“The salary is pitiful.”
“No, it’s not pitiful.” Pablo was getting angry. As he saw it he was earning good money, enough to decently maintain his family. Who was this woman, this stranger? Once upon a time she had sworn that as long as she was with him, she could live in a motel, in the street, under a tree. It was all the baby’s fault. The baby had changed her completely. And why? He was a charmless kid, boring, all he ever did was sleep, and when he was awake he cried almost nonstop. “Why don’t you go to work if you want more money?” Pablo asked his wife. At that she seemed to bristle, and she started shouting like she’d gone crazy. She screamed that she had to take care of the baby—what was he thinking, that she could just dump him with a babysitter, or with his crazy grandmother? My mother isn’t crazy, thought Pablo, and to avoid another shouting match he went out to the sidewalk to smoke. That was another thing: since the baby had been born, she wouldn’t let him smoke in his own apartment.
The day after the argument, the Runt came back to the bus. This time he was closer, almost right next to the driver, who clearly couldn’t see him. Pablo didn’t feel any different, just a little uneasy; he was afraid one of the tourists would be able to see the ghostly Runt and would cause chaos on the bus.
When the Runt appeared, holding his rope, they were almost at the end of the tour, at the house on Calle Pavón. That was where one of the Runt’s oldest victims had been found, after one of his strangest attacks. Arturo Laurora, thirteen years old, had been strangled with his own shirt; his body was found inside the abandoned house. He wasn’t wearing pants and his buttocks were bruised, but he hadn’t been raped. While Pablo told this story, the ghost of the Runt, standing beside him, appeared and disappeared, trembled, faded, as if he were made of smoke or fog.
For the first time in many nights someone had a question. Pablo smiled at the curious man with all the insincerity he could muster. Pablo thought the tourist must be Caribbean, judging by the way he pronounced the word clavo, nail. The man wanted to know if the Runt had driven a nail into any of his other victims’ heads. “No,” replied Pablo. “We only know of the one.”
“It’s very strange,” said the man, and he ventured that if the Runt’s criminal career had been longer, maybe the nail would have become his trademark, his signature. “Maybe so,” Pablo answered politely as he watched the spectral Runt disappear completely. “But I guess we’ll never know, huh?” The Caribbean man scratched his chin.
Pablo went back to his house thinking about the nail, and then about a math teacher he’d had in school. When he got a problem right she’d say, “Pablito! You hit the nail on the head.” Then he thought about a tongue twister his mother had taught him when he was little: Pablito clavó un clavito. ?Qué clavito clavó Pablito? Un clavito chiquitito. He opened the apartment door to find the tableau that had become so common in recent months: the television on, a plate with Ben 10 cartoons on it smeared with the remains of pureed squash, a half-empty bottle, and his bedroom light turned on. He looked in. His wife and son were sleeping on the bed, together.
Pablo walked to the room that he himself had decorated for his son before he’d been born. It was so empty he felt cold. The inert crib was dark. It was like a dead child’s room kept untouched by a family in mourning. Pablo wondered what would happen if the boy died, as his wife seemed to fear. He knew the answer.
He leaned against the empty wall where months ago, before the birth, before his wife turned into a different person, he’d planned to hang a mobile: a universe that would spin over the baby’s crib and keep him entertained during the night. The moon, the sun, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, the planets and satellites and stars shining in the darkness. But he had never hung it because his wife didn’t want the baby to sleep in his crib and there was no way of changing her mind. He touched the wall and he found the nail still there, waiting. He yanked it out with one tug and put it in his pocket. He thought it would make a great prop, adding to the dramatic effect of his story about the Runt. He would take it from his pocket right when he was telling about Jesualdo Giordano’s murder, at just the right moment, when the Runt came back and drove the nail into the dead boy’s head. Maybe some na?ve tourist would even believe it was the very same nail, perfectly preserved a hundred years after the crime. He smiled as he imagined his small triumph, and he decided he’d lie down right there on the living room sofa, far from his wife and his son, the nail still clutched in his hand.
Spiderweb
I t’s harder to breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can turn from limpid blue to stormy black in minutes. You start to struggle right away when you arrive, as if a brutal arm were wound around your waist and squeezing. Everything is slower; during siesta the bicycles only rarely go by along the empty street, the ice cream shops seem abandoned in spite of the ceiling fans that spin for no one, and the chicharras shriek hysterically in their hiding places. I’ve never seen a chicharra. My aunt says they’re horrible creatures, spectacular flies with pulsating green wings and smooth, black eyes that seem to look right at you. I don’t like the word chicharra; I wish they were always called cicadas, which is only used when they’re in the larval stage. If they were called cicadas, their summer noise would remind me of the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees along the Paraná, or the white stone mansions with their staircases and their willows. But as it is, as chicharras, they make me remember the heat, the rotting meat, the blackouts, the drunks who stare with bloodshot eyes from their benches in the park.
That February I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Corrientes because I was tired of their reproaches: “You got married and we haven’t even met your husband, how is that possible, you’re hiding him from us.”
“No,” I laughed over the phone, “how could I be hiding him, I’d love for you to meet him, we’ll come soon.”
But they were right: I was hiding him.