The strange thing was that none of the old people in the neighborhood, none of the grandmothers or grandfathers, remembered the owners of the house when they were young. As if they’d always been old. Or as if they were imaginary. Once, Vicky’s grandmother had said: When your grandpa and I came to live here, the owners, who were already old . . . and Vicky had interrupted, almost shouting: But you were young when you got married—they were already living here? And they were already old? Impossible, that’s crazy. Her grandmother hesitated and said she thought so, they were already old, yes, maybe they were Polish. What does their being Polish have to do with it? Blond people age badly, replied her grandmother. Not like you, Vicky, my pretty little creole girl. Vicky pulled away from her hug, and later, when they talked about it at the table—her grandma had already gone to bed—Hugo Peirano wiped his lips with a napkin and said well, she’s getting on in years, old people get confused.
That time Vicky kept quiet and cleared the table—green glass plates and brown cups: the forest table, she called it. She hadn’t eaten much. Adela was eating less too. They were both feeling the same thing. They were afraid. The fear was diffuse and Vicky couldn’t really tell where it came from, but it had started less than a month earlier, in front of the TV. She was in the living room with her family and the eight o’clock news was on. It was boring—stories about how the radicals had won the legislative elections, about the bomb threats in schools and the state of siege, which was making her mother hysterical—when a story came on that caught her attention: a volcano in Colombia had started to erupt. Vicky both liked and was afraid of volcanoes; for a while she’d been obsessed with Pompeii and Herculaneum. That night was only the eruption, but the next day Vicky sat down on the sofa with Gaspar sprawled beside her to see if they were still talking about the volcano, and what she saw left her speechless and trembling, so much so that she reached for Gaspar’s hand. The volcano’s lava had swept up ice and mud and all that material had flowed into the rivers, swelling them to four times their size and flooding the nearby towns.
“Oh, I’m terrified of floods,” her grandmother said, and Vicky shushed her.
In a village called Armero, lots of people were trapped inside their houses and waiting to be rescued. But all the cameras, in a shaky transmission with strange colors, were focused on a thirteen-year-old girl named Omaira—what a strange name, thought Vicky—who was half submerged in the rubble and mud; she couldn’t move, but she could talk, and when they gave her the microphone, far away in Colombia （where’s Colombia? Vicky asked Gaspar, and he told her it was a Caribbean country, but it wasn’t an island, it was next to Venezuela）， the girl said something that made Vicky feel like running away, and she squeezed Gaspar’s arm until she got a hey, quit it out of him, which was a lot, because nothing ever hurt him. The girl, Omaira, said: “Under my feet, I can feel my aunt’s head.” Her aunt who had drowned, of course, thought Vicky, imagining slippery feet on a dead head while she mechanically adjusted her shoelaces.
They kept showing Omaira for three days, not just on the evening news but also in the afternoon. Vicky saw her when she came back from school and later at night, when she got home from her gymnastics class. Omaira knew they couldn’t get her out, but Vicky didn’t understand why, and her mother, brutal as only a doctor can be, had told her that the only way would be to amputate her leg, and in that mud they didn’t have the right “sanitary conditions.” Omaira said, I want you to help my mom, because she’s going to be left all alone. She said she wanted to go to school. She was afraid because she didn’t know how to swim, and if the water rose above her head, she would drown. She sang a song. She wanted to study for a math test. She called out to her mother—who was far away, in Bogotá—and asked her to pray that she could walk again and that these people could help her. She told her mother she loved her, said she hoped she was listening, and she also said she loved her father. Vicky’s grandma said, I can’t watch this, that child has such dignity, they shouldn’t be showing this, and she left and never sat down again to watch Omaira die.
One of those days when Vicky was watching Omaira’s televised agony, Lidia Peirano came in with Juan Peterson, who stayed a while for a cup of tea—he never drank coffee—and Vicky observed him attentively because Gaspar’s father almost never came to her house. Her mom held him in high esteem, always insisting he was a good and fascinating guy. That’s what she said: “fascinating.” Vicky knew he and Gaspar fought a lot, and she got angry when she saw her friend sad and, too often, bruised. That afternoon, though, Gaspar was sitting beside his dad and they were talking in low voices, intermittently, as if they were alone. They weren’t alike physically but they shared certain mannerisms: their way of pushing their hair back from their face, how they leaned back on the sofa with their torso always erect.
“You want something to eat, Juan?”
“Thanks, but I’m not at all hungry.”
Lidia persisted, offering him a pasta frola she’d bought at the bakery, but Gaspar’s father refused again. Lidia said:
“These kids are obsessed with that Colombian child, it’s awfully morbid. Adela, Betty’s girl, doesn’t talk about anything else either. I let them watch it because if you forbid it, they just go and watch somewhere else.”
Juan said nothing. They all went quiet in any case because, from Colombia, a doctor was announcing that they’d tried to suction out the mud around Omaira, but unfortunately the gangrene in her legs was too advanced. It’s over, poor thing, said Lidia. She’s going to die, sweetie, it’s done. Don’t watch anymore, it’s too sad.
But Vicky wanted to watch and she saw the doctor crying, he cried and said this isn’t fair, not after we fought so hard and she’s held on. And Lidia asked Gaspar’s dad: Juan, you remember how years ago there was another case like this with an Italian boy? And he nodded very seriously and said nothing and put an arm around Gaspar’s shoulders. Gaspar was now hypnotized by the TV too, because the thing was that Omaira was about to die on camera and they were going to broadcast her death, they weren’t going to let her spend even that moment alone. Omaira took up the whole full-color screen and she was clear, no ghosting or static: her eyes were totally black, no irises or whites, her eyelids swollen, and her hands holding on to a piece of wood were disproportionately large and very white, too white, already dead, not like the skin of her face, which was still dark and pretty. Her hands looked like they were covered in wax; it’s from being underwater too long, thought Vicky, they get like that, wrinkled and whitish, but they still looked strange. Why are her eyes all black? Vicky asked her mom, who only replied, I’m going to turn it off, okay? It’s an abomination they’re showing that on TV. But she didn’t turn it off, she stood there watching too as the girl agonized in her grave of mud and filth, her legs trapped and her feet resting atop her dead aunt’s head.
It was Juan, who hardly ever spoke, who answered the question about the eyes. It’s blood, he said suddenly. Her eyes are full of blood. It’s not circulating through her body anymore and it accumulates there. Vicky looked at her mother for confirmation and Lidia said yes, it’s something like that. If it were dilated pupils, she wouldn’t be able to hold on anymore, she wouldn’t have the strength. And then she kept her word: she turned off the TV. Enough. You’ll never get that image out of your heads if you keep watching.