Getting into the yard was easy, easier than she’d expected. She had a small, normal thought: that meant it would be easy to rob the neighbor’s house, and her own. She would think about that later, once she’d done what she had to do.
There were two doors that led from the courtyard into the house: one to the living room, the other to the kitchen. There was no sign of the boy in the courtyard. Not even the chain. There were no bowls with food or water, and no dirt; quite the contrary, it stank of disinfectant or bleach: someone had washed the place down. The boy had to be inside, unless the man had taken him somewhere while she and Miguel were fighting, or in the morning after she’d fallen asleep. Stupid, lazy! How could she fall asleep?
She went into the kitchen, which was dark, and the light wouldn’t turn on. She tried other switches, even one in the courtyard; the house didn’t have electricity. She was afraid. The kitchen stank. At first, the adrenaline had kept her from feeling the full impact of the atrocious stench. But the counter was clean, and so was the table. Paula opened the refrigerator and didn’t find anything strange: mayonnaise, cutlets on a plate, tomatoes. Then she opened the pantry and the smell filled her eyes and made them water, and bitter liquid flooded her throat; her stomach churned desperately and it took a tremendous effort not to throw up. She couldn’t see well, but she didn’t need to; the pantry was full of rotten meat on which the white maggots of putrescence grew and wriggled. The worst was that she couldn’t tell what kind of meat it was: whether it was everyday beef that the man in his madness had left there to rot, or something else. She couldn’t make out any human shapes, but really she couldn’t make out any shape at all. In the half darkness, it seemed like the meat was living its death right there, growing in the pantry like mold. She ran from the kitchen—she couldn’t hold back the nausea any longer—without closing the pantry door. She knew she had to go back, close it, cover her tracks, but she didn’t feel capable. Let whatever had to happen, happen.
The rest of the house—foyer, two bedrooms—was all very dark. Still, Paula went into what had to be the man’s bedroom. It had no windows. In the shadows she could see that the bed was neatly made and covered with a warm blanket, though it was the middle of summer. The wallpaper had a very subtle design that looked like little signs, an arachnid weave. Paula touched it, and to her surprise she felt the rough paint of the wall. She moved closer and saw that the walls weren’t actually papered: they were covered in writing that left almost no white space, an elegant and even script that she had taken for a filigreed motif. She couldn’t make out any coherent sentences. There were dates: March twentieth, she read; December tenth. And some words: asleep, blue, understanding. She checked her pockets for her lighter, but she didn’t have it. She didn’t want to look for one in the kitchen. She thought that once her eyes got more used to the darkness she could read better, but after waiting a few minutes she felt the sweat run down her back and the pain in her head grow stronger and she was afraid she might faint in that horrible house, that house she never should have entered. If she hadn’t cared about that beautiful child with her broken ankle—oh, the look on that girl’s face when the ambulance took her away, the look of hatred in her eyes; she’d known that Paula was guilty, every bit as evil as the streets—why did she care about that boy she’d glimpsed in the courtyard? A boy who, if he was living with this crazy man, was surely already ruined for good, far beyond any possible recovery or normal life. The compassionate thing to do, if she found him, would be to kill him.
She went into the living room. Also neat and empty, but there she found the chain on a maroon faux-leather sofa. The living room, which led out to the courtyard, had some light. She ventured to speak.
“Hello,” she whispered. “Are you there?”
She knew she didn’t need to shout in the house: it was small and utterly silent. She waited, but didn’t hear anything. She went over to a glass-doored library, where she could make out piles of papers. But when she went in she was not only disappointed but also frightened: the papers were bills, electricity, gas, phone, all unpaid and organized chronologically. No one had noticed this? No one knew there was a man living in these conditions in a middle-class neighborhood? There were probably papers of other kinds among the unpaid bills, but Paula had to hurry and she turned to look over the books. They were all big, heavy medical books from the seventies, with satiny pages interspersed with glossy illustrations. The first one she flipped through didn’t have any marks, but the second one did; it was an anatomy book, and on the pages that described the feminine reproductive system someone had used a green ballpoint pen to draw an enormous cock with spikes on the glans, and, in the uterus, a baby with large, glaucous eyes who wasn’t sucking his thumb, he was licking it with a lascivious gesture that made her say aloud: “What is this?” When she heard the key in the front door she threw the book to the floor; she felt a sudden wetness in her underwear and pants and she ran to the courtyard, climbed desperately onto the tank—I’ll fall, I’ll fall, my hands are sweaty, my blood pressure is low—and with fear-induced speed, she made it to her own terrace. She went running down the stairs and locked the courtyard door, though she didn’t think that would stop the man who would surely be coming after her, because he must have heard her, because she had left the door to his fetid pantry open, because she had seen his drawings. What other drawings were there? What did those walls say? And the boy? Was it a boy? Or had it been the man himself? Did he sometimes like to chain himself up in the courtyard? It could be him; with distance and the influence of her own history with children, maybe he had seemed smaller than he really was. A relief, to think that the boy didn’t exist. But the relief didn’t protect her. Maybe the crazy man wasn’t dangerous; maybe he wouldn’t care that she’d broken into his house.
But Paula didn’t think so. She was remembering things seen out of the corner of her eye. Something on the couch that looked like a wig. Some words on the wall that were in a language she didn’t know, or were in an invented language, or were simply letters grouped senselessly. How all the plants in the yard were dried up, but the earth was damp as if someone kept watering them, as if someone refused to accept the fact that they were dead.
For the first time, she hated Miguel unequivocally. For leaving her alone, for judging her, for being a coward, for running away at the first real problem. For running to his mommy! She called him. Asshole.
“He’s not here,” her mother-in-law told her. “Are you all right, dear?”
“No, I’m shitty.”
Silence.