I told him about Miguel and Rafael and the others, told him in a Plaza del Oro flooded with the light of a sun that struggled in and out of clouds. Pedro’s face was luminous one moment, mysterious and thoughtful the next. I told him not because I really expected him to believe, but because I had to tell someone, and he was the only one I knew who might not laugh at me.
“The world,” he said, “it forces children to become terrible things sometimes, so that they may live. Makes new things of their nature. For every loss, a gain, I think, but not every gain is worth its cost.”
He seemed very sad. Pedro has never married, never fathered children, and at times like this I wonder if he’s glad, or regrets it all the more. He’d have made a wonderful father.
I have him to thank for suggesting a way to get closer to the kids when I first began to notice them, take an interest in their plight — surrogates, I’m sure, for the ones I couldn’t save at home. Give them pictures of themselves and their friends, Pedro suggested. He has done so himself for many years. They like this not only because it makes them feel more like a family — see, they have proof — but because when one of them dies, or disappears after the shadow of the policía is seen, then the rest have something by which to remember the lost one. They have no marker and no grave, but at least they have images preserved for all time, and some believe that in pictures there lives a sprinkle of magic.
From my pocket I pulled one such picture. I’d done a terrible thing, taking this from the wall of Rafael’s shack, stealing from someone who has less than nothing, but I planned to give it back.
I showed it to Pedro, positive he would recognize it.
The picture showed the fountain in the center of the Plaza del Oro, from the same vantage point that Pedro must have photographed tens of thousands of times. The Plaza was deserted, glowing with soft light that can only come at dawn. A half-dozen gangly-limbed kids were crowded together, Rafael among them, and at their waists rose the hackled head of some lupine animal, at play, with happily lolling tongue. But at their side was someone of adult stature, a blur of gray lost to motion the moment the shutter had clicked, a sweep of dark hair covering most of her face. She knew what they were — I had convinced myself of this in the days since stealing the picture. Where might they have been in the hours before dawn?
“Do you know who she is, Pedro?”
He calmly looked at the picture with soft eyes that betrayed nothing more than, perhaps, what he wanted me to see. It compelled me to wonder how much Pedro, having spent nearly every day out here for forty years, had really seen.
“Some, they call her a bruja.” A witch. He handed the picture back. “But me, I think she is just lonely.”
*
Over the next weeks I paid special attention to the strange and brutal deaths one always hears about in a city of millions. People live, people die, and neither can always be peaceful. On a few I dwelled longer: another shopkeeper, with his throat torn out; a policía officer, disemboweled in an alley. A few more.
I recognize survival and I recognize vengeance, and sometimes the two exist like fist in glove. Whenever I encounter Miguel and his friends, or seek them out to make sure they’re well, I’m aware of these things inside their hearts, but we never speak of them.
I’m new to this city, still, but it wasn’t always this way down here. Even Pedro admits that. And I wonder what process has been wrought, what set it into motion. If it was a deliberate act, or something waiting to happen, inevitably, that finally came to pass.
The woman in the picture was known as Doña Mariana. After I’d summoned enough nerve I went to see her. She lived on a quiet street in one of those areas that most cities have, that reek of history rather than mere age, and seem further removed from the city’s chaos than the few blocks between would imply. Her apartment was on the third floor of a building steeped in subtle European flavors, bracketed top to bottom by balconies and lattices of dark wrought-iron.
Doña Mariana was about my age, but she wore it with more dignity. Her dark hair was gathered at the back of her neck, long wisps curling free, and the fine lines at her mouth and eyes were cut as if by a loving sculptor who had no choice but to season her with an air of tragedy that would make her beauty all the more poignant. She stood as tall as I and elegantly big-boned, with a robust underlying sensuality that immediately set me to wondering how she would feel lying with me — how powerful her body must be, and how exquisite her touch.
Bruja, some said, according to Pedro. Witch. It would’ve been easier to expect a hag.
I showed her a picture I’d recently taken of some of the kids, Miguel and Rafael and others. “I believe we have some young friends in common,” I said.
She stared at me, so bold, so direct, her eyes so deeply brown. “Monjito?” she said, and I nodded. “If they trust you, then so will I. You do not judge them?”
I knew what she meant, but judge seemed so inappropriate a term. Least of all it wasn’t my place to judge. They were children and they were something more, something bloody they’d been forced to become. They frightened me and they fascinated me, and I suppose that’s an accurate description of the beginnings of love.
“I just want to understand,” I told her.
Doña Mariana took me into her home, full of polished wood and crystal and lush green ferns. We spent hours drinking sangria and talking about children, and what a terrible place the world can be for them, how they can only heal from so much before something else sets in and takes them over. You have to wonder sometimes if the survivors are lucky after all.
We shared our losses, Mariana and I. I told her of the family I’d failed to bring through the fire, and as I did, I had to wonder if that’s why I’d not done anything more for the street kids beyond giving to the few needy ones I knew by name. Certainly I was in a position to help. Back in the States I knew editors all over the country who would run whatever I wrote, should I decide to emerge from retirement. Americans love a good cause, as long as it comes with plenty of pictures. So why hadn’t I done more? Could it be that I feared my best wouldn’t be enough?
And then where would I be, losing not two kids, but hundreds?
Mariana knew my heart, I think, knew it as only one can who has lost her own children after already losing a husband. All three of hers — a daughter and two sons, none older than fourteen — had been killed last year in the massacre that had left the eleven dead in the street. I didn’t ask if they were delinquents or had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Surprisingly, I didn’t even wonder until much later. Not that it mattered.
We grieved for ourselves, mourned for each other, long after the afternoon sun had gone to evening moon, long after Pedro would have packed up his camera and bid another day farewell. We held each other against the night, and soon she took me to her bed and we loved each other in the sad passion of tears, loved each other as only two who intimately share some mutual anguish can love. I knew the powerful rapture of her body, and it exhausted mine. I groped for her soul, and it left mine feeling less abandoned.
We slept some, but late in the night she awoke with a start, trembling, and when I tried to hold her, Mariana gently pushed my hands aside. Her beauty became ethereal by moonlight, a silvery flood that came through the open door to her balcony. Her hair was now unbound, a lush tangle across the pillow, deeply black with silver threads that glimmered under the moon.