At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. They were tiny objects, yellowish white and semicircular. Some were rounded, others sharper. I didn’t want to touch them.
“They’re fingernails,” said Pablo.
I felt like I was going deaf from the buzzing and I started to cry. I hugged Pablo, but I didn’t stop looking. On the next shelf, higher up, were teeth. Molars with black lead in the center, like my father’s, who’d had them fixed; incisors, like the ones that bothered me when I started wearing a retainer; or sharp canines that reminded me of Roxana, the loudmouthed girl who sat in front of me in school. When I looked up to see what was on the third shelf, the light went out.
Adela screamed in the dark. My heart pounded deafeningly. But I felt my brother, who had his arms around my shoulders and didn’t let go. Suddenly I saw a circle of light on the wall: it was the flashlight. I said: “Let’s go, let’s go.” Pablo, though, walked in the opposite direction from the exit. He kept walking farther into the house, and I followed him. I wanted to leave, but not alone.
The flashlight shone onto things that made no sense. A medical book with gleaming pages open on the floor. A mirror hung near the ceiling—who could see a reflection up there? A pile of white clothing. Pablo froze; he moved the flashlight and the light simply didn’t show another wall. That room never ended, or its end was too far away for the flashlight to reach it.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” I said again, and I remember I thought about fleeing on my own, about leaving him there and escaping.
“Adela!” Pablo shouted.
We couldn’t hear her in the darkness. Where could she be, in that endless room?
“Here.”
It was her voice, very quiet, close. She was behind us. We went back. Pablo shined the light toward where her voice was coming from, and then we saw her.
Adela hadn’t left the room with the shelves. She was standing next to a door and waving to us with her right hand. Then she turned, opened the door, and closed it behind her. My brother ran, but when he got to the door he couldn’t open it. It was locked.
I know what Pablo planned to do: get the tools he’d left outside in the backpack, open the door that had taken Adela. I didn’t want to get her out; I only wanted to leave, and I ran out behind him. It was raining outside and the tools were scattered on the yard’s dried-out grass; wet, they shone in the night. Someone had taken them out of the backpack. We stayed still for a minute, shaken, surprised, and someone shut the front door from inside.
The house stopped buzzing.
I don’t remember how long Pablo spent trying to open it. But at some point he heard me yelling. And he listened.
My parents called the police.
—
And every day and almost every night I return to the rainy gloom of that night. My parents, Adela’s parents, the police in the yard. The two of us soaked, wearing our yellow raincoats. More police who came out of the house shaking their heads no. Adela’s mother fainting in the rain.
They never found her. Not alive or dead. They asked us to describe the inside of the house. We did. We repeated it. My mother slapped me when I talked about the shelves and the light. “Liar! That house is nothing but rubble inside!” she shouted at me. Adela’s mother cried and begged, “Please, where is Adela, where is Adela?”
“In the house,” we told her. “She opened a door in the house, she went into a room, and she must still be in there.”
The police said there wasn’t a single door left in the house. Nor anything that could be considered a room. The house was a shell, they said. All the interior walls had been knocked down.
I remember I heard them say “hell,” not “shell.” The house is a hell, I heard.
We were lying. Or we’d seen something so terrible that we were in shock. They didn’t want to believe that we’d even gone into the house. My mother never, ever believed us. Not even after the police searched the entire neighborhood, raiding every house. The case was on TV, and they let us watch the news. They let us read the magazines that talked about the disappearance. Adela’s mother came to see us several times and she always said: “Let’s see if you’ll tell me the truth, kids, let’s see if you remember…”
We would tell her everything again, and she’d leave in tears. My brother cried, too. “I convinced her, I made her go in,” he said.
One night, my father woke up and heard someone trying to open the door. He got out of bed and crept downstairs, expecting to find a burglar. Instead he found Pablo struggling with the key in the lock—that door was always tricky. He was carrying tools and a flashlight in his backpack. I heard them yelling at each other for hours, and I remember my brother saying please, he wanted to move away, and that if he didn’t move away he was going to go crazy.
We moved. My brother still went crazy. He killed himself at twenty-two. I was the one who identified his ruined body. I had no choice—my parents were at the beach on vacation when he threw himself under the train, far away from our house, near the Beccar station. He didn’t leave a note. He’d told me his dreams were always about Adela. In his dreams, our friend didn’t have fingernails or teeth; she was bleeding from the mouth, her hands bled.
Since Pablo killed himself, I’ve started going back to the house. I go into the yard, which is still burned and yellow. I look in through its windows, open like black eyes; the police knocked out the bricks that covered them fifteen years ago and they stayed like that, open. Inside, when the sun shines in, you can see beams and the roof full of holes and the ground littered with garbage. The neighborhood kids know what happened there. They’ve spray-painted Adela’s name on the floor. On the walls outside, too. Where is Adela? says one scrawled message. Another, smaller and written in marker, repeats an urban legend: you have to say Adela three times at midnight in front of a mirror, holding a candle in your hand. Then you’ll see the reflection of what she saw, the thing that took her.
My brother had also visited the house and seen those instructions, and one night he performed the ritual. He didn’t see anything. He smashed the bathroom mirror with his fist and we had to take him to the hospital to get stitches.
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
The first time he appeared to Pablo was on the bus during the nine-thirty tour. It happened during a pause in his narration while they rode from the restaurant that had belonged to Emilia Basil (dismemberer) to the building where Yiya Murano (poisoner) had lived. Of all the tours of Buenos Aires the company he worked for offered, the murder tour was the most popular. It ran four times a week: twice by bus and twice on foot, two times in English and two times in Spanish. Pablo knew that when the company appointed him as a guide on the murder tour, they were giving him a promotion, even though the salary was the same (he knew that if he did well, sooner or later the salary would go up, too). He’d been quite happy about the change: before, he’d been leading the Art Nouveau of Avenida de Mayo tour, which was interesting at first but got boring after a while.
He had studied the tour’s ten crimes in detail so he could narrate them well, with humor and suspense, and he’d never felt scared—they didn’t affect him at all. That’s why, when he saw the apparition, he felt more surprise than terror. It was definitely him, no doubt about it. He was unmistakable: the large, damp eyes that looked full of tenderness but were really dark wells of idiocy. The drab sweater on his short body, his puny shoulders, and in his hands the thin rope he’d used to demonstrate to the police, emotionless all the while, how he had tied up and strangled his victims. And then there were his enormous ears, pointed and affable. His name was Cayetano Santos Godino, but his nickname was El Petiso Orejudo: the Big-Eared Runt. He was the most famous criminal on the tour,
maybe the most famous in Argentine police record. A murderer of children and small animals. A murderer who didn’t know how to read or add, who couldn’t tell you the days of the week, and who kept a box full of dead birds under his bed.
But it was impossible for him to be there, where Pablo saw him standing. The Runt had died in 1944 at the Ushuaia penitentiary in Tierra del Fuego, a thousand miles away, down at the end of the world. What could he possibly be doing now, in the spring of 2014, a ghost passenger on a bus touring the scenes of his crimes? Pablo was positive it was him. The apparition was identical to the many photos that had survived. Plus, it was bright enough to see him well: the bus’s lights were on. He was standing almost at the end of the aisle, demonstrating with his rope and looking at the guide—at him, Pablo—somewhat indifferently but undeniably.
Pablo had been telling the Runt’s story for a while (two weeks now) and he liked it a lot. The Big-Eared Runt had stalked a Buenos Aires so distant and so different from today’s that it was hard to be disturbed by the thought of such a character. And yet something must have left a deep impression on Pablo, because the Runt had appeared only to him. No one else could see the apparition—the passengers were talking animatedly and they looked right through him, they didn’t notice him.
Pablo shook his head, shut his eyes tightly, and when he opened them, the figure of the murderer with his rope had disappeared. Am I going crazy? he thought, and he comforted himself with some pseudo psychology: surely he was seeing the Runt because he and his wife had just had a baby, and children were Godino’s only victims. Small children. On his tour, Pablo explained where, according to the experts of the time, the Runt’s predilection had come from: the Godinos’ first son, the Runt’s older brother, had died at ten months old in Calabria, Italy, before the family immigrated to Argentina. The memory of that dead baby had obsessed him. In many of his crimes—and his attempted crimes, which were much more numerous—the Runt imitated the burial ceremony. He’d told the detectives who interrogated him after he was caught: “No one comes back from the dead. My brother never came back. He’s just rotting underground.”
Pablo would tell the story of the Runt’s first simulated burial at one of the tour’s stops: the intersection of Calle Loria and San Carlos, where the Runt had attacked Ana Neri, eighteen months old, the daughter of a neighbor in the Liniers tenement. The building no longer existed, but the site where it had once stood was a stop on the tour, with a short contextualization to explain to the tourists what living conditions had been like for those recently arrived immigrants fleeing poverty in Europe: they were stuffed into rented rooms that were damp, dirty, noisy, unventilated dens of promiscuity. It was the ideal environment for the Runt’s crimes, because the squalor and chaos ended up driving everyone out to the street. Living in those rooms was so unbearable that people spent all their time on the sidewalks, especially the children, who roamed unchecked from a very early age.
Ana Neri. The Runt brought her to the empty lot, hit her with a rock, and once the girl was unconscious he tried to bury her. A policeman chanced upon him before he could finish, and the Runt quickly improvised an alibi: he said he’d been trying to help the child after someone else had attacked her. The policeman believed him, possibly because the Big-Eared Runt was a child too: he was only nine years old.
It took Ana six months to recover.
And that wasn’t the only attack involving a simulated burial: in September 1908, shortly after he dropped out of school—and after he started having fits of what seemed like epilepsy, though they never really figured out what caused the Runt’s convulsions—he brought another child, Severino González, to a vacant lot across from the Sacred Heart school. There was a small horse corral on the lot. The Runt submerged the boy in the animals’ water trough and then tried to cover it with a wooden lid. A more sophisticated simulacrum: an imitation coffin. Once again, a policeman passing by put a stop to the crime, and once again the Runt lied and said that he was actually helping the boy. But that month the Runt couldn’t control himself. On September 15 he attacked a fifteen-month-old baby, Julio Botte. He found him in the doorway of his house at 632 Colombres. He burned one of the boy’s eyelids with a cigarette he was smoking. Two months later, the Runt’s parents couldn’t bear his presence or his actions anymore, and they turned him over to the police themselves. In December he was sent to the juvenile detention center in Marcos Paz. He learned to write a little while he was there, but he was most notorious for throwing cats and boots into steaming pots in the kitchen when the cooks weren’t looking. The Runt served three years in the Marcos Paz reformatory. When he was released, his desire to kill was stronger than ever, and soon he would achieve his first, longed-for murder.
Pablo always ended the section on the Runt with the police interrogation after his arrest. It seemed to leave quite an impression on the tourists. He would read from a transcript to make it seem more immediate. The night the Runt appeared on the bus, Pablo felt somewhat uncomfortable repeating the killer’s own words with him standing there, but he decided to proceed as usual. The Runt just looked at him and played with his rope.
—Isn’t your conscience troubled by the crimes you have committed?
—I don’t understand what you are asking me.
—You don’t know what a conscience is?
—No, sir.
—Do you feel sadness or regret about the deaths of the children you killed?
—No, sir.
—Do you think you have the right to kill children?
—I’m not the only one. Others do it too.
—Why did you kill the children?
—Because I liked it.
This last response brought on general discomfort among the passengers. They usually seemed happy when the tour moved on to the more understandable Yiya Murano, who poisoned her best friends because they owed her money. A murderer born of ambition. Easy to wrap your head around. The Runt, on the other hand, made everyone uneasy.
That night, when he got home, Pablo didn’t tell his wife that he had seen the Runt’s ghost. He hadn’t told his coworkers either, but that was only natural: he didn’t want any problems at work. It bothered him, though, that he couldn’t talk to his wife about the vision. Two years ago he would have told her. Two years ago, back when they could still tell each other anything without fear, without mistrust. It was only one of so many things that had changed since the baby had been born.
His name was Joaquín and he was six months old, but Pablo still called him “the baby.” He loved him—at least, he thought he did—but the baby didn’t pay much attention to him. He still clung to his mother, and she didn’t help, she did not help at all. She had turned into a different person. Fearful, suspicious, obsessive. Pablo sometimes wondered if she might be suffering from postpartum depression. Other times he just got sulky and thought back to the years before the baby with nostalgia and a little—well, more than a little—anger.
Everything was different now. For example, she didn’t listen to him anymore. She pretended to, she smiled and nodded, but she was thinking about buying carrots and squash for the baby, or about whether the skin of the baby’s hips was irritated from the disposable diaper or from some spreading disease. She didn’t listen to him, and she didn’t want to have sex with him, because she was sore from the episiotomy that just wouldn’t scar over. And to top it off, the baby slept with them in the conjugal bed. There was a bedroom waiting for him, but she couldn’t bring herself to let him sleep alone; she was afraid of sudden infant death syndrome. Pablo had had to listen to her talk about that white death for hours while he tried in vain to calm her—she who had never been afraid before, who once upon a time had gone with him to scale high peaks and sleep in mountain huts while the snow fell outside. She who’d taken mushrooms with him, hallucinating for a whole weekend, that same woman now cried over a death that had not come and that maybe never would.
Pablo couldn’t remember why having a baby had even seemed like a go
od idea. Now she never talked about anything else—no more gossiping about neighbors, no more discussing movies, family scandals, work, politics, food, travel. Now she only talked about the baby and pretended to listen when other subjects arose. The only thing she seemed to register, as if it woke her up from a trance, was the name of the Big-Eared Runt. As if her mind lit up with the vision of the idiot assassin’s eyes or as if she knew those thin fingers that held the rope. She said Pablo was obsessed with the Runt. He didn’t think that was true. It was just that the other murderers on the Buenos Aires horror tour were all boring. The city didn’t have any great murderers if you didn’t count the dictators—not included in the tour for reasons of political correctness. Some of the murderers he talked about had committed crimes that were atrocious, but they still conformed well to any catalog of pathological violence. The Runt was different. He was strange. He had no motive besides desire, and he seemed like some kind of metaphor, the dark side of proud turn-of-the-century Argentina. He was a foretaste of evils to come, a warning that there was much more to the country than palaces and estates; he was a slap in the face to the provincialism of the Argentine elites who worshipped Europe and believed only good things could come from the magnificent and yearned-for old country. The most beautiful part was that the Runt didn’t have the slightest awareness of any of this. He just enjoyed attacking children and lighting fires—because he was a pyromaniac, too. He liked to see the flames and watch the firefighters as they worked. “Especially,” he told one of the interrogators later, “when they fall in the fire.”
It was a story about fire that really made his wife fly off the handle: she’d gotten up from the table screaming at him that he was never to talk about the Runt around her again, ever, not for any reason. She had shouted it while clutching the baby like she was afraid the Runt would appear and attack him right there. Then she’d locked herself in the bedroom and left Pablo to eat alone. Under his breath, he told her to go to hell.
Things We Lost in the Fire Page 7
