And every day and almost every night I return to the rainy gloom of that night. My parents, Adela’s parents, the police in the yard. The two of us soaked, wearing our yellow raincoats. More police who came out of the house shaking their heads no. Adela’s mother fainting in the rain.
They never found her. Not alive or dead. They asked us to describe the inside of the house. We did. We repeated it. My mother slapped me when I talked about the shelves and the light. “Liar! That house is nothing but rubble inside!” she shouted at me. Adela’s mother cried and begged, “Please, where is Adela, where is Adela?”
“In the house,” we told her. “She opened a door in the house, she went into a room, and she must still be in there.”
The police said there wasn’t a single door left in the house. Nor anything that could be considered a room. The house was a shell, they said. All the interior walls had been knocked down.
I remember I heard them say “hell,” not “shell.” The house is a hell, I heard.
We were lying. Or we’d seen something so terrible that we were in shock. They didn’t want to believe that we’d even gone into the house. My mother never, ever believed us. Not even after the police searched the entire neighborhood, raiding every house. The case was on TV, and they let us watch the news. They let us read the magazines that talked about the disappearance. Adela’s mother came to see us several times and she always said: “Let’s see if you’ll tell me the truth, kids, let’s see if you remember…”
We would tell her everything again, and she’d leave in tears. My brother cried, too. “I convinced her, I made her go in,” he said.
One night, my father woke up and heard someone trying to open the door. He got out of bed and crept downstairs, expecting to find a burglar. Instead he found Pablo struggling with the key in the lock—that door was always tricky. He was carrying tools and a flashlight in his backpack. I heard them yelling at each other for hours, and I remember my brother saying please, he wanted to move away, and that if he didn’t move away he was going to go crazy.
We moved. My brother still went crazy. He killed himself at twenty-two. I was the one who identified his ruined body. I had no choice—my parents were at the beach on vacation when he threw himself under the train, far away from our house, near the Beccar station. He didn’t leave a note. He’d told me his dreams were always about Adela. In his dreams, our friend didn’t have fingernails or teeth; she was bleeding from the mouth, her hands bled.
Since Pablo killed himself, I’ve started going back to the house. I go into the yard, which is still burned and yellow. I look in through its windows, open like black eyes; the police knocked out the bricks that covered them fifteen years ago and they stayed like that, open. Inside, when the sun shines in, you can see beams and the roof full of holes and the ground littered with garbage. The neighborhood kids know what happened there. They’ve spray-painted Adela’s name on the floor. On the walls outside, too. Where is Adela? says one scrawled message. Another, smaller and written in marker, repeats an urban legend: you have to say Adela three times at midnight in front of a mirror, holding a candle in your hand. Then you’ll see the reflection of what she saw, the thing that took her.
My brother had also visited the house and seen those instructions, and one night he performed the ritual. He didn’t see anything. He smashed the bathroom mirror with his fist and we had to take him to the hospital to get stitches.
I can’t get up the courage to go inside. There’s a message over the door that keeps me out. Here lives Adela. Beware! it says. I’m sure some kid from the neighborhood wrote it as a joke or on a dare. But I know it’s true. It’s her house. And I’m still not ready to visit.
An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt
The first time he appeared to Pablo was on the bus during the nine-thirty tour. It happened during a pause in his narration while they rode from the restaurant that had belonged to Emilia Basil (dismemberer) to the building where Yiya Murano (poisoner) had lived. Of all the tours of Buenos Aires the company he worked for offered, the murder tour was the most popular. It ran four times a week: twice by bus and twice on foot, two times in English and two times in Spanish. Pablo knew that when the company appointed him as a guide on the murder tour, they were giving him a promotion, even though the salary was the same (he knew that if he did well, sooner or later the salary would go up, too). He’d been quite happy about the change: before, he’d been leading the Art Nouveau of Avenida de Mayo tour, which was interesting at first but got boring after a while.
He had studied the tour’s ten crimes in detail so he could narrate them well, with humor and suspense, and he’d never felt scared—they didn’t affect him at all. That’s why, when he saw the apparition, he felt more surprise than terror. It was definitely him, no doubt about it. He was unmistakable: the large, damp eyes that looked full of tenderness but were really dark wells of idiocy. The drab sweater on his short body, his puny shoulders, and in his hands the thin rope he’d used to demonstrate to the police, emotionless all the while, how he had tied up and strangled his victims. And then there were his enormous ears, pointed and affable. His name was Cayetano Santos Godino, but his nickname was El Petiso Orejudo: the Big-Eared Runt. He was the most famous criminal on the tour, maybe the most famous in Argentine police record. A murderer of children and small animals. A murderer who didn’t know how to read or add, who couldn’t tell you the days of the week, and who kept a box full of dead birds under his bed.
But it was impossible for him to be there, where Pablo saw him standing. The Runt had died in 1944 at the Ushuaia penitentiary in Tierra del Fuego, a thousand miles away, down at the end of the world. What could he possibly be doing now, in the spring of 2014, a ghost passenger on a bus touring the scenes of his crimes? Pablo was positive it was him. The apparition was identical to the many photos that had survived. Plus, it was bright enough to see him well: the bus’s lights were on. He was standing almost at the end of the aisle, demonstrating with his rope and looking at the guide—at him, Pablo—somewhat indifferently but undeniably.