Everything was different now. For example, she didn’t listen to him anymore. She pretended to, she smiled and nodded, but she was thinking about buying carrots and squash for the baby, or about whether the skin of the baby’s hips was irritated from the disposable diaper or from some spreading disease. She didn’t listen to him, and she didn’t want to have sex with him, because she was sore from the episiotomy that just wouldn’t scar over. And to top it off, the baby slept with them in the conjugal bed. There was a bedroom waiting for him, but she couldn’t bring herself to let him sleep alone; she was afraid of sudden infant death syndrome. Pablo had had to listen to her talk about that white death for hours while he tried in vain to calm her—she who had never been afraid before, who once upon a time had gone with him to scale high peaks and sleep in mountain huts while the snow fell outside. She who’d taken mushrooms with him, hallucinating for a whole weekend, that same woman now cried over a death that had not come and that maybe never would.
Pablo couldn’t remember why having a baby had even seemed like a good idea. Now she never talked about anything else—no more gossiping about neighbors, no more discussing movies, family scandals, work, politics, food, travel. Now she only talked about the baby and pretended to listen when other subjects arose. The only thing she seemed to register, as if it woke her up from a trance, was the name of the Big-Eared Runt. As if her mind lit up with the vision of the idiot assassin’s eyes or as if she knew those thin fingers that held the rope. She said Pablo was obsessed with the Runt. He didn’t think that was true. It was just that the other murderers on the Buenos Aires horror tour were all boring. The city didn’t have any great murderers if you didn’t count the dictators—not included in the tour for reasons of political correctness. Some of the murderers he talked about had committed crimes that were atrocious, but they still conformed well to any catalog of pathological violence. The Runt was different. He was strange. He had no motive besides desire, and he seemed like some kind of metaphor, the dark side of proud turn-of-the-century Argentina. He was a foretaste of evils to come, a warning that there was much more to the country than palaces and estates; he was a slap in the face to the provincialism of the Argentine elites who worshipped Europe and believed only good things could come from the magnificent and yearned-for old country. The most beautiful part was that the Runt didn’t have the slightest awareness of any of this. He just enjoyed attacking children and lighting fires—because he was a pyromaniac, too. He liked to see the flames and watch the firefighters as they worked. “Especially,” he told one of the interrogators later, “when they fall in the fire.”
It was a story about fire that really made his wife fly off the handle: she’d gotten up from the table screaming at him that he was never to talk about the Runt around her again, ever, not for any reason. She had shouted it while clutching the baby like she was afraid the Runt would appear and attack him right there. Then she’d locked herself in the bedroom and left Pablo to eat alone. Under his breath, he told her to go to hell.
The story really was impressive. No cause for such a fuss, he thought, but it was pretty brutal. It had happened on March 7, 1912. A five-year-old girl, Reina Bonita Vaínikoff, daughter of Latvian-Jewish immigrants, was looking in the window of a shoe store near her house on Avenida Entre Ríos. The girl was wearing a white dress. The Runt approached her while she was absorbed in the sight of the shoes. He was holding a lit match in his hand. He held the flame to her dress and it caught fire. The girl’s grandfather saw her from across the street as she was engulfed in flames. The grandfather ran desperately to reach her, but he never even got near the girl: mad with fear, he hadn’t noticed the traffic. A car ran over him and he died. Very strange when you consider the slow speed of cars in those years.
Reina Bonita died too, but only after sixteen days of agonizing pain.
Poor Reina Bonita’s murder wasn’t Pablo’s favorite crime. He liked—because that was the word, what can you do?—the murder of Jesualdo Giordano, three years old. Without a doubt, that one inspired the most horror in the tourists, and maybe that’s why he liked it: maybe he found it pleasant to tell the story and wait for the reaction of his audience—they were always shocked. Plus, it was the crime they’d caught the Runt for, because he committed a fatal error.
As was his habit by now, the Runt brought Jesualdo to an empty lot. He strangled him by winding the rope thirteen times around his neck. The boy fought back with all his strength, he cried and screamed. The Runt told the police that he’d struggled to keep the boy quiet because he didn’t want to be interrupted as he’d been on other occasions: “I grabbed that kid with my teeth right here, near his mouth, and I shook him the way dogs do with cats.” That image distressed the tourists, who squirmed in their seats and murmured “my God” under their breath. But they never asked him to stop the story. Once he’d strangled Jesualdo to death, the Runt covered him with sheet metal and went out to the street. But something kept tormenting him, an idea burning in his mind. So after a while he went back to the scene of the crime. He was holding a nail. He drove it into the boy’s skull, though Jesualdo was already dead.
He committed his fatal error the next day. Who knows why, but he attended the wake of the boy he had killed. Later on he would say that he wanted to see if the nail was still in the head. He confessed this desire when they brought him in to witness the autopsy, after the dead boy’s father had pointed the finger at the Runt. When the Runt saw the cadaver, he did something very strange: he covered his nose and spat as if he were disgusted, though the body had not yet begun to decompose. For some reason—the police records of the time don’t explain it—the medical examiners made him remove his clothes, and the Runt had an enormous erection. He had just turned sixteen.
Pablo couldn’t tell that story to his wife. Once, he’d tried to tell her about how the tourists reacted to the Runt’s final crime, but before he could even begin the story he realized that she wasn’t listening to him. Instead, she started complaining, demanding they move to a bigger house when the baby was older. She didn’t want him to grow up in an apartment. She wanted a yard, a pool, a game room, and all in a peaceful neighborhood where the boy could play in the street. She knew perfectly well that such a place barely existed in a city the size and intensity of Buenos Aires, and moving to a rich and tranquil suburb was far beyond their means. When she finished listing her desires for the future, she asked him to get a new job. “I won’t do that,” he said. “My degree is in tourism, things are going well for me. I’m not going to quit—it’s fun, the hours are good, and I’m learning.”