She leant out over the front balcony and looked down at the empty street. A car whizzed past. She went through the apartment, searching for the children, until she reached the back, and looked down from there as well. The sun was beating in; it was an oven. She thought she saw a body falling, even faster than they normally do, the naked body of a ghost, covered with fine, white dust. It might have been an optical illusion, but she knew it wasn’t when she heard another volley of guffaws, a great choral outburst of laughter so loud it was almost desperate. When she turned back toward the stairs, they were there again, or had just appeared, some swinging back and forth stupidly, like garlands, others perfectly balanced — they all were, in fact, it was just that they were using different methods. A quick movement behind her and a touch that felt particularly real made her swing around suddenly. It was Blanca Isabel, looking at her with a fading surprise. She was a pretty girl, an exception in the family, lively, and very intelligent according to her parents. Although she was startled and must have guessed why her sister had come downstairs, a smile was hovering around her lips: she thought she had caught Patri peeking at a forbidden sight. She looked as if she were about to start humming. Patri didn’t feel that she had been “peeking” at the ghost’s genitalia, not at all. Their laughter proved her innocence. “Now we’re going to take a nap,” Patri said energetically, although she too was disconcerted. It was a bad tactic, because Blanca Isabel didn’t feel like a nap, and ran away. She reached the stairs before Patri, and started going down, whispering something to the others, who must have been nearby. Patri knew she had to hurry if she wanted to catch them, but she was half-hearted about it. It was too hot, and she was tired. So she listened, helplessly, as they scattered. Nevertheless her momentum carried her to the stairwell. Juan Sebastián was looking up at her from the next landing, ready to go down to the third floor. “Let’s go,” she said, “or Mom will come and get you.” “Why?” he replied. Children always ask why. “Because you have to take a nap.” “I don’t know how. How do you do it?” “Where are the others?” “How should I know?” Patri started going down and the boy took off. He was already down on the next floor. She’d be able to corner him eventually, if he went all the way down. But the rascal knew hiding places with two escape routes, so the chase could go on forever. It was no good. She raised her voice again hoping to scare him into submission. She was irritated and couldn’t understand why he had to run away. She wasn’t going any further. What a stupid, childish thing to be doing, chasing kids around at siesta time! If they didn’t want to sleep, why should they? It made no difference to her, or to their health, why would it? But since she had come down to the fourth floor, she could fetch the baby girl, at least.
Luckily for her, little Ernesto was there, looking at her with his beautiful big, dark eyes. Hi, he said, as if hiding something. There was a wet patch on the wall, at a height that indicated clearly what had happened. The children were forbidden to urinate anywhere inside the building, but they did it anyway. She shook her head disapprovingly. I took out my weenie and did it, said the boy. I know how it works, but your dad’s going to tell you off. My dad did it too. Here? she asked him. He looked around, mildly perplexed. He seemed to mean two things: first, “all the floors look the same to me” and, second, “they all take out their weenies.” He was letting his thoughts show in that gentle, docile way because sleepiness was overcoming him irresistibly. And both aspects of his excuse were reasonable, in a way. The mood of summery exhibitionism prevailing on the site, accentuated perhaps by the imperfect, deceptive repetition from one floor to the next, didn’t shock Patri (even she wasn’t that naïve) so much as intrigue her. She’d seen the gangs of ghosts shaking their sturdy members and aiming the jets of urine at the sky, showering it over the first-floor patio (their favorite place for this sport) until rainbows with a metallic sheen appeared in the siesta’s white glare. The day the big satellite dish was installed on the terrace, they spent hours doing it, perched on the edge.
You get to bed, or Mom’s going to smack you, she said. Compliantly, half-asleep, Ernesto headed for the stairs. Where’s Jacqueline, she asked? The two youngest children were never far apart. He shrugged his shoulders. Patri called her. I’m going, she said finally. She followed the little boy up the stairs. When she was half way up, Blanca Isabel appeared behind her, with the baby girl in her arms, intending to move her to a safe place on the third floor. Patri turned around and started back down. The movement was enough to make Blanca Isabel deposit her sister and take off alone, jumping down the stairs three at a time. Jacqueline burst into tears. As soon as Patri picked her up, she calmed down. She put her arms around Patri’s neck and rested her head on her shoulder. She weighed nothing at all. Amazingly, she was still the size of a doll at the age of two. But, in fact, it was like that with all children. They might be relatively big or small for their age, but, compared to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream. As Ernesto had said a moment ago: the weenie. That must be why children were always playing with scaled-down models of things: cars, houses, people. A miniature theater, with its doors opening and closing, over and over again. The previous night, on television, they had seen The Kiss’n Cuddle Love Show, in which two puppets, a frog and a bear recited the names of the birthday boys and girls, and those who had written in. They never missed the show, although they had never written in themselves. Anyway, the puppets appeared on a tiny scene, with two window shutters instead of a curtain, which opened when their act began, and closed again at the end. In the course of normal distracted viewing, Patri had assumed that the shutters opened on their own, as they seemed to do, or were pushed from the inside, or something like that. But last night a problem with the lighting or the general clumsiness of the production had allowed her to see that the white shutters were opened by hands in white gloves, which were supposed to be invisible. The children didn’t realize, but she did. Her mother noticed too, and although they said nothing, both she and Patri thought of the ghosts. They said nothing because it wasn’t worth the effort of opening their mouths. But now, in retrospect, Patri felt that the incident had a sexual significance, or connotations at least.