I bought this apartment with the money that came to me two years ago from the sale of the house in Educación. Mariana used her share to make a down payment on a much more spacious apartment near her office, but I decided that I lacked the patience and perseverance needed to repay a mortgage, so bought the first place I could afford, without giving much thought to the condition of the building—in urgent need of renovation—or the neighborhood—frankly dangerous.
Had he still been alive, my father would have disapproved of the purchase of this apartment. He’d have spent hours telling me about the property bubble, the benefits of having a credit history, the practicality of buying a place where I could raise the children I don’t have, when the time came. If he were still alive now, my father would disapprove of everything I do. Since he died, I’m constantly making those sorts of assumptions, as if I’ve taken on the office he handed down to me at his death in a dingy hospital room and now have to disapprove of myself in his name.
Something similar had happened after Teresa’s death, which I first heard about on September 23, 1994, the last day of summer. It’s commonly said that denial is the first phase of mourning, but for me, at the age of ten, it wasn’t just the first but, for a long time, the only phase. Through a process of highly complex mental gymnastics, I managed to convince myself that not only was Teresa still alive, but that she was more attentive to what was happening in my life than she’d ever been in the past. During the first two or three years, I used to imagine her reaction to anything I did. I could almost hear her robotic voice explaining why I didn’t need a certain toy, why memorizing dates was not the best way to study for my history class, why my sister’s life would be more difficult than mine because she was a woman.
Those years of secretly evoking Teresa were followed by overt imitation. Between 1998 and 2001—in the full fury of adolescence—I got into the slightly forced habit of talking like her, in that neutral tone with only minimal variations that was so characteristic of her speech. At the age of fifteen or sixteen I let my hair grow and began to wear it the way she used to. But I never managed to look like Teresa: however reluctantly, I was developing my father’s features, his voice, his brusque, uncouth manner.
After that imitative phase, my life continued along relatively conventional, uninteresting paths. I went to college and got a job. I had very short-lived relationships and harbored lasting grudges. I made superficial acquaintances and formed one or two friendships that were much closer but then later faded. I lived in either shared apartments or in others—as small as this one—where I was on my own. I adopted a dog that ran away one day, never to be seen again. I developed curable illnesses and chronic addictions.
Throughout all those years, I continued to see my father from time to time, and less frequently, my sister. And although I still thought about Teresa, eventually days and even weeks would pass when I managed to forget her completely, when I didn’t hear her voice or imagine the way she used to smoke, leaning against the wall of the house in Educación. Days and weeks when I didn’t, even once, think about Friday, September 23, 1994.
After that summer, Rat continued to be seen on the streets of Educación for some time, but following the night in the Taxqueña terminal, we never exchanged a word. Mariana forgot him almost immediately—programmatically—and began dating other boys and, later, women. Rat’s reputation gradually faded after the summer of ’94, which was apparently the modest peak of his popularity. His escapades were mentioned less frequently, he appeared in the Rec less often, and even his retinue of gorillas dwindled as they found new leaders. Whenever we happened to cross paths in the arcade or Los Orgullosos, I’d try to catch his eye, seeking a trace of complicity, or at least recognition that the night in Taxqueña had existed, that he’d accompanied me from my living room to the bus terminal, had helped me to cross a busy street in my local neighborhood—in my known world. But Rat either avoided me or pretended not to know who I was. He’d look at me without seeing, as if I were transparent or he had the power to see through human bodies.
For a long time I thought that maybe Rat had forgotten what happened. That, in the end, it had been less important for him than for me. He’d given me the nudge that led to one of the most formative adventures of my childhood, during the summer vacation that shaped my personality, but for Rat it had probably been one night among the many others of his teenage years, its memory blurred by an alcoholic haze. Walking with some local kid to the bus terminal and giving him a little money couldn’t have had any great significance for someone generally thought to be associated with much bolder activities.
Rat disappeared from the neighborhood a few years afterward, when I was in high school. His mother spread the word that he’d gone to study abroad (the secret desire of every mother in that middle-class district during those aspirational years), but it very soon became known that he’d gotten one of his girlfriends pregnant and was selling clothes—some said marijuana too—in various street markets in the south of the city. Rat’s function in Educación was speedily taken over by shadier characters who didn’t brag about using temporary tattoos or drinking beer, but about smoking crack and holding up drugstores.
