Angela From Her Own Darkness

I don’t know when I started to feel afraid of that room in the second courtyard. However, I seem to remember one afternoon we were playing soccer when the rag ball hit the closed door hard and it creaked within its entire worn-out structure. Suddenly, it seemed that the noise that had penetrated the house was slowly turning into a rich and full sounding echo that lifted dust, removed cobwebs, and moved objects from one place to another. Afterward, I sensed how it would quiet down and empower itself with the air, filling and absorbing all of it, so that if the door were suddenly opened, the increasing noise would overflow into the courtyard, sweeping us away, drowning us.

Not until the day the porter’s son drank poison to kill himself over Yolanda, did I notice that the room was occupied by two old women and a tall, pale woman named Angela. On that very day, while my mother and I watched how Roso rolled around vomiting and screaming with pain on the stone pavement, I was surprised to see the door opening slightly. The blood in my veins froze because I was absolutely sure that room was empty. Luckily, Roso didn’t die until nightfall, so I took the opportunity to look more closely through the small crack in the door seemingly left open deliberately. Angela was sitting motionless in a chair, and the two old women were taking turns to see the spectacle of Roso, who wasn’t letting anyone touch him, while his father cried hysterically in a corner. Just as I had unconsciously assumed, the objects that I managed to see were much older than my imagination could tolerate. What depressed me the most was the large number of pictures of saints with satisfied faces from so much suffering that were hung on the back wall, and a small, crucified Christ, bleeding all over and with hair so long that it frightened me and made me nauseous. We all remained there like that until Roso died and even stayed until the police arrived to take the body away. By then the door had closed completely, as if no one existed behind it.

(On All Saints’ Day, my mother and grandmother spread a black cloth over the small table located in the darkest corner of my room. They dust off a photograph of my grandfather who has been dead for fifteen or twenty years and slowly place it on top of the table. Then, they light a candle and affix it on a porcelain saucer using its own dripping melted wax. The photograph glows. My grandmother brings a glass full of fresh water, places it on the cloth, and then we all start to pray while I chew a piece of bread. At night I can’t sleep because of the lit candle and the fear of seeing my grandfather’s sad look locked in his photograph, while his crying soul drinks the water in the glass in large gulps. The candle flame crackles, and my mother doesn’t realize how scared I am; that’s why she’s asleep instead of hugging me.)

My childish cleverness, containing well-planned hostilities, caused me to devise a thousand ways to closely observe the inside of the room. Sometimes, however, the door would remain closed for several days. Still, I knew that Angela and the old women were inside because of the smell that was escaping through the cracks.

As time progressed, the features of the three women became familiar to me, and I would look at them without them realizing it, all the while playing some game. Whenever they went out, Angela would always walk between the two old women, and appeared to be suffering so terribly that I started to love her with all the power that fear permitted. I was sure that her hair, styled into a bun, the black veil, her hump, and the overcoat down to her legs, were imposed on her by the old women so she could look like them. But Angela had an authentic paleness that completely distinguished her from them.

When my mother realized that I liked to stay in the courtyard longer than was necessary, she inexplicably started to demand that I stop playing games before nightfall. But it was precisely when it became dark that Angela would come out in the custody of the old women. That’s why, the first few times, I refused to obey, using my playtime as an excuse; but later, in the winter, when it became darker earlier, I ran out of excuses. Then, I decided to tell her that I needed to go to the bathroom. That’s how I fooled her; by letting her see me go in, and then later sneaking out and hiding in the darkness of the alley which connected my courtyard with the second one, until Angela came out and headed for the street.

I don’t remember when I found out that Angela wasn’t her real name, it was Elvira, and that the old women were her mother and her aunt, and that every night, without fail, they would attend the seven o’clock mass at St. Francisco. From then on, I shamelessly ventured to approach the door at the very moment they were leaving, so that every night, I could see the room from a different angle, and thus begin to form mental images of its interior; even getting to know the exact location of the table, the two beds, the pictures, the wooden trunks, the old chairs, and all the other objects.

(On the mornings of All Saints’ Day, my mother is the first to wake. She gets up, looks at the nearly empty glass indifferently, picks up the remains of the burning candle, and throws them in the garbage can. When we leave I can still hear the intense weeping of my grandfather’s soul. In the courtyard the dog looks at us with its eyes bleary with dried mucus because it has been watching the spirits roam around the house all night. In the cemetery I still hear the distant weeping intermingled with the tolling of the bells that brings a smell of cadavers and flowers. After we’ve prayed, it starts to rain on the graves and the morning seems like the afternoon.)

It was simply bad luck when a long time ago, while I was secretly hiding and waiting for Angela to come out, Doña Juana and Carlos’s father appeared at the other end of the alley. Without seeing me, they hurriedly started to hug, kiss, and touch every part of each other’s body. But when Carlos’s father spotted me, I barely managed to run toward Angela’s door, as he chased after me while pulling up his pants zipper. At the very moment he was gaining on me, the three women were leaving the room. That day, for the first time, I noticed that Angela was looking at me, and that’s why I didn’t feel the blows Carlos’s father was inflicting on me as he dragged me back to my room.

From that moment on, my mother wouldn’t let me go into the courtyard because I was perverted. But the one good thing that did happen was that she didn’t find out that I was in love with Angela or that I was scared of the room in the second courtyard.

I thought my confinement would only last a short time, but my mother couldn’t forget about that night in the alley, and even went so far as to consider that we move to another location because she couldn’t bear the embarrassment she felt in the presence of Carlos’s father. But my grandmother, who defended me to a certain degree, would tell her not to act crazy, that we weren’t going to find an apartment we could rent this cheap anywhere, and that finally, she should stop being a nuisance, it wasn’t that bad. It seems that this caused my mother to resign herself.

For Christmas, I found a wooden truck painted purple and blue underneath the bed. I thought that by giving me that gift, my mother had forgiven me; moreover because she became so happy that she became distracted, I went out to the courtyard pulling my toy toward the alley. When my mother realized this, she started to yell my name angrily, but not before I managed to see that Angela’s door was locked with a large and somewhat rusty padlock.

Since the morning during which we heard hellish screaming coming from the courtyard because Carlos’s father had split his wife’s head open with an ax—Doña Juana crying loudly at the top of her voice and bringing her hands to the deep wound on her face inflicted on her by the dead woman—my mother breathed easier and would let me go out to play sometimes. Still, the long period of confinement meant that I couldn’t enjoy myself like before, and it was even worse when I found out that my friend Carlos had been in the orphanage since his mother’s death and his father’s incarceration. On those occasions when I was able to go the second courtyard, I always found the door closed, as if no one had ever lived in that room. There once was a time when I wanted to beg my mother to let me go out, even if it was just for five minutes, at nightfall, under the condition that I wouldn’t go out during that entire day, but I was never able to do it.

(On All Saints’ Day, I run toward the room in the second courtyard, and when the door opens, I see a candle burning in front of a photograph of Angela on a black table in the back. At night my mother makes me pray and gives me cookies. Later on I can’t sleep, because while my grandfather’s soul drinks the water in the glass, Angela slowly places herself in a stain on the ceiling and from there looks at me firmly and whispers to me in her very smooth voice. I see that she’s paler and more stooped than before. At dawn she starts to cry quietly and then leaves. My mother wakes up, prepares breakfast, and replaces the candle that is about to blow out. My grandmother stands up and, with her nails, scrapes off the fly excrement that has accumulated on the photograph. As we’re leaving to go to the cemetery, we find the dog asleep with a great amount of dried mucus in its eyes, thus causing my mother to comment that if one wants to see the spirits of the dead, all one has to do is rub the dried mucus of a dog into one’s eyes. We pray for a long time in the cemetery. My mother greets the two old women from Angela’s apartment as it starts to rain; I look at them with hatred. Then, we place the bouquet of baby’s breath in an old flower vase. My grandmother says that her husband’s tomb is increasingly in worse condition each year. Upon returning home it starts to rain harder and we can’t hear the tremulous sound coming from the bell tower. Meanwhile, I pray silently that the old women never die. The moment my mother opens the door to our room, I extract the dried mucus from the dog’s eyes as it continues sleeping.)