Page 12 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

feed the pigs. The boy sat in a dark spot, his eyes wide open. What was he
looking at? Hey, he crawled under the bed. Was he hiding? I heard the old man
pouring feed into the trough and heard wheelbarrow operators passing in front of
the house. Today this home was making me feel insecure. I needed to find a
different place to rest. With that, I left quietly and slipped into the home across
the street.
This family didn’t raise pigs, but it did have an emaciated black goat tied up
behind the house. It was gnawing a radish. What did they usually feed him? The

black goat sized me up and stopped nibbling on the radish. Although his feet
were tied and he couldn’t walk even a few steps, he didn’t feel at all inferior. His
bright gaze was such that I began feeling inferior. I thought of the food that
people ordinarily prepared for me—all set out nicely in dishes, but they gave
him only a small radish that was no longer fresh. Was it this that he was proud
of?
The man of the house filed keys by the light of a lamp. A small vise was on
the table. He filed very quickly, and the bright lamplight shone on his savage
face. He was like a ghost. The keys he had filed were packed into a wooden box.
There may have been several hundred keys. What locks did these copper keys
open? I hadn’t seen these locks. Perhaps there weren’t any. The room smelled of
sulfur, and I began sneezing—one sneeze after another. Mucus dripped into my
mouth. Finally, I grew used to it. I didn’t go up to the stove. I just squatted on a
stool and rested. Just then, I heard the man talking with his wife. She was sitting
in a dark spot trimming vegetables to cook. Her voice was faint. At first, I didn’t
see her.

“I bent down and picked it up. Who cares what it was? I just brought it back.”
Her voice was a little exultant.
“You did the right thing,” the man said, in a low muffled voice.
“I used to walk very far, as if a ghost were pulling on my feet.”
“That ghost was me, wasn’t it?”
“The rooms are full of these things.”
“It’s good to go back and forth among them.”
“The thing! Very, very scary! One year, after I brought one back from Long
County . . .”
All of a sudden, they stopped talking. And the man stopped filing. Something
puzzled me: Were these two people talking in their dreams? Not long before, I
had heard them talking about this in their dreams. What were they doing? They

were listening closely to that goat. The goat apparently was ramming the wall
outside—time after time. Had the rope snapped? This couple was evil. After
ramming the wall for a while, the goat stopped. Perhaps it was injured. The man
resumed filing keys. The file made a rasping sound against the copper. It gave