I KNEW HER WELL—and I barely recognized her picture in the paper. In black and white, the colorful shawl and red tablecloth looked ghoulish, the shattered glass around her, otherworldly.
I knew her before she became a sensation at the San Juan fairs. We called her Ña Meli. The woman lived in my neighborhood, in La Chacarita, before they kicked us out and built the fancy park flanking the river that they now call Costanera. It was just a bunch of cardboard boxes and corrugated metal back then. It clung to the lip of the river—muddy, smelly, filled with mosquitoes—like a howling, injured beast.
Ña Meli wrote letters at festivals and fairs. She wrote horrific letters that left you staring at the paper shaking like a leaf. She had a second-grade education and terrible handwriting, but when she wrote the letters, her handwriting changed. Sometimes she used words she didn’t even understand. Once I saw her write an entire letter in Portuguese. It was creepy, before we got used to her.
The woman arrived out of nowhere. Running from God knows what, as we all do. She built her home out of burlap, sticks, and Styrofoam—a shelter out of nothing. She was poor among the beggars.
Not a week after she arrived, Ña Meli showed up at my house and said, “I have a letter to write for you.”
I stared at her like she was crazy, which I honestly believed she was. I was trying to take a siesta on a bunk I had made out of old tires and plywood from the junkyard where I sometimes worked. I had a second job as a guard at a nightclub and had gotten in late the night before. In shorts, covered in sweat, using my T-shirt as a pillow, I was trying to catch a sliver of shade under a weathered cardboard awning.
She stood firm as if she were a government official or something, with a threadbare pink towel on her head like a turban.
“Give me a piece of paper and quinientos guaraníes,” she said.
I threw a half-eaten guava at her. Five hundred guaraníes in those days bought you an empanada and maybe even a bottle of Coca-Cola.
She shrugged.
“I guess this Fulvio guy doesn’t mean anything to you then,” she said over her shoulder as she turned and walked back down the dirt path between our houses.
That first time, after I threw the piece of fruit at her, I stayed put. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of sitting up from my nap and calling after her, much less following her, but I wanted to. How the hell did she know about my brother?
It goes without saying that everyone in La Chacarita was poor. Who would pay five hundred for a crazy woman to write a letter? But she would goad us with hints until curiosity got the better of us. We all resisted, as best we could, but no one ever fully walked away.
People would try to negotiate with her, but she held firm at five hundred. The letters were eerily precise. If you don’t believe in these things, you probably have your reasons, but the handwriting, the very phrasing—it was as if someone else had taken her hand.
We got used to it. We would see her running over to someone’s house to sell a letter, like her purse was on fire. She would call out and say, “So and so wants to write you a letter!” She would stand there with her plastic Bic pen and ask for paper and quinientos guaraníes.
It had to be done right then and there though, or the moment was lost. “The visitor left,” she would say. And if you didn’t have money, “Too bad.” She was disciplined, that Ña Meli; she walked away. The poor person who had denied her was left with the doubt.
Ña Meli was not that much older than me, maybe thirty when I first met her, but she acted like my grandmother. She acted like she had already been through it all and back, and she didn’t take nonsense from anyone.
It wasn’t all that frequent at first, the letter-writing. How Ña Meli made her living back then, I don’t know. But we all managed.
A few days after I threw that guava at her, curiosity got the better of me. I waited to see if she would come by, but eventually I walked over to her shack.
“Ña Meli,” I called in through the little window in the front.
She whistled first and then called me over from the back. She was washing clothes in a plastic bucket on a wooden plank.
“Ña Meli, about that letter.” I wasn’t sure how to go about asking her.
She wiped her hands on her shirt, a colorful man’s shirt, and said, “Watch out for the mud over there,” as she led me to a couple of stools next to her house. “There’s no way to keep this place dry…”
Once we were seated in the little patch of shade next to her house, she asked me if I had brought paper. I said I didn’t have any but I did manage to get five hundred guaraníes. I showed her the money and she smiled.
“I don’t have any paper either,” she said.
We sat there for a while, not saying anything. Swatting at flies, we followed the neighbor’s chicken with our eyes as it pecked at the dirt.
Finally, she said, “I have a pen. I’m sure we can find cardboard or something around your house. You have anything to eat?”
Ña Meli was very scrupulous. “I tell everyone,” she insisted, before she took my five hundred guaraníes, “you pay to see if someone answers. If no one does, I can’t help that.”
When we got back to my house, I gave her off-brand cola and leftover soup. She was hungry. She wrote a short note for me on a piece of cardboard, but it wasn’t from my brother. I never told anyone.
Most of the messages—and this I know firsthand as well as from her telling me—most were not of great importance. Nothing life-shattering. Most.
But she wrote lots of letters.
Where Ña Meli eventually made her money was at the fairs leading up to the feast day of San Juan, selling letters to adolescent girls. They came in pairs and bought letters for laughs, for the thrill of dabbling in the occult. Those kids had money to burn. Ña Meli would charge two thousand per letter outside the neighborhood, sometimes more, and people paid. She made a good living after a while.
After the first year working at San Juan fairs, people started coming to see her year-round, at the little house she had pieced together just down the dirt path from mine, and she always produced something that either delighted or horrified them. Either way, it kept them coming back.
Even fancy people came after a while. Some drove cars as far as the dirt road would allow them and then continued on by foot. A pregnant woman once paid me a thousand guaraníes to watch her car, just like that, as if I had been standing there waiting for a car to watch. I was waiting for the bus. I pocketed the money and went on my way.
The feast day of San Juan falls on the twenty-fourth day of June, but there are celebrations, fairs, carnivals, and processions all over the country for two or three weeks leading up to it. As soon as it gets cold we look for the traditional foods and the games with fire—pelota tatá, toro candil, things like that. Finally, on the night of San Juan proper, we burn the effigy of a man; we light a San Juan of rags and kerosene on fire and we cheer as we watch him burn.
These days it’s all very modern, and it’s harder to find the real, traditional games, but back then when Ña Meli and I started working the fairs, almost every San Juan had a real toro candil, a live bull with real fire burning on its horns, and people of faith or good drinking walked over hot coals without burning their feet. Boys waited in line to impress the girls as they climbed greasy poles for prizes and kicked the pelota tatá, a ball of cloth lit on fire.
We crossed paths frequently in the month of June. I had some experience as a mechanic and picked up work setting up the Ferris wheels that were all the rage at the time. I piled on whatever job I could get.
The whole month, Ña Meli would work at two or three different San Juan fairs every day, one after the other. She had a cardboard sign that read, “Madame Melie Labé,” but everyone knew her as “Ña Meli who writes the letters.”
At the fairs, she would set up with a red tablecloth and wear a shiny turban and a colorful tasseled shawl. As her fame grew, she invested in a stack of envelopes and letter-writing paper. Over time she added things to her stand. I have to admit it had a certain flair.
Ña Meli wrote me a dangerous letter once, an ugly, painful letter. The ghost was not all that literate so it was all jumbled up with terrible handwriting. Still, I knew who it was. I knew what he was trying to tell me. In truth, I had known all along. He was a small-time agitator in a forsaken town; it didn’t take much imagination to guess what happened.
When they caught my brother, a neighbor tipped me off. I left my drunk father to fend for himself and abandoned the tall bushes of yerba mate I knew he would never get around to harvesting.
As Ña Meli wrote the letter for me I thought, What good does it do me to know it was muddy after the rain and he slipped? And I told her. I said, “Ña Meli, be careful. You can’t go around writing things like this.”
She smacked me on the head with her purse and said, “Imbécil! It’s not me. They visit me.”
I didn’t know what to tell her.
“Read it if you want to, burn it if you don’t, I don’t care,” she said. “Just don’t leave it lying around, you incompetent badulaque…” She gave me another smack with her purse for good measure and continued the string of insults as she walked away.
Once, she found a round glass light fixture on the side of the road and brought it home on the bus. She showed it to me.
“What do you think it looks like?” she asked.
“I don’t know, a glass light fixture?” I answered.
“No, you idiot,” she said. “A crystal ball, don’t you see?” She lifted it so I could see it up close. “No?”
It did look like a crystal ball in her hands. It was a kind of white frosted glass, and I could see it getting milky or dark with the light.
“Supernatural,” I said.
She showed it to me later, after she had made a Styrofoam base for it and covered it in scraps of tinfoil. It looked like a legitimate crystal ball.
What really made her name, though, was her seal. She sealed her letters with red wax and a stamp. The stamp, I know for a fact, was a small wooden block with the letter “M” in relief. She saw it on the street one afternoon while she was running to catch the bus. She missed the bus for that stamp and had to wait another hour and a half for the next one, but she said it was worth it. She said she believed it was “sent.” I believe it was dropped by a distracted nanny hoisting some pampered baby’s bag into a fancy car. But what do I know?
The point is, she sealed her letter with her “M” in red wax, and handed it over for the person to read on their own time. Anyone could recognize one of her letters with that red “M.”
Ña Meli always wore a colorful turban when she worked at fairs. She took it seriously. From time to time, she would change them. She said the thing would begin to weigh on her, as if she had been standing for hours in a light rain.
She never told me this herself, but I heard that sometimes ugly things came to her, ugly spirits. “Bad visitors,” they called them. But she felt that, having given her word and having charged up front, she could not deny even these “bad visitors” their time. She would write down the message and seal the envelope and ask the addressee not to read it.
“Burn it,” she would say. “Don’t read it.”
Knowing that people are curious, and once they pay they want their money’s worth, she would write at the end of these letters a second warning in her own handwriting, simply stating, “Burn this. Do not keep it.”
But even then, I doubt anyone followed her instructions. Everyone wants souvenirs, even of the worst things.
I often saw Ña Meli in her element, sitting behind her red table with the fancy turban and her homemade crystal ball. Whenever she was at a fair, hers was, without a doubt, the longest line.
But that last San Juan season before she died, the whole month of June, she looked like she could evaporate. Like she could disappear.
There were a lot of bad letters that season—not evil spirits, but spirits who had suffered, and the suffering weighed on her. She changed her turban four or five times a day. She told me she felt like it was raining all the time.
“You don’t look good, Ña Meli,” I told her one night as we waited for the last bus back to La Chacarita.
She was carrying a heavy bag with the tablecloth, the turbans, and the crystal ball, and I offered to help her. I guess I was getting soft.
She didn’t even put up a fight.
It was almost midnight, bone cold and humid. We could see each other’s breath, and hers came out like tiny bursts of nothing.
“You have to take care of your health, Ña Meli,” I said, just to have something to say.
There was no point in telling her to stop with the heavy letters, with the string of detailed accounts from souls that had been imprisoned, tortured, and raped. Who wanted to know for sure that their loved one had been gunned down or stripped naked, electrocuted, and submerged in a filthy pool? What good was it to know the names of the officers that did it?
Maybe all that rattling about of their names in documents had lured the poor souls back. The “Archives of Terror” had been all over the news, recently discovered in a pile in the back of a minor police station. I saw the picture in the newspaper. It was a mountain of yellowing paper, taller than the armed guards that surrounded it. The picture itself took up half the front page.
Some journalist had heard a rumor that the torture files of the Stroessner government, which had been hastily moved out of Investigaciones, the intelligence headquarters, after the dictator was deposed, were still intact. They had been dumped in the back shed of a remote police station. They only survived, almost four years later, because no one there knew what the stacks of files were. The leadership had been shifted around and the conscripted eighteen-year-olds on mandatory military service that manned the police station had simply not gotten around to burning them.
These files offered a meticulous log of method, application, time, and duration, mechanically typed, in addition to the lists of names of the tortured and killed. It was all over the radio and the TV—you couldn’t turn the channel without someone commenting on it. After a while, the thing, like all things, was dying down.
But there was evidence now. There were files and lists for people with money and lawyers to look through. I could guess that much of what Ña Meli transcribed in letters from spirits could be corroborated in the newly discovered Archives of Terror. If I were a spirit, maybe I would also want to tell my story now.
I wanted to warn her, to tell Ña Meli that she was on the losing side, the side of the souls of the tortured, the ones who had already lost. What good was their clamoring for some sort of recognition when we, on this side, were just trying to get by, just trying to get on with our lives?
I knew enough. What good does it do me to know who shot Fulvio as he ran away from the church shed? What good does it do me to know he slipped in the mud? What good does it do me to know who threw the first punch, breaking his jaw, once he was tied to a chair in Investigaciones? And everything that came after? My brother was a nobody. He never stood a chance. I knew everything I needed to know before she wrote a single word.
I thought, as I watched her shivering at the bus stop, that those letters, heavy with pain and suffering, they didn’t do anyone any good. Nothing had changed. Maybe they would show a little restraint, maybe they’d be better at covering up, but the same people were still there. I wanted to tell her, Be careful, these are powerful people, and someone is bound to come across a letter of yours sooner or later.
She smiled and looked out at the distance. She knew what I meant. I knew there was no deterring her.
Poor Ña Meli died one night, not long after that, at a San Juan fair at a school for rich kids. They said it was an evil spirit, a “bad visitor” from the other side that possessed her. But there are more evil demons on this side. In the neighborhood, where no one had the luxury of being innocent, we all knew.
I wasn’t there but I was told that she began to tremble, then to shake violently, and that her eyes went completely white. She clawed at the tablecloth before the folding chair gave out and she fell back pulling her red tablecloth and with it her whole display, sending the crystal ball flying before it shattered into a burst of sparkling stars around her.
A few days after she died, they came around asking questions. They shook a few things up, made a real mess, tried to find letters she might have left lying around, but they didn’t find anything. That part never made it into the papers.
But the death of the medium at a San Juan fair was immediate, sensational news. The whole country was talking about it. As soon as I saw the black-and-white picture in the newspaper, I found that letter she had written from my brother and I burned it in a barrel a good distance from my house. I had memorized the names and places, but I wished I hadn’t. I knew what Fulvio wanted me to know. That was enough.
The first message Ña Meli had written for me, that was from my mother. A few days after the incident with the half-eaten guava. My mother told me that she loved me and that it had pained her to leave Fulvio and me behind when we were still so young. Nothing I didn’t already know.
Eventually the cardboard with my mother’s message became a replacement shade for my window. Then, when the whole place was razed, it was lost along with everything else. I didn’t miss it, or the letter from Fulvio that I burned. I had loved my brother and I had cared in my own way for Ña Meli, the woman who wrote the letters. When they razed La Chacarita, I moved on. I don’t need souvenirs.