From Don Bueno

Night had fallen but it was still too early for his mother to return from work. The small apartment on the second floor picked up every sound from the narrow street and reproduced it as a continuous roaring noise. César stood at the window, his bare arms hanging over the sill. At eight years, he was slightly taller than the urchins who played in the street and whose company his mother forbade him in order to save him from becoming like them. There was not much flesh on his cheeks; that, together with the absence of any peculiarity in the shape of his nose, made his dark brown eyes appear large and, perhaps therefore, melancholy. He looked down on the congestion of dilapidated old buses, with black clouds of smoke from their exhausts; rickety trucks that rattled when they moved and whose engines made a loud, clattering noise when they idled; little yellow taxis honking their horns; and innumerable hand-drawn carts, both on the road an on the sidewalks. The wares of the shops flowed out to the sidewalks, and clusters of people stood in front of them, gesticulating and talking loudly. Barefooted boys ran in and out of the traffic and the crowds of people, the tails of their dirty shirts flying behind them out of their shorts, chasing one another in some wild game of chance or trickery.

César hated the hour when it became dark and it was still too early for his mother to return. Until this night, however, it was only her absence that he dreaded, and the fear that she might not return; but now he noticed two men standing in front of a shop across the street, looking up at him while they talked. The gestures of their hands and the way they jerked their heads in his direction made him think they were talking of him. Their grins appeared to him to be malicious and full of evil intent. He wanted to move away from the window but found himself frozen there, and was terrified. He had begun to feel a new kind of fear that had nothing to do with the absence of his mother. The men suddenly shook hands and walked away in opposite directions. César breathed a little more easily, but the idea of fear had become lodged within him, and he wished his mother would come at once so that he could pretend that nothing had changed.

The dinner hour approached and the congestion in the street gave way to a steady flow of traffic with the buses grinding past in second gear. César felt hungry, but knew he must wait. He had looked into the kitchen. There were a couple of pots and a pan, all scrubbed clean; of the jars on a shelf, one had half a kilo rice in it, another some flour, and three others were empty. He put a pinch of rice grains into his mouth and chewed them, but found the taste revolting.

Seeing that the street was less crowded, he had an idea. He slipped out of the apartment, closing the door behind him, and raced down the dark staircase where a naked bulb, long dead, had remained unreplaced. He walked rapidly down the sidewalk, dodging past the cluster of people outside some shops. He was glad that the urchins had gone home by now. But he was mistaken and his sense of having the freedom of the street was short-lived.

‘Hey, Mr Good Guy!’ a voice shrieked behind him.

‘Hey, mama’s little backscratcher!’ shouted another.

‘Hey, motherfucker!’ yelled a third.

César saw over his shoulder the three kids running after him. Earlier in the year, one of them, seeing César for the first time, had invited him to some game in the street, but César, too naïve at the time to know better, had truthfully answered, ‘My mother does not want me to play with you.’ Screaming ‘Fuck you, snotnose!’ the boy had aimed first at him, but César had escaped unharmed. Since then, it was agony for him...