The face of the monkeys (English version)

 

 THE FACE OF THE MONKEYS

 

Ricardo Gabriel Curci

 

 

Notes on The face of monkeys by Fabian Vique

The reader of novels is patient, he is condescending to the long road, he waits for the epiphany like someone who drinks coffee in slow sips, he goes through a labyrinth full of twists and turns with a greater or lesser degree of affinity. The poetry reader penetrates the texts, stops at a pronoun, allows himself to be moved by a word, a line, an image. It is feasible and even expected that the reader of poems and novels feels empathy with a work as soon as they know it has been created by an author. A character, a voice, a language, act as bridges for an unconditional encounter, similar to passionate love or maternal love.

The story reader is of a different condition. He is an individual who does not wait, nor let go, nor fall in love so easily. He does not sweeten his voice, he does not dive into the text through any door. The reader of stories thinks more about the singular of the story than about the stories in a book, much less about an author. He makes his own anthology, he modifies it day by day. Seen from the outside it is arbitrary, seen from the inside it is rigorous. If there is love between a story reader and a story, it is a conditional, demanding love. Empathy with a good story ends when the story ends, it does not extend to the next. The next is a new beginning, a new universe. He will have to fend for himself.

And if there are story readers with a palate educated by dint of reading enjoyment and training, there are also story makers. I am not referring to the writers who, among other things, produce stories, many of them unforgettable, beautiful; but to those who, before being writers, are storytellers: born storytellers, by race. People who have the story incorporated into their DNA. That scrutinizes reality with a story-telling perspective. The traditional storyteller can explore other genres, but in his intimacy he knows that these are excursions, exercises, his universe is a storyteller.

Ricardo Curci belongs to this race. His literary perspective is always story-telling. In each new text the primary challenge is posed: to create, from a few elements, a unique world that has its particular architecture, its cardinal points, its own laws, its talismans.

Between 1994 and 2005 Curci wrote, simultaneously, Los Casas, The Intermediate Beings and The Face of the Monkeys. Networks are established between the texts of the three volumes: characters that reappear, shared places, recurring atmospheres; as if there were, in addition to what each story reveals, a trans-story plot that we can glimpse. In these allusions and revisions, the resource of intertextuality reaches its full potential, which is not a game of references but an affirmation of the provisional nature of events. Nothing is definitive, not even the past, the inter-plots of the stories tell us.

But there is also an invisible thread that connects them. In all of them something stalks one or more characters. Sometimes a tragedy is presented as imminent, the reader feels that it could be unleashed at any moment.

What is notable is the economy with which Curci constitutes a world. They are essentially metonymic texts. Each story is built around a minimum of elements that are loaded with meaning with their barely outlined presence. The white of the texts, representation of what is not said because it is imaginable or sometimes because it is unimaginable and even unsayable, plays a fundamental role. They are the spaces in which the reader conjectures, gets involved, and seeks to unravel.

Those elements that activate the reader's journey can be an object, an image, a simple gesture. In “The Asylum,” for example, the flooded cemetery expresses a hidden and serious past. The sea, in the story of the same title, is not a decorative factor, nor a landscape, nor a setting: the sea hides something ominous that will be revealed as the plot unfolds. A classic literary work is a lure in “The Book”, Asunción Silva's Nocturne is combined with the fateful night in which the characters are discovered. “The tuba case” is a title and an object that hides horror: where music is expected, calamity occurs. In “The Homeland of Saturday” the individual opprobrium is a reflection of the perpetrator of the Malvinas war referred, as if to carelessness, by a radio broadcast. In “El colchonero” it is the mattresses never collected by already dead clients, that hide a terrible secret, darker than the fate of the owners themselves. In “Memory” guilt materializes in bones. Cowardice, in “Gloria”, is enclosed in a journalistic editorial office. In “The Drawing” the worst of crimes is combined with the obsession of composing a huge and transcendent drawing. The redemption that some characters consider goes through unlikely territories. Confession is the talisman that saves the narrator of “The Birthday Party.” In “Comments for Andrés” the characters recreate, in a Borgesian way, the anecdote from Crime and Punishment. In “El flaco”, the name takes on the attributes of the person. In “The Face of the Monkeys”, the encounter with the truth is not the best news. As a concise and essential artifact, each plot establishes an implacable certainty.

The stories in this book are stripped down and forceful, they are unexpected and overwhelmingly logical, they plot dark stories limpidly, with neatness. They are unique objects and at the same time linked. They do not allow a passing reading. They are, to put it with a precise adjective, disturbing.

Something beats behind all of them. Something is imposed, it wants to be revealed, but the detailed plots take us only to the doors of otherness. In some way they propose, like that Celine novel, a journey towards the end of the night that we embody as readers. That's where the stories in this book are going, or it seems that they are going.

Because it is known that you have to go through the darkness to find the light of day.

​

 

 

“There are faces that are not faces, they are battlefields.”

 

Abelardo Castillo

 

 

 

 

THE SEA

 

I know that to my right is the sea, beyond the dunes and the beach. The sea where the mercury lights and car headlights are lost. But I only see the road with its line of white stripes, dividing the world as bodies divide men. That's what I told Jessica yesterday.

 

-We have lived together for ten years, and yet we do not know each other.

 

He looked at me the same way he always did while I was driving, without moving his head, as if he was ignoring me. Without answering me, he began to protest the same old topic from each of our trips.

 

-When are you going to fix the gas leak? You know my head hurts.

 

He then opened the window on his side and then Diego's in the back. My son had his nose pressed against the glass like a squashed bug on the windshield, as he watched the dunes go by.

 

"Is there much left?" he asked.

 

"You got a cold nose," she said, and smiled at him in that special way she saved for little men, for young men. He had smiled at me like that once, ten years before.

 

Jessica rubbed her eyes hurt by the fuel. I knew how that smell irritated her at the service stations, in the workshops that attracted me so much. She stayed locked in the car, with the windows tightly closed because of her anger. She doesn't love me, I thought on those occasions, looking at her from the edge of the pit while I chatted with the mechanic. She kept

honking to get me to hurry up, and I felt embarrassed like a boy.

 

I would have wanted to kill her in those moments. Go back to the car, break the glass and grab her by the neck, shake her until she was forced to change that face that wasn't hers, the one I had once known. But then I realized that nothing was going to remove such a mask because it was the essence of his soul.

 

We are blind, we are all blind and deaf. In the darkness reflected in the windshield, on this night when I travel towards what seems to me to be the last beach, I see my face outlined in the starry sky, and the opaque shine of the pavement like tiny diamonds placed there to guide me.

 

It must be almost two in the morning. This time I travel alone, or not so alone, if I think about it better. If only she had known when to shut up. But Jessica did not know the silence, the same one that surrounds me like a shadow, a network of barbed wires that she always insisted on crossing, even knowing that she was going to be irreparably hurt.

 

The lights grow with the hum of the engines. The cars pass and the silence of the road remains, the sound of my car and the roar of the sea to the right. The wind between the dunes, bending the bushes.

 

My son excitedly jumped into the front seat, knocking over a small plastic cup of coffee that Jessica had placed on the glove compartment. But she didn't say anything, because it was about Diego, her son, not me. I had the child sit on my lap and rested his little hands on the steering wheel, under mine.

 

-You're driving, son.

 

My face and lips were glued to his neck and cheek, to the soft aroma of his hair despite the sweat.

 

"Your grandfather Christian drove a bus when we lived here," I told him.

 

Later, he bought a car and taught me how to drive along the beaches at full speed. And I felt, even before I heard her, that she was looking at me. His suspicious look, his obfuscation. His anger. Because now Diego was not only her son, but also her husband's son.

 

-It doesn't need your memories.

 

Those were his exact words, and a stench came out of his mouth and filled the interior of the car. I smell, even today, the aroma of its putrefaction.

 

I turned to look at her, and it was then that the idea that would later come to fruition occurred to me. I glimpsed her future: the wrinkles on her sullen old woman's face.

 

I'll do him a favor, I convinced myself.

 

But I couldn't continue looking at it. I braked and parked in the ditch. The dust from the road that was raised by braking entered when the door was opened. I vomited on the edge of the asphalt.

 

-And now it happens to you?

 

His voice was different. Snoring, horrible. But if I looked at her, I would see her beautiful again, I was sure of that. His silence was always beautiful. Her lips without cigarettes, thin as a boreal goddess. That's where she came from, from the northern towns, from the cold towns that worship only in privacy and merge with the light of the sun.

 

They deform like wax.

 

The vomit had stained Diego's sleeve, and he laughed. For Jessica it was the excuse to unleash the fight she had been building since we left home. We were two kilometers from the beach where I had spent my childhood. I could smell the aroma coming from the sea, see the long leaves of the reeds growing in the dunes, hear my father's voice calling me, warping in the wind until I was nothing more than a distant figure on the beach with the arms raised under the bright sun.

 

My father was there, and he had to show Diego the grandfather who had died a month after he was born. His body lost among the waves, deliberately, and then returned as stubble that the sea had not deigned to accept. So many times I asked myself the reason for his action, that it had stopped making sense as a question and had become an answer. The question was the sea, the result was the water that had remained in his lungs, warm and with its smell, that of my old man, the same aroma that Diego carried in his hair. The smell of the bushes and the sand that the wind dragged along the ground, stinging our skin wet from the sea water.

 

I picked up Diego in my arms and walked firmly towards the beach. There was a narrow path through the grasslands. Jessica yelled at me:

 

-Where are you going?! I didn't pay attention to him. I was challenging her, I knew it, and despite feeling obligated to celebrate such a challenge, I only had thoughts for the beach that awaited me.

 

The images came from childhood. I saw myself coming out of the water with tanned skin and the smile I remembered from my photos. One does not remember one's own smiles, unfortunately. My mother was waiting for me lying down, and when she saw me arrive, she brought me the towel while I shivered with chills under the sun. And my father rubbed my head, offering me the cup of tea with milk for snack.

 

The same beach but other dunes, like others were the men who would pass there tomorrow, like someone else I was after so many years. Jessica's voice, saying something unintelligible, managed to wake me up. I heard the car door close and then his footsteps behind us. He had decided to accompany us, perhaps just to see what he did or said to our son.

 

I climbed the dunes that hid the sea, reached the top and stopped. The beach stretched out huge and empty, whipped by the spring wind.

The gray, pearly waves fell one over the other, breaking on the beach, licking the sand and then returning and merging into the new waves continually generated. The figures of summer appeared in my eyes as if they had returned from the dead to tell me something, to order me something.

 

Then I cried, and Diego began to stare at me.

 

-Dad? -He said, and with his right hand he wiped my tears, then pointed towards the water.

 

-That? -I asked, although I didn't think there was any reason to talk at that moment. I felt, I actually knew with certainty, that I had my father in my arms, that I had created him like the water created those waves. And death redeems itself in some people, it uses them as messengers. They are the Christs of the shadows, they have invisible thorns in their skulls.

 

My wife was one of them.

 

-Do not be ridiculous! -He shouted at me when he saw me crying.

 

He was looking at me with furious eyes, which the gray of the afternoon melted and attenuated with the tones of sorrow. She was the sorrow and the pain. It was the necessary death and the knife with which he grabbed me to wake me up. But instead of breaking my skin, he tore off my hand, my leg, because that's what he was doing when he tried to get Diego out of my arms.

 

-Give me the baby. I get back on the road and wait for the bus. I can not take anymore.

 

-But don't be stupid... He didn't answer me. I was left with my mouth open, full of wind. I was nothing and didn't deserve an answer because maybe they wouldn't even be able to see me. My clothes and my face were white like the clouds, my hair brown like the stalks swaying in the wind.

 

As my feet sank into the sand, I watched them walk away.

 

It's cold inside the car. The weather stripping on the doors and windows are broken, cut as are the seats. I smell the smell of leather and dirty rubber foam leaking from the seams, the smell of tires. But I feel protected from the elements that overwhelm me. The roof of the car protects me from God, from the cold of his face. Nobody accompanies me in the seat next to me, nobody in the back seat. Just a little further away is whoever is chasing me. I imagine the face of God, and he has Jessica's features. God follows me walking on the asphalt, perhaps tied to the rear bumper, sliding softly and silently.

 

I turn on the radio. Saturday night's concert on National Radio. My father always turned on the radio after dinner. We sat on the sofa next to the fireplace, with a book in our hands, whose reading aloud accompanied the music with words that were always in harmony. Today this Sibelius melody plays. The music penetrates the night, follows the steps of the car headlights as they open the darkness. The white swan that floats meekly on the waters of the river of death.

 

My car a swan.

 

When I got home this afternoon, the same house my old man had lived in when I was a kid, my wife was packing her suitcases and Diego's. My son was out riding his bike.

 

"I'm going back to Buenos Aires," she said.

 

-You are going to leave Diego with me, there are things I want to share with him this summer.

 

-I don't want you to talk to him anymore about deaths, torture or missing people, like your father did with you. You're going crazy just like him.

 

"My old man wasn't crazy," I said, in a low voice, clenching my teeth and fists to contain my anger. No one in my family had dared to call my father by that name, which was always just a thought and never a word.

 

But I couldn't continue talking.

 

One manages to live many years with someone one does not love, but not with someone who has hatred in their eyes. I saw my eyes reflected in Jessica's pupils, and approaching her, to myself, I closed my trembling hands around her neck. And I kissed her desperately, biting her lips while she tried to scream. However, his voice became null, trapped in the throat that my fingers guarded like sentinels, guardians of the hell of that mouth that burned me.

 

Fury comes when it is impossible to stop injustice. But then it no longer has a name, and it is an echo of ancestral forces, it is a river of sounds and fears.

 

When something has already been said, only forgetting or force remains, and force is faster, always. That's why I shook her shoulders, her body to see if once and for all I could make the woman I had loved come out. Her head hit the edges of the bed several times, and she remained motionless, the waist of her neck limp.

 

Quiet, finally.

 

I carried her in my arms, looking at the room where I spent all the summers of my childhood. The ceiling with damp stains, the empty fireplace, the furniture full of dust. There had been no more music for many years before. I turned around and looked in the mirror.

 

I, a man I didn't recognize, was carrying his wife's corpse in my arms. I started crying for the second time that day, as I left Jessica in the bathtub.

 

I washed my face and went out to the back patio. A neighbor greeted me, but I lowered my head, as if paying attention to the snails on the brick path.

 

I went back to the kitchen to look for the salt shaker, and I spent five minutes watching the snails die under the little pile of salt.

 

I brought the burlap bag from the shed. I took her to the bathroom and closed the door. I put Jessica's body in the bag and carried her to the trunk of the car.

 

It was getting dark.

Diego's voice sounded loud, happy, as he opened the front door.

 

-Dad! -He shouted when he saw me, just as I was closing the trunk, and he climbed into my arms.

 

-Mom went to a friend's house. "He won't be back until tomorrow," I told him.

 

I spent the rest of the afternoon playing with my son in the middle of the living room.

 

We pushed aside the dining room table and raced the toy cars on a makeshift track on the floor.

 

At night, I put Diego to bed and turned off the lights. Before closing the door to his room, I watched him sleep. His tanned and sleepy little face. His breathing serene.

 

I pushed the car to the corner so Diego wouldn't hear me. Then I started the engine and took the road towards the road, to the beach where my father had gone to die.

 

The letters on the sign appear white in the light of the headlights.

 

Some bluish bushes, ocher at times, sink into the narrow paths that lead to the beach. I get on the shoulder and follow the wall of bushes until the descent to the beach. The wet sand of the night lets the car glide effortlessly.

 

Brake. Not because I have seen something, but because I see nothing. The stars have disappeared, as has the moon. There is nothing but darkness, in which the car lights are less than weak candles subjected to the wind. I only hear the noise of the sea when I turn off the radio. I can't even figure out if I'm close to the shore or still far away. I guess the tide has risen like it does every night, and I don't want to go any further.

 

I open the door, take the key out of the ignition and go to the trunk. I do this with my head down, I don't dare look ahead. I feel like an embarrassed child who fears the looks of others. But who, I wonder, could be watching me. If anywhere it is possible to be alone in this world where men from cities are born and die surrounded by beings who look at them and do not understand, this is it. It is heaven, however, that I fear. It is the fear that I always had of the immense darkness of the beaches at night. To the sea barely glimpsed by the white foam of the waves. And when there is a moon, it illuminates an insufficient sector of the waters, where golden and black waves form figures that I do not dare to imagine.

 

I rest my knees on the bumper. The car, its proximity, its warmth, will protect me. The smell of blood comes from the trunk. I lift the bag and set it on the sand. I take off my sneakers, drag the bag to the water. The sea is not as cold as I imagined. My eyes get used to the darkness, but my heart trembles. The water is a friend, but not the darkness that has fallen upon it. I don't dare look up further than the length of my arms.

 

I throw the bag a few meters away, but the waves bring it back. I push her again with my feet, I go inside to take her further and deeper.

 

I remember fishing with my father on summer afternoons. The water is warm because that's where we come from, he told me, and then at night he read me passages from Darwin's book that always rested on his nightstand. I return the dust to the waters, I think now.

 

I return to the beach, and bump into someone.

 

-Fishing? -ask. But it's not irony, he can't even have seen something clearly enough to be suspicious.

 

-Walking, nothing more. I get rid of rotten fish.

 

He remains standing at the edge of the waves that do not get to wet him. He has turned on a flashlight, and focuses the beam on the bag that floats and slowly moves away.

 

-They say they always come back.

 

-As?

 

-Everything that is thrown away, the sea brings back sooner or later. Some say that men's hearts do not sink.

I snatch the flashlight from his hands and shine it in his face. He is a middle-aged man, a homeless man whose breath smells of wine and dirt. I pass the beam of light over his torn, stained clothes. He doesn't have shoes.

 

-Who are you?

 

-Don't worry, I'm not a thief. I live on the beach, but during the day I hide from tourists because they are scared of me.

 

I don't know what to do, I don't know what he's seen.

 

-I'm going to sleep here.

 

-It's good, the night is cool-. He stops for a while to think. -Can you tell me something?

They told me that men's hearts don't burn when they cremate one either.

 

I look at him, try to read what he knows in his face, but the flashlight's battery is dying.

There is no room for doubt for me from now on. I throw the flashlight into the water and grab him by the shoulders. He is startled for a moment but does not resist. I hit him in the face and drag him by his hair to the shore.

 

I sink his head into the water.

 

He screams, chokes, continues flailing for several seconds. Then, at last, he remains still.

 

I lift it up and take it again now towards the big waves, beyond the breakers. I submerge with it until I feel it float and make sure that the body moves away.

twenty

Wait. The water is no longer cold. The body disappears into the darkness.

 

I turn to return to the shore. I'm almost there, but when the waves are small and only touch my heels, with the water come two hands that squeeze my ankles tightly. They drag me back.

 

I stumble, try to get up and fall again and again.

 

The unbreakable will of those fingers is greater than the strength of my body. They have the firmness of a wise man, sad like my father's face in his photographs. I know where I saw that face tonight, and I also know whose hands are dragging me into the depths.

 

 

 

 

THE MEMORY

 

He looks at the time on his left wrist. The passengers overshadow him. Look for the pale light of the bulb that appears, precarious and dirty, from the ceiling of the car.

 

It's half past five in the morning. He hasn't gotten up this early in a long time. Since the time when he went to college, or even later, when he woke up without needing a clock, almost at four-thirty, to get to the hospital ward.

 

But now the medications don't let him sleep before two or three in the morning, he rests for an hour and wakes up again, sure that he will never sleep again. He knows that there was a time when he slept ten, twelve, twenty hours a day, somewhere he doesn't remember, but perhaps his dreams confuse him by giving him such an impression of reality.

 

People go to work. The train is not very full. Few travel to Moreno at that time. Blas lives in Buenos Aires and does not work, at least until his situation is resolved. A situation that no one but him knows about, because if the others were to find out, he could not be as he is now, free, in a train car, and without anyone reproaching him for his loud yawns, his unkempt beard, his hair a little dirty.

 

Blas looks like a homeless man. However, he would never recognize himself, he never imagined that he would ever look like this. Memories come, fragmented, as if they were from other men, from other times or remote places, and when he closes his eyelids they take over. Then he rubs his face and takes out the previous day's newspaper from his coat pocket.

 

Read a five-line article, lost among bold headlines. In Mariano Acosta, excavation will begin today, at seven thirty in the morning, to begin the foundations of the new municipal building. And Blas must be there, he knows he has to arrive before them and check what will rise from the dust.

 

He had been working in that guard for about a year. It was a small aid room with some offices fifteen blocks from the Mariano Acosta station. When he arrived for the first time, he hardly paid attention to the looks of the neighbors, to the kids who watched him pass by from the school windows.

 

He was wearing a gray suit with a vest, a red tie, his overalls hanging from his forearm, and his briefcase in his other hand. He only realized the contrast of his clothes with the precariousness of the neighborhood when the dirt streets stained his pants and shoes with mud.

 

-Good morning Doctor! -the morning nurse greeted him-. But how did it come so elegant! He didn't answer. He stood speechless, as if he were listening to his mother's reproach. Then, his voice sounded hoarse, and his dark circles were more consistent with that voice than with the fact that he had gotten up so early. He had gotten dressed without thinking about where he was going, while he had breakfast with the three morning capsules. The medications that he was taught to take every day in a place he does not remember, just as distant and imprecise as the time before his birth. Drugs that perhaps had been created for that: to forget, and yet, the mind was revealed, it flowed through a sieve of opaque and black steel like the memories that were hidden behind.

The nurse helped him change. He showed him the on-call office, the emergency instruments and the gynecological table, which was broken.

 

"The previous doctor was encouraged to attend to the births until the ambulance arrived to refer them to the hospital," she said, smiling.

 

That gesture cleared up the fear that Blas had been harboring all morning. How a thirty- eight-year-old man could be afraid to take a minimum attention guard. He had not forgotten the knowledge, the medications could not cope with that. That part of his mind remained unscathed, but, without being able to help it, he was afraid.

 

The next day, he replaced the suit with a duster and white pants. Now the boys followed him down the street, clinging to his legs. He stroked their heads and greeted the women leaning out of the doors.

 

-Today I'm taking the baby for the vaccine, doctor! Blas nodded silently. The long but clean beard, the short hair, the smile ready for any child who approached him.

 

-You should have been a pediatrician, doctor, you get along very well with kids. Where did you work before?

 

He looked at the nurse for a moment, and pretended he hadn't heard.

 

-We must order gloves and have these tweezers sterilized, please.

 

-Yes doctor-. She didn't insist again.

 

On a July night, the nurse had felt unwell and went home.

 

Blas was left alone on guard. The light at the entrance to the living room shone like a star in the middle of the desolation of the street. From time to time there was the sound of bicycle chains. They were the men who came home late from work. The dogs barked, and their voices became howls lost in the wind. People didn't usually arrive after twelve, and he wasn't afraid of assaults. Blas knew that his doctor's clothes were as strong as armor, commanding respect and admiration. They left him alone.

 

Looking out of the window fogged by his breath, he was afraid again. He thought about the pills, but had decided to give them up.

 

They knocked on the door impatiently. He went to open it. A girl who couldn't have been more than eighteen years old rushed towards him and hugged him. The cold, wet clothes surrounded him as if winter itself had entered to trap him and take him to a place of no return.

 

He asked him what was happening. She didn't look up. He cried with his face pressed against Blas's chest. He made a gesture of annoyance. He closed the door and stroked the girl's head of straight brown hair. Slowly, she let herself go, and let all her weight fall into Blas's arms.

 

He picked her up and laid her on the stretcher. Then she realized that she was pregnant, perhaps about to give birth in those days. She woke up again with a scream, and clung to him as she looked at him.

 

"I finally found you!" he stammered. Blas asked him if he knew her.

-Don't be a son of a bitch! I knew you were going to deny me! But you're not going to deny the son you made for me! Blas stepped back. The girl was crazy or probably on drugs.

 

-Look... -he said-...first let's see what happens with the contractions and then we'll talk.

Do you live around here?

 

-But I was looking for you for months! I ran away when I found out I was pregnant and started looking for you. Don't tell me the story that you don't know me        The girl's voice was

brutal, dark, worn by something deeper than a cold or the flu.

 

He touched her forehead. It burned. He put the thermometer on her and began to listen to her.

 

-You have tremendous bronchitis. I'm calling the hospital to admit you.

 

-No! I want to stay here.

 

Another contraction made her scream.

 

-Let me check you, please.

 

The girl was greatly dilated, and labor was imminent. Damn my luck, he thought. But she heard him. How could he have heard her thought, unless he had muttered it without realizing it, it sometimes happened to him.

-You never called me a whore, you told me that I was your best comfort in a long time. I

remember how you cried after making love, you seemed liberated.

 

Blas had finished inserting the IV and the IV. He called the hospital and urgently requested an ambulance. They didn't have any at the time, they told him, but as soon as they had one, they would send it. He returned to the side of the stretcher.

 

He took off her damp clothes and covered her with blankets that he had warmed on the stove.

 

The girl calmed down for a while, but she kept looking at him with feverish eyes. There was a tense silence that was only interrupted by some barking from the street. Blas couldn't stand that look, he couldn't hold it without his own eyes fleeing, seeking to hide, but in reality there was nowhere.

 

-Listen to me. Believe me, you are confused. I'm almost twice your age, I don't even know you, nor is it possible that we ever crossed paths.

 

Think about it, think about your boyfriend and tell me if he's like me.

 

-You know me, Blas-. She took her hand out from under the blankets and caressed his cheek, his ear, and rested her index finger on Blas's nose.

 

-Your soft name convinced me. You seemed to me to be a sad man, but confident, strong, not like boys my age. Tell me if you don't remember this, if almost nine months are enough to make you forget it. And he showed him his wrists, a transverse scar crossing each one. -I told you that same night why they had admitted me, and you understood me, you were the only one who really... but your voice convinced me... in the darkness of the room, even if the others heard us, for me there was only you      She lost herself in delirium, beads of sweat made her

face shine under the light of the fluorescent tubes.

 

He took his blood pressure. If he continued descending he would lose her. But I wasn't going to perform a cesarean section there, without help, without material. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He remembered what he had learned many years before. Yes, he remembered the essentials, but how was it possible for that girl to speak to him with such confidence, when he had no memory of anything regarding her. She knew his name without him having mentioned it to her, although she could have also found out from the neighbors in the neighborhood. I wanted to put him in a trap, take advantage of his situation with a lawyer involved.

 

She woke up again.

 

-We were together that November night, do you remember? You touched me and said you haven't been with any woman like me. Your breath was similar to mine, that smell of medicines that filled the hospital hallways. Everything smelled the same, always.

 

Blas did not remember having ever been hospitalized, and told him:

 

-I'm going to confess something to you, while we wait, so that you can calm down. Sometimes I get depressed, I had a period in my life when I couldn't resist anymore, you understand?, and I sank like those hallways you talk about. One sinks without realizing it. I took remedies, I still do. They helped me pass the time, to not think. They erase things from you, they cancel you until you no longer feel anything. And that is a way of living, of spending the days as if they were all a cloudy Sunday at two in the afternoon, indefinitely.

 

The girl fell asleep again. He took her pulse. It was decreasing. I no longer had contractions, but the dilation was the same. The baby was going to die before being born. He called the hospital again, this time all the lines were busy.

 

Enough, he told himself. He prepared the sterile box, the surgical fields. He cleaned the body with iodine and took the scalpel. The incision came out perfect, as if a few years had not passed.

 

He was the only male in the pediatric service, and mothers chose him for various reasons. Perhaps it was the attraction that his presence exerted among so many female screams and shouts. After three years of residency and five of hard work, he had gained more sympathy from the patients than from the hospital authorities.

 

The night the three-year-old girl arrived, there were no empty beds. He decided to leave her on the guard's stretcher to observe her and do studies. The parents looked at him suspiciously as he looked over it.

 

-We are going to admit her as soon as there is a bed, don't worry.

 

Blas heard himself called over the loudspeaker, and went to attend to other patients. Half an hour later, he saw a commotion in the office where he had left the girl.

 

Ran. The little girl convulsed, vomiting blood and staining the sheets and clothing.

Suddenly, the tremors stopped. A pediatrician had begun resuscitation maneuvers, but two, three, five minutes later everything was useless. The girl did not move. The mother lifted her in her arms like a bundle wrapped in dirty cloths.

 

The father began to threaten Blas by shaking his fists in front of his face.

 

They managed to push him away, but the man continued calling him a murderer, and that word resonated throughout the guard. People looked at him, and perhaps thought nothing in particular; However, he could no longer see anything but that accusatory look.

 

Months later they sued him, and his insurance did not cover the amount. Blas's father

 

was a renowned coroner in the city, whom everyone simply called Dr. Ibáñez, but he did not want to ask him for help. Blas was sure what his father would think when he found out.

 

He sold the house and took his wife and son to an apartment in the Once neighborhood. He tried to continue working, but when caring for a patient he doubted the diagnosis and the prescribed drug. He brought the sick back almost every day, and they got tired and abandoned him. He didn't want to work anymore. That was the time when he stopped sleeping, tossing and turning in bed all night. His wife told him one day:

-There are sleeping pills, Blas, you should know. And that harsh voice was right. But then

the pills didn't help him anymore. He stayed locked up all day, eating, watching television. Did not talk.

 

Then one day, he turned off the TV and never left the couch. He heard voices around him. That of his wife, that of his son, and other unknown ones. One day someone came looking for him, speaking softly to him. Since then he remembered nothing.

 

The baby was dead and the placenta had detached covered in clotted blood. He put the boy's body in a bag and set about closing the wound. He looked at the girl's chest, it seemed to him that she was breathing more weakly. He took her pulse. Did not exist. Maybe he had died several minutes before and hadn't realized it. He, a doctor, had not realized it. This time, he was no longer surprised by himself, and this left him even more perplexed. So many children he had saved, so many, and one who was lost, left, betraying him, he had taken away the meaning of everything, absolutely.

 

Blas caressed the dead face with his blood-soiled gloves. He didn't remember what had happened that year lost in his memory, nor how the medications had made him act. Was it possible that he knew her and had seduced her? No, I didn't remember, but maybe I did know.

 

He looked around. He found himself alone, with two dead, and surrounded by the traces of a surgery that anyone would have refused to perform. But more than anything there were Blas and his past, his background marked in red.

 

Blas and the time zone outside his memory.

 

The others would remember, surely, everything was established in clinical histories of irreversible course, like manifestos written by God himself at the beginning of time. And then, perhaps, the witnesses would appear, who always emerge from the shadowy areas. What if the child was his? The godmen could determine, with their blood and a hair of the child, if he

was.

 

So what was I going to answer?

 

He closed the red bag with the baby's corpse. He put it against the front door. He went to get a black bag. He lifted the girl's body in his arms and, bending her legs, waist and head, made it enter. It wasn't big, it wasn't robust. She was thin and frail now.

 

Open the door. Nobody was outside. It must have been three in the morning. The phone rang, and he suddenly thought of the ambulance. He went to attend.

 

-I already referred it. No, I don't need it anymore, thank you.

 

He hung up. He returned to the door and carried the small bag on his shoulder and dragged the other one. He began to walk hidden by the shadow of the wall, away from the street lights. He continued walking along the dirt path that crossed the open field behind the aid room.

 

I couldn't see anything, I just felt the grass growing. There was a stream five kilometers away, after the abandoned tracks, where a series of trees formed a small forest. People didn't even throw trash there because it was so far away and dark.

 

The shadow of the trees moved against the cloudy and stormy sky. The wind swayed the tops with a roar of clashing branches that dominated the night. The world and the city seemed to have ceased to exist.

 

Everything was wind, the smell of wet grass and earth. And the blood came to join them.

Blas told himself that sometimes things agree, they look for each other.

 

With the shovel he had brought from the warehouse, he dug a single grave. He threw down the bags, and returned the earth to its place. If it rained that night, the mud would even out the removed surface.

He returned to the room. He washed his boots, put the shovel, now clean, in its corner. He cleaned everything inside. He washed the instruments and sterilized them again.

Nothing remained of what had happened, and there were still two hours before the morning nurse arrived.

 

In Merlo, get off the train and wait for the exit from the junction towards Mariano Acosta.

It's already half past six. The train leaves, this time full of people, and must travel stopped. The seasons follow one another between pushes of those who go down and go up.

 

It is Sunrising. A ray of sunlight enters through the window and falls right on his eyes, blinding him. Despite the cold, he feels warm. The collar of his coat becomes damp with sweat and gives off a smell that embarrasses him. But he doesn't look away from the window. Look at the sun peeking out behind the poor houses of the city.

 

He has seen so many suns, so much that he remembers, except that year before they offered him the job at Mariano Acosta. It was a general guard, it didn't matter. Everyone was aware that he would never practice pediatrics again.

 

Without a wife or child, he had to face the reality of supporting himself. But who had supported him until then, he did not remember.

 

The train stops at the station. Comes down. He stops for a moment on the platform, thinking that just two months before he had left the guard saying goodbye to the nurses and the neighbors of the neighborhood. No one asked him about the girl who had visited him one night several months before. He let time pass, burying the idea as bodies are buried. Nobody asked, nobody missed someone who perhaps had never existed. That calmed him down. But he couldn't take the risk. The sooner he left, the sooner they would forget him.

 

But then he had nowhere to go. He left the boarding house and some friends sheltered him for weeks. But when they saw him abandon himself to dirt and a carelessness that bordered on madness, they asked him to leave. He, however, could not leave the city, like a fly that is unable to move beyond a few meters from a garbage dump.

 

One afternoon he saw the article by chance in a forgotten newspaper on the bar table, and he began to read it slowly, so that each word would last an hour and sleep would come sooner than hunger. They were going to dig in the land next to the stream. The place couldn't have been any other, because he recognized the description of the trees, the grass and the open field path. I have to go, he told himself then.

 

"Master," he said to the waiter. A packet of sugar, please, lowered my blood pressure.

 

The waiter did not want vagrants in the establishment, but Blas' careful intonation, the almost dark paleness of his face, made him abandon his reluctance. Blas opened the sachet and poured it under his tongue. He quickly recovered and left, hiding the diary in his coat. He lay down on the threshold of a building, next to a dog that had won his hand, and tried to sleep.

He walks through the streets without anyone recognizing in the dark wanderer the doctor who once treated them. Pass in front of the aid room. Someone, a man in white, he thinks, must be checking another man, and the two willingly participate in the destiny that has brought them together, without knowing that it is forever. But he doesn't look out the window, he walks past.

 

See the open field. The bulldozers move their mechanical arms through the morning mist. Some workers place red striped ribbons around the area. Blas walks slowly towards it, hidden by the tall bushes and the fog. His body looks like a vertical trunk, black and burned, that moves when no one is looking.

 

Get to the first tape. Listen to the voices of the workers and the architects. The machine engines are heating up. The branches of the trees shake with the momentum of the bulldozers, and the leaves fall like rain.

 

The others are down there. Expecting.

 

Go under the tape and continue. Nobody stops him. There are many people who appear to be unaware of each other. Administrative staff, local journalists, police, builders, politicians. Everyone gives instructions in a more or less loud voice.

 

But no one sees it, nor notices what has sprouted between the roots of the tree they are uprooting.

 

The steel cables pull the tree, and between the roots the bones emerge, peeking out from the torn bags.

 

-No! -he shouts.

 

Everyone turns to look at him. Those on the machine have not listened and continue pulling the log. Blas runs and pushes those who, more in amazement than obfuscation, stand in the way of that man whose overcoat waves like a character out of old movies.

 

He makes it to the trees and stops under the one being uprooted. "Be careful!" they shout at him, but he doesn't pay attention.

He kneels and buries his legs in the disturbed mud. The roots rise like arms from the earth. He starts looking for the bags, the bones.

 

But he has lost sight of them. Then he covers his face with his dirty hands.

 

Someone approaches him, helps him up. Blas realizes that this person, whoever he is, is giving someone, further away, the silent sign of someone pointing out a madman.

 

"They were here, I swear," he insists, but now he can no longer contain his tears.

The man's arm squeezes him a little, comforting him, and it is the first to do so in a long time.

 

"It doesn't matter if he lost something, we'll find it," the man consoles him, as they walk away.

 

Blas looks at him and wipes his tears with the handkerchief that the other has offered him. He feels, for a brief, sublime moment, that he has emerged unscathed, and that his memory has played with him nothing more than the cruel game of Russian roulette.

But someone screams behind them, like a cry that is not crying, a voice that reestablishes reality peeking out of the gray space of oblivion.

 

-Holy God! -cries one of the workers-. Look there, next to the tree!

 

 

 

THE SPA

 

Walter was twenty-five years old when he designed the project for Playa del Sur. Chosen from among twenty architects with more experience than him. It was the first important job he had been given. But four weeks later, the investors decided to suspend the work, when the land was prepared and the workers and materials were ready to begin construction.

      Now, looking at the beach from the pier, he thinks about his original idea. Two days ago they announced the decision to resume the project, forty years after having signed the first plans. There were many works after that, several awards and an imprecise amount of money. But almost everything has disappeared, except the buildings in the possession of those who paid for them, and the rest taken on the abstract figure of prestige.

      He is sixty-five years old, and not even the honors he receives from his friends and colleagues are enough encouragement to lift him out of his constant melancholy. He is used to going in and out of those periods of sad thoughts, which his psychologist likes to call depression.

      He climbs onto the pier abandoned since the waves knocked down some of the wooden columns. He feels the persistent sound of the sea between the pillars. He leans over the moldy railing, and imagines throwing nets into those disturbing waves, like when he was young and fishing with his brothers. So much time has passed that only resignation seems possible. He brought two dogs to accompany him, two sheepdogs still puppies, who run around him jumping over the grooves in the boards and the splinters. He pets them while he gives them cookies that he carries in his pockets.

      Two days ago he received the call at his home in Buenos Aires, and shortly afterward he set off to the coast to meet the builders, carrying the roll of the original plans on the back seat of the car. He looked for those leaves, now yellow and brittle, with great effort in the basement of his house invaded by humidity. When he opened the scrolls on the drawing table, he was surprised that he did not need glasses to see the sketches made by his young hand, with such firm hand and strokes. Then he smiled almost imperceptibly, and his wife told him that there was something different shining in his eyes.

      As he left the garage with the car, she advised him at the last minute:

      -Wear your glasses, and take care of your eyesight, when you come back you have to have surgery. And don't forget the mood pills.

           Her wife had an intense look of concern, as if all she could do to stop him was nothing more than nervously rubbing her hands and giving him the same advice over and over again. He refrained from reproaching her for anything about her or calling her a deaf old woman for not having heard her phone. If he hadn't been in the room, he wouldn't have received that good news. Somehow, the phone had always been a messenger of primordial events, turning points in his life.

      That old day of his youth when he was told that the work would be suspended, he felt terribly disappointed. He had been told that the companies that would sponsor the project did not approve the budget. After all, it was his first formal job, and he was still very young. That was what he thought at that time. Later he learned that they considered his idea too futuristic and impractical. But disappointment had taken root in those days, and he felt the first symptoms of his manic depression forming in the skies of that time. Then Juan Carlos's death happened, and he remembered little of the weeks that followed that.

       Today, forty years later, he did not ask why they resurrected the project. He tried to do it two days ago on the phone. He tried to find out the origin of that call, which at first seemed like a bad joke.

      The voice of the man who spoke seemed inquisitive and abrupt, as if nothing Walter could oppose was enough to derail the plans. Suddenly, on the other end of the phone he started talking to someone else, murmuring, and he couldn't understand what they were saying; The line was interrupted momentarily, and the secretary reappeared.

      -Architect? I'll contact the manager again...

      But the voice that had now taken the phone was not the same, he was sure. That new tone seemed familiar to Walter, like a voice he had not heard in many years.

      -Juan Carlos, is that you?

      He didn't know why he asked that question so impulsively, his old friend had been dead for forty years.

      The secretary continued speaking behind a deafening intermittency. Then the communication became clear, and Walter heard the old, familiar voice return.

      -Walter, your project is magnificent, it is the future made work.

      Then he hung up.

      A while later his wife woke him up by making him smell a handkerchief soaked with a strong aroma. and cologne water.

 

      She looks back at the dogs, and then out to sea. The pilot that he uses during the winter, but that this year he also needed since the beginning of autumn, closes. Discover a seat blended with the rusty color of the pier. He sits with his back to the sea, facing the north side of the beach. The sky is clear, however the luminosity has decreased. He remembers the buildings designed so many years ago, somewhat austere in their forms, although that was how he imagined the future of the world. The plans return in detail to his memory. Many changes would have to be made, but the essentials of the city had already been created. He can see her clearly in front of his eyes, there on the beach. Because like then, he thinks that place needs a city.

      The morning he and Juan Carlos traveled together to that beach for the last time, they had talked about precisely that.

      -This site is a useless void. There must be people and buildings, you understand me?

      His friend did not answer him, he continued talking.

     -The sun burns and the wind dries out the skin. Humanity is not prepared to withstand the elements and the vagaries of the climate.

      So that same afternoon, sitting on the sand, with his back to the sea, he made corrections to the initial drawings of the city. Like a mirage, buildings emerged from the wind-swept dunes. Cars raced down the future streets of the beach. It was a new organized world, covered by the protective roofs of the houses and the almost eternal lights of fluorescent tubes.

      Juan Carlos had taken off his shirt and was lying face down in the sand, with his head resting on his hands. For a moment, Walter saw how the wind moved the hair and brushed the hair on his friend's back. He continued drawing, this time more sure of what he should do, because the other's back needed protection from the harsh climate of the sea, from the salt that eats away at everything like a tool of time that knows no mercy. His hands sketched and touched the paper, they squeezed the pencil and his mind thought excitedly and feverishly about what he would do if he weren't doing that: creating a refuge for them. Because at the end of the day, we don't create for the world, he says, but for survival. His works had always seemed necessary to her in one way or another. But now this seems absurd to him. The beach continues to live even without that city that he once believed to be essential.

      Juan Carlos opened his eyes and caught him looking at him. He didn't say anything, but Walter felt embarrassed.

      -Are you angry?

      -No... It was a contest, nothing more. There will be others.

      Then he lay down next to him, resting one elbow on the sand, while with his other hand he brushed his friend's back with the tips of his fingers. Juan Carlos continued looking at him, as if searching in his eyes for an answer that perhaps he did not dare to hear. He stretched out a hand and rested it on Walter’s chest.

      -Are you going to get married?

      And before he had time to respond, he already knew that Juan Carlos knew the answer. His voice was dark, it was cold like sea water at dusk, when the sun goes down and a cool, unfriendly breeze tells us not to enter, to leave because the sea is closing in on itself. The sea is silent and silent, and does not want to talk to humans. Something bigger is coming when night falls, another life arrives or emerges from somewhere and expels us with chills and uncertain restlessness. Anything can happen then, the beach is emptying of people, and the sea has become an inhospitable guest that sows stones and creates teeth underwater.

      That's why he didn't need to respond, Juan Carlos knew the answer, so they both left the beach and returned to Buenos Aires.

 

      Many years later, in that same place that seems to have changed nothing, he hears the engine of a car, and sees the lifeguard's Jeep stop, which has begun to walk towards the dock and waves his arms to greet him. Walter answers him, and suddenly, his hand freezes in midair, amazed by what he sees.

       It's Juan Carlos, he thinks. His stocky and tall body, his hair short and his face cleanly shaved. He approaches her at a slow pace, with the empty bottom of the dunes and the sand flying around him. He is wearing a jacket and a pair of shorts. She is his friend, he is sure. He then looks for his glasses, rifles through his pockets and realizes that he has forgotten them in the car.

      The figure of that man is ten meters away and he greets him again.

      -Architect, how is he?

      He shakes her hand, and his arms feel strong, too young. He squints his eyelids to see it better.

      -Juan, is that you?

      -He doesn't remember me? Look at the city, look at its city built on the shores of the sea. Look at this pier destroyed and about to fall. We leave it in his honor. It is a living museum. Do you want to see the main avenue? We named it after him, he knows?

      Walter observes carefully nition, and sees nothing. He furrows his eyebrows and his eyes suffer with effort, and he thinks he glimpses what his friend is telling him. Because without a doubt it is Juan Carlos who is speaking to him, the irony in his voice gives him away. His subtly contained anger has turned into flattery.

      Walter believes he must initiate an apology, an attempt at justification.

      But the other does not listen to him and walks away. He has the scent of wet sand mixed in the hair on his legs. The sandals clatter on the boards, and he walks towards the forbidden area of the pier, the region about to collapse from the impact of the waves. He tries to warn her, but the voice won't come out of his throat. Juan throws himself into the sea.

      Walter runs to look into the abyss, and among the waves that hit his body against the pillars, a presence emerges that he cannot fully discover. As if an invisible monster inhabited the surface of the water and that place was the source of all fear. However, he is calm. It is his dogs that tremble. They are the waves that increase animal fear. It is the dawning darkness at the end of the pier, capable of resisting any artificial light, and the deaf presence of the sea, which is always speaking and nothing more than making itself heard. Perhaps it was there where the creation of his works grew like an outpouring of horror.

      The dogs, frantic, run back and forth to the end of the pier. He goes back to the beach to tell someone, but discovers that the jeep is still there. Now, up close, he realizes that the car is the same as the one Juan had bought. He obtained everything on credit at that time, he had gone into debt with an unfounded confidence of winning the contest.

      -Architect, we must inform you of the death of his colleague...

      When he wanted to go to the funeral, they forbade him; the family did not want him to see Juan's destroyed body.

      He slipped, it was an unfortunate accident, they told him at the meetings of the Association of Architects, and so he was informed in the weekly newsletter. Old colleagues patted him on the back to console him.

      -Don't think about the dead anymore and enjoy your prize.

 

      The clock points to seven in the afternoon. The wind has increased its intensity and the cold its harshness. One of the dogs howls, and when the other goes to accompany him, Walter yells at them. Then they crouch against the ground and lie at his feet. He tries to see the city, but despite the effort he cannot.

      He remembers that Ibáñez has a house on the beach ten kilometers away. He gets into the car and closes the door after the dogs have settled in the back. The beach is almost dark. Only a yellow line crosses the horizon, the dead line of the sun over the dunes. He turns on the radio because he is afraid of hearing strange voices, whose arrival he senses. He knows he is going crazy, or maybe the word is senile, like his father once was. Madness and senility, what a narrow space there is between them, he thinks. He then takes off, takes the waterfront and heads towards Ibáñez's house.

      When he arrives it has already gotten completely dark. He sees the light in the front window and knocks on the door. Dr. Ibáñez opens the door dressed in a robe and with a cigarette in his mouth. He is haggard, with ink stains on his hands and his gaze is still vacant, lost in the papers on the desk.

     "Hello, Mateo," he says.

     -But it's my old friend Walter...! -answers the other, who suddenly seems to wake up to embrace him with affection.

      He makes him come in and sit on the sofa that faces the beach, darkened and undisturbed on the other side of the window. The doctor goes to get coffee, and a bottle of rum. The noise of the glasses and the bottle clears the memory that comes from the sea, just a few meters away, and the voice of Juan Carlos calling him.

      -What's the matter?

      But it's the doctor's voice coming from the kitchen.

      -I think I have become senile, Mateo. I see and remember things that he thought were buried or that perhaps never happened.

      Ibáñez returns and sits next to him. Walter's thin body contrasts with Ibáñez's slender and obese build. He looks into his eyes, then glimpses the graying chest hair of his friend under her robe. He pushes those thoughts away.

      -You met Juan Carlos. You signed the death certificate. It wasn't an accident, was it? He killed himself.

      Ibáñez looks at him confused at first. He doesn't seem to understand how those memories have arisen after so long.

      -They called me a few days ago to tell me that they were restarting the project, so I came and things have happened to me that seem absurd.

      Ibáñez puts a hand on the shoulder of his friend, whose body trembles slightly holding the coffee cup. Walter feels that the hair on the back of his neck has stood up with a chill.

      -Wait. What is this about resuming the project? I know this area. The owners died a long time ago and the land is in succession. Cannot be sold or built r nothing.

      -But they called me, Mateo, the phone rang and if he hadn't been around I wouldn't have even heard it...

      Ibáñez settled down a little better on the couch. He rested one arm on the backrest and touched Walter's forehead with the other hand.

      -You have a fever.

      He got up, went to the kitchen and brought a glass of water and an aspirin.

      -Your wife didn't want to tell you the truth because the investors were afraid that you would have another attack of depression. You remember the first one, don't you? Fifteen weeks hospitalized after your old man's death. Well, the thing is that she asked me not to tell you anything either, and you never asked the details of Juan's accident. She told me that you had a special affection for her. She, how can I tell you..., saw in your eyes what you felt for him.

      -But not…

      -The only thing left, my friend, is for you to see clearly yourself. Sometimes the lack of glasses makes us see other things beyond what is within reach. Old and senile, perhaps we hear and see better.

      Like a guilty child, Walter gets up and walks to the window. He is crying, but not moaning. He doesn't remember ever actually doing it before. Before it was despair and panic, it was sadness irreconcilable with life. On the day his father died, he had seen the body eaten away by disease, and its appearance was that of an object exposed to the elements for a long time, just like the pillars of the old pier hardened and splintered, rusted by the air and the weather. rain. How to protect it, he had wondered, how to build walls and a roof around it. He would have wanted to hug him like when he was little, it was a need so great that he knew even then that it would never disappear if he didn't fulfill it, and he never did.

      Like a sixty-five-year-old boy, he turns and walks out, leaving the door open. Dr. Ibáñez sees him walking away into the darkness in the direction he came from, followed by the stray barking of the dogs running after the car.

 

      He spots some lights on the waterfront and stops the car. There are some couples gathered on the beach, they seem to scream and get scared because someone has almost drowned. But he only has one thing left to do. He goes to the pay phone under a mercury light on the corner just above the drop to the beach.

      -Dear, it's me!

      "What happened?" she says, scared.

      -Listen to me please, and don't interrupt me. Did Juan Carlos commit suicide?

      His wife does not answer, a sob is heard over the speaker.

      -Tell me, don't be afraid.

      His wife's voice breaks for moments.

      -We didn't tell you because you wouldn't have had any consolation, dear...and the company had so much money invested in you...

      He is now sure he remembers a scene with all the details of it, even though he was never there. Juan Carlos returning to the coast shortly after Walter's marriage. Climbing onto the dock with indecisive steps and movements, that same man who knew how to create structures capable of supporting the weight of hundreds. It was five in the morning on a Sunday in January, and the few fishermen who saw him jump from the last board, from the last pillar towards the biggest wave that was going to appear that day, would later say that he looked like a god of the sea. returning to his home. The expert swimmer who had grown up on those same beaches. That's why his projects were like underwater cities, ethereal and weak like water and air. On the other hand, for Walter, buildings were a refuge, solid shells to protect himself from the inclemency and uncertainty of death.

      He hangs up the tube. He returns to the dock, but does not climb up. With a flashlight he searches for some branches and lights a weak fire at first. The waves are just lines of white foam that approach the fire without reaching it. He sits and spends almost an hour watching the campfire.

      He then contemplates the dark and clean sky, so immense and timeless. His age, his own lifespan is even much smaller than any grain of all that sand at his feet. He digs while he thinks, and something suddenly comes up. Not from the well, but from the head of it, like salt water from deep sand. It's the barking of dogs approaching. They have followed him those kilometers running after the car. When they arrive they throw themselves on him with caresses and licks. But soon the animals stop and look around, trembling. He feels a strange contrast between him and the dogs' fear of the night. Fear is fueling the strength that arises in them.

      He goes back to the car. So great is his calm now that he no longer resembles what he used to call by the name of life. He takes out of the back seat the plans of the city that must have succumbed before it was born, and throws them into the fire.

      The flames immediately grow and illuminate the surroundings, seeming to encompass the entire horizon. Such flares cannot be explained other than by thinking about the dock, about the wood ready for combustion. He sees that it is burning completely, and the sparks from the electric cables that connect it to the road lights flash like lightning.

      The pillars collapse and fall into the water with a crash that continues the crackling with which they have been consumed. The fire invades the previously dark sea, and both coexist without killing each other. The pier is a scorching sun illuminating the night.

 

 

 

CECILIA

 

I walked between the tables, among the men and women who were quickly eating lunch before returning to their offices. I saw Cecilia at one end of the room, next to the last window. She had short hair, like when we were in high school and started dating. Not even ten years had passed, and since then we had only seen each other twice.

      She finished her coffee and read the newspaper open on the table, with the remains of a salad and a chicken on the plate pushed aside to her right. The cigarette smoke attenuated the smell of grease from the kitchen a little. A waiter, after collecting her bill, handed him her crutches.

      Then I remembered everything. Sometimes a single object is enough to give us the complete profile of someone we know. Cecilia's illness was not part of her person, but herself.

      As I approached, she looked at me with surprise at first. Then, smiling, she gave me a kiss, and put the crutches back against the wall. She looked thin and pale. She rested her elbows on her tablecloth, wondering what she was doing there.

      -I have been selling spare parts and tools here in the center for a long time. I have lunch when I can in different bars. And do you always come?

      She wanted to say yes, I'm sure, but she regretted it as if she suddenly remembered that from that day on she was no longer going to do it.

      -Generally... I leave the office at twelve thirty, and I come in at one thirty.- She looked towards the street, and seemed not to want to talk to me about her work.- It's raining, right?

      -A bit. Always with the refrigerator company? You were a secretary, I think...

      I saw again that elusive, introverted look that she gave me every time I hid something. That's how it had happened ten years before, when we separated. We were dating, I even remember going to her house to introduce myself to her parents. We were eighteen years old. I know I went out with her more to avoid being single for the prom than for any other reason. I liked him, but I never felt in love. If she was, I don't know. Before she could find out, she ended our relationship in just two months, right before we graduated. That night at the party I was alone, waiting to see her to embarrass her in front of her friends. But it was not. I didn't want to dance with anyone else either, I needed to get over the accumulated anger thinking about Cecilia.

 

      "And you, how are your things?" I asked her, pointing to her crutches.

      It was cruel, I admit, but every time she met her she asked her the same question. As if a small remnant of that spiteful teenager emerged when he saw her.

      -Here I am, Leandro. I continue to deteriorate little by little.

      She said it with a beautiful smile, as pathetically beautiful as only a melancholy face can make it. The same expression she made on my birthday, in the backyard, while my friends were looking at us, when she told me that she didn't want to go out with me anymore. He had tried to hug her, but he roughly pulled away from her. She said that she was sick and it was not convenient for us to continue going out for fear of her attacks. She wanted to know more, but she refused to tell me. She said all this in front of the others, and I felt like a punished child. She made you feel that way.

      The following year I found out that she had been admitted a few days before her graduation date. She had insisted that they not tell me. I was starting to work as a cadet, and by chance, a schoolmate I ran into one day told me about it. I imagined her alone in her hospital room, with her silent parents at her side, and I couldn't help but remember her frequently.

   

      “I'm deteriorating” he echoed in my head, and I even thought I heard it throughout the restaurant room, and that the people had heard it too. It wasn't like that, but those words were too harsh to be spoken by a twenty-seven-year-old woman. Her eyes were cloudy now, somewhat clouded and distracted.

      -What time is it?

      "One o'clock," I answered, looking at the watch on my wrist.

      She made an exaggerated gesture of concern, and insisted that in half an hour she had to leave for work.

      "Did you get married?" she asked.

      -No. I go out with women very little anymore. I come back from the street and I don't feel like talking to anyone. I think about them, yes.

      -Who are you thinking of?

      The waiter interrupted us to bring us the mug of beer that I had ordered. Cecilia smiled without repeating the question to me. I didn't tell her that I had been thinking about her since the first time we met after we separated.

      She went to the exit of a movie theater in Lavalle, at a late-night showing. It was three in the morning, I think. I came out sleepy from watching a mediocre movie, then I found it at the pizzeria across the street. Seeing her looking like that, with long hair, glasses and a worn raincoat, was attractive to me. She was prettier, distant but at the same time seductive. She said that she wrote for a magazine, and she liked to go to the bar to feel calm.

      -My parents are getting old and they make my life impossible.

      Later he told me what they had done to him in the hospital: they had amputated two toes on his right foot. I asked her to forgive me, and she shushed me with a voice so sweet that it could have made her love her from that moment on definitively.

      We drank two bottles of wine. I was already a little drunk when she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offering me a few full ones.

      "They're good ones," she murmured as she turned them on.

      I accepted one from him, and I tasted the marijuana smoke in my throat, but I tried not to inhale to stay lucid. I knew she would get lost, she was already seeing it in her glassy eyes, and from the counter they started looking at us. I told Cecilia that it was time for us to leave. She put the pack in her purse, along with her insulin vials. It was five in the morning, we said goodbye on the sidewalk of the bar and exchanged phone numbers.

      I don't know what happened next. I called her, we chatted for a while, but we couldn't make an appointment. We never spoke again. I reintegrated into the blind vertigo of my work, that inexplicable inertia that pushed me, at twenty-two years old, to achieve something, no matter what it was.

 

      "But I'm not hot for money anymore," I told her as the clock struck a quarter past one, hoping that she would forget her obligation and stay with me. She insisted that it was late, and when I got up to get her crutches, she yelled at me not to do it. This time people did turn to look at us. Cecilia started crying, and she asked me to sit down again.

      -I lied to you. "I was fired from the company a week ago," she murmured through tears.

      She had the same expression as the day we met after that night at the pizzeria, three years later. She was sitting on a bench in Lezama Park, half hidden among the thick bushes, surrounded by dry leaves. I was walking alone, common for me for some time. The truth is that I found women too complicated and confusing, extremely exhausting. Each one of them had disappointed me. Except Cecilia, and hers was not love, or at least not what one imagines it should be and in reality it may not even exist.

      She was wearing the same raincoat—for some reason, we always saw each other in the fall—her hair was messy, and her glasses were a little thicker. That was the first time I saw her on crutches, leaning on the back of her seat. Seeing me, she tried to get up, but then she made a gesture of transparent sadness, of irremediable resignation.

      -Hello.

      She invited me to sit next to her, and we talked for a long time. She no longer worked at the magazine, she told me, they had fired her after the hospitalization.

      It was six in the afternoon and it was cloudy, so she showed me her orthopedic shoe. Half of her foot had been removed. The disease was advancing very quickly, and I was a witness to it. The only man I would talk to about all that.

    

      The restaurant clock said two.

      -Now they fired me again, but believe me, I regret it only because of the salary. I always wanted to do other things. The company saved me for a while, but it was boring...If I could go back to the publishing house...I still have a folder of unpublished notes and notes. If you want I can show you my articles, some are so old...

      I accepted, and when we called the waiter she got nervous. I brought the crutches to her, she moved the chair and the tablecloth moved. Suddenly, I felt my muscles go numb or numb, like when one is about to faint. Because there are things that amaze even if you expect them for a long time. Seeing Cecilia with only one leg was something that I can hardly compare with any other memory in my life.

      "They haven't given me the prosthesis yet," she said, and her lower lip trembled.

      I remained silent while I helped her get into the taxi, and during the entire trip to her apartment in a building in the Abasto neighborhood. She no longer lived with her parents. The doorman greeted her with surprise and me with distrust. When we reached the fourth floor, we entered that single room divided by a closet. On one side there was a kitchen and a table, on the other a bed and two chairs.

      "I'll change while the coffee's making, okay?" She left a stack of six or seven bound folders on the table. "Go look through them if you want."

      I started reading her notes and her articles from various years. They were opinions and studies about all things in the world, facts or characters known or strange and insignificant. Each everyday image seemed to have elicited some thought from her, and the curious thing was the fluidity of that intellectual life, so contrasting with her other external life.

      The final impression of those writings was overwhelming to me, because they came to the same conclusion over and over again. For Cecilia, the man and his body were eternal servants of each other.

      "I'm convinced," she told me when we sat down to have coffee. .- Science and philosophy in some way also say it with their eternal failures. It is a slavery that ends at the moment of death.

      -And the soul?- I asked him.

      -Don't know. This body has taken up too much of my time to dedicate myself to thinking about something as abstract as the soul. It's time for my injection.- And he went to look for his first aid box.

      While he waited, I found among the papers two notebooks with poems, some as long as epic poems. How could a woman like her, I asked myself, relate her poor life to an epic. Like a queen who keeps her suitors away from her in her own lonely punishment cell. Without caring what she leaves behind, without looking at who she hurts. Because perhaps her pain is as strong as the sound of the sea in a storm. Then I felt the taste of anger secreting on my tongue. I had to get up from the chair.

      "You never got married," I asked him.

      -No, Leandro. I lived with a man a little older than me for a while, but it didn't work out.

      I had hidden that much from myself. As if he were still a boy, someone not mature enough in mind to take him seriously.

      There was a dry bone on the television. It looked like the head of a small animal.

      -What is this bone?

      -Oh, that? My cousin Leticia gave it to me when we were girls. It is part of a dog's head. I like to look at it from time to time. It reminds me how futile we all are.

      From the other side of the closet, I heard her turn on the shower. I approached the furniture, and through the cracks in the doors, I watched as she took off her blouse, until she was left with that black bra that hid her white breasts, barely bigger than my fists. I wasn't ashamed to want to touch her, to really possess her for the first time. I think that upon discovering that aspect of irrefutable superiority of his mind and the exquisite lucidity of his thinking, the hidden adolescent resentment arose in me. And I know that at that time I was a capricious boy that if he couldn't get what he wanted, I would have been able to destroy him.

      I went to the other side of the room, and took her by the shoulders with an energy that I did not dare to diminish for fear of regretting it. I spoke in his ear, smelling his strange perfume, that aroma of cologne and medications mixed on his skin. I remember the weak resistance she offered me, and that was almost disappointing, because I had the need to take her by the arms and shake her until she looked into my eyes, saw beyond her body and felt the strength of someone other than herself. the silent and constant bite of his illness.

    

      When I woke up, morning light was coming in through a window near the bathroom ceiling. I decided to get up to go to work, and stepped on the needle she had dropped the night before. I screamed when I felt the puncture, but Cecilia didn't wake up.

      The strange stillness of her body made me feel sick for a moment, and I shook her shoulders several times. But her arms moved limply, inertly. One of them hung like a pendulum from the edge of the bed.

      On the nightstand there was an endless row of remedies and ampoules. The labels read “insulin”, however they were empty except for two, filled with a white powder. I tasted the contents with the tip of my tongue, and then smashed the rest on the floor in anger. But mostly scared. The dust was scattered on the floor, the substance that had replaced the other in the flasks, that other superior, or perhaps less execrable, alchemy.

      I separated the sheets from her body, full of bites and bruises that I had not been able to see in the darkness of the closed room. I started crying like a boy over Cecilia's corpse.

 

 

 

THE ASYLUM

 

The old route that leads from the city where I live to the town where I was born is a lonely, inhospitable and rocky road. However, I prefer it to the new one, because it is as peculiar as my town. There is a plaza and few businesses around it, and now only the elderly live there, except for the insane asylum and the cemetery.

 

The asylum is in the center of the town, as if the rest had been born from that building of alienated and deformed men. The cemetery, on the other hand, was built between the last inhabited street and the beach, on an esplanade of sand and cement mounds that are lost in view of the ever-rising sea.

 

I walked this path on the last Sunday of every month since I moved to the city and left Damian at the nursing home. My brother, the encephalic one, couldn't speak and was barely able to move. I never knew if he recognized me, or if he at least liked seeing me. At first I visited him out of commitment, out of a sense of guilt that I got rid of for a month. But as the thirtieth approached, an unclassifiable mood of pity and desire arose in me. I drove tirelessly back and forth all those years. I would get up very early and return to the city at dusk. I got used to the old route, and when they built the new road, I continued using the other one.

 

One night I traveled before dawn, and arrived at the entrance to the town just as the sun was rising. Then I saw that the swollen sea was flooding the cemetery. The entire land was a lagoon with little surf, with tombstones sticking out like rocks on a beach. The wheels of the car made waves as I passed, moving the dirt and sand from the graves a few meters from the road. I was surprised to see a latent threat materialized since I was a child, when every summer I watched the beach shrink a little more.

 

That afternoon I was with Damián, like every Sunday, in the garden of the asylum, surrounded by the whispering tumult of the crazy.

 

-Don't you think it's absurd that they built it right there? They must have known that the tides were going to flood it sooner or later. That's how I spoke to her, about things that occurred to me at the moment, or I stayed silent, looking at her strange beauty, a beauty that bordered on the limit of beatitude. A slight deviation on the left side of his face was almost imperceptible. After looking at it for a few minutes, anyone could have said it was normal. But it wasn't.

 

That's what Gonçalves said the first time he saw him when we were kids.

 

-You can see from afar that he is retarded.

 

Every end of the month at the office, when Friday arrived, I also repeated the same thing to myself.

 

-What do you have to do in that town? Well, visit your brother if you want, but you'll end up as sick as him.

 

Gonçalves was my age, the same as Damián. He had a dark beard, which he touched constantly, as if he couldn't keep his hands still.

 

He always laughed at everything, and his gestures coincided with that need to act at every moment, to say something or simply not stay still.

 

That feverish activity exasperated me.

 

"Gonçalves did it to me again," I told Damián one day. He said he was reserving the position of assistant manager for me, and gave it to someone else. He's a son of a bitch and I still believe him.

 

My brother looked at me intently. For the first time all afternoon, he moved his eyes and scratched his head with his good arm. The midday sun shone on him like an aura, and he seemed to want to tell me something.

 

"Don't make an effort," I insisted, because his desire to move or speak transformed his features into horrible gestures, common perhaps, but violating his strange and beautiful passivity.

 

As I left, he grabbed my hand and it was difficult to let go of that strength that his body

 

did not show.

 

-You know I'm coming back, see you next month-. I kissed his forehead and he cried, wetting his red face, the long blonde hair he had inherited from our father.

 

During the return trip, I found the old road covered with sand and mud, and in the middle of that mixture, the remains of bones that the water had washed away from the cemetery.

The day was still light, so it was easy to see the skulls of men dead countless years ago. I stopped and got out of the car, splashing through the salt water. In front were the tombstones, and the sea merged with the gray of the sky, which was beginning to die on that Sunday afternoon.

 

I walked several meters, a little scared, but also with a kind of fascination. That was the only thing I did, walk kicking the long bones that broke with my steps. Then I thought I understood why the builders had placed the cemetery so close to the sea, and I told Damián when I returned the following month.

 

-They knew that the tide would flood it, so they did it so that one day the dead would be unearthed and show the futility of life.

 

My brother looked at me serenely, with his enviable and apparent carelessness. I believe that if he had been able to speak to me, his words would be, in an uncertain but fundamental way, extremely revealing. Because his eyes were, that beautiful stillness of his innocent gaze, perhaps merciful.

 

-Gonçalves did not understand it. Forgive me for not telling you before him, but all this month I've been anxious to tell someone what I saw. It's just that we've known each other for too long, even though he's surpassed me and is now my boss. But the only thing he answered was: "Are you serious or is this one of those stories you make up? Stop fooling around and go to work."

 

It is true that sometimes I made up stories, episodes with which I seasoned my opaque and irreparable life. After discovering my lies, Gonçalves used to punish me with extra chores. He would put the files on my desk, and look at those dark eyes under thick black eyebrows, touching his beard, trying to understand me, perhaps, to catch me or abolish my rebellious submission. I knew, however, that I was running away anyway. Even as I sat there, my mind remained in the town with Damián.

 

Over the next few months, I returned to the city at the time I knew I would find low tide.

The bones were there, renewed and stirred by the waves. I thought about my mother, perhaps her skeleton was among those remains, the narrow pelvis that had barely been able to

 

conceive Damián and me simultaneously. How we were born alive, I don't know. Sometimes I think that one of the two should have died, and not been left like this, with this unbalanced state of things.

 

-Then Gonçalves appeared, do you remember? -I told my brother when remembering the old days-. He was eleven or twelve years old, and he was our neighbor. His family is strange, especially his mother, who runs a funeral home, but I liked him back then because he was just a kid like us. He went home for snack, and played with Damián's wheelchair, pretending to be a clown. His gestures, however, already at that time were vital and unpredictable, his face would suddenly light up with a gesture of anger and he would shout at us: "Fuck you and your retarded brother!"

 

When the old woman died and we were alone, he offered me to travel with him to Buenos Aires. I had no choice but to get rid of Damián and abandon him. He showed me the center of the city, the damp and worn part of an office floor very high on Alem Avenue. And he left me there, controlling me, subordinate to him, almost his right hand, but always under him.

 

The new route was finished, and the old road was still covered with clean bones, because the sea washed them in each of its incursions. Upon returning from the asylum, I would park the car on the side, sitting and contemplating the desolate landscape of the remains on the road, and the ocean in the distance, with its imperturbable sound hiding the imagined voices of the dead. I fell asleep, and when I woke up a flu had taken hold of me. Then he would go straight to the office, dirty and tired. Gonçalves yelled at me.

 

-You're crazy, old man. I brought you so you wouldn't starve in that shitty town. And you pay me like this? Forget about your brother or get out of the office, okay?

 

With his fists clutching my shirt, he approached me until his lips brushed my face.

Closeness was a way for him to understand me.

"You have Damian's eyes," he told me later. They are like stones, and stones are useless. He returned to his work, always wearing that black sweater that he put on every morning,

surrounded by his sterile and yet sensual secretaries. The dizzying movement that surrounded him from the beginning of his life.

 

He punished me with work for seven days of that week. And I did it. The rest of the staff looked at me like a poor guy, with the curiosity of someone observing a strange phenomenon. I stayed up after hours to be alone, to avoid those looks that made me desperate for eight hours.

 

-Sometimes I'm calm, working at my desk, and suddenly something makes me jump. I insult everyone, I bang on the table, and my colleagues turn to look at me. Now I argue with Gonçalves, I confront him, and believe me, he no longer dares to fire me.

 

Damián looked at me with a kind of discouraging disapproval as I finished telling him. But he, in his extreme beatitude, did not understand the captivating passion of contained strength and violence.

 

When Saturday came, they called me from the nursing home. My brother had died peacefully in his wheelchair.

 

"I have to travel tomorrow," I told Gonçalves.

 

-On Sunday you stay, there is work. That brother of yours is making you sick. What is it about visiting nursing homes and cemeteries.

As he listened, a fury grew with a noise that seemed to come from everywhere. A sound similar to the engines of cars passing by on the street, to the thunder of the advancing waves.

 

-Now you are here, you have a future. Do you think Damian could ever take my place? And serious. Good God, why did he do it? Why did he say it with that laugh?

 

Then I would not have grabbed the paperknife from the desk, nor would my hand have made it penetrate his body with that fury that I was not able to stop.

 

It was too close. As always, he shook me by my shirt and shoulders to control myself. His breath was the last thing I smelled of him, the aroma of expensive cigarettes that he learned to smoke when he was twelve, and that one day he had forced my brother to try. Damian almost drowned and would have died from his own vomit if my mother hadn't arrived at that moment. That was the first time I wanted to kill Gonçalves.

 

Now he collapsed onto the table with a scream that no one else heard.

 

It was ten o'clock on Saturday night. The horns of the cars on the avenue and the bustle of the people hid the other sounds. On that top floor of the office building, so close to the silent sky, I began to drag my body to the service elevator. I wrapped him in a black blanket, but didn't clean anything.

 

I drove all night to the town, with Gonçalves in the trunk, feeling how his body swayed with every jolt of the car. The old road was just beginning to be illuminated by dawn. The sea

 

was no longer the same. I stopped on a rocky shoulder. I felt the cold like a paperknife when I opened the door. The cloudy sky was an ink stain suspended over the town and the sea, dotted with violet eyes through which the dawn filtered.

 

I opened the trunk and threw the body very close to the other bones. It simulated a rock, an inert stone in the middle of the road. Still, serene and unchanging for the first time. As I drove away, in the rearview mirror I saw that the tide was beginning to cover the route. The black lump, however, did not move. He was deader than the centuries-old bones floating around him.

 

At eight in the morning I arrived at the asylum. We made the arrangements and they handed me over to my brother.

 

"I want to bury him in the city," I told them. The wake will be in my boss's office. They took him in the car from the garage to Buenos Aires.

At four in the afternoon on Sunday, the coffin was lifted to the top floor. The doorman gave me his condolences, and asked me to let him know if I needed anything.

 

I paid the undertakers, I bribed them to leave me alone. I took Damián's body out of the drawer, that body so similar to mine, but with twisted arms and a deformed head. Her blonde hair was dry and gray, within a few hours death had begun to destroy her beauty.

 

The body was heavy, but I was able to carry it to Gonçalves' chair. And there he remained, still as always, on the red corduroy seat, with one hand in his lap, the other hanging at his side, and his large head resting with a slight inclination on the backrest.

 

 

I sat down to wait. When one of the secretaries entered the office in the morning, she covered her mouth, stifling a scream. Then I told him not to worry, there was the one who had come to reconcile us all.

 

 

 

 

THE BOOK

 

She got off the train with her sheepskin bag and her hair disheveled by the swirls on the platform. The incessant movement that she had seen upon arriving in Buenos Aires from General Lavalle when she was a child had scared her, and this time was no different. She felt suffocated as she found herself enveloped in the heat of the crowd, with no possibility of freeing herself, as if she were forced to be part of the city forever.

 

He thought about Arturo, it was curious that he did it today, like that time. At that time

 

 

 

she had been in love with her cousin, a teenager barely three years older than her, and who only paid attention to his studies. No one was surprised that when she finished school she left the town to study Literature in the Capital, but she had already stopped adoring him, and Franco was there, always stronger, whose voice and body she admired more than her cousin's intelligence. .

 

He walked the platforms looking for Franco's face among hundreds of other faces that changed from one moment to the next. The turnstiles were barely enough to make way for people, and their metallic sound was only drowned out by the incessant purring of footsteps and the cracked voice of the loudspeakers. She had heard a lot about Buenos Aires, its boastfulness, its humid unhealthiness drawing sour grimaces on people's faces, but the letters Franco sent her from there were encouraging. My love, the work is profitable, so in a few months you come and we will see about settling in.

 

A week before, she had received an obituary that surprised her a little, although her husband's words resonated in her imagination, strong and warm. Arturo has vacations from college, let's take advantage of the three of us to meet. Don't forget Asunción Silva's book, she needs it for the next course.

 

He looked at the time on the large clock in the central hall, but it was stuck at a perennial midnight, perhaps noon. She felt worried because he had announced that he was going to wait for her in the line at the turnstiles, and she had been searching for a while without finding him. Her bag moved with the pushes of those passing by.

 

He stood to the side, muttering a "sorry" that no one heard. The guards watched her. "I'm waiting for my husband," she said, and they left her alone.

Outside, the afternoon sun was setting, dragging its light across the floors of the hall.

The magazine stands were still open, and she went to entertain herself by leafing through copies, looking toward the doors in case he appeared. He had never been so late, but traffic or work, perhaps, were the causes of his delay.

 

Then she remembered the book he had asked for Arturo. His cousin's last letter told him about his progress in college, his specialization in poetry, and that he was going to write his thesis on the work of Asunción Silva. The same verses she had heard from his lips the day he left town. And as she watched the train go away, Mercedes had cried silently on the platform, with those verses echoing above the increasingly distant panting of the machine.

 

She remembered having once confessed to Franco that still frustrated desire, that of being the woman who inspired a new poem. But he had limited himself to talking about other

 

 

things, changing the subject. No, he would never get Franco to recite a verse to him. Then she had that surprise, when he gave her the book. And now, the rush to lend it to him. They, so jealous of each other since they had fought over her, were suddenly friends. I'm a conceited fool, I should be glad to no longer be a doll pulled by the arms.

 

He sat on a bench, which was filled with families, lonely men, homeless people, bags and boxes that disappeared as the trains left. Only crumbs of bread remained on the wood, and some pigeons descended from the high ceilings enclosed in darkness.

 

She took the book out of her bag and began to look through it. I had read it two or three times. The poems were sad, especially the Nocturnes underlined by Franco.

 

It was already a quarter past eight. He had been waiting for three hours, but he didn't want to move. He read the note again, but he had forgotten to write down the address of the new boarding house. If there was one thing she could feel sure of, it was that he was going to come, sooner or later.

 

It occurred to him to ask at the station's mail office, but it was closed. He inquired at the railroad offices if they had received any messages, but they answered no with bad humor and tired faces.

 

He returned to the seat, and as soon as he looked up, a man had stood next to him.

 

-I can help her?

 

-I'm waiting for my husband. It's late and it worries me, but it must be coming. The man looked at her for a moment in silence.

-Can I wait here? The seat is not occupied, is it? -She asked with a naive air.

 

The other smiled, while he tapped his thighs, as if following the rhythm of music. He had a black suit and a white shirt, no tie.

 

-Of course. I'm leaving work in that office over there, see it? Tell me if I can guide you, it seems to me that you are not from here. Maybe she misunderstood her husband's instructions.

 

He sat next to her. Mercedes was a little surprised, but she also felt accompanied for the first time all afternoon.

 

 

 

-The place fills with strange people when it gets dark. "They are always homeless people who come to sleep, but some look for lonely and unsuspecting people," the man told him.

 

She showed him Franco's obituary. He looked at her quickly, not paying her any attention.

 

-Are you sure you didn't give him a phone number or an address? -He sent me this book for my birthday, with the dedication. Mercedes blushed when Franco's pencil lines underlining the verses shone in the light of the fluorescent tubes.

 

-Don't worry then, your husband seems like a romantic, and they are what never disappoints a woman.

 

Mercedes now saw a friend in that man.

 

-That's why it worries me, something may have happened to him.

 

The other had started looking towards a group of young people who were drinking from a bottle wrapped in paper. She asked him:

 

-Are they known?

 

-They spend their time drinking and sleep all night, others sell drugs. There are some who take advantage of single women. I'm going to stay to protect her.

 

-No, please, don't be upset about me.

 

But he didn't pay attention to her. He ran his hand through his thick, slightly frizzy dark hair. The beard had grown since that morning when he had to shave, and Mercedes could feel its roughness even though she had not even touched it. He seems like a good man, lonely, maybe single.

 

"Do you read a lot?" she asked him, noticing that he was looking at the cover of the book on her lap.

 

-When I have time. I like the verses, but I can't tell my classmates because they would make fun.

 

-Let me read you some-. Then he read aloud two poems, the first two Nocturnes. "Cemeteries," he said, and Mercedes had not yet finished the last verse.

 

-As? -Nothing. I mean, the obsession with cemeteries is obvious.

        -Or for death, or for love. But my cousin, who is a writer, would say they are the same. And

while she showed him the page she had read, he leaned closer and put his finger on the words Franco had marked. She felt the breath of tobacco, and closed her eyes for a moment. That's why he was slow to react when he saw that the book was no longer in his hands, and the man, who had brushed against his shoulder for almost half an hour, was fleeing. At first she thought he was chasing someone, but suddenly she realized what had happened, and reproaching herself for being so stupid, she started crying. I no longer had the book, and that was what I regretted most. Without knowing why, she only managed to run after him, who had slowed down his escape in front of a contingent of nuns. Mercedes managed to grab him by the sleeve, but he hit her in the face with his fist. A fleeting faint made her fall to the ground, as she watched him finally disappear through the doors that led to the street.

 

His left cheek was swollen. It wasn't bleeding, but it could barely be touched.

 

-Bag! -he moaned. The people gathered around her, and the nuns who wanted to help her, suddenly moved aside as another man approached her with the bag in his hand.

 

-Wick! I saw the guy, but I couldn't grab him, at least he dropped the bag. See if anything is missing.

She recognized the voice, although she couldn't see his face clearly between her numb eyelids.

 

-Arthur? But what are you doing here? -Franco told me to come look for you. Then I'll explain to you. He helped her up, while she shielded her cheek from people's gaze.

 

-What a shame! -Do not be silly.

 

-But I let myself be fooled like a girl.

 

Arturo looked at her, condescending. She couldn't help but smile when their eyes met, but her face hurt intensely. He took her to the station bar, ordered two coffees and an ice pack for the bruise.

 

-Do we have to file a complaint? Please take care of it, I don't know how to handle these procedures well.

 

-No, leave things as they are, and forget about it, it's not worth it. If he didn't steal anything from you.

 

-No, but... yes, he took the book that was for you. I don't understand anything-. He took two sips of coffee and put the ice back on his cheek. -I think I'm in a dream, I see everything cloudy. But a thief who steals a book from me? Nobody is going to believe me...

 

Arturo looked around at the other tables. Some were watching them.

 

-Lower your voice, Mecha. Maybe he thought you had money hidden, many people do that, especially those who come from the interior.

 

Mercedes could now see her cousin more clearly. Arturo was nervous, he had put four teaspoons of sugar in the coffee, and stirred it so many times that it was already cold. When she mentioned the book and the note, he took quick glances around, and told her to keep her voice down, although she could barely speak with her cheek swollen.

 

-Tell me something, what was the name of the book, did Franco send you anything else? - You asked him for it for your course, don't you remember? That's what he told me, the poems of Asunción Silva.

 

-But Mecha, what I want to know is if there was something marked on the pages, something that would serve as an indication to the jet. What Arturo was saying didn't make sense, and he looked increasingly nervous. He poured the coffee onto the plate and began to dry it with paper napkins. She helped him, looking at him as strangely, as distant as when he was a pale, distracted teenager, the same one she had once fallen in love with. That's why he felt sorry for him when he noticed the tremor in his hands.

 

-What's the matter? -Nothing, it's just that I forgot to take the nerve pill today, and the mid-year exams are making me feel bad. Look, Mecha, I'm going to tell you the truth, because otherwise we won't finish anymore. Franco is selling merchandise... in construction you don't earn anything. And I, out of the blue, got hooked to pay for my studies.

 

She looked at him as if she were being told a movie.

 

-We manage with small money, we stay in the shadows, and the gray hair looks the other way when they pass her some bills. That guy was one of the competition, who is looking for Franco.

 

Mercedes looked out the bar window. The station showed off all its splendor of towering

 

pillars and ornate gates, and the steel arches, more than a protective sky from the rains and storms, formed a cage, whose door opened only to let out the iron beasts carrying tiny beings in exile. I wanted to start crying, but I couldn't feel anything but anger.

 

-And what do I have to do, other than return home? Tell my husband... Arturo grabbed her wrists tightly.

 

-It's not you that matters now, Mecha, but him. The other guy is going to kill him if he finds him, and you let him know where he is.

 

-But how did you know it was me?! -The book, the whore who gave birth to you, how many women wait for hours on the platform with a book in their lap! Forgive me, but as we speak your husband may be dead. Arturo's hands shook even more, but above all he had a desperate look.

 

Mercedes tried to think. How the other had found out that she was coming, she wondered, but she was afraid to ask such a question out loud. The answer, he sensed, was going to be as unpleasant as discovering that Arturo was not what he seemed. The calmer she tried to stay, the whiter her memory became. He drank the rest of the cold coffee.

 

-There were notes from Franco, scribbled, underlined verses, in the Nocturnes. When I showed it to the guy, the first thing he said was: Cemeteries.

 

Arturo's eyes seemed to sparkle.

 

-In Chacarita, there it is! Come on!-. He stood up, throwing away some bills that got stained when they fell on the coffee cup, and grabbed Mercedes by the hand.

 

She barely had time to put down the ice and grab her bag.

 

The cold air calmed the swelling in his cheek, but he felt chills in his legs. They exchanged glances with two or three guards, who paid them no attention.

 

Several homeless children were taking drugs on the doorsteps of the offices and under the windows of the ticket offices. On the street, the lights of cars and traffic lights blinded her and blurred her eyes.

 

-Do you have money for a taxi?

 

-No, if Franco was going to come look for me.

 

He grabbed her arm, squeezing it hard, and she felt that tremor again, which was now impatience. They walked to a bus stop. There were two or three people before, but Arturo went ahead. They insulted him and he backed away, hiding an expression of shame in the shadow of his straight hair that fell on his side.

 

"It's okay," she consoled him. She didn't know if he had paid attention to her, but the tone of his voice must have been enough because he stopped pressing her arm and took her hand.

 

On the bus, sweat ran down his cousin's forehead and neck, despite the cold. She remembered things she had read in women's magazines, medical reports that talked about withdrawal syndromes. Those things had always been far away from his previous life, from his parents, from the small parish, from the time when Arturo and Franco were children who played ball in the gardens of their houses and came to look for it on Sunday afternoons. to go on bike.

 

She put her hand on Arturo's knee, he looked at her and stopped shaking.

 

-Why Chacarita? It is not the only cemetery in Buenos Aires that I know of.

 

-We make sales there from time to time, Mecha.

 

He looked at Arturo's watch, it was almost ten thirty at night. The traffic decreased, slowly, and the mercury lights illuminated the silence of the dogs digging in the garbage bags.

 

The cemetery walls were not very high. From outside you could see some crosses and trees. They got off the bus at the corner, walked along the wall until they reached an auxiliary door for the staff. A lamp hung from the entrance frieze, which flickered as Arturo began to struggle.

 

"I'm afraid," she said.

 

-You can't stay here, it's more dangerous for everyone if a police officer passes by.

 

-I don't even think, I want to see Franco-. And just as she pronounced her name, the door opened and Arturo pushed her inside.

 

At first he saw nothing but darkness. Then, the silver alleys between the tombs, wet with dew, formed the square through which they walked for almost ten minutes. The walls of the street were far away.

 

The moon shone in its waning quarter, illuminating the crosses, the roofs of the chapels

 

and vaults, and the reflections of the bronze plates. The air was saturated with new flowers, and also with old flowers full of insects. The smell of rotten water in porcelain vases. The smell of the dead.

 

Further ahead, the fields of crosses showed the earthen graves, with the moon almost lying down, asleep over the desolate paths. Now it was Mercedes who was trembling, and she felt Arturo's hand calm, controlled.

 

He heard a bang, and although he had never heard one before, he knew it was a gunshot.

 

-Arthur...! -She began to say when her cousin's body pushed her with him to the ground.

She touched his face, felt it in the darkness, but he didn't respond. Someone else then dragged her to another side, crushing the grass until she was left next to a tombstone, while one hand covered her mouth so she wouldn't scream. She could only see the silhouette of a cement angel silhouetted against the violet sky.

 

-Shut up, Mecha! -Frank! -Her voice was barely audible under her husband's palm.

 

-I'll let you go if you promise not to scream.

 

She agreed, and took a deep breath when he released her.

 

-My God, Franco, something happened to Arturo...

 

-I already know it.

 

But Mercedes' hand tripped over the revolver when she tried to hug him, and it was so hot that it burned. He put his hand to his mouth to stop the scream.

 

-You...?

 

Franco watched around, and looked at her for a while without really seeing her, hidden by the shadow of the angel. But Franco's eyes were shining and he was looking for her. He didn't answer. He just grabbed her shoulders and pressed her against his body.

 

The gun, in his hands, warmed Mercedes' back.

 

-He always got between us. Even in our bed, I knew you were thinking about him. I heard you talking in your sleep, Mecha, reciting those verses. Then it occurred to me that verses are like food that serves as bait for fish.

 

But Mercedes was no longer listening to him. She was making her way through the darkness like a well that had always been at her side and she had never seen. As if until the day before she had been living in another neighborhood and another time, surrounded by the love of her parents, green gardens and sandy paths. Paths that she walked thinking about the two men who fought over her and adored her. She felt so stupid that she wasn't able to blame anyone but herself.

 

She had brought the book. She led people to death. He wanted to get away from Franco.

"Let me..." she screamed into his arms, tearing the buttons and her husband's shirt.

But he didn't let go of her, perhaps that was the only way to have her to himself, finally. "You made me bring it, you used me, son of a bitch." And the crying was drowned in the

open shirt.

 

Franco's caresses stopped. Something caught his attention.

 

"Let her go," she heard him say, and it was the last thing she would remember about him.

 

Many times, alone at home, I fantasized about which of the two would die first, about what each would say so that the other would remember. And that plea from Franco was better than all the phrases imagined.

 

I guessed who he was talking to. The man at the station. He felt the need to be faithful to Franco once again, he had to tell him that Arturo had betrayed him, but the evidence always arrived late, making repentance useless. When she looked up, he was already pushing her aside, and she saw the flash of a gunshot explode over Franco's head. The body fell next to him, wet and warm with the heat of the blood. And suddenly, a few steps away, the shine of metal appeared, reflecting the glow of the moon. He heard the footsteps on the boulders between the graves, and recognized those soft taps of the palms on the pants.

 

She knew it was the man from the station, again. He smelled that tobacco aroma again, which overpowered the odors of the cemetery, dominating everything with its sure and penetrating firmness.

 

The man turned on a flashlight and shone it on Mercedes. She covered her face with her hands, without getting up. Then the beam of light retracted. Then she tried to take refuge looking for Franco in the darkness.

 

"Do not look for life among the dead," the other told him.

 

Mercedes could not suppress her tears, and she believed that she, who had always laughed so much, would never be able to stop crying.

 

The light came on again, this time over the man's face. He had the book open in his hands, almost in front of his face.

 

-"The shadows of the bodies that join the shadows of the souls, form a single long shadow" -he recited with the tone of someone who is actually reading a psalm.

 

Mercedes repeated the verses almost without thinking about what she was saying. The flashlight got closer to her, touching her lips with a kiss before turning off.

 

 

 

 

 

THE DRAWNING

 

They found the woman's left foot among some garbage bags in the Once neighborhood, the city was convulsed and no one could extract from the collective memory something that would be repeated several times within a radius of fifty blocks. Each discovery added a little more speculation and newsprint to daily life, at the same time completing a corpse that thus took its original shape.

 

Both the feet and the hands had been burned, and you must also understand the different state in which the remains were. The head was found six months after the murder, which according to experts must have occurred two days before the first discovery.

 

They only made known to the press a year later the peculiar distribution that the murderer had chosen to distribute the body fragments. But the day I went to the police station to see if they could collect reports, I saw a map hanging on the wall and full of pins with colored heads forming a drawing of a child in the fetal position. Then some police looked at me suspiciously and I left, but I had managed to copy the drawing in my notebook.

 

At this point, I must talk about Hugo Hollander. If the murder is attributed to him, it has not been due to the merits of the investigation, but rather to his own confession. Two years after the crime occurred, he wanted to tell us the truth.

 

Hollander worked in the judicial morgue, and labor psychiatric examinations did not demonstrate any unusual peculiarities in his character. One day he took leave for two weeks, and according to statements from his colleagues, his six-month-old son had died. The neighbors corroborated it, and we were able to check the baby's grave in a cemetery in the province. No one could answer the reason why he was not buried in the capital. Only the cemetery employees said something interesting: that they saw Hollander arguing with his wife about this cause on the same day of the funeral.

 

During his six months of life, the boy was hospitalized three times. The medical history was seized on two occasions, and the experts confirmed the diagnosis of severe physical trauma. We don't know if Hollander was mistreating the boy or if it was his wife. At first the police leaned towards the hypothesis that the baby and his mother had been victims of the same disturbed man, and it still officially persists. I raised my doubts with Dr. Ibáñez, a medical examiner who welcomed me into his office with great impatience. I told him that a battering man generally acts furiously and abruptly, but this crime had been premeditated, as demonstrated by the careful dismemberment. The doctor agreed with me. He said that it is not the most brilliant minds who get away with their crimes, but the men who know how to keep silent. Those who have an incessant turmoil in their heads, and yet their faces show peace. Afterwards, he said goodbye to me by recommending some texts that I already knew.

 

We only have to resort to Hollander's confession. A thirty-year-old man, the son of Polish immigrants, who never left the city limits except to bury his son. He was quiet and introverted, he liked to visit the candy stores in Buenos Aires in his free time. His face was thin, with childish eyes, short in stature, and did not suggest more than twenty-four or twenty-five years. I imagine him looking at the body for a long time after the crime - perhaps he strangled her - and then going to look for the axe.

 

We know from the expertise that ink marks were found on the skin, so first he must have stripped it, then drawing, like a painting, the precise lines on the corpse. He divided the arms and legs into three fragments, separated the head and thorax from the abdomen. It had to be an ax without a doubt, because the jagged edges of some of the remains indicated that they had been torn off.

 

He was not a strong man, but a sedentary guy who did not play sports.

 

But if he did all this it was not because of the discomfort of the load, but with a precise objective: the figure drawn on the streets. I can now see him loading the fragments into separate bags, taking them into his truck to distribute them.

 

Maybe I didn't even need a map. The city was in his head from his birth, and he used that same neighborhood to express himself.

 

We all wonder what he wanted to tell us with that drawing. No doubt something related to the death of his son. The crime was committed after the death of the child. His wife didn't work, so the neighbors saw her stay home and scream like a crazy woman until someone called her husband at work. But he also did it before the boy died. When the ambulance arrived to treat the baby, they protected each other from the doctors' questions. The truth is that his son died in the third hospitalization, with a fracture to the skull.

 

Hollander confessed to having killed his wife, and we only have the testimony of González, his closest companion. There is no other evidence. His wife was not found either. People involuntarily participated in the search, unintentionally discovering each human fragment with a cry of horror.

 

Without knowing it, he was walking between the lines of the drawing, invisible threads that joined points, forming the figure of that shrunken child that the murderer used for some reason.

 

You will wonder why Hollander decided to confess two years later. According to him, he saw his wife's body again. The night before he had received the body of a drowned woman in the river, and he said it was the same body he had destroyed. But he was whole again on a morgue stretcher. He kept saying, then, that she had returned to take revenge.

 

The police attributed all this to delirium. We know that dismembered bodies do not come back together on their own, nor do the dead come back to life to die again. At least that's what we think.

 

Now that the gray hair stopped bothering me once and for all, the judge sends me this new summons to declare the same thing that I told him on a thousand occasions. I don't know why fucking luck I had to be the one to accompany Hugo that night. Maybe for the same reason that made me meet him the day he started working, when he was just twenty years old.

 

At that time he started in maintenance, but later he was promoted.

 

I was almost five years older than him, and since I was the only young man in that room, we became friends. He didn't talk much, and the few times he said something it was because an anger was growing inside him, slowly, until he finally made him tell what was bothering him. That's what happened in the last few months.

 

Shortly after we met, we got into the habit of going to a cafe after work. Later, we frequented two mines. The day the four of us went out for the first time, I played him badly. I ran into them a while earlier, and I noticed something strange about the girl who had come with my friend. She wasn't ugly, she had nice tits that made up for her stupid look, but I didn't like her, as if behind that superficial clumsiness there was some planned cruelty. The three of us waited at the bar, and when Hugo appeared, I didn't resist and changed seats. So I stayed with the one I liked the most, and he went out with the one with strange eyes. I know it was a tricky move on my part, but Hugo also entered like a mouse into the hands of that mine.

 

Shortly afterward they got married, and the problems had already started before. She had

 

the unfortunate habit of screaming at anything she didn't like. Her whims were always so disproportionate to the situation that in the end I had no doubt that she was crazy. A different type of madness than Hugo demonstrated later. Because it seems to me that it is time to tell things as they really were, even if the police and the journalist who interviewed me do not agree. Her madness was one of those that brings out that of others. Suddenly she wakes up in one, without knowing how or where she was hidden.

 

The point is that he endured his hysteria for a long time, and it was not easy to do so. Sometimes she would get angry in the middle of the street, and he would remain silent and humor her. It occurred to me that then the two of them would take it out in bed and everything would go back to how it was before. But let me tell you that what is in the head cannot be removed by anything, not even by death. If I could ask him, Hugo would agree with me.

 

Then she got pregnant, and I swear I've never seen a guy as excited about the boy as my friend. I went to visit them at the hospital the day after the birth, and I got the impression that she was not happy. As I left the room, I heard their protests and screams again. However, Hugo just looked at the baby in his crib, repeating how beautiful he was. They called him Tony.

 

From then on, things happened very quickly, only six months, and I can't believe all that was working in Hugo's mind. I mean what he did next. I found out about the boy's hospitalizations through the diary, when everything was over. He had never told me anything, he just missed some isolated days from work without warning. When he started talking to me more often, I realized that something serious was heating him up inside. When we found out about Tony's death, no words came out. He didn't want me to attend the funeral, and only told me that it was going to be in the province.

 

They told me, a few days later, that they saw them arguing at the cemetery gate, because they didn't want her to be at the ceremony. I asked him about Tony's cause of death, and he didn't answer. That's why I insist that there is no other possible explanation: she was killing her son. I don't know if I was aware, but with blows or carelessness I took away the health of that little body that I imagined crying like a pig all day, until Hugo came home from work. Then I'm sure he lifted it in his arms more carefully than if it were just another member of his own body, because I saw him do it. I know that she was capable of killing herself for the boy. I was wrong, I was going to kill for Tony. This is what I told Beltrame, the journalist. She woke Hugo up, shaking his madness out.

 

The last night I worked with him, he confessed his truth to me. A few hours earlier I noticed him turn pale in front of the corpse that had just been brought in at one in the morning. He began to sweat, sitting up and holding his head in his hands. When my shift was

 

 

almost over, he told me everything. The same thing I repeated to the judge until I was tired. Hugo went back and forth from the stretcher where the body was, examining it as if he were a forensic expert. I looked at the armpits, the knees and the hands. The hair on his arms had stood up like a cat's, and he was trembling. I didn't believe him at first, he wasn't a strong guy capable of destroying a corpse the way he told me. It seems to me that in addition to strength he must have also needed the stamina to do it over and over again, until he put the last fragment in the truck.

 

But, for a long time now, I have believed it to be true, especially when I think of the times when something within us rises from a deep lethargy, and we can no longer stop it.

 

It's been five hours since she arrived. The boys left her on the stretcher. When I saw her, I felt like I was going to faint, because despite having always had a sharp desperate pain in my chest, I had never experienced this fear before. I walked towards her, trying to hide my trembling, although I know González noticed. In the few moments that I could be alone, I began to observe her. I looked at her unscathed face, her breasts white and wet from the dirty river water. And I read in his face that he did it to get revenge, he revived to kill himself again and make me feel guilty. He plans to deceive forensics and the police by faking a suicide. He has come to destroy these two years of oblivion, because he knows that it is the only state that allows me to live.

 

I loved her, it's true, but never as much as I loved Tony. When I returned home and found him crying, bruised and tense, that pain in my chest suddenly grew. She, with her blonde hair and beautiful eyes, hid a fury very similar to the one I had later. I don't know how much time has passed since that night, I have already said that oblivion has been my savior. However, the only thing I could rescue from my memory was Tony, and to bring him back to my side I had to make that drawing.

 

I just confessed it to González, but he doesn't believe me when I tell him that one of the next nights, while we were alone, I decided it was the right time. It took me two hours to dismember his body. By the end, he was exhausted and covered in blood and perspiration. I took a shower and then loaded the truck with the remains wrapped in black bags that I stole from the morgue.

 

It was six in the morning, and like a delivery man I distributed my merchandise in the neighborhood, forming the figure of my son. A drawing big enough for him to see it from up there and respond to me.

I never answer.

I have been waiting for him for two years, and I use my strength to achieve complete

 

 

 

oblivion, just for him. Now my wife has returned to tell me that the dead remain in their graves, no matter what happens. Only the unfortunate ones wake up, and that's why he comes to undo my work from that entire night. To turn my sleepless effort into a useless death sentence.

 

I examine her looking for marks, cuts on her arms and neck, and I only find a dirty body. But it is the same face, the same beautiful sex from which my son was born. I'm sure that when they identify her they will condemn me, and even if I destroy her again, she will find a way to bother me once again.

 

It's half past five in the morning, and the sun is rising behind the city. González says goodbye with some concern in his eyes. I'm alone.

 

And when I go to cover my wife's face with a sheet, I hear her say not to do it, that she wants to see me, and to use the cloth to hold me down.

 

Then I look up at the ceiling, and I know that for this once, this one time, we agree. A beam, the piece of cloth and the chair under my feet will be enough to take me to the darkness where there will no longer be fear, because my son will be with me.

 

 

 

THE LAND OF SATURDAY

 

Claudia woke up. The Saturday morning sun came through the

cracks of the blinds until it fell directly into his sleepy eyes. He rubbed his eyelids, turned in bed and saw the sleeping man's body. His lucidity, barely clear, was surprised for a moment, but he immediately remembered. What are you still doing here? He rested an elbow on the pillow and his head in his hand, he covered himself with the sheet because April was already bringing the first cold of autumn. Lines of light drew cuts on the man's back. Everyone leaves at two or three in the morning, why does he stay? He's a fool if he thinks I'm going to fall in love. But no, he wasn't that stupid last night, it looks like he has experience. Most likely, you want to have a cup of coffee with milk or a mate, and in the process avoid the cold and humidity of Friday night.

 

I'm not going to give in, I'm going to make just one cup. He stayed a while longer looking at the patches of dark, curly hair on his shoulder blades and lower back. He was going to pet it, but stopped in time. Just as her hand was about to touch him he stirred, although not yet awake. The clock said half past eight. He turned on the radio and raised the volume. Let's see if he wakes up and leaves once and for all. National Radio and the military march for the hundredth time in the last two days. "...more than two thousand people gathered in the historic Plaza de Mayo to celebrate the recovery..." She stood up, stunned by the strident monoural sound and the shouting of the crowd, which sounded like a wordless out-of-tune

 

choir thundering from a place further away or deeper perhaps than that of the square. If you don't wake up to this. She put on the green terry cloth robe, a bathrobe actually, which reached to the middle of her thighs. A draft of air gave him chills.

 

He got up and opened the blind. The morning was beautifully golden in the sky, the city was wrapped in whitish clouds similar to the wings of angels. The horns could be heard weakly due to the height of the apartment and the closed windows. He was tempted to open them and let the cold and noise wake the man, but a remnant of pity prevented him from doing so.

 

He opened the closet doors that separated the room from the small kitchen behind it. On top of the wardrobe, the suitcases had been resting for two years before, and the dust had accumulated.

 

"The previous tenant, a girl named Cecilia, died of an overdose," the owner had told her, casually, but looking at her superiorly, as if thus warning her that she should behave well.

 

But he soon began to like the room, and had already lived there for four years. Then he remembered the warning he had been given a week ago. Rumors about her caused complaints at consortium meetings. The old woman from the apartment across the street told the neighbors that she had seen different men come into the apartment every weekend. But what was Claudia going to do if men cajoled her and she couldn't say no, she was a woman after all. Just as there are guys who take women to their rooms every night, why shouldn't I do it if I like them, if I want to not sleep alone, if I need them to make me feel alive in the middle of the night, when I think I'm Sinking through every floor of this damn building. If arms and breath were capable of rescuing her, she did not hesitate. She never thought about the danger that strangers could bring, she looked them in the eyes, and trusted.

 

Everyone left at two in the morning, if that didn't happen, she would turn on the light and the radio. The other then got up and dressed, then saying goodbye with a kiss and a greeting in a low voice. No, I would never charge them; Although many made the gesture of putting their hand in their pocket, as soon as they looked her in the eyes they knew the answer. That was not what Claudia needed, and the cold, impassive expression of the men seemed to be transparent in a memory, a gratitude, as if they had known her long before.

 

Tomorrow I'm going to look for Diego at mom's house. He turned on the stove and put the jug with water. He took a jar of cookies out of the cupboard. The sound of the can echoed between the four walls, but was effectively hidden by the loud noise of the radio, as well as the clashing of the cup, the plate and the spoon. The lid of the sugar bowl fell and rolled, without breaking, on the aluminum counter.

 

Precarious noises before the onslaught of the radio. Personal sounds that seemed like innocent dogs in front of the armies that invaded islands and the crowd that followed them, cheering them.

 

"...we haven't seen something like this in decades, people applaud and wave banners at this demonstration of courage by the government..."

 

If they kick me out, I want to be prepared. I have money to support Diego for a few months, and mom is going to help me until I get a job. Diego is already four years old. So much time wasted, so few times she saw him. But she couldn't support him, that wasn't how she wanted to raise him: in a shitty apartment, sleeping in his same bed due to lack of space, leaving him with strangers while she worked as a maid. At least the grandmother was the grandmother, and no matter how bad she wasn't going to neglect it. In the end, Claudia turned out to be the strange one when she visited him, and a tightness squeezed her chest when the boy turned away crying and clinging to his grandmother's legs.

That's over, tomorrow I'm going to look for him and take him to another place to live. He heard the mattress squeak and then a smoker's throat clearing from the bathroom,

over the noise of the water. The son of a bitch is going to take a bath without asking my permission, without telling me. He slammed the cup hard against the saucer, the water now boiling on the stove. He went to the door, and when he was going to call him, he realized that he didn't remember his name. He had mentioned that he was a rugby player, but he didn't know anything else. I didn't want to look like a witch, though, what can I say, skinny guy, who gave you permission to use the shower?

 

After all, it wasn't that big of a deal. Maybe the guy had really gotten the idea that they could get to something serious, sometimes it happens and you find good men.

 

She returned to the kitchen, but first she turned down the radio a little, saying, in a motherly tone:

 

-There are clean towels under the sink! Why did he say it?, even against everything decided. Always the same nonsense, you don't learn more. He drank his coffee, without sugar this time, he only had half a jar left and he wanted to make ends meet.

 

The radio intermittently and the noise hurt his ears. He went to lower the volume a little more, when he now clearly heard the president's hoarse, hoarse voice. I could imagine him on the balcony of the Government House, with his arms raised encompassing the crowd that listened to him in silence. Not a sound interrupted the voice born from the deep darkness of the lungs of a man who caused fear just by hearing it. Then the voice seemed to emerge from

 

the bathroom, from a body draining water while singing something similar to the San Lorenzo march, distorted, its glorious chords punctuated by others more similar to the weak warp of contemporary men.

 

-These marches are catchy, aren't they?! -And the voice did not come from the radio, but from the bathroom. -The lyrics won't fade from your head no matter how much time passes! Claudia imagined the guy naked, drying himself with one of his towels, with his arms raised to rub his back. Then the door opened, and she saw him come out with a towel around his waist.

 

-Good morning, Clau.

 

That familiarity. She felt helpless, at a disadvantage because he knew her name and she didn't know his. He smiled barely and turned his back on her to return to the stove that kept him warm. He left the cup in the sink, rubbed his hands near the flame. The man's bare feet approached him from behind.

 

She felt his hands go under her robe, touch her buttocks and go up to her waist. He kissed her neck, while he said:

 

-How about? We broke the English's asses, didn't we?

 

She looked at the ceiling, sighing, and endured the cold of the wet hands on her body. The fly spots, which formed an increasingly populated map, led her to think about travel. To forget the smell of dirt and smog in the city, the aroma of fried foods and the urine of children from neighboring apartments. Tomorrow will be the last day, hang in there.

 

He turned around and tried to break away.

 

-I have to go out, dear. Get dressed and if you want, wait for me, and we'll go down together.

 

But he didn't want to let her go. He was staring at her.

 

-What is that about dear? And my name that you shouted with so much pleasure last night? ... you don't remember, it's true, you don't remember        He began to laugh, satisfied,

hugging her even more.

 

Now he could no longer ask, an idea was drawn on his face, a freedom of action, an impunity that anonymity freely granted him.

 

Only the face individualized him, and faces, she knew, are always confused, lost in

 

memory with thousands of others. Like the faces of soldiers.

 

"...our young heroes have turned this event into a milestone in the history of the country..."

 

The march sounded again, in the background, while the announcer described the ministers' greeting to the president. Claudia could even imagine the impeccable uniform and the jingling of the medals swinging on the chests of the strong men.

 

-Let go of me! She managed to break away, but he reached for her again and took off her robe.

 

-But what's wrong with you, you fucking whore! He pushed her onto the bed and threw himself on top of her. With her mouth against the sheets, Claudia let out a muffled scream as she felt him penetrate her. But this time it was not like at night. The softness became a touch of sandpaper, the kisses on the neck became bird pecks. The tears flowed, and his lips drank those tears. However, she wasn't going to scream, for what, so that the neighbors would call the police, to find herself thrown out a day early without being able to go look for Diego? Don't say your son's name right now, don't stain him, stupid, if you ruined your life, don't do the same with his.

 

The man seemed determined to delay his pleasure, to subject the arrival of the end to rules specified in his mind perhaps many days before. He would look for a woman alone, deceive her with his feigned shyness, or perhaps he had planned nothing, and the opportunity would awaken desires that he might not even know about.

 

Claudia felt a tear. He was hurting her.

 

"Enough!" she said, but he didn't pay attention to her. The voices from the square on the radio continued to thunder haughty, proud, and the car horns rose to the sky of the city.

"...there are thousands of white and light blue ribbons falling from the windows, all

They are eager to show the pride of national sentiment..."

 

Then, the man's cry of joy was heard loud as a war cry, triumphant and irrevocable. He stayed leaning on Claudia for a long time, agitated but still.

 

"Leave me, I'm bleeding," she murmured.

 

He didn't move. The sheets were wet. Tears, saliva, blood.

 

She couldn't see because her eyes were cloudy. He turned his head to the side. The apartment was still bright, incredibly clean now. The light mocked Claudia. Always so dirty, and now, so shiny. It shone like the brilliant lightning of the sun on the silver wings of the caps and uniforms, on the brass of the band that played on the old record on the radio.

 

The nameless man stood up. She didn't want to look at him. He waited, he only waited for the certain blow that would end his life, and that he even came to wish for, because he no longer wanted to live in that apartment clean and cold as bronze.

 

She heard him get dressed. The pants, the belt buckle, the zipper, the touch of fingers on the buttons of the shirt. He didn't say anything, maybe he wasn't even looking at her. Then Claudia heard the door opening and closing.

 

He touched his lower abdomen. She was hurt, but it was nothing she couldn't fix herself with a few days of rest. She went to the bathroom, cowering in pain, and got into the bathtub with the smell that the other had left behind. She only allowed herself a few tears again when she thought about Diego. He must have still been in bed, surely, while grandmother was heating up the milk for breakfast.

 

The aroma of boiled milk, what a beautiful smell, what a warm aroma for those who, far away, fought and missed.

 

He would no longer go looking for his son tomorrow. There was no longer any point in changing the rhythm of his life, nor in the useless attempt to look better in the opinion of others.

 

The image had been brought into harmony with the interior, almost in perfect balance.

She could be calm, although not completely.

Then he started humming the march on the radio. I hadn't sung it in years. First very

softly, hesitant, doubting what her voice would sound like.

 

Then she decided to raise her voice, because no one was listening to her, and if they did, they would say that she was finally aware of the events and was not oblivious to them.

 

His life was finally adopting the rhythm of reality. That brilliant and blinding stridency of the forces that stop at nothing.

 

 

THE FACE OF THE MONKEYS

 

The woman resists strongly. His heavy body slips from Charly's arms, and a punch hits him in the mouth. But he doesn't protest. He holds the fist that hit him and twists it and his other hand on the woman's back. She screams, continuing to fight against the scarf that is pressing on her mouth and nose. But the chloroform begins to make her drowsy and she falls on the stretcher.

 

Charly breathes a sigh of relief, it is the second time she has woken up. He decides to keep her sedated with something stronger.

 

Tie the woman's hands with cords. He feels the grown belly and checks if there are still movements, but he cannot find them. It doesn't take your fingers long to figure it out. They have been, along with your eyes, the only system communicating with the world.

 

He goes to the refrigerator, prepares the syringe and returns to the stretcher. He injects it into the arm. It will delay the birth, she knows it, however it is essential to tie her well before she wakes up again. She has to be conscious all the time for the birth to be normal. It has been on the last four occasions, with the last four women.

 

Rosa, the midwife who attended to his mother when he was born, had always praised his hands. He said they were small and sensitive to touch babies. That's why, since he was ten years old, she had taught him to put his fingers like tweezers in the moist flesh of pregnant women to find the fetus and stimulate it.

 

Charly remembers what the house in La Boca was like when she lived. A room with two beds, the kitchen and a bathroom added to the side, which was reached from the patio. Only two elements of his work always enjoyed special care: the refrigerator where he kept his medicines, and a closet with instruments for emergencies. The women came screaming at any time, and Rosa attended to them even if it was night or the power was cut off in the neighborhood. hospitals. But he had known the good times, when she worked every day and part of the night. He helped her until he fell asleep or felt like vomiting, and he was only able to think about the sticky liquid, the blood and the pubic hairs that his hands would touch before he knew he was completely defeated for that night. Because in reality it is the only thing he remembers clearly. He has almost forgotten the faces of the children he helped birth.

 

The first time Rosa had him accompany her, she put him in front of one of the many women who passed by that house.

 

"It's this or the circus, you have to work on something..." she told him.

 

So he learned by watching her. Rosa gave him instructions and he obeyed.

 

None of the women were scared when they saw him, because Charly had always been a well-known and silent face in the neighborhood. Sometimes he thought about the reason for his forced silence, spending long hours of the night in a fruitless attempt to make sounds with his tongue between his teeth. Later, he came to realize that his tongue was a rudimentary example of dead muscle with an unalterable scar.

 

He keeps looking at his open mouth in the mirror. There is a lot of light in the room, and yet it only evokes the darkness of restless nights, when he held the instruments with wet hands. The same ones he keeps in the old closet. Since Rosa's death he has only used them for four other children.

 

The woman wakes up again, but she is so sedated that she moves only her eyes. She looks at him carefully and furrows her eyebrows.

 

The teasing from the neighborhood kids had started to become unbearable one day, and since then he didn't want to go out. Rosa heard the insults from the street, but she did not dare to criticize them.

 

"Stay here and help me, they'll soon forget about you if they don't see you," she told him, looking at him with her clear, ancient eyes, in the middle of that face with dark, leathery skin. He was in charge of teaching him to read with the manuals he borrowed in the neighborhood, and later with the recipes and leaflets that people brought them.

 

Charly's hair is black, straight, and combed back. Such resemblance to an ape must be deliberate, he thinks. Rosa liked to tell him that while she combed his hair, brushing his hair back. He knew from then on that this was how it would be forever.

 

The woman becomes agitated and wants to scream. She glances toward the window, but gives up. It's ten p.m. Look at Charly, at his simian mask placed so appropriately. Because the body, although it had no deformity, had grown under the authoritarian idea that that strange head proclaimed. She watches him walk from the refrigerator to the closet. A light turns on over the stretcher. He is wearing a gray overall, beneath which his hairy hands and hairy chest escape. There is no possibility of doubt for those who see it for the first time, although it is difficult to believe in the human transformation of an animal, and in reality it was nothing more than the opposite fact.

 

He knows that he will have to induce labor, so he prepares the solution that Rosa used in recent years, when she was already tired of the hours of expectancy.

 

She had always heard neighbors say that the methods she used were dangerous. But that no longer matters now, the only essential thing in this eleventh hour, of this fifth time, is to take the child out so that he can be similar to the other four.

 

Rosa was dying when she called him to her side. X-rays of his skull fell to the floor as he sat up in his bed. Charly grabbed one, but couldn't understand the white spot that occupied half of Rosa's head.

 

The image screamed evidence, but he didn't understand. He saw the midwife stand up clumsily, almost naked, with flabby, dark breasts that trembled as she walked to the closet to take the forceps out of a drawer. The instrument was so old, so shaped by his fingers, that it seemed to have become an extension of his own hands. He then placed one of the pieces on Charly's head, then the other on the opposite side, and joined them, forming a clamp that pressed against the jaw and forehead. It didn't pull, but it was enough for the face to remember its origin. Rosa rested her hands on him, trying to stop the imaginary bleeding in Charly's mouth, just as she had done twenty-two years before. He turned his head away, trembling. She caressed the protruding chin, the swollen lips, and stopped. Charly's eyes had the glow of embers.

 

The next day, Rosa had died. Charly dressed in the long, black coat with a wide collar that he pulled up to cover his ears, put on a hat, and walked to Rosa's brother's house to ask for the money she had saved. They handed him over with fear, his appearance was that of a tall, dark, silent man. He lived with that money, without worrying about getting more, accustomed to austerity, to the deep-rooted idea of poverty that Rosa had always instilled in him.

 

She spent the next two years trying to get rid of that growing pain, as if on that last night she had opened the floodgate of a bonfire. He knew that he was no longer part of the world, and that it could not harm him anymore. The only thing left for him to do was what he had always done best: take children from their mothers' wombs. He had had to watch the first woman during almost the entire pregnancy, and even after kidnapping her he had to wait for the birth. But then he calculated the exact time, and the kidnapping, childbirth, revenge and abandonment happened without requiring any waiting time.

 

It's half past twelve at night. There is a performance in the circus, the band's music travels soft and muted. Charly thinks it's time to start.

 

He takes another syringe out of the refrigerator, and injects it below the navel. She screams, her voice muffled by the gag. Only disguised moans reach the street. He removes the needle and sees the woman crying, who looks towards the lamp.

 

They all do the same thing, he thinks, women always cry, even Rosa. It is difficult for him

 

to understand crying, although children's crying was never strange to him.

 

He must have cried too, and imagines his birth. Then that old pain in his chest begins to get stronger, and the hair stands up on his arms, on his back. He circles around the table, waiting for the drug to take effect.

 

Half an hour has passed, and the contractions are very intense. She continues moaning. Charly goes to the closet and looks for the branches of the forceps. She returns and pushes a bucket with her feet, but the woman breaks the bag and the water falls to the same floor that has endured so much human liquid before. The abdomen contracts rapidly, the child's head peeks out. Charly doesn't wait, that's the right moment. He puts one of the levers on his forehead and another on his jaw. Note that the fetus has a very peculiar dark color, it almost does not move. Join the branches of the forceps and turn the cap screw. Keep squeezing.

Keep compressing.

Traction

The head of the fetus detaches from the body, and remains between the pieces of the forceps. Charly looks at her without understanding. He doesn't hear crying, this time. He only sees a head with closed eyes, and narrow shoulders peeking out between the woman's legs.

 

The color purple, he thinks, and realizes that the child has not had a life for a long time.

 

The child to whom he was going to give a new face slips from his fingers. He knows there will be no way to continue with the plan. It is no longer necessary to take the woman's body to the river, or abandon the baby with the new face on a busy street for someone to find it.

 

That long-awaited delivery to the world of its fifth monster. Another angry ape like him among men.

A smell of stench floats through the room, but an even greater absence scares him and makes him tremble: that of shrill and vital crying. The pain starts again. The unquenchable fire must be allowed to advance, thinks Charly. The door that stops the fire now open to the end of its hinges. Then he takes off his duster, stuck to his skin due to sweat, and runs away from the house.

 

The night lights of the street illuminate him as he runs, as if he were jumping over hot coals. It is burning. He takes long steps, the force he applies to his legs seeming to disarticulate him. Charly reaches the edge of the dock and jumps into the river.

 

The thick, dirty water sways, and two anchored ships begin to slowly gather together at the place where it has sunk.

 

It's almost five in the morning. People are gathered on the shore of the port, around the body rescued from the water. A coroner has come to investigate, and asks what happened.

 

"I don't really know how it happened, Doctor Ibáñez," the policeman answers, with a tired face and eyes that do not hide his confusion. A few hours ago I thought I saw the shadow of an animal running clumsily, upright on its hind legs, and I thought it was a monkey escaped from the circus.

 

 

 

THE SKINNY

 

The route was busier than usual. There were cars with suitcases and bicycles on the luggage racks. Pedro knew that they were traveling towards the coast, coinciding with the beginning of summer. He liked to see them pass. Sometimes I even thought I heard children's voices from the cars.

 

Always walking, without stopping, he told himself that with great luck he would reach the city before nightfall. He looked at the countryside on both sides of the road, interrupted by some factories, the towers that held the high-tension cables with the delicacy of a spider, the fruit stands and the grills that were closing as it got dark. Some workshops showed the faces of the mechanics between cameras and disused tires. He looked sideways at the prefectural detachment, but without looking for long or turning around. The patrollers rested peacefully under the dust and afternoon sun.

 

A caravan of three trucks raised dust around them. He covered his face with the collar of his dirty shirt and coughed. The sun decreased its warmth, hiding behind the lights of the still distant city, paling in front of the enormous square moon of buildings and fluorescent tubes. With more attention than other times, he observed the dead dogs on the shoulders. He had the habit of counting them to entertain himself while he walked; Sometimes it was impossible for him to clear his mind, and the repeated thoughts drove him crazy. That's why he began to count them, he could even estimate the days they had been dead. It was easier if they kept a certain warmth in their skin, if when you caressed them you could still feel the silky electricity of the muscles.

 

It was cold and he put on his jacket. The orange of the twilight gave way to the darkness of the road, interrupted by the headlights of the cars. He was tired, and hitchhiked to get to the city sooner. An old Valiant stopped. The doors had stains from different sheet metal workshops.

 

-Where are you going? -asked the driver. The man's appearance was familiar to him, his complexion dark, his straight hair falling to the side, and he assumed that he knew him from a nearby town. Pedro opened the door by putting his hand through the glassless window, there was no external handle.

 

-Even General Lavalle... -he answered-...you can leave me at the entrance arch, just...if the car goes that far.

 

-Don't worry, the way you see it, this car killed a teacher in La Plata a few years ago, they told me. My name is Norberto-and he offered his hand. Pedro responded by shaking her with encouragement.

 

They maintained a brief silence. But his companion started talking and didn't stop talking the entire way. In the breaks, Pedro was able to tell him about his work and family, although he didn't really want to talk. I was thinking about Maria, whom I needed to see as soon as possible. Two weeks were too long for the anxiety locked in his pants. They had not been intimate with Dominga for a long time. He had stopped thinking of her that way, and after the fourth child he refused to give in. Tonight, however, he would return to Mary's body, which was waiting for him. His hands began to sweat as he regained the enthusiasm that was born in him when he remembered her. The voice of the man next to him suddenly brought back memories of his brother.

 

-He helped me a lot when I had a bad harvest, he always made me goofy with anything...-. Pedro remained thoughtful, staring at the headlights of the cars. He was almost able to touch the lights, to touch with his fingers the white shapes of his brother's face drawn in the mercury sky.

 

"What's wrong?" the other said when he saw him distracted.

 

-He died two days ago. If you had seen him lying there, with his face so calm that he seemed to have fallen asleep.

 

From that moment on they only made vain, brief comments. At night, they crossed the city arch. He wasn't entirely sure, but his partner had looked suspiciously at the police officers parked next to the entrance marker. Pedro's lower lip also trembled, but perhaps it was just the cold night. He looked at the gas stations and half-built buildings, the shadowed skeletons where beggars spent the night. The car stopped at a corner.

 

-I'll leave you here, because I have to turn.

 

-Don't worry, I'm just a few blocks away. Thanks, man, see you later.

 

-See you later then.

 

He waited a while while the car, with effort, picked up speed and got lost among other similar lights. At night, he walked out, listing the streets that separated him from María. From time to time the homeless stretched out a hand from the shadows, thin arms with threadbare sleeves, some red with the sting of lice. The expanse of the field suddenly flooded his eyes, without warning, blocking his vision like a thief, a red cloth covering his eyes, and the serene solitude of his brother's body seemed unattainable.

 

Once he had walked the same streets with Raúl, who was thinking of taking those people to the fields to work on the crops, but he had laughed at that folly.

 

-Look at these! -was saying-. They are finished, they are going to die like the dogs on the road. Tomorrow they are going to take them in a truck to the cemetery.

 

Raúl then began to observe him with half-closed eyes.

 

"Don't look at me like that, it's the truth," Pedro defended himself. -Do we have money to at least support our families?

 

They continued walking, offended with each other, reconciled later at noon in the sun, harvesting, or in meetings by the fire and their women.

 

He arrived after dinner. María could not hide her joy when she saw him, and prepared a clean place for him at the table. Pedro began to look through the newspaper. A piece of news at the bottom of the page seemed to catch his attention, but Maria distracted him by sitting next to him to tell him everything she had done in his absence.

 

When they went to bed, Pedro slowly undressed, talking to her about the plans they had been making together for some time before. Face up, he stared at the ceiling beams and unplastered bricks. He turned to caress Maria's breasts and kiss her. He wanted to forget the collapse of those plans. She discreetly rejected him. He began to explain that he had gotten him a job, and they had to go to the factory early. It was just a matter of trying, they told themselves, and turned off the light. Pedro thought about the blue uniforms as he ran across the flat field, toward the road.

 

Little by little, lying in María's bed, he felt his muscles relaxing extremely slowly after the long walk, until he fell asleep. He dreamed, like other times, about fire. A large bonfire that spanned the entire expanse of the buildings under construction, burning the bodies of the weak, rat-like men in their cement caves. Flames born from a single, large shotgun flash, sending pellets everywhere. The initial shot that had given life to the sun over the fields that

 

he planted to feed his children.

 

He woke up startled by the loud ringing of Maria's alarm clock. She was getting dressed and reproached him for his laziness. They arrived at the factory when the sun had already peeked out behind the bars of the property. She guided him into the building, among the noise of the machines, and began to talk to one of the employees, but Pedro did not understand the dialogue, he was stunned by the roar of the engines. The voices of the men were becoming similar to each other.

 

There were tones, words, syllables that resembled Raúl's voice. He tried to get rid of that idea, and followed Maria to the chief of staff's office.

 

The man was cordial. He told him that he would come in as a replacement until his papers were ready. Pedro left the office thinking about the newspaper from the previous day that he had seen lying on the desk, absorbing the stains from the spilled coffee.

 

-How did it go? -María asked him, who was waiting for him sitting on the side of the door.

 

-I'll start today.-But seeing her so happy, it bothered him that her mood contrasted so much with his own. They said their quick goodbyes when an employee arrived to show him the position. For the rest of the day he thought he heard his brother's voice inside the machine. I listened to him talk about his plans for the farm.

 

-I hired people from the city, Pedro. "A guy is coming this afternoon to help me," he had told him one day. He looked at him then with resignation, tired of reproaching him for his stupidity.

 

-You're going to be screwed, remember what I'm telling you, I don't like strange people...

But Raúl didn't pay attention to him. The guy arrived and got to work right away.

 

He dug the trenches for the new fence posts, and then Raúl helped plant. Back then they still had the old tractor, and every half hour they stopped to let it cool down. While waiting, they started talking about women and work. Pedro, passing by his brother's field every afternoon, would find them working or chatting friendly. From afar I saw them laugh as if they were blood brothers. They greeted him by waving their hats, and he answered them, but an uncertain anger grew in his chest without fully understanding it.

 

-I'm done with the subscription. Do you want me to help you? -he asked, wiping the sweat from his forehead in the sun of a summer morning.

 

-No, Pedro, thank you, the "skinny" one is going to help me.

 

They called him that because he barely had the muscles of a fifteen-year-old boy. But he was tall, broad shoulders making up for the weak appearance of his arms. That quick trust with Raúl had hit Pedro like a bucket of cold water. He had never gotten along much with his older brother, but he always needed his approval. Only Raúl could give him the peace of mind of an accepted project, of a shared idea.

 

"Tonight we will eat at your house," Pedro said, without waiting for a response, as if he wanted to reproach the stranger who was listening to them for the trust and privilege that he did not yet fully possess. But Raúl answered: -Well. The "skinny" one is going to have a spectacular barbecue. And they both laughed, without looking at Pedro.

 

"But..." he began to say. Then he shut his mouth.

 

When the work was finished, the men left the factory like ants from a crushed anthill, leaving behind the hum of the machines. The gates opened and the groups dispersed towards the bus stops. Pedro thought he saw a familiar face. In the long waiting line, two people in front, was the guy who had brought him in the car. He wasn't wearing the factory overalls.

 

"Hello," said Pedro. Do you remember me? -Yeah! What do you tell me? The twilight light reached them as if cut by the bars.

-Here we are, on my first day of work. And your car? The man left the line and approached him to whisper something in his ear.

 

-It wasn't mine... So we drove past police stations in a stolen car, Pedro thought, and that idea amused him. A knowing smile covered his face for the first time all afternoon, which was already beginning to end as the sun fell in reddish shreds behind the chimneys.

 

-I'm glad to see someone I know, I swear. I was going crazy locked in there. Let's drink. They walked through the center, looking for a bar.

"The cheapest one you have, boss," Norberto asked, when they sat down at the table in a musty-smelling bowling alley. An aroma of urine came from the back bathroom. The window had at least five years of dirt on it, according to the almanacs that hung, yellow, on the wall behind the counter.

 

A waiter brought them a red wine the color of coagulated blood. That was what Pedro thought as he lifted the glass, stopping to watch the liquid dancing under his nose.

 

With Raúl, they sometimes competed over who could drink the most without getting drunk, but since they had gotten married they rarely had to do it again.

 

That night they had dinner at his house, the "skinny"'s barbecue made everyone excited to drink too much, even their wives.

 

"Now... let's talk about business," Raúl had announced, banging his fists on the table.

Dominga brought the demijohn and served them.

 

-Listen to me, little brother, the bank asks me for guarantees in land for the loan. I want to expand and for that I need a new tractor. You know what it costs, and the skinny guy had the idea that you give me half of your lands, only on paper, with a notary he knows.

 

Pedro looked at the skinny man, and with his eyes he told him that he was not going to let him get away with this.

 

-You unfortunate son of a thousand whores! He threw himself on the "skinny man" ready to kill him. His brother separated him with pushes and threats. The women intervened. La Dominga began to reproach him for his lack of ambition. Raúl called him a coward for not daring to do something so easy.

 

-You don't realize that he wants to screw you, he's going to take your money! -Peter insisted with his eyes full of fury. The spilled wine had stained his clothes. The table was turned, and his children looked at him with fear.

 

They walked back in the dark under the waning moon. He felt his wife's gaze accusing him of being a coward and a bad brother and father. But he thought about Mary, about her body under that same moon, about how he could have loved her right there on the grass.

 

-Are you dreaming again, old man?

 

Norberto's voice brought him back to the city. The wine finally passed down his throat, not without difficulty at first. They drank glass after glass, several bottles, convincing the owner to trust them. The old man raised his shoulders in resignation.

 

Norberto staggered in his chair, while he accompanied the melody of a radio advertisement that sold a hair spray.

 

-Tell me something, if you put that on... -he asked, pointing to his crotch-...it gets harder, right?

 

They both laughed out loud, and Pedro suddenly remembered that María was waiting for him at home. He didn't feel like leaving yet. He didn't even have the excuse of having gotten drunk, because despite everything he had drunk, he had not managed to get drunk. Even that was impossible without his brother. Norberto got up and walked around the empty place, while the waiter put the chairs on the tables and swept the floor. The lights were turned off to the bare minimum, the headlights of the passing buses illuminated the interior through the open door.

 

A voice on the radio announced the local news. A man had been killed nearby. Pedro clenched his fists on the table, the oilcloth tablecloth puckering with his force. He thought he heard the sirens, Dominga's crying fading into the distance, and he even saw his own hands resting on the night grass again as he stumbled.

 

-I'm going to propose something to you, old man... and listen to me attentively, idiot! -he shouted, grabbing his arm-. I have a fairly large field, and it gives me a lot of work. But it's in the sun and you have your own schedule. I suggest you come with me to help me. If you want, I will give you a salary or a percentage of the harvest, depending on what results. How about?

 

It wasn't him speaking, it wasn't his voice. But yes, there was the same Pedro as always, in a bar in General Lavalle, at eleven or twelve at night, talking to a drunk. It was his body, his face with three days' worth of beard, his calloused hands. However, a shadow crossed in front of the bulbs that fought against the viscous darkness of the place, a flicker in the shape of a shotgun barrel.

 

Since the discussion at the barbecue, he and Dominga were no longer on speaking terms. He saw her return from her brother's house several times, and assumed that she was gossiping with her sister-in-law. He thought about his plans with Maria, about the house in the city that was going to protect him from the world.

 

He had not seen Raúl again, except from afar, working in the field. It hurt her not to be able to talk to him, to get close to him because of her pride. After all, he was his brother. But he wasn't going to give in, to let a city thief fool them like two stupid people.

 

The "skinny one" continued helping him, and he saw them sharing the afternoons and the jokes, the bottles of water and the food, the heat of the sun making them sweat equally, as one man. Pedro could have been there, occupying the other's place, that was the right of his blood.

 

One morning he heard a very loud engine, and the whole family went out at dawn to see Raúl's new tractor. How did he do it, Pedro asked himself, barefoot and in his underwear, looking at the flashing brilliance of the machine.

 

Her brother was on top, taming her as the new boss of the area, surrounded by the family who cheered him as the greatest hero of the plain.

 

It was Raúl who shone, not the metal of the tractor, but his eyes. Man and machine was one and only one triumph. The children had climbed up to touch him, Dominga was hugging him with her hair down and a threadbare robe that outlined the profile of her breasts.

 

There were not even clouds, not a single one that could cover for a moment the dazzling image of his brother on the tractor. Raúl had managed to possess both things: admiration and the machine. And Peter, almost naked in the middle of the dust, standing next to the poverty of his house, looked at him, knocked down in his pride, but upright in anger.

 

-He comes to boast, after all he comes to rub shit in my face.

 

It was his weakest and most gloomy voice that spoke, not because he was afraid that his brother would hear him, but because he was afraid of the rising sun.

 

He turned around and walked inside.

 

When he came out again, he carried in his hands the shotgun that his father had given to his other brother, Nicanor, and that he left abandoned under the bed when he left home. The weapon, despite the thick layer of dust, shone with the light that the sun seemed to be giving it especially. The barrel rose, steady, to eye level.

 

Pedro's eyelids trembled. After a few seconds, he managed to close one and put his sights on the crosshairs. He looked for the body on the tractor, but the shapes of his wife and children stood in the way.

 

-Raul! -shout.

 

Everyone turned to look. There was a single cry of children, a single scream of a woman, and the pale silhouette of the brother was drawn clear and solitary on the beautiful machine of the earth.

 

Soon there was nothing more than a large stain of blood on the body hanging upside down, with a boot hooked on a pedal.

 

-He seemed asleep, I swear, calm as if he had not gotten out of bed that morning. But Norberto was so drunk that he must not have heard anything he had said. -So are you coming or not? -Yes brother! -He answered with his drunken tune.

 

Pedro felt a bitter taste in his throat, but he said nothing. He helped the other man up and they walked out of the bar onto the dew-damp sidewalk. The door closed, and the figure of the waiter was lost in the darkness inside. They resigned themselves, between hiccups and sighs, to walking back, so that the fresh air would clear their heads. His walk was a zigzag in the middle of the street.

 

The footprints were erased from the pavement, but others persisted behind them, leaving footprints in the humidity, forming and dying at the same pace as their footsteps.

 

As if a familiar shadow took shape on the street.

 

Pedro suddenly felt trapped by two men in the middle of the open street, one he hardly knew, and the other whom he felt he knew too much.

 

However, there was no one but Norberto and him. But Norberto's voice hurt him then with an intonation that was not his own, as if someone strong enough to be behind him and at his side at the same time, was speaking through his mouth. Someone who didn't want to abandon him.

 

"If we are going to be partners you have to call me like my friends," I was telling him.

 

-Okay, and what do they call you? -Peter asked, almost without interest, distracted in his thoughts.

 

"In many ways," said Norberto. But some call me "the skinny one."

 

 

 

 

LIBRARY

 

The day Leandro Suárez turned thirty-eight years old, he left work at the hardware store on Riobamba Street and walked, like every afternoon, to the corner of Córdoba Avenue. He turned right, without crossing, the library was three blocks away on the same sidewalk.

 

It was winter, but he wouldn't remember that afternoon because of the black, violent storm clouds that brought down icy gusts over the city, not even because it was his birthday. He was going to remember her because of the look and the first smile he received from the librarian.

 

He had seen her enter the library a year earlier, replacing another employee who had retired. At first, she walked up and down the hallway that separated the reception from the reading room, picking up books from the tables.

 

 

He wore pants made of fine fabric and amber or green in color, depending on the brightness of the afternoons and the lights in the room. Her black hair formed soft-looking curls, and every time she bowed her head, they covered her forehead and caressed her shoulders barely outlined under her silk blouse. He had never given him more than a fleeting glance, as if Leandro were just one of the many objects that crossed his path.

 

But two months ago he had been assigned a position at the reception, and since then, he noticed the redness in his cheeks with the hustle and bustle caused by the kids and students when they came from the school on the other block.

 

Leandro asked for the texts that he had planned to remove since the night before.

 

But when she said good afternoon to him, he suddenly forgot what he came to do. When he really liked a woman he felt awkward, distrustful.

 

-Sorry? -he said, just after feeling freed by those eyes that had trapped him like hooks of question marks.

 

She, however, returned a haughty look, and he lowered his head or smiled like a fool. He would have liked to speak to her, to know her name. He would have liked, above all things, to touch those black curls that he guessed were impeccably soft to the touch.

 

On the afternoon of his birthday, as he entered, the wind hit the door against the wall.

Everyone turned around, the pages of the open books shook, as did the calendar on the wall and the old women's skirts. He hurried to close it. But he didn't pay attention to the recriminating looks, but to the veiled smile, the laugh hidden between the fingers with which she covered her mouth, the sparkle in her eyes that showed not mockery, but appreciation. Then he smiled at her for the first time without shame, although he said nothing. He simply approached the counter, and she, stopping serving the others, extended a hand to him.

 

Leandro saw that white hand coming as if he were watching it in slow motion, while his heart accelerated, and he feared that the others would hear his heartbeat. He felt her fingers on his hair, and he would have closed his eyes for a long time with that caress, like a sleeping dog or a child now safe from the cold of winter. But that hand, with two dry leaves that he had found in his hair, was already moving away.

 

"Excuse my entry," he said.

 

He didn't know how old she was, no more than twenty-five maybe. He decided not to address her as he remembered the coldness with which she had received him until then.

 

-It doesn't matter, if I knew how many the same thing happened to today. What do you need?

 

-Hey?

 

The same thing happened to him again, but he wasn't going to let that afternoon be ruined by his clumsiness.

 

-I'm looking for a Hawthorne book-. And he handed him the paper with the references.

 

He watched her recede into the veiled luminosity of the library walls, her delicate figure dressed in gray corduroy pants, a white blouse, and low heels that clicked on the wooden floor.

 

A man, leaning on the counter next to him, was looking at him from the side and smiling, at the same time raising an eyebrow and pointing a finger at the librarian. He was almost bald, with a crown of brown hair, somewhat short and slightly fat.

 

Leandro didn't answer anything, just as he didn't respond to his co-workers when they talked to him about women. Silence, he told himself, gave him peace, it took him away from the anger that he had often felt gripping him, stinging his chest. He then immersed himself in reading, and that was the sublime silence, which despite the screams and noise of the city, separated him into a world of men and women that he built at his will.

 

She returned with the book.

 

-"Stories twice told." Please sign and leave the document.

 

He already knew the procedure, but he made a hesitant gesture before registering.

 

-What date is today? -asked.

 

She opened her mouth almost from ear to ear. I had never seen her smile like that.

 

-You're not going to tell me that you don't remember your birthday. Leandro looked at her amazed.

-As you know? -It's in your membership file, Leandro.

 

He felt happy. He knew that his cheeks had turned red, the stove also made him hot and

 

sweaty.

 

-Which…? -Geraldine.

 

-Thank you.

 

Without daring to say more, to break the spell of that gray and cold afternoon in which he had found a warm refuge next to the fire that flowed from the books and from that woman's mouth, he quickly retreated, with the book under his arm. , towards the reading room.

 

But he couldn't concentrate anymore. He read but his mind wandered. Half an hour later he got up and went to the counter.

 

-I'm taking it home.

 

-Of course. Sign me here.

 

Their hands touched when he returned the pen. Her skin confirmed to him that she had been waiting for him all this time, but why had she hidden it from him until now, why had she feigned coldness. For the same reason as you, Leandro told himself, you never know what the other person really thinks or feels about you. And he left the library that night happy, thinking about what women know, about the world they hide and reveal only when they want.

 

She did not treat him coldly again. Every time I saw him enter, I would abandon their tasks to the other employees and attend to him. For a week before, she had had her hair braided and tied up at the nape of her neck. His brown eyes, intense and bright in the light of the fluorescent tubes, seemed to be larger than the narrow, dark space of the library.

Sometimes I would accompany him to the backyard, where a bench and a tree provided a place of serenity in the middle of the city. There they commented on books or places they had visited.

 

One day Leandro dedicated himself to watching her while she worked, fixing his eyes on the green sweater, barely bulging over her small breasts. As he looked back at the book, he met the gaze of the man he had seen at the counter. He seemed to want to say something to her, but he ignored him and stood up.

 

"That guy is annoying," he said to Geraldine at the reception. She looked over Leandro's shoulders.

-Yes, he always comes to take a nap, he's a loner…-. His voice broke, his cheeks turned

 

red, and he realized that this made the situation even more regrettable.

 

Leandro did not respond. Oh, the silence, he thought, as if he were reading from the pages he had once memorized. And so she decided to finally speak, ignoring whether she had a boyfriend, whether she could even feel interest in a man ten years older. He spoke, not as he had planned so many times, but like someone clinging to a boat after a shipwreck.

 

-Geraldine, I would like to go have coffee with you when you get off work.

 

-I can't tonight, I have to classify some books.

 

Leandro continued looking at her for a while, knowing that if he barely blinked he would reveal his disappointment.

 

"But tomorrow, yes, I would like it very much," she said a minute later. And they both smiled. Afterwards he returned to the reading room, but the man opposite had raised himself slightly from the table to speak to him in a low voice.

 

-You already have it, don't you? "Mmm..." he answered, ready to cut off the conversation before it began.

 

-Take care, friend, I'm telling you this because you seem inexperienced. Beware of women in general, and librarians in particular.

Leandro closed the hardcover book with a bang that echoed throughout the room, and quickly left the library. He felt, however, her eyes following him until he disappeared through the street door.

 

They went to the cafe on the corner of Callao and Córdoba. He knew the waiters and the atmosphere was familiar, comfortable. The traffic turning the corner when the light opened would fill the void of silence if it appeared. But there was no occasion for this. They talked all the time, stepping on the ends of each other's sentences in order to tell each other things.

 

"There is a story by Hawthorne, it is called "Young Goodman Brown," said Leandro. It seems to me an allegory of the world, of the appearance of what surrounds us.

 

-I do not agree with giving interpretations to fiction, it is best to take the stories as they are, with the mystery they have. She played with a sugar packet between her fingers.

 

-But there are stories that make sense when you interpret them, they are like music, they

 

 

get into you to recreate them. Look, in that story the protagonist grows up seeing people in one way, then, in the forest, he discovers that they are different, like an initiation.

 

"Like losing your virginity," she added.

 

-Yes, there is the interpretation, you see?

 

-But I don't like it, it trivializes history, I find it more interesting to think that there is a true transformation, then the world opens up and provides another light.

 

"A black light, in this case," he said, and she nodded, as if defeated but not convinced.

 

Outside, car lights illuminated the corner, pedestrians' scarves fluttered in the wind, white smoke billowed from their breaths on that cold night.

 

Leandro took her hands. She didn't resist, but perhaps she felt hurt, because he suddenly withdrew them.

 

"Well, it's late," he said, looking at the clock.

 

They always move away, he thought, always this barrier.

 

-I'll walk you home.

 

She let him do it despite begging him over and over again that he didn't have to go so far from the neighborhood. Need, that was the word she didn't seem to fully understand. He needed to accompany her. When they reached the door of the building in Palermo, Leandro approached to kiss her. She turned her head slightly to offer only her right cheek.

 

-Because? -He asked in her ear, feeling stupid for asking such a question.

 

She pretended not to know. He said good night and went inside. The glass doors separated them more than all those months they had seen each other in the library.

 

But he was naive. Why, he wondered, would she rush if perhaps she wasn't even sure of her feelings. With that idea, he headed out relieved to look for a taxi, and then it occurred to him to see the window of the apartment. I had told him it was the second floor, right on the corner. He crossed the street.

 

The light was on. A shadow came and went from one place to another in the room, disappearing for a long time, only to appear again. It was her, he guessed her face in her

 

silhouette, her small breasts under a white bra.

 

The figure grew, as if it were approaching the window to draw the curtains.

 

Leandro hid behind a parked car. But it wasn't just one person who looked out the window. The silhouette had unfolded when it was no longer a shadow, although the bodies were not yet two.

 

Leandro believed that the tiredness of his eyes was blurring the already deceptive shapes of the night. One face and another seemed to fold and separate behind the curtains. Then the blinds killed the light inside.

 

All night he tried to explain what he had seen, but interpreting led to madness. She had told him: you have to accept stories as they are. I hadn't even asked him if he lived with anyone. Next time he was going to do it, or maybe it would be better to continue with silence and not know.

The next afternoon, as soon as he entered, he realized how eagerly he had expected to see, behind the counter, what he had seen in the window. But Geraldine was her usual self. Her hair was loose, her pink blouse and the little gold chain around her neck.

 

-What are you going to get today, Leandro? -she asked him, distracted, as if she had forgotten what happened last night.

 

"The same story," he replied. I'm going to read that story again, I think I've lost something between the lines.

 

She raised her shoulders, as if to say "there you go." He returned with the book, and before handing it over, he put a piece of paper between the pages. Leandro sat down at a table and opened it. The paper said: "I'll wait for you tonight at the usual bar."

 

This time, however, his heart didn't race. Looking up at her, he only managed to come across the man who seemed to insist on declaring himself her protector. The guy winked at him, and he immersed himself in a book again.

 

Two hours later, he was waiting for her at the bar. She arrived and sat down, tired.

 

-Today I almost got into a fight with the director, she has me fed up. How do you get along with your boss? -he asked, while ordering some tea and toast.

 

-I don't fight, I let the problems go. Before I made trouble, I worried and I lost jobs, now I keep quiet.

 

Neither spoke for five minutes. Then he said:

 

-Look, Geraldine, if you live with someone, I don't want to get you in trouble... -Who am I going to live with? My parents are from Córdoba, my brother went abroad. I live alone. If I didn't let you in last night it's because I want to get to know you more.

 

-No, it's not because of that, it's…-. But she couldn't tell him what she had seen without giving away that he had been spying on her.

 

They stayed later than the night before. It was almost two in the morning and they found a taxi lost on a corner two blocks from the bar.

 

"Don't get off," she asked him, and kissed him on the lips. He watched her disappear behind the glass doors. The taxi took off, but three blocks later she told the driver to return to where she had gotten off. The car stopped again in front of the building.

 

-Turn off the lights.

 

The taxi driver frowned at him in the rearview mirror, but he obeyed. Leandro then dedicated himself to observing the second floor window.

 

Guessing what the driver must be thinking, he could see his obscene smile in the mirror for a second.

 

The light turned on. Almost the same routine of movements was repeated again.

Afterwards everything was dark, the blinds not lowered. I was going to order the taxi driver to take off, but then, in the entrance hall, the elevator door opened. Geraldine went out into the street wearing the same clothes she had come in, and began walking along the sidewalk towards the south.

 

Leandro paid and got out of the car without hitting the door. He knew that the taxi would make a noise when it started, and he hid in a doorway. But she didn't even turn around when she heard the engine.

 

He followed her for fifteen blocks. It must have been almost one in the morning when he saw her enter an old building, with garbage bags that looked like homeless people asleep on the sidewalk. She disappeared behind the door. I could no longer follow her, nor know more for that night. What he was sure of was only himself, his frustration and the wells from which

 

his pain arose.

 

He missed the library for two days. As in the afternoons when there was little work, he dedicated himself to taking inventories and throwing away old spare parts.

 

-What's the matter? -the boys asked him when they saw him more silent than usual. He shrugged, not looking at them.

"It must be a woman," said one of them, winking at the others. Women are not worth the suffering, you should know that by now.

 

They patted him on the back, laughing, and left him alone.

 

He found once again, as always when he took inventory, that old pistol on the last shelf on the back wall. The boss had told him that the previous owner of the place had left it, perhaps, forgotten, and like most of the things that were there, rusty screws, broken tools and wires, it had been abandoned for many years. It was now covered in rust, but the trigger worked. Many times he took it between his fingers and looked at it with interest, but soon he would put it back on the shelf and return to his work. But this time he grabbed her and began to observe her carefully. He began to clean it first with fine sandpaper, then looked for a brush to remove the dust and oil crusts from the barrel and barrel of the bullets. He looked at the caliber and serial number, wrote them down on a piece of paper.

 

That night, when he returned home, he unwrapped the packet of newspaper where he had hidden it and put it in the nightstand drawer, along with a strip of old aspirin and the book.

 

On the third day, he returned to the library.

 

"I'll give you the book back," he said to Geraldine. And I want to give you this. She took the bookmark he handed her and read on the back.

-But for God's sake, Leandro, I can't accept it. It's an autograph from Marechal. No, no, no way.

-I want you to accept it, I found it with my old man's things when he died a few months

ago.

 

 

-But you can't get rid of this treasure.

 

-It's a gift, I won't get rid of it.

 

She accepted and gave him a kiss on the cheek, while she said to him: 126 -Tonight.

 

They met at the bar, but didn't stay long. This time he took her through the glass doors of the building, and they went up to the apartment.

 

The luminosity he had seen from outside was different now, more homogeneous and less strange. The furniture was simple, covered with books, photographs and reproductions of paintings. Geraldine carried herself with the same scrupulousness as in the library. Careful, cautious, neat. She went to her room and came back with the same clothes but barefoot.

-The shoes kill me-. He went to the kitchen to prepare something. -Would you like to eat? "I'm not hungry," he said, as he looked at the spines of the books. They were treatises on

philosophy and history. He had planned the next scene hundreds of times in his head: the recrimination, the revelation and the outcome, and he could have written a book with that story.

 

Geraldine brought two glasses and a bottle of wine.

 

-It's the best thing I have in the refrigerator today.

 

Seeing that warm apologetic smile, he no longer dared to speak. They sat on the couch, each drinking a sip in silence. He made her put the glass on the table next to his. Then their hands touched, and he grabbed her wrist, then her arm. He put his hands around Geraldine's head, his thumbs resting on her cheeks. I kiss her.

 

He couldn't ask yet, he was sure of that. Not that night, at least, not with those lips abandoning her naked body on the couch, nor later in bed.

 

Only at dawn, in that uncertain, desolate hour, when the sun appears but the alarm clock has not yet rung, would he manage to speak. And when that hour arrived, he said to him:

 

-I have to ask you something.

 

-What's happening?

 

She was sleepy, with her legs out of the sheets and one hand searching for warmth

 

between her thighs.

 

-A few days ago there was a man in this room, and another night I saw you leave to meet another, probably in a seedy building in the direction of Eleven.

 

She looked at him for a few seconds, as if she didn't understand what she had heard.

 

-But...but what are you saying, I don't understand you. Are you serious? You are not one to lie or joke. But...why did you hurt me like that, just today …She had gotten up and was

pacing from one wall to the other, wrapped in the sheet, babbling explanations to herself.

 

-I'm the one who asks you why you hurt me like that. You gave me hope, and that's why you're worse than a whore.

 

-But how do you tell me that? Because I smiled at you and knew your birthday, do you think I was planning this? I liked you, until today I liked you, you were different... -And he started to cry.

 

Leandro sighed.

 

-So you don't deny it to me? -I don't have to explain to you, how are you going to believe me if you were following me.

 

Leandro didn't think he had made a mistake, her tears seemed like something out of a sentimental movie. How can I know, he asked himself, how to penetrate her soul as I did her sex. Then he began to count, without having premeditated it, lying down and still covering his thighs with the pillow.

 

-I once met a woman, but until she died, my eyes did not see the true face behind her face.

 

He moved closer to her left ear. She had sat back down on the bed, facing away from

him.

 

-What's behind your face? -he asked him.

 

Gerladine turned her body and looked at him with angry, watery eyes.

 

At seven in the afternoon, Leandro arrived at the library. He noticed in Geraldine's expression that she had not expected to see him again, but she must have guessed that this building and its contents had more power than anything else in the world. There was

 

something else, however, in Leandro's face that caught his attention. She raised her eyebrows and turned pale.

 

-What's happening? -his partner wanted to know.

 

-Nothing.

 

She continued filling out a form, but when she saw him approaching she changed places.

 

Leandro saw her go towards the bald man, the usual busybody, now leaning on the counter. They both spoke in low voices, glancing towards him from time to time. And sometimes they laughed.

 

He stayed at the reception for ten minutes, his heart racing with anger at seeing that mockery. I expected them to break up once and for all, but they were still together. Then he was definitely sure that they had both been making fun of him all this time.

 

He put the pen aside, damp from his sweaty hands, and approached them.

 

-Fucking bitch! -he said, directly to Geraldine. Her eyes widened in astonishment, then overwhelmed with shame, and she slapped him. She ran to the office and her colleague followed her.

 

Everyone in the library, the children with their little faces barely peeking over the counter and the teachers, were looking at him. The other guy hadn't moved, but was moving his head from side to side. Then he said, in a low voice:

 

-I knew you were inexperienced. Sleeping with them is never enough.

 

He put an arm over Leandro's shoulders and made him accompany him to the back patio.

 

Leandro felt people's eyes on him as they walked. He covered his face with his hands and let himself go. He tripped over a chair, over a door frame.

 

"Look," the man began to say, resting a hand on Leandro's thigh, caressing it. She is my friend, sometimes I go to visit her, but you will understand that we cannot be more than that... and she told me that she fell in love with you, until one night she went to tell me how happy she felt, she couldn't even wait for the morning , he doesn't have a phone, he knows that, I imagine... Leandro thought for a while, with an expression no longer saddened, but desperate.

 

"I will never be able to return again..." he murmured.

 

 

-What did you say?

 

-I won't be able to look at their faces. I was always afraid of what people think.

 

-Come on, no one is going to remember in a few days... -But she does, and as long as she's working here, I won't be able to set foot in this library again.

 

He was thinking, however, that he had never wanted the truth.

 

To see the soul of a woman is to see the back of her face. Certainty, she had once told him, is the same as losing one's virginity.

 

"I'll miss the library," he said, "and I don't know if I can handle it."

 

The man tried to stop him by holding him by one hand, but he broke away and ran to the bathroom. He looked in the mirror, his cheek still red from the blow. He left the library with one hand on the side of his face, to hide himself.

 

For three days he passed by the door. He glimpsed the light in the room, the movement of the people, and suddenly he realized how he envied those privileged people who lived in there as if in ideal worlds created by themselves.

 

It was for a woman who couldn't get in there again.

 

He felt the old anger again, as if it had looked in a mirror and decided that disguising it as compassion wasn't worth it. That's why I was going to leave a memory for Geraldine. Not a bookmark this time, nor anything that could be extracted from the books, and not because it was not written in any of them, but because he did not need to open any to do it.

 

He continued straight until Esmeralda Street, where he had been told that the best gun stores in Buenos Aires were located. In his pocket he carried the paper with the numbers that he had copied from the revolver.

 

The next afternoon, he waited in the bar until it got a little dark, and headed towards the library. The sky had clouded over, the drizzle hurt his face with small stings.

 

I enter. His raincoat was open, his shirt was wrinkled, his tie was loose.

 

He appeared to have not shaved and to have slept in his clothes. His hands, previously always occupied by a book, swung empty at his sides. The bald man followed him with his eyes along the hallway, as if wanting to guess the purpose of this unexpected entrance.

 

 

 

But Leandro walked past the reception without looking at anyone. He reached almost the back of the reading room, where he usually sat, and stopped in a shadowy space under a burnt-out lamp. He turned around. He was alone in that sector, a few were looking at him from ahead.

 

Geraldine had looked out into the hallway; She seemed scared, and began to approach him with slow and hesitant steps.

He reached into a pocket of his raincoat and pulled out his revolver. It would be a memory she wouldn't forget, like a pained cry on a beach on a moonless night. Then she put her hands to her mouth, but the indelible mark could never be covered, the paleness of the lightning sown forever.

 

-No! -He heard her scream, as she ran towards him, too slowly to arrive in time.

 

 

 

 

 

THE TUBA CASE

 

He did it in a chartered van, bringing his few pieces of furniture, four wooden and canvas chairs, a dining table, an antique wardrobe and a box with dishes and pots. The rest was already in the house he had rented in the middle of the block. The driver helped him unload the things and they left again.

 

Two hours later they returned, and this time he didn't want the guy to give him a hand.

 

-No no! Leave it to me! -I heard him say in a deep voice, very similar to the sound of his musical instrument. Then I saw him take out a large bell-shaped case from behind the truck.

 

"A tuba or a horn," my wife commented as we looked out the window, she had studied some music before we met.

 

"So we have a musician in the neighborhood," I said, and at that moment we saw Molina bring down cardboard boxes with vinyl records. I don't know how many there were, maybe twenty or thirty boxes of long-plays. He entered and left loading one after the other, alone, without letting the freighter help him. Then the truck left, and he continued bringing in the boxes that were left on the sidewalk. On the last trip, he tripped on a tile and fell to the ground. The discs scattered like playing cards.

 

"Go help him," my wife asked.

 

-Don't you see that he doesn't let anyone do it?

 

But I don't know why I said it. If it had been anyone else, I wouldn't have hesitated.

 

 

However, I disliked his strange, subtle mannerisms.

 

-Don't you think it's a bit effeminate?

 

She looked at me like I was talking nonsense. The guy was attractive, and my daughters began to pine for this man who put together his records with exaggerated care. I had no choice but to come out and offer my help.

 

-Neighbor, welcome to the neighborhood. Allow me... He watched me for a few seconds, standing up with dirty knees. I realized that all the recordings were by classical authors.

 

"How much I would give to listen to a little of his music," I commented.

 

-Likes?

 

-I don't know much, but my daughters have already tired me out with their usual groups. There is no variation for them... One Sunday at noon, we met.

"Hello, neighbor," he greeted me, smiling.

 

-We see you very little. When are you going to give us a recital? Suddenly, he stopped smiling and started the mower motor again.

"They wouldn't like it," he said after a while. Essays are boring and sometimes give the wrong impression. Why don't you and your wife go see me next Saturday. It's a bit of a long opera, but anyway... Tomorrow I'll bring you the tickets.

 

At that moment, a young woman, although with an aged face, appeared across the street. She had long, bleached hair tied with a pink ribbon, and she was wearing a short, provocative dress. She must have been beautiful once, I told myself. Now she was just somewhat attractive, almost brutally attractive. They approached him, holding on to each other without it being possible to pass a sheet of paper between the bodies. She entered the house without greeting me.

 

"The one I told you," he whispered in my ear, and followed her, forgetting the lawnmower on the sidewalk.

 

-Free to Colón! -my wife shouted with euphoria, upon seeing the tickets that Molina had put in the mailbox the next morning.

 

 

On Saturday I had the van washed so that it looked at least worthy of parking near the theater, we dressed in the best we had and I left the girls with my sister. It's just that watching opera or even going out on a Saturday night, after a whole week of selling encyclopedias, was already a habit that we had decided to forget. So my wife grabbed my arm in a way she hadn't done for a long time, and I felt happy.

 

The location was excellent, two solitary seats in a box to the right of the stage. And then we realized something we hadn't thought about in our excitement: the orchestra remained in the pit during opera performances. Molina took me for an idiot, I told myself. We paid attention to the sound of the tuba, since according to my wife, it was easy to identify and it did not have many opportunities to shine as a soloist. So when it rang we looked for it with binoculars. But the figures of the instrumentalists were very weakly illuminated by the light from the music stands.

 

At the end of the performance, we waited at the door for almost two hours. We went to a candy store across the street and watched the musicians leave. However, it did not appear. When we were about to leave—it was almost three in the morning—two men with violin cases got into a taxi and suddenly looked back, as if surprised. We then saw Molina, who greeted them, carrying the tuba case.

 

-See you Monday! -He still shouted at them from inside the confectionery, but they did not answer him. Then he crossed the street and went inside. Greeting us enthusiastically, he asked if we had enjoyed the performance.

 

"If we had seen you, we would have liked you more," I answered angrily.

 

-But why that face? -he said as he sat down, looking at us suspiciously.

 

"My husband insists on seeing you blow the tuba, and until you do he won't believe you," my wife said. I looked at her in surprise, not knowing if she was joking or reading my mind.

 

"Don't pay attention to him," I went ahead to tell Molina, who had turned pale. How much does this thing weigh?

 

I grabbed the case, and it was heavy, it's true, but it was more like something solid than a hollow, metal instrument. Then he took it from me abruptly, and my wife and I looked at each other in surprise.

 

-Shall we order something, a pizza? I'm starving-. He called the waiter and did not speak of the matter again.

 

 

A while later, my wife had gone to fix her makeup and Molina approached me.

 

-Now comes the mine that I mentioned to you, so go with your wife if you want. I don't think she likes meeting her. They are different, you understand?

 

On the way out, we ran into her. My wife went to look for the car and I watched them for a while from the sidewalk of the store. The blonde, with her grotesque appearance, seemed to deliberately try to resemble a whore, and perhaps she really was.

 

Almost three months later, the same woman began visiting him two or three times a week. They slept together and I cooked him simple meals. It was intense, maybe too much, he told me one day, the way she had become attached to him. Love or not, that routine was a renewal or extension of another one they had already had before the move.

 

Sometimes she seemed different, simpler, without artifice or overacting, as if she forgot that she had to pretend or hide. At times she was a beautiful girl, especially when seeing her in the garden accompanying him while he cut the grass. She remained silent with her arms crossed over her small breasts, wearing a pale pink sundress and her hair tied at the nape of her neck. In those few moments, I don't know why, he looked a little, just a little like Molina.

 

"She's a bitch," he told me. A fox in the body of a gazelle.

 

-Won't it be the other way around? -I asked him, and he laughed out of obligation.

 

Some time later we heard them arguing more and more often. We heard screams at all hours, desperate cries from her, who then went out with her purse and a purse in the middle of the night. The sound of her heels receded, retreated, and left again four or five times until finally dying on the asphalt. The music of a tuba echoed from the house.

 

One night, after hearing them arguing, I got up because I was worried. I put on my robe, went out and looked out his window, but I couldn't see or hear anything. Suddenly, she came out.

 

-What do you want, Ariel? You'll never see him play, forget about that-And he left, leaving the door open.

 

I entered the house, where the record player filled the atmosphere with a concert.

 

Peeking into each of the rooms, I found him sitting on the bed, in his boxers and with a kitchen knife in his hand. He looked at me scared, really embarrassed that I discovered him like that. He put the knife under the bed, went to the bathroom, urinated, and after washing his

 

face, he talked to me while putting on his pajamas.

 

-Tomorrow I go on tour, you know?, and I can't wait to leave it for three months. Find another guy, I told him. I do not need it. Come, have a beer.

I accompanied him to the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty. Then he went to the street door, I think thinking about his lover, looking for her in the darkness of the night.

 

-Look at this-. He showed me a passport photo torn from some document.

It was her a few years ago, and the resemblance between them left me speechless. "Good God," he said, moaning like a child, kneeling at my feet and wetting my robe with

tears and saliva. I love her so much... That night I stayed with him. I was afraid he would do something crazy. My wife came to pick me up at seven thirty to go to work, but I didn't tell her what I knew. Molina left without saying goodbye around noon. My daughters say they saw him take a suitcase and the case. The woman had returned around eleven, but he left alone. Apparently, they had to reconcile and she had stayed to take care of the house, because they didn't see her leave.

 

When I got back from work, I went to talk to her. I knocked on the door, as no one answered me, I entered. Everything was disordered, and there were stones on the table. As I picked them up, I remembered the night I weighed the tuba case.

 

A week later, we crossed paths on the theater block. Later, thinking about that moment when our lives crossed paths for the last time, I asked myself if it is chance, destiny or what other damn thing that makes us inevitably fall apart.

 

It was a Sunday noon. The sun was beating down on the sidewalk, the street was strangely deserted, and the light of the traffic lights was changing without anyone noticing.

 

My wife and I had gone for a walk downtown and sat in the square in front of the theater.

Just as we were about to leave, I saw him on the stairs of the main entrance, going up and down as if he didn't know where to go, or what to do with the case that was hanging from his right hand.

 

-Look, it's Molina! -I told my wife, and asked her to wait for me. I crossed the street, but he got scared when he saw me, he got nervous and even made a stupid attempt to escape. I held him by the arm, the one holding the case, which swung abruptly. A smell of stale eau de cologne reeked around him, however he had not shaved and his beard gave him the

 

appearance of a homeless man.

 

We were in full sun and not a shadow protected us from the heat. Therefore, a few minutes were enough for a different smell to prevail. The intense aroma of something fermented.

 

"I thought you were on tour," I said ironically, like when you reproach a friend.

 

I do not answer myself. I wanted to overcome his refusal, to make him confess his pretense.

 

He tried to get away from me, but I kept holding his arm. The case shook with a sound of muddy, clogged water.

 

-He came back, you know? -He began to tell me with something similar to horror in his voice-. She came back like so many other times, threatening to tell Mom the truth if I didn't set her free. But I saw in her face that this time she was willing to do it.

 

Molina collapsed crying on the sidewalk.

 

The case fell to the floor with a loud bang and the lid came loose, without opening completely. A nauseating liquid began to come out from the edges and spread over the tiles. But I didn't dare open it, I left that to you, Dr. Ibáñez, and your men who are fond of death.

 

 

 

 

OLD DAVID

 

I will never be able to forget old David's face when I approached to arrest him, on that corner of Viamonte and Pasteur, where he had had his tailor shop for more than forty years. After a time in the La Boca branch, I was assigned to the center when the attack on the Embassy forced increased surveillance throughout the city.

 

I arrived one winter morning, shortly before he raised the metal shutters, on which there was a sign announcing the temporary closure for mourning. The old man, who must have been sixty-five years old or so, went out in his impeccable black suit to sweep the sidewalk, shooing away the dogs lying on the threshold. I greeted him, and he responded with a barely perceptible gesture.

 

It wasn't until a few weeks later, when I found him by the door, that I tried to approach him. I started looking at the windows, at the mannequins dressed in the suits he designed and that I would have liked to try on at least once. Sometimes I stopped to observe carefully his employees, who cut the fabrics spread on huge tables. Men with thin bodies and glasses with

 

thick lenses, in shirts and ties, with scissors in their hands and a pencil resting behind one ear, while others worked with old irons forgotten by time.

 

This was characteristic of his business, the intention to maintain there the atmosphere of a time in which Buenos Aires had been very different.

 

-Do you want to try something on? -he told me one day. I had the wrong feeling at that moment that he was making fun of me.

 

"Since I joined the police, almost the only clothes I know are the ones I'm wearing," I answered.

 

-When the service is over, come see me to talk. Even if it is closed, knock.

 

That's how we spoke for the first time. But for a long time he never directly mentioned what had happened to his family. The night I entered the place and we chatted, he assumed that I was aware of all that.

 

-My wife is still sick in bed, you understand what I mean, it seems like she doesn't want to get better.

 

He didn't tell me anything about the day he took his daughter and grandson to the Embassy in the car. As he walked two or three blocks away, he heard the explosion. It was as if life suddenly stopped within a radius of two hundred meters, and then time resumed its course. That's what happened, the neighbors told me, that winter of nineteen ninety-two.

 

"One day a week he closes the business and goes to the cemetery, it's the only time his wife leaves bed," they told me later.

 

The night I visited him, he wanted me to choose some fabric, but I refused.

 

We went to the kitchen behind the store, and had something. After a while in which he seemed hesitant, he leaned close to my ear and I smelled his rancid breath, a vague mix of spices and alcohol.

 

"If I was sure of what I saw that day, if I at least remembered that guy's face for sure," he murmured, but at that moment I didn't understand what he meant.

 

Since then I stayed distant. It's difficult to approach someone who doesn't talk about what you only expect to hear. I didn't visit again after closing time for the next two years.

 

It took all that time to realize that there are things that cannot be told, facts that are simply impossible to relate or transmit effectively. The problem is what survives and shakes you with each new attack, with each repetition of the tragedy. I learned it one morning in June of 1994, when we heard the explosion, and a sparkle of glass scattered in the air, falling on the sidewalks like rain. I saw the glass of almost all the windows fall into pieces around the people who passed by, and I saw their faces hurt by fragments of glass or iron. I made my way through those who were running, scared, between the wounded, towards the column of smoke half a block away. An enormous cloud of dust rising from the remains of the Mutual building. Then I was afraid, but fear allowed me to walk over the rubble, despite the vertigo, of feeling almost faint from desperation. And yet I continued, raising my voice above the shouts, and my arms worked harder than they would for the rest of my life. Throughout the afternoon and night, my hands separated, as if I were some kind of elemental and domestic god, the living from the dead.

 

I don't remember in detail what happened next, nor the time that elapsed until the day we considered everything over and stopped the search. Those of us who participated in the rescue groups were given several days of leave. But I couldn't stay at home and do nothing, and I returned to the neighborhood.

 

David's business had broken windows and dented metal curtains.

 

Another poster, like the one from two years earlier, had been taped to the half-raised blinds. The neighbors told me that nothing had happened to him or his wife. That day I met his son-in-law. They both talked on the sidewalk, and then they went inside. The morgue vans continued to pass by from time to time, and the smell of burning was slowly overcome by the aroma of putrefaction.

 

When I returned to work, the windows of the entire block had already been repaired, and I saw David calling me from the door.

 

-Sir, how are you? Did it suffer a lot of damage? -The same shit as always, but that doesn't matter now, I have to tell you something... He put an arm over my shoulders and made me walk between the employees to the desk at the back of the room. On the back wall there were shelves and drawers of all sizes. That place was so old, so close to a familiar and endearing warmth, that I let myself be carried away by his words. He told me for the first time about the day his daughter and grandson had died. Lowering his voice, he said that when he left them at the entrance to the Embassy he saw the van that the television news later talked about.

 

-The van was parked right in front of me, no more than twenty centimeters from where I parked so they could get out of the car.

 

Listening to him, I started to think that just a few measly seconds more or less could have saved his family or killed him too. He continued speaking with increasing concern, rubbing his hands, always sitting in semi-darkness. The enormous piece of furniture, like a strange, watchful creature, seemed to be threatening me if I didn't believe the old man's story.

 

-I swear I saw him again, it was the same guy who was driving the van that day. He came even closer to me, almost touching my face with his lips.

-About five minutes before the Mutual exploded... -he continued counting -... I saw him pass in front of the business with a truck just like the previous one. He stopped in front of the traffic light, and when I saw his face I knew it was the same one. I don't know how I didn't have a heart attack at that moment. When I went in to tell my wife, I heard the explosion, and the stained glass windows collapsed.

 

David had become very agitated and paused to calm down.

 

-You know, it is impossible for me not to look carefully at every white van that passes by on this street.

 

If he thought about the foolishness of his statement, I didn't know and I didn't ask him.

 

I only made him calm down with somewhat cold words on my part, official phrases that avoided commitment, because after all many people there were watching us.

 

I don't think I would have mentioned it to anyone else, at least not to any other police officer in my section, in the following months. He went back to his old self when the neighborhood began to normalize, except for that obsession with which he watched every car that stopped on his block. He continued wearing those invariably dark suits, and the small round glasses. His wife didn't go out now, only the doctor came to visit her from time to time.

 

Two years passed before he insisted on his idea again. This time he didn't call me. I went to see him at the end of my shift because I wanted to make a suit for my son's baptism. It was November, and it was starting to get hot even at that time. He turned on the lights at the front door and we went to his office. He brought a mannequin on which he placed different fabrics of such quality that I didn't know how to explain my inability to pay for them. I think he understood me because he gave me a gesture of indifference.

 

I noticed he was more enthusiastic than in recent months. He took measurements of my arms and back width, but his hands were shaking. He left the pins on the table, and as he approached, I felt his tobacco breath flooding my senses like a drug.

 

-There is a man with dark eyes and a beard in a white van, which parks every day on the corner. He arrives at seven thirty in the morning, I can always see him from my room. I haven't slept in two weeks...

 

-But you can't suspect every person   I tried to convince him, but he continued talking,

becoming more and more agitated.

 

-Listen to me, this guy stays there for almost an hour, then he leaves and walks with large boxes to the avenue. Four hours later he returns alone and waits another half hour, until a woman comes up with him and they leave at two in the afternoon.

 

He took a breath and coughed, I patted him on the back a few times and begged him to calm down.

 

-He's watching us, don't you understand? It's been two years since the last time. Don't you realize that? Every two years, son, we are doomed! Fear moved his eyes. He looked from one side of the room to the other, looking for someone hidden.

 

"I'm going to take care of the problem," I told him, and I don't know why. The business and him were so old, that I felt sorry perhaps.

 

The worst of all is that the next morning, I saw the truck and the man he had told me about. As if his words had suddenly taken on a category of probable truth, I approached to question him.

 

-We sell books with my wife, officer. The merchandise is back here, see? he said, pointing to the back of the van, full of dictionaries and encyclopedias. There was nothing strange or suspicious. The documents said his name was Ariel Márquez, and the paperwork for the truck was also in order.

 

For two weeks the van kept coming, and old David called me every day to ask if I had any news, if I had been able to find out anything about the matter. I didn't know how to convince him otherwise without treating him like a crazy person. Maybe I should have acted differently, more harshly. I was very young then, not yet twenty-five years old, and without realizing it, I came to have a special respect for him. He ended up getting mad at me for not believing him, stopped calling me and didn't want to make the suit for me.

 

This lasted almost a month, and it helped me distance myself from his affection. But at the same time it prevented me from controlling his growing desperation, and I swear I never thought it could become so great.

 

On the morning of March 1, 1996, with heavy rain that had persisted throughout the night, at half past seven I stopped at the corner. The truck parked as usual, I greeted the man and went around the block. At seven forty I heard the shot. I ran back through the rain, tripping over broken tiles. I saw someone behind the vehicle with a revolver in his hand, throwing books onto the sidewalk. The ink rubbed off and stained the drains black. Then I recognized old David, with his back hunched and his glasses sliding down his nose.

 

He was screaming like a madman, asking for help to find the bomb.

 

-It has to be here! Water was falling from the driver's cabin, and it was red. I discovered the guy's body on the seat, with his hand still trapped in the door handle, and his head shattered by the explosion of a bullet.

 

 

 

 

 

THE BOYS OF THE SQUARE

 

He opened the window and a gust of cold wind wiped the sweat from his face. He took a deep breath of that wind that blew his straight hair, which was somewhat long for his age.

 

-Boss! -Fernández shouted from his desk, two steps from the window.

 

Then he realized that the papers from the last sale in Chile, arrived by fax, were flying towards the ceiling of the office like eagles from the mountain range.

 

"Sorry," he said, with his usual seriousness, austerity in words and gestures. He noticed, however, that they were observing him out of the corner of their eye, exchanging intelligent glances, smiles hidden by dark mustaches or the shadow of the fans that fought against the humidity of that autumnal and rainy Monday.

 

Only the skinny Bermúdez dared to approach him with all deference.

 

"Aren't you cold, boss, don't you want me to turn off the fans if you're going to leave the window open?" He held the two o'clock cup of instant coffee, stirred with a little hot water for ten minutes, until the foam bubbled as he poured the rest.

 

He did not then need to look at the clock of the attendance card machine. The day was divided into before and after that coffee prepared in the narrow kitchen on one side of the balcony that was almost never opened. He raised the cup, still looking towards the park.

There were the boys playing ball, the girls coming and going simulating the household chores that would await them much later like hands sharpened by time.

 

He thought about the balcony, only open on New Year's Eve when they all decided to celebrate together after closing the office. But like every time he had tried to be like the others, to join them by showing himself as he really believed himself to be, the idea collapsed

 

before midnight arrived. Along with the long faces and boredom that he saw in the employees and their wives forced to please their boss, he noticed for the first time the children setting off firecrackers in the square in front.

 

That was, perhaps, two years before, and he was amazed now at how many things had happened since then. Little Griselda, with blonde hair shining like ears of corn. The pretty Sara, with the dark eyes that looked at him so intently, almost reading his thoughts, the shadow of his ideas so far away from the sun over the square.

 

That end of the year, while the luminous stars were dying in the hands of the girls, he knew what he had to do, maybe tomorrow, or the first business day of the year, to get rid of the heated desire, the restlessness that had been in his body for a long time. longer than the life of fireworks.

 

The girls' dresses swayed, and the lips that their mothers had let them paint that night looked like cherries and cream, creamy white on their pale faces under the lightning of the sparklers or candles.

 

He stood looking stupidly at the illuminated square, with the glass of cider in his hand, while one of his employees touched his arm to wake him up and make him toast. The church bells rang twelve, and he came back to reality, barely smiling, barely blushing, and toasted them.

 

I knew that something was beginning, not the New Year, but the canal, the channel opened by force of fists soft like the cheeks of children who played. And like every afternoon at two o'clock, except for this one afternoon when he opened the window in the middle of autumn, Bermúdez's coffee spread its aroma of lost youth, of irremediable consolation. The coffee was recreation, the serenity with which he observed the smiles, the pleasures that his employees offered him to ingratiate themselves with him.

 

A murmur came from the cornered desks in each corner. The white shirts rolled up, the black ties, loose, agitated by the wind that hit the sweaty chests. Someone coughed.

 

The shadow of an immense cloud covered the city, the plaza, and entered the office, and he could no longer see them well. Just guess their presences. But Bermúdez, getting between him and the serenity of his spirit, between him and the future of the shadow he longed to reach to finally rest, turned on the lights. Then his face must have surprised them, because they looked at him as if scared.

 

-Okay boss?-. And it wasn't the faggot Bermúdez who asked, but Fernández's distressed voice.

 

-Yes, thanks-. But his hand trembled, and he turned toward the window. The children continued playing, the girls opened their umbrellas to cover the strollers with the toy babies. I had to protect them, save those smiles, those theatrical grimaces forever, preserve them for the eternity that the sky announced in the clouds formed and destroyed every minute, in the sun that made golden spikes grow in the girls' hair.

 

He closed the window. The curtains, gray from the car fumes, stopped swinging. The ties also quieted, and the men's fingers once again tapped on the keys of the typing and adding machines.

 

Bermúdez handed him a folder with the sales numbers for that year in Chile. He sat down, with his head resting on his left hand, and his right hand on the paper. But the numbers were white as the snow of the mountain range he had flown over when he went to play for the continental rugby championship. Other times, he thought, or perhaps he murmured under his breath, but no one heard him. I still felt, under that suit, his strong body despite having just turned forty-nine years old, his arms wide, his back straight.

 

He got up and went to the bathroom. While urinating, he looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. He was sure he could still seduce any woman he found, not just the ones he paid to please him every fortnight. I couldn't hug these anymore, I couldn't kiss them without smelling the aroma of other men. They were nothing more than organs without faces, without bones, sex without even a smell.

 

He returned to the desk, but not to the numbers. He looked through the window at the faint glow of the sun on the sidewalks, on the grooved tiles of the square, on the compacted earth where children kicked the ball toward imaginary arches.

 

"Gentlemen," he heard himself say, suddenly, without planning it, "I'm leaving earlier, I don't feel well." He ran a hand over his forehead covered in beads of sweat, and left without waiting for someone to ask him something.

 

When he reached the ground floor, the doorman greeted him respectfully, but in the hallway mirror he saw him make a mocking face as he walked away.

 

Before leaving, he lifted his pilot's collar, buttoned it painstakingly, and straightened his tie in the mirror. Yes, she told herself, he was attractive, and all the women who had met him must have thought the same. But they became inhibited, and any possible relationship was ruined in the silence, in the few sentences said before leaving forever. That's why he went to whores, and paid them to say I love you. And yet some refused, like that Claudia he had met in April, even though he was willing to double the price.

 

They were words that didn't sell, they replied.

 

He looked towards the square. The wind had decreased. Children played while mothers talked in the circle of cement benches under the pergola. He crossed the street halfway down the block. A guard, standing in the corner of the school, was barely visible among the mothers, apparently busy talking to the women and contemplating the hips that swayed under their dresses.

 

He, who had looked at them so much and cried for them, now had his eyes fixed on the girls, the only ones who never let him down, those who blindly obeyed, those who never suspected because they had not yet awakened to the dark side of life.

 

He sat on the edge of a flower bed. Some ants were climbing on the pilot. He shook abruptly, and it was then that he heard the laughter, before he even saw it. It was as if it came from the sky, from the few rays that fell, illuminating the square from time to time. He looked up and there she was, the little girl of maybe six or seven years old, freckled, with reddish hair, smiling like a newly incarnated angel.

 

-Do they tickle you? -she said, laughing, wringing her hands in front of her blue dress, dirty with mud from having played after the rain.

 

-No, but if I let them get into my pockets, I'm going to take them home, he answered.

They both laughed. What is your name? -Sofia.

 

The girl's legs also had freckles. The sneakers had left muddy prints on the tiles.

 

-Take off your sneakers to dry in the sun. Look, now it's peeking out.

 

They looked at the sky together, and blinked at the brightness that blinded them. She sat down next to him and began to untie her laces.

 

-You're going to have to help me tie myself up later, because I haven't learned yet. My mom teaches me, but I always forget.

 

-Don't worry, I have a special method that you will never forget.

 

Then he put his arm over the little girl's shoulders. They felt pointed, skinny but soft like green stems.

 

She searched her pockets and took out some candy.

 

 

 

-Do you want?-He accepted. They ate, and the wrappers fell into the puddles of water.

 

-Look! They are like little boats. And the tips of the red hair slid to the ground, touching the water.

 

-You will get wet. Where is your mom? -He has a mothers' meeting at my older brother's school.

 

-But he left you alone?

 

She looked at him for a while, serious, and leaned close to his ear. Her hands crossed his neck. He smelled the soft smell of childhood, the perfect aroma of the girl's hair. He thought he was suddenly lost in an abyss from which he would never return, the journey to heaven and hell at the same time, the great leap from which he was never going to recover or redeem himself.

 

"He left me with the other kids, and I ran away to play on the slide, but they're still busy," she murmured to him, and when she let him go, she asked him to keep it a secret. He nodded, putting his finger over his mouth.

 

"Shhh..." he said, and the girl smiled again.

 

The boys were coming out and blocking the narrow sidewalk and the street. The mothers approached, searching among the heads, dark or blonde, for their children.

 

The policeman got lost in the crowd and was never seen again.

 

The two looked towards the school, but nothing interested them, and they began to play with some figurines that he took out of a pocket and had tied with an elastic band.

 

"Look, this is the most difficult of all!" she shouted. You lend me?

 

-But you're going to get it dirty with your hands. Let me keep it until you leave. She watched the little figure disappear between his thick, rough palms, and then into the darkness of the inside pocket of the suit, protected forever from all danger.

 

Half an hour passed and Sofia had gotten tired of the figurines. Now he was walking on the edge of the flowerbed as if on a tightrope in a circus.

 

-It seems to me that your mother forgot about you. Wait for me here and I'll see.

 

 

He got up and started walking towards the school, but when he passed the fountain in the center of the square, he hid behind a statue. He waited five minutes.

 

He watched the girl, who did not move from her place, talking to herself with her imagination. Then he returned to her side.

 

-Your mom told me to take you with her. Come, give me your hand. Sofia clung to him, almost hanging on his arm, happy.

-What is your name, sir?

 

He hesitated before answering, but it wasn't something he hadn't anticipated a long time before. Since he saw Griselda, the one with the blonde curls. He had asked her the same question as soon as they spoke. And that time he answered as he did now.

 

-Jesus. My name is Jesús Méndez.

 

-But your name is like the little boy in the manger!-. Sofía's eyes shone, beautiful, curious, full of expectation.

 

-Don't worry, I'm too old to drag you along. Come on, let's go to your mom.

 

They walked towards the sidewalk. People looked at them for just a second, smiling at that couple of father and daughter, or young grandfather and granddaughter. He responded to the looks with a greeting, Sofia stuck her tongue out at the strangers. He realized that no one was talking behind him, they were not pretending to be friendly, nor was he a strange and isolated being in the middle of the human current. The girl was there to protect him, and he would return the favor, soon.

 

Then, he turned for a moment towards the office window. It was open, and some heads quickly hid. They were looking at him. He shouldn't have left early, and he wondered, for the first time all afternoon, why he had done so. He knew that everything could end because of that single mistake, and such an idea nevertheless brought him a strange feeling of relief. But his face darkened, he was afraid of the pain of the end, and he squeezed Sofia's hand tightly.

 

-Oh, it hurts! "Forgive me," he said, he loosened his hand and the girl sang again as they walked.

 

He quickened his pace and they reached the car. Open the door.

 

-I came up to take you to mom.

 

-But my mom is on the other side.............. She looked around, hesitating, the square was large

and many people had passed by, transforming the place again and again since they were there. He put his fingers in his mouth and bit his nails. -I think it was there, but I don't know...

 

-Don't worry.

 

He tried to push her onto the seat, gently. She also gently resisted, as if it were wrong to doubt that kind man who called himself like God. Jesus' hands had taken her arms and lifted her off the ground to sit her in the car.

 

-The figurine! -he shouted, suddenly remembering.

 

-I'll give it back to you when we get there-. But she looked at the pocket where he had kept it, and that thought seemed to dominate her ever since.

 

He closed the door, started the engine, and took one last look at the office window. It was closed, or perhaps the late afternoon fog made it look that way. It was half past five, and everyone must have been going down the stairs. She looked at the girl, who was looking askance at her pocket, serious, perhaps distrustful of being in that car with such a strange smell.

 

-What an ugly smell! -Cigarettes, Sofia. Don't your parents smoke? -Mom yes.

 

Moms smoke, he thought, the ones who say I love you without selling themselves. It started.

 

They walked down street after street, they turned many corners that the girl watched absorbed and always kneeling on the seat, with her hands resting on the window.

 

-We are far from home, Jesus-. She was looking at him and her lips were trembling, on the verge of crying. This time he didn't respond. Only after a while, seeing her tearing in silence, did he say to her:

 

-We're here.

 

The daylight turned into darkness as we entered the darkness of the garage. The guard was talking on the phone in his cabin and barely greeted him. The car spiraled up two, three, four stories, and Sofía held on tightly to his arm, united to him again by fear. At the entrance to the top floor, a tape ran from wall to wall. The workers remodeling the apartment had

 

already left. The car broke the tape and parked in one of the back spots.

 

He stopped the engine. He put his right arm over Sofía's backrest and looked at her.

 

-I don't understand, let me out, where is mom?

 

He took her by the shoulders, and no matter how much she tried to move away, crying, he brought her closer to his body. Jesus began to hum a children's song that he had learned as a child. She never knew if they, the innocent ones, recognized her, she was never really able to find out. But the song calmed him down. It made him remember the afternoons when he slept in his mother's bed.

 

He held Sofia with his rock-hard hands. Then he placed his mouth on hers, silencing her. The screams stopped, the garage returned to the silence of spilled gasoline. Sofía's lips were now screaming into him, and he heard her inside him, in his chest. Soon she would be a part of him forever.

 

She kept trying to scream, but she was choking. His arms hit him, but they could do nothing.

And Jesus cried when he realized that those thin, forever pale lips would never again utter words of discredit or hurt anyone.

 

With one hand he held the head, with the other the body. Then he began to rock her, humming the melody of his childhood, the lullaby that speaks of children alone and lost in the shadows that advance at dusk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMMENTS FOR ANDRÉS

 

I see you crying in bed, while the midday sun remains behind the blinds, and I think that it was just this morning when we met in the cafe. You wanted to get back to Sonia, and you were hoping to call her when you left work this afternoon. You told me about his dedication to you all these years, despite the fights and disagreements. You'd never find a better one, you said.

 

But I also don't forget the way you started looking at the girl at the other table.

 

It was still very early. After almost a year without seeing each other, you wanted to chat

 

before going to the office to tell me about your decision. Only now, Andrés, did you realize the time, as if you had suddenly seen some gray hair in your beard when you shaved, more than fear allowed you to tolerate. Or maybe you found yourself talking to yourself in the mirror, in the messy bathroom, and getting no response.

 

But Sonia was losing importance in your words, while I looked out the window at the movement of the street. The musty smell of that bar brought back memories of your parents' house. I never knew where it came from exactly, whether from the wooden floor, sunken in the corners, or from the walls.

 

When I stayed to eat, I would observe the bas-reliefs on the chandelier in the dining room, the damp stains forming figures on the ceiling. But you and your parents didn't seem to care. They spoke as if the paint chips that fell on the table did not exist.

 

When your old man came home from work, while we were playing ball in the yard, we heard him knocking on the bathroom door.

 

-Give me a clean towel! -he told your mother. Then he entered the dining room with a scent of rancid cologne. They talked, yes, but you know what I mean. They exchanged words without really responding to each other. I raised my eyes from my plate hoping to discover the only moment in which their gazes would coincide. But before that, your old woman brought the platter of fruit, and he began to peel a peach until it almost fell apart between his fingers, drinking it into his glass of wine. His beard was stained red, then he changed suddenly. Because of her submissive attitude, serving him almost like a servant, she approached him to dry his face. First with one hand, then with an open palm, covering the cheeks and chin, rubbing it with a tenderness that increased with imperceptible intensity.

Their eyes, at that moment, met for the first time all day. You, suddenly, told me:

 

-Come on!-. We were going to play in your room. You closed the door, and the dining room scene was always truncated in my imagination.

 

At home, my parents always argued, so I couldn't understand your suspicion, if I can call it that. Your parents, although strange in certain things, seemed to love each other.

 

"I'm never going to get married," you said once, while we were listening to records. Your lips pronounced those words beneath the sound of the music, and I didn't dare answer you, I just didn't know what to say.

 

The tables were filled little by little. It was almost nine in the morning and I had to go into the office. When I wanted to talk to you about my wife, you put your hand on my arm, looking towards that girl. It's true, she was beautiful. Somehow all the women I saw with you looked

 

alike, even Sonia.

 

That's why I needed to tell you about her before you tried to call her, but your boastful mouth made me self-conscious again. You got up, and that gesture of boredom bothered me when I tried to stop you, as if you were saying that I was also getting in your way. Your way of seducing a complete stranger made me think about my clumsiness. I looked at the waiter, and I knew from his smile that he already knew you.

 

I remember the night the four of us had dinner at your house. We had a good time, and then this happened. I didn't understand anything, until my wife yelled at you:

 

-Pig, son of a bitch! I had never heard her talk like that. I saw your hand moving away from her and I knew what had happened. You were drunk, but at that moment I didn't care.

 

You received the blow of my fist with true pride, I could see it in your face. You apologized to me, while I tried to hold you. Your lips were bleeding, staining my shirt. I don't know what they would think when they saw us, but I couldn't let go of you. I took you to the couch and wiped your mouth with the tissue. It's just that I was always willing to forgive you because I envied your way of being with women, that challenge between naive and arrogant that I never had.

 

All night we talked leaning against the frame of the street door.

 

"I don't know if I love Sonia," you confessed to me. You also weren't sure you'd ever felt the slightest bit of affection for all the women you'd slept with. I thought about the faces of those I came to know, and I felt ashamed.

 

Then you cried, I resigned myself to putting up with your tears until you were sober. From the bedroom came the irritated, furious words of your wife and mine, while they were preparing your Sonia's suitcases. You then leaned against me saying, with irremediable certainty, that you were not capable of love.

 

Once, when we were kids, I saw you as scared as that night. I had arrived late to your house. Strange noises came from the bottom. The hallway was long, and in the darkness that an old lamp could never overcome, the sound of animals moaning could be heard, and I felt more curiosity than fear.

 

-What's happening? Are they the neighbors?

 

My question was innocent, I swear. I didn't mean to sound sarcastic. You, on the other hand, interpreted what I didn't mean. A few weeks earlier, at school, we had been given a sex

 

education class, in which we laughed and nudged each other as we looked at the illustrations. Afterwards there was no other topic of conversation outside of school. We all celebrated Bermúdez's witticisms, who imitated the cries of a female in heat with her fluted voice.

 

How not to remember it now, how to avoid remembering it that afternoon.

 

You pushed me and closed the door. I stayed on the sidewalk, smelling the humidity that came from your house, from the heavy, high door. I was going to insist, but when I thought of your face I didn't dare.

 

While I was reviewing files at my desk, at half past eleven I received the call. Your voice sounded very bad, like the one on the night of the separation. I talked to the boss, made up an excuse about a family problem and he let me out.

 

I found the hotel, this seedy hostel, with friezes eaten away by humidity and rain and two windows closed, as they always should be.

 

The rooms are condemned to darkness according to the encounters between those who do not so much want to see each other, but rather feel that fragmented human smell, divided by cosmetics, cigarettes and the aroma of time on the old walls. A construction very similar to your parents' house. That's why you chose her, I think. Yes I will know you, old friend.

 

I went in asking about the room, the concierge told me what had happened before and after seeing the man who fled the hotel. When I left him he was already lifting the telephone tube. I walked down the hallway and some whores hid when they saw me. I saw the door open. I found you in bed, almost naked, but I couldn't find traces of alcohol in your eyes. You were shaking and I covered you with the sheets.

 

-Don't explain anything to me.

 

You had, however, the need to do it. Then I saw the girl's body on the floor, on the other side of the bed, probably with her neck broken.

 

-We arrived, everything was fine. We take off our clothes, we lie on the bed. Then the guy appeared, I don't know where from...he was waiting here.... "Cry, let off steam," I told you with the minimal, lukewarm words of a friend.

-The guy grabbed my arms while she took my wallet and watch. And they laughed, do you understand me?, they laughed...

 

I patted your cheeks gently. Messy hair, face dirty with tears. So similar to little Andrés who greeted me one afternoon with the most unprotected expression I had ever seen in my life. You still have that face, after so many years, the same one that I will never have again even if I look in the mirror for hours, looking for some trait of who I was. That's why I hated you, no longer feeling my stomach turn at the thought that you were my friend, that I was your best friend, and yet I hated you.

 

-I put up with their jokes for a while, but they wouldn't go away. The guy wouldn't let me go and she said stupid things to make me nervous. When Mina told him to tie me up and he loosened my grip for a second, I threw myself on top of her.

 

You looked at your hands as if they weren't yours, stained with dried blood on the hair on the back. It only occurred to me then to squeeze them between my palms, like I did when we were kids, remember. It was the day after that afternoon, or perhaps later. We left school, but we didn't walk down the sidewalk to your house. We walked to the park, while some boys took off their overalls and hit the first ball of the game. You, without looking at them, started to talk. And meanwhile, I imagined every step you took in that house whose corners I didn't completely know, although I did know the atmosphere, the smell that offered each shadowy sector of my memories a defined, adequate setting. I saw your house at twelve at night. A floor lamp at the back of the living room. The dark dining room, only inhabited by the black silhouette of the table, the chairs pushed aside, the plates not lifted. Beyond the light, the hallway that led to the bedrooms. At the end, the door to the backyard, with its frosted glass that drew the shadows of the trees as they swayed in the wind. I saw you walk over the eternal remains of paint fallen from the ceiling, walk through the rooms in your forced insomnia. Waiting for the noises to quiet down, the unbearable moans next to your room. You had big pajamas, the sleeves exceeded the length of your arms, the pants were slipping off your hips.

 

But you couldn't be in the kitchen anymore, nor sitting in the darkness of the dining room.

Your eyes closed, and every scream, every call opened your eyelids as if there were an invisible finger in front of you.

 

-Andrew! They were looking for you. Losing hope that they wouldn't do it this time, you sank, like every night, into the despair that spread across your face.

 

Then you went, you obeyed, because not doing so was waiting for punishment the next morning. You saw the light, pale, yellow, coming out of the half-closed door of your parents' bedroom. And even if you knew what you would find, you looked out with the foolish idea that that night would be different. But the shadow of your mother's hand on the wall, like a huge spider, moved in signal of a call.

 

She was naked on your father's body, and his arm moved too, claiming you. You, with perspiration running down your body, dried your hands on your pajamas.

 

Then the pants loosened and fell on your feet. You didn't realize. Your eyes, big, scared, looked and didn't see. You only discovered it when you heard their laughter. Your old man couldn't contain himself, and she told him something like "poor guy, it's not his fault," laughing. He encouraged her, "but he's already a man," and asked you to come closer to the light. You no longer looked at them, but rather you looked down at your boxers, tense and wet from something that wasn't urine.

The janitor must have already done what I asked, and before the police come through the door, I'm going to tell you what I couldn't mention this morning. What I would have told you if you hadn't let yourself be entangled by that body of an indifferent girl, a deceitful girl, like everyone else. To give you my news in the best possible way, sparing you from this that you already did, this death that is next to us.

 

I can already tell you that my wife left me. After the night of the fight, I insisted on defending you, I told you before, and he abandoned me months later. I didn't call you because I was sounding too much like you. Drunk and stupid in my loneliness. But you don't have to worry anymore, not even about calling Sonia to wait for you to get out of prison.

 

I take care of her now.

 

 

 

 

GLORIA

 

I don't love her, and yet I've been looking for her for ten months. It is the imperative desire to keep her at my side that makes me follow in her footsteps.

 

Like when we lived together, and in the old bed in Almagro's apartment he told me about the problems he had gotten involved in. I must convince myself that it is not love, even though it is terribly similar, this need to miss her that my memory feels. Even more so at this moment that I think I have finally found her in the small house across the street, in this remote neighborhood of Lomas de Zamora, between wire fences and dirty dogs barking at the boys playing ball in the street. I've been sitting here for hours, and I'm trying not to attract the attention of the neighbors, but it's useless. People look at the car with curiosity, the women with their shopping bags, the children with their overalls open. In each one I hope to see Gloria, her unalterable beauty standing out amid the overwhelming signs of poverty. He could never convince me when he said that his place was among these people.

 

Ten months earlier he abandoned me, leaving everything he had brought: the curtains, the new sheets and the woven tablecloths on the nightstands, the coffee cup still with the mark

 

of his lips. Things she only brought to feel calm with the inevitable mandate of domesticity, although she was always different from other women. I remember the first time he confessed to having participated in the demonstrations, describing to me the wounded in the streets and the shootings against the walls of Defensa Street. He spoke to me about the future fall of the de facto government as if he were reciting an epic poem, beautiful and improbable.

 

Possibly I ran into her long before I met her, between the shootings, dodging bullets and tear gas, surrounded by the tumult. She persecuted, violent and scared. Me, with the recorder in my trembling hands, running from one sidewalk to another near Congress or the Government House. Crossing each other without knowing it, without imagining that some time later we would be in the same bed calling each other lovers, and suspiciously happy.

Almost a year had passed since the coup d'état, he spent more and more hours in his party meetings in some hidden place in La Boca.

 

He never wanted to tell me anything in detail, it was for my protection, he assured me.

 

A month after she abandoned me, I knocked on the editor's door to demand coverage of the attack. Because that morning I had heard the news on the radio about the explosion in the house of a military leader, and I remembered what Gloria had told me when she left: that they were about to do something important and I didn't want to commit myself, that our ways of life were incompatible. . She did it with her usual emotion, that gesture of melodramatic commitment. She left dressed as when she met her, with her pants slightly tight, her white blouse unbuttoned to just beyond the birth of her breasts, without paint or necklaces, just the harmonious movement of her brown hair falling on her shoulders. Now the soldier's house was destroyed, and the bomb seemed to have screamed Gloria's name as it exploded.

 

The publisher finally gave me permission, but first I had to sell it. I had to tell her that she was in my hands. He made me tell him about the way we met at the last assembly before the coup, the way we fell in love and I discovered what he did. I made up a story about how I had found out her plans just by taking her to bed and making love to her until I forced her to tell me everything.

 

"Betrayal and prostitution is the same ineffable virtue of women," I told my boss.

 

Then, like a child who lies for the first time, I realized that I couldn't back out. She had sold her name, the image of the violent and subversive leader that I never really got to know. That's why I needed to look for the other Gloria, the one who felt protected just by being with me.

 

The following week, I published an entire column dedicated to the guerrilla group blamed for the attack. At first it was data that other newspapers already had; The second week I

decided to hand in my interview with the mother of Gloria's friend. I visited Mrs. Fay in Belgrano, in a mansion that must have had the opposite effect that this woman wanted for her daughter Cristina, whom Gloria rarely mentioned. It's strange how all of them, activists, can hide their thoughts, or divide their minds into two parallel lives. Being lovers and at the same time strangers. Only men like me, those who have only one thought, are simple and as flat as anything useless can be.

 

Mrs. Fay spoke of her daughter in a derogatory manner.

 

-Since he was eighteen years old he started getting involved with those groups. I saw her return from the street with signs and that attitude of contempt towards everything we gave her, education, position, you understand what I mean. But no government is good for them.

 

-Did you meet his friends? -asked.

 

-Several times he held meetings in this house, while I was away, of course. When I found out and told him to leave, he laughed in my face.

 

He paused to search the desk for a piece of paper, which he handed into my hands. She told me that she accepted this interview only so that I could help her find out something about her daughter.

 

-Here, this is the last address I have for her.

I noticed that she was a little moved for the first time since we started talking, and she asked me what I knew about the people who disappeared in the arrests.

 

I thought, without telling them, that the earth was swallowing them.

 

The address that Cristina's mother gave me was a place in General Rodríguez, and before leaving, I stopped by the newsroom. The boss leaned close to my ear and murmured:

 

-Give me the manuscript, Beltrame. They pressure me from above and I have the rope around my neck.

 

Then I was calm, I guess it was tranquility, that feeling of doing something that everyone considers right except one, at least the smallest part of oneself.

 

When I arrived in town on Sunday afternoon, it was extremely quiet on the streets. Some

 

dogs barked and crossed paths, interrupting the established silence. I stopped at a gas station and asked which street I was looking for. The house turned out to be located at the back of a series of apartments arranged in a row. I knocked on the door.

 

"I'm a friend of Gloria's," I said to the woman who opened the door for me. "Are you Cristina Fay?" I stopped the door with my foot before it closed on me. -I need to talk to her, I was her partner and I miss her.

 

Hearing my own voice was like hearing another man pretend. I was speaking to him like a lover who feels alone, but I kept thinking about my article that was being printed in Buenos Aires at that moment.

 

When I convinced her, she made me enter a small, empty room, like those places that are only going to be inhabited for a short time. I continued talking to her and observing her beautiful eyes, although not as beautiful as Gloria's. However, her distrust did not subside, as if she could also hear the noises of the printing machines in my head. Approaching his ear, I spoke to him almost crying.

 

-You can't imagine how I miss her, so much that since her escape I haven't slept with anyone else.

 

Then I kissed his ear gently, placed a hand on his thigh, and he no longer resisted. Not even that cautious silence, which disappeared with frequent sighs. It was like breaking down the fragile barrier in his body in one fell swoop. My hands began to touch her breasts, baring them. Taking out that dress that was more of a housewife costume than a liberation fighter. His body was very thin, almost malnourished in the bony hips, in the flabby thighs, marked by burns and cattle prod marks.

 

But my mind was always wandering away, thinking about the words of my next note, and Gloria's face suddenly appeared to me. At that moment we finished, and I pulled away.

Cristina was exhausted, and from her lost look I knew that perhaps she would never get out of that bed again. My arms, I thought, my body, had been the last remedy, the ecstasy and electricity that heals and damages at the same time.

 

While I was dressing, she looked at the window several times, as if searching for something, but I ignored her. Then he looked at me for a moment, and began to rummage through some folders on the floor next to the bed.

 

"No matter what happens, never mention us," he told me as he handed me a piece of paper.

 

I left there with the crumpled paper in my right hand, a sheet of agenda with Gloria's address. She was perhaps his closest friend, and with whom he believed he had committed a personal betrayal, small and childish, perhaps, but which he was going to make up for by returning his lover.

 

When I returned to Buenos Aires, Mrs. Fay harassed me with her calls.

 

"It's not what we agreed on, you have distorted everything I told you," she complained from the phone, warning me that she would make me flee the country.

 

I looked for the morning newspaper and read an unrecognizable fragment of my note.

 

The faint glimpses of humanity with which I wanted to color the Fay family had disappeared. It was no use slugging into the boss's office.

 

Getting up from the chair, he pointed his finger at me like a gun.

 

"This is what they were going to do to you and me if I didn't change it." His voice became a murmur. -While you were fucking with that mine in Rodríguez, they were following you, and then they took her away. They even kidnapped an agenda that, like an idiot, he was not able to see.

 

I sat down, loosening my tie, and a cold sweat began to run down my back.

 

-Yesterday they called me again from upstairs. They gave me a whole list of people who need to be screwed, you understand what I mean? -. And he began to repeat, rubbing his face over and over again: -We're screwed... I went back to my desk and locked the door. The walls seemed to me like four men and eight imperturbable eyes. Any misstep involved me, and I was so afraid for my life that I was capable of only one act.

 

This damn reaction that has finally been responsible for my survival. I went back to the typewriter and started typing like an executioner.

 

I hesitated for a long time to continue looking for Gloria. I knew that his address was no longer on Cristina's agenda, so going to her meant burying both of us. Every week I prolonged my life by delivering my share of new names to the newspaper. Men or women suspected of subversive militancy were mentioned in my column, and if something happened to them, I did not want to know about it. But in the editorial office my colleagues were in charge of leaving me reports on my desk, notes of unexplained deaths, missing persons, raids and kidnappings that, when published, would change their names to others more in line with the prevailing desire to reassure the people. They left anonymous notes on the windshield of my car, and

 

treated me distantly, spitefully but fearfully, and I learned a new kind of respect. The tension every morning when facing the typewriter made me feel sick. Maybe my body was flagellating itself because of the faults of my mind. I was in bed for three weeks, with fever and meningitis that left me very weak. Only Gloria could save me from the fall that seemed inevitable to me.

 

That's why I came to Lomas de Zamora to look for his house. I have been waiting in front of the door for hours, enduring the cold of the morning and the surprise rain of the afternoon. But I haven't seen it. I get out of the car and blend in with the people, in case they're watching me.

 

From a corner I finally see her come out, as beautiful as ever. It occurs to me that she, with her mere presence, is capable of redeeming any man in the world. Look everywhere, and run towards the other corner, raising one arm to stop the bus. I know I don't have time to look for the car. The bus stops and she gets on, I run and catch up with him. He pushes those in front, they protest and I see Gloria turn around.

 

He has seen me. And from her look I realize that she is running away from me as if a criminal were chasing her.

 

-Please wait! -shouted him.

 

Maybe one word from him is enough to make me feel different. Not loved, not even forgiven, but different, other than myself or the man I have become.

 

The bus is full of people. I try to make my way. She sneaks among the passengers.

Someone gets in her way, and so I manage to reach her by extending an arm. I'm about to do it, I can touch with my fingers the blue coat that I gave him on his last birthday. He still has it, and it is a comforting sign that he cannot forget me.

 

Then he looks at me once more. I just hope to hear your voice. But all I get is a look of fear. Only fear. If he hated me, if there was at least an indescribable contempt in those eyes, perhaps that would be enough to justify me.

 

The bus stops at a traffic light, and she runs out. I follow her, but the door closes in my face. Now he's looking at me from the sidewalk, and suddenly two Falcons stop next to him.

 

-Open! -I yell at the driver, but he doesn't listen to me. Two men get out of the cars, grab Gloria by the arms and cover her mouth. She resists, kicks like an animal. People look out the window and murmur.

 

They have already loaded Gloria into one of the cars. They start and pass by the bus with the squeal of tires on the asphalt, crossing the red lights.

 

I stay still, surrounded by people who are watching me and saying nothing, surrounded by that unbearably accusatory human smell.

 

 

 

 

 

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

 

Lucas turned eight years old today.

 

I arrived at Lucila's house in the middle of the afternoon. The party wasn't going to start until six or seven, but they wanted me around to buy last-minute things at the store, carry bags and cases of soda, or entertain the kids when my sister and the other mothers sat down to rest.

 

"That's what I'm here for," I told him. As if I had nothing to do.

 

-And what do you have to do? -she answered me.

 

Kill me, I would have told him, prepare the plan to die on my nineteenth birthday. But I remained silent, and in his hard eyes, inflexible like Mom's, I saw, for a moment, just a hint of pity. As always, in order not to argue, we changed the subject, or in reality each one took care of his own thing. That's how we learned to live together after dad's death. The old man protected me. It was my armor, my shield against the verbal attacks tinged with affection from mom and Lucila. Men defended each other, and that was my way of growing up.

 

But my mind and my memory are one thing, my body another. That's what one of the many doctors I saw in the last eight years said and whose names and faces I no longer remember.

 

I know, however, that there are memories recorded in the body.

 

Like that day when I came running from the vacant lot on the other block, and opened the door of the house. The cat ran away meowing towards the kitchen. Dad looked out from there and then I choked my words, swallowed them with saliva and sweat. Because I discovered, even though my old man's face was the same as always when he argued with mom, that expression of bitter patience, that nothing was the same anymore.

 

The meow had been like the bell that announces a new round, or the scissors that tears the fabric, and in both things there is no going back. The smell of the fried food, the television on, the table prepared with the oilcloth tablecloth and the bottle of Coca-Cola were there like

 

every day. I heard Mom's voice as I passed without stopping in front of the kitchen door. His voice and the usual protests. At eleven years old, I already knew my mother's character. But this time I felt something was different.

 

When I sat down, she came over to put the bread on the table. Then I realized that she was crying with silent tears, unusual for her. Seeing that I had noticed, she wiped her face with her apron and looked at me. It was the first time I saw fear on my mother's face.

 

I was going to say something, I don't know what, but Dad appeared and begged me with his eyes to keep my mouth shut. He took her back to the kitchen, hugging her shoulders, while she rested her head on his chest, crumpling the sweaty shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was moaning, even though I didn't hear the crying, and Dad was crying too.

 

-Dad! -I shouted.

 

He raised his hand for me to sit back down. It looked like a large elm directing the growth of the beings around it with its large outstretched branches.

 

But the elm trembled, and it was the wind that came from the telephone that did it.

 

Mom left the arms of her man, who would never again be anything other than her husband. My mother's strong hands, the hands that raised two children without accepting help, lifted the tube. Dad followed her and put his ear to the receiver.

 

The comedian on television was still telling jokes, I guess, but no one listened to him anymore. The fries were burning, but no one smelled it. I couldn't understand what mom was saying, most of the time she was on the phone she just seemed to be listening. Then he cried again and dropped the tube. Dad started talking, he asked about Lucila.

 

-Where…? And I felt, for the first time in my entire life, that my sister was not just the girl who bothered me, the unbearable older sister who took Mom's side to make my life miserable. His body was also made of flesh and blood, it could also be broken.

 

-What happened? -I asked for.

 

Mom went to the bedroom. Dad shook my hair, with the saddest face I had ever seen on

him.

 

-I knew it was going to happen sooner or later! -he finally said, with the anger that was making its way into his face full of fear-. Let's go to the hospital, son! Your sister is sick.

 

I knew that Lucila was pregnant, not sick. She had married Marco, after fighting hundreds of times with my parents, because they said he was a bad guy. For a time Lucila brought him home every day.

 

He was nice, engaging, he talked about soccer, he accompanied me to foosball or the field sometimes, but they couldn't stand each other with mom. When he was leaving, my parents argued, and in the end he agreed with him.

 

"I don't know what it is about him that doesn't give me confidence," Dad commented, with his usual slow and thoughtful tone. But she did know. I couldn't give it a name, nor could it be seen at first glance as a physical defect. It was something in the way he spoke, in the click of his tongue, in the color of his teeth, perhaps.

 

-What do I know! But I'm not going to let them get married! They got married and went to live at Marco's mother's house. But the woman died five months later. At that time, Lucilla came home very few times. When Mom called her, my sister's voice sounded like a throat sore from crying.

 

But now, almost about to give birth, my sister was in the hospital, beaten, the doctors said. However, they did not talk about the baby or mention how hard the blows had been.

 

The boys arrived and started playing in the yard with my nephew.

 

Lucila was preparing the table with her friends, and turned to look at me. I watched the boys play, but she, as always, couldn't see me calm. Here it comes again, I told myself.

 

-How is the new doctor? -he asked, and that was a way of investigating me, of monitoring my mind. No one, for eight years, had allowed me to sit still for a moment. As if letting myself ramble was dangerous.

 

-Like everyone. But are you going to control me now?

 

Dad let you do what you wanted, and look at you, you don't work or study, you just wander around without any benefit.

 

-But stop fucking with me, you and mom won't leave me alone, they count every breath and word I say. It seems like they were afraid to let me grow.

 

I've grown up, if you haven't noticed, I've done things you could never do. Lucila just gave me a tense look, although I don't know if it was enraged or

 

compassionate. She, like my mother, had the peculiarity of loving but without showing it except with rigidity. Women, Dad told me, have so much love overflowing that they don't know how to control it and they get nervous.

 

Then we put together the boxes for the puppet stage. A puppeteer had come, but his partner was sick, he said, so Lucila quickly asked me to help him.

 

"Okay, little sister, at your service." She smiled condescendingly, her lips seemed like two edges that wanted to cut the air I was breathing.

 

With the guy we stood behind the curtain and started making up a story. I was a little surprised that the kids laughed at that story that seemed so ridiculously false and cheerful to me: two hunters who couldn't kill anything because of their clumsiness. When the story was halfway through, I thought it was time to season it with some emotion, and I grabbed a knife from the floor, with which we had cut the ropes that had tied the stage when we arrived.

 

"We can't go home without anything to eat," my character said. The puppeteer looked at me backstage.

-But there is nothing to hunt, little friend. Don't you feel sorry for the poor little animals in the forest?

 

Then I raised the knife with my doll's rag hands.

 

-No! Lucila's voice was the one that screamed, so strange in the middle of the party, as if a murderer had burst in, spreading blood around the children. sea of blood. Then my old man looked at me, pitying me despite the concern he must be feeling for his daughter.

 

-Go buy yourself a Coke at the bar, you're kind of pale. He gave me some coins. Mom didn't even look at me, she was staring at the door that led to Lucila's office.

A while later I returned to the waiting room. A doctor was talking to mom and dad. "They take her to the operating room," they told me later. There was nothing more to do

than keep waiting.

 

-Take a taxi home and sleep a little, tomorrow morning I'll tell you what happened.

 

-I don't want to, dad. I'm not sleepy.

 

"Do what I told you," he insisted, but then we heard shouting from the glass entrance door, then a crash of glass and new voices and knocks. The security people ran towards the counter, where a man shouted:

 

-My wife! What are they doing to my wife?! But I didn't need to look at Dad to know that he too had realized who I was. Gustavo struggled to free himself from the guards. For a moment, I felt sorry for him. Anger and then pity for that nineteen-year-old boy who didn't seem to realize what he was doing.

 

"He's on drugs," Dad said, and his fists trembled, as if at any moment they were going to hit his son-in-law. But he stayed still, crying, and my mother stood aside, looking at the elevator that took to the operating room.

 

We had known for a long time that Gustavo took drugs. Lucila had hidden it throughout their courtship. After getting married, he had begun rehabilitation that he never finished.

 

The guards walked past us with him, holding his arms.

 

Gustavo looked at us with hatred. His eyes were bright and his clothes had a strange smell. I looked at his arms, full of infected bites. Dad finally stood up and grabbed him by the shirt. The guards separated him, but my old man managed to grab his face and punch him almost lightly, and then spit him in the eye. But Gustavo didn't seem to feel anything.

 

-I'm coming to look for my wife! -he continued shouting. Then he took advantage of the fact that the guards had loosened him a little and let go. He took out a knife from his belt and began to threaten everyone like a cornered animal looking for its female. The people who had come to watch walked away, forming an empty semicircle around them.

 

It was one in the morning, few doctors were left hanging around the offices. The fluorescent lights formed sparkling halos above us. My parents and I were tired, we wanted to go home and wake up the next morning knowing that this had been nothing more than a bad dream.

 

But the reality of the lights was cruel. The razor's edge shone like our sleepy eyes. I saw Gustavo coming as a brilliant figure that surprised me with his brilliance, and I woke up to the contact of his hands. My daydream lasted perhaps thirty seconds, but it was too late when he grabbed my arm and placed the tip of the knife on my back. I had my face pressed against him, and although I tried to turn around, he held my head with his other hand.

 

-I kill him! -he shouted, going from one side of the waiting room to the other, without deciding, not knowing where to go. When he turned around to look for an exit, I saw the

 

frightened faces of those around us. There was an expression of fury on my old man's face that I would never see again. It was not my father's face, but that of that man I had never met before, because he had been asleep since the day he met my mother.

 

Gustavo opened the door to the infirmary, and without letting go we leaned against a counter. While the others were talking to him to convince him to give up, I saw a used surgery box next to the pool. There was also a scalpel blade with its handle, clearly showing among tweezers and needles, suture threads and bloody gauze.

 

I looked at my hands.

 

I wondered if it was possible that my hands were free, and I had not yet used them to defend myself. And while I heard the voices screaming, I grabbed the scalpel and stuck it in Gustavo's back. I didn't ask myself if it would take a lot of strength, if the human body was as hard as a stone or soft as a leaf. As the scalpel went in, I felt the smell, the sweet aroma, and the hot warmth of blood splashing on the side of my face. Gustavo twisted and we fell to the ground together. I had his blood on my lips, in my mouth, and I started vomiting.

 

My old man ran to look for me while the guards grabbed Gustavo and tied him to a stretcher. They took him to the operating room along the same path where Lucila had disappeared. Now they would be together again, I thought.

 

My sister was saved, and her baby was born by cesarean section prematurely, but healthy.

 

I went to and from the police station several times, making statements that my old man corroborated, as did all the witnesses. Mom didn't move from Lucila's room or the nursery. Dad, on the other hand, accompanied me every day to intensive care, where Gustavo was.

 

They had operated on him, but they said he was getting worse. He still had a fever and the wound did not stop oozing. They operated on him again and removed his left kidney; the blunt and broken end of the scalpel had remained inside.

 

Gustavo had no family other than us. I watched him from the living room door. I was afraid that when he woke up he would see me. And how was I going to stand his eyes, I wondered. At eleven years old, I knew I was more lucid than him the night I hurt him. He was an animal that wanted to survive, I was, on the other hand, a man who had planned his escape.

 

"If he dies, what do I do..." I asked my father.

 

-We already talked about it... I nodded, but there are things that cannot be transmitted, that remain and grow in one.

 

Until he finally died one night in therapy. I heard my old man tell my mother, when he returned home late, how they had disconnected the wires, removed the tubes, and covered the body with a clean white sheet.

 

"I killed him," I said, without looking at them. I repeated it over and over again until I fell asleep from exhaustion, but I didn't cry.

 

When Lucila and the baby left the hospital, I accompanied them in the car. They had told her what had happened. He said nothing. She looked tired, sad, and looked at me with a pleased smile. I was alone with a son, I had no more time for myself or my supposed sorrows.

 

But over time he began to dedicate time and efforts to me. I grew up, going through adolescence among therapists, and she guided me harshly, supported by my mother, who only had eyes for Lucila. Later, Dad died, and the morning we left the funeral home after the wake, before the iron figures of the two of them under the autumn sun, I felt myself fall into a large well born on the sidewalk. And in that well, swallowing me, pointing at me, was Gustavo.

 

-Kill! Die! Break life! -my cloth hunter with button eyes shouted, and the children looked on, amazed.

 

Lucila walked behind the cardboard stage and grabbed my wrist. We both remember. The strength of his hand went back in time, and I knew then, definitively, that his hand would never have hesitated to stop mine that night in the hospital. That's why, in front of the children who were waiting with suspense for the ending of the horror story I had chosen to entertain them, I was freed from half my weight.

 

-Let's live in peace, hunter! -said the puppeteer, and my little character dropped the knife.

The children cheered and ran to the table with the cake.

 

-Wait, we have to put out the candles! -Lucila said before they pounced on the birthday cake.

 

The candles were lit. The lights went out. My nephew's face lit up with a shy smile, looking even more embarrassed against that pale light. At that time he was very similar to his father.

 

Before blowing, he shook me by the sleeve and asked something in my ear.

 

"Yes," I answered. You can ask out loud.

 

I knew that Lucila was looking at me, suspicious, although I couldn't see her well. "I want my dad to come back," Lucas said out loud and with his eyes closed.

The silence of the darkness became even more intense. Even the children, who knew of their friend's orphanhood, murmured. My sister didn't have time to tell me anything, she kissed her son and asked him why he asked for that. She had never spoken to him about his father, nor had she cared until today to find out why the boy never asked about him. But he could no longer postpone answering. Without having yet blown out the candles, someone turned on the lights. The children sat down and seemed to forget. Lucilla looked angry, pressured to give an answer. Then Lucas looked down at the ground. But then he looked at me again, and said:

 

-Where is my dad?

 

Eight years, my God, in eight years I had seen hundreds of kids with their parents, and I was just asking today. No one could blame him, however. It had taken me all that time to find an answer. Death awaited me next week, when I turned nineteen. And still feeling the rest of the weight I had been carrying, I told my nephew, with a serene and sad voice of pain:

 

-I killed him.

 

Nothing weighed on my soul anymore.

 

I would tell my doctor, next time, that I would not take my life. Before the eyes of a child marked forever, I had found my longed-for peace.

 

 

 

 

THE MATTRESS MAKER

 

A closed street, next to the Villa Luro station, had no name. It was no longer than fifty meters, it began on Rivadavia Avenue to end on the tracks. In the neighborhood everyone called it "the mattress's cut", because on the corner was Don Álvaro's business, the same one that had belonged to his parents and that he had reopened after many years of absence.

 

He was a man of forty-five years old, short, thin, with apparently short and not very strong arms. However, he was capable of loading the heavy spring mattresses from the trucks in which the neighbors brought them to the interior of the premises. Then the vehicles left, and when the smoke from the exhaust pipes cleared, Álvaro could be seen through the stained glass windows, checking the surface of the mattress and writing in a spiral notebook. He always had a pencil resting against one ear, which he sharpened with a penknife he carried in his blue apron. In winter I wore a thick t-shirt, because I could never leave the door closed for

 

more than fifteen minutes. The neighbors came to greet him at all hours, even if they had nothing to order from him. They stood in the display case on the counter, where dirty samples of fabrics had remained for years without being renewed. Fragments of old almanacs hung on the walls.

 

At night the young people of the neighborhood gathered at the cut. They were children of families with money and elegant houses that stood on the other side of the avenue, children of lawyers and doctors. They smoked, changed addresses of brothels, and from time to time left the city to go to one of these places. Álvaro looked up from his work when he heard the laughter barely illuminated by the lights inside the premises. Sometimes the little brothers would arrive with messages from their parents asking them to come home for dinner.

 

Álvaro worked late every night, but since he almost always did it alone, he was late in his deliveries and the mattresses accumulated at the back of the workshop. They never reproached him. He knew how to repair mattresses like no one else in several surrounding neighborhoods.

 

"The springs no longer squeak," the men said.

 

"I sleep like I'm in the clouds," the women commented.

 

Then he nodded his head, because he was short of words. His bald head revealed the brown hair he had had when he was young. Curly hair stuck out from the collar of his shirt and the raised sleeves.

 

But his most constant clients were those from the clinic on the other block, the only ones with whom he met regularly because they paid him without delays. And yet, they were also the only ones he attended to casually and sullenly, as if his most profitable clients were also his least desired.

 

One day, one of the young men entered the business.

 

"Don Álvaro," he said, "my friends and I are wondering...since you are single and tough...I don't know if you understand me...if you would like to accompany us to a watering hole in Caballito, they won't let us enter unless it's with an older man." .

 

I swear we're not going to tell our parents anything.

 

Álvaro looked him in the eyes for almost a minute, and the boy believed that he had not heard him. Then he raised his shoulders, as if he didn't mind doing them that favor.

 

-You are from the Saravia, right? -Yes, don. You met my grandfather at the clinic, they told

me.

 

There was no malice or irony in the boy's voice, but it was the first time anyone had mentioned the past. The day Álvaro returned to the neighborhood, he had hoped that people would recognize him, but no one had noticed. Only the older ones later asked him about his parents. No one, however, ever spoke to him about the clinic for five years, and that offended him. How can they not remember my face and my brother, he had said to himself at the beginning. If he had returned it was only because he was already forty years old and had no prosperous business from which to live. In the neighborhood there was an uninhabited place, still in the name of his dead parents. And at the end of the day that was his neighborhood, there he had left his brother.

 

But he immediately changed the conversation.

 

-Tell your parents that the mattress is ready, and that your little brother will come help me next week.

 

The boy smiled, nervously swaying his long adolescent body, as he said goodbye.

 

On Saturday night they came looking for him. They took the train, walked the eight blocks to the brothel, and entered. Álvaro stayed in the living room, allowing himself to be caressed by one of the women, sleepy and drunk, while the boys entered and left the rooms along the dark hallway.

 

The following Monday, on the morning of the first day of his winter vacation, a ten-year- old boy came in as the mattress assistant. Parents sent their children every summer and winter during vacations.

 

The children returned happy from the mattress business, telling what they had learned, the threads and needles they had handled. Álvaro sometimes needed small hands to sew corners that his calloused hands could not even feel.

 

"I can't feel the thin threads anymore," he told his neighbors, and they lamented seeing those hands as hard as dry leather, contrasting with his still young, but always slightly dazed face.

 

"Álvaro needs a girlfriend," people commented. The poor guy feels alone.

 

Many of the children who had passed by his business were the teenagers who now gathered on the corner. Everyone had memories of the days with Álvaro, leaning on the

 

mattresses while they watched him sew under the weak lamps that hung from the high ceilings. None, however, returned on the following vacation, even if their hands had not grown so much that they were no longer useful to the mattress maker. They said they were not interested, as if there was something prearranged between Álvaro and the children, a bond, a verbal contract, perhaps never actually spoken, that stipulated that only the children would work for him. It was in Álvaro's clear but cold eyes, in his hands with stronger fingers than they looked, in his austere, dry and painful voice when he asked for something in the silence interrupted by the passing of the trains.

 

"Hello, boy," he said.

 

"Hello, Don Álvaro," answered Ignacio. My brother insisted that I come today without fail. He looked with timid eyes at the man behind the counter, who had looked up over his glasses with shattered glass and tortoiseshell frames.

 

-Come closer, don't be afraid, I'm not going to eat you. You didn't feel like coming, did you?

 

Ignacio raised his shoulders and lowered his gaze. The boy dressed well, but he knew that the parents were no longer as prosperous as when the clinic was renowned. In recent years they had closed services and fired several doctors. They said in the neighborhood that they were about to go bankrupt. The grandfather had died, and the father was no longer director of the clinic.

 

-Your brother forced you, that's more correct, I imagine.

 

The boy nodded. Álvaro took off his glasses and began to observe him with an amused air, as if mocking the child.

 

-You're skinny and have small hands, you're going to be perfect for the job.

 

"Come, let me show you," he made him pass to the other side of the counter, resting a hand on the back of Ignacio's neck. He explained what the tools were for, while they went around the tables with fabrics and walked towards the back, where the mattresses had been piled up for years. Abandoned mattresses never picked up by their owners, whose bills also accumulated in a desk drawer.

 

-I consider them as dead. The mattresses have been left here and the owners are now in their graves, but much less comfortable.

 

Ignacio listened to him without paying too much attention. He was attracted by the

 

rarefied and yet not entirely unpleasant air of the place, the pale lights that were lost in the background, dominated by the piles of mattresses, bags of tape, and the penetrating smell of glue.

 

At seven in the afternoon, the boy yawned.

 

-Enough for the first day? -My head hurts a little, don. The thing is? -…the smell of the mattresses, the smell of the people, it seems to me, I don't feel well.

 

-You'll get used to it in a few days. For years I have been fixing the clinic's mattresses.

You don't know the smell of piss that I have to put up with, the stains of blood impregnated. I leave them like new, but three months later, the same again. Broken, sunken, dirty. There is a different smell sometimes... Ignacio stayed waiting for him to finish, but Álvaro continued working as if that were the natural end of the phrase.

 

-Well, Don, see you tomorrow then.

 

-See you tomorrow, kid. And he greeted him by raising his hand with the needle, so you couldn't tell if it was a greeting or the routine going back and forth of his hand at the task.

 

In the morning, Ignacio came in yawning. The door, which used to be half tilted and stuck with the other leaf, made a squeaking noise as it opened.

 

-Do you deign to appear at this hour, Mr. Manager? Look at the clock.

 

-Sorry.

 

Ignacio looked down and immediately began to organize the tangled reels.

 

While they had lunch, Álvaro remained silent. It was only when he worked that his thoughts were translated into words, speaking almost without looking at others. Maybe that was, Ignacio must have thought, what Álvaro really needed, someone to talk to at work. A smile of satisfaction appeared on the boy's face, as if he suddenly understood things that were previously out of his reach, and understanding them would make him older and there would be fewer steps left towards maturity.

 

-What's happening?-Álvaro had surprised him in full smile.

 

-Nothing, I remembered something. "But look..." he said, suddenly, surprised to have

 

found something stuffed inside a mattress.

 

Alvaro nodded.

 

-Candy papers, pieces of worm-eaten plastic, people put everything in the torn seams because they don't get up and throw them in a bin.

 

They laughed, and this time it was Álvaro who was left with the laughter stuck in his mouth.

 

As Ignacio observed him, he explained:

 

-If I told you everything I found in these years. I told you about the clinic, right? He was famous many years ago. Your grandfather had founded it, and people came from the center and the west. My appendix became inflamed one summer, I was twelve years old at the time, and since my brother was my twin, the doctors recommended that we have surgery at the same time. Germán's name was my brother, and he was not happy that they operated on him to prevent, as the doctors said at that time, and to take advantage, as my father said. But in the end my brother allowed himself to be dragged to the clinic with the promise that he would miss school for two weeks. Álvaro remained silent again, but his smile did not disappear.

Then he repeated several times: -My brother, what a good boy he was…-. And he shook his head like someone remembering things that have never changed because they are fixed, repeated and dead in memory.

 

The third day passed almost unnoticed. The same customers, the same orders. Only the smell of grease while they lubricated the springs tinged certain dirty words that Álvaro muttered when something went wrong.

 

The next afternoon, a long moment of silence had preceded the endless recommendations that the old woman from the house across the street made to Álvaro.

 

-Very soft, and does not squeak.

 

Don Álvaro watched her leave, thinking that that same voice had shouted at him and his family, many years before, the insults that forced his parents to leave the neighborhood.

 

"Well stuffed balls, if you don't have someone to sleep with," he murmured, and when his eyes met Ignacio's, he winked.

 

-And they operated on them? -asked the boy.

 

Álvaro looked at him without smiling.

 

-They operated on us, yes. On a Wednesday at two in the afternoon. My brother was crazy scared, he had urinated on himself twice, even though we had been fasting since the night before. I, I don't know why, was calm. It must have been why people say we have twins, a special relationship, something that unites us like those wooden blocks that psychiatrists use. Complementary bodies.

 

Álvaro looked at the wall clock. It was six o'clock in the afternoon. It was getting dark.

There were no traffic lights or guards at that corner, so cars passed by without stopping. The mercury lights had just been turned on, and the luminosity of the dying afternoon was like a filter, a sieve through which the dew of the winter night was condensing on the sidewalks, on the walls with the shapes of humidity and old age

 

He closed the door, left ajar by the shaking of the trains. He returned to one of the tables in the back. He turned on the big lights, clearing the shadows of the mattresses towards the ceiling, like ghosts that had been sleeping until that moment.

 

-When you wake up from anesthesia, you feel in the worst possible way.

 

I had to wake up at twelve, maybe one in the morning. I only remember that a nurse was looking at me, and two other heads appeared and disappeared. They opened my mouth to give me pills, but I didn't feel anything.

 

The tongue was like a flavorless mint paste, so dry and cold, I say.

 

They were talking something, but I kept crying. The light in the room was very soft, although I had the feeling that it was shining right in my face, and people were coming and going from one side to the other. From one bed to the other. Then they turned off the lights and we were left in shadows, my brother and I. The creaking of stretchers could be heard in the hallways.

 

"German," I murmured. He didn't answer me at first.

 

"German," I said again. Then a moan answered me. I thought the lights had just gone out, but the ticking of the clock on the table made me realize the hour was late. My brother was trying to talk, he sensed it. That's when I smelled that smell for the first time in my life. An acidic, bitter metal aroma. I could feel it in my nose, I could see it in front of my eyes even in the dark. And my ears perceived the drip that I still couldn't see. "Mom!" I shouted.

Immediately the door opened and the lights revealed the color of that perfume that seemed older to me than the history they taught us at school. A nurse bent down, absurdly, to collect

 

the blood that fell from my brother's bed. A doctor ran in. Other nurses arrived with syringes, while the orders and comments followed one another without me understanding them. I stood up a little, but my throat and chest hurt. I saw that they injected something into the bottle that carried serum to Germán's veins. I don't know why I followed the path of the now empty vial, thrown into the metal container that the nurse carried in her hands, a little separated from her skirt as if she were carrying a dead baby. They turned off the main light and turned on the bathroom light. No more than ten minutes had passed when my brother's body began to gasp, and he turned red, his face swollen. I realized I couldn't breathe. A nurse came up to me and hugged me. I felt her breasts against my face. And I fell asleep while someone put something in my blood.

 

Alvaro now had tears on his cheeks. She lowered her head against the fabric she was sewing, dried herself, and looked up again.

 

-I woke up in the morning, and although I hoped it had all been a bad dream, I knew it wasn't. The light entered clearly through the white curtains of that elegant clinic on Rivadavia Avenue. The open windows cooled the room with the early morning air. I could smell the blood on the mattress next to me. He was sure that if he stretched out his hand, he could touch it, still wet. But the bed was empty and the mattress was bare.

 

Ignacio looked at the clock. It was nine o'clock at night. He had never stayed so late. "Go home and eat," Álvaro ordered him.

The boy didn't seem to know what to say. Álvaro wasn't sure how much the boy could have understood of all that, but he hadn't been able to stop. It was the first time he had related that with such accuracy. Perhaps he saw in Ignacio's face, so similar to his grandfather, the face of the doctor who had operated on him.

 

But before closing the door and leaving, the boy muttered a word that Álvaro did not understand, although it had sounded like an insult said at random, shouted into the cold breeze that flooded the neighborhood and covered the houses. There where people lived and condemned others.

 

For two days they worked without speaking about it again. Ignacio arrived early and left at the usual time, after looking at Álvaro with a mixture of shame and sadness at the same time. But Álvaro worked absorbed in his task, commenting from time to time on something inconsequential.

 

When the boy came in the following Saturday, they greeted each other as usual. They were busy all morning. Álvaro received orders and unloaded the mattresses. Some neighbors

 

came to look for the already fixed ones, and Ignacio climbed the piles in search of the wooden paper label tied to the fabric with a thread.

 

They had lunch, and it was at the end of the meal when Álvaro spoke to him again. They had closed, but they would stay working until five.

-Did you notify your house? -Yes, Don Álvaro.

 

-You know that today I pay you for the first week.

 

-Thank you, Don Álvaro.

 

-Always answering with monosyllables, you remind me of my brother.

 

He lifted the plates from the table, marked by knife cuts and dry, hard clumps of glue.

 

-You don't know the expression anaphylactic shock, do you? I didn't either when I was your age, but I learned it right away because that's what my brother had according to the doctors. They gave him corticosteroids for the inflammation, and it seems that killed him. They said they couldn't explain it, that even I, their twin, had reacted well. A scandal broke out. We were in the newspapers for a few days, but then the press didn't do as much sensationalism as it does now. Expert reports were carried out and the doctors were acquitted. The people of the neighborhood, the same ones who used to speak evil against the doctors, had gathered in front of the clinic to ingratiate themselves with them, because in the end the clinic gave prestige to the neighborhood. And they began to look at us as if we were Judas. Dad's business started to fail, and we had to leave. We never recovered. Now it is their children and grandchildren who live in the houses. They look at me and they no longer remember anything that happened, or maybe they don't even know it. I do remember my parents' fight. Do you know what it's like to see hate in the eyes of your parents? My brother was dead, and he didn't even need surgery. I knew that somehow they blamed me, even though they didn't say it.

 

She finished drying the dishes, put them in the cupboard and heated water.

 

-I'll make you a chocolate, would you like?

 

Ignacio looked at the street. Saturday afternoon at nap time was one of his favorite times. The sidewalks were almost deserted, even the traffic on the avenue had decreased. He turned his attention to Álvaro, whose voice seemed to fascinate him, eager to hear this different version of the neighborhood's history.

 

-When I finished school, I started working in a textile workshop. When I found fabrics identical to those of the clinic's mattress, I felt nauseous.

 

I ran to the bathroom and vomited. I washed my face. But in the mirror, haggard and pale, it was not my image that was reflected, but that of my brother Germán, with the same face as the day he died. And the background of the mirror was the color of his mattress. So I decided to study medicine, but my parents didn't want to.

 

So I pooled my savings from the factory and managed to stay studying for almost a year after leaving work. I shared a pension with a friend and my parents didn't find out. In the morgue, the bodies always looked like Germán to me, and the blood always had the smell of that night. I learned to dissect and explore bodies. But one day my parents found out and forced me to leave school, I saw the old reproach on their faces. I returned to work at the workshop, and the rest, as you imagine, is already known history.

 

He put the cup of chocolate on the table.

 

"This afternoon we have to catch up," he said later, and looked in the piles at the back for the clinic's mattresses, which had been waiting for repair for twenty days before. He brought the ladder and made the boy climb first.

 

-Look at the labels. You see them? So let me go up, I want to see if they aren't so moth- eaten that they can't be repaired.

 

He climbed the stairs and knelt on the mattress next to Ignacio. He felt the fabrics, and as soon as he pulled a little they would tear. The filling was caked and smelled like excrement. He made a disgusted face and the boy started laughing.

 

"Sons of bitches," said Álvaro. They all hide the shit of their souls in the mattresses when they get up, and when they go to sleep they rub themselves back in it.

 

There were no signs of joking in his voice this time, but rather a sullen, rough, knife-like feeling.

 

-When I woke up that morning... -he began to remember while tearing off the fabrics-...the soot from the cars and the dust from the street was stuck to the windows. They had taken Germán's body out of the room, but had ordered the maids to clean up later. The stained mattress and dirty windows: a beautiful landscape when you wake up. Then, in the dust of the windows, I saw some letters drawn. They were from Germán. He must have done it while he was dying in the dim light of the bathroom, because the windows had been clean the day before.

 

He looked at Ignacio intently.

 

-Can't you guess what they were saying?

 

The boy stayed thinking, as absorbed as if that were the most important task for which he had come to work.

 

-A bitch..., a request for help..., no, I don't think so.

 

-You are on the right track, son, much better than so many others who have passed through here. That's why I'm going to help you a little. What would you say to your brother, the only person you love in the world, even if he's that bum who uses you as an errand boy, at a time like that?

 

-I would tell him... Ignacio thought, rubbing his hair with one hand.

 

-A word that starts with "v"... -Álvaro helped him.

 

-Revenge! -Ignacio shouted, with a wide smile as if he had won the jackpot, but he immediately lowered his eyes, embarrassed. When he picked them up again, he saw that two tears were running down Álvaro's cheeks, through Saturday's unshaven beard.

 

Álvaro took Ignacio's face in his hands and kissed him on the right cheek. He was shaking, but he couldn't seem to control himself. The boy made efforts to free himself.

 

-It's okay, don, let me go a little... -I can't...son          And he continued crying while he picked

up the child, holding him by the neck.

 

-It hurts me! -Ignacio whimpered, while Álvaro got up.

 

His head almost touched the ceiling, and his feet sank into the squeaky mattress. The echo reverberated through the premises, but not a squeak would filter into the silent siesta of the neighborhood. Why would they suspect a sound of springs in the mattress shop.

 

The boy's feet dangled and swung in the air. Álvaro, despite his apparent weakness, lifted him as he did with his mattresses, much heavier than that body. Then he laid him down and covered his mouth. His hard hands did not even feel Ignacio's teeth, which hurt him as much as the fragile fangs of a puppy. He grabbed a mattress with his free hand, covered the boy and lay down on it, arms outstretched and legs spread.

 

Wait.

He felt the movements. He heard the muffled screams. The voice that reached him through centimeters of fabric and rubber, as if it traveled kilometers of distance and time, as if it came from years ago and asked for help that he would never receive.

 

Then he removed the mattress. He looked at the face, at the purple skin around the eyes. The mouth open in the interrupted scream. Head sideways, as if asleep. Closed fists. He tried to open her bleeding hands. The nails had small fragments of fabric. The legs were still. He felt her neck looking for a pulse that didn't exist. He took off his clothes, the gray shirt and pants. He covered it again with the mattress.

 

He went down and confirmed that the dirty mattresses could not be seen from the entrance of the business. He turned off the lights. He changed and burned the stained clothes along with the child's. He looked at the clock, it was half past four. From the half-closed blinds barely any afternoon light came in. On the glass, dirty with dust, someone from the street had written something, an obscenity, perhaps, and he remembered the letters on the clinic window.

 

At five o'clock, several boys appeared on the corner. He raised the blinds and looked around. When he saw someone a block across the street, he opened the door. They greeted him when he came out. Then Álvaro raised his hand and shouted:

 

-Ignacio! He took a few steps along the path. The boys were watching him, and he called out to the one the others relegated because he was shy and wore glasses.

 

-What's wrong, Don Álvaro? -It's this Ignacio, who forgot his salary for the week. Do you see it there? He pointed to a boy who was turning the corner at that moment, wearing a white t-shirt, almost the same color as the one Ignacio was wearing that Saturday. The boy adjusted his glasses and hesitated for a moment.

 

"I'm going to see if I can catch him," he said, and ran away. But when he reached the corner, the boy was gone. When he returned, he returned the money.

 

"Do me a favor, tell my brother to come get the money," Álvaro asked.

 

-Of course, don.

 

Half an hour later, Ignacio's brother was at the door, knocking with his knuckles.

 

-Excuse me.

 

-Enter.

 

-Is my brother there? -But he left at five, and he forgot the money. Here you go.

 

-I have not arrived yet.

 

-One of your friends saw him leave. Ask him.

 

-Yes he already told me. Well, maybe it must have already arrived on the way here. Thank you, Don Álvaro.

 

Álvaro shrugged his shoulders and saluted as if to bow.

 

As the door closed, he looked out the windows. The neighborhood was still just as quiet. People had woken up from their nap and were beginning preparations for Saturday night. He locked the door and lowered the blinds halfway. They had always seen him do the same thing, because he always worked late on Saturdays. The light from the store illuminated the corner for the 203 boys, and from inside he heard the screams or murmurs, and the empty bottles rolling across the tiles.

 

He barely distracted himself for a moment from his task to have a cup of coffee to put off his night's work a little longer. Anyone curious enough to see what he was doing could have seen him hunched over, cooking, repairing springs. But no one would bother to peek under the blinds. Álvaro worked for them, calmly, in a self-imposed isolation that bothered none of them. Álvaro's silence, correct courtesy, and his effective work had exempted him from the usual comments or gossip.

 

It was eight o'clock when there was a knock at the door. Ignacio's parents came to ask him if he had heard anything about the child. He saw the doctor's face, aged, with clothes that had been elegant but were now old. He must have barely been a teenager when his father owned the clinic. He had the same face as the old surgeon, the same correct manners. Now there was, however, a sign of servile domesticity in their expression, as if imminent ruin had dimmed their pride and they were the ones who needed it this time.

 

-Sorry, Don Álvaro, but we are worried about the baby. He's only twelve years old, and anything could have happened to him.

 

-If I understand. But I don't know any more than what I told his other son. We saw him turn the corner... The parents looked at the eldest son, and he turned towards the door,

 

already accustomed to being reproached for having neglected his brother. Álvaro put his calloused hands on the boy's shoulders.

 

-It's not your fault, maybe he ran away for some reason, kids keep secrets at that age, they feel isolated even from their older siblings.

 

-I hope that's it…-said the mother. He had been crying, it was evident in his dark circles.

 

Álvaro shook their hands and was cordial, correct and serious as they had always known

him.

 

The night was interrupted by neighborhood meetings, which he could not help but attend.

When everyone was dispersing, he went inside and lowered the blinds again. The big lights were already off, but he left the ones in the background on. He went to where he kept the tools, and looked at the forks, carefully, thinking. He chose a wide and strong one.

 

He climbed the ladder and took the mattress off the boy. He rested the knife on one of his shoulders and sank it to the bone. The blood flowed, and it was warm. It stained the mattress, but it absorbed it quickly.

 

He followed the same line of the cut to the hand, as he had learned in the college dissection room, the cut he had made several times on the dead dogs on the railroad grounds. He began to separate the meat with a curette. They were soft muscles that came off easily.

 

Barely the tendons offered any resistance. He cut the ligaments, and the bones came out almost clean and whole from the body.

 

He did the same with the other members, slowly, taking all the remaining hours of that night. In the thorax he sank the edge of the tip of an awl into the center of the chest, and broke the ribs with a chisel and hammer, as if it were the skeleton of a mattress. He took out the bones, left the viscera. He turned the body over. He tore out the vertebrae. He opened the scalp and peeled it away from the skull.

 

Álvaro's legs sank into the mattress, which overflowed with blood towards those below. He stopped to rest. The first light of day entered through the cracks in the blinds. He wiped his hands with a rag and went down to look out the window. The neighborhood was quiet, the cars on the avenue passed slowly on the sleepy Sunday morning. No one had ever come to bother him on a Sunday at that time.

 

He went to look for bags. He went up and put the remains of the body in them. He took down the bags and smeared them with glue. He took them to the incinerator where on Saturdays, every fifteen days, he burned the fragments of useless cloth and tape. The smell came out with the usual aroma, the deep smell of glue that the neighbors were used to.

 

In the afternoon, he had already begun to cut up the stained mattresses to burn them. A column of smoke came out for almost the entire day through the ventilation that overlooked the vacant lot next to the tracks. The people of the neighborhood did not pay attention to him. Two or three times they knocked on the door. He saw shadows behind the windows, he approached to listen, he heard voices that then moved away.

 

He thought for a while as he looked at the scattered bones, and began to break them with a gouge. When they were small enough, he began to crush them with a hammer. The bones were reduced to particles of sawdust. He placed them in a bag, closed it, and hid it under many other bags full of heavy, raw body.

 

Then he turned on the big lights again. He took a look inside the premises. Everything was clean, and he was very tired, but he felt protected by those same old walls that had housed his parents.

 

A police officer stopped by to collect reports on Monday morning. He entered the business looking around, even at the high ceilings barely illuminated by the early light. Álvaro gave no sign of noticing. He was thinking, perhaps, about the smell of burning mattresses, but the smell of the thoughts could not be perceived by others. The policeman closed his notebook and left, taking a quick, last look as he closed the door.

 

That same afternoon, Álvaro dedicated himself to taking handfuls of bones from the bag to place them inside the mattresses that he had ready to deliver. He mixed them between the tape and the structure of the springs. Then he sent one of the boys who were playing on the sidewalk to tell the clinic that the mattresses were ready.

 

The employee came to pick them up the next morning.

 

"You were more late than other times, old man," the man reproached him.

 

"You are right, and I apologize," answered Álvaro. But I think this time he will be more satisfied with the arrangements. And he smiled at her.

 

The other, who had never heard him speak more than two words, kept his mouth shut and began to carry the mattresses. He returned twice more in the following days to collect the

missing ones.

 

A week later, the bag was empty. Only a white powder remained at the bottom, and it burned her.

 

They looked for Ignacio on the train tracks, the wastelands and the hospitals. A court order ordered a search of the premises.

 

"Excuse me, Don Álvaro, it's the judge's order, you know, as it's the last place the boy was," said the commissioner, who had known him since he had entered that section as a corporal.

 

He didn't answer. He looked down at his work on the counter and let the police officers do it, and after half an hour, and without having found anything, they left, shaking his hand.

 

The boy's parents entered a while later. They looked even more haggard and defeated. The woman remained silent and looked down, she was thin and her gaze was lost due to the sedatives. The doctor approached Álvaro, extending his hand with a slight tremor. A lock of straight gray hair, which he didn't think he had seen the previous time, fell over his forehead.

"Thank you for your condescension with justice, Don Álvaro, please forgive us for bothering you," he said, shaking his hand and letting the coins that had been Ignacio's salary fall into it.

 

-If it weren't for you, who gives our kids jobs and keeps them away from vices. This... -he said pointing to the coins-...my baby will no longer need it.

 

The man wiped away some tears and left.

 

Álvaro sighed deeply as he watched him leave. But he wasn't going to cry, he didn't even feel like crying.

Illustration: Wild (Dan Hillier)