Pablo had been telling the Runt’s story for a while (two weeks now) and he liked it a lot. The Big-Eared Runt had stalked a Buenos Aires so distant and so different from today’s that it was hard to be disturbed by the thought of such a character. And yet something must have left a deep impression on Pablo, because the Runt had appeared only to him. No one else could see the apparition—the passengers were talking animatedly and they looked right through him, they didn’t notice him.
Pablo shook his head, shut his eyes tightly, and when he opened them, the figure of the murderer with his rope had disappeared. Am I going crazy? he thought, and he comforted himself with some pseudo psychology: surely he was seeing the Runt because he and his wife had just had a baby, and children were Godino’s only victims. Small children. On his tour, Pablo explained where, according to the experts of the time, the Runt’s predilection had come from: the Godinos’ first son, the Runt’s older brother, had died at ten months old in Calabria, Italy, before the family immigrated to Argentina. The memory of that dead baby had obsessed him. In many of his crimes—and his attempted crimes, which were much more numerous—the Runt imitated the burial ceremony. He’d told the detectives who interrogated him after he was caught: “No one comes back from the dead. My brother never came back. He’s just rotting underground.”
Pablo would tell the story of the Runt’s first simulated burial at one of the tour’s stops: the intersection of Calle Loria and San Carlos, where the Runt had attacked Ana Neri, eighteen months old, the daughter of a neighbor in the Liniers tenement. The building no longer existed, but the site where it had once stood was a stop on the tour, with a short contextualization to explain to the tourists what living conditions had been like for those recently arrived immigrants fleeing poverty in Europe: they were stuffed into rented rooms that were damp, dirty, noisy, unventilated dens of promiscuity. It was the ideal environment for the Runt’s crimes, because the squalor and chaos ended up driving everyone out to the street. Living in those rooms was so unbearable that people spent all their time on the sidewalks, especially the children, who roamed unchecked from a very early age.
Ana Neri. The Runt brought her to the empty lot, hit her with a rock, and once the girl was unconscious he tried to bury her. A policeman chanced upon him before he could finish, and the Runt quickly improvised an alibi: he said he’d been trying to help the child after someone else had attacked her. The policeman believed him, possibly because the Big-Eared Runt was a child too: he was only nine years old.
It took Ana six months to recover.
And that wasn’t the only attack involving a simulated burial: in September 1908, shortly after he dropped out of school—and after he started having fits of what seemed like epilepsy, though they never really figured out what caused the Runt’s convulsions—he brought another child, Severino González, to a vacant lot across from the Sacred Heart school. There was a small horse corral on the lot. The Runt submerged the boy in the animals’ water trough and then tried to cover it with a wooden lid. A more sophisticated simulacrum: an imitation coffin. Once again, a policeman passing by put a stop to the crime, and once again the Runt lied and said that he was actually helping the boy. But that month the Runt couldn’t control himself. On September 15 he attacked a fifteen-month-old baby, Julio Botte. He found him in the doorway of his house at 632 Colombres. He burned one of the boy’s eyelids with a cigarette he was smoking. Two months later, the Runt’s parents couldn’t bear his presence or his actions anymore, and they turned him over to the police themselves. In December he was sent to the juvenile detention center in Marcos Paz. He learned to write a little while he was there, but he was most notorious for throwing cats and boots into steaming pots in the kitchen when the cooks weren’t looking. The Runt served three years in the Marcos Paz reformatory. When he was released, his desire to kill was stronger than ever, and soon he would achieve his first, longed-for murder.
Pablo always ended the section on the Runt with the police interrogation after his arrest. It seemed to leave quite an impression on the tourists. He would read from a transcript to make it seem more immediate. The night the Runt appeared on the bus, Pablo felt somewhat uncomfortable repeating the killer’s own words with him standing there, but he decided to proceed as usual. The Runt just looked at him and played with his rope.
—Isn’t your conscience troubled by the crimes you have committed?
—I don’t understand what you are asking me.
—You don’t know what a conscience is?
—No, sir.
—Do you feel sadness or regret about the deaths of the children you killed?
—No, sir.
—Do you think you have the right to kill children?
—I’m not the only one. Others do it too.
—Why did you kill the children?
—Because I liked it.
This last response brought on general discomfort among the passengers. They usually seemed happy when the tour moved on to the more understandable Yiya Murano, who poisoned her best friends because they owed her money. A murderer born of ambition. Easy to wrap your head around. The Runt, on the other hand, made everyone uneasy.
That night, when he got home, Pablo didn’t tell his wife that he had seen the Runt’s ghost. He hadn’t told his coworkers either, but that was only natural: he didn’t want any problems at work. It bothered him, though, that he couldn’t talk to his wife about the vision. Two years ago he would have told her. Two years ago, back when they could still tell each other anything without fear, without mistrust. It was only one of so many things that had changed since the baby had been born.
His name was Joaquín and he was six months old, but Pablo still called him “the baby.” He loved him—at least, he thought he did—but the baby didn’t pay much attention to him. He still clung to his mother, and she didn’t help, she did not help at all. She had turned into a different person. Fearful, suspicious, obsessive. Pablo sometimes wondered if she might be suffering from postpartum depression. Other times he just got sulky and thought back to the years before the baby with nostalgia and a little—well, more than a little—anger.