“It’s not enough to be ugly, right, you freak?” the children would laugh. “You have to live in an ugly house, too.”
Every day, Olga heard variations of this cruelty. To her classmates, she and the house were the same thing, as if one explained the ugliness of the other.
Throughout her tortuous school years, Olga had grown used to seeing her own name scribbled in crooked handwriting on the “ugliest girl” lists that circulated through the classroom. There were also some permanent reminders: insults and obscene drawings scrawled on the bulging bathroom doors or traced along the peeling walls of the courtyard.
The written taunts were easier to endure than the shoves in the hallway, the pinches in the lunch line, and the spit launched from the top of the stairs as she passed below.
What incited such violence, beyond the sociopathy inherent to most children, was the total inertia with which Olga responded to the attacks. She never fought back, never cried, never complained—not to the teachers, nor to her own grandfather, with whom she lived alone in the ugly house.
Confirmation of this suspicion came on a Thursday, when some girls in her class noticed that the crust—now dry, hard, tangling the strands with dust, lint, and dead flies—was still there, stuck to the scalp of Olga’s thick hair. It was the result of the bottle of glue they had dumped on her head on Monday. Four days had passed and the strands remained glued together, increasingly taking the shape of an abandoned bird’s nest.
“Did she really not tell her grandpa?”
“Didn’t she even ask for help to wash it?”
The girls whispered among themselves.
A week after the attack, Olga finally appeared without the crust of glue.
And without a single strand of hair on her head, either.
From that incident onward, the comments about Olga became even crueler. Her shaved head became, of course, the primary target of the jokes, and slaps to her now-exposed nape became common.
The children felt increasingly safe bothering Olga, for the buzz among them had converged on a perverse conclusion: they could do whatever they wanted, since the teachers ignored it and she had no one in the world to defend her. Her mother had died in childbirth and her father was never heard from.
Her only guardian was Raimundo, her grandfather, known in the neighborhood as “Seven Fingers” because he lacked the pinky and ring finger on one hand, and the thumb on the other. He never showed up at school, not even for parent-teacher conferences.
They said Raimundo only cared about one thing: protecting—God knows from whom or what—the ugly house where they lived.
This obsession only fueled the mockery against Olga, inciting mean-spirited comments, not only among the children but also among the neighbors.
And to complete Olga’s misfortune, her house was on a street near the school, on the path for most of the children. The students followed her almost daily, in a hostile procession of jokes, insults, and kicks to her heels, all the way to her gate.
“Hey, you fucking weirdo! Tell your grandpa that no thief wants to rob your house!”
“Yeah! What’s all that for? Nobody wants to step foot in that dump!”
They were referring to the countless defenses Raimundo had placed around the property: thick iron chains intertwined through the gate; rusted gratings he scavenged from the junkyard and piled one on top of the other; shards of glass lined up along the wall; and wooden and metal stakes pointed toward the sky. Everything was interlaced with barbed wire and filthy tarps.
It was a large yard, abandoned in appearance. From the outside, one couldn’t see much of it now that the wall had so many barricades, but it was still possible to notice the tall weeds taking over, the sickly coconut tree rising up, and the scratching of the chickens Raimundo raised.
That day, Olga left school at twelve-thirty, accompanied by the horde of children who tormented her all the way home. At twelve-thirty-five sharp, her grandfather opened a crack in the lower part of the gate, the result of a rig he had made himself, just enough for her to pass through, crouching. It was a scene her classmates saw with delight: watching her drag her knees across the asphalt of the sidewalk until she disappeared through the gap, like a rat entering a sewer.
On the other side of the gate, Olga stood up in the yard, shaking the dust from her knees while her grandfather checked the chains and padlocks for the thousandth time.
In that brief moment, as she loosened the backpack on her shoulders, her gaze swept across the facade of her own home, which rose like a tumoral pearl in the center of the lot.
The older residents of the neighborhood might remember the colonial style in which it was built. But today, its architecture was buried under decades of ruin. The paint peeled off in flakes of countless shades, exposing worm-eaten bricks that breathed a red dust. On the packed earth floor, sticky mud clung to feet and ankles, mixed with feathers, whitish droppings, crushed insects, and the debris and knick-knacks Raimundo accumulated. The roof sloped down on both sides like a circumflex accent, giving the house a permanent air of sadness—a sadness now accentuated by the holes in the tiles, through which rain entered and ran down the walls as if the house were weeping.
There was an old porch, where a rocking chair creaked at the faintest wind. That was where her grandfather spent most of the day, when he wasn’t perched on the wall adding another shard of glass or another turn of wire; and from where he waited, patiently, for Olga to complete her daily offerings.
“Water tank,” Raimundo muttered in his heavy tone, already moving toward the back of the house.
Olga swallowed hard. And before following him, she thought about how much better the best hours of her day were at school.
The yard also extended behind the house, though with less square footage. To the right, there was a small, improvised chicken coop; a clothesline supported by stripped wires, mostly exposed metal; and a cement basin clogged with feathers and old clotted blood, where Raimundo slaughtered the chickens.
To the left, a guava tree whose fruits were always wormy. And in its shadow, the water tank, a large stone cistern, unused for decades. Unused as a water tank, at least.
The house’s water supply depended exclusively on the street pipes. And when, for some reason, the neighborhood ran dry, there was no reserve. The stone box, a closed cube of cement, deep as a pit, with high, compact walls, now served other purposes.
At the top, an opening projected upward like a small concrete ridge; its lid, also made of stone, resembled the mouth of a tomb. Raimundo dragged it with his old, already faltering arms. The stone creaked against the ground. Raimundo’s bones creaked along with it.
When the opening was wide enough, he made a sharp gesture, without looking at his granddaughter, indicating she should enter.
Olga dropped her backpack on the ground, climbed onto the edge of the tank, and walked to the opening. Carefully, she stepped inside, sliding down the small wooden ladder that Raimundo had built. Old, murky, moldy water waited to meet her ankles.
She had barely touched the bottom when Raimundo hurried to slide the lid back.
From down there, surrounded by a damp darkness, Olga tilted her neck up and saw the square of sky narrowing, the light drowning, while her grandfather’s face contorted in the effort to lock her in.
When only a thin line of light remained, the girl risked speaking, shielding her face from the sand falling in a fine rain, loosened by the dragging of the stone.
“Don’t leave me here for too long today, Grandpa . . . ” she murmured, her voice fragile and frayed.
The movement of the lid ceased for an instant. In the crack, one of Raimundo’s eyes appeared, fixed on her. He saw his granddaughter’s pale face, eyes too deep for her age, her thin hair still trying to grow. Something in Raimundo wavered, a sudden urge to pull her back out.
But he couldn’t.
Whenever, on other occasions, he had yielded to compassion, the care, or the love he locked inside his chest, it had been worse.
The house would not tolerate it.
Still, she was only a child . . .
Raimundo was nearly giving in to his paternal instincts when the curse itself reminded him of what had to happen.
“Yeah, Grandpa . . . don’t be long,” a deeper, dark, and hollow voice finished—a voice that was not Olga’s. “She has homework to do.”
When he discerned the shadow crawling, slowly and intentionally, to envelop his granddaughter, his eye widened. The terror of never getting used to it gave him the strength he lacked to drag the stone shut once and for all.
And seal Olga inside.
With his back hunched and his arms supporting the weight of his own body, Raimundo stared for a few moments at the grey of the newly closed stone.
Then, he shuffled to the cement basin nearby and, with difficulty, thrust his hand with the most fingers into his pants pocket. From it, he pulled a large, rusted nail, brought it to his mouth, and chanted in a low tone, almost brushing his teeth:
“Kulle nama, kulle kasa, kulle komai . . . ”
Squeezing the iron in his palm, he plunged it into a bucket of still-warm chicken blood. He left it there for a while, and when he felt the impulse to lift his hand, he felt something pulling it back. He continued, louder and stronger:
“Kulle kofa, kulle ɓata, kulle rai . . . ”
When he finally pulled his hand from the bucket, the blood served him like a glove, sticking to his fingers like hot varnish. Raimundo walked to the front of the yard, toward the wall that surrounded it. He looked for a gap among the hundreds of nails already driven in—all of them hammered in reverse, their heads buried in a crude mortar and their sharp points facing outward, pointing away from the house.
“Kulle jiki, kulle titi, kulle duniya . . . ”
He fitted the nail among the others and fumbled through the narrow space, adjusting the iron until he found the right position and felt it had held. The new point aligned with the others, thickening that thorny shell of the wall where, every so often, a bird would dart in on a low flight and never manage to get out.
“Kulle jini, kulle ido, kulle diya . . . ”
Raimundo took a few steps back, the wall looming in his vision. Then he returned slowly to the porch, letting himself fall into the rocking chair, where he waited for the house’s hunger to satisfy itself with the hatred his granddaughter brought with her—from the accumulated humiliations she brought from school.
What terrified him the most was imagining that, perhaps, a day would come when the house would demand more.
More than childhood taunts.
More than the contempt of the neighbors.
More than kneeling on corn, lashing backs, tearing off one’s own fingers.
More than burying his daughter in the yard, under a tree that never again bore healthy fruit—but eating them anyway, because the house likes to watch, even if they tasted of rotten meat and saudade.
A violence greater than condemning a child to live forever within that curse.
May God permit, if He still looked upon them, that this collection of petty hatreds be enough to sate the house.
But the hours Raimundo spent alone in the rocking chair, watching the spiderwebs grow between the blessed bars of the wall while Olga offered her own pain to the house’s stomach, led him to an even more terrifying thought.
Where did all that hatred go?
The question chilled his spine. Raimundo tried to dissipate the cold in his gut by repeatedly making the sign of the cross over his chest. But it never helped. No prayer, plea, supplication, charm, drum, or spell ever diminished that house’s cursed hunger.
Still, Raimundo had decided he would never let that hatred leak out. He and Olga, accomplices and victims, sacrificed themselves together before an unnamable evil, appealing to the sacred and the profane.
That was why he resorted to the ancient chants he had learned from a grimy book and to the blood rituals he wasn’t even sure he believed in. And, day after day, he built that wall a little higher, blessing and cursing every piece of iron, every inverted nail, every wire, padlock, and chain.
It wasn’t to ward off thieves, as those ungrateful children said.
It was never about the outside.
It was because he didn’t know how deep the belly of that foundation went.
Nor what might happen if, after swallowing, regurgitating, and belching so much hate . . .
. . . the house decided to vomit it all back.
