My mother taught me that we shouldn’t talk about other people’s lives. For many years I followed this teaching, a kind of golden rule against annoying things. The lives of others are property that does not belong to us and, therefore, we should not dare, armed with cunning, on private land. But what do we do when we hear the neighbor across the street crying and asking for help with a frequency that we wish had been unique, or had never existed?
I am sure that all the tenants hear it as well as I do, that the word “help” is perceptible to the ears that live from the ground floor to the second floor. In this building there are few residents and too many accomplices in a crime that happens on the second left, almost always when it is dark, in the early hours of the morning, which makes leaving the room in pajamas and knocking on the door of a sick couple even more delicate.
A few days ago, after hearing the woman’s loud crying and an aborted attempt to leave the house, I called the police. I remembered my mother’s teaching and, trying hard to contradict it, I asked people to come and help that woman, even though she didn’t want to be helped. Sometimes we need someone to save us.
I thought it would be inhumane to remain inert in the face of violence, a force of death that was entering my house liquidly without me being thirsty. I called the police and, restless, waited at the window for the requested help. It took more than an hour. When they knocked on the door of my front neighbors, they had already fallen silent, the dam of insults and aggressions had stopped.
Through the door window I saw the attacker, wearing a sweater and underwear with Mickeys and Minnies, and, I confess, I was surprised by the childish print on a beast that I imagined dressed in latex or rancid flannel. There, in front of two police officers, he lied with an almost domestic calm: that it had been a mistake, that nothing was wrong, that the woman was lying down and they shouldn’t wake her up because she was suffering from insomnia.
I saw the agents insist that the wife come to the door, they needed to confirm with her. And the girl finally appeared, scared, pretending to have recently awakened, her hair rumpled, we don’t know if from the pillow or from the blow. A girl who was no more than thirty years old, dressed in complete pajamas that covered every inch of her skin, denying the complaint, saying that it was a mistake, that it must have been in another building, that nothing was happening there.
And I remember my mother’s advice, wanting to remain silent, not to interfere in other people’s lives. But I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know if it was the Disney figures in the monster’s underwear, or the girl’s hair, as disoriented as what was inside her. I decided to speak. I decided to open the door. Even if it didn’t solve anything, even if it just created problems for me, I decided to do what I wanted someone to do for me.
And then, when I introduced myself and said that I was the one who made the complaint, the girl lost the strength in her legs and fell onto one of the officers, a bald, mature man. Then she cried, holding onto him, her eyes so tight as if she didn’t want to see what her life would be like from now on, as if she didn’t want anyone to see her. But I saw it. I saw. And I won’t forget.
