My parents never believed this story, mostly because they assumed I craved attention and had a perversely hyperactive imagination. But I swear that, for months, I was terrified of the view from my bedroom window.
I could also swear that this is the story of how I lost my brother.
It all started during my 7th birthday party. Mom spent days setting up Power Ranger decorations and baking sweets. Just before guests started arriving, my brother Javier, who was 14 at the time, gave me my first gift: fluorescent stickers of stars and planets for my bedroom.
“I didn’t want it to get lost among all the other presents,” he told me while smiling.
I hugged him tightly. He’d always been an excellent older brother, one who gives you advice, stands up for you and plays with you. It made me happy that someone whom I admired that much would also call me his best friend.
I remember there were a lot of people at the party. The adults drank and smoked in the living room, while the children played in the backyard. A handful of us decided to play a couple of rounds of hide and seek, and I thought I had been lucky to not be the one counting.
We had 30 seconds to hide. I was always indecisive with these kinds of games, so one of my friends invited me to follow him. We ran towards a mango tree on the side of the house, in order to climb it and hide ourselves in its foliage. A great hideout, no doubt.
But the second my friend went around the corner, he stopped dead in his tracks. So did I when I caught up and saw what had paralyzed him.
I first laid eyes on the rope, then on the hanging body, spinning serenely.
Javier dangled from one of the tallest branches of the mango tree. Hung by his neck.
My friend and I watched him in silence, with a stillness akin to those admiring a sculpture. I recall my heart beating wildly, but not feeling the blood reaching the rest of my body.
I left my friend behind and tore through the backyard, desperately yelling for my parents. Mom almost dropped her drink when she saw me.
“What happened Simón?” she asked as she ran to meet me.
“It’s Javier mommy.” I tried speaking while gasping for air. “He’s hanging from the mango tree.”
Everyone around us looked at each other with concern. Mom squeezed my hand.
“What do you mean Simón? What happened?”
“I… I think he’s dead mom.”
My parents hurried to the backyard in a panic, with all the other grown ups close behind. But the collective anguish seemed to ease as more adults arrived. Mom and dad furiously called for me.
Javier was no longer hanging from the tree. Its branches only held leaves and mangoes.
Not only that, but Javier joined us a few seconds later alongside my older cousins. They were curious to find out what the whole raucous was about.
Mom dispersed the small crowd, asking them please forgive my “bad joke,” as Dad dragged me by the arm to his home office, where he gave me a brutal spanking.
“Be thankful today’s your birthday,” he said, “or I would have used the belt.”
That scolding was probably the reason why I never told them that later that evening, when I went up to my bedroom, I saw my brother’s hanging body again, framed by my window.
I rushed to Javier’s room and felt a mixture of relief and confusion when I found him lying in bed, sifting through a motorbike magazine. I asked whether I could sleep there for the night, and without requesting an explanation, he handed me a sleeping bag and a pillow from his closet.
The next morning, I woke up praying for the disappearance of whatever dangled outside my window. But when I peeked into my room, there he was, still hanging and spinning. A couple of flies fluttered around the blue and asphyxiated face of that thing that looked like my brother. And when it noticed me, its head snapped up.
“Little brother,” he said in a coarse and choppy voice. “It’s so good to see you. Please come and get me down from here. I’m starting to smell.”
I ran in terror to the kitchen, but wanting to avoid another spanking, I sat down and ate breakfast while attempting to hide my fear from my family. I lied to Mom and said something stunk near my window. Perhaps, I thought, this time she’d see the awful corpse.
But when she went to my room to sniff around, Javier’s copycat was gone. It only reappeared later on, once I was alone.
For months, the body hung where only I could see it and smell it. I tried not looking at it, but every now and then I’d glance and see the ongoing decay: the decoloration of its glassy eyes, the skin’s green and purple hues, and the open sores overtaking its body. The smell of rot was truly dreadful.
I also noticed how gravity had slowly stretched out its neck, bruised by the rope’s friction. Its voice kept sounding drier by the day, but never lost its desperation.
“Simón… Simón please…” he’d cry. “Help me little brother, it hurts so much…”
I’d always ignore it. During the day, I’d abandon my room; at night, I could only close the blinds, even if it wouldn’t shut out the smell, or the gentle sound of the tip of his toes barely scraping the roof underneath my window. He eventually ran out of tears to cry with.
“The rope is tearing Simón… I don’t know what will break first, that or my neck, but if you don’t help me I’ll fall down the steep slope next to our house. Don’t leave me here. Save me.”
But I kept resisting his request. One afternoon, as I rushed to my drawers to find my baseball mitt, I heard him calling my name. Then, I heard the rope snap.
I turned. Nothing hung from the mango tree any more, and the remaining flies went away after a couple of minutes. I never saw, heard or smelled that sinister apparition again.
But ever since it dropped to the pits of the steep, Javier began to change. At first the alterations were nothing outside the ordinary. No more than a snappy reply from him every so often, or a bad mood every once in a while.
But over time, my brother became more absent from our home. He stopped talking or sharing details about his life with us. It was as if a black cloud constantly floated above him.
No. Not a cloud. A shadow, chasing him. He wasn’t unhappy, and actually seemed like his old self around other people. But when he was with us, it seemed like that shadow swallowed him whole. It turned him into someone who was constantly annoyed at his parents, and estranged him to the little brother he used to call his best friend.
He moved away the moment he graduated from high school. His lack of contact with us throughout college made him into a stranger who we only saw at family gatherings. We often demanded a reason for his absence, but he never knew how to explain it.
Years later my parents sold the house, and the new owners built a concrete wall that concealed the whole property. But one can still find other ways to get to the bottom of the slope.
Sometimes I’ll drive by, park the car and consider risking going in and climbing down, to see if there’s anything left of my brother at the base of that fall. Maybe there lies the solution to whatever happened between us.
I’ve never told this to anyone, at least not this in depth, let alone to Javier. I wonder if he’s also keeping something from me, and whether that was what stealthily kept drawing us apart, until the day when it was too late to shorten our distance.
After all, that’s what happens with any secret that is kept hidden. It’ll wither, spoil and rot, and that corruption will silently spread throughout your entire being, your soul, and your family.
