San Juan Noir

Death on the Scaffold by Janette Becerra

Santa Rita

I was only interested in the incident because I ended up looking him in the eye. I had him up close, so I looked into his eyes. That little gesture, for someone familiar with my proclivities, makes a world of difference. You see, beyond the careful contemplation of what takes place inside my own apartment, I’m blessed not to see. From the height of my apartment, Río Piedras is just a mosaic of sepia tones, with a few tiles for garish contrast scattered here and there. Its grout, cracked and gray, is made up of avenues and alleyways of nervous trajectories, bustling with mechanical insects and organisms of unknown species, walking about day and night with purposes that — for me, at least — remain indecipherable. There, in the distance, the blur of San Juan: an impressionist painting of restless brushstrokes, silver streaks with white dots that I’ve never been able to identify, and beyond that, the sea. That stripe of cobalt blue they call the ocean, there in the distance. Here, above, none of that matters. I go down once a week to stock up on the essentials. There’s a shop on the first floor where I get what I need, which isn’t much. The rest of my life transpires between these four walls. Let’s call it my private command center. Perhaps the world is preparing for man’s return to the primordial cave, from where you can order and pay for everything, think of and resolve everything, win and lose everything — even your life — without ever going down.

And so, at the beginning of this week (Monday, to be precise), I was startled by the presence of a man at my window. I had completely forgotten that they would be painting the condominium. Yes, an assembly had been called. Yes, overages had been approved. Yes, notices had been left under the door. I always consent to the nonsense that others occupy themselves with. Laissez-faire.

I was sitting in my armchair, with my back to the window, which is what I generally do early in the morning. The living room reverberated with one of Haydn’s major quartets. It wasn’t quite nine yet and I was enjoying the iridescence that radiated on my orchids during their morning sunning. That’s why I was surprised by the sudden shadow. When I say sudden I should probably say unexpected, because to be honest, I clearly remember that it was gradual. It was a curious spectacle, more worthy of nature than of man: the rest of the apartment in shadows; a sphere of light, like a tracking bulb, on the flowers; and in the heart of the light, like an inverse sunrise or a celestial body entering an eclipse, a sliver of shadow rising little by little, until it projected itself across the cattleyas. I don’t know if you can appreciate the strangeness of that vision — a circle of the absence of light, in the middle of a circle of light, in the middle of half-light. I sat observing this phenomenon with that hypnotic attention we give to something that seems like a delusion or fruit of the imagination, when we know ourselves susceptible to such visions. And I wouldn’t have turned around if it hadn’t been for the head of the shadow, which at first appeared so perfect that it seemed celestial; as it ascended, it began to reveal a body made of flaps and adornments sprouting out of it. Then I did turn around, and I saw him. He saw me too.

He was just a kid, couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was wearing a T-shirt wrapped around his head like a Palestinian kaffiyeh, and over it the crown of earphones that — whatever they were transmitting — had him nodding frenetically, hyperbolically. He startled me — like I said, I admit it — but my reflexes are so slow that I didn’t even try to hide what was already, without a doubt, obvious to him, mostly because of the several seconds of advantage he had, watching me from behind.

Then there were a few — I don’t know how many — seconds of a sustained and knowing look. He was climbing at the speed of a turtle on his motorized scaffold, and pressing the button that activated the mechanism, with nothing else to do as his vertical world slowly ascended. I remember that when he saw what I was holding in my hand (because his eyes did stray from mine for a moment, a fraction of an instant), he gave a hint of a smile. I suppose you understand what I’m referring to, right? That intention of a smile we sometimes see in the corners of someone’s mouth who’s definitely not smiling, no, but holding a smile back. Farther back than the lips, even farther inside, perhaps behind the teeth or on the cupola of the pallet, shaped like an arch, waiting for that solitary moment when at last it can peel itself off the roof of the mouth and be pushed out with the tongue, free now. So it was. He saw me and I saw him. It was done.

Tuesday was another thing entirely because it was anticipated. I’ve never had curtains because at this height, frankly, privacy ceases to be a consideration. But now that for a brief time I’d been exposed to the gaze of an intruder, now that this foreign coexistence with the painter had been initiated, I had to stay shut in my bedroom. Since I don’t have stereo equipment in there, I was able to hear the soft screech of the pulleys as the scaffolding ascended. From the threshold of my bedroom’s half-open door, I saw him look inside, feigning disinterest at first and then, assuming no one could see him, scrutinizing the interior of my apartment with such intensity that he even made a visor of his hands and stuck his face against the glass — searching. This time he let himself grin, of course, because he thought he was alone. He made some gesture of sarcasm or criticism. And he kept ascending slowly, histrionically, as noon does.

By Wednesday I had an itinerary of his ascents and descents: he went up initially at a quarter to nine; he came down at twelve like clockwork; he went back up after one; and at three, or maybe three thirty, he came down and didn’t return until the following day. I deduced that they painted condominiums from top to bottom, and he must have started with the penthouse on Monday, which is two floors above mine. So that day it was time for him to paint my floor. It was a long Wednesday, shut away in my room without music. I had to leave the door ajar, because the living room windows give a clear view to the back of the bedroom. I crossed into the kitchen a few times, of course. I passed by without looking at him and returned with my ice tray. At five after two (I remember because the digital clock on my stereo, which I contemplated nostalgically in its silence, showed the time) I perceived out of the corner of my eye that he was gesturing to me with his hand, like he was waving. I pretended not to have seen him and shut myself in again.

At three o’clock, desperate for the workday to end so I could retake dominion over my house, I positioned myself at the crack in the door to spy on him. The platform of his scaffolding went way beyond the width of my apartment, so there were long periods when I couldn’t see his movements. I watched his torso cross in front of one of my windows and disappear behind the adjoining wall, then reemerge in my field of vision. It took him fifteen or twenty more minutes to complete the day’s work. Since he tended to place his equipment on a segment of the scaffold outside of my big living room window (the one out of which I had seen him the first time), I was able to observe when he started to get his things ready to go. He sealed the bucket of paint and began to clean his hands with a cloth from the back pocket of his overalls. Instead of focusing on what he was doing, he entertained himself by looking into my empty living room. He smiled through clenched teeth as if remembering, reliving that Monday morning, and peered into every corner his eyes could reach. It’d been like that since Monday: him, just a boy, inhabitant of a still vertical life; us, old residents of horizontal universes, where there was space for our vices to scatter themselves around. Maybe he was too young; now I’m not even sure he was twenty. He still had a desire to see, and that’s no longer of interest after a certain age.

When he felt satisfied that he had devoured my slice of the world, he returned to his hands. Then I saw him make an expression of disgust, curse, throw the cloth furiously down on the scaffold floor, and look with despair at the fronts and backs of his fingers, which, judging from his rage, had been left more covered in paint than before — probably because he’d used the same cloth too many times. Then, with his elbow he activated a switch that I’d not seen him use yet, and with the same elbow he pressed the button of the motor for a second and pulled back his arm. The scaffold began its automatic descent, while he rubbed his hands against his chest, butt, and thighs, as if determined to soil himself as much as possible.

Not even ten seconds had passed — I barely had time to take three steps into the living room — when I again heard the screech of the pulleys and saw that the painter was returning. I scurried quickly back toward my room and I saw him pass by my floor on his way up. I was surprised, because he should’ve already finished painting the upper floor the day before. I slipped timidly into the living room and went up to the glass, but my vantage only revealed the bottom of the wooden platform. I opened a window — the windows here are sash windows — and stuck my head out as far as I could, but I didn’t see much. A swaying, nothing more. Observed from below, that platform was transformed into an iron curtain, perfect for concealing the intimacies committed by those on top of it (a real advantage over my apartment, I remember thinking). I noted how the mechanism was flanked by metal brackets, cables, cords, and pulleys that stuck out like tentacles from the condominium’s rooftop down to the first floor. I closed the window and returned to my observation point behind my cracked bedroom door, resolving not to enter my living room during the day until the scaffold had definitively descended.

Time passed... I don’t know, maybe five minutes? It seemed like more to me, restless as I was. The unusual silence of my apartment, which was ordinarily submerged in music, heightened my senses. Maybe I imagined sounds. It was after three thirty. At that hour, the world becomes for me a kind of underwater concert, you know? Everything muffled, slow, majestic. I sensed a thumping in the ceiling: vibrations, like drowned thunderclaps, from the floor above me. One here, another there. It happens. It’s not rare in a condo, nor did it bother me. I turn on music, and that’s that. But that day, in the silence, combined with my anxious waiting, it attracted my attention. I looked around overhead, trying to find the origin of those sounds to decipher their pattern. They weren’t sounds that merited alarm, it was just a way to kill time. Eventually the thumps stopped, and yet I remained in suspense a few seconds more, my eyes lost in the smooth ceiling of my bedroom. Then I went back to the observation that mattered most to me: the scaffold’s descent. It came down one or two minutes later, and I felt freed from the prison of that day.

I turned on my music at full volume and had a party. You might understand what I mean when I say I had a party. Such was the celebration that I found it necessary to go down to the shop on the first floor an hour later. I entered the elevator and when I pressed the button for the lobby there was a stain on it, something with the opacity and texture of a relief. It seemed strange — not because I tend to focus on that kind of detail, nothing is more foreign to my personality. It made me remember the recent spectacle of the eclipse over the cattleyas. The buttons in elevators are illuminated, right? That circle of light had a half-moon of shadow in its interior, some imperfection that obstructed the glow. It took shape on the left and stole a piece of illumination from the upper part of the G. I stumbled closer and touched it, like a blind person reading Braille. I returned to the back wall of the elevator and reclined my head, humming a Brahms melody. When the doors opened, I bent forward and leaned against the call panel. With the light of the button now off, I could better study the stain. It was a dry streak of grayish or brown paint, nothing more. I scratched it with a fingernail.

Then I went out into the lobby and saw the commotion.

Everyone was congregating around something in front of the building. The lights of I don’t know how many police cars and ambulances spun rhythmically in reds and blues, creating a curiously festive air in the twilight. I went inside the shop and asked the clerk at the cash register what had happened. He told me about the painter, shattered on the pavement. I didn’t want go over and see the macabre spectacle that everyone seemed to be enjoying right there and then.

The return trip in the elevator was strange: I stood looking again at the button for the lobby, clean of paint this time. I must have cocked my head or made one of those gestures we make when something doesn’t fit.

It wasn’t until the next morning, sitting at ease in my living room armchair, that everything became clear. I carefully read the news in the online papers: the police were investigating the unfortunate incident of a painter who’d accidentally fallen from his scaffold. I vividly remembered the kid and I think I even felt bad about his death; at that hour of the morning it’s easy for me to feel empathy for the human race. But I imagined him just as I’d known him — sniffing around more than was appropriate, his hands forming a visor to look inside and judge the depths of other lives, our lives. What could there be on the floor above that would make him return when his workday was already over? What, in the windows above mine, would’ve awakened his need to look? I fixed my eyes on the ceiling of my apartment, and just so, like an epiphany, I knew. The threads knit themselves together and everything made sense, old things that you don’t even know you remember suddenly link together and create a choir, like the four instruments in the Haydn piece.

Early as it was (I think it wasn’t even eight yet), and in an outburst of heroism that, given my tendencies, surely wouldn’t last past ten, I decided to meddle. I already knew there was nothing of interest in the penthouse. The spectacle that had captivated the painter was in the apartment just above mine. That boyish voyeur, with his vertical advantage, had served as a periscope between my eyes and the window above. I went up.

I wasn’t sure what I would do or say once the door opened. I was impelled by the precarious sense of coexistence that’d begun with that brief, repugnant visual contact between me and the painter. Silly as it seems, he was the closest thing to a neighbor I’d had in my condo building. Someone familiar with my habits would understand.

I knocked one, two, three times. I knew I was being observed through the peephole; I managed to embody a kind of character by concentrating on synchronizing my heartbeats with my blinking. I suppose that this conferred on me the air of a battery-powered doll, innocuous enough that they’d venture to open the door. I had no idea who occupied that apartment: I was there because I needed to scratch the coat of paint with my fingernail. The rest would come later.

The door opened just a few inches, scarcely enough for me to glimpse a pair of eyes peering through the diagonal along the line of the threshold. This was all that was needed for the other to exist in me, as I suppose you might already understand. And those eyes said everything I needed to hear by revealing their dilated smallness, their suspicious turbidity. We were of the same species.

“Hello,” I whispered. And I smiled. I remember that I smiled.

“Yes?”

“I’m here on behalf of the committee. We’re calling an urgent meeting of all the residents.”

“Yes?”

“Because of the incident yesterday.”

“Yes?”

“Will you let me come in?” I didn’t want to go in. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go in. I just wanted to corroborate that he wasn’t ready to allow it. Already, for me, it was obvious.

“No. I can’t.”

“I understand,” I said. “We’ll be distributing the notice later on today. Have a good day.”

I turned around and hurried to the elevator. As I was walking with my back to that door, which had yet to close, I began to evaluate the risk I was taking in the deserted hallway of an unfamiliar floor, vulnerable to the paranoia of someone who probably knew that he’d been found out. Because he had been found out, there was no doubt about it. I could feel the heat of his gaze, his terror that was also my own. The elevator took an eternity; I had time to focus on the call button, perfectly clean, as if it had just been polished. Each additional second that passed without hearing that door lock into place threw more fuel on the invisible fire that devoured the distance between us. I never turned around to check, but I know he was about to jump on me and drag me inside his small hell, just like the rest of them.

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.

He gave me my first porn magazine, wrapped in a B&B case. On the cover was a blonde dressed as a nurse. I stashed it away, like a relic, and it probably is. The process, before, had its charm: nudity transmitted an aura of mystery, and it was a marvel hiding away in my room, flipping through the pages, delving into the intimacy of a stranger, feeling the texture of the glossy pages between damp fingers, looking at bodies opening the doors to eroticism and pleasure. Now everyone bends over and shows it all. “We macho machos buy Hustler,” he warned me. “Pendejos settle for Playboy.” That observation made such an impression on me that, even today, flipping through such magazines on a shelf in a 7-Eleven, his comment still seems valid. In effect, he was more precocious than I was. At fifteen, his relatives took him to Black Angus, to pop his cherry, and a few months later he passed this kindness to me. “Just stay calm, big guy, she knows what she’s doing.” It was the best advice I could’ve gotten, and I repeated it to myself out loud, walking down the long, dark hallway, trembling with excitement and terror.

I rolled him his first joint one Palm Sunday, when we were about to finish high school. He got hooked on weed and almost failed the semester. Well, to be honest, he didn’t pass: the teachers came to an agreement and inflated his grades to get him out of there. And that’s what he did — he hitched up his gown, walked at graduation, and the next week he joined the National Guard Reserve. He came back from Fort Jackson off his rocker, jacked, his biceps bursting out of his T-shirt, hell-bent on banging all the girls. As soon as he could, he got himself a motorbike, a brand-new Yamaha RX, which he crashed into a wall at Parada 26 coming out of a Palma Party rally. Even in this respect we were different. His family was blue, true blue, and mine was red to the core. We barely ever talked politics, preferring to avoid unnecessary disputes. Things like that sow discord where there is none. I knew that a flag of the ex-governor hung from his window, and that was more than enough.

We grew apart while I was at university, but we still saw each other every now and then. We bumped into each other at Boricua or Ocho de Blanco, dives we went to on the hunt: hair slicked back à la John Travolta, starched and unbuttoned guayaberas, faded blue jeans, riding boots shined to perfection. That was when he started getting into cocaine. He came out of the bathrooms with dilated pupils and a numb jaw, euphoric. He avoided me under these circumstances, ashamed, even though he knew drugs weren’t foreign to me and that I’d tried everything — even LSD and hashish, of which I was an aficionado for a time. I found out from other friends, randomly, that he was getting heavily into smack. “He’s turning into a junkie,” they said. Alone, I cried, I admit it. Nobody returns from that trip intact: they want to come back, get back to the shore, save themselves from the tide that’s sucking them out. They fail. A dense jungle, darkness, live ash, snake-bitten shadows, hunting, inexorable. Only the grave frees them from that prison. When I graduated, just scraping by, with a degree in accounting, and with the strike calming down at the university, I lost sight of him. What I mean to say is I stopped seeing him, although not so much his doubles, that multitude of creatures wandering along the avenues and sidewalks: the plastic cup in their ulcerated hands, their breath broken with thirst, happiness fading from their expressions, slow and without rhythm.

And one day around Callejón del Gámbaro, I ran into him when I was coming out of work. He looked stooped, older. He asked for a peso, making it sound like a joke, and I invited him to get a beer. We went into one of those bars on San Sebastián and settled in at the counter, which was covered with candles and ashtrays. He drank calmly, serenely, detached from what was going on behind him at the restaurant tables. He held the bottle with a napkin, and when he brought it to his mouth, foam sliding out the corners, his expression was transfigured. I had the impression that the alcohol ran swiftly through his veins, one by one healing all his wounds. We talked for hours without stopping, laughing loudly. It was very late when we drunkenly said goodbye and I gave him twenty dollars. I heard he got by as a handyman, fixing plumbing and household appliances, but it’s possible that he was already involved in other business. Maintaining a vice costs you a nut. Sometimes both.

He disappeared completely around Christmas. The radio played “La Finquita,” the hit by Tavín Pumarejo, and also a song by Tony Croato that depressed me: the story of a kid with torn shorts, barefoot and freezing. Repollo didn’t leave a trace. Someone told me it was rumored that he’d screwed someone over and taken off. I believed it, so he was either dead or on the run — six feet under, wrapped in a Glad bag, or in an apartment on the Lower East Side, sleeping on a cot, dressed like a janitor. One night, in the middle of a City Council meeting, my doubts were eliminated. Doña Cambucha, the spinster of San Justo, accused him of robbing the rearview mirrors from cars. Can, the girl from Tetuán, seconded the complaint, adjusting her cleavage: “He took the hubcaps off my Nissan, the crook.”

I knew right away that his hours were numbered. I searched high and low to find him.

“You’re heating up,” I warned him.

He smiled, showing his teeth, indifferent, and took a wooden top out of his pocket. He wound the string around the tip, tightening it with his thumb, and threw it onto the ground. That slow dance across the stones entranced us; we were captured by its spinning, tied to its movement; the lost murmur of our innocence, the sounds of the waves crashing against the rocks on the coast, our broken dreams. Immobilized on the benches of the dock, sheltered by a tree, we scrutinized the horizon, the wind shaking the bushes. Hiding my anxiety, I tried to find cracks in his face, signals that would help me guess what was convulsing inside him. I found no answer, just a sad question in his gaze.

“Keep it,” he chided, “see if you can learn how to use it.”

He headed for Covadonga, prowled around the area, and his pilgrimage ended around the bus station, slouched on a sidewalk, watching the flow of passersby.

Word got around among the neighborhood residents that he’d already been given a warning: “Pickpockets have to go to Condado.” It was the logical move. Robberies attract the police, inconvenience the residents, create a climate of suspicion and rancor, and, in the end, damage the drug trade. The important thing is to guarantee the normal flow of goods and services. The recipe is simple: if something alters the social harmony, it’s eliminated. So a good capo, apart from being invisible and feared by his peers, insures that there’s order. He intimidates thieves, gives the belt to abusers, compensates widows, takes care of appearances, and administers justice. In a sentence: he imposes his law, with an Uzi SMG hanging from his shoulder. There’s no other way for the gang to gain ground. I once heard a taxi driver near Tapia say that we need fewer governors and more gangsters.

Life continued on its way. I forgot about the thing with Repollo. My work routine imposed itself against my will. Getting up at six to avoid traffic. Tying my tie, driving to the office. Punching in before eight, taking a break at ten. Eating lunch, filling out forms, attending meetings. Drinking coffee, smoking, snacking on donuts. Monday to Friday: the automation reflected on the computer screen. I was waiting for the bell, and my existence turned into a silent movie.

One day, near the end of my Semana Santa vacation, I was heading up to Hooters when I noticed a crowd gathering around one of the watchtowers, including some police officers and reporters. A soft breeze blew, dragging in an intense, salty odor. I went over to see what was going on, removing my hat, and from a distance I made out the sailboat retrieving a solitary swollen arm, floating out to sea, chewed on by fish.

“It must be from a Dominican,” someone speculated.

I moved away silently, heartbeats pounding in my chest, sweat running down my thighs. My soul made a junkyard of words, convinced they were wrong. The robberies in the area had stopped, and I hadn’t seen him standing on the corner of Ballajá lately, absently peering out of the graveyard. I went out and looked for him everywhere, I must confess, aware of his fate and of the futility of my effort, the top he’d given me clenched in my fist, dancing inside me, inaudible. It’s hard to know what his last minutes were like. He was impulsive and antisocial. Brave with little effort. I just hope that they killed him before cutting off his limbs, to spare him the pain. But hired thugs tend to be sadistic, and they have their methods. There’s no way to know.

The Infamy of Chin Fernández by Tere Dávila

Barrio Obrero

“Invisibility!” he commands, like a superhero from an action comic. But he humbly prays for it from the Almighty too. Chin Fernández asks for the protection necessary to enter the neighbor’s patio, cross behind the plantain trees, slip between the trash bins, and make it to the clothesline, where the sheets that were left out all night will provide him the necessary cover on that patio — which is foreign to him, but identical to his own and to all the others in the neighborhood: a narrow U bordering a squat, sweltering house. That familiarity helps him feel less like a scoundrel than he should, crouching behind the three-foot cement wall that separates one residence from the other. There, Chin waits, ready to jump.

The neighborhood is still asleep — Maritza too, Chin is used to getting up and dressing without waking her — as the sky turns from black to violet, and the shapes of things start to emerge. Not a soul in the street, or nearly, because suddenly there’s another presence on the pavement. Chin almost jumps from fright, but it turns out to be Prieto, who won’t give him away. Better than that, it’s good that he’s out and about and was able to escape again from Angelito; hopefully he’ll get away for good, disappear; but when the dog, recognizing him, comes over, weakly wagging his tail, Chin notices that he’s been beaten and maimed, in such pain that he won’t be going anywhere. What kind of person abuses their own animal like that? he wonders, remembering the afternoon he found him bleeding in an alley.

“Don’t bring that dog in the house!” Maritza had scolded him when she saw them approaching.

“But look what that thug did to him...”

Maritza shook her head, making it clear that, as usual, Chin didn’t understand anything. “Aha, and what will you do when Angelito finds out where his dog is? I don’t want that madman showing up here.”

She had a point. The next day, Angelito had shown up looking for him.

“Give him back,” he said to Chin, one foot inside the house, poisoning everything with his bad blood and demonic appearance: face like a skinhead, skinny as a cable, veins protruding from his neck; like one of those guys who smile just before stabbing you.

“Why don’t you leave him with me?” Chin had responded, but the request lacked conviction, like when you ask for a privilege that you know beforehand won’t be granted.

“If I see you with my dog again, I’ll kill you,” Angelito had threatened before taking Prieto away on a chain leash.

Most men named “Angelito” come out just the opposite, Chin thinks, and then fantasizes, with more than a little pleasure, that the guy falls down dead, that someone burns him with the same cigarettes he uses to torture Prieto, that he gets a beating instead off doling them out... but no — better to remove bad thoughts from his head. According to the reverend, we sin not just in action but also in thought and, considering where he is now, it would be better to keep his thoughts pure, so God won’t abandon him.

Invisibility, he repeats to himself. It’s a matter of jumping over, running to the far side of the patio without being caught, grabbing what he wants — he saw it yesterday when the neighbor came out to hang up the clothes — and returning quickly to the street. He feels his heart beating so fast that it’s difficult to breath.

I can’t handle this kind of stress anymore; lots of forty-year-old men kick the bucket for less.

On the bus heading to work, he keeps his hand in the pocket of his handyman jumpsuit. He punches in. Pours coffee. Cleans the bronze banisters in the lobby where his coworkers hurry by. He eats lunch alone in the cafeteria. And all day long, his hand going in and out of his pocket, stroking his treasure every five minutes: he plans how he’ll care for them, how he’ll give the stolen panties the value and importance they deserve.

“Can you change Gómez’s lightbulb?” says the receptionist, pulling him out of his daydream. And there goes Chin with his screwdriver. Gómez doesn’t even greet him or stand up from his desk; he just moves his ergonomic chair to one side so Chin can do his thing without getting in the way.

Where would she look for them? Chin imagines his neighbor looking through drawers, closets, and inside the washing machine, searching for the panties. But she won’t find them. Chin smiles and gives his pocket a little pat, thinking about the other women, the previous women, looking for their missing garments; some that must have been their favorites, others that they almost never used, but were reserved for special occasions and for that reason, perhaps, they miss them even more. Because that’s the point: they belonged to someone. It’s no good to go to a department store and buy a dozen pairs with no history. That someone misses them is precisely what gives them value.

He punches out at six and is on his way, running late, to the church, where everyone is already sitting — Maritza, in the tenth row, hasn’t saved him a seat — so he listens to the sermon, which is quite long, standing in the back. When the service is over, he heads to the dais, where the reverend is talking to a few congregants. Normally he avoids greeting him, his wife does that, but considering that morning’s activities, he feels the need to earn some points with God.

He waits his turn, looking for a pause in the conversation to greet the reverend, but no one gives him a chance; someone jumps in front of him, or someone else cuts in with another question. So there he is, in front of everyone, his nose buried in chitchat, nobody noticing him, like they don’t even see him. He wonders if he really has become invisible; so he gives up and goes back Maritza.

“And that outfit?” she asks, definitely seeing him, or really just his jumpsuit.

She’s right, he should’ve changed. Chin starts to explain: he got held up in the office, he didn’t want to be even later — but Maritza doesn’t listen, she’s busy doling out kisses.

He heads home alone. There’s no moon, and Barrio Obrero looks gray and monotone without the color of the day, when the sun strikes the blue, green, pink, and yellow walls of structures that, though identical in construction, show their individuality in layers of paint. Peach, guava, and turquoise — shades more appropriate for lingerie than for concrete.

Chin rubs the stolen panties as if they are a good luck charm. A pair of tennis shoes hangs from a power line.

Angelito. Those shoes must indicate a drug corner that he controls. Or maybe they killed someone there, because when someone gets taken out they say that the dude hung up his shoes. Either way it’s unclear; Chin doesn’t know if they indicate territory or are giving a more serious warning, and anyway, he doesn’t know how long they’ve been there nor who they belonged to. He keeps stroking the little piece of satin; he’s almost halfway home when he hears the whimpers.

Prieto.

He goes down an alley to his right, slips behind an abandoned shed, and peers — for the second time in less than twenty-four hours — into someone else’s patio, though he’d never wanted to come to this one, nor had he ever been invited.

Chin sees the silhouettes of Angelito and Prieto against the back wall. The dog curls in on himself, trying to make himself small and disappear, but the boot hits home anyway. Another whimper. Angelito takes a drag from his cigarette — the orange tip glows in the darkness — then exhales, grips the chain that holds Prieto, and extinguishes the coal on his head.

Chin shouts.

“Who’s there?” Angelito grunts.

Chin covers his mouth, as if that could cancel the sound. His feet have ignored the order from his brain to take off running; if he goes now, that madman will kill Prieto for sure. Instead, he holds his breath and prays, crouching down being the wall, barely three feet high.

“Come out, cabrón!” Angelito shouts, advancing.

Click.

A knife flicks open in Angelito’s right hand. Chin instinctively brings his hands to his pockets, searching for a weapon he knows doesn’t exist.

Something, something... His right fist closes around an unexpected object: not the piece of satin he’s been caressing all day, but something else — the screwdriver that he used to install Gómez’s lightbulb.

Barrio Obrero seems bigger than it is. The connected buildings, the many little houses, the daytime activity, all the businesses and small shops bewilder those who don’t know the area, but you can walk its perimeter fairly quickly. From Angelito’s patio to Chin’s house is no more than ten minutes, although right now Chin feels that each step takes forever; he’ll never be able to get away from that damned patio. The scene repeats in his mind and he sees again how Angelito falls to the ground, with that skinhead smile turning bit by bit into an incredulous expression — so certain was he that Chin was harmless — with the screwdriver protruding from his neck. The move took him by surprise, he fell to the side and bled out from his throat. Before taking off, Chin let Prieto off his chain. The dog approached the man who until that moment had been his master, and, to check that he was dead, began to lick the bloodied ground.

The street is calm. Nobody has come out, no light has been turned on to signal an alarm, the evening is just like any other. Chin Fernández has gone unnoticed as always. And what isn’t seen here doesn’t exist, he tells himself, turning the corner onto his street.

“Here he comes!” someone announces.

There’s a mess of people in front of his house, and worse — two officers, one short and older, the other tall and young, waiting beside a patrol car that looks like a mobile dance club with all its spinning lights.

“Are you Adalberto Jesús Fernández?” asks the older officer.

Chin nods and the younger officer produces a piece of paper that he puts in front of his nose, apparently granting them permission to come inside.

How did they find out so fast?

He doesn’t understand. He just left Angelito’s patio, nobody saw him, and besides, the police are never that efficient.

He goes upstairs with the two officers, takes out his key to the front door, and looks at his hands. They’re clean — he’d found a spigot in the alley — and his old jumpsuit doesn’t have any stains that stand out among the others, from oil and paint.

“You take the living room and I’ll start in the kitchen,” one officer says to the other. Within minutes they go through the kitchen cabinets and the sofa and chair cushions; they take the Sacred Heart down from the wall, and even pull out the TV. They move quickly. They open the doors of the oven and refrigerator, where, of course, they don’t find anything of interest, but they leave everything wide open anyway.

Chin, prisoner of panic, covertly feels inside his pockets. God hasn’t forgotten me, he sighs with relief; only the panties there, he doesn’t have the screwdriver on him. He reviews his actions: he definitely removed it from Angelito’s neck and threw it away. The police weren’t going to find anything.

But meanwhile, they are emptying the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

“What’s all this?” shrieks Maritza, who has just come home from the service. She goes from one officer to the other, ignoring Chin, who wouldn’t have known what to tell her anyway. The older officer plants himself in front of her and silences her with a, “Señora, be quiet if you don’t want us to arrest you,” and that gives her the hiccups.

They move to the bedroom, where they remove all the clothes from the closets and unmake the bed, throwing everything on the floor. Chin, who has remained fixed like a post while the police do their thing, suddenly moves — reflexively, without thinking — to pick up one thing: his pillow. The young police officer sees him and, without giving him a chance to react, rips it away from him. Like a broken piñata, the pillow spits out white, blue, red, pink, black, and violet lace; small pieces of satin and silk, some with bows and little flowers, others with tiger stripes or leopard print.

The police officer bends down and collects the panties, one pair at a time, and starts handing them to his partner. Maritza hiccups and sobs quietly without interrupting the counting process: seven, eight, nine... and Chin understands at last. Of course someone saw him, but not tonight and not in Angelito’s patio. More than anything he’s surprised that they view him as someone dangerous.

Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty. That’s why the police are there, for the eighty pairs of stolen panties hidden inside the pillow that he, Chin Fernández, has zealously sewn and unsewn for months. The pillow where he rests his head every night.

“Excuse me,” he interrupts, “you’re missing one.”

He takes the panties out of his pocket and, allowing himself the perverse pleasure of breaking the round sum of eighty, he hands them over, so they can be taken into evidence.

The short officer handcuffs him and escorts him, almost courteously, as if he hadn’t just destroyed the interior of his house, toward the patrol car, around which more onlookers have gathered. There are the neighbors — including the owner of the patio that Chin infiltrated that morning — the guy who runs the shop two streets down, the reverend, accompanied by some of the church’s congregants, and many people who Chin doesn’t know who must have come running, attracted by Maritza’s screams or by the presence of the patrol car. On the other side of the street, he sees the silhouette of a dog. Prieto? And also an individual with a skinhead’s smile who looks a lot like Angelito but who, of course, isn’t, because he’s wearing the official shirt of Channel 4 News.

“We’ve got the Barrio Obrero panty-snatcher,” the young officer says into his walkie-talkie. “Don’t let Rivera leave — we need him to open the file.”

And then Chin pictures the screwdriver again. He remembers it disappearing into the hedges surrounding Angelito’s patio. What he can’t remember is if he wiped off his prints before throwing it away.

Invisibility, he prays in silence, but his wish is immediately annulled by the blinding flash of a camera.

Two Deaths for Ángela by Ana María Fuster Lavín

The first time I saw someone die was also the first time she and I came face-to-face. Her eyes met mine, then she turned around. She walked away to the rhythm of salsa in Taberna Los Vázquez; her footsteps and the old musicians’ cadence entranced me. In the distance, someone called her with a voice very similar to my own: “Mita, c’mon.” There, for an instant, we saw each other. She opened the door to another mirror. I was certain I was no longer alone.

It was December 28, Innocent’s Day, and that night I’d gone to the little plaza in Santurce to meet up with my friends Omar and Margarita, who were celebrating their honeymoon. They’d set me up with a blind date, which, as usual, was shit. The aforementioned Don Juan, named Beto — Bert in English, like the stupid Sesame Street character, of course, not like Beto, the gorgeous singer of La Ley — passed the time reading me high-minded poems: If Borges did this, if Che Meléndez did that... I recalled another poet, who looked like a pigeon filled and about to burst with Vaseline. They found that bastard dead in the Plaza las Américas parking lot. I laughed to myself. My friends thought my blind date was making me nervous.

The night continued with a long monologue about Beto’s studies in comparative literature and languages. I spaced out, remembering my last ex, a professor of English at the university who constantly talked about himself and about his ex-wife who’d taken his apartment and lived there with another woman and three cats. Beto had the same tone of voice and the same smugness. The chatter of this date was just as insufferable. “And that’s why I hate cats,” he said. I went to order two drinks. I looked at the clock. We’d been talking for forty-five minutes. Another guy who hates cats, I thought. He must’ve also been dumped for being an idiot.

“Why do you hate cats?” I asked him when I got back. He started to tell me about the cats of Cortázar, some other writer. Of course, then he complained about his last girlfriend, how she slept with her cat and how the cat’s hair on the bed disgusted him. I thought about taking my revenge against his idiocies. I also thought about Mita, who disappeared down the street to the rhythm of the pleneras.

My friends were sitting and kissing among the avocado trees on the little plaza, and I asked Beto for a triple shot of vodka on the rocks. He’d had a shot of B-52 and I’d had a whiskey on the rocks. Alcohol helps me move apathetically in the face of cretinism. He continued his monologue, culminating in another of his poems. This was the vilest, most damned Innocent’s Day in my whole life. As tends to occur, he began to get clingy, cheesy, cunning. I remembered what my mother once told me: there are some men who are just like a bottle of beer — from the neck up, there’s absolutely nothing.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“I’ll walk you.”

“No, I live nearby down Canals, turn on Primavera, and keep going to Estrella, straight up to Bayola.”

“Look, beautiful, it’s dangerous for a woman to go that way alone, I’ll walk you. Besides, the night can’t just end so quickly.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to comprehend that he was fucking up my night. What a cesspit of a man. “I’m leaving now,” I told him.

“Don’t be silly, it’s still early. C’mon, Ángela, don’t be mad.” The poet moved closer, almost grazing his chest against mine, running his hand across my hip.

“I’m leaving.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m leaving.”

“I’ll walk you. Really, it can be dangerous.”

“Let’s go then, but be quiet and don’t touch my ass.”

I picked up my pace. We were passing under the graffiti-covered bridge, and in the distance I saw Mita disappearing into the shadows. I smiled. Beto was beside me, he stroked my back, resuming his monologue, and brought his hand down to grab mine. I felt the brush of his lips against my neck, like a poltergeist. I pulled away and shoved him. He fell down in the street and groaned. He was drunk, and when he tried to stand up, he slipped and fell again. Unfortunately for him, a car was passing by at full speed, and it hit him.

I hid around a corner at the end of the bridge. I’d heard the crunch of his bones, his moan mixed with the whisper of blood escaping his mouth. The driver had fled. My soul took flight too, escaping through my throat. I hurried to my apartment, assuming the worst, imagining his body crushed like a trampled dove. I was so scared that I thought I was dying as I tried to open the door to my apartment.

I poured myself a glass of wine and stayed in the little room with my computer. I looked at my hands, which shook, and drank, drank, and shook. I got a text from Margarita asking where I was. I replied that I’d escaped from Beto because he was a waste of time, that he’d gone to buy some drinks at Velázquez, and so I’d left. Margarita texted me that she thought she’d seen him talking to some friends of hers. Could he be alive? Impossible. I didn’t tell her what’d happened, danger disappears if you ignore it. I wrote: Don’t set me up on any more blind dates. She replied with a sad face and told me good night, the next time she’d find me someone more fun.

I kept drinking wine and writing. My hands, fallen into insomnia, kissed psychedelic shadows that wrapped themselves in the silence of the pathetic memories of that night, of old exes and future loves, until I fell asleep. I got an unexpected text, an ex who wanted to see me, he was drunk, no doubt. I dreamt again about the poet’s blood, about Mita, and about a poem dancing in my bedroom.

I woke up at sunrise with the sensation that it all had been an illusion. I was confused. The whispers of loneliness suffocated me. I opened the door of my apartment and saw a dead dove. I closed it quickly and slid the little chain. Terror gripped my spine. I looked at my phone: no calls. I turned on the news: they weren’t covering the poet’s death. And yet, I expected that they’d come to arrest me any minute. I ate a light breakfast and wrote all day long, as well as the next day and the next, trying to free myself from my amputated memories.

I didn’t leave my apartment until New Year’s Eve. Mami had called to have me come over on New Year’s with them. I went as far as the door, lay down to peek below it, saw nothing. My hands shook, I made it into the hallway. In the area in front of the building’s entrance, some kids were playing with a ball, and Doña Cleo, the lottery ticket vendor, gave me a number for free. I went to a nearby supermarket that had a cafeteria, and I ordered rice with chicken, potato salad, and the newspaper. I texted Margarita and she replied that she was in New York with her cousins.

I took out my notebook so I could write while I ate, and I remembered the voice that’d called to Mita, so similar to mine, almost my own voice — the moment that I knew I wasn’t alone. It isn’t loneliness that suffocates me, but the recycling of pasts, the shadows of the witching hour, my Aunt Mabel reproaching me for not marrying or having kids, going to a party and right away someone asking about my ex, or why I don’t have a boyfriend, or why I work in a bookstore when I could be a university professor. What’s suffocating about loneliness is other people. For a few seconds I felt bad for Beto, but I rid myself of the feeling quickly. Some memories bring negative consequences. I kept writing.

I listened to my neighbor, girl of the eternal dubi dubi, who was protesting into her cell phone because she’d called the salon and they didn’t have a single appointment available to dye her hair and fix her nails. “The biggest tragedy since Fortuño lost the governorship,” she said. I couldn’t write anymore. I got up, wanting to tell her what I really thought: Who do you think you are? Do you think your life matters to anyone? Instead, I went to buy some wine and cheese to take to Mami’s house. In the hallway, I ran into the neighbor girl and muttered, “Cunt.”

I went down Calle Loíza toward the intersection with San Beto. There was an AMA bus at the stoplight. I looked at the window. There was a girl there, reading; she lowered the book and looked at me with a slightly surprised smile. My reaction was the very same smile and a powerful attack of arrhythmia. The light turned green, the bus continued on its way, and I continued on mine toward San Beto. One by one, my footsteps sank into the memory of the woman in the window. She looked just like me, I was certain. I felt a little light-headed and sat down in the parking lot across from the synagogue. I lowered my head. I was sweating, a cold sweat. I opened my eyes and Mita was sitting beside me. I tried to touch her, but she moved quickly off toward a nearby Catholic school, and I headed on to the condo where Mami lived, just past the children’s hospital.

That night I rang in the new year in Mami’s apartment, with my three brothers, their wives, and my nieces and nephews; also Julio, a neighbor from Spain who was a cook at a pizzeria in Hato Rey. The kids watched YouTube videos on a tablet, my mom prepared rice and beans, and my brothers and sisters-in-law talked about their jobs, inescapable even on vacation. Their lives are as small as their offices, like worlds all their own where the rest of us are invisible.

Mami was sad because January 1 was the five-year anniversary of our father’s death, and she cooked to forget. She runs a little business where she sells carrot and amaretto cakes at the bookstore on Ponce de León. Mami respects my individuality, so she doesn’t ask questions about my life. She’s also the only one who reads my childish stories. I told her that I thought I’d killed a boy. She laughed as if I’d delivered a Cantinflas monologue, and said, “You wouldn’t even kill in your dreams.” She gave me a kiss and poured two cups of coffee-flavored Pitorro.

Julio, also invisible to my brothers and their wives, was on the balcony. I poured him some of the Pitorro and we chatted for a while. He talked about new pizza recipes, about a Dominican lover he had three years ago who’d slather him with coconut oil before they made love. As we drank more, we reached a complicit silence. We looked out at the city from the balcony, and I told him about the woman I’d seen who was identical to me, that I thought I’d killed someone, and even about my two encounters with Mita. Julio told me that sometimes nightmares mix with memories and these memories are all we have left when everyone’s abandoned us. We hugged and gave each other a light kiss on the lips. We’d always wanted each other, but never found the synchrony in our lives to be together. That’s our destiny, we, the others.

Julio began to grow pale. He clenched his jaw, his eyes seemed to be popping out of their sockets. He pressed his chest and was sweating as if it were noon on a summer day. He grabbed my shirt and I started to scream for Mami and my brothers. Julio vomited on me, pissed himself, and collapsed to the floor. I tried to stand him up, I took his pulse, I gave him mouth-to-mouth. Nothing. At last, my brother Alberto came and helped me try to resuscitate him. My sister-in-law Teresa called 911. The ambulance arrived twenty minutes later. Julio died at my feet of a massive heart attack, in an ocean of vomit and piss.

It was very late when Mami was finally, after a few tranquilizers, able to fall asleep. I left silently. The street was deserted, the fog from the cool morning hung in the air, mixing with the smoke from all the fireworks that had roared, bidding farewell to an unforgettable year. It’s nice to walk in the early morning. Those seconds spilled into the air incessantly, just empty games, spells armed with lies, like stopping the breath of a dead man to give last rites to another illusion.

Mita appeared in the dark alley that took me from Calle del Parque to Avenida de Diego. I told her that Julio had died before ringing in the new year. I cried a little. She looked at me. We continued on our way and a vagrant vomited on the curb. I caught him just as he was about to fall, and sat him down. He looked like a zombie; he fell asleep like that. I left him a container with a little bit of rice and beans, two pasteles, and a drumstick. Mita rubbed against my legs. She also was a creature of the night.

Another resident of the street slept on the sidewalk in the light of Pizzeria Macabre (the name that my ex had given it). There, three musicians played their last notes among Medallas and cigarettes. The flute player offered to buy me a drink. He told me that his home was the night and loneliness was his lover. The New Year’s Eve celebrations intoxicated us with greater nostalgias than the alcohol. I said goodbye to him and took a couple bottles of beer in my backpack. Mita was waiting for me and we went on our way in silence. I was ready to invite her to come stay with me if she wanted. But after opening the condo door, I looked back and she was already gone.

I woke up after midday. I was weak; I had a coffee and sat down to write. I remembered that I might’ve killed a man, that these days death was caressing my footsteps. I also remembered the girl who looked like me. Seeing myself in the mirror of death or the mirror of another life, parallel to my own maybe. Just seeing myself confronting the possibility of being someone else.

Already nightfall, I got a text from Margarita telling me to be careful, not to go walking at night, that she’d had a nightmare in which I was attacked by a woman. At that moment, they knocked on my door. Two police officers. They asked me if I knew Beto Matías and Angelina Fabrani. I said I’d gone out with Beto one night in Santurce. They asked me where I’d been that night. I told them. They asked me if I was Angelina Fabrani. I said my name is Ángela, last name Fuentes. They asked me to accompany them to the precinct on Calle Hoare with my ID. There I learned that Beto and Angelina were suspected of beating a vagrant, a woman, and a cat that morning, and leaving them to die, bleeding out, dismembered. They showed me a photo and I started to cry. It looked like Mita and the vagrant to whom I’d given the food.

After four or five hours, they let me go. I called Mami on my way home. She was calm. I continued walking, with the feeling that I was being followed. I picked up my pace. I called Margarita. She didn’t answer; neither did Omar. I sensed footsteps almost on my heels. A hand touched my shoulder. When I looked behind me, I saw myself. The other me laughed with a voice similar to mine, but it wasn’t my laugh.

I pushed her and started to run, then looked back. There was no one. I ran down Ponce de León to Calle Canals. I continued to my building without stopping. At the pizzeria on the corner there were two patrol cars and an ambulance. I approached. There was a black shoe on the ground, a case on the other side. I picked it up; it contained my friend’s flute. I went as close as the onlookers and police would allow.

The man’s nose was broken, under his bare feet the blood formed a pool. His left eye was about to pop, a piece of his glasses stuck into it. He called to me and I went to him. I hugged him and cried. He said, “Be careful, my girl.” He passed out, then they took me away from him and put him in the ambulance.

A hand blew me a kiss from a car that passed slowly by. I was sure that it was the other me; I heard her mocking laugh. I tried to run after her and I slipped. I stepped in the enormous pool of the flute player’s blood and sank into an immense darkness. It smelled like death. When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in one of the booths in the pizzeria. One of the musicians, my violinist friend Javi, had bought me a vodka with orange juice. He smiled, with traces of bitterness in his expression, and said: “You fainted when you tried to wave to someone.” We drank together, but almost without talking. I kissed the corner of his lips, and he hugged me tightly against his chest. We kissed softly, those kisses recovering something of our lost humanity, or the last hidden orgasm before dying. We said goodbye with a nod. He didn’t get up.

Walking home, my footsteps sank into the asphalt. I lowered my eyes but couldn’t see past my knees, my feet and legs were beneath the street. I got to the stairway with my waist almost touching the concrete. Mita was sitting in front of the door to my apartment. Her tongue flicked across the tip of my nose. At last I started to feel like I’d recovered my body. For a while I forgot the past hours, but not the smell of blood. Mita lay down on the sofa. I poured myself some wine and turned on the computer. I had to write to recover. I had the sensation of living different lives.

I returned to myself. My fingers fell between the moldering memories, between my thighs too; I was touching myself, I recognized my lips, my clitoris. I masturbated as I wrote, and my blood moaned metaphors. Maybe each word could rescue me, splitting apart every scar of my fears. The words and my body melted together, the living words, my hot cunt. I could feel that other me kissing my neck, her hands playing with my nipples; I got even more wet. I thought about how that other me had to be that Natalie, and about Mita, and about all the deaths too. The two of them were always nearby when they occurred. That other me, could it be possible? My pussy convulsed, my other hand wrote automatically on the keyboard. At last I could cry out.

In the morning my cell phone woke me. It was Javi, the violinist. He asked me how I was feeling and invited me to breakfast. He told me that the flute player had died shortly after arriving to the hospital. While we were talking, I saw Mita jump off the balcony. I lived on the first floor, but it was still dangerous. I dropped my cell phone, ran after her, but couldn’t see her anymore. I went back to the phone and asked Javi if I could come over, because I was feeling really messed up. I got a text from Margarita saying I should call her as soon as possible. I ignored it.

I got to Javi’s apartment in Ciudadela around two in the afternoon. We talked, drank vodka, and ate sushi. He played a piece from a Tchaikovski concerto. Really, before the flute player’s death, we’d only said hi to each other, talked about random things, had a drink. Tragedy often unites loneliness and desire. And yet I was truly captivated by this man’s sadness.

When he finished the piece, I applauded and got undressed. Even at fifty, his expression was still that of a boy with a Christmas present, a gift we gave each other in his bed. We made love tenderly, caressing each other slowly. Oral first, then I let him enter me, the coming and going of his body against mine, the squeak of the bedsprings, our sweat, and his hoarse moans when he came. I didn’t have an orgasm, but I enjoyed it anyway.

“Do you think it’s possible to have a double?” I asked him, naked on the bed, a postcoital purr.

“What are you talking about?”

“About how there’s another version of you in the world, that you can cross paths with that identical person.”

“I get it. I saw it in a movie.”

“Last night I felt like I was making love with my double.”

“That can be remedied, mine has found its second life.”

He put my hand on his hard cock and kissed my neck. After getting wet, I climbed on top of him and tried to think of nothing, riding him hard until I finally had an orgasm and he came between my thighs. He told me softly: “Someday you’re going to fall in love with me.”

I was hypnotized, looking at a photo I saw on a shelf above his desk. It was Beto, but in Spanish military attire, and a woman with a familiar face. “Those are my parents,” he managed to tell me when the intercom started buzzing. Javi answered it, then looked at me, frightened. “It’s my ex-wife, we split up six months ago, she’s furious because the divorce papers came. Please, go down the stairs in the hallway. Forgive me, I love you, I’ll call you.”

I said nothing. I got dressed quickly and went down the stairs. I heard them screaming at each other as I left Javi’s building. I crossed over to Libros Ac and bought a graphic novel. Then I ordered a craft beer and sat down at a little table in front of the window. I saw clothes and some women’s boots falling from Javi’s balcony. I thought I heard a gunshot. Samuel, the bookseller, looked at me with surprise, I stared at him uncomprehendingly and said goodbye.

The seventh time I ran into Mita, it was a few blocks away from there. I was smoking a cigarette, Margarita didn’t answer my calls, Mami neither. Just how you’re sometimes surprised by your own stupidity, it occurred to me to call Javi. His wife answered and said, “Fucking whore! If I find out who you are, I’ll shoot you too.” I sat down right there on Calle Canals and cried inconsolably. Mita stayed close to me; she was nervous, as if wanting me to pay attention to her, for us to get out of there.

I looked up and I saw my other, Angelina, standing in front of me, handing me a handkerchief and a folded piece of paper. She turned around, and as she tried to cross Ponce de León, an AMA bus hit her; I heard the screech of the brakes already on top of her and the crunch of bones. When I stood up, there were two young men in front of me. One grabbed me, held a knife to my throat, and said in my ear, “You look prettier when you’re quiet, bitch. If you move or scream, you die.”

Meanwhile, the other one put his hands in my pockets, took out my cell phone, my wallet, my iPad mini, lowered my zipper, and stuck his hand in. “If I could, I’d eat your pussy right here, and nobody would notice.” I kicked him in the face and his friend cut my throat, hard like a guillotine.

I watched them run down Canals. I fell slowly to the sidewalk; I saw the folded paper flying through the air. I saw her, me, dead, I saw myself dying. Mita licked my forehead, meowed, and I watched her disappear down Calle Canals, across Ponce de León, losing her around the old Telégrafo building. A blank page floated through the air, landing in front of my face. I already felt nothing.

Matchmaking by Mayra Santos-Febres

Buen Consejo

They called him Koala because even while executing his victims, he did not appear totally awake. He had a swollen face and belly, and Koala Gutiérrez often spent hours chomping on a little twig, a “chewing stick,” as it’s known in Nigeria. He’d served there, first as a soldier, later as a sergeant in his government’s peacekeeping forces. It wasn’t exactly his government, but the government of the island. His island floated in the middle of the Caribbean. They speak Spanish there, but it’s a territory of the US. And the army is operated by a government separate from but in control of his own, giving it an international presence on this planet. In other words, he left the island as a member of the peacekeeping forces of a country that occupies his own, with the goal of maintaining order in a country that had none. They hadn’t declared war on his country nor on the country that wasn’t his, but were internationally committed to maintaining a false peace. Or something like that.

All of that happened in the eighties. After serving, it was easy for Koala Gutiérrez to obtain more work as a mercenary soldier. He lived in Africa for ten years, fighting in various wars. The one in Sierra Leone was the last — he got sick of it and went back to his homeland.

Koala’s homeland wasn’t really the island. He only ever knew a slice of it before enlisting in the army when he was just eighteen. At that time, Koala was already an immensely fat kid who didn’t mess with anybody and was lethal in a fight. A well-placed punch, a chokehold around the neck, and boom. No enemy was a match for Koala. And in Las Margaritas almost everyone was an enemy.

Koala was from Las Margaritas, an apartment project that the government (of his country? of the other country?) had built to provide shelter for the thousands of starving families living on the edge of Laguna San José. His was like all the other apartments: a square box made of concrete, with one bathroom, two bedrooms, and bars in all windows, where a family of six had to live. His parents were like many other parents, shadows of hunger and rage, who’d left the countryside and come to the city to look for work, finding it occasionally. One afternoon Koala’s father got lost in the labyrinths of little streets, pastures, and trash dumps that surrounded Las Margaritas, and never came back. His mother told him he went north, to that other country. To help out, his mother brought his grandmother from the country to live with them.

Koala could spend incalculable hours sleeping. He ate, slept, and chewed on his little stick — or on a leaf or a plastic straw, anything he could shove in his mouth — and then he’d sleep some more. He was never good in school. He never showed any interest in anything that didn’t require the absolute minimum effort. And in fights. He never initiated any, but he won them all. So when he was old enough, he enlisted in the army. And afterward, he came back. He never had children, no regular lover, not even an irregular one. He never got into sleeping with ex-convicts, the ones who got out of prison and came back to Las Margaritas, after years spent surrounded by men, a new need in their bodies. Not with the sad little whores who sold themselves on the project streets for drugs, either. “This guy only uses what he’s got between his legs to piss,” heckled Chino, a distant cousin, who got him into the business and introduced him to the Boss. “Just like a koala bear. Hanging from his pole all day, snoring away without a care.” Koala stayed silent and stared at him with his dark, round eyes.

But now he had to keep those eyes open. He was sitting next to Ballpoint in Café Violeta, waiting for his next victim: a woman. “La Pastora” had moved through the ranks and turned into a solid rival for the Boss in the interminable battle for domination of the drug trade. She had inherited control from her dead brother, and inexplicably emerged as a lethal power, a force from which it was necessary to be protected. That’s why the Boss contacted Koala. “Go with Ballpoint, he knows her movements. Get her out of my way. Nothing fancy, maybe a quick shot in the forehead.” He didn’t know why the Boss qualified it. That was Koala’s classic method. A shot to the head, infallible, between the eyebrows. No bloody mess. No bodies full of holes. Clean and wholesome, Koala guaranteed a tranquil death, and he was famous for not even giving his victims time to scream.

But he didn’t like killing women. He’d seen too many ruptured bellies in the war. Too many women raped by militia soldiers and then hacked up by machetes, bodies rotting in the savannah. Exposed flesh, just before exploding, had the consistency of plastic. The butchery of a woman’s body turned his stomach more than anything.

When the Boss informed him about La Pastora, he thought about saying no. He was about to shake his head when something stopped him. What woman could be a boss in the drug trade? In other words, does she really count as a woman if she’s gotten her hands dirty — not with blood, which is easy (Koala knows it), but with terror transformed into blood in the eyes of her enemies? How many addict children — now corpses, because of some stupid drug debt — had she, personally, turned over to their mothers? Koala imagined La Pastora as a brutish woman, shapeless, with short hair and swollen hands. A broad back just like his. Or like a frigid whore, one of those skinny, painted women with plastic everything, who so many people like and who leave him wanting to stay eternally asleep.

“I work alone,” he responded to the Boss.

“I want you to take Ballpoint. He’ll point her out. The thing is, it has to be her.”

He never could’ve imagined what he saw: a woman soft as velvet entered Café Violeta; she was full-figured, with a mature head of hair that smelled like cinnamon and eucalyptus — long, straight, and a little stiff, like a mane. All of her was brown, or really the color of honey. She half-closed her small, round eyes with the lust of someone who had just awakened from a long dream. Koala intuited that her very large breasts had dark nipples, enough in them to suckle for all eternity. Her thighs pressed against each other under her skirt, which fell to the middle of her calf — they were the thighs of a woman who’d known children. Firm hips, wide rump. Koala had to close his eyes after watching her pass by. He smelled her walk down Café Violeta’s central hallway; he heard her sit down at a table in the back. Three men stationed themselves around La Pastora, three men similar to him who were obviously her bodyguards.

“That’s her,” Ballpoint whispered in his ear, and left.

With eyes wide open, Koala Gutiérrez kept watch. He was also watching inside. Flesh, touch, an erection. The aroma of eucalyptus and cinnamon made him alert. He saw how La Pastora ordered a coffee with milk; how the owner of the place sat down to chat with her for a while; how she finished conversing with the owner of Café Violeta at the same time that she finished her coffee. His prey would soon be making a change of scene. Koala Gutiérrez asked for his bill and paid it, chewing on his stick. He’d wait for them in the car.

La Pastora left Café Violeta five minutes later. She and one of her henchmen got into a new SUV, subtle gold, like her. Koala prepared to follow her, his eyes lit up like two sparks in the night.

They turned down Avenida Borinquen and took the road down to the boat launches. They crossed a new bridge heading toward Las Margaritas, turned around at the roundabout at San Juan Bosco Church, and entered the ramp that connected to the housing project. Koala followed them in silence. Suddenly, his sixth sense tingled. Along that route, most of the roads were closed down for repairs from the recent rains, when the laguna flooded the banks of Las Margaritas. Koala stepped on the accelerator.

It smelled like a trap.

He couldn’t explain where the car that hit his vehicle on the driver’s side came from. Koala lost control and struck a lightpost in a flat area near the entrance to Las Margaritas. The owner’s manual for the vehicle pressed against his chest. He felt like he was suffocating, but then two hands pulled him out.

La Pastora was waiting for him. A single look and Koala Gutiérrez knew he’d never be able to shoot this woman in the head. He’d never be able to shoot her, period. He’d rather kiss her.

The bodyguards held him by his hands and feet. Koala put up no resistance; he didn’t get desperate.

He closed his eyes and imagined himself caressing that woman’s long hair, sinking his massive, clumsy hands into that flesh dressed in leaves and spices. He imagined La Pastora looking at him in the same way, savoring him. But in his imagination, he caught sight of a strange light in her gaze. It was a cold light, like that of a deranged animal. He wanted to look away. He kept imagining how his hands would slide along her soft belly; how he’d push them down to find the mound between her legs. Then he saw himself bending over and lifting La Pastora’s skirt, burying his face between her thick legs, licking them, opening them. Koala bit La Pastora, chewed on her slowly, drank her down in an instant, and for all eternity. At last, he opened his eyes.

“You can kill me now,” he said.

Two shots sounded.