Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

  “But death’s not a bad saint, either,” I told the dirty kid, who looked at me with widened eyes as if I were saying something crazy. “He’s a saint that can do bad things if people ask him to, but most people don’t ask for evil things; they ask for protection. Does your mother bring you back there?” I asked him.

  “Yes. But sometimes I go alone,” he replied. And then he tugged at my arm to urge me on toward the ice cream shop.

  It was really hot. The sidewalk in front of the shop was sticky from so many ice cream cones dripping onto it. I thought about the dirty kid’s bare feet, now with all this new grime. He went running in and his old-man’s voice asked for a large ice cream with two scoops, chocolate and dulce de leche with chocolate chips. I didn’t order anything. The heat took away my appetite, and I was worried about what I should do with the boy if his mother didn’t turn up. Bring him to the police station? To a hospital? Let him stay at my house until she came back? Did this city even have anything like social services? There was a number to call in winter to report someone living on the street who was suffering too much from the cold. But that was pretty much all I knew. 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.

  When the ice cream was gone, the dirty kid got up from the bench we’d been sitting on and went walking toward the corner where he lived with his mother, practically ignoring me. I followed him. The street was very dark; the electricity had gone out, as often happened on very hot nights. But I could see him clearly in the headlights of the cars. He was also lit, him and his now completely black feet, by the candles in the makeshift shrines. We reached the corner without him taking my hand again or saying a word to me.

  His mother was on the mattress. Like all addicts she had no notion of temperature, and she was wearing a thick coat with the hood up, as if it were raining. Her enormous belly was bare, her shirt too short to cover it. The dirty kid greeted her and sat down on the mattress. She said nothing to him.

  When she saw me, she was rabid. She ran at me snarling, there’s no other way to describe the sound she made. She reminded me of my dog when it broke its hip and went mad with the pain, when it stopped whining and would only growl.

  “Where did you take him, you fucking bitch? What do you want with him, huh? Huh? Don’t you even think about touching my son!”

  She was so close I could see every one of her teeth. I could see that her gums were bleeding, her lips burned by the pipe, and I could smell the tar on her breath.

  “I bought him an ice cream,” I shouted at her, but I retreated when I saw she had a broken bottle in her hand and was ready to attack me with it.

  “Get out of here or I’ll cut you, you fucking bitch!”

  The dirty kid was staring at the ground as if nothing were happening, as if he didn’t know us, not his mother or me. I was furious with him. Ungrateful little brat, I thought, and I took off running. I went into my house as fast as I could, though my hands were shaking and I had trouble finding the key. I turned on all the lights—luckily the electricity hadn’t gone out on my block. I was afraid the mother might send someone after me to beat me up. Who knew what could be going through her head, or what kinds of friends she had in the neighborhood. I didn’t know anything about her. After a while, I went up to the second floor and looked out from the balcony. She was lying there faceup, smoking a cigarette. The dirty kid was next to her and it looked like he was sleeping. I went to bed with a book and a glass of water, but I couldn’t read or pay attention to the TV. The heat seemed more intense with the fan on; it only stirred the hot air and drowned out the noise from outside.

  In the morning, I forced myself to have breakfast before I went to work. The heat was already suffocating and the sun was barely up. When I closed the door, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the mattress on the corner in front of my house. There was nothing left of the dirty kid or his mother, not a bag or a stain on the pavement or even a cigarette butt. Nothing. Like they’d never even been there.

  The body turned up a week after the dirty kid and his mother disappeared. When I came back from work, my feet swollen from the heat, dreaming only of the coolness of my house with its high ceilings and large rooms that not even the most hellish summer could heat up entirely, I found the whole block gone crazy. Three police cars, yellow tape cordoning off a crime scene, and a lot of people crowded just outside its perimeter. It wasn’t hard to pick Lala out from the crowd, with her white high heels and gold bun. She was so agitated she’d forgotten to put the false lashes on her right eye and her face looked asymmetrical, almost paralyzed on one side.

  “What happened?”

  “They found a little kid.”

  “Dead?”

  “Worse. Decapitated! Do you have cable, sweets?”

  Lala’s cable had been cut off months ago because she hadn’t paid the bill. We went into my house and lay on the bed to watch TV, with the ceiling fan spinning dangerously fast and the balcony window open so we could hear if anything interesting happened out on the street. I set a tray on the bed with a pitcher of cold orange juice, and Lala commandeered the remote control. It was strange to see our neighborhood on the screen, to hear the journalists out the window as they dashed back and forth, to look out and see the vans from all the different stations. It was strange to decide to wait for the TV to give us details about the crime, but we knew the neighborhood’s dynamics well: no one was going to talk, they wouldn’t tell the truth, at least not for the first few days. Silence first, in case any of the people involved in the crime deserved loyalty. Even if it was a horrible child murder. First, mouths shut. In a few weeks the stories would start. Now it was the TV’s moment.

  Early on, around eight o’clock, when Lala and I were at the start of a long night that began with orange juice, continued with pizza and beer, and ended with whiskey—I opened a bottle my father had given me—information was scarce. In a deserted parking lot on Calle Solís, a dead child had turned up. Decapitated. They’d found the head to one side of the body.

  By ten o’clock, we knew that the head was skinned to the bone and that the scalp hadn’t been found on the scene. Also, the eyelids had been sewn shut and the tongue bitten, though they didn’t know whether by the dead boy himself or—and this brought a shriek from Lala—by someone else’s teeth.

  The news programs continued with information all night long, journalists working in shifts, reporting live from the street. The police, as usual, didn’t say anything in front of the cameras, but they supplied constant information to the press.

  At midnight, no one had claimed the body. It was also known by then that the boy had been tortured: the torso was covered in cigarette burns. They suspected a sexual assault, which was confirmed around two in the morning, when the first forensics report was leaked.

  And at that hour, still, no one was claiming the body. No family members. Not a mother or a father or brothers or sisters or uncles or cousins or neighbors or acquaintances. No one.

  The decapitated boy, said the TV, was between five and seven years old. It was difficult to calculate because when he was alive he’d been undernourished.

  “I want to see him,” I told Lala.

  “You’re crazy! How could they show a decapitated boy? Why would you want to see him? You’re morbid. You’ve always been a little freak, the morbid countess in her palace on Virreyes.”

  “Lala, I think I know him.”

  “You know who, the child?”

  I said yes and started to cry. I was drunk, but I was also sure that the dirty kid was now the decapitated kid. I told Lala about our encounter the night he’d rung my doorbell. Why didn’t I take care of him, why didn’t I figure out how to take him away from his mother, why didn’t I at least give him a bath? I have a big old beautiful tub and I barely ever use it, I just take quick showers, and only every once in a while do I enjoy an actual bath…why didn’t I at least wash the dirt off him?
And, I don’t know, buy him a rubber duck and one of those wands to blow bubbles and let him play? I could easily have bathed him, and then we could have gone for ice cream. Yes, it was late, but there are big supermarkets in the city that never close and they sell tennis shoes, and I could have bought him a pair. How could I have let him walk around barefoot, at night, on these dark streets? I should never have let him go back to his mother. When she threatened me with the bottle I should have called the police, and they’d have thrown her in jail and I’d have kept the boy or helped him get adopted by a family who’d love him. But no. I got mad at him for being ungrateful, for not defending me from his mother! I got mad at a terrified child, son of an addict, a five-year-old boy who lives on the street!

  Who lived on the street, because now he’s dead, decapitated!

  Lala helped me throw up in the toilet, and then she went out to buy pills for my headache. I vomited from drunkenness and fear and also because I was sure it was him, the dirty kid, raped and decapitated in a parking lot. And for what?

  “Why did they do this to him, Lala?” I asked, curled up in her strong arms, back in bed again, both of us slowly smoking early-morning cigarettes.

  “Princess, I don’t know if it’s really your kid they killed, but we’ll go to the DA’s office once it’s open, so you can get some peace.”

  “You’ll go with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “But why, Lala, why would they do such a thing?”

  Lala crushed out her cigarette on a plate next to the bed and poured herself another glass of whiskey. She mixed it with Coca-Cola and stirred it with a finger.

  “I don’t think it’s your boy. The one they killed…They had no pity. It’s a message for someone.”

  “A narco’s revenge?”

  “Only the narcos kill like that.”

  We were silent. I was scared. There were narcos in Constitución? Like the ones that shocked me when I read about Mexico, ten headless bodies hanging from a bridge, six heads thrown from a car onto the steps of the parliament building, a common grave with seventy-three bodies, some decapitated, others missing arms? Lala smoked in silence and set the alarm. I decided to skip work so I could go straight to the DA and report everything I knew about the dirty kid.

  —

  In the morning, my head still pounding, I made coffee for us both, Lala and me. She asked to use the bathroom. I heard her turn on the shower and I knew she’d be in there at least an hour. I turned on the TV again. The newspaper had no new information. I wasn’t going to find anything online, either—the web would only be a boiling cauldron of rumors and insanity.

  The morning news said that a woman had come in to claim the decapitated boy. A woman named Nora, who had come to the morgue with a newborn baby in her arms and accompanied by some other family members. When I heard that about the “newborn baby” my heart pounded in my chest. It was definitely the dirty kid, then. The mother hadn’t gone sooner for the body because—what a terrible coincidence—the night of the crime had been the night she gave birth. It made sense. The dirty kid had been left alone while his mother delivered and then…

  Then what? If it was a message, if it was revenge, it couldn’t be directed at that poor woman who had slept in front of my house so many nights, that addict girl who couldn’t be much older than twenty. Maybe at his father: that’s it, his father. Who could the dirty kid’s father be?

  But then the cameras went crazy, the cameramen running, the journalists out of breath, everyone surging toward the woman coming out of the DA’s office. “Nora, Nora,” they yelled. “Who could have done this to Nachito?”

  “His name is Nacho,” I whispered.

  And then there she was on the screen, Nora, a close-up of her sobbing and wailing. And it wasn’t the dirty kid’s mother. It was a completely different woman. A woman around thirty years old, already graying, dark-skinned and very fat—surely the kilos she’d put on with the pregnancy. Almost the opposite of the dirty kid’s mother.

  It was impossible to make out what she was shouting. She was falling down. Someone, probably a sister, supported her from behind. I changed channels, but they were all showing that wailing woman, until a policeman got between the microphones and her sobs, and a patrol car appeared to take her away. There was a lot of news. I told it all to Lala, sitting on the toilet while she shaved, fixed her makeup, pulled her hair into a neat bun.

  “His name is Ignacio. Nachito. And the family had reported him missing on Sunday, but when they saw what was happening on TV, they didn’t think it was their son because this boy, Nachito, disappeared in Castelar. They’re from Castelar.”

  “But that’s so far away! How did he end up here? Ay, princess, what a fright this all is. I’m canceling all my appointments, it’s decided. You can’t cut hair after this.”

  “His belly button was sewn shut, too.”

  “Whose, the child’s?”

  “Yes. It seems they tore off his ears, too.”

  “Princess, no one’s ever getting to sleep again around here, I’m telling you. We may be criminals, but this is satanic.”

  “That’s what they’re saying. That it’s satanic. No, not satanic. They say it was a sacrifice, an offering to San la Muerte.”

  “Save us, Pomba Gira! Save us, Maria Padilha!”

  “Last night I told you the boy talked to me about San la Muerte. It’s not him, Lala, but he knew.” Lala kneeled in front of me and stared at me with her big dark eyes.

  “You, my dear, aren’t going to say a word about this. Nothing. Not to the police or anyone. I was crazy last night to think of letting you talk to the judge. Not a word about any of it. We’re silent as a grave, pardon the expression.”

  I listened to her. She was right. I didn’t have anything to say, nothing to report. Just a nighttime walk with a boy from the street who disappeared, as street kids often do. Their parents change neighborhoods and take them along. They join groups of child thieves or windshield washers on the avenue, or they become drug mules; when they’re being used to sell drugs, they have to change neighborhoods often. Or they set up camp in subway stations. Street kids are never in one place for long; they can stay for a while, but they always leave. Sometimes they run away from their parents. Or they vanish because some distant uncle turns up and takes pity on them and brings them home with him far away in the south, to live in a house on a dirt road and share a room with five other kids, but at least there’s a roof over their heads. It wasn’t strange, not at all, that the mother and child had disappeared from one day to the next. The parking lot where the decapitated boy had appeared was not on the route the dirty kid and I had taken that night. And the part about San la Muerte? Coincidence. Lala said the neighborhood was full of people who worshipped San la Muerte. All the Paraguayan immigrants and transplants from Corrientes were followers of the saint, but that didn’t make them murderers. Lala worshipped Pomba Gira, who looks like a demonic woman, with horns and trident. Did that make her a satanic killer?

  It did not.

  “I want you to stay with for me a few days, Lala.”

  “But of course, princess. I’ll ready my chambers.”

  Lala loved my house. She liked to put on music very loud and slowly descend the stairs wearing a turban and holding a cigarette: a femme fatale. “I’m Josephine Baker,” she’d say, and then she would complain about being the only transvestite in Constitución who had the faintest idea who Josephine Baker was. “You can’t imagine how rough these new girls are, ignorant and empty as a drainpipe. They get worse and worse. It’s hopeless.”

  It was hard to walk around the neighborhood with the same confidence I’d had before the crime. Nachito’s murder had an almost narcotic effect on that area of Constitución. At night you didn’t hear fighting anymore, and the dealers had moved a few blocks south. There were too many cops watching the place where they’d found the body. Which, said the newspapers and the investigators, had not been the scene of the crime. Someone had dumpe
d him there in the old parking lot, already dead.

  On the corner where the dirty kid and his mom used to sleep, the neighbors set up a shrine to the Headless Boy, as they now called him. And they put up a photo with a caption that said Justice for Nachito. In spite of the seemingly good intentions, the detectives didn’t entirely believe the consternation around the neighborhood. Quite the opposite: they thought people were covering for someone. And so the district attorney had ordered many of the neighbors to be questioned.

  I was one of the people they called in to give a statement. I didn’t tell Lala, so she wouldn’t worry. She hadn’t been summoned. It was a very short interview and I didn’t say anything that could help them.

  I’d slept soundly that night.

  No, I hadn’t heard anything.

  There are street kids in the neighborhood, yes.

  The DA showed me the photo of Nachito. I told her I’d never seen him. I wasn’t lying. He was completely different from the boys in the neighborhood: a round little boy with dimples and neatly combed hair. I had never seen a boy like that (and smiling!) around Constitución.

  No, I never saw black-magic altars in the street or in any of the houses. Only shrines to Gauchito Gil. On Calle Ceballos.

  Did I know that Gauchito Gil had practically been decapitated himself, his throat slit? Yes, the whole country knew the legend. I don’t think this has to do with Gauchito, do you?

  No, of course, you don’t have to answer my questions. Well, anyway, I don’t think they’re related, but I don’t know anything about those rituals.

  I work as a graphic designer. For a newspaper. For the supplement “Fashion & Woman.” Why do I live in Constitución? It’s my family’s house and it’s a beautiful house; you can see it if you go to the neighborhood.