sea had become another wall of his prison. Despite so much change of water, he used to say, so much death and resurrection, the result was absolute immobility. The waves seemed to warn him that the path of the world ended there.

 

They heard the bells of the last mass of the day. Pablo carried the suitcases with the creaking of the stairs, while she tidied up the kitchen. The oven was useless, the water had a rusty color, and they did not dare to bathe. They lay on the floor, hardly speaking, and María had one of her dreams. She called them that because she had to name them somehow, but they didn't necessarily happen at night or when she was asleep. Sometimes they were harbingers of events that would happen sooner or later. Sounds and voices that no one else heard.

 

That night he heard the screams for the first time. He didn't know if they were from joy or tears, where or who they came from. She looked at Pablo next to her, tossing and turning sleeplessly, listening, not to the voices, but to the noises of the house, as if the construction was adjusting to the weight they had brought. "He must be thinking about the sea that is chasing him," she said to herself. Those were the words Paul used the day they decided to flee. Not even on the coast, as anonymous as they were, they would be safe. The salary was no longer enough for them, and although he had tried to connect with his friends to obtain some of the stolen money, he had not been able to obtain it. Separated from them when they captured him, he never saw them again. He had told her all this when he met her on the coast, trying to hide from the police. They lived together for two months, and during that time she had her first dreams about Pablo. He had heard the police sirens, and warned him. He was the first to believe her, and accustomed as she was to being called crazy, María felt happier than ever.

 

When he woke up in the morning, he checked one of the suitcases. From a box, next to Pablo's revolver, she picked up a handful of sand to smell it, like when she was a girl and sat on the shore looking toward the sea. In those years he heard the first voices he could remember, and although he searched everywhere he had never been able to discover where they came from. They just kept ringing in his ears.

 

He went to the kitchen, and since there was nothing left but the remains of the food from the trip, he got dressed and went out to the street. Businesses were beginning to open their doors with aromas of vegetables and bread. He entered the bakery "La colonial" and talked

 

with the owner, who spoke to him with an air of subtle seduction. The pregnancy was not yet noticeable, and her brown hair, falling over her narrow shoulders, gave her a delicate and defenseless appearance. She told him that her husband had once worked in a pizzeria, and asked if he needed a helper.

 

"Let him come this afternoon and we'll talk," the baker answered.

 

María returned excited, and just before reaching the house she heard the shots. They came from the street, but everything was normal at that time, the kids walked to school and the delivery trucks stopped on the corner. However, they had been too intense to come from one of his dreams. Then he saw Pablo reading the newspaper in the kitchen, half dressed and distracted.

 

-Did you hear something? "No, why?" He told her.

But she didn't want to worry him, that morning he seemed calm after a long time. He was beginning to believe that they could settle down and stay there forever.

Pablo started working at the bakery, and within the first month he asked for a loan to buy furniture. As the porters brought in the dining room table and bed, a crash echoed through the floorboards. Everyone heard it, although Maria at the same time heard a brief scream that had barely surpassed the previous noise. He was curious, not afraid, because somehow the old, sterile sounds of the house seemed to have stimulated the perception of more subtle and indefinable ones.

 

The next time happened that same afternoon, and he looked out the window to make sure the voice wasn't coming from the street. For the rest of the day she sat on a chair in the middle of the room, as if forming or being herself a part of the furniture, and began to listen with extreme attention. Then he could make out two overlapping voices, male voices screaming in panic.

 

When he told Paul, he regretted having done it. A look of concern invaded her husband's face, and he went out to the balcony to smoke. Surely she would think of a new way to escape, to leave the house that she was beginning to feel like her own. He did not decide, however, to also tell her about the shootings, which were repeated with greater frequency in the following days.

 

Later she was afraid of being alone, and she went to the bakery when the uninterrupted

 

sound of weapons became unbearable. As he walked away, the force of the shots decreased, and he turned around looking at the profile of the solitary house on the block, dirty and sad under the cloudy autumn sky. Since sometimes I didn't want to disturb them in the business, I would visit a neighbor or stay locked in the bathroom, where the noises would be subdued.

One day he looked for her everywhere when he returned from work, and María came out of the room in which she had locked herself, hugging his neck, crying.

 

-What did you hear? Tell me.-Pablo asked her, comforting her with warm caresses on her wet cheeks.

 

She was about to tell him about the sirens and the screams, but this was her home now, and she wasn't about to leave it. That's why he didn't say anything to him. Pablo lay down looking at her worried. She knew that bitter expression, with his mind obsessed by the sirens of the cars that one day would come looking for him. She approached him to caress him, and he pulled away abruptly, annoyed, as if he were trapped.

 

Two months later, they bought more used furniture. They had spent the entire loan, but it was no longer possible for them to be careful. They thought that perhaps, by filling the house with greater weight, his insistent moaning would disappear. They were chosen for one reason only, not their usefulness or their beauty, but because of their weight. They looked for solid wood, as dead and immobile as possible. The workers distributed the furniture, and the creaking of the house echoed again. Pablo was beginning to get a little more nervous by the minute, treating the workers with sharp orders and furious shouts.

 

Then she heard the voices again, even more so when the men finished and the sound of the boards stopped. He saw Pablo arguing with them about paying for transportation, and when he heard him speak in that tone, the voices mixed. María felt dizzy, a shout of angry men was surrounding her. And he was not able to distinguish the real voices from those in his dreams.

 

Afterwards only one persisted, that of Pablo. Hers was the only one similar to the original duo of screams that had disturbed her since her arrival.

 

In the following week, the pregnancy occupied her thoughts, and she decided to forget everything else. The house seemed to respond to him by attenuating the sound of the wood, and Pablo was now calmer and more enthusiastic about his work in the business.

 

At the end of winter, the source of the screams resurfaced. They tried to spend most of the time apart, unable to explain the need for sudden rejection. On weekends she stayed in bed, and he went from room to room with nails and a hammer. He repaired the loose boards and those that were not, with the obsessive idea that this way he could reduce the moaning

 

of the house.

 

In October, María began to feel the pains of childbirth and waited for Pablo to return before going in search of the doctor who lived across the street. Half an hour later the baby was born and the doctor was cleaning him, lulling him to sleep. Maria, with a frightened look, looked up at the doctor. The pain had already passed, but that lullaby, instead of calming her, disturbed her spirit, because she recognized the voice, the same one that, along with Pablo's, was screaming in fear.

 

Then the sound of sirens came, although this time she was sure it wasn't her imagination. The two men ran to the window, and she, from her bed, could see the patrol cars in front of the door, setting the neighborhood on fire with their red lights. Pablo looked for the revolver from the closet, and holding the doctor by the neck he opened the street door. The police shined their headlights on him and pointed them at him.

 

-If you don't leave, I'll kill him! -He shouted.

 

When he closed, he tied him to a chair and went to turn off all the lights. Afterwards he stayed with his wife for a while.

 

"I'm going alone," he said to María, while caressing his daughter.

 

María started to cry, she wanted to accompany him and warn him of danger, she was the only one who could do it. But he refused.

 

"You couldn't prevent me this time, my love, maybe you lost your gift." She wanted to say something, but she knew it was useless.

 

Pablo would leave before dawn if he managed to evade the police, so he closed all the doors and shutters of the house. By the time he finished, it was already difficult for him to breathe. Touching his bare chest, heaving and sweaty, he walked around the room with an involuntary whistle from his narrow throat. He went from one window to another in search of a crack of fresh air. She noticed the expression of hopeless despair in her husband's eyes, in that face where the darkness and suffocation were increasingly similar to the confinement of a prison. The old house had been, since his arrival, a new prison for him.

 

Before dawn the doctor managed to remove the gag and shouted for help.

 

Pablo woke up scared from the light sleep he was in, and without thinking, like a reflex, he shot him in the neck. The body moved convulsively for a few seconds and then stopped.

Maria got up to stop the blood with her sheets, and began to cry.

 

 

"I already knew it, I already knew it!" She said, moaning desperately, and when she realized her words it was already too late.

 

Pablo looked at her now with incomprehensible terror, as if she had been transformed into an object or a place, something more like a place of inevitable confinement than a woman.

 

Then he made an extreme choking gesture and ran towards the door. When he opened the door, the shots that killed him were heard.

 

 

 

 

THE STAINS

 

Casas stood in front of the bathroom mirror on a fall Monday morning. His pregnant wife was still sleeping in the room.

        -Clara!-He called. -It is six o'clock! Looking at his freshly shaved face, he saw the freckles that had reappeared since the last time he grew a beard.

 

"They went away when I grew up, and now I have them again," he told his wife, and she showed him her own spot, one that had sprouted right in the center of her belly since the beginning of the pregnancy. An opaque white circle, with the color and shape of a jasmine petal. Sometimes Casas would lean his head on it, trying to listen to his son's growth through that white window, and he could also smell the perfume. Not that of his wife's skin, but the aroma of his grandmother's garden.

 

Rodrigo looked at his grandmother with indiscreet insistence every time he went to visit her when he was a child. It was inevitable for him to observe his head carefully until the moment he had to leave, as if he really saw something more than that skull with no more hair than two gray strands on the back of his neck. He thought he saw coherent drawings in the strange shapes of the moles on the old woman's skin, different colors that he could never classify. The body was already defeated, but his voice was special. When he listened to her, Rodrigo felt an unknown fear.

 

Throughout the afternoon at the bakery, Casas thought about what he was going to do with Costa. The old man had helped him a lot, it was true, but he wanted the big place in front of the square.

 

"I'm sick, kid, I need money like my daily bread," the old man told him.

 

"But you're dying," Casas thought, resentful, anxious as he had never been before.

 

 

 

-Lower the advance a little and I promise to pay you the rest in installments.-Casas insisted.

 

However, he could not convince him. The guy was delirious in his illness, he seemed to deny the real state of his body. That's why that night I was finally going to challenge him.

There was already another interested party, someone who did not need the premises, who might even rent it to him to transform him into a debtor for life.

 

Looking at the clock on the wall, he hurried to finish the work. He left the old garage where the business now operated and told himself that this would be the last time.

 

-I'm going to have a son, man, I want my own business. My bakery is going to be the best in the neighborhood, you understand? Clara is going to decorate the stained glass windows, and everyone who passes by on the sidewalk will be able to smell the aroma of freshly baked bread.

 

Costa was in bed, in his flimsy, creaking metal bed. A weak lamp plunged the right side of his face into an agonizing luminosity.

 

-Tomorrow the buyer comes, he offered me cash that I can't refuse. You know, kid? My treatment is expensive.

Casas grabbed his pajamas with his fists, and the fleeting idea that he could kill him right there without anyone ever knowing frightened him.

 

-He has been promising me this for ten years. Why the hell did I work hard for you, you old miser?

 

Then Costa had a spasm, his chest moved convulsively, and for an instant he opened his eyes wider, just an imprecise period of time in which he waited for the arrival of death.

 

Then they stayed still forever, just like when Casas' grandmother died.

 

Grandma's home had the aroma of rain on its walls. Walls covered with moss and plants. The smell of the dogs filled the rooms and beds. That perfume remained in her nose all week, until the moment she returned to fix her astonished gaze on the old woman's almost dead head.

 

"What are you looking at?" She shouted at him, and Rodrigo, holding back his tears, fled from her side.

 

 

No one ever told him about his illness until he was older. She only knew that he went to the hospital in the capital every three months, and returned in silence. The spots on his head were taking on their character, a shape that was indecipherable to him. If he could have gotten closer and taken the skull in his hands, he would have studied it like a globe in search of seas and lands.

 

Casas held Costa's head in his palms and closed his eyelids with his thumbs.

 

He sat there for perhaps ten minutes, motionless, and then shuffled through the papers on his desk.

 

There were dozens of old documents, and his surprise knew no limits when he found the title deeds to the large house next to the warehouse and all the lots on that block. Suddenly he found himself master of all that; He and Clara and their son would be the richest and most respected family in the neighborhood.

 

Desperate, he kept looking at the corpse, as if he were going to wake up and discover it, as if he were not sure of the effectiveness of death.

 

Then he grabbed the sales contract for the premises, put it on the table and turned on the big lights. Something disappeared in that moment, perhaps the shadow, which had become so heavy in that room. The truth is that when you sat down at the typewriter, something else guided your hands when adding the other properties in the document. Then he signed his signature and that of the old man. It came out so similar that everyone would say upon seeing it that Costa made it at the last second of his life.

 

Looking at the corpse, he put the contract in the nightstand drawer. He went to the bathroom and washed his face. An intense itch was bothering him again. He looked in the medicine cabinet and only found an old lavender that smelled. In the mirror, full of small spots of rust, he had a hard time looking at the freckles, the renewed spots.

 

He picked up the phone and called his friend.

 

-Seal the document and then we'll settle with the money.-When he hung up he was thinking about how much he would give to the notary.

 

Once he had looked at his grandmother for a long time. She approached him and said, with a finger pointing to her own skull: "You're going to grow spots like mine from looking so much." Then he had sat down without saying anything else, and the whole family watched Rodrigo, making signs for him not to cry. Several months later she died, and the funeral was invaded by strange people. The old relatives commented that the grandmother had

 

frequented them for the last twenty years.

 

They were almost all women with extravagant dresses, silver jewelry and full of curious symbols. Some approached the coffin making strange movements with their hands, as if they were forming spherical figures in the air, and the spiral tobacco smoke emanated from their lips, further thinning the atmosphere filled with flowers and incense.

 

Rodrigo made his way through them, until he reached the grandmother's body. The stains were still there, even more shapeless, and he decided to touch it. He couldn't think about it too much, he didn't really want to, and as he did so he noticed the softness of the whitish flesh, the smell of flowers that he carried on his body. The women had covered it with jasmine petals. That night, when she looked in the mirror after the funeral, she discovered the freckles on her hands and face. Very small freckles, milk tea color. Almost beautiful stains if it weren't for the horror he felt when he saw them. He was sick two weeks after this, and the doctor found no cause.

 

Casas stayed in Costa's room all night. In the morning he put a sign of mourning on the door and called Clara on the phone.

 

-The old man died last night, I have to prepare things for the wake. "I don't feel well today," she said. "I better stay home."

At ten in the morning the buyer appeared. The man agreed with Costa's last wish, and left without saying anything else. Casas was now the new owner of the entire block.

 

It would have a business with wide doors facing the square, with double windows and the largest kitchen in the entire neighborhood.

 

They came to look for the body at twelve, in full sun, and Casas closed the warehouse forever.

 

The dogs from the big house next door howled.

 

The hearse passed in front of the new premises. Casas smiled, and his mind planned the immovable framework of the future.

 

He was at the wake until very late, but few came to say goodbye to the old man. Soon, the drawer and the garage door were closed.

 

"Tomorrow at eight o'clock in the cemetery," the employees told him, and he said

 

goodbye to them.

 

When he got home, Clara was already in bed and he didn't want to wake her. He undressed and got under the sheets, feeling that itch on his face again. It took him a while to fall asleep, but he dreamed of Costa. With his dead face, whose voice came from another place or another world. And he defended himself by hitting everywhere.

 

He woke up agitated, the bed was messy and Rodrigo had Clara's arm clinging to his shoulder.

 

"So many blows you gave, dear, you almost killed me." She said with her eyes half closed, panting agitatedly. Clara was sweating and burning with fever.

 

He caressed her to calm her, but he began to smell a peculiar smell, a fresh and bitter aroma.

 

The jasmine perfume returned from time or distance.

 

Casas ran to the window and the morning light illuminated his wife's moans, her crying, and the sheets that moved like the dunes on a beach. Then, separating the blankets with a brutal movement, she discovered that enormous red hole of blood flooding the nightgown and the bed, like a pregnant well through which dead children go forever.

 

 

 

 

 

THE DOG YARD

 

One afternoon we met at the corner of the wood and brick house, already old and ruined since before we were born. Two women named Cortez lived there. The mother was a fortune teller or seer, or simply a witch as we called her; and the daughter, barely a year older than us, was quiet and sickly, but nevertheless had a strange beauty. Santiago and I followed her when she left the school, to the door where the old woman was waiting for her to prepare the session room.

 

At that time we were only eleven or twelve years old. During the summer, with Santiago and Laura we would sit on the sidewalk of the pharmacy or the bakery, and then we would go to the house to watch the dogs. They had twelve, an invariable number of animals that barked at anyone who approached the owners' dirty garden. During the night, their howls could be heard throughout the neighborhood, as pitiful and desperate as if they had not been fed in weeks. In the morning they came out carrying plates of nauseating food, and the dogs jumped around them, growling at each other. When I shouted at them, they fell silent and crouched against the floor, afraid and submissive only to the women's voices. But at night the howling ritual was always repeated again, and this became a mystery even more fascinating than the peculiar way in which the old woman made her living.

 

"Let's do it quickly," Santiago murmured, still in his school uniform, his hair slicked, and the cardboard box in his hands. He kept the lid closed tightly with his right hand, while Laura pulled the hair clip we had asked for out of her hair.

 

I think that morning at school, none of the three of us thought about anything other than what we planned to do that afternoon. We did not feel afraid, we knew the total helplessness of the old woman for anything other than insulting us from the door of the house. We never really bothered her until that day, and if we did it was because strange things started to be said about them. Rumors and fables regarding their dogs. So we, out of ungovernable curiosity, decided to keep watch.

 

We gave the first turn to Laura, who then went to her piano lessons. Santiago took the second, until six in the afternoon, when I replaced him. We kept watch for several months, until we discovered that the twelve dogs were never the same. The most curious thing was that we never saw them escape or die. When one disappeared, the next morning another had taken his place.

 

The witch Cortez's sessions began at two in the afternoon, so we hid behind the warehouse. The box trembled in Santiago's hands, and we covered it to hide it, as if its contents could be seen through the cardboard. Laura ran close to the entrance and the dogs barked.

 

"They are feeding them," he told us when he returned. From afar we observed the fountains whose smell filled the neighborhood until nightfall, and we saw how the animals pounced on the dishes.

 

Half an hour later, a car stopped in front, and two fat old women, with reddish hair and covered in silver necklaces, got out. We heard barking, the daughter's voice silencing them, and then the strident greeting with which the fortune teller welcomed her clients. The old woman looked older than her age. The exaggerated paint on the face, the dyed hair and the sadly decrepit frame of the house gave it that appearance. She raised her hand in a gesture of great solemnity and invited them to enter.

 

Then we walked there. The barking began again, as we ran along the path that led to the back garden and the shed. It was a kind of driveway, separated from the rest of the house by a very low wall. The dogs never jumped over it, nor did they jump over the fence that separated them from the sidewalk. It made us think many times that they did not want to leave; Perhaps they wanted to die protected by the extensive shadow of the building, among

 

the smell of incense that came out of the windows. They were common animals, mongrels, almost a breed of bastard dogs.

 

They barked at me from four inches away along the entire length of the wall, showing their teeth threateningly but not daring to jump. In the previous weeks we had discovered that pregnant females disappeared before giving birth, and it was this that decided Laura, finally, to accompany us. Santiago and I, on the other hand, did it out of curiosity, and perhaps also out of a weak sense of justice towards those animals.

 

We reach the back door. It was locked, so Laura grabbed her buckle, opened the lock, and ran out into the street. Now only a mosquito panel separated us from the kitchen. I went first, and if I wanted to do it it was because I felt that I was gaining something from those women, that unconscious fight that we were waging against their deliberate secrecy.

 

"Come on, give me the box!" I yelled at Santiago.

 

I opened the screen door and threw in the box. Fired like a bullet, the white cat detached itself from the cardboard and went directly to the visiting room. I heard the strange phrases that the old woman was saying about the crystal ball stop, and across the kitchen I saw her enraged silhouette rise.

 

"Ready Eduardo, run!" My friend shouted, and then I saw his shadow opening the fence.

 

The dogs had been freed, and they chased the cat into the living room, where the women jumped out of their chairs, screaming like crazy. The animals circled around the room, destroying the porcelain plates, and suddenly the crystal ball fell from the table. When it exploded, its countless fragments looked like fireworks. Then, the old woman collapsed unconscious on the living room floor.

 

I fled a second later, laughing and crying at the same time, with the image of his face against the ground and his bloody skull. The cat ran away, I think. But the dogs stayed. They did not dare to go beyond the boundaries of the house. They remained locked in that free space of the patio, fatefully submissive.

 

-How is she? -We asked a few days later, trying to appear simply curious, so that the guilt would not give us away. That's how we learned that an artery had burst in his head after the blow, and half his body was paralyzed. The daughter took care of the house from that day on.

 

I haven't met my friends in a long time. However, I had to go through the sidewalk of the house every morning to go to school, and I began to notice that the girl fed the dogs less frequently. They pounded on the door, howling, receiving no response. I witnessed the death

 

of each one over the course of several weeks. I saw how, fallen with their legs defeated, they died peacefully, almost feeling guilty. One afternoon a municipal truck came to collect the bodies.

 

-Who called? -The guy who looked like an inspector wanted to know.

 

-It was me. -Said one of the neighbors gathered on the sidewalk, with a defiant gesture and a finger moving accusingly in front of the man's face. -And if you allow me to say it, here we all know that the witch bribed them so that They got him animals.

 

-You can't prove it, ma'am, you can't... -The man defended himself, walking away with an indignant expression.

 

They took all the dogs, except the one that remained alive and hidden behind some boards. I didn't say anything to them and waited for them to leave. He was the last, the smallest of all.

 

He tore open the wooden door, and the girl began to look at him from the window. Giving a scream he chased it away, and the animal ran towards the back yard. I decided to look for it, and that's why I hid until she closed the curtains.

 

A while later I walked crouching next to the wall, a little further than where I arrived the previous time. My sneakers were slippery in the mud, and I felt a crunch under my feet. Losing my balance I fell onto a pile of fragile, wet bones, piled up against the wall, hidden by the shadow of the house. They were short and small bones, like the skeletons of dogs. I felt nauseous and walked away towards the shed at the back, from which the heat of the boiler flames reached me. Peeking out the door, I saw a wooden and straw chair, and more bones scattered on the floor around it.

 

"Get out, get out!" I heard someone tell me in a tone of contempt.

 

The old woman, whom I didn't see before because of the darkness, was screaming at me hysterically. With one hand he stoked the fire, and with the other, forever dead at the side of the body, he tried in vain to grab some piece of meat and chew it. But I couldn't anymore.

 

I ran out into the street, and the surviving dog ran away with me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUNDAYS

 

After ringing the doorbell, I caressed the old door of my parents' house. The wood was also sweating from the humidity that Sunday. Since his death, my brother and his family occupied it. The day after Mom's funeral they moved without notice. They brought the furniture in a truck, and the neighborhood watched them unload their things as if the house had always belonged to them.

 

-How about? -Daniel had asked me when I went to see the spare parts, but I preferred to remain silent, like so many other times. Since then, I only had to visit them on weekends to take my nephew to the court. It became a ritual eagerly awaited every Sunday.

 

That day they were having lunch in the kitchen. The boy, as soon as he saw me, ran to his room to change.

 

"I'm going to sell the house, we're moving to Buenos Aires," Daniel said, reading the newspaper, without looking at me, oblivious to my face full of panic, extreme vertigo clouding my eyes.

 

The first thing I thought then was that I was going to lose Gabriel. If they moved I would only see him sporadically. He wouldn't even be the second father, the Sunday replacement, the assistant who went out onto the field in the last fifteen minutes of the game. That's how it happened with us since we were kids. At the club, Daniel was always the starter, the captain of the team, the one who planned the plays. Once the coach told me:

 

-You come in, kid.

 

When Daniel left the field, he murmured in my ear:

 

-Don't screw up the game.

 

My sister-in-law's voice woke me up from my memories.

 

-Don't buy him ice cream, he has a sore throat today. "It's okay, Alicia," I answered.

Gabriel ran back, dressed in jeans and the team t-shirt. Daniel had not accompanied us to the field for a long time. He was tired, he said, and he relegated that task to me.

 

I thanked him as if I had finally obtained his approval. But this time he insisted on coming with us.

 

We took the last slices of pizza from lunch to the car. Gabriel leaned out of the Torino's

sliding roof and his father held him by his belt. We talked for a while about the championship, but I needed to talk about the house.

 

-Are you sure about selling it? Look, I would like to stay there. My apartment rent is due at the end of the year, and...

 

-And what are you going to do with that fucking house alone?

 

Then I remembered that feeling of abrupt emptiness I had every time Daniel beat me.

 

That was what had happened in mom's womb. the food and blood that belonged to both of us. It pushed me and absorbed the vital fluid, it deliberately took away my strength. Thus my brother had become the natural heir. The firstborn for two minutes, but the first at the end.

 

Gabriel watched us carefully from the back seat, as if he were studying the physical difference between us. Our hair was curly and brown, long at the nape of the neck, with the reddish beard cut close to the skin. This time, without planning it, we had dressed almost the same, like when we were kids and confused people.

 

-How many did they fool, dad? -He asked, and we both laughed.

 

We were united for just a moment by that laughter similar to an aura, a heavenly gift granted and stolen the next second. Nothing more than a white t-shirt with a different print differentiated us.

 

I stopped the car at a corner, and I heard Gabriel ask me things that I had never thought to tell him.

 

-Why didn't you get married, uncle?

 

I laughed almost without realizing it.

 

-I don't know, man. The truth is that women are complicated, or am I the one who understands them less and less every day.

 

Suddenly, Daniel's voice emerged as if it were an echo of that moan that he had already heard in his mother's womb. The walls of the organ were a cavern.

 

 

"Your uncle is a selfish piece of shit," he said. And I hit the steering wheel with my right fist, while I continued driving with my left. But my brother laughed, and then Gabriel's face quickly went away in surprise.

 

In just a minute the air tensed to immediately relax, thus testing the elemental rope that had always united us. It was at that moment that I knew what I had to do to defeat my brother once and for all. Since he was stronger than me, I had to catch him off guard.

 

In the parking lot Gabriel ran to get ahead, and locking the car, I mentally went over the steps of my plan over and over again. Daniel now walked beside me tall and proud, without seeing or even suspecting the darkness that was forming around him. A shadow similar to the one I inhabited until I was born. Because I was sure that Daniel, by taking away my food, had hoped that I would die without ever seeing the light.

 

The stadium was covered in a roar of hoarse voices. We are located fifteen minutes before starting the game. The weather deteriorated very quickly, and a light rain was beginning to fall when the game began. The smell of sweat grew, surrounding us. The men sang, jumping on the stands. Flags and papers waved in the thick Sunday air.

 

They seemed to get stuck, to become suspended mud. We took off our shirts and wiped off the sweat.

-Do you remember the fight we had before we were born? Didn't you ever have the feeling that you were born exhausted after the effort you made to beat me? -I asked Daniel.

 

-What are you talking about? -Come on, old man, you're not going to tell me that you never had the idea of killing me.

 

"Fuck you!" He told me with that gesture of unbearable superiority that I hated.

 

In the midst of the stridency, I rested my face in my hands, and those seconds that marked my brother's invincible advantage disappeared for a while.

 

I waited for a goal. I waited with infinite anxiety, as if at that point, in that move chosen at random perhaps by God himself or providence, I was placing the eternity of my soul. The men around me were suffering, clinging to the wire fence, mad and anxious. I remained seated, waiting.

 

And when it happened, the stadium seemed to collapse. An uncontrollable group began

 

to fall in an avalanche from the highest stands. It was a mass of blows and deafening screams. Daniel was there, ready to take the impact and pay his share of the fate that had been prepared for him.

 

Then I knocked him out with a direct, cold blow that any of those guys could have given him, and from which I desperately hoped he would never wake up again. I saw a large piece of rubble next to my feet, and something made me reach out to grab it. But the guys around me started staring at me. I hurried to take off the shirt tied to his belt, and put it on.

 

I found Gabriel several meters away, jumping and shouting with joy, hidden among the shapeless mass of bodies that moved to the rhythm of a wave. I approached him speaking like Daniel. I didn't really know where my conscience was when I did it. It was just like another person took over me.

 

The game was ending.

 

"Uncle, we're leaving!" Gabriel shouted, looking around. I also started calling with my brother's accent and tones.

 

-He must have left with some mine. Don't worry. We left the stadium and I opened the car.

-Did he give you the keys, dad? My hands shook for a second.

-No. I always have a few copies of the guy's car.

 

Now he had my brother's son, and in a few minutes he would be the owner of his wife and his house.

 

Like a poacher, he had stolen her life. However, my hands continued to tremble on the steering wheel.

 

The men continued to leave in groups through the stadium doors. Naked and dirty torsos, flags and signs red as blood. Suddenly, Daniel's reddish beard appeared among the raised arms and the voices of the fanatical fans. And his beaten and recovered body reached the car and hit the door again and again.

 

 

"Uncle!" Gabriel said to the man who attacked us from the street.

 

One of the windows splintered with a punch from the outside, and the glass hurt the boy's forehead. Several trickles of blood ran down his face.

 

Then everything seemed to disappear. The warm, maternal air of the car, the sound of the engine so similar to my mother's monotonous voice, the rain-wet windows simulating the opalescent fluidity of yolk fluid, all of this was now expanding to come out of its cloister and free itself.

 

The door opened and a strong arm, undoubtedly stronger than mine, threw me to the ground, to the pavement covered in saliva and garbage. My brother got into the car with Gabriel.

 

-Dude, what's happening?! "I'm your old man!" Daniel shouted, grabbing him by the shoulders.

 

-Dad, help me!-The boy begged me-I'm afraid of the guy! And I, sitting there in the mud, weak and dirty, started laughing like a madman.

 

 

 

 

 

THE HOUSE WOMAN

 

Some neighbors said that Clara began seeing my uncle Antonio shortly after finding out that she was sick. Others who had done it before. The truth is that, one night ten years ago, when she was undressing, she found a red, wet stain on her bra, and she was afraid.

 

I remember the day he returned with Laura from the hospital. I worked in the business at the time, and I saw them come in. Laura, happy and carefree, with her blonde hair, looked with curiosity at her mother's livid appearance. Clara, on the other hand, was pale and mute, so much so that she forgot to greet me, left her daughter with me and went to the kitchen. She looked very white, with her hair disheveled by the early wind of that autumn, and her coat open, revealing her gray dress.

 

If she said anything to her husband about the illness, I don't know. Presumably that was the case, because Casas came out of the kitchen two hours later, and told me that they were going to close early.

 

The next morning I saw Clara behind the counter, still pale with fear, but with a smile that, although drawn, was indelible.

 

"Just you, poor thing." The neighbors tried to console her when they found out, because

they knew of the dedication she had put into raising money for the women who came to her for help for years.

 

The sick women came from all over the city with their breasts taken by cancer, and some already mutilated or without hope. The Casas had become the most influential family in the area, and Clara had the idea of raising money to help them with their treatment.

 

He organized fairs and quermeses, shows and popular works in the street to benefit his small neighborhood foundation.

 

From that day on, the couple continued working without showing any concern. He, with his floured apron, peeked out of the kitchen door from time to time to greet someone. She continued smiling beatifically, as when one of her protégés came to complain about her pain or to announce her death. Laura, however, was never told anything, and they only warned me:

 

-If Laurita asks you something... -Clara murmured in my ear. -You don't know anything, do you understand?

 

So I just watched.

 

At noon I saw Laura standing on the opposite sidewalk. At that time he was leaving school with his blue uniform and the books hugged to his chest. I looked carefully towards the corner, where my uncle Antonio looked restless, perhaps trying to look inside the business from afar.

 

Then the two entered almost at the same time, but he, always in his impeccable black suit, stepped forward to open the door for Laura.

 

-Thank you.-She said.

 

"I was waiting for you, I wanted to know if mom was coming today, I'm sure," she told me a few days later, when her suspicion was almost a certainty.

 

When they entered, I was surprised when Clara suddenly turned around to look at herself in the mirror behind the cash register. She fixed her hair and dress, and only then greeted my uncle.

 

-Antonio, good morning. When does the barbershop open? -In a month, Clarita.

 

That bothered me, that unexpected confidence, obtained who knew when and in what way.

 

 

Laura heard it too, and must have immediately thought of her father. She stood there, staring abstractedly at the shelves with the freshly baked bread, but with her mind circling around the figure of Casas.

 

"Dad was so close," he told me later, "just a few feet from his wife, but he didn't really know her."

 

Since that morning my uncle's visits became more frequent. The people of the neighborhood began to murmur. Laura avoided the women gathered on the sidewalk, who always looked at her with an expression of unbearable pity.

 

My uncle Antonio was a strange man. I had hardly seen him in my entire childhood, while he participated in politics and in his committee meetings and campaign trips. Until he became a councilor five years earlier, and became inaccessible. Surrounded by tall, fat men, with impeccable suits and always dirty mustaches, he carried his memorable 1942 revolver under his left arm. That relic that he cleaned every day, like a jewel whose loss represented the loss of his own soul. He always said he had killed two men with it.

 

"Whoever insults me does not live to tell it." He shouted everywhere, in the committee, in the bar, on the street or in the ladies' hair salon, where women demanded his presence to listen to anecdotes and gossip about their wives. the politicians.

 

At home I heard that he was impoverished, after losing his money in bad investments. Now, he was back to open the barbershop two blocks from the Casas' premises, but no one could say where he got the money from. He took to visiting us before dark, at a time when the rains decreased and the cold became more intense. Laura saw him arrive with his black overcoat and the same old suit.

 

"They're going to bury me in these clothes." He joked when he met Casas, and then they started talking.

 

Laura focused her attention on perceiving the slightest sign of aggression, any word, act or gesture that was the seed of an argument. But he especially wanted to highlight the tense expression on his mother's face when the two men met. It was then that he noticed that Clara's appearance was different. He had lost a lot of weight and complained of not being hungry.

 

I, on the other hand, looked at my uncle, at his suit bulging under the armpit due to the metallic mass, like a latent cancer on the left side. That weapon intrigued me and I feared it at the same time.

 

 

For several weeks nothing happened. Clara went to the doctor every afternoon, and sometimes Laura accompanied her without going into the office. She was nervous, and awkwardly picked up her bag. "He did the same thing at the hospital," Laura told me, "...it took him several minutes to organize the social work papers, and he immediately hid the doctor's prescription in his wallet." Laura stayed in the business thinking something very bad was happening. In front of the register, he played with the keys. Some customers arrived and she attended to them distractedly. It became dark over the square and the children soon left it. He went to turn on the front lights, and saw Antonio crossing the street. He looked from the sidewalk, surely looking for Clara. When he left, Laura was sure he was going to see her. She turned pale, and her whiteness increased as she faced the cold of the street.

 

"I'm coming out!" He warned me, and went after him.

 

He must have been thinking about his father, about the silent and sometimes indifferent man that Casas was most of the time, and he did not doubt that his loyalty was with him. The mercury lights had already been turned on. Antonio entered the house, she did so two minutes later. He smelled the aroma of fried food from the kitchen, saw the striped apron on his mother's skirt. My uncle's arms were around his shoulders.

 

He didn't want to tell me what happened later. Laura was disturbed, her mind went from one thought to another and she was distracted for a whole week. He missed school without warning and didn't want to explain himself to anyone. He stopped talking to his mother, and even got angry with me.

-You are the nephew, help me finish this.

 

"I don't like my uncle very much, Laura, but what are we going to do?" However, I knew by looking at her eyes that she was willing to do anything.

 

The day the barbershop opened there was music, food and lots of drinking. People danced tangos to the rhythm of an old record player, garlands hung from the ceiling and fans. A welcome sign was taped to the large mirror on the main wall. The place had been completely remodeled, and I heard people murmuring behind Antonio's back, wondering how he had gotten the money.

 

We all went that night: friends and enemies of my uncle, neighbors and political opponents. The Casas family was also there. Laura had put on a short-skirted dress and her hair was down. She smiled in a way similar to her mother, to the dark and inaccessible expression that Clara had sometimes, when she was hiding something. Almost three hours

 

 

had passed and some were drunk and others were already going to sleep.

 

Then the door suddenly opened, and we all looked at the police who came in, pushing the tables and knocking over the cider bottles, glasses, and empty cocktail plates, which exploded on the floor. The women screamed and some boys ran away.

 

-There are complaints against you.-Said one of the guys.

 

-I have all the papers in order, gentlemen.-And Antonio spread his documents on the table dirty with the remains of cakes, with the aroma of beer and cider enveloping our noses in a nauseating mist.

 

Two groups immediately formed, one around the table with the police, my uncle and his friends; another with the rest of the neighbors who were whispering among themselves, and the old women who were looking for chairs to recover from the shock. Clara went from one side of the room to the other, arranging the tables with simulated but nervous indifference. Laura followed her with the look of a vengeful woman, which contrasted with her fifteen-year- old face. It occurred to me that perhaps she had been the one who made the anonymous call to the police, who had been monitoring my uncle for a long time because of his background, just waiting for an excuse to search him. But she never confessed it to me or wanted to admit it.

 

I heard the word "fraud" next to me, barely hinted at and murmured by the silent lips of the people in that smoke-filled place, in the middle of the dying atmosphere of an interrupted party. "Whitewashing," said others. Embezzled money, countless sums, definitions and terms too imprecise for my teenage mind.

 

-Name of the company? -Asked one of the guys.

 

-"The Councilor" Hair Salon.

 

"Partners, sir, please," he insisted.

 

Antonio murmured, almost spelling, the only words necessary.

 

-Clara Palacios de Casas-He said, so softly that it could not be heard beyond a few centimeters from his mouth. But the air in the room announced it, condensing like an ice figure among the garlands of the party.

 

 

 

-This lady has a foundation for the disabled, doesn't she? -Non-profit.-A voice interrupted from the distant group, firm but not very convinced.

 

The inspector looked for the origin of that voice among the people, took off his glasses and explored the tension, the dazed look of everyone present. Then Clara took a step forward.

 

Some wanted to defend her, but the police separated her from the group.

 

After a while in which they questioned both, the inspector took his secretaries, and the police officers left. We all stayed silent. Casas remained in a corner, absorbed in his thoughts and destroying a plastic cup in his hands, now definitively isolated from his wife.

 

Laura had gone from a state of vengeful ecstasy to that of tragic astonishment, as she observed her mother's indecisive movements in the midst of that accusing crowd.

 

Because people were already beginning to leave without greeting her, avoiding the almost imploring look of Casas's wife. Then, when no one was looking at her anymore, Clara ran towards Antonio. With all the mature beauty that had distinguished her among the other women in the neighborhood, her graying hair and previously straight back, she pounced on him and put her hand between his jacket and his shirt. Immediately we heard the shot.

 

Clara remained motionless over the body of my uncle, who held her in his arms. We watched the blood flow slowly, staining the dress like blotting paper. And the stain became wider than the wound, but not as big or as deep as the pain in Laura's eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

THE PHARMACIST

 

Gustavo Valverde's pharmacy was on a corner facing the square. My family lived next door, only separated by a vacant lot, so it was inevitable that I would take care of my mother the day I was born. Many years later I became ill for several months, and he came to give me injections every week. His kind voice meant that I never felt pain from the punctures, and I grew to love him. I grew up seeing the small, dark-colored medicine bottles, and it was impossible for me not to associate their figure with that peculiar aroma. I liked watching him work, moving from one place to another behind the display cases and the counter, always wearing his light blue overalls. No certificate hung on the walls proving his profession, but no one in the neighborhood ever doubted his knowledge.

 

When I entered the pharmacy two weeks before his final departure, I was arguing with the owner of the store. He lived there for thirty years, he was very young when he first opened his business, but the building was never his. The owner came every two months to collect the rent. I was surprised to see Valverde's eyes wide open and teary, as if he had never been

spoken to that way in his life. I managed to hear that the woman was going to sell the store and wanted her to leave before the end of the month.

 

I stepped aside for her to come out. I heard the door bells ring, while he remained still for a few seconds. When he saw me he told me to come closer, but he didn't mention anything about what had happened. I looked into his green eyes, thinking about what he would be like with women. I knew he had been married at one time, but he never talked to me about it. He was tall, with brown hair combed back, and I think he was still attractive to the ladies in the neighborhood, at least that's what they said when they met at the hair salon.

 

"Are you still sure what you're going to do, Santiago?" He asked suddenly, and I blushed.

 

-Yes sir. I'm asking you because you're the only one I can talk to about this. My friends...you know. If I go another year without sleeping with a girl I'm going to become the school idiot. You understand, right? -Yes do not worry. But what about her? -You already know. She's not sure but I hope to clear her doubts tonight.

 

At that time, I saw him as so serious that I wanted to be like him when I was his age. The way in which Valverde influenced my life was something that only became aware of me at this time, when I was discovering new things. He took the keys out of a drawer, and gave them to me with the warning to only open his room. He hesitated a little before releasing them. I pulled them gently, and when he left them in my hands, he repeated that it would only be for one night. Mom once told me that he had settled in the city with his wife, upon arriving from his hometown. According to my mother, she was beautiful, but not as attractive as Valverde. The girl didn't talk much, staying most of the time in her room. The marriage lasted a few months. She left for her town one day and did not return. Some time later it was learned that he had died at the same time, but he never mentioned it until someone could get him to talk about himself. Then he said what he would later repeat with some frequency when he went to the bar on Saturday nights.

 

-The only way to save life is to stop it a moment before death, before decomposition.- And his breath did not have the aroma of alcohol, even if he had drunk, but the rancid smell of old flowers in cemeteries.

 

Not much more could be learned from him. My parents remembered that the woman seemed sick before she left, because they heard her vomiting frequently from the bathroom of the house when they went to buy something at the pharmacy. Valverde then made a gesture of sad resignation, while he dispatched his orders. But from the hallway behind the counter, a penetrating aroma similar to dried fruit filled the air between the walls full of shelves and display cases.

At night I went to look for Lidia at her house. When it was ten twenty the bus passed by, with its usual regularity. The lights of the square illuminated the paths, and opened spaces in the darkness. We stopped at a corner, while I played with the keys in my pocket.

 

We entered the pharmacy and I closed the door. We crossed the premises to the back, where a narrow passage led to the rooms. I saw Valverde's room and beyond it a small kitchen.

 

Lidia asked me to wait a few minutes in the hallway before entering. I toured the rest of the house meanwhile, and discovered a room next to the previous one and another at the end of the corridor. I went there, but it was closed. I then tried the previous one, and when I opened it I couldn't go back.

 

A desk occupied the center, covered with papers and thick-spined books. To one side I saw a common but dirty sink full of curved scissors, tweezers of different sizes and scalpel blades. Some bottles around the taps smelled of detergents and antiseptics. I discovered all this little by little, as I recovered from my astonishment and my eyes became accustomed to the darkness. On the walls there were paintings with drawings of human figures that seemed alive and dead at the same time, showing their detached muscles in a serene and impossible walk. I stumbled to the other side of the room, where the wall was filled with shelves filled with jars. Most contained fetuses immersed in formaldehyde. Some were intact, others destroyed or dissected, but none of the containers bore the date or name.

 

I stayed for several minutes looking at that chilling exhibition of dead children, their shapeless faces and swollen bodies.

 

By accident I hit a tin plate, and the noise woke me up from my abstraction.

 

I remembered Lidia and returned to the next room. We did what was our intention from the beginning. She was upset and scared, and I felt too clumsy, because I couldn't stop thinking about what I had discovered.

 

A week later I found Lidia near her house. We had not met again by mutual agreement. We chatted for a while, she was calmer, and we promised to talk to each other on the phone.

 

I went to see Mr. Valverde, whom I have not seen since that night. The day after using his house, I left the keys in the mailbox very early in the morning. I didn't know how to talk to him, he wasn't the same guy as before to me.

 

When he saw me he didn't want to greet me. At first, he began to speak slowly, as if holding back his anger, until after a while he burst into a rage that I regret having provoked.

 

-I'm leaving in a few weeks, and all you can think of is throwing the keys at me like a stranger! -I just felt embarrassed, I didn't know what to say... He stopped what he was doing, and leaning on the counter smiled at me in a way that suggested the most obscene question. "Didn't I tell you to open nothing but my room?" He told me with a contained tone of fury.

 

I felt the blood turn red on my face, and my hands were sweating. I asked him about the rent, to change the subject. He ignored me and continued talking about the jars. He mentioned the doctors he had met, and told me about his love of research. He also said, with an expression of enormous sadness, as if the failure of humanity fell on him, that none of all that knowledge was of any use to him now. The only thing he had been able to verify throughout all those years was a slower, but inevitable, decomposition of the body.

 

Then I spoke, making the last and most serious mistake.

 

-Doesn't it make your stomach turn to do that?

 

Valverde looked at the door, then at me, and with a speed that I couldn't react to, he took the palm of my right hand and made a cut from one end to the other. I don't know where the knife came from, I only saw its reflection when it was too late and the pain appeared several seconds later.

 

I was screaming like crazy, but no one came through that door. My parents were working and the neighbors were taking their imperturbable nap. He himself later covered me with some bandages that turned red quickly, and he changed them again. I saw a mixture of blood and shapeless flesh on my palm, and before bandaging me again he said:

 

-This is the only thing we are.

 

It was the last I heard from him.

 

The following week I stayed at home without going out. Dr. Ruiz did his best for me, and I decided not to tell the truth. I was afraid of Valverde. I lived next to him, and every night I feared hearing his threats from the formaldehyde-smelling room.

 

Exactly seven days later I found Lidia, who was attentive and concerned about my injury. As we were returning home we saw a truck and a police car. I assumed that they were coming to evict Valverde and I wanted to cross to divert us from the place. Lidia was excited to see the patrol car and insisted on staying. We heard a woman scream from inside the pharmacy, and the old owner ran out. She leaned against a tree on the sidewalk and cried agitatedly while other women came to help her.

 

 

At that moment I saw Valverde leave with handcuffs on, guarded by two officers who put him in the car. People murmured in amazement.

 

The patrolman left and they immediately began to take out the bottles, hidden by white covers.

 

My parents were there too. Mom entered the store, curious, and I followed her. She managed to avoid a police officer who wanted to arrest her, and I saw her bump into two men who were coming from the back carrying a stretcher. I didn't have time to wonder what that was, because Dad grabbed my mother's arm and she, scared, uncovered part of the sheet that covered the body. The corpse - impeccably dissected, submerged until minutes before in the formaldehyde that was now dripping on the black and white mosaics - of Valverde's wife.

 

I remembered the closed room at the end of the hallway, and what I had been told about those who die of cyanide poisoning with the scent of bitter almonds in their mouths.

I saw Lidia dusting off her arms and dress, and she looked at me with contempt while still

cleaning the dirt that only she could see. Then he ran away.

 

I stood at the door of the pharmacy that I visited almost every day of my life, crossed since then by a judicial strip. I looked at my injured hand, useless forever, with the severed tendons that Dr. Ruiz could no longer attach. My dead hand.

 

 

 

 

 

MAX

 

I don't know what she was thinking at that moment, maybe about the trip she was going to take two weeks later. The truth is that I crossed the street halfway down the block, and I didn't see the truck. The midday sun after lunch lulled me to sleep, perhaps also the fleeting awareness of my happiness.

      But I heard the engine just an instant before I saw it next to me, and then I felt the push from behind. A blow not from steel, but from another body that threw me to the opposite sidewalk, saving me from death.

      I remember hearing barking, almost hysterical howling from the patio of that old house where there were always abandoned dogs. However, it was so common to see them there that I ignored them that morning.

      Lying on the cold sidewalk, with my palms red from hitting the tiles and my lower lip bloody, I felt the dog's caresses. The same one who had warned me of the danger with his bark, and he jumped over the fence, throwing himself at me just before the truck crushed me.

      He was a mixed breed animal, large in size but still with the appearance and habits of a puppy. Resembling a Doberman, he had short, very black hair.

      "My God, Gabriel!" shouted Juana, who came running from the corner where we were going to meet.

      Juana Santos was the daughter of the bar owner and my girlfriend since childhood. The day I turned eighteen, dad let me use my uncle Jorge's Torino, who had died a few months before. Then she had the idea of the trip, and as always when those plans occurred to her, she hung around my neck, insisting until she convinced me.

      Now she was doing the same, but sitting on the sidewalk, hugging me and getting the blood on my face. The truck driver got out and wanted to help me.

      "Oh, my God, forgive me kid, forgive me!" He said with nervous hands.

      People gathered around us, forming a compact group within which the dog was a clearing, a free space that everyone respected, as if it were a beast to be venerated. A wild and noble animal at the same time.

      "That dog saved me," I murmured after the fear left me, when I was finally able to speak.

     Everyone looked at him again with more attention, and Juana held him by the old leash that someone had once put on him. Then the animal came to lick my face, and I hugged him and Juana, with my arms still shaking.

      "We're going to call him Max," she said, and later she told me an English legend that she had once read in her history class. She didn't know why she felt so moved when she heard it, told by the professor, nor the reason why for months afterwards she dedicated herself to searching for it in all the books and libraries. Now, this legend returned to her memory.

      A medieval king had a dog that accompanied him in all battles. It was a huge animal, ferocious towards strangers and owner of eyes so black that the devil himself seemed to take over him when he went out onto the battlefield. One day the king lost his sword in the middle of a fight, and an enemy began to ride towards him to impale him with his sword. Then the dog jumped at the other and ripped off his hand.

      -That greyhound was called Maximilian.- Juana finished telling me.

      -Come, Max.- I called him, and she responded, looking up, with her ears lowered. She started running around as if she were hearing his name again after many centuries.

      After this we had no choice but to take him on our trip. We confirmed the rental of the beach house, and the next morning we loaded the suitcases into the car. Max was in the back seat, and Juana was sitting next to me. That day I noticed that both of them expressed a mutual resentment, still slight and subtle. She tried hard to please him, caressing him and feeding him in her mouth. But Max was behaving more and more strangely. Especially when she would lean on my shoulder and pour me coffee by resting the thermos on the glove compartment. She would turn to look at him and he would growl at her, showing his teeth, always sitting like an imperturbable statue.

      "Do I have to put up with a dog's jealousy?" She said irritably, but a moment later we were laughing together, a fresh laugh in the middle of the heat of the road.

      “What more could I ask for?” I thought, opening the sunroof so that the sea breeze and the smell of the sand from the first dunes renewed the air inside the car. “I have a beautiful girl, a nice car and a great dog.” Then I put my right arm on Juana's shoulders, and she fell asleep while she watched the sun hide behind the dunes.

 

      The next day we were on the beach, lying on the sand. Juana and I next to each other, and Max sitting looking around, expectant. He sniffed out odors indiscernible to us, pointing his snout toward the north or south, as if the wind carried signs of unimaginable threats. It occurred to me that that dog of legend must have the same ancient cunning of perceiving the distant sounds and smells of the enemies, who rode through the dust raised by the horses, with the green banners of their heraldry and their swords raised. I imagined a huge group of armed knights coming towards us along the beach, while the horse tracks in the wet sand were erased by the waves.

      I noticed that she was also paying attention to what Max was doing. The sun wonderfully tanned Juana's body, covered only by a green bikini. She really liked this color, her dresses, her blouses and her shoes always had a touch, even a small one, of some shade of green.

      -Tell me more about that legend.-I asked him.

      She began to tell me that Maximilian was a descendant of the finest breed of dogs bred by the nobility of that time.

      -That's why he lived with the kings, and slept in the same room.- He continued telling me.- The queen was pregnant during the period of the battle in which the dog saved the king's life. He protected them better than any army. He was able to perceive danger from miles away. Once, they say, a tornado tore through the region, and Maximilian was restless for three days before the storm hit. Then the prince was born...- Juana interrupted herself.-...The sun is burning your back...- he told me, and got up to rub suntan lotion on my shoulders.

       I don't know what move she made, or how Max reacted. I only heard the scream under the exacerbated light of midday, like a queen threatened by the bleeding wound on her left ankle. The amazing heaviness of the sun did not let me wake up completely, and suddenly I saw Max attacking Juana, biting her foot while she screamed.

      "Stop it!" I yelled at her, and she obeyed immediately.

      -You son of a bitch.

      -It's not very serious.-I wanted to console her.

      "But what's wrong with that animal?" She insisted, jumping on one foot to return home. We watch him stay next to our bags, watching like an unbribable soldier.

      -He thought you were hurting me...

      In the afternoon we went to the doctor. He treated the wound and prescribed a vaccine and antibiotics.

      That night he complained of pain for several hours, only managing to rest after taking some sedatives. Max watched her from the rug she slept on next to our bed. Her eyes glowed in the darkness, but he never once reached out to comfort her, like he had done with me the day of the accident.

 

      The wound on Juana's ankle grew. She believed that the sun and sea water were going to cure her and she did not want to see the doctor anymore. She took the remedies, but even without pain, her wound turned into a growing ulcer.

      One afternoon we went too far from the city. We drove near the San Antonio lighthouse, surrounded by miles of sand on one side and the cold, merciless sea on the other. A still distant rain had begun to fall on the water. A fishing boat was turning on its lights.

      -It's already late, Juana. Let's go back home.-I realized that she was sleeping. I touched her cheek and noticed that she was feverish. Suddenly, she woke up and said she had had a nightmare.

      The fever revived her little obsession with that English story. She liked to repeat what her teacher had taught her: that history never repeats itself. Sometimes only an element that cannot be grasped by understanding persists, and that usually survives in irrational beings like a stigma.

      -Do you remember the legend of the king and his dog? Suddenly I remembered how it ended. It seems that when the queen gave birth, her husband was not in the castle. Her servants attended to her as best they could, but the doctor took too long to arrive. The birth was complicated. They sent a servant to look for the king, but he had traveled too far to return in time. The queen was alone and she had her son assisted by her teenage maid. The candles illuminated the baby in the crib next to her mother. The maid felt so happy that she barely covered it with a green apron that she was wearing over her, and she went to announce the new news to the others, leaving them alone. But. In the middle of the darkness, in a corner of the room, was Maximilian.

      Juana fainted. I was so scared that I picked her up in her arms and carried her to the car immediately. However, the car would not start. That morning I forgot to fill the gas tank.

      -Come on Max, we have to walk until we find help.

      I picked up Juana, who was already awake and was still delirious and sweating with fever. The sky was completely cloudy and I had chills. Max's footsteps on the sand were slow and steady, as if he wanted to follow me but didn't want to rush.

      -Give him dog, son of a bitch! You were to blame for all this.

      Then he ran towards me, and without hurting me, bit the heel of the shoe. I tried to kick him, but as soon as he broke away, he gained momentum and grabbed me again without hurting me. I don't know how many meters cam

 

iné in that situation, but there were very few. My skin was burning and dry from the sun of those days, the sea breeze gave me chills and I had not brought a coat.

       Max took away my strength with every step, he exhausted me. My girlfriend's body was slipping from my arms. Until I saw a truck in the distance, with the lifeguard's badge on the door. I signaled to her and she responded by turning on the headlights. When he came to look for me, Max didn't approach him, limiting himself to threatening him from a distance, growling at him. I left Juana on the back and lay down next to her, while the wobble of the jeep over the dunes rocked us as if in an insensitive death. Max followed behind us.

      "He killed the baby," she said in a fleeting moment of lucidity, awakening her deep-rooted consciousness of her in the past.

      -Who, the queen did that? - I asked him.

      -No, no.- She answered.- The one who was waiting in the shadows pounced on the child as if he were the enemy, a threat to the power of his king, and she devoured him.

      Juana was hospitalized for three days, and she died one morning. Her father had come to see her, but I didn't stay to wait for him. That same night I fled with Max to the beach.

      -Come.-I called him.

       When he approached I kicked him. He just howled. I kicked him in the ribs again, and he stayed still. I stoned him and ran away, but he followed me, looking like a demon and a protective angel at the same time. Then, approaching in pain, he began to lick my bare feet.

 

 

 

 

CABINET

 

Laura unbuttoned the second button on her blouse when she saw Tomás, who was getting off the bus at the corner of the square. He had his everyday blue suit, worn at the knees and with two pitons on his elbows. The collar of his white shirt was open, and the newspaper was rolled up under his left arm. This time he came without that smile that was always on his lips when he went to visit her. His eyes shone when he thought of Laura. But now it wasn't like that, there was something different on his face, perhaps very similar to an expression of irreflotable sinking.

 

Upon entering he went directly towards her, surrounded by the aroma of bread and bills.

 

The door bell went off calmly.

 

"Duke died last night," he said in that abrupt silence of five in the afternoon.

 

"For God's sake, dear!" Laura answered, hugging him over the counter. The silk blouse waved with her labored breathing, pressed against Tomás' chest, wetting his neck with her tears.

 

-How old were you, thirteen, fourteen...? -Seventeen years. He was my best friend all that time.

 

They decided to go to the bar to talk.

 

"Dad, I'm coming out!" Laura shouted towards the kitchen, and her father must have heard her but he didn't answer.

 

In the candy store they sat near the window, holding hands. The waiter placed two coffees between his trembling arms.

 

She had seen Duque three days before. That old dog was big. A German shepherd mix that still jumped and licked her face when she saw her. Standing on two legs, he prevented him from making his way through the narrow hallway of Tomás' house. He lived alone with his dog, in those small, closed rooms all day, with humidity and dust covering the furniture, and a smell of putrid acidity coming from somewhere.

 

-I eat outside, I don't feel like cooking when I get back from work.-He had once said.

 

That's when she offered to cook for him. I went almost every night to make him something simple and hot. Then she prepared the bed for him, the clean sheets on which they would lie together.

 

She always felt watched by Duque, still and silent until Tomás returned at nine at night. Upon arrival, he opened the garden door for her, while Laura watched them play, sitting under the oak tree, with the lights of the city rising towards the twilight sky. The pale moon was growing, and Duque howled.

 

-He barks at the moon every night since I've known him. If he's not outside, he gets desperate scratching the doors, like when he sits next to the closet and I can't get him out of there.-Laura complained many times.

 

Tomás then looked at her with suspicion.

 

 

-It's your closet, Laura. Duque has his things there.

 

She had often gone through the furniture looking for something, but always when the dog was away. Otherwise it would stand in front of him, alert, with an expectant growl, stealthy and protective, watching the varnished and polished wooden doors. The Venetian-style legs and antique façade contrasted with the simplicity of the hallway. Because the closet was there, in the middle of the passage, getting in the way so that you had to squeeze against the other wall to get through.

 

"Why don't we put it in your room?" He asked.

 

-No, I don't want you to touch anything.

 

She stared for a long time at that huge closet, impossible to move. Full of old things, the dishes that Tomás used to feed Duque, the towels to bathe him, the soap, the straps from when he was a puppy, and the slippers eaten away by his precocious teeth.

 

"He died without bothering me, poor old Duke," he said in the humid afternoon at the bar, while they watched the kids coming out of school pass by on the sidewalk. "When he remained stiff on the carpet, I remembered his strength, his jaws." ferocious from some time ago. I told you how he defended me, right?

 

In reality, Laura was already tired of hearing that story. Everyone in the neighborhood knew how Duque protected him the day his parents argued, and the way the old woman fell, hitting her head. They said that the old man pushed her, and then he wanted to do the same with Tomás. He was then a boy of twelve years old. An apathetic and sad child who hid from others, fleeing with his dog from his parents' arguments.

 

-We would go to the train tracks, and we would stay there until nine at night, when dad would go to work as a night watchman at the factory. I counted the trains one by one, waiting for the one that would take him away until the next day.

 

Tomás, sitting on the tracks, entertained himself by watching Duque, who was barking at the locomotives, slow as mastodons. For the dog perhaps they were monsters, primitive animals or wild beasts.

 

She started rubbing Laura's legs with her shoes under the table. She looked around, blushing.

 

-Let's go home, Laura. I'm tired and alone.

 

 

She accepted and they went out to the streets of La Plata, covered by the shadows of the houses in the evening. It was almost seven.

 

When they arrived they turned on the lights, but there was no one to welcome them this time, no barking, no happy jumping, no muddy paws. Only Duque's scent lingered, his smell of wet hair and fresh grass. Its smell everywhere, and that closet always there, bothering. Being an absurd obstacle now.

 

Laura made the initial gesture of trying to push him, and Tomás screamed.

 

-No, no! -He stopped for a moment when he realized her reaction. -They are his things and I don't want to take them out for a few days.

 

Laura asked him where he had buried it, and he took her to the garden to show her the mound of disturbed earth.

 

They ate little, some fried eggs whose oil helped hide the phantom aroma. But Tomás missed the breadcrumbs he gave to the dog, sitting next to him, looking at him like a beggar.

 

At nine o'clock Tomás said he heard something, but she only heard the train horn in the distance. He insisted that the sound came from the garden, echoing off the high ceilings of the house, hidden in the shadows.

 

-It's Duke's howl, I'm sure.

 

Tomás always told how Duque lunged at his father that last night. He was about to go to work when his mother thought of annoying him by asking him for money.

 

-The fights were always about the same thing. They seemed like irreconcilable partners in a bankrupt business.

 

She didn't remember exactly how it happened, but they started hitting each other and she collapsed on the kitchen floor. The floor was suddenly covered in blood, and the old man looked desperate. He grabbed Tomás very hard, so much so that the boy thought he was going to kill him.

 

-Maybe, maybe he just hugged me very tightly, I don't know.

 

Then Duque threw himself on top of the old man and bit him until he was disfigured. Only months later did it become known that the man had been taken to prison. Thomas said so, and everyone accepted it. The old man was never seen since that time.

 

 

In the morning Laura accompanied him to the bus stop. It was cold, she was wearing a light blue shawl and he was wearing an overcoat. When she saw him walk away, she returned to her father's bakery. The next weekend was Easter, and the chocolate eggs looked beautiful in the stained glass windows decorated with European figures. The aroma came out the door, a bitter and hot smell.

 

-Dad.-It occurred to him to ask.-Do you know of any neighbors who have puppies to give away? And with that idea in mind he searched the neighborhood all afternoon. Until in the vacant lot of the Cortéz house he found two small, newborn dogs. He grabbed one and took it to Tomás' house. It was still early. She made dinner and let the dog run around. He opened the garden door for him, separating him from Duque's grave. I didn't know what to call him, I was going to leave that to him.

 

-Dog, dog, come in!-The puppy obeyed her quickly.

 

They tripped in the hallway over the closet, always in the middle of the step. Laura looked through it, seeing what she could get out to move it. Just old blankets, cans of food, and Duque's silly things, his leashes and muzzle. The puppy sniffed the furniture with intense curiosity, crawled under it and scratched the wall.

 

It was half past eight, and Tomás did not arrive. I didn't know what to do and I was hungry. He started thinking about where to put the closet. The puppy kept scratching the wall.

 

"It hasn't been cleaned in so long, there must be dead rats," Laura thought, and decided to empty it. He took everything out, even the shelves to make it lighter. He put force and little by little he gave way. Paw marks had made a hole in the flexiplast floor, and he saw two scratches on each side, as if someone had moved the furniture regularly.

 

Running it slowly inch by inch, with a lot of effort, and amidst the barking of the dog that was jumping excitedly around him, he discovered a simple, unpainted door. The puppy barked more and more madly, and pushed the door, which, without a key, opened with a creak of hinges. An abrupt smell of dirt and fermentation made his stomach turn and he covered his mouth. At first the darkness hid the shapes from him, but then he saw the bed and the walls without openings. The only window was covered by bricks.

 

There was someone there. You could hear his weak but hoarse breathing, and the acidic breath that filled the air. He was a deformed fat man, surrounded by dirty sheets, and there were several plates piled up on the side of the bed. Laura got closer without really knowing if what she felt was fear or perhaps a slight fear tinged with pity. The dog, however, this time stayed at the door. The horn of the nine o'clock train was heard distant and attenuated by those walls.

 

 

The man said something unintelligible, as if he had not spoken in many years and did not know if he still had a voice. His neck was deformed by scars, his face was indistinct, and it seemed to Laura that one of his eye sockets was empty.

 

The dog continued barking, and the plaintive voice of the abandoned old man was reborn, now clearer but hesitant.

 

"Another... dog," he murmured, perhaps missing the bark of his dead jailer.

 

A light suddenly illuminated the room from the hallway. He saw Tomás running towards the patio, and he went after him. The horn of the nine o'clock train sounded again, wet and heavy, like the sound of a hunting horn through the night dew. Then Laura stopped at the kitchen door, frightened, watching him abruptly take off his shirt, and with a shovel shining in the moonlight, dig his dog's grave.

 

 

 

 

THE TRAIN TO BUENOS AIRES

 

The train left the station before La Plata, and I packed our suitcases so we could get off at the next one. Juan was still silent and sad. I thought until that moment that the cause was the irreconcilable separation from his wife. In reality, I always had to imagine more than what he told me, and that's why I was often wrong about the real reason. He had the habit of hiding his desires or moods until the exact moment when something led him to communicate them, then it was no longer possible to contradict him. That was the way he asked our boss, almost demanding him, to assign us this city. I asked him the reason, and he said he had to visit someone. His parents had insisted on hosting us at their house, and without being too enthusiastic about the idea, he agreed so as not to argue.

 

I offered him a cigarette, but he refused. The open windows let the wind travel through the car with signs of the imminent summer, the leaves torn from the trees near the tracks and the smell of the factories, confused with the aroma of the tracks warmed by the sun. I decided to break the silence with an anecdote that might cheer him up a little.

 

-I don't think I ever mentioned it to you. The first time I made love to a girl was on a train. - I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, exhaling the smoke towards the other side. He looked at me with a painful smile of complacency.

 

-It happened on the trip to Buenos Aires...-I insisted-...when we moved. I knew the girl from the neighborhood, but it was only on that train when she seduced me.

 

I had not been able to escape that memory, and I had the need to tell him. However, he seemed to be listening to me with the indifference of someone who already knows everything

 

 

beforehand, even though I was sure I had not told him before. Sometimes I was exasperated by his manner, and I muttered a bad word in his sick ear. It was a way to get rid of that sad feeling that seeing him like that caused me.

 

I closed the suitcases after a quick inspection of the samples, and discovered the shiny beads of sweat on Juan's forehead. We arrived at the station, my gaze was fixed on two figures standing, among many others, in the middle of the platform. The parents were not as old as I first imagined, but stronger and somehow almost invulnerable. That was the first word that came to mind when I saw them for the first time. I remembered his story about the day he lost hearing on his left side. The father was drunk and beat him until he was deaf. He told me, in one of the few times I was able to make him speak at length, the blood and pain in his head, the rush to the hospital and the inexorable result. He was eight or nine years old, and suddenly he found himself with the abysmal obligation to accept that there would be many sounds in the world that he would never hear.

 

The station was not much changed from how I knew it a few years before. Only the signs, fresh paint and slot machines changed it up a bit. When we got off, they greeted each other without signs of affection, and the same introversion that characterized my friend also lived in them. It was easy to see it in their normal faces with the naked eye, but dry, raw, surely incredulous. Juan once described them as disillusioned children.

 

We drove through part of the center in her father's car, while she pointed out to us, from the front seat, the changes in the city. I talked about our work, that I also grew up in that neighborhood, and yet, we only met much later in Buenos Aires.

 

Juan, with the suitcase on his legs, continued in silence, tremblingly clasping his hands when his wife was named without mentioning the separation. I realized that I hadn't told them anything, and I noticed their look of extreme fear for what they would think when they found out. He was a man of apparent indecision, but his inner life surpassed that of any of us.

 

While he was doing what others expected of him, another idea was growing inside him at the same time, to be expressed later in an unexpected way, like an explosion. That's how he planned the separation, it seems to me. He searched for it with small and large discussions, until he found it.

He always had something else on his mind, which he wouldn't even reveal to me. "I told my son hundreds of times that the life of a traveling salesman loses the

advantages of a stable family." His mother told me with a tone of undeniable reproach, without even looking at him, as if Juan were not present. "But he insisted. In leaving home, even after getting married he liked to spend more time outside than with his wife.

 

 

-It's not that, mom. I like to travel, one thing has nothing to do with the other...-He answered, with the repeated words of someone trying to excuse himself for the hundredth time. The father then intervened for the first time in the conversation.

 

-If you can't do everything at the same time, you have to choose, especially after having finally found the right woman... The three suddenly fell silent, and I didn't want to interrupt the silence. The streets became wider as we moved away from the center, accompanied by the monotonous sound of wheels on the cobblestones and the barking of dogs from the front yards. I know that Juan was the only one who couldn't do it, and I thought about that strange world in which he lived. Partial sounds, arbitrarily selected by the only ear that remained healthy.

 

When we arrived at the house, we saw the letter from his wife leaning edge on a vase, with the postmark from several days before. It was there, exposed with deliberate intention, as if Juan's soul were exposed, dry, on that table.

 

As they took me to my room, I observed how austere the house was. The windows remained closed, even at that time of day, keeping the old and scarce furniture in shadow. As I was getting ready for a shower, I heard the family arguing in the living room. Later, I talked to his mother, or rather she talked to me non-stop, while putting Juan's clothes in the closet, as

if he were still a child. His high-sounding voice went from one side of the room to the other without pause. The artificial light of a weak lamp on her old dress and the gray streaking her dark brown hair made her small and elusive, similar to an agile and uncatchable rat.

 

She called her husband several times to talk to me. When she received an answer she looked at me, fearing that she had discovered the obvious, that her husband's voice sounded drunk.

 

During the following week, we divided up the businesses in the area to begin work.

 

Juan returned with his suitcases intact, but also with a new expression illuminating his face. I would leave the samples on the bed, and we would go have a coffee or walk the streets.

 

We looked for the places we had known separately in our childhood. He was happy about something he didn't dare tell me, but I couldn't get anything out of that stubborn head.

 

I imagined it was a woman.

 

Almost ten days later, we completed our tour, and since I didn't have much to do, I suggested accompanying him to speed up his sales. He rejected me. I didn't take it the wrong

 

way because I knew he was hiding someone, so one afternoon I decided to see where he was going. This time I felt reconciled with Juan, his attitude was easy for me to understand, closer to human modesty than his usual reserve and distrust.

 

It was three in the afternoon and the heat was more than bearable. I followed him several blocks, leaving the commercial area. He turned along a diagonal and stopped in front of a house, neighboring an empty lot on one side and several ground-floor apartments on the other. The house was very old, remodeled in some parts, with a hybrid and grotesque appearance. It had a front garden with well-kept grass, and Juan crossed the path to the front door.

 

The neighborhood was quite changed, although still recognizable and similar to the one I left when I was fifteen. No one opened the door for him, he did it himself with a key that he took out of the pocket of his brown jacket. Before I saw him disappear, I discovered the shine of his glasses with the reflection of the sun that fell fully on the house, and the door closed. Afterwards there was only silence, some tired and empty buses completing their route, and the suffocating vapor of the heat that surrounded me. I went to a bar on the opposite sidewalk to wait, and among those wooden tables covered with small brown tiles, stirring the sugar in my cup of coffee, I remembered what I thought I had forgotten. I looked carefully at the house, its façade so modified by deterioration that I had almost confused it with any other of the several that remained from that time. But I finally recognized it as the permanent object of conversations with my friends during high school days.

Lidia was only a year older than us, and her peculiar beauty attracted us without being

able to avoid it. Around him a succession of true comments and other invented ones were woven, in which dirty words were mixed that we pronounced for the sole reason of feeling like men. We saw her almost every afternoon after school, and since she didn't avoid us, we considered it an incitement. He never accelerated his steps when he saw us behind him, although we very rarely spoke to him. His adult gaze, perhaps resigned, fascinated and inhibited us at the same time. We only knew about her that she lived with her mother, an old invalid who once made a living telling the future for a clientele that decreased over time. Now it was Lidia who practically supported her, cleaning houses or taking care of children in the afternoons.

 

But I don't know for what reason, perhaps because of the absurd need to transform the lives of others, no one believed her, and since then they said that they saw her go out with men, or that she even took them to her house.

 

I remembered our escapades to spy on her at night, and the dreams that made me sweat

 

 

so many times. All that until that day when I took the train to Buenos Aires. I said goodbye to my friends, promising to write, then I saw her in the same carriage. After a while, I sat next to him and he told me that he was going to look for a job.

 

"I had to leave school, but it doesn't matter," he said, shrugging his shoulders charmingly.

 

She told me about her life with an air of extreme seduction, inevitable in her. That message that she sent to us kids at school, strange and attractive, as impossible to ignore as it was for her to make it known with her body and her impeccable beauty. Then I couldn't control myself anymore, I kissed her and she didn't reject me. We went to the medical car and made love, afraid, afraid that someone would discover us, and as quickly as we could to return to our seats and behave like strangers for the rest of the trip.

 

I never heard from Lidia again. Now maybe someone different lived in that house, and Juan visited her. I spent several hours waiting to see him come out, but I got tired of waiting. At night, we had started eating when he arrived. The mother served herbal tea which she said was good for digestion. I was happy to see him, to recognize the new smile that renewed the acrid feeling of confinement in that dining room with closed blinds, with tall, antique lamps, with ceilings peeling from humidity, where the table was as heavy and large as the cynical grimace of old.

 

They looked at him with such disapproval that he didn't dare sit down and I had to return to my chair as soon as I got up to greet him.

 

-I imagine you already had dinner at the whore's house... -Said the father.

 

The old woman stood next to her husband, lifting the dirty dishes, staring sullenly at her son. A small, irritating hiss came from his lips, between his false teeth.

 

Juan leaned on the back of one of the chairs, carved with figures in the shape of ebony flowers. His glasses bothered him, and he took them off. He wiped them with his handkerchief, slowly, while he spoke.

 

"Eduardo doesn't have to put up with our problems..." He said quietly, looking at me, but I didn't feel offended, but rather covered by a mantle of protection.

 

-Your friend has to know that you separated to return with a whore... and a thousand times a whore! The father's voice rose above the table like a wind capable of sweeping away the entire rigid structure of the house. The woman looked at him, scared, without letting the plates that were shaking in her hands fall. The old man's hand had been raised with a clenched fist, but it stopped high above his head. Juan looked at the center of the tablecloth,

 

but there was no bottle of wine. She knew, however, that her mother was responsible for hiding her when they had guests.

 

I heard the clinking of cutlery and the explosion of Juan's glasses, although I don't think he realized it, not even when he put the handkerchief with broken glass back in his pocket. He left his glasses on the table and approached his father. I didn't expect that, I never suspected that he was going to do it. He grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, made a face of disgust at the rancid aroma of the old man's breath, and shaking him like a doll, threw him to the floor. I don't know if the other one defended himself, he seemed strong but maybe he decided to play the role of victim. His eyes did not stimulate pity.

 

I went to my friend to stop him, but he had already knelt with the father's body between his legs, and was still shaking him by his clothes. The mother had disappeared, only to return a few minutes later with a box of shoes, which she threw on us. Papers, old documents, notebooks and photos, were scattered around us. They covered part of her husband's chest, agitated but not afraid. The old man's mustache was sweating, his lips moved several times over his teeth, dirty with the tiny remains of meat from dinner.

 

Juan did not want to open his fists, nor get up from his side. He didn't speak to him, he just held him as if there was still a long way to go to eliminate all his fury.

 

-Tell your friend, tell him, tell him...!-Repeated the mother, with her arm and hand extended towards the papers. Then my eyes crossed one of the many photos, and I recognized Lidia. The old woman picked up a notebook, perhaps a photocopy, and put it in front of my face. She seemed fascinated by revealing the rugged world of her son. The names of Juan and Lidia were written there, ten years before. Then Juan let go of the old man, and covered his ears, the mother's voice stunned him.

 

I could no longer look Juan in the face, I did not dare to do so for fear that he would discover that the woman he was defending had belonged to other men before, including mine.

 

All night I tried to explain to myself why he wanted to come back, to force the facts in such a way. I thought about Lidia, too. Her photo had revived in me the most innocent memory I had of her, before we grew up, when I still wrote her name in my class notebooks, over and over again.

 

The next morning, Juan knocked on my door. It was very early, and we talked while I shaved. He had packed his suitcases to leave, and left them next to the bed. With his hands in his pockets, he leaned against the bathroom door frame.

 

 

-We were married by a priest friend, when we were seventeen, in a chapel in Pilar. When my parents found out, they forced us to annul the marriage. They threatened to kick her mother out of the neighborhood if she didn't do it.

 

-And now, how is it... -I asked. "We can't relive that, so I'm leaving." He came closer, put a hand on my left shoulder. "You take care of her," he said in a very low voice.

 

I wasn't sure if I heard correctly, I was going to ask him to repeat himself when he hugged

me.

 

Without letting go, he murmured in my ear that he had known me since I was a child, that a few days after my departure, he learned about the experience on the train from letters to my friends, who recounted my adventure several times after leaving school. Juan was there, listening to them. He was the boy in his first year of high school, who we always thought was completely deaf.

 

I pulled myself away from his arms with force, but not before feeling his teeth squeezing my ear until it bled.

 

 

 

THE TRUCK

 

Santiago Chávez saw the boy on the next corner, right at the edge of the

sidewalk, where an abandoned mailbox shadowed him. He could also see the flashes of the bicycle in the sleepy midday light. That's why he took his foot off the accelerator, but he was already halfway down the block and the brake didn't respond.

 

He wasn't afraid at first. I had had the brake fixed just a week before. However, even though he pressed it all the way, the truck did not obey him. He shifted gears in vain, put it in second gear, and tried to turn off the engine. The handbrake didn't work either. The horn had gone mute.

 

The boy, six or seven years old, was now in the middle of the street, crossing on his bicycle with exasperating slowness, while looking at the other children in the square.

 

Santiago could already see himself in front of him, less than five meters away, and suddenly the steering wheel gave way to his force, turning to the left. The horn began to sound and the lights came on.

 

The boy turned around scared, and when he lost his balance he fell on the asphalt. The truck stopped right there, somewhat oblique over the ditch, with the wheels in the

exact place where the boy had been a few seconds before. Santiago wiped the sweat that was running down his red face.

 

-Watch where you're going, pay attention when you cross...!-He said, getting down and getting closer.

 

But the boy was crying, with his hair disheveled and his pants torn. He wanted to cry too, and yet he screamed.

 

-Stop a little I tell you! I almost killed you, do you realize? Where are your parents? -And with his eyes he looked for the Casas' business.

 

The people in the square began to approach. Santiago lifted the child in his arms, who was pointing towards the truck in amazement. Crates of fruits and vegetables had been overturned, scattered all over the street. A smell of apples and crushed grapes invaded the musty air of that corner. The truck, strangely, turned on its lights two or three times, by itself, as if it were blinking.

 

Laura appeared and told him: "Yes, yes, I saw him from the business, Santiago, he was the one who crossed wrong." -Excuse me, please, he's not hurt, and the bike wasn't broken. I couldn't even touch it. Please forgive me.

     She listened to him but she just wanted to go home to her son. He accompanied them to

the door carrying the bicycle.

 

-The brake didn't respond to me, you know, and I fixed it recently. The truck is already old.

 

It was bad luck or maybe even worse, he thought, that this happened just a month after buying it. It was abandoned for five years in that vacant lot next to Aníbal's mechanical workshop.

 

Exposed to the harsh passage of time, to the blows and abuse of the boys who played ball on the field. Santiago didn't know how many times he had seen it there when leaving school, that Dodge truck relegated to the voluntary oblivion of its owner, or perhaps punished. Every time he entered the workshop to ask if he would sell it to him, he refused.

 

-No, kid, how old are you, fifteen, sixteen? Wait until you buy a new one.

 

Some afternoons Santiago took off his school uniform, and in his shirt tunic he began to

 

     help him. Then he took the opportunity to convince him, but Aníbal continued working without paying attention to him. From time to time he glanced at the back of the workshop, where the stunted and twisted figure of his nine-year-old son lay.

 

Hidden in the shadows in his wheelchair, next to the tool table, the boy had his gaze lost, absolutely lost forever, against the black background of the grave.

 

He didn't want to leave there. If someone moved the chair away from that spot before mealtime, he would start shouting until everyone on the block heard him. Sometimes customers left scared, not knowing what to say. Aníbal then stayed with him, muffling his screams against his chest, supporting his deformed arms and legs as best as possible, with his clothes sweaty and dirty from his son's uncontrollable vomiting. Afterwards he would go out to the sidewalk almost exhausted, wiping his face with a dirty cloth, and looking at the parked truck.

 

Santiago continued passing by the same place during the following years. The kids played there and from time to time some glass would break, but no one stole anything. Not a tire, a lantern or an accessory. She, the truck, knew how to defend herself. It was even said that when the bricklayers from the building on the other block took a woman, the lights would suddenly turn on, illuminating the entire vacant lot. For him, those were nonsense, rumors that he was no longer going to pay attention to: the time had come to finish high school, and he found out that his girlfriend was pregnant.

 

-A greengrocer, that's what we're going to do. "I'm asking my old man for money to rent the Costa warehouse," he said determinedly. "But I need Aníbal's truck to bring the merchandise."

 

This is how I was going to remember it almost six months later, as an uninterrupted, orderly and logical succession of common events. At least until that time when leaving the market with the truck full of watermelons, he once again encountered the unmistakable flashes of a shiny bicycle.

     It was still far away, more than a hundred meters away. He could assure, however, that a

boy with long, curly hair was circling a tree.

 

"Six months, my God, I've seen so many boys since then, why does it have to happen to me again," he thought out loud, not knowing why he was talking to the truck. "Behave well, and you will never feel the cold again nor will I abandon you." He didn't slow down, trusting in her. With his right hand he caressed the adjacent seat as if a woman were present there.

 

Some had already seen him do it, and also talk to himself while carrying the boxes. "What's wrong, kid?" They said with a pat on the shoulder.

-Nothing, what's going to happen.-And it seemed that Santiago really didn't realize what he was doing.

 

Fifty meters away the bicycle left the sidewalk, carrying the curly-haired boy towards the cobbled abyss of the street. Then Santiago hit the brakes and nothing happened. Then the handbrake, which didn't respond either. The gears, the engine, the steering wheel, none of them obeyed. The horn worked, but making screams similar to that of a woman mad with pain. The boy began to pedal with all the strength of his short legs.

 

The truck, uncontrollable, straight on its target, was heading towards the child. Santiago was crying.

 

-Damn machine, damn you, don't ruin my life! I told you I was going to protect you! -And with his free hand he hit the board. The speedometer needle moved with the jolt, and it was as if it responded. This time the bumper managed to knock down the bicycle. The machine had stopped just in time, regretfully, but the boy's body jumped forward, mercilessly. Santiago moaned through clenched teeth, hitting his head against the steering wheel.

 

-God, holy God! The bicycle was still crushed under the wheels, and more than ten meters away was the boy, who was limping and fleeing in fear to his house. People, leaning out of the windows, watched him as if he were something more than a twenty-year-old man, standing next to an old truck, with the smashed watermelons around him, turning the street a blood red color. It was a man who was now crying and his beard was wet and sticky. Maybe they were afraid of him, because as soon as they saw him take the bicycle out from under the vehicle, with that abruptness and the inexplicable dialogue he had with someone who didn't exist, everyone closed the doors and hid. Then he was left alone at one in the afternoon, in the middle of the dead street during siesta time. A light breeze shook the branches of the trees. He lifted the crushed and twisted bicycle and put it in the trunk. The truck started without any fanfare, calm, almost satisfied.

 

A feeling similar to the one he had the day he entered Aníbal's workshop, determined to buy it from him. He had put on a clean shirt and a new tie to seal the deal. The money for the advance filled his pants pocket. With the hand that could never close properly because of the scar he had had since he was a child, he touched the bills every moment to make sure he had not lost them.

 

-Come on, I really need it. The baby is coming in two months and I still don't have the

 

means to bring the merchandise to the business.

 

-Get another car.

 

-But the Dodge is ideal, and I also can't afford anything newer.

 

Aníbal was leaning with his arms outstretched on an engine, and a clamp fell from his hands.

 

-The whore! Look what you make me do, you talk to me and talk. I'll show you once and for all.

 

He grabbed his arm to take him to where his son was.

 

-Look at it. See? This is what she did to him.

 

The crooked child kept looking at the bottom of the pit. Then they went out onto the street, entered the vacant lot, and opened the door of the abandoned truck.

 

-Do you see that stain on the seat? It's his blood. After the accident I left the bike on the ground and loaded it into the truck to go to the hospital, but the damn thing stopped on a corner and didn't want to start again. He lost so much blood that when we arrived nothing could be done.

 

Half an hour, man. For half an hour we stood here with the baby in my arms, bleeding to death. He went to the garage of the house, where the truck was protected from the cold of the nights of that harsh winter. On Sundays I washed it and made it shine with polishes and sprays. He knew that it was the only way to keep her calm, satisfied, and satisfied. As if he were a servile assistant afraid of his owner's fury.

When he got in he noticed, for the first time in a long time, the red stain on the seat. It

was dry and dark as always, soaked into the leather, but this time it seemed different, a little brighter. Even before starting the engine, he also noticed the uneasiness that dominated the truck. The windshield wipers worked by themselves, and the needles on the dashboard moved with nervous intermittence.

 

-What's happening? Calm down. Do you need something else?

 

The machine turned on without permission, furious and shining in its renewed

 

appearance of malicious irony.

 

-Okay, stop it, I'm not going to sell you, do you believe me? You have to believe me.

 

From the house, his wife watched him talk to himself, and with a sigh of hopeless regret, she let go of the son she was carrying in her arms. The boy escaped from his side, and crossing the threshold of the street door, got on his bicycle to follow his father.

 

"Dad, dad!" He called with a high-pitched voice.

Santiago could not hear him; The engine was running and the windows were closed. When he saw the shadow, that little shadow with flailing arms, it was too late to stop it.

She, the machine, launched herself at the child with unappealable fury. The body disappeared under the truck, and unknown screams began to be heard from all sides.

 

He got out to look under the vehicle, pulling his son's hands. When he picked it up, the body seemed broken in two, inert, uselessly dressed in its blue checkered kindergarten uniform. I didn't know how or what exactly I was doing. He only saw that his wife was hanging on to his arm, screaming. He got into the truck and put the child in the seat next to him, on the fresh blood stain. He closed the door without paying attention to his wife's pleas.

 

He thought of the hospital, of the nearest doctor. But, this time, the engine did not want to start.

 

 

 

 

 

THE PREDATORS

 

Mom was lying in her wheelchair, silent, looking out the window at the feverish midday traffic. Someone approached the door and the doorbell rang.

      -It's the postman, mom.- I told her, and I started to read the telegram out loud, but I stopped when I saw what it was about.

      “I invite you to leave the property within two months if the rent for the last five years is not paid to me.”

      She gave a small gasp of surprise, and she noticed.

      -They're kicking us out, mom, I knew we had to talk to this guy first.

      -They are going to demolish the house and sell the land, aren't they?

      I looked at her without being surprised, because she usually guessed those things. I noticed the restlessness in her dark, always nervous eyes. Now she was being kicked out of the house she had lived in for thirty years, the place that had fit her like a perfect mold. The darkness of the rooms, the noise of the wood, the unbearable humidity, and the dirty appearance of the garden, always occupied by stray dogs, marked us as a strange family in the neighborhood. They called us “the witch Cortez and her daughter,” the fortune teller who spoke of the future, of coming tragedies shouted from the four winds even though no one wanted to hear her.

      -Listen to me, Lidia.-Eduardo told me when I told him all this. We were in the bar, at the end of our first year of dating. -After living for so long without paying rent, and knowing your old lady, five years of compensation for endurance is not much. Don't worry, I'll take care of everything.

      When I returned home, Mom had left the food untouched on the bedroom table. She kept looking out the window, and she murmured a strange prayer that was increasingly inaudible. Then, the neighborhood dogs began to bark all together, as if she were able to connect with the instinctive world.

      "I don't want you to bring that guy anymore," she said suddenly.

      -We're getting married, mom. He's going to save the house.

      -I forbid it.- she answered.-I am not going to leave this house in the hands of my enemies.

      Eduardo moved in a month later. I know that he paid the debt or at least reached an agreement with the owner. We took the room that belonged to my parents because the only double bed was there. It had a balcony facing the street, with a beautiful view of the neighborhood and the image of the cathedral in the distance.

      Eduardo's strong and fast steps reigned over the wood that covered the entire construction. They were new sounds for the bleak daily life we led with Mom. But she decided not to speak to him, nor did she even deign to look at him for ten seconds straight.

      "It doesn't matter," he said, but I know that then he remembered the time when he and his friends followed me to the house, and stayed on the opposite sidewalk shouting: "Witch!" They challenged my mother for her uncanny ability to divine or perhaps determine the future. I even once thought that it was like that, that the world and its tragedies were created around her. That indescribable capacity of hers to make everyone fear her just by knowing, or claiming to know, the future of men.

      That's why Eduardo also feared him. Every morning at breakfast, he spoke to me, and I to my mother, and she rarely to me. But both of them only exchanged sharp and suspicious glances of suppressed anger.

      -You married the enemy, his parents and families like his hated us. "That time was like a witch hunt," my mother said once in front of him, at nine in the morning on a bright sunny day, and Eduardo left, knocking on the door. He wanted to kill her at that moment. Take advantage of her disability to deal a blow that no one was going to blame me for.

      "I should be grateful," Eduardo told me at night in our bed, occupying the exact place where my father had once slept. He put his hands behind his head, looking out the open window at the summer night. I consoled him then to calm his anger, that ancestral and almost mythical hatred of his childhood.

 

      The night we went out to dinner, three months after we got married, we saw how people shunned and avoided us. I was used to it since I was little, back when Eduardo was one of them. But now he also felt that rejection. During the two hours we were there, the waiters served us silently, looking at us askance. His old friends came in, the same ones with whom he had made fun of us and written obscenities on the walls of the house. Except he, of all of them, had noticed me.

      “The strange beauty, the thin and tenuous beauty of Lidia Cortéz,” he wrote in the school notebook, and I knew it. But that became a mark, a stigma on his forehead that everyone else in the neighborhood began to see clearly. Because, from one day to the next, they no longer invited him to besiege the house with his shouts, nor to put crucifixes on our door.

      -Let's go back.- He asked. His friends hadn't even looked at him.

      He was nervous ioso as we returned. The light in the entrance hall was on. The silhouette of the house was surrounded by the dark, cloudy sky. Then we perceive a peculiar and vague aroma. Upon entering, we saw my mother next to a burning curtain, fanning it, as if she were creating the world's first fire.

      Eduardo ran towards the cloth, and threw it to the ground, stepping on it desperately. I brought a bucket of water from the kitchen, and went back and forth several times until the fire was out.

      "I'm going to see the rest!" He said, going up the stairs. His thunderous footsteps could be heard as he opened and closed the doors.

      I looked angry and helpless at my mother, who was now crying. Her eyes shone, and her broad white forehead frowned endlessly. That's how I knew, in the midst of the smoke and ash covering the room, with Eduardo's fury running like crazy through the rooms, that Mom wanted to go back, to the non-magical time of her life. At the time when she still did not hear strange voices and the house did not exist; when she was still a child and no one escaped her. That time when she did not yet dream or fear that a crowd would come looking for her with her torches, to hang her from the first tree she found.

      "Damn old shit," Eduardo shouted as he got down, almost stumbling. -You unfortunate old woman! Do you know that I spent all my savings paying off her debts? Now I'm trapped.- I approached to calm him down, but he pushed me. That night we didn't sleep together. “I'm trapped,” I heard him scream in his sleep from the other room.

      The next morning he was silent and with a haggard face.

      -Your mother got into my dreams last night.- It was the only thing she told me.

      Since then Mom tried to burn the house down many times, sometimes even with us inside it, and we could no longer leave her alone. We thought about taking her to a nursing home, but then she became so agitated that we had to call Dr. Ruiz. He didn't find anything serious, and yet she knew how to intimidate us. She looked up, rolling her eyes as if mad.

      Eduardo then chose to leave very early, although every morning his mother's screams followed him to the front door.

      "Fire and charred flesh!" she raved. "They will come to burn me, but I'm going to do it first!"

      I was left alone little by little, like when when I was ten years old, the boys insulted me for being the witch's daughter.

 

      Afterwards, Eduardo began to lose weight for no reason. He ate with us every night, but barely, and he went to bed right away. I noticed how he feared Mom's penetrating gaze, that she watched him with her eyelids furrowed and murmuring an unintelligible curse. He began to sleep poorly and tossed and turned in bed, restless, sweating until the sheets were damp and cold. Every morning he told me the same nightmare.

      -I dreamed that birds and bats attacked me, and each one had the face of your old lady...It won't let me sleep, it's going to end up killing me.

      One day he didn't want to get up anymore. He stayed in bed, and said he felt too weak. His voice was plaintive, the skin on his face was so white that it already seemed transparent. I knew for sure, without needing any doctor, that he was dying.

      I then asked myself if I also had the same capacity as my mother. That lucid intuition perhaps taken to the extreme of superstition. Trying hard, I was locked up for days, exhausting my mind.

      -Mom.- I asked her one day.- Could I have inherited your powers?

      She looked at me like someone discovering a rival.

      -You're not going to beat me. Don't you realize that our enemies are out there ready to hunt us?

      Without answering him, I grabbed the chair.

      -Let's go to bed, mom. -I took her to the room at eight at night. I didn't make the bed or turn on the light. I left her in the middle of her small room, the narrowest in the house. I locked the door. That night was the first night I didn't feed her, but she didn't protest.

      Instead of eating dinner alone in the kitchen, I brought Eduardo a bowl of soup to the bedroom, and we ate together. He looked at me without asking me about her, and a faint and subtle smile returned to her face. It was enough to reward me. To be sure of what she should do.

 

      During the following week the old woman screamed almost all day, although her screams gradually faded. They were hidden by the summer bustle of the street, by the buses and the voices of the neighborhood kids. The mass bells aborted Mom's moans. Until we almost didn't hear them. Then we heard banging on the door, things falling to the floor, and the wheels of the chair spinning from one wall to another. Slowly, Eduardo was recovering the color in his cheeks.

       The neighborhood dogs then began to approach the garden, claiming the lost vitality of who they seemed to call their owner. The neighbors came to look for them, but they left scared by the old woman's screams. The animals then

They all stayed together in the garden of thick, tall grass. Growling and refusing water and food.

      One Saturday, a beautiful Saturday morning, the screaming stopped. I dressed in my best clothes. A white silk blouse, with the top two buttons open, and a blue skirt. I went down to the kitchen and made myself some coffee, listening to the sound of the shower while Eduardo took a bath.

       I spent fifteen minutes there, accompanied by the sound of the animals outside. I cleaned the cup and looked out the window. The dogs had come closer and were jumping against the door. I tried to force my mind, as I saw my mother do, and spoke to them without a voice, looking into their eyes. Then I let them in.

      Twelve dogs crossed the living room like a wild horde in search of their prey, and ran towards Mom's room. They stayed waiting at the door, and made way for me without touching me. The white blouse was left intact, my blue skirt was not covered with a single hair.

      When they opened it, they pounced on the old woman's body, lying on the floor. They destroyed him with their bloody teeth and fattened mouths. The tearing clothes seemed to make more noise than the flesh and bones. They dragged her body towards the garden, now so similar to an African meadow. I crossed my arms, calm, contemplating the hunt under the sun.

 

 

 

 

THE BARBERSHOP

 

That day the street on which my grandfather Antonio's hair salon - my great uncle, actually - was located, changed its usual mood. At that time there were still trees on the

sidewalks and the noise of the cars was loud and rhythmic. I remember arriving that morning in Dad's car, discovering what things were like at the time I was normally at school. The air was still cold, and the sun was slowly revealing itself. I greeted my father and gave him back the briefcase I had been playing with in the back seat. He didn't come down.

 

"I'll pick you up at two in the afternoon," he told me.

 

The curtains on the door of the business had small sheets of wood held together by thin threads, and when they moved they sounded like bells. I found my grandfather in front of the mirror trying to erase the rust stains from the glass, and it was like looking at a starry sky of brown suns. Those spots on the glass were getting bigger, terracotta colored, and seemed to come from behind the mirror. There had never been moisture on the wall even though it bordered a vacant lot, but from the first day he installed it, the dark stains appeared.

 

-We brought it with the guys from the moving truck from the capital. -He told me. -The best glass, my dear little Oscar, the most expensive.

 

The afternoon they entered the store and put it on the wall supports, the mirror broke. An oblique crack from top to bottom opened without completely breaking, but was palpable to the touch of the fingers. Then the stains followed one after another, very slowly over the years. We went to check the wall from the side of the empty land many times, getting between the grassland and the thorny bushes. We observe the wall carefully.

 

However, apart from the moss that covered the plaster, there were no cracks visible in that foot-thick wall.

 

With the light blue overalls open over his abdomen, he began to prepare the sink in a corner of the room, and while he was arranging the combs and other things, some neighbors entered. We all knew that that day was a special occasion in his life, and that was why I asked for permission not to go to school.

 

-Councilman Domínguez called me this morning, he says he will come without fail.- Commented an old friend from the neighborhood. I looked at my grandfather, who was smoothing his hair with one hand as he always did when something was bothering him.

Half an hour later more people arrived. The women were talking, some caressing me and

then looking at the mirror to fix their hair. I felt my cheeks blush with so many hands on them. I entertained myself by touching the trophies on the mantel. A huge collection from the times when grandfather had been president of the neighborhood club. Dad always told me about

 

that time, because he played for the soccer team when he was a kid.

 

I went out to the sidewalk, and sat on the threshold of that place that seemed to have stopped in time. A faded sign above the door announced "El Concejal's Barber Shop." People continued to enter and gather in a narrow space of the business, since the other sector had been reserved for the visit. But my grandfather didn't stop working. The sound of scissors was incessant.

 

Although he was old, he was a robust man, who did not look his sixty-eight years. With a sharp face and an aquiline nose, he had sparse but long and curly hair at the nape of his neck. With each passing year he became more strict and cold in his treatment of people, which is why people began to fear him and avoid him. As if instead of softening, approaching the timid reserve and slowness of the old, he was hardening. A year earlier he had lost the elections for councilors against his opponent of the last twenty years. My grandfather and Domínguez had been fighting since they were young, back when they were fighting for the presidency of the club.

 

-It was a war that lasted twenty years... -His friends told him.................. and it's over, old man.

 

Now Grandpa Antonio was focused on searching for ideas in the midst of the hair he cut.

Perhaps from the clash of the scissors, phrases that were understandable to him would emerge, like weapons.

 

-From here you can see the world.-He murmured in my ear a few weeks before, while I watched him work, sitting in the next chair.-Do you know that sometimes I see the souls of my clients? And looking at the mirror I noticed, that afternoon, that a strip had appeared on each side of the crack, obscuring the reflection of the glass. It was maybe two centimeters, maybe even more, I don't know. The rust stains were no longer shaped, giving the business an archaic appearance.

 

It was the previous Monday when a rumor began to spread that Domínguez would come to offer him a lifetime position on the Neighborhood Council.

 

"If he wants to come, let him come." He answered simply, but his head was planning something. I saw his gaze burst like lightning.

 

That same Monday I passed by the business, and I noticed that the crack in the glass was darker, with a brown halo or aura that blended with the luminosity of the sunset. My grandfather was already closing the curtains and suggested I look for cracks in the wall.

 

"The mirror is not going to withstand the humidity much longer," he repeated.

     For the hundredth time we checked the wall from the vacant side, hitting it until the dried

paint fell off. But we found the same solidity as always, the inviolable impermeability that protected the wall from premature death. However, the crack in the mirror was there, and when we returned to the premises we saw larvae emerging from the edges of the mirror. Black worms walking towards the ceiling. The grandfather stood on a chair and began to throw poison at them. They slowly became paralyzed.

 

"And the larvae?" I asked him the next morning.

 

-I think they're dead, dear.

 

The clock above the door said half past twelve. Many of the neighbors went to their homes or to Santos' bar for lunch. The metal curtains lowered, beginning the silent interlude of the nap. The mosaic pattern of the barber shop became clearer as people left.

 

Then Dominguez appeared at the door. They greeted each other with the silent and mutual agreement to avoid formality. We all kept quiet, but then the neighbors gave a dismayed exclamation as they were asked to leave.

 

"Please, ladies, please, there can't be so many people here," my grandfather said, gently pushing the women and the elderly towards the sidewalk, and locking the door.

 

I took advantage of those seconds of disorder to hide in the bathroom. I leaned against the tiles and watched them with the door ajar. Grandfather looked around looking for me, and thinking that I had already left, he invited Domínguez to sit down. Then he started putting the shaving cream on it.

 

-Look, Antonio, we already know why all these people were here. They have known us for a long time.

 

Grandpa continued covering half of his face with that cream as white as the shirts he always wore.

 

-There's nothing strange about a guy asking me to shave him. But he did show up offering me the position I should have had from the beginning.

 

Then I heard Domínguez saying something different than expected. I heard him talk about threats, and about supporters trying to kill him.

 

-I messed around, do you understand me? Follow me. I don't know who to trust anymore.

 

 

That's why I came to you. "Antonio is going to protect you," they told me.

 

My grandfather continued shaving him. Until that moment they had spoken to each other through the mirror, but since the spots now obscured almost all of their vision, Domínguez turned around. The knife slipped by accident, and some blood flowed out without him realizing it. He spoke like a desperate man and asked for protection. Antonio cleaned the knife in front of the mirror, a tiny drop of blood splashed on the glass near the crack. Silent, my grandfather listened to that request, 93 but he did not make any gesture other than moving his lips, as if he were insulting him in a very low voice. Then he spoke.

 

-Do you remember my boys, whom you sent to be murdered?

 

Then I remembered what they had told me about the three kids who worked on the neighborhood committee. They were found dead in the vacant lot a few months before the first elections in which both had competed. They carried posters that they were going to stick on the walls during the night. They said that it was a teacher who found them, at seven in the morning, while she was going to school. The woman had seen some blonde hair in the middle of the grass, and notified the police.

 

All three bodies had several bullet holes in the head and chest. They were hiding among the bushes and the dead cats, leaning against the wall of the barbershop. We never knew who had done it, nor could it be proven that they were victims of the opposition party. The three had been shot against the wall and the blood remained impregnated on the wall, even though the rain and sun bleached the plaster.

 

Antonio wiped the rest of the cream off her face with a towel, and put some lavender on

it.

 

Domínguez knew then that he would never receive help. He began to get up and saw the knife in the grandfather's right hand, who with the other held him in the chair until he turned him around facing the mirror again. Looking at each other through the opaque glass, one watched as the other pierced his throat with the neat cut of a sharp razor. Blood gushed out for a few seconds, and Dominguez's body turned white. I didn't even dare to breathe, I was paralyzed beyond my will.

 

Grandpa lowered the metal curtains immediately afterwards. He didn't know I was still inside. He was trembling, and calmed down by sitting for a while. He lit a cigarette, staring at the now dark mirror, covered by the terracotta stains born from the crack. Some larvae had begun to emerge from the opening, also emerging from the edges of the mirror. A quarter of an hour later there were so many that they covered the entire wall, and they scattered on the floor. Soon they were already climbing onto Domínguez's body. When they covered ever

crevice, they began to devour it.

 

 

THE ARCHANGEL

 

His name was Gabriel Benítez. He was blonde, with straight hair, tall, burly, and had a scar on his forehead. No one knew exactly how he had done it, not even my parents who had known him since he was a child. Years later he set up his own business, and from then on the myth of him began, that of the butcher shop that Benítez had decided to name “The Archangel.”

      Sometimes we would sneak out of school to go see him. His almost absolute silence was incomprehensible and fascinating to us. We knew that the women in the area visited him at least once on the advice of his friends, and they all ended up recognizing the strange attractiveness of this thirty-four-year-old man. We never met any girlfriend, and he voluntarily refused the advances of the neighborhood girls. As if he were not able to speak to them or say a single word of appreciation. That's why the men who gathered at the bar murmured that Benítez didn't like women. However, others claimed to have seen him several times with prostitutes.

      It was precisely this trait that attracted us to him, that peculiar virility that did not need to be demonstrated in any other way. We would go to the store and lean on the counter watching him work, distributing the meat slices on the plates, or hanging the half-carcasses from the hooks. His white cap hid his hair, but not the scar that seemed to call us at every moment. He then looked at us with rage, with a fury that I never saw before or after meeting him.

      -Max.- He said in a very faint voice, and suddenly the dog that he had picked up from the street many years before, appeared on the side of the counter from some hidden part of the premises, looking at us with a furious expression. He was always by his side, almost adoring him. That dog, I am now sure, was an extension of Benítez, the unchanging and sullen mask with which he hid from the world a part of his person that we never fully knew. The animal resembled a Doberman, with a mixture of undefined breeds. It was big and strong despite his advanced age, and completely black.

      In the morning, before eight, he would open the business and let Max out. The dog stayed in the street for half an hour, sniffing the sidewalk and barking with a moan of extreme distress. I could hear it every morning on my way to school, and it even seemed to me sometimes that that howl was a form of communication with something beyond our senses.

      The only times we heard Gabriel was during his contained drunkenness, on Saturday nights at the bar. Santos didn't like either of them, especially he was angry with the dog. Max sat under the table, while Benítez drank his constant glasses of gin. Those times he told us about his childhood, about the way people influenced his life. But what worried us most was that his words always sounded like a death sentence.

      -My parents called me Gabriel so that I would be good as an angel, but if they saw me now, they would undoubtedly regret it. Do you want to know how I did this to myself? -He asked us, pointing to the scar. -It was an advance punishment for what I was going to do later.

      "You're a strange guy," someone told him from time to time.

      -Only Max understands me.

      Then the dog howled. None of us ever dared to silence him. The butcher's voice was the sad and disappointed sound of that animal. Santos then roughly took the glass out of his hands, and that was the signal for him to leave. He was the only one to whom Benítez authorized this treatment, as if he were still a spoiled child who had to be forced to return home. At three in the morning he walked alone towards the brothel neighborhood.

      One night it occurred to me to follow him. I was around sixteen years old, and that man was like my necessary link with women. I walked behind him a few meters until the dog turned around.

      "What's wrong with you?" He asked me, while Max looked at me suspiciously.

      -Nothing, I wanted to know if you would let me come in with you to see the whores.

      I saw Benítez laugh for the first time, and I was ashamed. Then he took my arm and held me for two blocks, until the women began to appear on the corners, like spiders emerging from their gloomy rooms, from the thresholds with pale red lights. They walked in circles in their own footsteps, with torn wallets and purple lips.

      We approached one of them, and Benítez asked him:

      -Do you have a girl for my friend?

     The three of us entered the old house, where the heat of the stoves remained virgin and protected from the humid winter air. On a green corduroy sofa, three or four women of indecipherable age sat with their legs crossed and barefoot. Her dark, amazingly made-up eyes dazzled me. I felt the slight push he gave me to encourage me. ara. I don't know which one I chose, I don't even remember her face because they all looked the same to me at that moment. We went to a room along a hallway that was too similar to the one in my house, and I felt remorse. The last thing I looked at before locking myself in with that woman, with that stranger, was Benítez entering another room, and Max sitting down to wait in the hallway on a rug.

      When I came out, Gabriel was waiting for me on the couch, alone, in his underwear and smoking.

      "The girls sleep at this time," he said.

      The six in the morning light came in from the window. The sun had begun to illuminate the streets that were going to take me to school. The same path that would return me to my childhood and to the virginity already irremediably lost.

      We were there for a while, and I know he wasn't drunk when he spoke to me, when he told me what perhaps he would never tell anyone else.

      -I had a girlfriend once, you know? She was the daughter of Santos, the guy from the bar.- Then he got close to my ear.- I killed her.- He murmured.- I killed my girlfriend accidentally...

      -I don't believe you. If she lets you go every Saturday...

      -To get me drunk and make me talk. She humiliates me, don't you realize? The only thing holding him back from killing me is Max, he protects me.

      That morning I had breakfast trying to hide the sleepiness and dark circles from my wakefulness. I wondered if my parents could smell that traitorous aroma I thought I was carrying. I didn't want to go back to the business, I felt confused and I went to see Santos.

      The old man wiped the tables with a damp cloth and emptied the ashtrays.

      -Hello.- he told me, and suddenly he looked towards the street. I turned around and there were Gabriel and the dog sitting on the threshold of the butcher shop.

      -That dog is very special.-I commented.

      -They should have killed him many years ago... -He murmured without finishing the sentence, and he continued cleaning the tables, with that sad look that he always had.

      My mother later told me that Santos' daughter had been attacked by Max, and that she had died a few days later. She told me this just as we were passing the butcher shop, and Gabriel was at the door.

      -Good morning.- She greeted him.

      -Hello, Laura.- Then she looked at me and said:-What were you doing the other night in the whore neighborhood?

      I stood there not knowing where to go. Mom looked at him surprised, and grabbing my arm we walked away. When I turned around I noticed that she was smiling at me while she was petting the dog.

      -Mom, don't believe him.- But there was no point, I was lectured for a week. I locked myself in my room trying to come up with a plan, revenge for the son of a bitch Benítez.

 

      Five days later, during the night, I left the house without making a sound. I sat in my old man's car for two hours without deciding. At seven thirty in the morning my eyelids were closing, and I decided that if that wasn't the time, I would never do it. At the end of the day, Benítez was asking for it, his own act of betrayal seemed like a plea for someone to end what he was not capable of.

      When I reached the corner of the business, I waited until the bus that took me to school every morning passed by without me this time. Sitting nervously behind the wheel, I saw Benítez get out in his white T-shirt and bloody apron. He lifted the metal curtain as Max ran toward the sidewalk. Then I started the engine and accelerated, listening to the squeal of the tires on the asphalt.

      I think the dog lowered the curb just a second before I passed. I felt the knock on the wheels, the dizzying and irreparable step on the animal's back. There were two consecutive shocks. Then I lost control of the car and crashed into a trash can at the next corner. But only after gathering strength did I dare to turn around.

      When the cathedral bells rang eight o'clock under the luminosity of the August sun, the neighbors began to approach. Benítez was now kneeling on the pavement next to his dog.

     Raising her head, he kissed her cold, dirt-and-blood-stained muzzle, and I realized that he was crying. His face was wrinkled, tearing like a boy full of terror. He piously carried Max's corpse in his arms. He went to the sidewalk walking among the people, haughty and sad. His gaze had been transfigured, his entire body suddenly acquired soft contours, innocent movements. I swear that for a moment I saw a warrior angel in his place, the same man as always but with wings and a sword in his right hand, in a procession of homage to the dead animal. It was just a moment, a fleeting and strange image. Then Gabriel closed the door of the premises.

      Since we didn't see him again for several days, we went in to look for him. Neither he nor his things were there anymore. We only found Max's body on the counter, stiff and nauseating.

Ilustration: La gare Saint-Lazare (Claude Monet)