1994
Paula celebrated her birthday at Roxana’s house. For the party we scored some acid that, we’d been told, had been recently smuggled over from Holland. They called it Little Dragon. Was imported acid stronger? Since we didn’t know, just to be safe, we took a little less than usual—just a fourth. We put on a Led Zeppelin album. We knew it was going to piss off Andrea’s boyfriend, and that’s what we wanted: to piss him off. He arrived when the record was ending. We were still listening to vinyl then, although we could have bought CDs. All electronics were cheap—TVs and stereos, photo and video cameras. It couldn’t last long, said my parents, it couldn’t be true that an Argentine peso had the same worth as a dollar. But we were so sick of everything they said: my parents, the other parents, always announcing the end, the catastrophe, the imminent return to blackouts and all the pathetic hardships. Now they didn’t cry over inflation; they cried because they didn’t have jobs. They cried as if they weren’t to blame for any of it. We hated innocent people.
Andrea and her punk boyfriend arrived when the most hippie song on the album was playing, the one about going to California with flowers in your hair, and Andrea’s boyfriend scrunched up his face and said, “This sucks, fuckin’ stoners.” Paula’s brother, who was always friendly, offered him a little acid, just a fourth because he didn’t want to waste it on the punk. “Acid’s hippie, too,” Paula’s brother said, and the punk said that was true, but since it was chemical and artificial, he liked it. He preferred all things chemical, he said: powdered juices, pills, nylon.
We were in Roxana’s room. The mirror was hanging on the wall. There were a lot of people in the house, lots of strangers, as tends to be the case in drug houses: those people whose faces are half seen in a dream as they take beer from the fridge and vomit into the toilet and sometimes steal the key or make some generous gesture, like springing for more drinks when the party is about to end. The acid was like a delicate electric charge. Our fingers trembled; we put our hands in front of our eyes and our nails looked blue. Andrea was back with us, and when we put on Led Zeppelin III she wanted to dance, she shouted about lands of ice and snow and about the hammer of the gods, and only in “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” maybe because it was a blues song about love, did she turn around to look at her punk boyfriend. He was sitting in a corner and he looked scared to death. He was pointing at something and repeating who knows what, the music drowned it out. I thought it was funny; there was nothing left of that arrogant, twisted upper lip of his, and he’d taken off his sunglasses too. His pupils were so dilated his eyes were almost black.
I walked slowly over to him and tried to imitate the look of hatred in the eyes of the girl in Parque Pereyra. The electricity made my hair stand on end; I felt like it had turned into wires, or as if it were weightless, like when a TV that’s just been turned off attracts your hair so it sticks to the screen.
“Are you scared?” I asked him, and he answered with a confused look. He was cute; that was why Andrea had abandoned us. He was cute and he was innocent. I grabbed his chin and with my other hand I hit him in the face; I punched him right near his temple. His hair, styled so carefully with gel, became a tangled mess hanging over his forehead. Paula, laughing behind me, threw at his head the scissors we’d used to cut strips of acid. Only then did I notice she had the forest girl’s white ribbon tied in her hair. It was pure bad luck the scissors hit the punk boyfriend just above his eyebrow, a part of the face that bleeds a lot. We knew this because once in the van we’d cut our foreheads after an especially violent slamming of the brakes. He got scared then, the punk, he got really scared with the blood dripping down over his white shirt, and he must have seen the same thing we did, or something similar distorted by the acid: his hands covered in blood, the stained walls, the three of us surrounding him and holding knives. He tried to run out of the house but he couldn’t find the door. Andrea followed him, tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t understand her. When he made it out to the patio, the punk boyfriend tripped over a flowerpot, and once on the ground he started to shake—I don’t know if he was afraid or having a seizure. The album finished playing but there was no silence; we heard shouting and laughter. Someone was hallucinating scorpions, or maybe they had really infested the house.
We circled the punk boyfriend, looming over him. Lying on the ground with his eyes half closed and his chest covered in blood, he seemed insignificant. He didn’t move. Paula slid her knife into her jeans pocket; it was practically a toy, a little knife for spreading jam on bread. “We’re not going to need it,” she said.
“Is he dead?” asked Andrea, and her eyes shone.
Someone put a new record on back in the house, which seemed so far away. Paula took the ribbon from her hair and tied it around her wrist. Together, she and I went back into the house to dance. We were waiting for Andrea to leave the boy on the ground and come back to us, so the three of us could be together once again, waving our blue fingernails, intoxicated, dancing before the mirror that reflected no one else.
Adela’s House
I think about Adela every day. And if during the day her memory doesn’t visit me—her freckles and her yellow teeth; her blond, too-fine hair; the stump of her shoulder; her little suede boots—she comes to me at night in dreams. My dreams of Adela vary, but there is always the rain and my brother and I, both in our yellow raincoats, standing in front of the empty house and watching the police in the yard as they talk in low voices with our parents.