I met my wife, Caasi, midway through my second year of college, and by my third year we were already in a well-established relationship. I already knew her parents and got along very well with them, and so I was invited to meet the family at my then-girlfriend’s grandmother’s farm (on mother’s side). I accepted, of course, and we went on Tiradentes holiday, which would fall on a Friday, to spend the weekend.
It was a relatively long journey to the country house, which was in Araçatuba. We all lived in Campinas, and the relatives who would go to the farm lived in nearby towns, making the nearly six-hour drive inconvenient for everyone, but that didn’t worry me, it was a great chance to establish greater bonds with my partner. Another thing worried me.
I was never very sensitive (perhaps that’s why this impression jumped out at me) but, at a certain point along the way, something changed in the atmosphere inside the car. We were almost in town when the jokes, laughter, stories of Caasi’s father and chants suddenly turned into a terrifying but curiously not uncomfortable silence. It was as if everyone there agreed that they should stop having fun out of respect for something that hovered in the air, but didn’t affect me. I shut up, almost out of solidarity, and only the low music in the background took over the space. That was until we reached our destination.
The farm was not big, nor was it pretty. In fact, none of the lots in that subdivision had anything to appreciate. Each of them had an overly square house shrouded in overgrown weeds and maybe a forgotten tree in one corner, and the one we’d spend that weekend in was no different. When my mother-in-law got out of the car to open the gate and we got in to park next to the shack, something caught my attention: there were two boys playing in front of the porch, one about 12 years old and the other younger, about 7 years old, probably cousins of Caasi, and a grown man watching them near the front door of the house.
-If I were a kid, wanted to play in the woods and my father was watching me like that, I would hurt myself on purpose just to scare him - I commented ironically to my girlfriend, in a weak attempt to break the tense atmosphere that hovered, but who answered me was his father, in a dry and direct way.
-It’s not injuries he’s worried about, you don’t know how dangerous it is to raise children these days.
I didn’t dare to answer, I just nodded and got out of the car.
As we approached the porch, I was introduced to the man watching the children. He was Caasi’s uncle, and in fact the boys’ father. When we entered the house, the first to welcome us was our hostess, the grandmother. She was very warm, hugged me tightly, and hugged my girlfriend too, burying her wrinkled face in her long, curly red hair (another thing I noticed right away: there wasn’t a single red-haired person in the family. Caasi jokes that it is a lost gene that shows up now and then in a few lucky relatives). There were other uncles in the room. The first one I greeted was Daedalus, who had deep scars all along the left forearm with which he shook my hand, and he didn’t change the serious expression on his face for a moment, didn’t even say anything or look at me a lot. I followed him to his wife, Carina, who had a battered look, as if she’d worked hard for thirty hours straight and only stopped now to rest. Then I went to the wife of the guy who was watching the children’s play out front, and that was the whole family. If the car had bad energy, the house was much worse, but it wasn’t until lunch that I felt what was happening. With everyone sitting at the table, I noticed that, with the exception of Daedalus and Carina, everyone felt like a distant relative feels at a funeral. It was a little sad, but much of the feeling was a certain embarrassment, like the one felt by someone who wants to comfort but doesn’t know how, and that made it all very uncomfortable.
If we were the distant relatives of the funeral, Carina and her husband seemed to be the closest ones of the deceased, who are always silent with a melancholy air of someone who has no more words or tears and at no time, no matter what was said (not much was said, a damp silence spread most of the time), Daedalus wiped the sullen expression from his face.
It was late afternoon when Caasi called me to an old rusty swing at the bottom of the lot, which probably had been there for thirty years, where we sat down and started talking.
-I think you’ve noticed that it’s not the family from the butter commercials, right? - she asked with a smile of one who is embarrassed by the situation.
“I didn’t even notice,” I replied jokingly.
-Silly - she said laughing, and continued - I was thinking a lot, and I want to tell you something.
Before I could say anything, she started:
-I want to tell you why this bad vibe we have here, and it’s a story that maybe I should have told you already, but it’s something that we don’t talk about, so my head ends up going blank, and everything just comes back when I see my family. It must be some defense mechanism, I don’t know. The thing is, some things I’m going to tell you are very private, you know… - She paused and looked around, checking that there was no one around, and even lowered her voice a little - some things happened that I think has to do with it, and that I haven’t told anyone here. I’ve never told anyone, actually, and I’m not sure about anything either.
At this point I was already quite confused, and she saw it in my face, giving a slight laugh of mockery and nervousness. The sun was setting on the horizon, her grandmother was turning on the lights outside the house, as she began the story.
“Well, it happened on Easter 1999, when I was seven years old, so maybe one thing or another is a little confusing, after all I don’t remember everything exactly, and my perception of things was that of a little girl. Well, my grandmother didn’t live here to begin with, her place was close to Campinas, so we went there much more often. Despite this, it was rare for everyone to go, after all, someone always had some other commitment, so the only days we all got together were Easter and Christmas holidays, sometimes in the new Year.
I honestly preferred that other farm much more, it was much bigger, really, that one must be four or five times the size of this one here. It was an almost square lot, but a little wider than it was long, and the house was almost at the bottom of it. When you walked in, there was a little path leading up to the house, and it was all surrounded by every kind of tree you can imagine. Passing this path, you arrived at a small backyard, which was just grass, and then the house. That was indeed a beautiful house, it is not like this place. It had a sloping roof, typical of a country house, and a porch that surrounded the entire house. It was my grandfather who built the house, about ten years before he died, and he thought of everything. On the sides of the house everything was covered with trees, the same as in the front, and behind, on the left, was a kennel where Charon lived. He was a German shepherd, one of those big ones, but he was a fool, he didn’t hurt anyone, and he wasn’t even used to scare thieves, since he was in the back, although there wasn’t much crime around. In the back right part of the land there was a vegetable garden and soon after you could see the land behind, which was a gigantic eucalyptus plantation. It took the bottom of about 10 lands neighboring my grandmother’s, and you couldn’t see the other side of it, so long it was. It wasn’t like most eucalyptus plantations, to be honest. The trees weren’t all lined up, like you see on country roads, there was no pattern in planting, it was a mess. Sometimes we used to go there to play, since the owner never showed up, but our parents didn’t like that at all, they said it was too dangerous, that we’d get lost, that kind of thing.
Oh yeah, there’s that too, we were in several children, almost all the same age. There was me, Juana (daughter of Daedalus and Carina) and the twins Clara and Lúcia, daughters of Cláudia and Nelson, in addition to two boys who always went there to play with us, I don’t remember their names, but they lived on the farm on the side. By the way, Clara is that cousin of mine that I mentioned, who is doing the exchange program in Ireland, remember?”
I nodded, showing interest with my eyes, but I was realizing that neither Clara’s twin sister nor Juana were there. I didn’t think much about it, but it made me curious. I asked nothing, and Caasi continued:
“I was anxious for weeks to get to Easter, I would be able to see everyone, but there was one person I didn’t really like to see, Uncle Frater. With the exception of my grandmother, his mother, nobody really liked to see him. He was the younger brother, he was twenty-six at the time, and he’s the kind of person you walk away from in line at the grocery store, you know? In fact, visually he just looked like a very eccentric guy, maybe a beggar. He wore very baggy clothes, all torn or dirty or both, and his hair hung down to the middle of his back, curly, not to mention a lot of tattoos, all with weird symbols that I never dared look at. What was really strange was his lifestyle.
While my mother, my Aunt Carina and my Uncle Nelson followed their lives in a “normal” way, going to work, getting married, having children, that kind of thing, Frater would go after some strange friends, these people who isolate themselves in a basement doing whatever and listening to Norwegian metal, and he got further and further away from his family, so we hardly ever saw him, which generated a lot of rumors that honestly always seemed true to me: that he did drugs, did some really weird sexual things and with a lot of people at once, so on. There was even a rumor that he broke into a religious goods store, stole a bunch of stuff and managed to get away from the police. This last one was not very well founded, my uncles only saw that there was a robbery in the region and that the suspect’s description reminded of him, but there are many people like that in the world, right?
But I think the rumors were the least, he did some very suspicious things around the family. Uncle Nelson says that the day the twins were born he went with my grandmother to visit them, meet the babies and such. They were all in the maternity ward, until my aunt looks around and sees he wasn’t there. Of course, the first thing you think is that he went to the bathroom, so no one cared. Then an hour passed, and no Frater came back, so Nelson went out to look for the hospital, which was huge, so it took a long time to find him. It’s worth remembering that he was about nineteen years old at the time, which makes it all weird, like, “what the hell does a weird kid do roaming around the hospital?”. He was no longer old enough to get lost. So my Uncle looked in the last place he thought he might find the boy: in the chapel. If it was anyone else, everyone would think he was praying, giving thanks for birth and health and all, but it didn’t seem like that. It never seems like that when you’re kneeling with your back to the cross, up ahead, with your arms wide open, like you’re staging the crucifixion. Seriously, it gives me goosebumps just thinking about it, have you ever wondered if you’re an old lady who’s with her husband in the hospital for having broken her hip, or whatever the reason old people go to the hospital, go to pray and find a shaggy young man dressed in black in the last position you should be in a chapel? It gets disrespectful. Anyway, this wasn’t even his worst episode, by far it wasn’t. I think the worst thing was precisely why everyone was so afraid of him, and why he started not showing up much when the family got together. This time I even witnessed what happened, I was only about five years old, but I remember some things.
It was a holiday just like this, a long weekend, and the twins’ parents couldn’t go to the place, so they left them with us and we took them, since there was room in the car for that. I remember that it rained a lot these days, so we played more indoors. By the way, it was that weekend that Uncle Daedalus taught us to play the Truco, and my mother was mad. I don’t quite understand why, it’s not very childish but it’s not pornographic either. Anyway, Saturday afternoon, just like the time at the hospital, Uncle Frater disappeared, but now it was different: Clara had disappeared with him. So you think, add a grown man with a bad history of rumors and a little girl too, at the same time, it was raining and on top of that the place was huge. My parents were the ones who were the most worried, after all the girls were their responsibility, and they would never forgive themselves if anything happened. Nobody wanted to accuse the uncle of anything, after all his mother was there, but the situation is too suspicious and I’m sure everyone thought the same thing, I don’t even need to say what.
The difference from the day the girls were born is that we didn’t have to look for a long time, in about ten minutes they both came back, he was soaked and she was almost dry. No one did any very formal interrogation, but “casually” both him and her were asked what had happened, and the stories stuck. Basically they went to “play” near the vegetable garden and stayed there talking for a while, when it started to rain harder and they were sheltered in the covered part of the garden. Frater thought that everyone would be worried, he covered Clara with a coat and they ran to the house. I’m sure she was asked some additional questions, like ‘what was the game you were playing like?’, ‘did he touch you in a way your little friends can’t?’, and apparently nothing happened anyway, otherwise the repercussion would have been much worse than it was. I remember in the days that followed he stayed very far away from the girl, as if everyone was trying to push the two of them apart. The situation was already pretty awkward, but it gets worse: no one there asked what they talked about when they were there, alone and away from everyone.
A couple of weeks go by and Uncle Frater receives an angry call from Aunt Cláudia, complaining that Clara decided to break her crucifix and say that she doesn’t like God anymore, that the devil is much nicer because he lets us do drugs and drink, and that the one who taught this was the uncle. Worse, no one had told her what happened over the weekend, which made her a little pissed off at the rest of the family as well. But imagine, what goes through the mind of a person who says such things to a child? I assume he was quiet when she called yelling at him, he isn’t the type to argue, and from then on Aunt Claudia barely greeted him, and that was when they saw each other, which was rare. My parents and Juana’s parents were also very apprehensive, and that’s when they told us to keep our distance from him, which I particularly thought was fair at the time.
Anyway, Easter 1999. We arrived very early at the farm and only Uncle Frater and my grandmother were there. All the others arrived after breakfast. Everything was normal, everyone talking, Uncle Daedalus telling a lot of jokes, my grandmother cooking, everything was fine, but Uncle Frater was different. He was happy in a way I had never seen him before. He laughed, drank and chatted with everyone, it looked like he was celebrating something. He even talked to Aunt Claudia, and he must have said something about what happened a few years ago, apologizing or something, because she even smiled. While the women were doing the breakfest dishes I even heard my mother say that he seemed like he had changed. That’s when I let my guard down.
Look, this part that I’m going to tell you now I didn’t tell anyone, and you can’t tell either! I don’t know how much of that played a part in what happened, and it may even had been a dream, but it’s too much of a coincidence and the more I think about it, the worse it gets.
The children had their lunch before the adults as there weren’t enough places at the table, and while the others had lunch we played outside, the girls and boys from the farm next door. On that particular day I was finding the boys’ games very boring, they kept talking about cars and races, I liked playing house more. So we decided to play with throwing stones in a hole from afar, as if it were a basketball, so that everyone had fun, and for that reason Juana and I went looking for pebbles in a pile of sand near the kennel. Lucia ran after us to give a message.
-Hey, Uncle Frater said he’s going to teach us a new game this afternoon, after they’ve had lunch.
-Do the adults know about this? - Juana asked suspiciously.
-I think so, he wouldn’t call us if they didn’t know - Lucia replied.
That calmed Juana, but I wasn’t completely convinced.
-I don’t know, Mom said not to spend too much time with him - I pointed out.
-This is nonsense, my mother even said that he seems to have changed - Lucia replied.
It was true, my mother had said that too. In my head it could override what she’d said the other time. I didn’t tell Lucia I was going, but I wanted to. A new game? If we were playing with the boys, they would want to play something I didn’t like after all, and it’s always good to learn a new game. I remember thinking about me teaching it to my friends at school, and everyone would like it. I ended up convincing myself.
The game would be in the woods (the eucalyptus plantation) during the “cesta”, when the adults would be sleeping, which made me even more afraid to participate, since my mother always said to avoid going in the woods, and if I wanted to go, that was under adult supervision. What made me go was the fact that Uncle Frater was there. But I was already trusting him too much, and the whole time I was very distressed. Still I went. I walked through the barbed wire fence trying to make as little noise as possible and not rip my dress, which took me a while to set foot in the woods, and then I started walking. There was a clearing at one point if you walked in a straight line from the farm and when I got there my cousins were all already sitting on their legs in a circle with a bunch of twigs and dry leaves in the middle. We spent some time talking and speculating on what the game would be like, if we would have to run or if it was one of those word games, and I was all the time trying to hide my nervousness. I think deep down I still didn’t trust my uncle at all, even though everyone seemed to have started to like him out of nowhere. Anyway, ten minutes passed and he arrived.
Just like in the morning, he was all smiles, which reassured me a little: at least he wasn’t just faking a good mood in front of the other uncles. He sat in the circle and started to do a little theatrics, talking things in a very dramatic and exaggerated way, explaining that the game had one main rule: when he said to close our eyes, we had to keep them closed and not open it at all, no matter what, and only open it when he told us to. There were other games with a similar rule, but none had as much emphasis on this not opening your eyes thing, not as much as he’d put in this one. Then he talked about how to play, and I honestly don’t remember very well what it was like. It wasn’t like other games, there didn’t seem to be anyone who won or lost, any difficult goals, I don’t know, any mechanics that felt like a game. What I remember is that he would come, say something in our ear, without the others listening, and then in the end we would say what we had heard, but it didn’t seem to have a purpose for it, let alone to be with eyes closed. The impression it gave was that it was going to be like that game where you have to say the word that others say to test your memory, but I don’t remember ever getting to that point.
Anyway, we spent about fifteen minutes on it, and somehow we were all enjoying the game. I think it’s because sometimes he would say words that children find funny, or words that are difficult to say so that we would laugh at those who couldn’t speak, and in the end we had fun with it, and Uncle Frater didn’t look like that guy who had his back to Jesus at the altar or was in a basement listening to strange music anymore, he looked a bit like Uncle Daedalus when he taught us games. So he said ‘now the second part of the game will start’, and then things started to get really bizarre. First, he took a lighter out of his pocket and set fire to the dry leaves in the middle of the circle, which was strange, since it was daytime and quite hot, but I didn’t worry at the time, it was even fun.
So, he took a small airtight bag, just like the ones you put bread in so it doesn’t wither, but very small, from a bag he had behind him and which I hadn’t noticed until then. There were some jellybeans in the bag, and he gave one to each. When I picked it up I realized that they weren’t jelly beans, but very small pieces of something that looked like hearts of palm, because it was soft, white and a little rubbery. He told us to put it in our mouth and keep it there for a bit before swallowing. I didn’t have any malice, of course, but at that point I knew that it wasn’t good and I shouldn’t be there. It gave me a strong feeling that whatever it was, it would make my parents mad if I put it in my mouth, and their maxim was ‘if you think it’s going to make us mad, don’t’. The only thing that made me put that thing in my mouth was that all my cousins did, and the uncle himself did too. I think everyone has this intuitive notion that if someone gave you something and ate it, it’s not poison, and this is a much less sophisticated idea that ‘some people don’t value their integrity either’, that didn’t cross my mind. I took that and was reassured by the fact that nothing happened at first. It really tasted like hearts of palm, at the time I even thought that was it. Then the game started again.
However, after about ten minutes, I noticed a strange thing: the word I spoke didn’t match the one he had told me, and there was a period of only about thirty seconds between my hearing and speaking. And it was not a question of forgetting, if he said ‘clown’, I would say something like ‘circus’, always related but never the same word, and I was fully aware of that. I wondered if the other girls weren’t in the same situation, but I had my eyes closed and couldn’t tell. Gradually it got stronger, and from connected words I started to say completely disconnected things, sometimes even more than one word. At one point I just made sounds with my tongue, like someone imitating the noise of a train or an animal. At that moment I could have deduced that my cousins were saying different things than they were hearing too, since, like me, they only made sounds, but my mind was no longer connecting things properly.
My eyes then began to see colors, even though they were closed, and a sound came out of nowhere, frequent and loud, a rattle and a thump on the floor, the two always simultaneously, approaching and retreating. It must have been Uncle Frater who made those sounds, because they got louder whenever he came to tell me a word for me to repeat, and the words he said no longer made sense. It wasn’t a lack of meaning like the words I said, his were different, they seemed to be in a different language, but I couldn’t associate it, it was all very confusing. I couldn’t be scared, my mind was too slow and everything else around me seemed too agitated and frantic, with the colors in my eyes flashing and glowing brighter and brighter, and out of nowhere a loud sound came from far away, from the woods. It sounded like the sound cows make, but much louder and deeper. This caught my attention and almost without meaning to I opened my eyes.
What I saw was the uncle with his back turned, saying something to one of the twins (lucky me, I didn’t want him to see me with my eyes open). The other twin, beside her sister, swayed slightly from side to side. Then I noticed that everything seemed to come closer and farther away from me all the time, both beside me and in front of me. Juana scared me more, she swiveled her torso strongly, making a circle with her head in the air, and I had the impression that I was just like her. Before I closed my eyes I realized that my uncle wore one of those Indian rattles that go around the ankle, which made sense with the noises.
After closing my eyes, my energy seemed to have gone, and I passed out. It felt like 10 seconds passed out, but when I woke up I realized that an hour must have passed, because the fire had already gone out and they were all asleep, except for Clara, who woke up with me. We woke the others up and ran to the house, where we found only our grandmother awake. I asked her where Uncle Frater was, and she said that he had to leave, that he would be back on Sunday. I didn’t tell her what had happened, of course, and the others didn’t either. I think the rest of that day was pretty ordinary, I don’t remember anything very dramatic happening, nothing other than Juana and I staring at each other from time to time, so I didn’t think about it too much. It was just a silly game, and maybe a lot of it had been a dream. Anyway, we went to sleep around midnight, and I fell asleep pretty quickly, but it didn’t last long. After an hour or so I woke up to dog barking.
That’s what I said, Charon didn’t ever kill a fly, so it was pretty weird to hear him barking, I don’t think I ever heard him. And it wasn’t just a bark, he was barking all the time without getting tired. I kept waiting for someone to wake up and comment on this, for some light to come on in the hallway for someone to go see what was going on, but nothing. It felt like no one was listening. I must have put up with it for about twenty minutes, when I decided to go check it out. There must have been some animal bothering him, not that I was going to do anything, but I was curious, even to know if it was really Charon barking.
When I got to the back door and came out onto the porch I couldn’t see straight, but it looked like the dog had come out of the kennel and was within three feet of him or so (he wasn’t chained up). Well, it’s worth remembering that it was a farm and it was very dark, only the moon lit up a little bit, so I only saw his silhouette. As I got closer he heard me and looked quickly at me, and then continued barking. Now I could see that he was barking towards the fence that led to the woods, which made sense since every now and then a lizard or something like that would come out. At the time I thought ‘I won’t see the lizard if I don’t go there’, and I realized that I didn’t need to be doing that and it wasn’t my style either, but I wanted to. It’s not like I wanted it or I felt like something was pulling me, it wasn’t. A lot of thoughts went through my head like ‘I’m right here, it shouldn’t be a big deal, there’s no danger’. It was simple, but I convinced myself with that. So I started walking to the barbed wire fence that separated my grandmother’s land from the eucalyptus plantation behind it.
The dog didn’t stop barking for a moment, and pretended I wasn’t passing by either. I went through the fence a lot less carefully than that day in the afternoon, which was very unwise given it was dark, so I cut my leg. It wasn’t a very deep cut and I didn’t even know tetanus existed at the time, but again I realized what I was doing: I could have seen if there were any lizards on the fence about ten feet away from it, so I didn’t have to go there. At this point my mind did a hard job trying to convince myself to continue. Had I cut my leg? All right, sooner or later it will heal. What if someone hears the dog, wakes up and sees me here? If no one has woken up by now, they won’t wake up until morning, and after all, what would the person do, fight me for walking at night? That last point was a little weak, so I convinced myself to go back, when I saw a light. It was a little farther into the woods. The barking dog was interesting, but a light in the woods was bizarre. I remember spending a few seconds thinking about something harmless that would explain that light, and nothing came to mind. Even the landowner walking around with a flashlight at this time of night was scary. I had to go see it, and I don’t even know why, I just went. I started to walk, stepping lightly on the leaves to avoid any holes, and with my hand outstretched so as not to run into a tree.
I was glued to that light, and as I got closer I realized it was fire. A bonfire at this hour. I even thought about the fire that Uncle Frater had made in the afternoon, but it had gone out, I had made sure of that. What could it be then? I continued, willing find out, and at one point my heart skipped a beat. There was someone by the fire. But the jolt, from a fright turned into a fear and from a fear turned into a curiosity. Well, I wasn’t afraid. There was one person watching me walk all this way without saying anything (and, according to my reasoning, with no good intentions) and I was calm. To this day I don’t understand how. A strange thing was that the fire didn’t seem to light the person, and it was high. Not high like when you put kerosene on the fire, it was like it started from the top, about four feet high. The man was tall too.
Yeah, as I got closer I realized he was a man, and he wore a hat, just like a viking hat, you know? At least that’s what it looked like. When I got close enough to notice that he was shirtless, I decided to say something: ‘who are you?’. He didn’t respond with words, but he heard what I said, and he raised his hand, as if he was calling me. He was calling me.
I took another half-dozen steps and a lot happened. First I realized two things, and seriously, I’m sure I saw these things, it wasn’t a delusion. It was either a dream or it was just that, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a dream: the first thing was that the fire was in high in his stomach, and very close to him, at a distance that must have burned. It sounds crazy so I don’t think about it too much, but it felt like the bonfire was inside his belly. The second thing I realized was that it wasn’t a hat. He had an ox head himself. Of course that might not be his head, after all, there’s no one who has the head of an ox, right? But it wasn’t a mask, I don’t know how, but I know. If it was a person who did that, they cut a head off a fucking ox and put their own head inside. At that moment I still wasn’t afraid. I swear, I think I even reached up to give him my hand. I only felt scared when, by some miracle for which I can’t even think of an explanation, I heard footsteps. Slipper steps on tiled floor. I was well away from the house, the dog was barking, and I heard someone had woken up. I felt the fear coming as if someone had shot me in the chest. I ran out without hitting a single tree, went through the fence too fast and without cutting any part of my body, and leaned against the porch wall, not looking at the woods for a second. My heart was still beating very fast and strong, but I went very slowly to my room so as not to wake anyone, I lay on my bed and it took me a long time to sleep, but at some moment I slept.
It didn’t take long for me to wake up, and my ‘alarm clock’ was a shriek of suffering. The room I was sleeping in was right at the front of the house, away from the source of the sound, and yet I heard it as if the woman was screaming next to me. We all woke up confused, and followed the noise, which came from the back of the house. When I came out on the porch, what I saw was what made me spend three years in therapy. We all spent at least a little bit with psychologists, except Uncle Daedalus, he always refused. I don’t think anyone is ready to see a scene like that, not us, not the nurses who went there later, and not even the legist doctors. What we saw was Caronte, calm as ever, playing at rocking the neck he was holding between his teeth, the neck that was once Juana’s. It wasn’t really the neck, it was what was left of it, because between her chin and her collarbones there was only bone, he ate the entire flesh of the region. I had never seen so much blood in my life. It was blood splattered on the grass within a 2 meter radius of the dog, all over his mouth, on her nightgown and soaking through her short, shoulder-length red hair.
For about ten seconds no one did anything, we watched and heard Aunt Carina scream in a mixture of horror and pain. It’s really weird, when you see something like that it traumatizes you right away, the more you look the more fucked up your mind gets and you know it, but you get hooked, I don’t know why. It’s a feeling similar to what I had felt the day before. It was clear it wasn’t good, but I had to see it. Everyone had a taste of what that feeling was like at that moment.
When I looked away, the first thing I saw was the face of my uncle Daedalus, the father of that corpse that was in the dog’s mouth. That was the last time I saw him with a different expression than he does today, catatonic and all. He was looking like he was watching his horse near the finish line in first place when he tripped and fell, coming in last. It was a macabre mixture of disappointment and surprise. At that moment he frowned, locked himself up, and we would never see him laughing again, teaching us to play some game, telling a funny story about when he went hunting, none of that. And his reaction was the last one I was expecting: he walked over to the dog and, without giving anyone time to say anything, grabbed him by the neck and lifted him up. The dog bit his arm several times, but each time he bit, my uncle tightened his grip. Blood was running down his huge arms as Charon began to lose strength and bite more and more weakly, until he stopped, and fell on Juana’s side. That was the end of the family as I knew it.
My grandmother couldn’t live there anymore. I think she was going to make it until she had to clean and mow the lawn, or see the nurses pulling the bodies out of the yard, it must have shocked her more than she could bear. And that’s how everything was as it is today.”
I was shocked for a while. I did not expect such a serious and permanent situation. I had no idea what my girlfriend had felt about all this, given how distressed I was about it. From then on, I no longer had the feeling of embarrassment of a wake for solidarity, I was part of that, that and all the other times we went to visit the family. But something was still on my mind.
-And your other uncle, Frater?
“Well, he didn’t show up for a week. He wasn’t at the wake, the funeral or the seventh-day mass. After that came the news that he was arrested. He had been involved in cocaine dealing, I guess. He is in prison to this day.
The worst thing is that, with the exception of him, my cousins and me, no one knows about that afternoon in the woods, and only I know about that night. Of course, there’s that thing that no one would believe me, and I can’t even imagine a connection between that and Juana’s death, but still I… feel guilty, you know? I don’t know how to explain it well, it’s like… as if it had to have been me, I don’t know why”
At that she began to cry, just as she would cry many times and still cry to this day, just as she had cried before without any explanation. I hugged her, and we stayed like that for a while longer. It was late, so we went in.
That’s how I came to know it, and I tried to forget it for as long as I could during these past ten years. I was very close to achieving my goal until yesterday, when news reached me through my wife: Uncle Frater was dead. He had cut himself with a razor blade and bled to death, but not before writing on the wall of his cell, using his own blood as ink: “agnoscis opera mea”.