Hilda was an extravagant woman. She weird. And a bit stupid. She had several fish tanks with spiders and many cats in her house. She talked to them, asked them things and sometimes they answered her. Or so it seemed at least because she used to be seen on the sidewalk, watering a tiny piece of dry land, exclaiming "Do you think so, Serafin, are you sure? I don't think so." And the cat alluded to coiled around her ankles meowing, saying; and she shook her head and said things that did not reach the human ear.
She lived around the corner from Aunt Luisa's house in Tolosa. All the boys were afraid of her, because in the neighborhood she was said to be half a witch. She that she did rituals. That she summoned spirits. Once Jorge, the kiosk, a very old man who had half of his mouth paralyzed and spoke through the gap that was left, told us that Doña Hilda was a lover of the devil.
For years we avoided going through the door of her house. But in the midst of adolescence, things changed a bit. Her dwelling was so precarious that when the train went to or returned from Constitución, the glass of her window fluttered like a flag. On her door the boys from the square had drawn the giant head of an ogre. They had done it with green paint.
The boys from Plaza Iraola, near the railway station, were the ones who sent each other the most memorable clubs, the ones who dared to paint walls and shutters. Once they wrote with red aerosol ´the kids of the square´ on the tank of the great truck that Mr. Luzuriaga parked in front of her house. That day the whole neighborhood was revolutionized.
They dared to do everything they dreamed of. And, although we never said it out loud, they were our role model. But we did nothing more than throw a stone at one of the windows of the disused hangars or throw a match rocket onto the tracks while the train was passing. We were calm. We were between twelve and fourteen years old.
On the other hand, our parents wouldn't let us hang out with them because they were older than us and, above all, because of their fame as criminals. Very exaggerated fame, like all fame. It said that one morning the door of Hilda's house appeared with that ogre. We all knew it was them.
They say the old lady didn't say anything. She looked at the drawing, went in and out again with a dented watering can, poured water on the dry ground, as if she were watering hollyhocks, and went into her house. The next day the door appeared crossed with deep scratches. The ogre was gone. The boys in the square swore it wasn't them. "She was the old one... she's crazy" they said. But no one believed them. On the other hand, no one really cared about the matter. The truth is that the scratches were really strange. And there they stayed.
But the fact that I want to remember did not have to do with the front of the house but with its back. The bottom overlooked a vacant lot. As I said, as children we did not dare to step on the sidewalk, but with puberty our instinct for curiosity was also awakened. We used to climb the wall to spy. At first we were not sure what we wanted to discover. But soon we found out.
In Doña Hilda's patio there were three large chicken coops, but only one had chickens, another had a lamb locked up, and the third had nothing. It was empty. But Aunt Luisa commented that people said that there was a medium-sized cougar imprisoned there that had escaped from a circus that had once camped on the old Tolosa beach. We thought that was just gossip. People love to talk, to say unsubstantiated things. And in the neighborhoods that becomes superlative. To us the cage was obviously empty.
No, none of that had piqued our genuine curiosity. There was another thing.
In the center of the patio, which was made of earth, there was an artificial swamp, it had a circumference of about three meters. Buried in that mud, a mixture of sand, shell, earth, and a purple paste, there were a score of reeds pointing to the sky. They were covered in transparent green plastic, like a greenhouse. Some wooden stakes held it to the ground, like a tent.
One day when a friend and I were climbing that wall, we never all looked out together, we did it in shifts, we thought we saw something move behind the plastic, something big, my friend slipped off the wall, we got scared and went out in a hurry. We exaggerated a little what we had seen and the fear that we instilled in the rest of the group ended up winning us too.
We decided to tell the boys in the square. We knew that they would dare to go in to take a look and would even be able to remove the plastic that covered those rods. When we told them what we had seen, my friend and I shamelessly exaggerated, they told us that they were not interested. We insisted, we promised them chocolates and other things but they still showed no interest. Born negotiators, they exchanged glances and one of them said: "a submersible watch, if they bring us a submersible watch we'll climb up and take a look, and maybe we'll bring them whatever is there, as a gift". We left in silence.
When we got to the car we sat on the floor and without any of us saying anything, Cecilia said "I can't bother my old man." Cecilia's father owned a watch shop on Calle 13, near Plaza Moreno.
It was not necessary to insist too much. A week later she showed up walking down the tracks, hands buried in the pockets of her inflatable, she jumped on the wagon and left the clock in the middle of the round where we were passing out a Lucky Strike. Without wasting time, we all went to Iraola together and found them where they always were, climbing on the hammocks. They looked like a herd of monkeys.
One of them let go of the pipe and fell to the ground, stretched out a hand, and Cecilia left the watch on that palm, weather-beaten by the cold and wanderings. The other four came to look at him. "Let's try it in the pool at your house" said one of them. Juan Felliú, the oldest of us and perhaps the most intelligent, told them that we were waiting for them there, that they should not be long. "Calm down" Topo said that he was the one who had the least reputation of being brave. "Don't worry," he repeated, "if you can stand the plunges, we'll come back and go to the old woman's patio." We saw how they grabbed their bikes and walked away from the square.
After almost two hours, one of us said that they weren't going to come back anymore, that they had surely sold the clock and now they were all playing the little electronic games of 8 and 51. We imagined them with piles of chips resting on the Double Dragon or the game board. OutRun.
"We should have stoked up" said the red-haired boy who was always with us even though we didn't consider him one hundred percent of the group. I don't remember his name, I know he died before he was twenty, they say he committed suicide or was pushed, the truth is that the train cut him in two. When Colo finished speaking we saw them appear. They kicked their bikes in front of us, kicking up a movie powder. They were them, they could do anything and they always did it well.
"When it gets dark we go, but you stay here, these are not things for assholes, yes, when we get together tomorrow they bring us a two-liter Coca-Cola and we promise to tell them what the old woman has locked up there," Aníbal told us, the boy everyone respected because he had hung upside down from the pedestrian bridge... and had fallen and broken his leg. And he didn't complain at all. He was lame now, but he was also admired, and he knew it, that's why sometimes he exaggerated the limp. We tried to protest but they were the boys from the square, so we accepted thanking them.
We agreed to meet the next day, in our car, at three in the afternoon. We were all there, except Cecilia, she was punished; somehow her father had discovered her (in time everything is known and our friend knew that at the moment she took the clock out of the window, Marina, her young employee, was watching her behind the scenes); Cecilia confessed and her father gave her a steak that crossed her face. We learned this many weeks later, she told us herself with tears of hatred in her eyes. So we all went, except her, walking to Iraola.
When we got to the hammocks we found them perched on the crossbars. The skinniest of them, when he saw us, lowered himself acrobatically, fell to the ground, shook his hands on his jeans and said "that shitty old woman... today we're going to go again, but this time we're going to kill her." kick the chickens and we are going to set fire to the reeds".
"But what happened?" I asked in awe and prophetic fear. "What happened? What happened? Look, this happened" he told me, and he turned around, lifting his shirt and showing us his back: he had a red X marked with fire. "She did it to me with the broom, the old lady," he said with more shame than hatred. "Stay cool, Chipi, today we're going in and we're taking a chicken for the pot," said Aníbal, leaning back when he was long on the crossbar. We said things that I don't remember, surely words of encouragement, and we went to the car. We were afraid of getting into a real quilombo. As soon as we reached the tracks, we each decided to go home.
What happened next is conjecture. As the years go by, what happened often gets mixed up with what we thought might have happened. But most likely this has happened. The old woman had a cane toad farm. A type of toad that is not typical of South America, somehow they came to it. Maybe he bought them on the black market, but this is entirely on my own and imagination. But that she had them, she had them, the police confirmed it and it came out on almost all the radio stations and newspapers in the city. The case even reached the news of the Federal Capital, which is the same as saying that he became famous. Why did she raise them or since when and what did she intend to do with them, nothing was ever said.
This amphibian is typical of Central America and the east coast of Australia. His whole body secretes a constant poison, like eternal sweat, so toxic that a few drops can kill a grown man.
The five boys from the square were found dead on the vacant lot. His skin was blackened by poison. And a repulsive grin twisted their faces.
One of them had slashed his throat open with his own fingernails. He was trying to breathe, experts said.
Hilda was hardly disturbed. There were no traces of hers on any body, nor on the wall that divided her house from the land where the bodies appeared, no one had heard a scream or an insult or anything. She alone had to face a lawsuit, which finally fell without weight over time, because one of her cats had eaten part of Hannibal's left eye. But the woman's lawyer turned out to be a skilled professional. And, like I said, it all came to nothing.
A few years later Doña Hilda died in her house. She of old she died. It was the neighbors who noticed the smell. When the municipal authorities entered the house, they found the woman's skeleton lying on her bed, totally skinned. Her white skull rested on a cushion sticky with blood. Dozens of fat cats slept around her. Others meowed.
I never talk about this with anyone, I have something of a superstition on me. And today I am a man who tries to lead a neat and orderly life. I don't know what made me want to write about this. I have healthier and happier memories of those times. But I guess healthy and happy are not good raw materials for writing. Beautiful memories like the constant affection of Aunt Luisa; or the games we invented with my friends in the car, where we had put up posters and brought a table and a couple of chairs. Cecilia is today a charming woman, she took over her father's business.
Sometimes we pass each other and stop to chat, but generally we avoid those nostalgic encounters where there is not much to say. With a certain sadness (or guilt) I cross the sidewalk to avoid her. I know that she does the same, one realizes those customs that civilized life imposes. On the other hand, the commonplaces of language are not my forte (nor are the uncommon ones either).
I lost track of the rest of the guys. And I don't use a cell phone and I barely manage with social networks. Juan Felliú's name made headlines not many years ago, he was found skinned behind the Cathedral, hanging upside down from a tree. A very strange and horrendous thing. But hey, that's another story.
