The Little Girl
I live in MexicoCity. Around 1995, may family and I were living in an apartmentat Colonia Roma, a downtown neighborhood. The building has anopen courtyard between two rows of apartments. A
couple of gay young men, Hector and a friend, moved to theapartment that faced ours. They were nice neighbors but werealways pressed for money and to solve this, they sublet a room intheir apartment to other people, mostly gay like them. Thus, itwas a surprise for my wife, when, some morning as she was goingthrough her housecleaning, she saw a pretty little girl in thewindow of Hector’s apartment waving at her. She waved backthinking that the girl’s family may be new tenants.
Later on, when Hector knocked our door asking for something, mywife chided him telling him that maybe he was tired of gays thatcame and went and would now have a decent family as tenants.Hector was dumbfounded and said that there was no little girl inhis house. But a friend of his who was accompanying him said thatone night when he had stayed over, he had seen the little girl inthe corridor but that he had not thought anything of it.
Later on, my daughter brought a date over for lunch. They weresitting in the dining room and the young man was facing Hector’sapartment. Suddenly, my daughter saw his friend waving his hand.She asked him to whom was he waving and he said that there was alittle girl across the courtyard that said hello to him. Mydaughter couldn’t resist taking a scared look and she sawthe little girl also. Later on we found that a family had livedthere a long time ago and that they had a little girl who died.We never saw her again.