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The Dirty Kid
There are certain tricks to being able to move easily in this neighborhood and I’ve mastered them perfectly, though sure, something unexpected can always happen. It’s a question of not being afraid, of making a few necessary friends, saying hi to the neighbors even if they’re criminals—especially if they’re criminals—of walking with your head high, paying attention.
“Tell her, Sarita, tell her what you told me.” But Sarita pouts her lips like a silent-movie diva; she doesn’t feel like telling me anything. It’s better that way. I don’t want to hear the neighborhood horror stories, which are all unthinkable and plausible at the same time and don’t scare me a bit. At least not during the day. At night, if I’m up late to finish a project, and everything is silent so I can concentrate, sometimes I recall the stories they tell in low voices. And I check to be sure the front door is good and locked, and the door to the balcony, too. And sometimes I stand there
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I realized, while the dirty kid was licking his sticky fingers, how little I cared about people, how natural these desperate lives seemed to me.
The Inn
The Intoxicated Years
house, which seemed so far away. Paula took the ribbon from her hair and tied it around her wrist. Together, she and I went back into the house to dance. We were waiting for Andrea to leave the boy on the ground and come back to us, so the three of us could be together once again, waving our blue fingernails, intoxicated, dancing before the mirror that reflected no one else.
Adela’s House
I can’t get up the courage to go inside. There’s a message over the door that keeps me out. Here lives Adela. Beware! it says. I’m sure some kid from the neighborhood wrote it as a joke or on a dare. But I know it’s true. It’s her house. And I’m still not ready to visit.
An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt
Spiderweb
“We all make mistakes,” she told me. “The important thing is to fix them.” “And how does this get fixed?” “Babe, death is the only problem without a solution.”
End of Term
We’d never really paid her much attention. She was one of those girls who don’t talk much, who don’t stand out for being too smart or too dumb and who have those forgettable faces. Faces you see every day in the same place, but that you might not even recognize if you ever saw them out of context, much less be able to put a name to them.
No Flesh over Our Bones
The Neighbor’s Courtyard
He had her front door keys. The boy made them jangle and he laughed and his laughter was accompanied by a bloody belch. Paula wanted to run, but her legs were heavy as if in a nightmare. Her body refused to turn around; something was holding her there in the bedroom doorway. But she wasn’t dreaming. You don’t feel pain in dreams.
Under the Black Water
The cop came in with his head high and proud, his wrists free of cuffs, wearing the ironic smile she knew so well; he oozed impunity and contempt. She’d seen many like him. She had managed to convict far too few. “Have a seat, Officer,” she told him. The district attorney’s office was on the first floor and her window looked out onto nothing, just a hollow between buildings.
It was the most polluted river in the world, experts affirmed. Maybe there was one with the same degree of toxicity in China, the only place that could possibly compare. But China was the most industrialized country in the world; Argentina had taken the river winding around its capital, which could have made for a beautiful day trip, and polluted it almost arbitrarily, practically for the fun of it.
It was a dangerous place. She herself had left behind her little tailored suits she always wore in the office and in court, opting instead for jeans, a dark shirt, and nothing in her pockets except money to get home and her telephone, both so she could communicate with her contacts in the Villa and so she’d have something valuable to hand over if she was mugged. And of course her gun, which she had a license to use, was discreetly hidden under her shirt. Not so hidden, though, that the outline of its butt and barrel couldn’t be seen on her back.
She reached the platform the boys had been thrown from. She looked down at the stagnant black river and couldn’t imagine falling from up there toward that still water, couldn’t fathom how the drivers of the cars passing intermittently behind her hadn’t seen a thing.
“You know, for years I thought that rotten river was a sign of our ineptitude. How we never think about the future. Sure, we’ll just toss all the muck in here, let the river wash it away! We never think about the consequences. A country full of incompetents. But now I see things differently, Marina. Those people were being responsible when they polluted that river. They were covering something up, something they didn’t want to let out, and they buried it under layers and layers of oil and mud! They even clogged the river with boats! Just left them there, deadlocked!”
She ran between the precarious houses, through labyrinthine alleys, searching for the embankment, the shore, trying to ignore the fact that the black water seemed agitated, because it couldn’t be, because that water didn’t breathe, the water was dead, it couldn’t kiss the banks with waves, it couldn’t be ruffled by the wind, it couldn’t have those eddies or the current or that swelling, how could there be a swelling when the water was stagnant? Marina ran toward the bridge and didn’t look back and she covered her ears with her bloody hands to block out the noise of the drums.
Green Red Orange
When he stops talking to me for good I’m going to lie to his mother. I’ll invent fabulous conversations; I’ll give her hope. Last night he told me he wants to come out, I’ll tell her while we sip coffee. I hope he decides to run away while she’s sleeping her chemical sleep. I hope the food doesn’t start to accumulate in the hallway. I hope we don’t have to break down the door.
Things We Lost in the Fire
