“I don’t have any kids.”
I pressed her harder against the tree, I grabbed her neck. I don’t know if she felt pain, but I drove my nails into her. She wouldn’t remember me in a few hours anyway. I wasn’t afraid of the police either. I knew they wouldn’t get too worried over a fight between two women.
“You’re going to tell me the truth. You were pregnant until recently.”
The dirty kid’s mom tried to burn me with her lighter, but I saw her coming, the thin hand that tried to hold the flame to my hair. The bitch wanted to set me on fire. I squeezed her wrist so hard that the lighter fell to the sidewalk. She stopped fighting.
“I DON’T HAVE ANY KIDS!” she yelled at me, and the sound of her voice, too thick, ill, woke me up. What was I doing? Strangling a dying teenager in front of my house? Maybe my mother was right. Maybe I did need to move. Maybe, as everyone had said, I was fixated on that house because it allowed me to isolate myself, because no one visited me there, because I was depressed and I made up romantic stories about a neighborhood that really was just shit, shit, shit. That was what my mother had shouted at me and I swore never to speak to her again, but now, with my hands around the young addict’s neck, I thought maybe she wasn’t entirely wrong.
Maybe I wasn’t the princess in her castle; maybe I was a madwoman locked in her tower.
The junkie girl wiggled out of my hands and started to run, slowly, still choking. But when she got halfway down the block, right where the streetlight shone directly on her, she turned around. She was laughing and in the light you could see her bleeding gums.
“I gave them to him!” she shouted.
The words were for me. She was looking me right in the eyes with that horrible recognition. And then she caressed her belly with both hands and said, clearly, loudly:
“This one too. I promised him them both.”
I ran toward her, but she was fast. Or she’d suddenly become fast, I don’t know. She crossed Plaza Garay like a cat and I went after her, but when the traffic started moving on the avenue, she managed to dodge the cars and make it across and I didn’t. I couldn’t breathe. My legs were shaking. Someone came up to me and asked if the girl had robbed me and I said yes, hoping they’d chase her. But no. They only asked me if I was OK, if I wanted a taxi, what had she stolen from me.
A taxi, yes, I said. I stopped one and asked the driver to take me to my house, only five blocks away. The driver didn’t complain. He was used to that kind of short trip in this neighborhood. Or maybe he just didn’t feel like arguing. It was late. It must have been his last fare before heading home.
When I closed the door I didn’t feel the relief of the cool rooms, the wooden staircase, the walled garden, the old mosaics and high ceilings. I turned on the light and the lamp flickered: it’s going to go out, I thought, I’ll be left in the dark. It steadied, though the light it gave off was yellowish, old, dim. I sat down on the floor with my back against the door. I was waiting to hear the soft taps from the dirty kid’s sticky hand, or the sound of his head rolling down the stairs. I was waiting for the dirty kid to ask me, again, to let him in.
The Inn
The cigarette smoke was making her ill, as always when her mother smoked in the car. But today she didn’t dare ask her to put it out, because her mother was in a very bad mood. She exhaled the smoke through her nose and it blew into Florencia’s eyes. In the backseat her sister Lali was listening to music with her earphones jammed into her ears. No one spoke. Florencia looked out the window at the mansions along Los Sauces and waited eagerly for the tunnel and the dam and the colored hills. She never tired of the landscape even though she saw it several times a year, every time they went to the house in Sanagasta to escape the summer heat.
This trip was different; it wasn’t for pleasure, and it wasn’t summer. Her father had practically driven them out of La Rioja. Florencia had heard them arguing the night before, and by morning the decision was made: until the elections—Florencia’s father was running for La Rioja’s city council—the girls and their mother would stay in Sanagasta. The problem was Lali. She went out every weekend and got drunk and had a lot of boyfriends. Lali was fifteen and had straight, dark hair that fell below her waist. She was beautiful, although she really shouldn’t use so much makeup, and she should lose the long painted nails and learn to walk in heels already. Florencia watched her in her new boots and laughed at how she walked so crooked and slow. She thought the blue shadow Lali used on her eyelids was ridiculous, not to mention those horrible pearl earrings, but she understood why men liked her, and why her father didn’t want her running around La Rioja during the campaign. Florencia had often had to defend her sister after school, and sometimes things came to blows. Your sister the whore, the skank, the dicklicker, cocksucker, has she taken it up the ass yet, or what? It was always the girls who insulted Lali. Once, Florencia had gone home with a split lip after a fight in the plaza. While she was washing up in the bathroom and thinking of a lie to tell her parents—that she’d gotten a ball in the face at volleyball practice—she felt like an idiot. Her sister never thanked her for defending her. She never talked to her at all, really. She didn’t care what people said about her, she didn’t care that Florencia stuck up for her, she didn’t care about Florencia. She spent all her time in her room trying on clothes and listening to stupid music, crappy love songs, vas a verme llegar, you’ll see me coming, you’ll hear my song, you’ll enter without asking for the key…the same sappy song all day, it was enough to make you want to kill her. Florencia didn’t like her sister, but she couldn’t help getting mad when people called her a slut. She didn’t like it when they called anyone a slut; she would have fought for anyone.
No one was ever going to call Florencia a slut, she knew that for sure. She rolled down the window to get a better look at the dam and the Gypsy’s Skirt, that part of the hill that looked like the stain from a now-dry waterfall of blood. Her mouth filled with barely damp air. No, they’d call her carpet-muncher, freak, sicko, who knew what else.
“Mom, can you put some music on? My batteries ran out,” said Lali.
“Don’t bug me, kiddo, my head’s splitting and I have to drive.”
“Ugh, you’re so lame.”