Slum Virgin. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

      7. Quity: ‘I’d been working for hours and hours’

      I’d been working for hours and hours that day, covering the kidnapping of a businessman in the town of Quilmes, south of Buenos Aires. I ended up having dinner with his future widow and his soon-to-be-fatherless children as they waited for the captors to call. They didn’t call and it got late, and it was around three in the morning when I set off home.

      I drove slowly through the town centre because I’d had a bit to drink. I passed the first part of the slum that surrounded the motorway, going even slower then because there’s always the odd horse or drunk around there, and when I got to the last five hundred yards before the entrance ramp and was about to speed up again, everything went black. All the lights in the area went out, yellowish lights that blinked from the windows and holes in the shacks, hung from extension cords strung from ceiling to ceiling like pumpkins from a miserable Halloween or Christmas decorations from the holiday from hell. Everything went silent, too. The only sounds were the deep, muted roars of the cars on the motorway above, brightly lit and as tauntingly distant as the shore to a drowning man.

      I turned off my headlights. They weren’t doing much anyway, and besides, as everyone knows, being the only visible thing is very similar to being the only target. I took my .38 Smith & Wesson from the glove compartment and put it on the passenger seat, not thinking it would really do any good. Although the motorway punctuated the blackness and added a touch of normality to the scene, there was a stillness and silence that seemed almost tangible, and more than a band of teenage thieves, I feared I’d be attacked by an army of zombies. My lungs and my brain felt squeezed and I was left with only one idea: to get the hell out of there. There wasn’t a soul on the street, you couldn’t even hear the cry of a baby or a cumbia beat or the rattle of a cart or the bark of a dog and the only thing that moved, dark and slow, was my car, as if I were the only thing that existed. But everyone was still there. Turning off the lights and holding your breath is the shantytown’s way of saying there are no witnesses, that no one wants to have anything to do with what’s happening or even see or hear it take place.

      What was happening occurred a few seconds after the blackout, like thunder and lightning in reverse order: first the sound, a terrifying howl that sent me into the kind of animal alert mode that made my hair stand on end. All I managed to do was press the accelerator and grab the revolver, but that meant letting go of the wheel and I ended up on the curb, making a thunderous, metallic racket, the only noise besides the howling, as a lamppost crunched against the car’s back door. Everything else was black and still like an empty stage. Then came the light: a human flame running a kind of epileptic race, with movements that seemed impossible for a human body and a heart-rending shriek, running like someone falling, the torso plunging over the feet, contorting with the heat of the undulating flames that were burning the body alive.