I grew up on the outskirts of Mexico City—my life was framed by the arid heat of summer days and crisscrossed by dusty roads that took the occasional smoke-belching pickup truck to more important places.

Back in those days—the late sixties, it was—everyone you’d meet would be Catholic. A lot of people didn’t even know you could be atheist, or Buddhist, or anything else at all. It made perfect sense, therefore, that the rumors about the Gabriella’s son were almost entirely religious in nature.

Gabriella was several years older than me. Enough that we never really spent time together; I only knew her because her house was next to mine. But the difference in age was small enough for me to consider her as also a child—as not an adult.

When news spread, as it eventually did, of her pregnancy, I thought it strange at first. I was only ten or eleven, and pregnancy, in my mind, was something that happened to grown-ups, not children like us.

There were very few rumors about it at first, because nobody could even imagine who the father might be. Gabriella was a very quiet girl. Nobody knew what kind of men she liked or who she might have possibly been seeing, since she spent all her time at home. People got bored of guessing and speculating and making up charming male suitors very quickly.

The rumors began after her child was born.

For several years there were wild stories about strange things that happened around the child, who Gabriella named Matias. But these were not just playful fantasies told by children to their friends, who would pretend to believe them for the fun of it. Even the adults began to tell them to each other, and with geniuine graveness in their voices.

We children thought it odd for adults to be telling each other crazy stories, and even odder that they would believe them. My friends and I would laugh about it and say “Perhaps Matias is the son of the devil. Perhaps Gabriella named him ‘Matias’ as a joke.” We never gave it much thought—certainly not as much thought as our parents were.

That changed when Matias was three or four.

All the boys near my age (six or seven of us) were playing soccer on the seldom-used streets. We were using buckets and jackets to mark goals and corners of the field.

Matias came outside and watched us. He had little, fat fingers, and a little bit of saliva leaking from the side of his mouth. This was one of the first times we saw him without his mother, but we paid him little mind.

After several minutes, Matias declared in his limited vocabulary that he wanted to play with us.

Reno, the oldest of us, found this funny. He knelt down and shoved the ball at Matias.

“Could you kick a ball this big?” he teased. “Would it even move if you pushed it?”

Reno kept it up even as Matias’ little fists balled up, and his face became flushed in anger. We all thought it was even more hilarious. “Look,” we said, “he’s going to snap! He’s going to hit somebody!”

Then he did.

It all took us a moment to realize that when Reno toppled over from Matias’ punch, it was no joke on Reno’s part. He scrambled to sit up, wide-eyed and panting. The mark on his cheek were Matias had struck him was already becoming dark and swollen, and there was blood around his teeth.

Even then, a part of our minds were trying to rationalize what we just saw. As we helped Reno to his feet and gave him a towel to wipe away the blood, I knew from the looks in everyone’s eyes that we were thinking the same thing. “Perhaps a toddler could hit a fifteen year old boy hard enough to knock him flat on his ass,” we thought. “Reno was crouching very precariously, after all.”

In the commotion of it all, nobody heard the truck approaching. We only heard the terrible sound of tons and tons of moving metal coming to a sudden stop.

When we looked, I saw something that to this day I have not been able to forget.

The driver of the truck was struggling to exit the twisted wreckage of his vehicle, while Matias had a disinterested or perhaps a confused expression on his face, as he studied the toddler-sized dent in the truck’s heavy front grill.