I didn’t wait any longer. I headed to the stairs and ran down like I was running for my life. I locked myself in my apartment and called you, inventing an excuse for you to come, latching the bolts on the windows, dragging furniture in front of the door, and arming myself with kitchen knives.
And what I want to tell you is that the dry thumps were not just from yesterday. They’ve been there for months, I don’t know, maybe years. This morning, as I was reading the newspaper, a simple truth that I never cared to know became clear to me: my habit of playing music at such a high volume began because I preferred not to hear, not to see. I think I’ve already told you that I consent to all the nonsense that others do and say laissez-faire. But it’s not just thumps, you know? Sometimes there are moans, muffled and choked cries, and heavy round blows that reverberate across the pentagram of my bedroom ceiling. Have you heard the sounds a gagged mouth makes? That sound. A lot of that, sometimes. Mostly before, recently not so much. But yesterday... yesterday again, so much! As if the eyes of those silenced mouths had been waiting for the miracle of seeing their redeemer ascending, only to witness his useless expiation.
No doubt the painter saw what he shouldn’t have seen. And he was seen looking. Perhaps what he saw — which he must have seen Monday or Tuesday — ended up unsettling or exciting him so much that he wanted to go back up and enjoy it again yesterday, despite the fact that nothing justified his presence there anymore. I bet the apartment above doesn’t have curtains. I bet the door to the bedroom is open, because at this height, frankly, privacy ceases to be a consideration.
And now I understand why the scaffolding came down empty at three thirty. Yesterday, I assumed the painter had moved to a segment outside my line of vision, but really he’d already been thrown off. His body must have fallen in the brief lapse when I was distracted by the ceiling and the noises. The killer only had to go out through the window, climb onto the platform, and struggle with him — and in that hand-to-hand struggle, taking into account the paint-covered overalls, it was inevitable that his hands would get dirty. That was the plot point from which I began to deduce everything: the paint stain on the elevator button. He must have gone down right away to pretend to just be part of the crowd that surrounded the body, don’t you think? And we must admit that it was a good idea to take care of putting the scaffold in motion. Why call attention to his floor by leaving the platform there, so that later on you would come and examine it? Isn’t it better to make the things of this world fall, according to their own weight, while here above you can order and pay for everything, think of and resolve everything, win and lose everything — even your life — without ever going down?
Fish Food
by Manolo Núñez Negrón
Callejón del Gámbaro
When we were little we were like dirt and fingernail, that’s why it hurt so much. He grew up on Calle Baja Matadero, next to the Placita, and I grew up in one of the houses on the boulevard heading up toward Castillo San Cristóbal. He was fatherless, and in this we were the same. His had been killed at a cockfight, two stab wounds, and mine ran off with a hairdresser, or died in the Gulf War, or got a life sentence in federal prison, it’s all the same in any case. I remember because we were celebrating my birthday in front of Castillo del Morro, and Repollo was standing at the base of the wall feeding out string to his kite, which flew much higher than the one my uncle and aunt had given me. At one point I saw him heading down the hill toward the field, driven by my neighbors’ dogs, who pulled on the leash like horses, and I was jealous of his luck: he could go to the beach without asking permission, and to Recodo, Tite’s Bar, to play pinball. Later on when we were teenagers, he confessed that he would’ve given anything to live where I did; that it made him sad to see me sitting on the balcony, through the ornamental bars, with a coloring book on my knees. He longed to climb up, run through the city, put on tennis shoes, and get to know the stores full of tourists; I wanted to go down, out to the sea, roll around in the sand, and walk through the slums wearing sandals. Maybe that’s why we became such good friends.
My mom was opposed from the start. “Those people are like cats,” she said, “they bite the hand that feeds them.” She ruled him out from the beginning, and there was no way to convince her that, deep down, he had a good heart. I imagine that she never forgave him for how, after we invited him to the party and gave him a piece of cake, he cut my kite string — which was lost in the sky and traveled on through the air, past the rum factory, searching for El Cañuelo on Isla de Cabras. It didn’t bother me. To the contrary, it made me happy, because flying a kite seemed like a game for little girls.
I ran into him again one morning beside the Capilla del Cristo. It was his favorite spot — not because he loved the doves, he actually loathed them — but because from there he could study the arrival of the cruise ships, the chaos of the docks, the small boats crossing the bay. At first I tried to talk to him, offering him a bag of roasted peanuts, and still he reacted indifferently, picking his nose. It was, I think, the first time I noticed his features. His skin was tanned from the sun, his eyes were damp, his forehead broad. A bruise ran across his cheek, grazing his lower lip, and more bruises were visible on his neck. At first I was curious and then I felt bad. It’s possible that at that moment, inside of me, like a plant left without water, innocence began to die. To earn his trust I bought him a malt and some plantain chips. To tell the truth, I guess that behind his shy character and surly manners there was a spiderweb of insecurity. Childhood is a cruel time. Nothing is worse than a kid alone at recess — I say this with firsthand knowledge. Decades have passed, that environment has receded, and yet, looking at myself in the mirror every morning, holding my razor, my hair graying, I can hear my classmates shouting from the second floor balcony: Faggot, faggot, faggot!
He didn’t thank me, but he let me sit beside him. He waited awhile in silence, lost in thought, tears of courage rolling down his dirty cheekbones. Both of us, in a way, felt the summer suffocating the flowers, warming the tops of cars, melting caramels in glass jars.
“My mom hit me with a belt,” he said.
“Moms are like that,” I responded.
After a couple hours we got soaked by a downpour. We made little boats out of paper and launched them into the inlet ditches until it stopped. The rain had a virtue: it imposed a sense of cleanliness, of pulchritude, a new world springing up from the asphalt. We separated in front of Iglesia San Francisco. From that day on he was my accomplice. We went to different schools, it’s true, but we saw each other frequently. As we grew up and began to have more freedom, we became closer. We had, of course, some disagreements typical of that age. Standard stuff: trivial fights over a baseball card, a toy pistol, a couple of marbles. He cheated at everything — marked playing cards, hid dominoes, altered dice — but, to my surprise, he avoided these little tricks with me. As an adult, I understood that they were survival tactics: he moved in a universe governed by different rules.
Honestly, in terms of tastes, we were polar opposites. He declared himself cocolo, a fan of the Cowboys, and a lover of McDonald’s hamburgers. I, on the other hand, was into rock music, burritos from Taco Bell, and Raymond Dalmau’s jump shots. If I said Menudo, he answered Los Chicos; if he suggested Lourdes Chacón, I said Iris, and on and on. I guess we really loved the same things and the rivalry was nothing more than a front. Harmless entertainment that reinforced the ties that bound us together. He never mentioned the incidents with his mother again even though it was clearly a common practice. In the end, he let her hit him and didn’t talk back. Human beings adapt to everything. And yet I know he was unable to abolish the beatings from his memory. There are events that remain recorded under the skin, stuck to the bones, and nothing can be done to erase them. It doesn’t even do any good to talk about them, because little by little they dissolve, mixing into everything we do. At the smallest provocation, the slightest gesture, it’s like a puppet master pulls these events out of a trunk and they come back from the emptiness, and on our faces is an expression of incomprehension, absorbed and disbelieving. Something similar happened to us with the death of Vigoreaux and the DuPont Plaza fire: those events continued to live on in our imaginations, feeding on fear and foreboding.