I put my head around his bedroom door and told him that I was going out to play soccer. It was an unlikely story, one that I invented to capitalize on the complicity that had grown between us while watching the game between Sweden and Brazil, but he didn’t display the slightest interest or even congratulate me on my initiative: apparently busy working on some document, he was sitting in front of the black screen and glowing green letters of the computer (our first, bought by my father a few months earlier, which, to his consternation, my sister, Teresa, and I had completely ignored from day one).
The Rec had a basketball hoop (just one) and two rusting goals, around which gathered the most noteworthy local teenagers, who seemed to me like hostile, feral adults whose sole interest was harassing the younger kids. I tended to avoid the Rec; the nearest I got was to pass it when accompanying Teresa to buy the newspaper. On the emotional map I’d drawn of Educación, the Rec was not very far short of Hades: an abominable region where there was nothing for a child like me—with my preference for origami and the shadows, and no love of sports or getting into scraps—to do on a Monday during the vacation.
As I drew closer to the group of adolescents standing around the goal, I spotted Rat: the leader of a gang of hell-raisers, famous for his precocious consumption of illegal substances.
In 1994, my understanding of the word “drug” didn’t extend beyond temporary tattoos, the kinds of transfers that came with the wrapping of certain brands of gum. In the Paideia School, which both my sister and I attended, it was said that those gum wrappers were sometimes “adulterated” with drugs, so that when the temporary tattoos (of pirates or dinosaurs) were applied to the skin, children experienced sudden, disturbing fits of madness, and on occasion even died or ended up living in the tunnels of the 2 Line of the metro. That rumor, however over-the-top it might now seem, was for me, at the age of ten, the indisputable Truth, and every time I saw Rat—aware of his reputation—I imagined him in some not-too-distant future, smothered in temporary tattoos of diplodocuses and corsairs, tied down to a hospital bed, blood seeping from his eyeballs. That’s why I changed direction as I approached the Rec, before Rat and his cohort of bullyboys decided to relieve their boredom by making me the target of their mockery—as had happened before.
I walked along, folding leaves from the surrounding shrubs in half, following the midribs. In contrast to my usual practice, rather than discarding the two halves of the leaves, I decided to keep them in my pockets with the petioles (one half in the right pocket, the other in the left, so as to preserve on my person the fundamental symmetry demanded by origami). Absorbed in this meticulous activity, I didn’t notice that I’d reached the corner of the avenue on which stood the newspaper kiosk Teresa used to visit each and every morning. The sound of the vendor’s voice snapped me out of my reverie: “So why hasn’t your mom been around lately? Is she on vacation?” I looked at him in stupefaction. That the newspaper vendor should notice Teresa’s absence was distressing, and even now, twenty-three years later, I find it difficult to explain why. I considered telling him that Teresa had gone camping, but my voice stuck in my throat, as if I’d swallowed a small balloon and it was there, blocking half my gullet. The newspaper vendor must have noticed that something was wrong, because he refrained from asking any further questions and, instead, solemnly handed me a copy of the paper my mother used to read straight through in the living room while my sister and I were doing our homework, before my father came back from the office. On the front page there was, yet again, a photo of the man in a balaclava with a pipe in his mouth, addressing a huge crowd. “Subcomandante Marcos giving a speech during the opening of the National Democratic Convention,” I read in the tiny letters of the caption. There was no way I could have known then, but Teresa was one of those dots of ink on the front page of the newspaper, one head among a multitude of others.
On my way home, newspaper in hand, I decided to make a detour to avoid the Rec, where I guessed Rat’s gang would still be loitering, holding spitting contests, whiling away the time until a victim turned up and gave them the chance to swap tedium for cruelty. I progressed along the avenue—the boundary of where I had permission to go on my own, according to Teresa’s stipulations—passing a number of taquerías, the local pool hall, and the café where Mariana used to meet her girlfriends to drink cappuccinos and feel grown up. On almost every streetlight, every public telephone, there was at least one election campaign poster: a smiling—and basically menacing—face gazing out at the pedestrians and motorists from the rigid laminate, from its clumsy attempt to seem likeable.
I dropped the newspaper onto the coffee table in the living room and, as was my custom, threw my tennis shoes into the hall. Then I speedily checked out the house to ensure that my father wasn’t home. He’d most likely have told Mariana where he was going, charging her with the responsibility of communicating the information to me, but my sister was on the telephone in her room. A few months before they had given in—unfairly, I considered—to her demand to have a phone of her own in there.
