I

         When everything is over, it’s so easy to look back and see your mistakes. When you look at things from another person’s perspective, it’s easy too. The hard part is acting the way your gut tells you to at the exact moment things are happening. In real time. At the exact same moment. That Wednesday morning I remember thinking how much I hated eggs that still had bits of chicken shit on them. Sure it was quite natural and all that, but the only thing I could think of was that I was going to eat something that had come out of an animal’s butt. A chicken’s butt. That was really, really filthy, was the best you could say about it, it was the filthiest thing ever! After that, like I’ve already said, a thousand and one times, I don’t remember what happened very well. I beat the eggs so I could get the nastiest part out of the way and when I went to cut the potatoes up, they weren’t there. I could swear I’d put them on the table, but they weren’t there. Impossible. I searched all the cupboards, but there wasn’t even a bag of the fried ones I sometimes used in an emergency. The only solution was to head to Milucha’s store. I ran into Moncho on the steps on the fourth floor as he was coming home from work. And he got mad. And we argued. And he pushed me. And I fell. And I hurt my head really bad and I didn’t die because it wasn’t my time to go as much as I wanted to. In those cases, what one wants and what actually happens are like two different worlds. That was probably the first time I felt they were close to me, but I didn’t know it yet. I wasn’t aware. They were trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t ready to listen to them.

         Being in the hospital was like being in my own private spa. They served me my meals there and I didn’t have to wash the dishes! I was also able to sleep. And this time, a lot better. It’s not nice of me to say it, but I was thankful people were now obsessed with women who get killed, because they ended up taking Moncho away to jail for a couple of nights. I didn’t wish him any harm, not at all. I just wanted to get a little sleep. Take it easy for a little while. It’s so nice to wake up in the morning as if you’ve been sleeping for seven hundred years and you don’t have anything you have to do. No ironing, no yelling, no making breakfasts, no putting up with insults, no going to the market… You just get up and enjoy the warm shower while listening to the nurse pull the coffee cart along, with the fragrance wafting after her through the hallways. Sitting with your cup beside the window, watching the city wake up is a pleasure we all should experience once in our lives. Something so inexpensive and yet so costly if you try to get it. And there I had the entire sunrise to myself.

         Good things always come to an end. Always. And that’s what lets us appreciate them. If we didn’t have painful moments in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to make a comparison and then we wouldn’t be able to tell the good from the bad. Everyone knows this: happiness comes in small amounts. Leaving that small room where I felt safe made me feel sad, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d be back in one pretty much like it. That was the way things were. When it happened again, I’d be able to get some sleep. Now I had to take the plastic bag with the clothes I’d been wearing when I arrived and throw it in the trash because dried blood doesn’t look good on your clothing. Get on the bus and enter a house where emptiness filled all the spaces. Except one: the kitchen table. They would be lined up there, waiting for me. Their faces, their expressions serious, forecast a thunderstorm with rough sea and winds with a force of five to six knots. I sat down on the chair next to them.

II

         The sprouting eyes should frighten me, but it’s quite the opposite, they remind me of the hairdos I had when I was a kid. At the stage when your hair is short and when it’s pulled back, the ends stick out around the rubber band. Curly, really curly. It’s not the time to be thinking about that and I can’t avoid looking at them with the tenderness of a mother with an empty nest. My daughter emigrated to London years ago. It hurts a bit less every day but still the itch is there if you scratch it. You just have to give it a shot. The complicated part is getting out of the vicious cycle, because once you turn on the gas, you can’t ever get it back in. And you scratch and scratch and scratch and you think that if your daughter were back home he wouldn’t dare do it anymore. She’s a modern girl, the type who will go to the police and her knees won’t shake. She’d help you get over your fear, but she’s so far away and this is not a reason to worry her either. She’s got enough to handle with her own vida. And you scratch and you wish the stitches you have between your brain and your scalp would really upset her. The silver staples that hold the edges of the skin together. There’s no life without a utopia. A caress where the thoughts are broken. Soften the pain. Not the physical kind, the one that’s inside and doesn’t have blisters or black and blue marks. The one that doesn’t go away with ibuprofen. Knowing that the fingers that are pressing on the cotton soaked in Betadine will also be the ones that provide some kindness for what’s going on inside. I should call her. Tell her that they’re angry and won’t speak to me. They look down on my lack of determination even though they don’t judge me. On their surfaces I can see their anger and sadness at not being able to save me from myself. My daughter would scold me, though. Love hurts, too. Listening to what you don’t want to hear is a hard pill to swallow. She’d tell me that and I don’t feel like hearing it. I prefer and I choose to have this secret hate. It’s easier to put up with. Avoid the risk that she’ll ask for some time off and get on the first plane here. It’d kill me to see my reflection in her pained gaze. My daughter didn’t choose this situation: the cards were dealt for her. I can’t do that to her. Poor thing. It’s my responsibility. As long as I don’t tell her what’s going on, this situation won’t exist for her. She won’t be aware it’s happening. Any day now she’ll throw it in my face, saying I don’t have the right to make these decisions for her, she’s had hair in her armpits for years now, I’m selfish keeping all this to myself, it’s not good for me to hide behind my shame and my pride, because that’ll only help me keep my head in the sand. And she’s right but I don’t have enough strength left to hurt her. I don’t want to talk to my daughter today no matter how much you insist. Tomorrow’s another day and we’ll see then. They say nothing and the atmosphere is heavy with that silent tension that indicates an explosion is about to happen. A ball of emotional methane between the kitchen and the living room. All that’s lacking is a match. If I set myself on fire, everything will explode all over the place. All of them, my daughter, me… If I mix my methane feelings with the butane canister maybe even the house would blow up too. No! I never was a violent person and I’m not going to start now. What fault is it of my neighbors who kill themselves trying to pay their mortgages? And the little girls who play in the room with their toys? The truth is, the canister of gas has to be only for the heater and the fire. Now that I’ve calmed down, I hear his voice in the hall saying my name, pounding my eardrums. The tone of his voice sends a shiver up my spine: he’s angry. Really angry.

III

         “What were you thinking of? Do you see what you’ve caused with your foolishness?”

         Ei! Hoje eu mando um abraçaço, Ei! Hoje eu mando um abraçaço… Hey there, today I’m giving you a great big hug. Hey there, today I’m giving you a great big hug… Caetano’s voice echoes over and over in my neurons: abraçaço, abraçaço… a huggg, a huggg… I wish I could wrap myself in his arms like before, when we were young and the future was full of surprises. I miss his warmth. He comes over to me with none of that niceness that used to seduce me. His nerves draw his scalp up in a really misshapen grimace. I miss the man who’s been taken over by this new creature I don’t recognize. The testosterone that at some point in the past turned me on now only smells like rotten sweat several layers deep and several days old. Too close for me not to feel like throwing up. Click! Click! The staples on my scalp pop, making tiny sounds, as if they were gradually pulling loose. Metal lice crawling down my hair. The abraçaço huggg inabstract form. Abraçaço. Abraçaço. Huggg. Don’t let any other words enter my head. One hand on my jaw, the other on my side. Both are bloody. The red thickened by the salt of my tears. Repeat like a mantra: abraçaço, abraçaço, abraçaço… Don’t let any sharp words in.Stop the sharp blades. Turn myself into a sowbug just like experience taught me to do. Protect the wound. On the floor. Curled into a ball. My vital organs defended by my legs. My arms over my head. Sowbug. Abraçaço. Huggg. Everything comes to an end sooner or later. Nothing lasts forever. Abraçaço. Huggg. Everything comes to an end. Abraçaço. It always stops.

         “Get up and clean yourself off! You make me sick!”

         My calf coils up with a charley horse that sends needles into the back of my neck. Have to stay on my feet. That’s for sure. Wait for the ending. Silence. I try not to hiccup so as not to make any noise. If I don’t interrupt what’s happening, everything will take its course more quickly. Maybe I can manage it so they’ll be over as fast as the lightning-fast speed of slugs.

         “Look how I’ve come home – like a badger! Three days wearing the same clothes because of you! Look at me!”

         The shirt full of wrinkles and pants spotted with who knows what are as elegant as lifeless objects. Moncho was right: he was the perfect badger. It wasn’t his clothing that made him look like that. It was how well made it was. I look at him from inside my terror. That stranger was a beast, he was unrecognizable. When had he been transformed without my noticing? When had that sweet face become a parody of Chucky? What happened to that sweet young man with whom I created my daughter? A tear falls when I realize everything is over. I’m certain now. And they’re screaming at me.

IV

         “Me,” says one of them. “Me too,” screams another. “And me!” adds the third. Until there all five of them had chimed in. Me, me, me, me, and me. I don’t understand how they managed to talk to me without Moncho hearing them but I heard them, oh I heard them! The five of them staring at me. Daring me. And he was trying to figure out why I was staring so hard. Then something I never do, something that came from out of the blue, made my hand grab them. “Hard! Throw me, hit him right between the eyes, hard!” it bellowed. I did what I was told. I threw it like there was no tomorrow, with the anger of years and years of humiliation. I hurled it right between his eyes with all my might while it cried out, “Bingo!” and its companion begged, “It’s my turn now. It’s my turn!” I didn’t need to think twice. I felt as If I weren’t inside my body and had no control over it. Straight at the family jewels. He doubled over. The third slammed into his knee. The fourth his ankle. Then he fell like all towers fall: he collapsed. To me it seemed like hours, movements in slow motion, or a stroboscopic effect and a slow motion fall beside that, but intuition tells me it was just a matter of a couple of seconds. “I haven’t gone yet! I want to go, too!” clamors the one that’s in my hand, forgotten. Then it lands with a crash, but not without first bouncing toward the tiles. Afterward, everything was as silent as a tomb. So that was what death was like? The absence of sound. They’re quiet, too, but with a smile peeking out from between their eyes. They’re getting revenge for the two babies he killed when he kicked me in the belly. They’re the revenge for the three times I tried to die (by knife, car, and window, classified as attempts at suicide by people’s lies). They brought the past so I could make peace with myself. Five.

         “So now what?” I ask them, not expecting an answer.

         The first feeling that hit me was that I was an orphan. An orphan without the “you have to…”, without the constant anxiety and panic in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly I was gasping for air. I raised all the blinds, opened the windows, the door to the terrace, and even undid the buttons on my shirt. Calm down. The police? Yes, of course. I have to face it. But now? So soon? They’re not helping me decide. For the time being I’ll sit him on the sofa in the living room and I’ll scrub the small bloodstain that’s on the floor. If it gets into the cracks then you can’t get it out and I don’t have enough money to remodel the kitchen. Moncho’s on the couch, they’re on the table. I feel like I’ve lost fifteen kilos. I even feel like putting on my old torn blue jeans and my blouse with the thin straps. The smell of bleach calms my insides. Calms my upset stomach. Little by little, I’m realizing my new situation. Free. At last! Not afraid of all the corners of the house that hide threats in their darkness. Today I stood up to my demons and I won! I won? Yes! No! Who cares! I’m not going to think about that now! I don’t want to ruin this moment of happiness when I’m certain my sowbug self has just disappeared and my husband is sitting in the living room without yelling at me. Harmless. They know what I’m talking about. What I’m feeling.

V

         I clean their bruises and the bits that stuck to their skins. I place them, carefully, on the table. One of them got hit hard and I apologize for having acted so violently. The absence of noise is horrible. I can only hear myself until the doorbell rings. It’s the woman who delivers the mail.

         “I’ve brought a certificate for your husband,” she says, her tone somewhere between professionalism and the intimacy shared in gym locker rooms. “Sign here and add your ID number. Is everything all right?”

         “It couldn’t be better. It’s a good day. And… how’re things with your family, Pili?”

         “Not too bad, which is something at least… Paco keeps saying any day now something awful’s going to happen…”

         An odd feeling enters the part of my brain used for decision-making. Just like that. I ask her to wait and return from the kitchen with a bag. They’re going to help me do this. They know how.

         “What’s this?” she asks, as she starts off on her route again. “What is it?”

         “Think of it as your lottery. You had the winning number today. Take them home and put them on your kitchen table. It might seem crazy, but just try it. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

         The second feeling that hit me was loneliness. Now that they had left with Pili the mail carrier, I was alone. There was nobody who understood me, nobody to look at me with accusing eyes. There’s just Moncho, but he’s got a look on his face like a kid goat that makes me feel like putting sunglasses on him inside the house. At some point in time, that gaze, the one that used to seem so charming and enticing, turned into one I could never look at straight on, as if it were Medusa’s. His fury had frightened me. It’s as though his pupils were a black hole in which he’d devour me if I made even a little mistake. Then I put the glasses on him. I cry until I laugh. So many decades curled up inside myself and it turns out this is what he was? A piece of flesh like me. He wasn’t anything special. He didn’t even know how to find the strength to call me “stupid cow.” His lips were stupidly stiff. And it wasn’t that death didn’t suit him. It was his own poison. The one that had caused my illness. And everything is over in the moment of solitude. Of silence. Of peacefulness. Of relief. Of fear buried at the foot of a cliff. Of panic drowned in the depths of the ocean.

         “What did you give Pili?” the madness interrupts for the first time. “What was inside the bag?”

VI

         I can’t think about her from inside these foggy memories. If I lose my train of thought now I don’t know if I’ll be able to put it all together again. Things always happen when the time is right. When she’s ready to understand me, she will. Not before, not after. Maybe they didn’t have anything to do with Moncho’s death. It only happened because my time had come. I was ready to understand that it was him or me and I was the one who was meant to survive! And he’d end up on the couch, not saying a thing. I put his slippers on him like I’ve done so many other times, so he’ll be comfortable. I cover his legs with a little wool blanket. I turn the news on for him. And put an empty beer in his hand. Since he’s not going to drink it anyway, why waste it? It wouldn’t be good if guests came and I didn’t have any cold ones left. My daughter used to lecture me on how I’m not a maid, I shouldn’t let him treat me that way, he should get his own beer and slippers. “He loves me,” I’d tell her. In his own way, but even now, I think he loved me. Not in a good way, but he loved me. The problem is that I didn’t. I loved him, yes, but it was so many centuries ago that I don’t remember what that loving was. At the beginning things were so different. Each time he came close to me my skin trembled like ryegrass in the breeze at dusk. And I trembled with pleasure. Shudders went up my sides and ran down to my toes. That was how we spent the afternoons and the nights, hand in hand. One time we got over the embarrassment of seeing each other without much clothing and we shared a small towel on the edge of the sand. The water lapping at our heels while we submerged ourselves in each other’s eyes. Happy. Everything we dreamed about was born from deep inside us and the air was the best food for our souls. We even came to form a perfect team. Almost symbiotic. That’s how we were when my parents found us together. My mother couldn’t stand him. I think she had a bag on the kitchen table, too. That’s why she had her suspicions. And we got married. And I walked to the altar by myself. My father didn’t give me away. There were no guests. Back then I didn’t need them. Moncho was enough. He was everything. All five of my senses were focused on him. My sex, my pleasure. The first night as a married couple. That was the first time. The disappointment in his expression. That “you didn’t bleed!” he spat out with such disgust. We’d never talked about that because I assumed that in my time we women could have sexual relationships before marriage and he argued the opposite: only men had that right. And he split my lip while saying “you whore!”, even more disgusted, before going out and not returning until morning and it was time to go home. That was my honeymoon in a spa in Portugal. Then at some point he apologized so he could get between my legs again but it was never the same. Quickly and with a lot of ripping we created that future child who was never born. He disintegrated like finely ground flour inside me at six months. The doctor said something about internal hemorrhage, but I knew the danger was always external. I think about the early times and light a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but the pure joy of knowing how much it bothered him if I did smoke, and even more so in the living room in front of him, makes the pleasure even greater. I blow the smoke in his face and the bell rings. I open the door. Pili comes into the living room. Very upset, she enters my place. She’s got the bag in her hand. She stops when she notices Moncho.

VII

         “So what happened to this guy?” she whispers in a low voice, not realizing he can’t hear her. “What’s he doing home at this time of day?”

         “I killed him. He can’t hear you.”

         Pili gives Moncho a slap on the back of his neck and his head slumps over to his sternum that’s as stiff as an iron beam. Only his hair still seems to be alive as it falls over his glasses. The final effect is perfect for the beginning of a horror film: a man nodding in front of the television screen and two women looking at him with the tranquility of a calm sea.

         “So what are you going to do? Pretty soon he’s going to start to smell.”

         “Well, I don’t know,” I reply, when I realize she’s right. “I haven’t had a chance to think about that yet.”

         “Do you need him for anything?”

         “Not that I can think of… What’s he good for?”

         “Nothing. The same as before. Well, you’re going to have to get rid of the body.”

         “I don’t know how to do that.”

         “Paco has a chlori-somethingorother acid he uses to clean the concrete. I read the other day that the mafia guys use it to make cadavers disintegrate. If you want I can bring you a couple of bottles and we can put Moncho to soak in the bathtub…”

         “Do we need to add water?”

         “I think so… but I’ll look at the directions! They’re probably in the back of the van.”

         Pili puts the bag on the kitchen table and leaves the way she came in: determined. She believes a job should be well done. A definite goal. I sit down on the sofa, beside Moncho who continues napping, and a feeling of loss settles among my ribs. The thing to do in these cases is to go to the town hall and adopt a cat. That way loneliness won’t sink its claws into the house.

VIII

         I miss having the cat I don’t have. Just for a moment I’d like to be like Gargamel petting Azrael’s ears. To be the mistress of evil for a moment. Thinking about killing Moncho. Enjoying the revenge. Feeling that pleasure. The numbness I feel robs me of even this moment. I ought to be able to feel something. Feel pain. Feel pity. Feel remorse. Feel something, yet I’m only intrigued by the fly buzzing above the television screen. When did I become the straight line on a heart monitor? When did I stop being terrified of the familiar packages of potatoes where you have to put your hand in as far as the bottom to get the last ones? Why don’t I scream? Why don’t I vomit? Where are the tears you shed when someone dies? Where is my inner self? Did it die too? Has it too become food for the worms of feeling? In the street a fire truck runs through the center of my thoughts. It cuts them off and forces me to get up to shut the window because otherwise I won’t be able to hear myself with so much noise. I breathe in the smell of smoke and burned plastic that’s coming from two buildings further up, at number 8. Instinctively, I look out into space, searching for a shooting star, even though I know it’s daytime. I want to make a wish: please, please, please, make this rotting barbecue smell be the fellow who raped the neighbor in the doorway. Por favor, por favor, por favor, let there be cosmic justice in the face of rational human uncertainty. But I realize wishes don’t fall from the sky. I run to the kitchen. The table there. I kneel down and pray to them. Save the girl like you saved me. She’s only seventeen and has to share an elevator with the neighbor. Don’t let her be afraid. She’s just a young girl. Then the curly eyes tell me my request has been favorably received. I no longer need bits of shiny stardust. I’ve got them. And Moncho on the sofa. The cat, that I’ll call Azrael and that’ll be an orange tabby, lends me the shadow of his footsteps through the hall, helping fight off loneliness. Pili is also here. Not directly involved in the matter, but no less important. Without her the house would change its smell too. I imagine I couldn’t stand that. And the worms would arrive fast. I never thought about having a firefly for a pet. Someone with a body part that lights up is not to be trusted. It goes against nature. Completely. The sirens stop blaring and give way to big streams of water that leave little droplets in the air. They land on the window and call to me to let them in. They clink against the glass. Soft, constant. Transparent flecks of foam in the air. The noise of the people in the street echoes in the distance, like the fluttering of a moth, and forces its way into the apartment through the television line. The live newscast focuses on my building, on the one next to me and on the one where the fire is. People’s expressions show they aren’t sure what’s happening. The reporter is asking the woman working in the fruit store why her business is located on the ground floor. Burned to the ground. Grilled fruit with accelerant syrup. They tell her that the only person who is seriously wounded is a thirty-nine-year-old man who lives on the third floor and couldn’t get out of the building in time. He was unconscious when the firefighters got him out. The employee retorts that other times it didn’t make any sense, she doesn’t wish anybody harm, but deserve it, he definitely deserved it, because it was time bad things stopped happening to good people… I turn off the TV. I should thank them.

IX

         I look at them and can see they’re happy. They refuse to talk to me, but in a little bit I can tell what each wrinkle means. It must be complicated to communicate without a mouth and they don’t want to enter my inner voice again. Maybe they reserve this recourse for special occasions only, for when there’s no alternative. Or, perhaps they work like the emotions do, without phonemes, without spoken words. Connections that are sensed rather than touched with the hands.

         Pili rings the doorbell. I’m certain it’s her even before I open it by the way she presses the button. Speed and insistence. Probably she is burdened with the weight of responsibility and those containers of chloro-something. I hurry, my steps matching the rhythm of the bell in the doorbell box.

         “I brought you three containers.” Her gasps don’t keep the mail carrier from delivering her monologue. “I think one’s enough but it’s almost better not to risk it. We’ll pour them on him and that way we’ll be sure it all goes well. No loose ends. That way we make good use of it and the bathtub is going to look like it belongs to the Shah of Iran. Nice and clean, nice and clean, so you can even eat out of it if you feel like it! There won’t be anything left. We’ll make every last bit disappear, every last bit. If you kill the patient, you cure the disease.

         “That was a dog, Pili… The one they killed so the Ebola virus wouldn’t spread was Excalibur, the dog that belonged to the nurse who was infected.”

         “Yes, of course… but that doesn’t rhyme for me… A person can use a little poetic license, can’t she? Besides… we’re not going to get picky now at this stage of the game. We’ve got too much work ahead of us to be nitpicking…”

         “What if it takes the finish off my bathtub? Didn’t you say that’s used to clean concrete? Maybe it’ll eat a hole in the ceiling of the downstairs neighbors…”

         “You watch too many movies… How would it eat a hole in your floor? Are you crazy or something? It’s a cleaning product, not something to make holes in things! And if it caves, well… that’s one thing less to scrub and take the hairs out of the drain!”

         “Yes… but I’d already gotten used to taking a bath…”

         “You’re certainly careful when you want to be, you know…” Pili starts to laugh, while she winks at me. “Come on! Let’s stop lollygagging because we’ve got a lot to do…”

         “So what do we put in first?” I ask. “The container? The water? Moncho?”

X

         Pili thinks about it a bit and, after citing the principle of Archimedes, we come to the conclusion that, in order not to take any risks, first we’re going to lay Moncho in the bathtub, then we’ll pour the acid over him, then the water. If we did it the other way around there was the possibility that when the body was dropped in we could splatter ourselves a little and it wouldn’t be good if we had to rush to emergency for an unexplainable reason. We’d probably get ourselves into a big mess without meaning to. And it was the right decision, because Moncho had begun to look like a porcupine fish since he’d tripped in the kitchen. He’d swollen up about two hundredweight, more or less, sitting there on the sofa. He’d never liked to exercise and now the two of us were paying the consequences… Getting him onto the floor was the easy part: a good push and he tumbled over on his own like a sack of potatoes falling. The complicated part was moving him. Still, it was fortunate that Pili had the idea of putting the shopping cart underneath him and we managed to move him along to the bathroom. When I adopt my orange cat Azrael, I’m going to buy another cart. This one is all ruined, poor thing… Lifting Moncho into the bathtub was definitely an adventure and not exactly one like Odysseus had! I needed to go to the garage to get the car jack. For a moment I was glad I hadn’t argued against spending money on a hydraulic model. Just thinking about having to lift him by hand made my sciatica hurt! We put him on the board we use as a table on days when we have guests, and alley-oop! When we pushed him inside he twisted and landed on his face. His feet were hanging out thanks to this last gibe from Moncho. Resting on the edge.

         “Who cares!” Pili couldn’t hide her anger. “When the body melts we’ll do like with spaghetti: we’ll push what’s hanging out into the water…”

         “That might work… Hey, Pili… We should wear gloves or something, right?”

         “Whatever for, darling?… So we don’t leave any prints? It’s your house. It would be odd if there weren’t any of your prints around!”

         “No. I meant so we wouldn’t burn ourselves.”

         So we put on aprons with matching gloves. Sunglasses. Boots. Prepared for chemical warfare. Moncho, unaware of our preparations, maintains his absurd posture and the impossible angle of his body. I uncap the acid and watch how it lands on the clothing of the person who once made me so happy or who I wanted to think did. The anhedonia gives me a lack of complete satisfaction. I would have liked to feel good about getting my revenge, better than good, and yet in contrast, I feel nothing. Only rage maintains my nervous system at a minimal level of functioning. A dozen tears fall because of my impotence at knowing I’m incapable of taking advantage of the historic moment I’m living. Fury.

XI

         Even though in the movies acids are super incredibly fast, the truth is that nothing happens in the first few minutes. There are no terrible clouds of smoke where people can’t see anything, no explosions, nothing like that at all. There’s nothing attractive about it, no glamour whatsoever. So that fact of materialness made us really hungry and ruined the spectacle we’d conjured up in our minds.

         “Why’d you kill him?” Pili asks, while she opens the refrigerator to get us some yogurts. “Did he beat you again?”

         (I sit down on the chair.) “Yes, but I don’t know if that’s why I split his head open… I think… simply… it was time…” (Pili sits down on the bench in front of me.)

         “Does your daughter know? Did you call her?”

         “No. Just you.”

         “Well, don’t tell her anything. She won’t feel as bad if she doesn’t know what happened.”

         “And when she asks me about him?”

         “Tell her anything… like he went off with another woman, for example…”

         “That’s not a good idea. She’ll want to go looking for him and then when she doesn’t find him, she’ll be furious and things like that.”

         “Think. I’m not going to tell you what you have to do, because you’re an adult… but remember you’d be making her your accomplice…”

         “I hadn’t thought of that.” I swallow two spoonfuls of yogurt before going on. “I guess I can make up a story… By the way… you didn’t tell me why you gave me back the bag so quickly. Couldn’t you use it?”

         “Oh, yes, I could. It really worked for me! I just set it on the table and the telephone rang. I grab the phone and it turns out they’re calling from the jail. They took Paco to Teixeiro. He’s in prison there.” For the first time all afternoon, Pili smiles happily. “They’re not going to let him out for a long time and, since he promised not to drink, they nicely proposed a program for him to get sober. Morto o can, morreu a rabia! If you kill the dog, you get rid of the fleas.”

Text © Eli Ríos

Translation © Kathleen March