In that kitchen we swore an oath that we would never have boyfriends. We swore with blood, cutting ourselves a little, and with kisses, in the dark because once again there was no power. We made the promise while thinking about that drunken father, about what we would do if he came in and found us bleeding and embracing. He was tall and strong but he tended to stagger more than walk, and it would have been easy to push him down. But Andrea didn’t want to push him; she was always weak with men. I promised never to fall in love again, and Paula said she was never going to let a man touch her.
One night, when we were on our way back from Buenos Aires earlier than usual, a girl got up from one of the seats in front of us, went up to the driver, and asked him to stop so she could get off. The driver braked in surprise and told her there was no bus stop there. We were going through Parque Pereyra: an enormous park halfway between Buenos Aires and our town. It had once been an estate of over ten thousand hectares that Perón expropriated from its millionaire owners. Now, it’s a nature reserve, a damp, sinister little forest where the sun barely enters. The road cuts it right in half. The girl insisted. The passengers started waking up and one man said, “But where do you want to go at this hour, dear?” The girl, who was our age and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, looked at him with such intense hatred he was struck dumb. She looked at him like a witch, like an assassin, like she had evil powers. The driver let her off and she ran toward the trees; when the bus started up again she disappeared in a cloud of dust. One woman complained aloud: “But how can you leave her out there alone at this hour? Who knows what could happen to her.” She and the driver argued almost until we reached the terminal.
We never forgot that girl or her evil look. No one could ever hurt her, we were sure about that; if anyone was going to do harm, it was her. She wasn’t carrying a bag or a backpack, we remembered, and her clothes were too light for the coolness of the autumn night.
Once, we went looking for her. Andrea’s boyfriend, the one with the van, had disappeared from our lives, but there was another boy, Paula’s brother, who by then could drive his father’s car. We didn’t know exactly where the girl had gotten off the bus, just that it wasn’t too far from the windmill—the park has a Dutch-style windmill that doesn’t produce anything, it’s just a chocolate shop for tourists. Walking among the trees, we discovered paths and a house that had maybe once been part of the estate. These days it’s been refurbished; you can visit it like a museum and they even hold exclusive wedding receptions there. But back then there was just a park ranger who took care of the place, and it seemed to be holding its breath among the pines, secret and empty.
Maybe she’s the park ranger’s daughter, Paula’s brother said, and he brought us home laughing at us, the silly girls who thought they’d seen a ghost.
But I know that girl wasn’t anyone’s daughter.
1991
High school was never-ending. We started hiding bottles of whiskey in our backpacks and sneaking to the bathroom to drink from them. We also stole Emotival from my mother; Emotival was a pill she took because she was depressed, et cetera. It didn’t do anything much to us, just brought on a terrible fatigue, an exhaustion that made us fall asleep in class with our mouths open, snoring. They called in our parents, who thought that since we went to bed very late, our morning comas were caused by a lack of sleep. They were just as stupid as ever, although now they were less nervous about inflation and the lack of money: the government had passed a new law declaring that one peso was equal to a dollar, and although no one entirely believed it, hearing dollar dollar dollar filled my parents and all the other adults with happiness.
We were still poor, though. My family rented and Paula’s family had a half-finished house, with old-fashioned, interconnected bedrooms. It was disgusting: her brothers were older and she had to walk through their rooms to go to the bathroom; sometimes she saw them masturbating. Andrea’s apartment belonged to her family, but they could never pay their bills on time, and when their electricity wasn’t getting cut off, their phone was. Her mother couldn’t find any work except as an old people’s nurse, and her drunk father went on throwing money away on wine and cigarettes.
Even so, we three believed we could be rich. We thought that being rich was something that lay in our future. Until we met Ximena. A new classmate, she came from Patagonia and her parents had something to do with oil. When she invited us over we ran all through the house, bumping into each other as we tried to take it all in at once; we would have taken pictures if we could. The living room had a little bridge over an indoor pond with floating plants, water lilies, algae. None of the rooms had tile floors; they were all made of wood, and paintings hung on the white walls. The backyard had a pool, rosebushes, and white-pebbled paths. Seen from the street the house didn’t look all that pretty, but inside it was madness, all those nice things, the scent of perfume in the air, armchairs of colored velveteen and rugs that were neither frayed nor worn. We detested Ximena immediately. She was ugly and had a vertical scar on her chin, and at school they called her buttface because of it. We convinced her to steal money from her mother—it was so easy for her!—and we used it to buy drugs, sometimes pills from the pharmacy. These days they’re really strict, but back then if you just told the pharmacist you had an autistic brother or a psychotic father, they would sell you medication without a prescription. We knew the names of some medicines for psychosis, because we wrote them down whenever someone mentioned them. When we took the blue pills that we avoided forever after, poor Ximena went so nuts she tried to set the fine wooden floor of her room on fire, and she went on and on about all the eyes she saw floating around the house. We weren’t impressed. The year before, one of the hippies at the artisan market had been put away after he’d eaten too many mushrooms. He said there were tiny men only a few centimeters tall who were shooting little arrows into his neck. He wanted to pull out the imaginary arrows so bad that he scratched at his neck until he almost slashed his jugular with his nails. He’d always wanted to be Paula’s boyfriend—he called her his “spiritual companion.” Paula stole acid from him to take on our birthdays. He had only a few teeth, and his friends called him Jeremiah. They took him to the psychiatric ward in Romero and nothing more was ever heard from him.
Ximena had to have her stomach pumped and everyone blamed us. We didn’t care, except that we’d miss her money. That was when we started hating rich people.
1992