“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.”