I don’t know how much she understood, but she thought it was a reasonable bit of nonsense. She wanted to meet Vera, and I showed her. She thought it was morbid that I had her in the bedroom, but she totally believed the story about decorating for the party, even though I’ve never thrown a party in my life and I detest birthdays. She also believed my lies about Patricio’s vindictiveness.
She was reassured when she left, and I know she won’t be back for a while. That’s quite all right with me; I want to be alone. Vera’s incompleteness has put me on edge. She can’t stay like that, with no teeth, no arms, no spine. I’m never going to find the bones that went with her head when she was alive, that’s obvious. I’ll have to study anatomy to find out the names and shapes of the bones she’s missing, which are all of them. And where should I look for them? I can’t desecrate graves, I wouldn’t know where to start. My father used to talk about common graves in the cemeteries of Buenos Aires that were open to the sky like pools full of bones, but I don’t think those exist anymore, not these days. And if they existed, wouldn’t they have guards? He told me that medical students used to go there to find skeletons to use for studying. Where do they get them now, the bones for anatomy classes? Or do they use plastic replicas? It seems to me it would be difficult to walk through the streets carrying a human bone. If I find one, I’ll carry it in the big backpack that Patricio left, the one we took camping when he was still thin. We all walk over bones in this city, it’s just a question of making holes deep enough to reach the buried dead. I have to dig, with a shovel, with my hands, like a dog. Dogs always find bones; they always know where they’re hidden, where they’ve been abandoned, forgotten.
The Neighbor’s Courtyard
Paula looked at her hands, reddened and scored from carrying several big crates of books, while Miguel paid and said good-bye to the moving men. She was hungry, she was tired, but she loved the house. They’d been very lucky. The rent wasn’t high and they had three bedrooms: one would be the study; another, their bedroom; the third would probably be for visitors. In the yard, the previous tenant had left behind simple and very pretty plants, a large cactus and a tall, healthy climbing plant of a strange, very dark green. And the best part was that the house had a roof terrace, with a grill and space to set up a covered picnic area if the owner didn’t mind—and Paula thought she would let them make any reasonable modification they wanted. On one hand, she’d seemed like a very friendly and easygoing woman (“In the contract it says that you can’t have pets, but just ignore that, I love animals”), and on the other, Paula thought she seemed anxious to get the place rented. She’d accepted them with only one co-signer—Miguel’s mother; usually, landlords asked for two—and with only one salary, also Miguel’s, because Paula was temporarily out of work. Maybe the landlady needed the money, or she wanted the house to be occupied before it started to deteriorate from lack of upkeep.
Her attitude had made Miguel a little suspicious, and before signing the contract he had asked if they could visit the house one more time. He hadn’t found anything troubling: the bathroom worked perfectly, although they’d have to change the shower curtain because it was mildewed. The house had a lot of light, it wasn’t noisy even though it looked out onto the street, and the neighborhood with its lines of low houses seemed quite calm, but busy, with a lot of people in the shops along the street and even a modest bar on the corner. He had to admit he’d been paranoid. Paula, on the other hand, had trusted from the start in the house and its owner. She already knew where the desk and the books would go, and she was looking forward to studying outside in the courtyard, buying a comfortable chair so she could sit out there with her papers and a cup of coffee. Her plan was to finish her degree, take the three exams that she still needed to graduate, all within a year, and then go back to work. Finally she was setting a timeline, planning the months to come, and the house seemed ideal for her mission.
They unpacked boxes and stacked books until the mess became unbearable and they ordered a pizza. They ate in the courtyard with the radio on. Miguel hated the first few days in a new house, when there was still no TV or Internet, and he was in an anticipatory bad mood thinking of the calls he would have to make before everything was in order. But he was too tired to worry. After smoking a cigarette, he went inside to lie down on the mattress, still without sheets, where he fell asleep. Paula fought sleep a while longer and brought the radio up to the roof to listen to a little music under the stars. She could see the buildings along the avenue very close by; in a few years, she thought, houses like hers—she already felt it was hers—were going to be bought and demolished to put up tall buildings. The neighborhood wasn’t in fashion yet, but it was only a matter of time. It wasn’t too far from downtown, it had a subway station nearby and a reputation for being quiet. She’d have to enjoy it as long as the rest of the city remained indifferent.
The terrace was edged by low walls, but it also had a fairly high mesh fence. Likely the owner had once had a dog there—that was why she’d mentioned her love for animals—and the mesh was to keep it from escaping. In one corner, though, the mesh had fallen. From there it was possible to look over and just see a sliver of the neighbor’s courtyard, four or five red tiles. She went downstairs to find a light blanket to cover herself in bed: the night had grown cool.
—
The pounding that woke her up was so loud she doubted it was real; it had to be a nightmare. It was making the house shake. The banging on the front door sounded like punches thrown by enormous hands, the hands of a beast, a giant’s fists. Paula sat up in bed and felt her face burning and the sweat soaking the back of her neck. In the darkness the pounding sounded like something was about to get in, about to break down the door. She turned on the light. Miguel was sleeping! It was incredible; maybe he was sick, or he’d fainted. She shook him brutally awake, but by then the pounding had stopped.
“What’s wrong?”
“You didn’t hear it?”
“What’s wrong, Pau? Why are you crying, what’s going on?”
“I can’t believe it didn’t wake you up. Didn’t you hear the pounding on the door? They almost kicked it in!”
“The front door? I’ll go check.”
“No!”
Paula had shouted. A snarling shout, animal in its terror. Miguel turned around while he was pulling on his pants and told her: