My Sad Dead

First, I think I should describe the neighborhood. Because my house is in the neighborhood, and my mother is in the house, and you can’t understand one thing without the other, and you especially can’t understand why I don’t leave. Because I could leave. I could leave tomorrow.

The neighborhood has changed since I was a child. The houses, originally for British railroad workers, were built along these narrow streets back in the twenties: stone houses with lovely little gardens and tall windows with iron shutters. You could say that it was the residents themselves who gradually ruined the houses with all their innovating: the air-conditioning units, the tiled roofs, upper stories tacked on using different materials, exterior facings and paint jobs in ridiculous colors, original wooden doors replaced with cheaper knockoffs. But it wasn’t just the residents’ poor taste; the neighborhood suffered because it became an island. It’s bordered on the west by the avenue, which is like an ugly river we have to ford, with nothing much along its shores. To the south there are housing projects that have grown ever more dangerous, with kids selling crack in stairwells and sometimes pulling guns on one another when they fight, or firing bullets into the air if they’re mad after losing a soccer game. To the north is a tract of land that was supposed to be developed into some kind of sports field, but instead it was occupied by the very poor, who have built houses there, the best ones made of concrete blocks, the most precarious of tin and cardboard. The housing projects and this slum merge to the east of our neighborhood.

I understand how things go: if misery is stalking you—as it always is in my country and in my city—and you have to resort to crime in order to survive, then that’s what you do. There’s more money in crime than in legitimate work. In any case, there isn’t much legitimate work available, not for anyone. And if living a better life entails risk, well, it’s a risk that many people are willing to take.

Few of my neighbors—the inhabitants of this island of little houses built when the world was different—think the way I do. I want to be clear: I get scared sometimes, too. I don’t want a stray bullet to hit me or my daughter when she (rarely) comes to visit. I don’t want to be regularly robbed at the bus stop or whenever I’m in a car waiting at a red light on the corner by the projects. I, too, go home crying when a teen-ager pulls a knife on me and snatches my phone. But I don’t want to kill them all. I don’t believe they’re a bunch of freeloaders and immigrants and miscreants and deadbeats, all expendable and unsalvageable. My ex-husband, who works at an oil company and lives in Patagonia, tells me that the neighbors are just afraid. I tell him that fascism generally starts with fear and turns into hatred. He tells me that I should sell the house and move to the South to be closer to him. We’re divorced, but we’re friends. We’ve always been friends. His new wife is delightful. I tend to use our daughter, Carolina, as an excuse for staying here, but it’s just an excuse. Carolina lives far away from me and this house, and she works as a fashion editor at a glossy magazine. She doesn’t need me.

I stay because my mother lives here. Can I say that about a dead woman? She’s present, then. Ever since she first appeared to me, I’ve understood that word better. She was here, she occupied a physical space, and I sensed her presence before I could see her.

My mother was a happy woman until she got cancer and came home to die. Her agony was long, painful, and undignified. It’s not always like that. The wise patient with a bald head and yellowed skin who sits in bed imparting life lessons is a ridiculous romanticization, but it’s true that there are people who suffer less. It’s a matter of physiology, and also one of temperament. My mother was allergic to morphine. She couldn’t use it. We had to resort to other, impotent painkillers. She died screaming. A nurse and I cared for her as best we could. We couldn’t do much. I’m a doctor, but I haven’t worked with patients in a long time; instead, I do administrative work at a private medical company. At sixty, I don’t have the energy, patience, or passion for hospital work anymore. Also, to tell the truth, for a long time I denied (denial is a powerful drug) a fact I finally had to come to terms with when my mother appeared. Namely, that ghosts exist, and I can see them. Though they seek me out, I’m not the only one who sees them; in the hospital, the nurses used to go running. I tried to reassure them, saying, “Girls, you’re imagining things.”

It was morning when I first heard my mother scream. Not the wee morning hours under the cover of night but the full-on sunlight of day, so ill-suited to haunting. The houses in the area, though very pretty, are built close together in a semidetached style, and noise carries. My next-door neighbor Mari, who hardly ever leaves her house, because she’s terrified she’ll be robbed and murdered and who knows what other phobic fantasies, leaned wide-eyed out her window that looks into my little front yard just as I was going out to see if there was someone in the street. It was a stupid, knee-jerk reaction driven by my own panic: I couldn’t believe that I was hearing my dead mother’s cries, and I thought maybe it was someone outside. An accident, a fight. Mari remembered my mother’s real screams, too, and she was shocked and dumbfounded.

“It’s the TV, Mari. It’s O.K.,” I told her.

“It’s just, you realize what it sounds like, Doctor?”

“It really does. I can’t believe it.”

And I went back inside.

Since I didn’t know what to do, I started looking around the house for the source of the cries, and asking my mother, as if I were praying, to be quieter. I didn’t urge her to stop wailing entirely—just a little discretion, that was all I asked for. I’d made the same request of other ghosts, first at the hospital and later on at a clinic. Sometimes it worked. My mother always had a sense of humor, and my appeal to turn down the volume made her laugh. I didn’t find her that day—which I took off from work—but I did that night, sitting on the floor of the room where she’d died, which was now a storage room for furniture I never took the time to toss or give away. She was thin, but the way she’d been at the beginning of her cancer, not the brittle and feverish wraith of her final months. I didn’t dare approach; leaning in the doorway, my knees shaking, I sang to her. And as I sang I sank down until we were seated face to face, me with my legs crossed, her kneeling. I sang the same song that had soothed her when her pain became unbearable, or so I chose to think. That night, she didn’t scream.

But ghosts, I’ve learned, get upset. I don’t know what they think, if they think at all—it’s more like they reflexively repeat things—but they do talk and voice opinions and have bad moods. My mother wanders the house. Sometimes she seems to know I’m there, and other times she doesn’t. Sometimes it seems that the fury returns to her, the fury of her degraded body, her colostomy bag, the humiliation; she used to be so elegant, and I remember how she cried, “The smell, the smell!” It was worse than the physical suffering. At those times, when the anger returns, she produces screams of pure rage. I have several ways of calming her down, but there’s no reason to go into them here.

The interesting thing was what started to happen in the neighborhood. Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t crazy—I’d considered the possibility, as anyone would after seeing her dead mother climbing the stairs—and I also realized that my mother wasn’t the only ghost.

My neighbors have “safety” meetings. They don’t accomplish much. There have been break-ins around the neighborhood, some violent muggings, an old lady beaten. It’s awful. But the neighbors are even worse. They go to those meetings and yell about how they pay their taxes (which is only partly true—they evade everything they can, like most middle-class Argentineans) and how they’ve bought guns and are taking classes in how to use them. And they describe the actions they think the police should take: humiliation, medieval torture, an eye for an eye, that kind of thing, even execution. There’s one man I don’t know, a little older than me, who declares that the police should display the heads of these “illegals” on stakes, as in colonial days. The others don’t contradict him; they don’t even roll their eyes. All the meetings end with them recalling their grandparents, such good people, those European immigrants who arrived with nothing but the shirts on their backs, who came to find honest work, who were poor but dignified, who were white. Just another myth. The immigrants of that era were, in many cases, petty thieves; others were anarchists running from the police, and most of them became dishonest traders who prioritized earning money over assuming any kind of ethical responsibility. But I don’t argue anymore, if I ever did. I’m resigned to that world view they all share. It’s a lie, but arguing against a credible lie is a task for titans.

I go to the meetings because I want to know what they’re planning. I want to know beforehand if they’re going to close off the street, for example. One time, they installed an alarm system unbeknownst to me, and I accidentally set it off when I leaned against a door to check my phone messages. They also mounted a camera on my house without my permission, but I have to admit the thing has been helpful. At least it lets me see if someone is trying to pick the lock, which has already happened, in fact, several times. The camera is broken now, and I haven’t found the time to fix it. I can just hear my daughter’s voice: “Mom, your stubbornness is going to get you murdered. One day I’m going to find you lying dead. I hope you’ve saved money for my therapy, because I’m not spending mine.”

The emergency meeting they called in mid-July was a real shit show. A horrible thing had happened, and the neighborhood was full of TV cameras, from the regular stations and from cable and every other kind of media. Three girls had been coming back from a party in the early morning. They had to walk through our neighborhood to reach the projects, and someone shot them from a car. They didn’t even have time to run. They died in the street. They were young, all three of them fifteen years old. They’d been walking along holding hands, huddling over a phone to look at messages. And that’s how they appear in the newspaper photograph: huddled together but fallen, one on top of the other, with their cropped shirts exposing their flat stomachs, their leggings bloodied, and their tennis shoes brand-new. One girl’s face was destroyed by the bullets, and what remained of her eyes stared up at the treetops. The others, beneath her, bled to death right there. The identity of the murderers was still unknown when the neighborhood meeting was called, but it was clear enough to us what had happened: one of the girls must have been the daughter or relative of a criminal, an asphalt pirate, a mini-narco—there are no big narcos in my country—or a pimp. That person had offended someone or owed money: it was revenge. As the days passed, this theory was confirmed. A yellow police cordon blocked off the corner where the girls had been killed, but all around it people left bouquets of flowers, cardboard hearts, and Teddy bears, a street-side grave with offerings more appropriate to little girls than to teen-agers.

I saw them one day at dusk as I was returning from work. My taxi dropped me off right at the corner with the police cordon and the tributes to the girls: “Lu, we love you always!!!!!!!” “Justice for Natalia.” “My little angel, you were gone too soon.” They were taking photos as they walked: the three heads close together so they’d fit into the image, the pierced tongues sticking out (why do girls like to stick out their tongues so much?); a second round of pictures with duck-bill lips, that premature, faked sensuality. It had seemed especially grotesque in the real photographs of the girls that had appeared with the newspaper articles, pictures that had been posted on Instagram and Snapchat, as my daughter explained to me. I didn’t understand the dog noses and bunny ears in those images, and then I found out that they were “filters.”

The ghost girls were laughing as they walked. At that hour, almost nighttime, my neighborhood is deserted. “The night is dark and full of terrors,” says a priestess in the epic series that my daughter watches with true fanatical madness, and that I can’t get into because it has too many characters (though its violence, which other people find disturbing, doesn’t bother me). The ghost girls couldn’t get the flash to work, and that made them laugh harder. They were incredibly compact—there’s no other way to put it. They seemed like living girls doing the things that fifteen-year-olds do: oblivious of what’s happening around them, wearing clothes a size or two too small for their bodies, their hair dyed and colorful, a jostling whirlwind of blue, green, and black streaks. The neighborhood’s windows opened timidly, and the silence rang out like a gunshot. Someone in a house gave a stifled cry as the girls went past. They were about fifty metres from me, but I could already see them clearly, and I understood. One of them was bleeding from the neck. The blood flowed slowly down, and she wiped it away distractedly, as if it were rainwater or beer that some clumsy boy had spilled on her at a party. Another girl, the one whose face was destroyed, was taking photos unconcernedly, and the smallest one, skinny to the point of illness, had three red holes in her abdomen. I didn’t want to look anymore; they reminded me of my mother when she had cancer, her moribund thinness.

Then the girls started to look at the photos they had taken. And what they saw made them cry. “No, no, no,” they said and shook their heads, and they looked at one another, looked at the photos, and saw the purplish green of putrefaction, and the blood, dried and fresh, the bullet wounds baring white bone, the blind eyes. The photos broke the spell of friendship and immortality. Then they started to run. The ghost girls ran in desperate circles, and their wailing was truly terrifying, their confused desperation. Had they only just realized that they were dead? How unfair; usually the dead have the good fortune not to see themselves decompose, even when they return as ghosts. My mother, for example: her image doesn’t decay. But ghosts take different forms. I wonder if the shapes they take are determined by the dead people themselves or by those of us who see them—if those images are perhaps a collective construction.

The neighbors started to scream, too. It was madness. I heard a voice shout that someone had fainted and needed an ambulance, but who was going to call it with the girls right there, rotting in the lovely golden twilight? One of them, the one with blood running down her neck—the bullet had hit an artery—reminded me of Carolina. I don’t know why. It wasn’t her clothes, exactly: this girl wore the kind of cheap shirt and leggings you can buy in the neighborhood, maybe even at the supermarket. But there was something in the way she wore all that cheapness that reminded me of my daughter’s unexpected flair. (I say “unexpected” because I certainly don’t have the gift of knowing which color goes with which, or what pants can make my legs look longer.) Yes, the girl’s leggings were cheap, made of black Lycra, but her white shirt draped prettily over her buttocks, just so, and, with some bulky sneakers that were possibly men’s, the outfit gave her a style—urban chic, my daughter would say—that was very particular. Her shoes were a brash royal blue, and around her bloody neck hung a little chain with a Victorian pendant that added an ironic touch to the street style. As I describe her, I believe I’m imitating my daughter, who always adds a brief explanatory note to her fashion layouts. In any case, maybe because that girl made me think of Carolina she was the one I approached.

Of course I was scared, my heartbeat reverberating in the pit of my stomach. And I’m no longer of the age for that kind of fright: I’m at risk for an arrhythmia, or even angina. Also, the neighbors were watching. But I couldn’t just leave the girls like that. Did I know I would be able to calm them? I knew. One just knows these things. In the hospital, when I pacified my first ghosts more than ten years ago now—I knew then, too. But at the hospital there were too many of them, and it was too much for me. Hysteria is contagious among spirits as well as humans. Of course, the phenomenon will never be studied—no one would believe it. I’m embarrassed myself. I think about this thing I do and I’m reminded of those cable series, disgraceful, false productions about Hollywood mediums and ghost hunters. Programs spawned by the crisis of ideas and by the economic crisis, made with bad actors and worse scripts, all identical, all ignorant, not even entertaining. That’s not what I am, I tell myself, but I am also that, in a way.

I called the girls by their names, which was enough to get them to look at me, but not enough to stop them from screaming. For that, I had to talk to them. Ask them to delete the photos. It was hard for them to obey; it always is. And then I had to ask them to move on. Make them laugh a little. Talk to them about clothes. Ask them about the party they were coming from. Never mention the murder. They wailed a little more when they saw the memorial and the police tape, but soon the moans faded to whimpers and hugs, self-pitying tears, until finally the girls, too, disappeared, or, more accurately, they dissolved. Their images evaporated into the air like alcohol.

I had to sit down by the cordon for a second. Soon my neighbor Julio came out. Julio is very friendly; he used to have a lovely corner bar in the neighborhood, but couldn’t keep up the rent on the place. The drinks and food were too expensive and the customers too few, and, in sum, it was the same old story of restaurants and bars that go broke. It made me infinitely sad, and that was why I felt a greater affection for Julio than he perhaps deserved.

“What did you do, Doctor?”

“It’s Emma, Julio. Call me Emma, please.”

“What did you do, Emma?”

The question was repeated for weeks. There were semi-secret meetings among those who had seen what happened. Then the gatherings broadened to include those who hadn’t witnessed it firsthand. Needless to say, there was a whole lot of distrust and incredulity. They wore me down. I told them about my mother. Mari vouched for my story, but scolded me for lying to her that time I’d said the screams were on TV.

“Mari, what did you want me to say? I was scared, too. I thought I was crazy.”

That’s not true, not entirely. A person knows when she’s going crazy; it doesn’t happen overnight, not even after a trauma. Everything, everything in the body is a process. Death, too.

The neighbors started coming to see me in secret. Ashamed. The epidemic of ghosts—because that’s what it was—coincided with the neighborhood’s worst period. Whoever had ordered the hit on the three teen-agers was now running everything in the housing projects, and the muggings soon escalated to kidnapping. A particular kind of kidnapping they call “express.” The kidnappers pull their victims into a car and take them around to A.T.M.s until they have withdrawn an amount the thieves deem acceptable. Sometimes these express kidnappings end in violence—beatings, rapes, shootings—owing to an incredible misunderstanding. The thieves—who are, for the most part, very young men—don’t have jobs, so they don’t have bank accounts. They don’t know that some banks in Argentina let you withdraw only small amounts from A.T.M.s, maybe fifteen hundred pesos a day, or double that if you’re a customer of the bank. If you have multiple accounts, you can get more cash by withdrawing from them all. But if not, well, you can’t get much. The thieves, those frightened and agitated boys, want more. And they think that they’re being lied to. That their victims are looking down on them and trying to cheat them. “You think I’m some kind of dumbass, huh? I’ll show you.” And then the punch, the gun butt to the face, the panic. They haven’t done it to me yet, but it happens a lot, and it happens to people who live in the projects, too. I’m clarifying because I don’t want to be unfair—not everyone in the projects is a criminal, of course. There are a lot of people who have an apartment there just as I have a house here, and they can’t or don’t want to move, and that’s it.

When the first neighbor came, I was chatting with Mom. Sometimes I talk to her. She’s there, after all, and although she doesn’t talk, she looks at me, and sometimes she nods. If she’s not in a rage, she laughs. It’s a shame she doesn’t talk; we’d have more fun if she did. I don’t invite my girlfriends over anymore because Mom might appear to them. My daughter comes less and less, but that’s not her fault—she has a lot of work. In this country, she has to make the most of it: you never know how long a job will last, whether you’re about to be fired or not—the order to cut back on personnel can come suddenly, and you can wait years to find another job. Best to prepare for that wait with a good nest egg. She and I talk on the phone and chat online. She doesn’t know about her grandmother. I could tell her, but why? For now, there’s no need.

Paulo was the first of the neighbors to visit me. He has two little girls, both in grade school. His wife “suffers from nerves”—that is, she has panic attacks. Paulo has a brother in the United States, and at the neighborhood meetings he goes on and on about how well people live there, what a safe country it is. I don’t correct him. As I said, I don’t participate that way; I don’t like to argue. Paulo beat around the bush a lot before finally telling me his problem. He even asked if he could smoke, and seemed surprised when I gave him permission. To ease the tension, I told him, “You know, most doctors smoke. Too much stress.”

Paulo’s problem, then: three months before, a burglar had tried to break into his house. From the roof. He knew the guy was a thief because he was carrying a small handgun, a .22. When Paulo saw the intruder, he locked his wife and daughters in a room and got a hammer—he wasn’t one of the people who’d bought a weapon—and started to dial the police. Then, through the second-floor window, he saw the thief slip and fall from the roof to the patio below. When he told me this, I remembered the incident. It had been a subject of conversation at one of the neighborhood meetings, the one where my neighbors had decided to request more of a police presence from the Ninth Precinct. The thief had died from the fall. I didn’t ask Paulo if he’d let him die, but I think that’s what happened. It’s possible that the man could have survived if the ambulance had arrived in time. I can imagine Paulo, hammer in hand, watching from the window as he died, feeling like a small-time god with the power to decide another man’s fate. Would I have done the same thing if my family had been threatened? Maybe. It’s easy to have ethics when what you love is not in danger. I like to think that I wouldn’t have done it, though. I guess I’m a self-righteous person—I prefer naïveté and paternalism to hatred.

However it happened, the thief came back. Paulo’s wife heard him walking on the roof. Paulo didn’t believe her. After all, she suffered from nerves, poor thing. Until he heard the footsteps himself. And he saw the burglar fall to the patio again. Soundlessly. That’s what his ghost thief does: walks and falls, walks and falls. Paulo told me that, once on the ground, “he laughs his ass off at us.” I agreed to go over there one night. The wife took the opportunity to show me the medication she’d been prescribed. Generally speaking, it seemed like too much, but I know that doctors nowadays would rather prescribe extra than do a more comprehensive treatment. Paulo and his wife invited me to have dinner with them—hot dogs with mashed potatoes (“For the girls,” the mother told me, “they won’t eat anything else”)—but I’d already eaten at home. I waited. The footsteps came after the kids were in bed, fortunately. I decided that my work would begin after the ghost had fallen—once he’d finished his nightly rounds.

It took only a few minutes to dissuade him. It doesn’t matter what I said or what I did: there’s a moment when it all becomes very mechanical. This was my third encounter with an uneasy neighborhood ghost, but really I’d calmed the others—my mother and the murdered girls—many times. I don’t send the ghosts anywhere, nowhere good or bad. There’s no peace or closure. There’s no reconciliation. No passage to the other side. All of that is fiction. I just soothe them and keep them from re-offending so often that they make life unbearable for the living. But they do come back eventually; it’s as if they forget, and we have to start all over again. Why is that? I remember how, when my husband and I were newlyweds, we had a beautiful cat, all white with a black nose, who always seemed surprised on weekends when we spoiled her with a special can of tuna. When I wondered if maybe she had some kind of memory problem, my husband said, “No, it’s just that she has a tiny brain. Don’t you see how small her head is?” But her face was so intelligent! And ghosts are a little like that. They seem human, they seem intelligent, but they’re really just a sliver of a person that is compelled to repeat itself. They don’t have brains, but they do have something that thinks, so to speak. It’s just that it’s as small as that of my cat, whose name was Florencia and who used to purr every night between my husband and me before we went to sleep. I miss my husband, but not as a husband. I miss his friendship, his conversation, his food. (He’s an excellent cook.) But he needs to fall in love and care for someone, and I need to be alone.

After the ghost of the thief, others came. “Why this invasion?” I asked my mother once, and she seemed to listen attentively. She didn’t answer me, she can’t, but I knew the answer: it wasn’t the neighborhood that was being invaded. It was me. I was attracting them. That was why it didn’t make sense for me to leave, unless I learned how to rid myself of that magnetism. But, in truth, it didn’t bother me. The fear very soon became adrenaline. When many days passed without a neighbor knocking at my door, I started to get impatient. But there was one ghost in particular that is important to this story, one with whom I behaved differently. One I couldn’t or didn’t want to help. Or is it the neighbors I help? The two things are intertwined.

My daughter’s birthday is December 23rd. That year, maybe because we hadn’t seen each other much, she invited me to her more “intimate” party. (She’d had another, with friends and acquaintances, the weekend before; she isn’t superstitious and doesn’t mind celebrating in advance.) She also invited me to stay and spend Christmas and even New Year’s with her, if I wanted to, at her house in Palermo. I knew I would be invited to New Year’s parties, so I said no to that, but I agreed to stay for Christmas and a few days more. I left my house carrying a bag, and I went by taxi, because I’d long since sold my car. I’m not that old, but neither am I young enough to drive as attentively as Buenos Aires demands. The days I spent with my daughter were very good. We didn’t fight much, and we laughed a lot. We watched her epic series, and I fell half in love with Ned Stark, the kind of man I’d never had, with a square jaw and a back like a wild animal’s. Plus, the actor wasn’t all that much younger than me—maybe ten years, I figured. One night, when we opened a bottle of white wine and drank it very cold, ideal for the city’s humid heat and stifling air, I almost told her about the spiritualist talent I’d acquired in old age. But I was afraid of ruining a visit that was nearly perfect. She’d have every right to think I was demented. I went home on the afternoon of the 29th, by subway, because crossing the city above ground would have been an absurd proposition. In addition to the usual end-of-year protests, there were several others: state workers striking for raises; picketers blocking off streets, demanding bags of food; laid-off workers demonstrating in front of the Labor Ministry, demanding to be rehired; and a huge march in front of Congress, calling for stronger public-safety measures.

A youth had been murdered: seventeen years old, a Matías with an Italian last name. He’d been kidnapped. An express kidnapping, but the boy was a minor and didn’t have an A.T.M. card, so his captors had changed their plan and decided to ask his family for money. The family didn’t have money. That night, the kidnappers still had him in their car—they must not have known where to take him—and the boy escaped. He didn’t get far. His captors shot him in the slum that borders our neighborhood to the north, the one that was supposed to become a sports field, then became a vacant lot, and is now full of squatters. The authorities are constantly threatening to evict those people, but they probably never will. Where would they put them all? Plus, some of the little houses are now built with better materials and have a second story. Not long ago, on my way to buy food, I saw that a news kiosk and an ice-cream shop had opened there. The police arrested a few suspects from the slum, but apparently the kidnappers weren’t from there. People on TV were calling for the death penalty, as they always do in my country when a terrible murder is committed.

Strangely, and in spite of the fact that the crime had happened so close by, my neighbors didn’t call an emergency meeting. I waited for it for a few days—a phone message, or a piece of paper stuck to my door with Scotch Tape—but there was only silence, a sideways glance in the grocery store, a certain hurry as cigarettes were purchased at the kiosk. I attributed it to nerves, though this tense reticence was not my neighbors’ usual reaction; they tended more toward exaggerated anxiety shouted at the top of their lungs.

The knocks at my door woke me up. It was late, I knew without looking at the clock; I’ve gone to bed in the early morning since I was young, a habit from being on call that I could never shake. It was a gentle knocking: someone was outside. I decided to ignore it. But the sound continued, rhythmic, insistent, growing in urgency until I realized that the person was now pounding with both fists, as if to break down the door. I was scared. I thought about locking my bedroom door, but, of course, that door didn’t lock. What could I put between me and whoever it was who wanted to get in? Should I call Mari? The police? I sat up in bed, and, when I heard the whispering, the sweat on my hands went cold, but at the same time I felt calmer: it wasn’t a real person pounding. His low voice, his pleading, wouldn’t have reached me from the front door. “Please, open up,” he was saying. He spoke respectfully, using the formal usted. “Please, they’re after me. I don’t want to rob you—I’m not a thief. They kidnapped me! Please let me in or they’ll kill me, they’ll kill me!”

I went running down the stairs and looked out the window. The boy was on the sidewalk. A tall teen-ager, very visible under the street light. He was pale like all dead people, but I couldn’t see his wounds, even though he was dressed for summer in a white T-shirt, soccer shorts, running shoes. Where had he been shot? I couldn’t remember. During the days I’d spent with my daughter, I’d been happily disconnected from the news and TV. So here was Matías with the Italian last name, murdered just blocks from my house, and I didn’t know exactly how he’d died or why he was knocking at my door.

But I could guess. Was my neighbors’ silence related to this apparition? Of course it was, I told myself. And in more ways than one.

The teen-age Matías stopped beating on the door when he saw me. He approached the window, and his eyes—alive, totally alive, insect-like, with the buzzing shine of beetles—held vengeance and rage. I wasn’t afraid of him, because I knew he couldn’t take his revenge in the material world, but the frustration of being unable to act added layers to his fury, endless layers. He was going to spend what time he had—and I suspected that Matías with the Italian last name had all the time in the world—running up and down this street. Until the street no longer existed, if necessary. He wasn’t going to let the people who had helped to kill him sleep, never, never.

“You’re not going to open up?” he asked. His voice was clear, not very different from a living person’s. He no longer spoke respectfully.

I went to the door, turned the key, and opened it. Matías stayed in the doorway. Then I saw the hole in his temple. It was subtle, like a mole. It wasn’t bleeding. He reminded me of the suicides I used to get at the hospital. Most of them male, most of them his age, not all so precise with the gunshot; they usually destroyed their faces or put the barrel of the gun in their mouths.

“It’s too late now,” Matías told me.

I knew I couldn’t calm him, not this one, and I said in a very loud voice, “I wasn’t home that night! You know that. I would have let you in.”

“Yeah? I don’t believe you,” he said.

A conversation. Matías with the Italian last name could have conversations. What made him different from the others? I stayed on the threshold with the door open and the light on and I watched him as he left. He ran from one house to another, knocking; he knocked on every door. First lightly, then with his fists, finally kicking it. He started by politely entreating people to open up, and he ended with insults; in his anger and desperation, he was terrified, but also astonished. My neighbors turned on their lights, but no one opened the door. I heard one man moan.

Matías with the Italian last name went on pounding on doors until the sun came up. Only then did I go back inside. He didn’t miss a single house. They all got what they deserved.

I looked up his Italian last name online. Cremonesi. Matías Cremonesi. He’d been in high school, played basketball—of course, given his height—and they’d shot him on a small soccer field in the slum. One of the murderers had been caught. Of course, he said that the other man had wielded the gun and pulled the trigger, and he’d done it only because the boy had seen their faces when he escaped. And they knew each other. This murderer was from the housing projects, and Matías was, too. Why kill a neighbor? The kidnapper, who was nineteen, said again that it hadn’t been their intention, that they’d only wanted him to get some money from an A.T.M. “But he said he didn’t have a card. We weren’t in our right minds.”

That day at noon, my neighbor Julio, the one with the failed bar, came to visit. The neighbors had sent Julio because they knew I liked him. He didn’t hem and haw like Paulo, the one who’d watched the burglar die. He was direct. He claimed not to feel guilty. Yes, they had all heard the boy that night. Yes, they’d all thought it was a trick, the lie of a cunning thief who wanted to pass himself off as a victim so that he could get into someone’s house. Yes, when they’d looked out the window and seen a teen-ager their suspicion had been confirmed—weren’t thieves always teen-age boys? “Don’t give me that shit about how they’re victims, too,” he said. “You may think that. All of them victims of society. Stop fucking around, Emma.” I hadn’t opened my mouth. “You can think that way because they’ve never really gotten you. But they’re not victims of anything.” I still hadn’t said a word. I understood that he was trying to deal with his guilt.

“How long did he knock on doors?” I wanted to know. “How long did he ask to be let in?”

Beneath the hatred, Matías’s ghostly eyes had been imbued with fear, the adrenaline of his final night, when he realized that he would die alone. He’d had to comprehend that no one was going to help him, not even by making a call, that he was surrounded by hoodless executioners, hiding behind the façade of a middle-class, respectable neighborhood.

Julio didn’t want to answer. He said he didn’t know. “A while. Does it matter?”

“It matters,” I told him. “Because the boy is furious. And what am I going to tell him so that he’ll leave us in peace? That we were wrong? It’s not enough.”

“You have to try.”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t know how.”

“You don’t want to. You think you’re better than us. You wouldn’t have let him in, either!”

“That’s what Matías told me last night.”

“Don’t use his name.”

“Why not? He has a name.”

“And how are we going to sleep? What about the children?”

“Julio, you all should have thought of that sooner. Buy some sleeping pills. I can prescribe them. It’s a very fine medicine, no side effects.”

Confounded, Julio pounded the table.

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Not at all. But I’m no one’s servant. And you can stop yelling at me in my own house. It’s not the best way to convince me.”

Julio left, and I felt disappointment. I had thought he was a better person. Other people came to plead with me. Several of them. I told them they should go and cry in church. They were angry with me, but it would pass. Maybe they’d go crazy. None of them asked for a prescription for sleeping pills. It never ceases to amaze me how much suffering people will put up with simply because they’re prejudiced against psychiatric drugs. Or maybe they just didn’t want to accept anything from me, at least for the moment.

Matías came back every night to carry out his routine. Some of the neighbors shouted more than he did. When I woke up—rarely, because I did take sleeping pills—I chatted online with my ex-husband, who, down South, was also awake. “It’s age,” he told me. “I don’t sleep well anymore.”

With the passing days, one of my neighbors—the owner of a car service—broke. He gave a statement to the police saying that Matías Cremonesi had knocked at the door of his business begging for a ride home. But Matías Cremonesi hadn’t had any money on him, and my neighbor had refused to take him. A seven-hundred-metre drive, at most. Plus, he added, the boy didn’t look trustworthy. He seemed high. What if he was lying, what if he was a thief?

What could he steal? I thought. The man had nothing; no one ever used that car service. The driver spent all his time drinking mate and listening to soccer games. He had at most two customers a week, maybe three. He got by because he owned the building—he would never have been able to pay rent.

My neighbor said that he was very sorry he’d been wrong, poor kid, but people just didn’t understand the kind of dangerous conditions we lived with in our neighborhood.

I told my ex-husband that on the night the whole neighborhood had left Matías to his fate out in the street, the night he died, I had been staying at our daughter’s house. “But,” I wrote to him in our chat, “what if I’d been here? Would I have opened the door? Or would I have acted like all the others?”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have opened,” he replied. “But you would at least have called the police. They didn’t even do that?”

“They didn’t even do that,” I said.

I didn’t tell him that the boy’s ghost came every night to remind us of our meanness and our cowardice. It was a secret among the neighbors. My family was so far away! Except for Mom, of course. My ex-husband asked me again to come and live near him and his wife in the South. “She’s pregnant,” he told me.

“You’re crazy,” I said. “Sixty is too old to have a baby.”

“Why do you think I can’t sleep?” he asked.

“I’ll think about moving,” I lied.

It turns out that my ex-husband’s wife has a high-risk pregnancy, and I think he’d like to have me close by to help if there’s an emergency or a complication. But I’m no longer on the side of the living. I can’t leave my mother alone; she spends more and more nights sitting in the kitchen, just as she did when she was sick and couldn’t sleep for the pain. Nor can I leave the rotting girls who laugh hand in hand on the street, though they appear less and less. Where will they go, if someday they leave? The other day, one of them, the one who reminds me of my daughter, took a picture of me with her ghost Samsung. Where is my image? To whom does she show it? Nor do I want to abandon the thief who died alone on the patio under Paulo’s gaze; sometimes I see him perched on the roof, expectant as an owl. Is he planning something? And I can’t leave the pitiless Matías, though he hates me: his knocking is my lullaby. I don’t know if I could sleep without his visits. All of them, my sad dead, are my responsibility. I asked my mother if Matías would let me soothe him someday, and she did something unbelievable: she stuck out her tongue at me. My mother wears a very pretty blue dress printed with anchors, and she looks like a seasoned old sailor. I returned her salute by sticking out my tongue, too, and we laughed together, and I wondered if I was going to grow old with her in this house, until the two of us, mother and daughter, were the same age, going up and down the stairs, sitting in the kitchen, anchors on her dress, coffee stains on my white shirt, and, outside, a future of dead boys and a city that just doesn’t know what to do anymore. ♦