Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

  We made friends with her because she was a suburban princess, spoiled rotten in that enormous English chalet tucked into our gray neighborhood in Lanús. It was like a castle and its inhabitants were lords and the rest of us, in our square cement houses with their straggly gardens, were serfs. We made friends with her because she had the best toys, which her father brought back from his trips to the United States. And because she held the best birthday parties, every January third—just before Día de Reyes and just after New Year’s—beside the pool where the water under the siesta sun looked silvered, as if made of wrapping paper. And also because she had a projector and used the white living room walls to watch movies, while the rest of the neighborhood still had black-and-white TVs.

  But above all we made friends with her, my brother and I, because Adela had only one arm. Or maybe it would be more precise to say that she was missing an arm. The left one—luckily she wasn’t left-handed. It was missing from the shoulder down; she had a small protuberance that moved with a remnant of muscle, but it was useless to her. Adela’s parents said she’d been born that way, it was a birth defect. A lot of the other kids were afraid of her, or grossed out by her. They laughed at her, they called her a monster, a Frankenstein, a mutant. They teased her by threatening to sell her to a circus, or that her photo must be in all the medical textbooks.

  She didn’t care. She didn’t even want to use a prosthetic arm. She liked to be looked at and she never hid her stump. If she saw repulsion in someone’s eyes, she was capable of rubbing it—her stump—in their face, or sitting very close to the person and caressing his arm with her useless appendage until he was humiliated, almost in tears.

  Our mother said Adela had a unique character, that she was brave and strong and set an example, that she was a dear, and had been brought up so well. “She has such good parents,” our mother always said. But Adela said her parents were liars. That they lied about her arm. “I wasn’t born like this,” she’d say. “What happened, then?” we’d ask. And then she told us her version. Her versions, more like it. Sometimes she said her dog had attacked her, a black Doberman named Hell. The dog had gone crazy, a common fate for Dobermans, according to Adela. She said their skulls are too small for their brains, so their heads always hurt and the pain drives them mad; their brains just come unhinged pressed so tight against the bone. She said Hell had attacked her when she was only two years old. She remembered it: the agony, the growling, the sound of his jaws grinding, the blood mixing with the pool water and staining the green grass red. Her father had killed the dog with one shot. He had excellent aim; when the bullet hit the dog, baby Adela was still clenched between Hell’s teeth.

  My brother didn’t believe that version.

  “What about the scar, where’s the scar?”

  She got annoyed.

  “It healed really well. You can’t see it.”

  “Impossible. You can always see them.”

  “I didn’t have a scar from the teeth. They had to cut my arm off above the bite.”

  “Obviously. There would still have to be a scar. They don’t just disappear like that.”

  And as an example he showed her his own scar near his groin from his appendectomy.

  “For you, because you had lousy doctors operating on you. I was in the best hospital in Buenos Aires.”

  “Blah blah blah,” my brother said, and he made her cry. He was the only one who could infuriate her. And, even so, they never really fought. He enjoyed her lies. She liked how he challenged her. And I just listened, and that’s how we spent the long afternoons after school until my brother and Adela discovered horror movies, and everything changed.

  —

  I don’t know what the first movie was. I wasn’t allowed to watch them. My mother said I was too little. “But Adela is the same age as me,” I insisted.

  “That’s her parents’ problem if they want to let her. I said no,” said my mother, and it was impossible to argue with her.

  “But why do you let Pablo?”

  “Because he’s older than you.”

  “Because he’s a boy!” shouted my father, meddlesome and proud.

  “I hate you both!” I screamed, and then I went to bed and cried myself to sleep.

  What they couldn’t do was stop my brother, Pablo, and Adela from taking pity on me and telling me what happened in the movies. And when they finished relating the movies, they told other stories. I’ll never forget those afternoons. When Adela talked, when she concentrated and her dark eyes burned, the house’s garden began to fill with shadows, and they ran, they waved to us mockingly. When Adela sat with her back to the picture window, in the living room, I saw them dancing behind her. I didn’t tell her. But Adela knew. I don’t know if my brother did. He was better at hiding things than we were.

  He knew how to hide things until the end, right up to his final act, when the only thing left of him was that exposed rib, the crushed skull, and, especially, that arm, his left one, lying between the tracks, so separate from his body and from the train that it didn’t seem like the product of the accident—of the suicide. I don’t know why I keep calling his suicide an accident. It seemed like someone had carried that arm to the middle of the tracks to display it, like a greeting or a message.

  —

  The truth is I don’t remember which stories were descriptions of movies and which ones Adela or Pablo made up. Ever since the day we went into the house I can’t watch horror films. Twenty years later and the fear is still there, and if by chance I watch a scene on TV, I take sleeping pills that night and I feel nauseated for days afterward, remembering how Adela looked sitting there on the sofa in her living room, her stump of an arm, her eyes transfixed, while my brother gazed at her in adoration. Really, I don’t remember many of the stories themselves. There was one about a dog possessed by the devil—Adela had a weakness for stories about animals—and another about a man who had chopped up his wife and hidden her limbs in a freezer and the limbs, at night, had come out to chase him, legs and arms and torso and head rolling and dragging themselves around the house, until a dead and vengeful hand strangled the murderer to death. Adela had a weakness, too, for stories about mutilated limbs and amputations. There was another about the ghost of a boy who always appeared in birthday photographs, the terrifying guest no one recognized, his skin gray and a broad grin on his face.

  I especially liked the stories about the abandoned house. I even remember the day our obsession with it began. It was my mother’s fault. One day after school, my brother and I went with her to the supermarket. She sped up as we walked past the abandoned house that was half a block from the store. We noticed, and we asked her why she was in such a hurry. She laughed. I remember my mother’s laugh, and how young she was that sunny afternoon, how her hair smelled of lemon shampoo and she laughed her spearmint gum laughter.

  “I’m so silly!…Just ignore me. I’m afraid of that house.”

  She tried to reassure us, to act like an adult, like a mother.

  “How come?” asked Pablo.

  “No reason, just because it’s abandoned.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t mind me, sweetheart.”

  “Come on, tell me!”

  “I’m just afraid there’s someone hiding in there. A thief, someone like that.”

  My brother wanted to know more, but my mother didn’t have much more to say. The house had been abandoned since before my parents came to the neighborhood, before Pablo was born. She knew that just months before they’d arrived, the owners, an old married couple, had died. “Did they die together?” Pablo wanted to know. “You’re getting morbid, sweetheart. I’m going to stop letting you watch those movies. No, they died one after the other. That happens to old couples sometimes; when one dies the other just fades away. And ever since then, their kids have been fighting over the estate.”

  “What’s an estate?” I wanted to know.

  “It’s the inheritance,” said my mother. “They’re fig
hting over who gets to keep the house.”

  “But the house can’t be worth balls,” said Pablo, and my mother scolded him for using a bad word.

  “What bad word?”

  “You know perfectly well. I’m not going to repeat it.”

  “Balls isn’t a bad word.”

  “Pablo, please.”

  “Fine. But I mean, the house is falling down, Mom.”

  “What do I know, dear, maybe they want the land. It’s the family’s problem.”

  “I bet it’s haunted.”

  “Those movies are a bad influence on you!”

  I thought they weren’t going to let him watch horror movies anymore, but my mother didn’t mention the subject again. And, the next day, my brother told Adela about the house. She was thrilled: a haunted house so close, right there in our neighborhood, barely two blocks away, it was pure joy. “Let’s go see it,” she said, and the three of us went running out the door, shouting as we ran down the wooden chalet stairs, so pretty (on one side they had stained-glass windows—green, yellow, and red—and the steps were carpeted). Adela ran more slowly than us and leaned a little to one side because of her missing arm, but she ran fast. That afternoon she was wearing a white dress with straps; I remember how when she ran, the left strap fell down over the stump of her arm and she adjusted it automatically, as if brushing a lock of hair from her face.

  At first glance there was nothing special about the house, but if you paid a little attention there were some unsettling details. The windows were completely bricked up. “To keep someone from getting in, or something from getting out?” The iron front door was painted dark brown. “It looks like dried blood,” said Adela.

  “You’re such a drama queen,” I dared to say. She just smiled at me. She had yellow teeth. Now that did disgust me—not her arm, or lack of one. I don’t think she brushed her teeth, and her pale, translucent skin was like a geisha’s makeup, making the sickly color stand out even more. She went into the house’s tiny front yard. She stood on the walkway that led to the door, turned around, and said:

  “Did you notice?”

  She didn’t wait for our reply.

  “It’s so weird, how can the grass be this short?”

  My brother followed her into the yard, and as if he were afraid, he also stayed on the stone walkway that led from the sidewalk to the front door.

  “It’s true,” he said. “The grass should be really high. Look, Clara, come here.”

  I went in. Entering through the rusty gate was horrible. I don’t remember it that way just because of what happened later. I’m sure of what I felt then, at that precise moment. It was cold in the yard. And the grass looked burned. Razed. It was yellow and short: not one green weed. Not a single plant. There was an infernal drought in that yard, and it was also winter there. And the house buzzed; it buzzed like a hoarse mosquito, like a fat fly. It vibrated. I didn’t run away because I didn’t want my brother and Adela to make fun of me, but I felt like fleeing home, to my mother, to tell her: Yes, you’re right, that house is an evil mask and it’s not thieves behind it, there’s a shuddering creature there. Something is hiding there that must not come out.

  —

  Adela and Pablo talked of nothing but the house. The house was everything. They even asked around in the neighborhood about it. They asked the newsstand vendor and at the social club; they asked Don Justo, who sat in the doorway of his house waiting for sunset; they asked the Galicians at the corner shop, and the vegetable vendor. No one had anything meaningful to tell them. But several people agreed that the house’s strange, bricked-up windows and dried-up yard gave them the creeps too, or made them sad, sometimes afraid, especially afraid at night. Many of them remembered the old couple: they were Russian or Lithuanian, very sweet, very quiet. And the children? Some people said they were fighting over the inheritance. Others said they’d never visited their parents, not even when they got sick. No one had seen them, ever. The children, if they existed, were a mystery.

  “Someone had to brick up the windows,” my brother said to Don Justo.

  “Sure they did. But some masons came and did it, not the kids.”

  “Maybe the masons were the kids.”

  “I’m sure they weren’t. The bricklayers were dark-skinned, and the old couple were blond, translucent. Like you and Adela, like your mom. Polish, they must’ve been. Something like that.”

  The idea of going inside the house was my brother’s. He suggested it to me first. I told him he was crazy. And he was, he was obsessed. He needed to know what had happened in that house, what was inside. He wanted it with a fervor that was strange to see in an eleven-year-old boy. I don’t understand, I could never understand what the house did to him, how it drew him in like that. Because it drew him to it, first. And then he infected Adela.

  They sat on the little walkway of yellow and pink paving stones that cut the yard in half. The rusty iron gate was always open, beckoning them in. I went with them, but I stayed outside, on the sidewalk. They stared at the front door as if they thought they could open it with their minds. They spent hours sitting there like that, silent. The people who went by on the sidewalk, our neighbors, didn’t pay any attention to them. They didn’t think it was strange, or maybe they didn’t see them. I didn’t dare tell my mother anything.

  Or maybe the house wouldn’t let me talk. The house didn’t want me to save them.

  We went on meeting in the living room of Adela’s house, but we no longer talked about movies. Now Pablo and Adela—but especially Adela—told stories about the house. “Where do you get them?” I asked one afternoon, and they glanced at each other in surprise.

  “The house tells us the stories. You don’t hear it?”

  “Poor thing,” said Pablo. “She doesn’t hear the house’s voice.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Adela. “We’ll tell her.”

  And they told me.

  About the old woman, whose eyes had no pupils but who wasn’t blind.

  About the old man, who burned medical books out by the empty chicken coop, in the backyard.

  About the backyard, just as dry and dead as the front, full of little holes like the dens of rats.

  About a faucet that never stopped dripping, because the thing that lived in the house needed water.

  —

  Pablo had to work a little to convince Adela to go in. It was strange. Now it seemed like she was afraid; they’d switched places. At the decisive moment, she seemed to understand better. My brother insisted. He grabbed her only arm and he even shook her. At school, the kids talked about how Pablo and Adela were boyfriend and girlfriend and they stuck their fingers down their throats like they were throwing up. Your brother’s dating the monster, they laughed. It didn’t bother Pablo and Adela. Me either. My only concern was the house.

  They decided we’d go in on the first day of summer. Those were Adela’s exact words one afternoon while we talked in the living room at her house.

  “The first day of summer, Pablo,” she said. “This week.”

  They wanted me to go with them, and I agreed because I didn’t want to leave them. They couldn’t go into the dark alone.

  We decided to go at night after dinner. We had to sneak out, but getting out of the house in summer wasn’t so difficult. In our neighborhood, kids played in the street until late. It’s not like that anymore. Now it’s a poor and dangerous place, and the neighbors don’t go out; they’re afraid of being robbed, they’re afraid of the teenagers who drink wine on the corners and whose fights sometimes end in gunshots. Adela’s chalet was sold and they divided it up into apartments. They built a shed in the garden. It’s better now, I think. The shed hides the shadows.

  A group of girls was playing jump rope in the middle of the street; when a car went by—very few did—they stopped to let it pass. Farther on more kids were kicking a ball, and where the asphalt was newer, smoother, some teenagers were roller skating. We passed among them unnoticed. Adela was
waiting in the dead yard. She was very calm, illuminated. Connected, I think now.

  She pointed to the door and I moaned in fear. It was open, just a crack.

  “How?” asked Pablo.

  “It was like that when I got here.”

  My brother took off his backpack and opened it. Inside were wrenches, screwdrivers, tire irons—my father’s tools that Pablo’d found in a box in the laundry room. Now we wouldn’t need them. He was looking for the flashlight.

  “We won’t need that either,” said Adela.

  We looked at her, confused. She opened the door all the way, and then we saw that inside the house there was light.

  I remember we walked holding hands under that glow that seemed electric, though where there should have been fixtures on the ceiling, there were only old cables sticking out like dry branches. Or maybe the light was like sunlight. Outside it was night and it looked like rain was coming, a powerful summer storm. Inside it was cold and smelled like disinfectant and the light was like a hospital’s.

  The house didn’t seem strange inside. In the small entrance hall was a phone table with a black phone, like the one at our grandparents’ house.

  Please don’t ring, please don’t ring, I remember praying, repeating it in a low voice with my eyes closed. And it didn’t.

  The three of us went together into the next room. The house felt bigger than it looked from the outside. And it was buzzing, as if live insects were swarming under the paint on the walls.

  Adela moved ahead of us, enthusiastic and unafraid. Every three steps Pablo said, “Wait, wait,” and she did, but I don’t know if she was hearing clearly. When she turned around to look at us, she seemed lost. There was no recognition in her eyes. She said, “Yes, yes,” but I felt as though she wasn’t talking to us anymore. Pablo told me later he felt the same way.

  The next room, the living room, had dirty, mustard-colored sofas shaded gray by the dust. Against the wall were stacked glass shelves. They were very clean and had lots of little ornaments on them, so small we had to get closer to see what they were. I remember how we stood there all together and our breath fogged up the lowest shelves, the ones we could reach; they went all the way up to the ceiling.