“But why, Lala, why would they do such a thing?”
Lala crushed out her cigarette on a plate next to the bed and poured herself another glass of whiskey. She mixed it with Coca-Cola and stirred it with a finger.
“I don’t think it’s your boy. The one they killed…They had no pity. It’s a message for someone.”
“A narco’s revenge?”
“Only the narcos kill like that.”
We were silent. I was scared. There were narcos in Constitución? Like the ones that shocked me when I read about Mexico, ten headless bodies hanging from a bridge, six heads thrown from a car onto the steps of the parliament building, a common grave with seventy-three bodies, some decapitated, others missing arms? Lala smoked in silence and set the alarm. I decided to skip work so I could go straight to the DA and report everything I knew about the dirty kid.
—
In the morning, my head still pounding, I made coffee for us both, Lala and me. She asked to use the bathroom. I heard her turn on the shower and I knew she’d be in there at least an hour. I turned on the TV again. The newspaper had no new information. I wasn’t going to find anything online, either—the web would only be a boiling cauldron of rumors and insanity.
The morning news said that a woman had come in to claim the decapitated boy. A woman named Nora, who had come to the morgue with a newborn baby in her arms and accompanied by some other family members. When I heard that about the “newborn baby” my heart pounded in my chest. It was definitely the dirty kid, then. The mother hadn’t gone sooner for the body because—what a terrible coincidence—the night of the crime had been the night she gave birth. It made sense. The dirty kid had been left alone while his mother delivered and then…
Then what? If it was a message, if it was revenge, it couldn’t be directed at that poor woman who had slept in front of my house so many nights, that addict girl who couldn’t be much older than twenty. Maybe at his father: that’s it, his father. Who could the dirty kid’s father be?
But then the cameras went crazy, the cameramen running, the journalists out of breath, everyone surging toward the woman coming out of the DA’s office. “Nora, Nora,” they yelled. “Who could have done this to Nachito?”
“His name is Nacho,” I whispered.
And then there she was on the screen, Nora, a close-up of her sobbing and wailing. And it wasn’t the dirty kid’s mother. It was a completely different woman. A woman around thirty years old, already graying, dark-skinned and very fat—surely the kilos she’d put on with the pregnancy. Almost the opposite of the dirty kid’s mother.
It was impossible to make out what she was shouting. She was falling down. Someone, probably a sister, supported her from behind. I changed channels, but they were all showing that wailing woman, until a policeman got between the microphones and her sobs, and a patrol car appeared to take her away. There was a lot of news. I told it all to Lala, sitting on the toilet while she shaved, fixed her makeup, pulled her hair into a neat bun.
“His name is Ignacio. Nachito. And the family had reported him missing on Sunday, but when they saw what was happening on TV, they didn’t think it was their son because this boy, Nachito, disappeared in Castelar. They’re from Castelar.”
“But that’s so far away! How did he end up here? Ay, princess, what a fright this all is. I’m canceling all my appointments, it’s decided. You can’t cut hair after this.”
“His belly button was sewn shut, too.”
“Whose, the child’s?”
“Yes. It seems they tore off his ears, too.”
“Princess, no one’s ever getting to sleep again around here, I’m telling you. We may be criminals, but this is satanic.”
“That’s what they’re saying. That it’s satanic. No, not satanic. They say it was a sacrifice, an offering to San la Muerte.”
“Save us, Pomba Gira! Save us, Maria Padilha!”
“Last night I told you the boy talked to me about San la Muerte. It’s not him, Lala, but he knew.” Lala kneeled in front of me and stared at me with her big dark eyes.
“You, my dear, aren’t going to say a word about this. Nothing. Not to the police or anyone. I was crazy last night to think of letting you talk to the judge. Not a word about any of it. We’re silent as a grave, pardon the expression.”
I listened to her. She was right. I didn’t have anything to say, nothing to report. Just a nighttime walk with a boy from the street who disappeared, as street kids often do. Their parents change neighborhoods and take them along. They join groups of child thieves or windshield washers on the avenue, or they become drug mules; when they’re being used to sell drugs, they have to change neighborhoods often. Or they set up camp in subway stations. Street kids are never in one place for long; they can stay for a while, but they always leave. Sometimes they run away from their parents. Or they vanish because some distant uncle turns up and takes pity on them and brings them home with him far away in the south, to live in a house on a dirt road and share a room with five other kids, but at least there’s a roof over their heads. It wasn’t strange, not at all, that the mother and child had disappeared from one day to the next. The parking lot where the decapitated boy had appeared was not on the route the dirty kid and I had taken that night. And the part about San la Muerte? Coincidence. Lala said the neighborhood was full of people who worshipped San la Muerte. All the Paraguayan immigrants and transplants from Corrientes were followers of the saint, but that didn’t make them murderers. Lala worshipped Pomba Gira, who looks like a demonic woman, with horns and trident. Did that make her a satanic killer?
It did not.
“I want you to stay with for me a few days, Lala.”
“But of course, princess. I’ll ready my chambers.”
Lala loved my house. She liked to put on music very loud and slowly descend the stairs wearing a turban and holding a cigarette: a femme fatale. “I’m Josephine Baker,” she’d say, and then she would complain about being the only transvestite in Constitución who had the faintest idea who Josephine Baker was. “You can’t imagine how rough these new girls are, ignorant and empty as a drainpipe. They get worse and worse. It’s hopeless.”