—
The dirty kid and his mother sleep on three mattresses so worn out that, piled up, they’re the same height as a normal bed. The mother keeps what little clothing she has in several black garbage bags, and she has a backpack full of other things; I couldn’t say what they are. She doesn’t move from the corner; she stays there and begs for money in a gloomy and monotonous voice. I don’t like the mother. Not just because she’s irresponsible, or because she smokes crack and the ash burns her pregnant belly, or because I never once saw her treat her son, the dirty kid, with kindness. There’s something else I don’t like. I told my friend Lala while she was cutting my hair in her house one Monday, a holiday. Lala is a hairdresser, but she hasn’t worked in a salon for a long time; she doesn’t like to have bosses, she says. She earns more money and is more at ease in her apartment. As a salon, Lala’s place has a few issues. The hot water, for example, only flows sporadically because the heater is busted, and sometimes, when she’s washing my hair after dyeing it, I get a shock of cold water over my head that makes me cry out. Then she rolls her eyes and explains that all the plumbers cheat her, they charge her too much, they never come back. I believe her.
“Girl, that woman is a monster,” she yells as she burns my scalp with her ancient hair dryer. It also hurts a little when her thick fingers smooth my hair. Lala decided to be a Brazilian woman years ago, but she was born a Uruguayan man. Now she’s the best transvestite stylist in the neighborhood and she doesn’t work the streets anymore; faking a Brazilian accent was useful in seducing men when she was hooking, but it doesn’t really make sense now. Still, she’s so used to it that sometimes she talks on the phone in Portuguese, or she gets mad and raises her arms to the sky and begs for vengeance or mercy from Pomba Gira, her personal spirit, to whom she has a small altar set up in the corner of the room where she cuts hair. It’s right next to her computer, which is always lit up in a perpetual chat.
“So you think she’s a monster too.”
“She gives me the chills, mami. It’s like she’s cursed or something, I don’t know.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m not saying anything. But around here the word is she’ll do anything for money. She even goes to witches’ sabbats.”
“Oh, Lala, what witches? There’s no such thing as witches. You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
She gives my hair a yank that seems intentional, but then she apologizes. It was intentional.
“What do you know about what really goes on around here, mamita? You live here, but you’re from a different world.”
She’s right, even though I don’t like to hear it. Nor do I like that she can so candidly put me right in my place: the middle-class woman who thinks she’s a rebel because she chose to live in the most dangerous neighborhood in Buenos Aires. I sigh.
“You’re right, Lala. But I mean, she lives in front of my house and she’s always there, on the mattresses. She never moves.”
“You work long hours, you don’t know what she does. You don’t watch her at night, either. The people in this neighborhood, mami, they’re really…what’s the word? You don’t even realize and they attack you.”
“Stealthy?”
“That’s it. You’ve sure got a vocabulary on you. Doesn’t she, Sarita? Real high class, this one.”
Sarita has been waiting around fifteen minutes for Lala to finish my hair, but she doesn’t mind. She’s leafing through magazines. Sarita is a very young transvestite who works the streets above Solís, and she’s beautiful.
“Tell her, Sarita, tell her what you told me.”
But Sarita pouts her lips like a silent-movie diva; she doesn’t feel like telling me anything. It’s better that way. I don’t want to hear the neighborhood horror stories, which are all unthinkable and plausible at the same time and don’t scare me a bit. At least not during the day. At night, if I’m up late to finish a project, and everything is silent so I can concentrate, sometimes I recall the stories they tell in low voices. And I check to be sure the front door is good and locked, and the door to the balcony, too. And sometimes I stand there looking out at the street, especially at the corner where the dirty kid is sleeping beside his mom, both completely still, like nameless dead.
—
One night after dinner, the doorbell rang. Strange: almost no one comes to see me at that hour. Only Lala, on nights when she feels lonely and we stay up together listening to sad rancheras and drinking whiskey. When I looked out the window to see who it was—no one opens the door right away in this neighborhood, especially when it’s nearly midnight—I saw the dirty kid standing there. I ran to get the keys and let him in. He’d been crying; you could tell from the clean streaks down his grubby face. He came running in, but he stopped before he got to the dining room door, as if he needed my permission. Or as if he were afraid to keep going.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My mom didn’t come back,” he said.
His voice was less hoarse now, but he didn’t sound like a five-year-old child.
“She left you alone?”
He nodded.
“Are you scared?”
“I’m hungry,” he replied. He was scared, too, but he was already hardened and wouldn’t acknowledge it in front of a stranger. One who, moreover, had a house, a beautiful and enormous house right there beside his little piece of concrete.
“OK,” I told him. “Come on.”
He was barefoot. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been wearing some fairly new running shoes. Had he taken them off in the heat? Or had someone stolen them in the night? I didn’t want to ask. I sat him down on a kitchen chair and put a little chicken and rice into the oven. While we waited, I spread cheese on some delicious homemade bread. He ate while looking me in the eyes, very seriously, calmly. He was hungry, but not starved.
“Where did your mom go?”
He shrugged.
“Does she leave you alone a lot?”