I couldn’t get there on the third try. I took the train to Villa Elisa. The Roca line’s bad reputation is well deserved: windows without panes, many of the seats destroyed, constant theft at the stations of impoverished neighborhoods, and an unusual number of street pedlars and buskers. At Hudson, generally one of the less frequented stations, I saw a bum traversing the cars. There were always so many bums that there was no reason for him to catch my attention, but I couldn’t help staring at him. The man was missing an arm. The coincidence with Adela’s missing arm was disconcerting. I tried to reassure myself. There were a lot of homeless people with missing limbs. A lot. None had ever scared me or given me any reason for alarm. People with mutilations, if they’re poor, don’t adapt well in society.
The man was selling pens. He hawked them as the best on the market at an incredible price. People bought them: there was something friendly about him, warm and charming. My aversion grew. And when he approached my seat—which I wasn’t sharing: the person beside me had gotten off at Pereyra—the man stopped. He stashed the pens he was selling in a small shoulder bag. I realized he was well dressed: a high-quality short-sleeved shirt, pants with leather or faux leather hems to protect them from the grime on the ground and ensure their long life, a new digital watch, and clean, neatly combed hair. From up close, he didn’t look like a street vendor. With a prosthesis, he could have passed for an office worker.
“We all want to see him. But you won’t be able to,” he said.
“What?” I asked, and the adrenaline made me grab him by the shoulder. I didn’t want him to leave. He didn’t.
“There’s no point.”
His eyes, large and brown, stared directly into mine. His gray hair was smoothly styled.
“See who?” I asked.
“You know who. You won’t get to him. You can’t interfere. Leave it.”
He stared at me, but his face showed nothing. He was inscrutable. He jumped off the train while it was still moving, though slowly, and I saw him walk quickly away down the platform. I got off too, intending to follow him. I didn’t notice that the shoelace of one of my sneakers was untied. And I fell slowly between the platform and the car, in that terrible space so close to the tracks and the wheels of the train. The smell of hot metal filled my mouth: I screamed, and my scream could be heard over the squealing train. It’s not true that when death is near you see your life pass before your eyes. The only thing you feel is horrible fear and sorrow, sorrow for what was left to do, for your children, for your own stupidity, for the waste. But, above all, you feel fear.
The train stopped just before it hurt me. The wheels were less than a centimeter away. The station chief called an ambulance and they pulled me out. I was convinced the train would start up again, but I didn’t want to move in case the slightest touch would roll the metal wheel into my belly. When they managed to get me out—and I say “managed” because for some reason I resisted—I sat on the platform and cried while the doctors checked me over. Unharmed but very scared, I swore I would abandon this investigation I had begun beside a pit of bones.
I don’t know who the man on the train was. I thought about reporting him, but what would I say? I could have been hallucinating. I wonder if my inability to find the house and my encounter with that man aren’t all one big hallucination. Or if, on the other hand, it’s all part of a plan with rules I don’t know. I can barely leave my house without looking over my shoulder. I’m even afraid the armless man will take my daughter, who is the same age Adela was when she disappeared. As I put a final stop to this article, I have my doubts about publishing it.
VI
Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky
1987–1997
One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted
Emily Dickinson
Luis Peterson moved into a neglected house he had bought cheap with money he’d saved up in Brazil. A house in Villa Elisa, near La Plata, and it was falling down but it was beautiful, and Luis wanted to restore it. And so he started working obsessively on restoring the house and on restoring Gaspar.
The boy was angry, and when he wasn’t angry, he was depressed, an adult depression that collapsed him into bed. He couldn’t go to school. He barely ate a few mouthfuls at mealtimes, slowly nibbling a prosciutto sandwich （that was all he wanted to eat: prosciutto and cheese on French bread）， and he’d cry heavy tears that left little puddles on the wooden table, like the first fat drops of a summer rain.
The treatment with the first psychologist had been a disaster. She told Luis she thought Gaspar was schizophrenic, and recommended a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist accepted the diagnosis outright and prescribed pills. Gaspar took them sometimes; sometimes he threw them back up. His headaches made him writhe in bed. He fought with the psychiatrist and shouted to Luis that he never wanted to see him again, that they were going to lock him up, that it was obvious they wanted to get rid of him. Why do they say I can’t tell what’s real? he screamed one night in the kitchen, with ice wrapped in a cloth held to his temple to alleviate the migraine. But as long as he kept saying the inside of the house on Villarreal had been different from the outside, there weren’t many possibilities for a second opinion. That wasn’t true for the other kids, and Luis could guess why: Gaspar was the one who came from a strange family, the widower’s son, the boy who raised himself. The weird kid. The others, the judge had told him, were only following his lead.
The day Luis found a knife under Gaspar’s mattress he almost agreed with the doctors, and he was afraid. But he called the kid in, put the knife on the table between them, and asked why he’d hidden it. Gaspar sighed, but didn’t cry. To kill myself, he said. I was wondering if it’s better to stick it into my neck, and he pointed to his jugular, or here in my chest. But I think that would be harder because of the bone. Luis didn’t know him very well yet, but he was sure Gaspar wasn’t lying, that he wasn’t planning to use the knife to attack him or anyone else. That same afternoon, after hiding the knife, he decided to talk to Julieta, the woman he’d met just after moving back from Brazil, a young and unexpected lover who was surrounded by psychologist friends. He hadn’t seen her in months, not since he’d had to move into Juan’s house. She would understand, he thought. He left Gaspar with Negro Sánchez, a comrade from their activist days in the seventies, an ex-delegate like him who’d been one of his best friends before he went into exile and who now lived nearby; he’d helped Luis find the cheap house. Luis trusted Negro Sánchez more than anyone else in the world.
At a bar in La Plata, he told Julieta everything. How the judge had made him Gaspar’s guardian, and the boy was technically his son now. He told her about the knife under the mattress and how Gaspar had said he wanted to die, that he didn’t want to live if he was crazy. They’d diagnosed him with schizophrenia. He insists he isn’t crazy. They told me it’s normal for him to deny it, that he can’t distinguish reality from his own hallucinations. But, I don’t know why, Julieta, I believe Gaspar. I know it’s absurd, he’s a kid, how can he know more than the doctors? But he’s very rational. He talks like an old man.