The Children Were Alone

Their mother had left early in the morning and left them in the care of Marina, an eighteen-year-old who he sometimes hired for a few hours to take care of them in exchange for a few pesos. Since the father had died, the times were too hard to risk the job missing every time the grandmother got sick or was absent from the city.

When the girl’s boyfriend called to take her out for a ride in his new car, Marina didn’t hesitate too long. After all, the children were sleeping like every evening, and they wouldn’t wake up until five. As soon as she heard the horn she picked up her bag and picked up the phone.

He took the precaution of closing the door of the room and put the key in his pocket. She didn’t want to risk Pancho waking up and going downstairs to look for her, because after all she was only six years old and in a careless way she could trip and hurt herself.

Besides, she thought, if that happened, how would she explain to her mother that the boy hadn’t found her?

Maybe it was a short circuit in the TV on or in one of the lights in the living room, or maybe a spark from the fireplace; The point is that when the curtains began to burn, the fire quickly reached the wooden staircase that led to the bedrooms.

The baby’s coughing from the smoke leaking from under the door woke him up. Without thinking, Pancho jumped out of bed and struggled with the handle to open the door but couldn’t. Anyway, if he had succeeded, he and his month-old brother would have been engulfed in flames in a few minutes.

Pancho yelled for Marina, but no one answered his call for help. So he ran to the phone in the room (he knew how to dial his mother’s number) but there was no line.

Pancho realized that he had to get his little brother out of there.

He tried to open the window that overlooked the ledge, but it was impossible for his little hands to unlock the latch and even if he had succeeded he still had to loosen the wire mesh that his parents had installed for protection.

When the firefighters finished putting out the fire, everyone’s topic of conversation was the same:
—How could that little boy break the glass and then the lattice with the coat rack?
“How could you carry the baby in the backpack?”
“How could he walk up the ledge with such weight and down the tree?”
“How could you save your life and your brother’s?”

The old fire chief, a wise and respected man, gave them the answer:
—Panchito was alone … He had no one to tell him that he wasn’t going to be able to.