Why nobody in three generations ever got back into the house on Mabini Street unnoticed, and what happened the one night somebody nearly did.
The story
“The fourth step from the bottom announced you. Not a creak — a crack, like a knuckle. My father Tomás built those stairs and he never fixed that step, not once in forty years, and he was a man who fixed everything. I was nineteen before it occurred to me that this was on purpose.”
“One night I came home at two and I remembered. I stood in the dark and I stepped over it — a long step, right onto the fifth. And I got to the top and my mother was standing there in the doorway. She said: only a guilty man knows which step to miss.”
How it came down to us
Diego has told this at every gathering since Elena died, usually after the plates are cleared and always in her voice for the last line. It was written down at Talisay in 2019, the first Christmas anyone thought to.
What people disagree about
His sister says it was the fifth step, that he was twenty-two, and that their mother said nothing at all and simply looked at him — which he concedes is the more likely version, and refuses to tell it that way.