We made friends with her because she was a suburban princess, spoiled rotten in that enormous English chalet tucked into our gray neighborhood in Lanús. It was like a castle and its inhabitants were lords and the rest of us, in our square cement houses with their straggly gardens, were serfs. We made friends with her because she had the best toys, which her father brought back from his trips to the United States. And because she held the best birthday parties, every January third—just before Día de Reyes and just after New Year’s—beside the pool where the water under the siesta sun looked silvered, as if made of wrapping paper. And also because she had a projector and used the white living room walls to watch movies, while the rest of the neighborhood still had black-and-white TVs.
But above all we made friends with her, my brother and I, because Adela had only one arm. Or maybe it would be more precise to say that she was missing an arm. The left one—luckily she wasn’t left-handed. It was missing from the shoulder down; she had a small protuberance that moved with a remnant of muscle, but it was useless to her. Adela’s parents said she’d been born that way, it was a birth defect. A lot of the other kids were afraid of her, or grossed out by her. They laughed at her, they called her a monster, a Frankenstein, a mutant. They teased her by threatening to sell her to a circus, or that her photo must be in all the medical textbooks.
She didn’t care. She didn’t even want to use a prosthetic arm. She liked to be looked at and she never hid her stump. If she saw repulsion in someone’s eyes, she was capable of rubbing it—her stump—in their face, or sitting very close to the person and caressing his arm with her useless appendage until he was humiliated, almost in tears.
Our mother said Adela had a unique character, that she was brave and strong and set an example, that she was a dear, and had been brought up so well. “She has such good parents,” our mother always said. But Adela said her parents were liars. That they lied about her arm. “I wasn’t born like this,” she’d say. “What happened, then?” we’d ask. And then she told us her version. Her versions, more like it. Sometimes she said her dog had attacked her, a black Doberman named Hell. The dog had gone crazy, a common fate for Dobermans, according to Adela. She said their skulls are too small for their brains, so their heads always hurt and the pain drives them mad; their brains just come unhinged pressed so tight against the bone. She said Hell had attacked her when she was only two years old. She remembered it: the agony, the growling, the sound of his jaws grinding, the blood mixing with the pool water and staining the green grass red. Her father had killed the dog with one shot. He had excellent aim; when the bullet hit the dog, baby Adela was still clenched between Hell’s teeth.
My brother didn’t believe that version.
“What about the scar, where’s the scar?”
She got annoyed.
“It healed really well. You can’t see it.”
“Impossible. You can always see them.”
“I didn’t have a scar from the teeth. They had to cut my arm off above the bite.”
“Obviously. There would still have to be a scar. They don’t just disappear like that.”
And as an example he showed her his own scar near his groin from his appendectomy.
“For you, because you had lousy doctors operating on you. I was in the best hospital in Buenos Aires.”
“Blah blah blah,” my brother said, and he made her cry. He was the only one who could infuriate her. And, even so, they never really fought. He enjoyed her lies. She liked how he challenged her. And I just listened, and that’s how we spent the long afternoons after school until my brother and Adela discovered horror movies, and everything changed.
—
I don’t know what the first movie was. I wasn’t allowed to watch them. My mother said I was too little. “But Adela is the same age as me,” I insisted.
“That’s her parents’ problem if they want to let her. I said no,” said my mother, and it was impossible to argue with her.
“But why do you let Pablo?”
“Because he’s older than you.”
“Because he’s a boy!” shouted my father, meddlesome and proud.
“I hate you both!” I screamed, and then I went to bed and cried myself to sleep.
What they couldn’t do was stop my brother, Pablo, and Adela from taking pity on me and telling me what happened in the movies. And when they finished relating the movies, they told other stories. I’ll never forget those afternoons. When Adela talked, when she concentrated and her dark eyes burned, the house’s garden began to fill with shadows, and they ran, they waved to us mockingly. When Adela sat with her back to the picture window, in the living room, I saw them dancing behind her. I didn’t tell her. But Adela knew. I don’t know if my brother did. He was better at hiding things than we were.
He knew how to hide things until the end, right up to his final act, when the only thing left of him was that exposed rib, the crushed skull, and, especially, that arm, his left one, lying between the tracks, so separate from his body and from the train that it didn’t seem like the product of the accident—of the suicide. I don’t know why I keep calling his suicide an accident. It seemed like someone had carried that arm to the middle of the tracks to display it, like a greeting or a message.
—
The truth is I don’t remember which stories were descriptions of movies and which ones Adela or Pablo made up. Ever since the day we went into the house I can’t watch horror films. Twenty years later and the fear is still there, and if by chance I watch a scene on TV, I take sleeping pills that night and I feel nauseated for days afterward, remembering how Adela looked sitting there on the sofa in her living room, her stump of an arm, her eyes transfixed, while my brother gazed at her in adoration. Really, I don’t remember many of the stories themselves. There was one about a dog possessed by the devil—Adela had a weakness for stories about animals—and another about a man who had chopped up his wife and hidden her limbs in a freezer and the limbs, at night, had come out to chase him, legs and arms and torso and head rolling and dragging themselves around the house, until a dead and vengeful hand strangled the murderer to death. Adela had a weakness, too, for stories about mutilated limbs and amputations. There was another about the ghost of a boy who always appeared in birthday photographs, the terrifying guest no one recognized, his skin gray and a broad grin on his face.
I especially liked the stories about the abandoned house. I even remember the day our obsession with it began. It was my mother’s fault. One day after school, my brother and I went with her to the supermarket. She sped up as we walked past the abandoned house that was half a block from the store. We noticed, and we asked her why she was in such a hurry. She laughed. I remember my mother’s laugh, and how young she was that sunny afternoon, how her hair smelled of lemon shampoo and she laughed her spearmint gum laughter.
“I’m so silly!…Just ignore me. I’m afraid of that house.”
She tried to reassure us, to act like an adult, like a mother.
“How come?” asked Pablo.
“No reason, just because it’s abandoned.”
“So?”
“Don’t mind me, sweetheart.”
“Come on, tell me!”