The Little Castle - O Castelinho

The Little Castle

Apa Street, 236, on the corner of São João Avenue. Maria passed in front of the curious house every day as she wandered through the center of the city, trying to survive. Surrounded by buildings, the construction stood out, even among the few that were its contemporaries left in the region. Its architecture inspired by medieval buildings reminded a miniature castle, with a single tower facing the corner diagonally. The tower windows grimly resembled mouths agape, with two more round openings above them, like eyes stuck in an eternal expression of terror.

The bricks of the facade could be seen behind the peeling paint, resulted from the total neglect of almost forty years. The city still did a good job of preventing invaders from making the castle into a shelter, but the authorities knew that, now and then, someone managed to get in. And when they came out, they brought with them the most curious tales. Agonizing voices screaming "stop!" and "it was him", apparitions of a woman at the window, noises in the dead of night. Still, Maria wasn't scared. Maria wanted to know more.

She still lived at Dom Pedro Park, downtown, having been her official address for almost two years now, but whenever she could, she passed by the castle, wishing she could one day enter. Something in it called to her.

The street was still busy at that late hour, and the newly built overpass offered a new shelter to the castle's facade. Maria looked at the building, at the windows that looked like open mouths and bulging eyes staring back, waiting for someone to appear there. She wondered if she would see the woman, her old-fashioned dressed silhouette leaning her face against the glass, watching. Waiting for justice.

On that same night of May 12, thirty-seven years before, the castle had been the stage for a mystery that had never been solved. A mother, two brothers and three unanswered murders. Newspapers at the time were quick to solve the case based on misreported versions and unofficial sources. In a family business dispute, one of the brothers had shot dead the other two family members and then taken his own life. Simple to believe, especially considering men's volatilities in material matters. However, the few pictures that remain tell another story. The mother, shot three times, was found lying in front of the main staircase. In the adjoining room, both brothers lay side by side, also shot to death. One thing, however, didn't fit the version propagated by the media: the fact that the alleged murderer had killed himself with two shots to the chest. Something wasn't adding up. And the spirits lingering in the house didn't seem to want to leave without the truth being revealed. It was all too easy to blame the dead body that couldn't defend himself.

Hugging her body against the icy wind that mercilessly blew, the young woman who was barely twenty years old looked and waited for some sign from the castle. Footsteps beside her startled Maria momentarily, wrenching her from the past that seemed to want to lure her in deeper and deeper. A young man with his arms crossed over his chest watched her with the same anxious expression she had while contemplating the castle. He was standing by the entrance gate a few steps away from Maria. She didn't know how she didn't see him approaching, so much so that she didn't even know if he came from inside the castle or from the street.

"What are you doing there?" she asked. He did not answer. He just stood there, staring at her. And she stared back at him, motionless, as if something was catching the muscles in her body.

It wasn't until he turned around that Maria felt like she could lift her feet off the ground again. She noticed how old-fashioned his clothes were, something her father would have worn when he was still young, in the countryside of Maranhão. The man opened the iron gate with a metallic creak that made the hair on Maria's arms bristle even more so than the cold wind could, and entered the courtyard, heading for the front door. Maria looked around at the street, and even though it wasn't past nine o'clock, there was no one around, even the cars that used to run along the busy avenue seemed to have vanished. When she looked back at the man, he was gone.