The Apparitions
Three gothic ghost stories. Three women. Three silences.
On a foggy day, when the IBM building blurred from the midpoint down as if its upper floors were floating above the city, the first of the girls appeared at the Metrobus stop: Cecilia O.
Pale as death, still wearing the bikini she had on when she was killed, or rather, when the doorman Romualdo tried to rape her and ended up smashing her skull with a wooden wine case. Her forehead was caved in, her hair matted with blood. The bottom of her bikini was pulled aside.
Holding one’s gaze on that spectacle was difficult, yet the passengers on the 152 bus not only stared; they took photos and recorded videos with their phones, which they later uploaded to social media.
The second apparition occurred nearby, in an old mansion being demolished in San Telmo. The worker was on the upper floor when he entered the bedroom. There, lying on the bed, was Margarita S.
Margarita was dressed in her wedding gown, her eyes rolled back, her skin the color of dulce de leche, with a bullet hole in the center of her chest. She spoke in a guttural voice. Her rotting vocal cords demanded tea from India.
Apparently, judging by the color of his skin, she thought the worker was her slave or her butler. In reality, he was Ricardito, who had grown up in Caraza, had three children, and took the number 20 bus every day to get to the construction site.
Ricardito, who had already seen Cecilia O.’s appearance on social media, offered her a mate. Margarita declined. He told her there would be choripán1 for lunch and invited her to eat with the guys.
Margarita S. was enchanted by the renovation. She devoured the choripán greedily. The workers didn’t seem bothered by the putrid color of her skin or the hole in her chest. The architect wasn’t surprised either.
He showed her photographs of what the house would look like and apologized for altering it. Margarita grew sad at the thought of losing her bed, but said she would haunt the new café franchise they were building. The architect assured her they might serve a tea similar to the one she used to drink.
He added that the result wouldn’t be as imposing as her original French-style mansion. This is where a problem arose. Margarita’s ears no longer worked properly; the hair cells were dead, as they should be. Somehow, she took it as a comment on impotence. She said her husband had been impotent.
She explained to the architect that she was terrified of men in suits, the kind walking along the sidewalk in front of her old house.
On her wedding night, after failing to consummate the act, the man who had been her fiancé tried to deflower her with a candlestick from the bedroom. Despite its length and sharp edges, Margarita hadn’t bled. When she screamed, her husband beat her and put a bullet through her chest.
Margarita smiled as she recounted her tragic end, delicately holding the choripán with her pinky finger raised, the translucent phalanx visible, while her bleeding gums stained the bread’s crumb.
In the surroundings of Nonthue, about fifty kilometers from San Martín de los Andes in Argentine Patagonia, tourists who prefer the most beautiful way to travel sleep beside the lake at night, in their sleeping bags.
Before one of those groups settled by the lakeshore for the night, the coordinator suggested a game to help everyone get to know one another.
That night, they would head into the forest in teams of four, each with a flashlight, trying to find the hidden assistant in the darkness. The assistant would imitate an animal cry to guide them. The first group to find him would win, but they weren’t allowed to alert the others, who would keep searching. The assistant might be under a fallen tree trunk or hidden in the undergrowth.
Gilberto went with his group. He got lost because he didn’t have the flashlight. He tripped over a branch and fell. The moonlight revealed fragments of the scene.
A teenage girl stood with her back to him, naked, her hair falling to her waist, almost brushing her ass, or her butt, take your pick.
Gilberto, already aware of the other apparitions, fought the animal instinct to run away screaming. He tensed up but gathered his courage and approached. He placed a hand on her shoulder. A shaft of moonlight fell directly on the spot, illuminating what she had scratched into the tree trunk with her long nails.
It read: The governor’s son. Alfonso and Eugenio. Soledad covered for them, lied to the police.
The girl turned around. She was crying tears of blood that fell onto the back of Gilberto’s hand. Her eyes were completely black. On the ground, the earth had been disturbed, and there was a T-shirt with the inscription I Walk The Line.
Gilberto managed to remove the bottle lodged between Clara U.’s buttocks. She had been beaten and buried alive. She asked to borrow his phone.
She showed him her Facebook page, filled with condolences from friends and calls for justice from family. She looked pretty in the photos; the most recent ones showed her with a group of boys and Soledad on the shore of that very lake.
Then she took a selfie with his phone and posted it on Facebook and Instagram with the caption: I am a ghost.
Her black eyes and peeling skin, which revealed some of the teeth in her upper jaw, helped the photo go viral. Gilberto took her, just as she was, back to the campsite, where they were in the middle of telling ordinary ghost stories. This apparition from the forest was welcomed as if nothing were amiss.
She sat by the fire but refused the stew the coordinator had prepared. She went to sleep in Gilberto’s sleeping bag. He shivered with cold and clung to Clara through the night, even though she was colder than the falling dew.
The next day, Clara was gone. She had left a message: I’ll wait for you at my tree. Their relationship became the talk of the camp.
In other countries there were apparitions too. The more disappearances there were, the more women appeared hitchhiking by the roadside, missing a finger, haunting the graves of famous musicians, or sighted on balconies, in prisons, in nightclubs, at parties, and even in the trunks of cars.
Months later, the first one, Cecilia O., still in her bikini near the IBM building, was strangled by a man in a suit. He raped her and dumped her in the Costanera Sur reserve. She reappeared with a mark around her neck and an even emptier gaze than before.
The same thing happened to the others, except for the one involved with Gilberto. There was a small variation in her case. She herself asked Gilberto to kill her, because she felt enormous guilt over the others and needed him to murder her again and again.
I, who am not popular because I appeared in this house in Tigre, where one day I received a businessman I barely knew, was also murdered. They called it a suicide. But it wasn’t.
— Adrian Fares
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Choripán: A humble Argentine sandwich of grilled chorizo served on bread.
Loved it. Yeah. The detail of the ghosts going viral, Cecilia’s murder photographed and uploaded before anyone thinks to help her, says more about how we actually witness violence against women than any direct statement could.