In his house, he had a superstitious impulse. He took the clothes out to the patio and burned them, just as he’d seen his father burn his mother’s clothes years before. Vicky and Pablo loaded books into boxes while he tended the flames with a shovel and remembered those pants, that shirt with the rolled-up sleeves, the white T-shirt now moth-eaten after years in storage. His father had been cremated. He didn’t know where his ashes were: he hadn’t wanted to ask. It seemed like enough to burn his clothes.
Vicky and Pablo were now reincorporated into his life. For some time, the contact with Vicky had been only by telephone, but the conversations were always torrential and direct, no evasions, no careful euphemisms. Vicky had been the first: she interrogated him, and told him how at night she slept in socks because she felt Omaira’s head; how she didn’t avoid passing by the house on Villarreal, but she had to sneak off to see it, because she wasn’t allowed to go; how she’d switched schools, and if her classmates knew who she was, they’d never said so. I want to see you, it’s not going to be bad for you, there’s a reason we can’t make new friends, or have you? Gaspar admitted he hadn’t. She came to the house in Villa Elisa happy and anxious; Gaspar thought, as well, that she looked very different, tall, her familiar, heavy hair now very long and cared-for, and her skin so fine you could see tiny vessels in her cheeks. Pablo’s return had been more careful. The phone calls were uncomfortable and nervous, but his first visit was an immense relief, one cold afternoon under a blanket on the sofa, like reaching shore and being able to tie up and forget the storm. It was always Vicky and Pablo who came to the house in Villa Elisa, never the other way around. And Pablo’s visits would soon become more frequent: his dad, who had gotten rich off the gas company, had signed a contract with the province’s Ministry of Production, and he would soon be moving the family to La Plata, the capital. He was already renting an apartment downtown, which for now he was using as an office, but soon they’d need a house for the whole family. Gaspar told Pablo he felt like someone was bringing them together. Pablo listened to him, thought about the hand that sometimes touched him in the darkness, and said nothing. Vicky wanted to move there too, once she finished high school, to study medicine at the National University of La Plata. Luis had his reservations about the reunion: he thought if the kids reformed their group it would only bring back all the drama. He would have preferred them to maintain a friendship of phone calls, birthday parties, an occasional concert. The way they understood each other disturbed him. He talked about it with Isabel, and she surprised him when she said it didn’t seem like the best thing to her, either. But they were teenagers: forcing them to separate was no longer an option. Suggesting distance after years of keeping them apart could also be counterproductive.
Gaspar had asked Vicky to go through his father’s drawers—he didn’t dare. There wasn’t much. A few photos of his mother, which Gaspar put in his backpack. Several decks of cards: he kept those, too. She threw away all the expired medication. She found drawers with candles and chalk and little aluminum pots stained with something brown that could be rust or coffee. Gaspar also kept some postcards from Europe and some notebooks. The books went into a suitcase.
While Pablo was washing his hands in the bathroom—Luis still paid for the water and electricity—he admitted to Gaspar that he’d tried to get into the house a few times. He didn’t have a key, but raising the shutters didn’t seem so hard, nor did climbing over the flat garage roof. But he never could. It was as if the house didn’t want me, wouldn’t let me in. It ended up scaring me. Plus, the last time I tried to get in, it was later that night I felt the hand, it grabbed my shoulder in the bathroom at my house. And that was the end of that.
Gaspar handed him the towel and leaned against the bathroom wall with his arms crossed.
“I’m sure the house kept you out.”
He said this and felt his scar burn. He rubbed it: he wasn’t worried about hiding it in front of Pablo.
“It’s been months since I felt the hand grab me. Almost a year.”
“It’s not gone. Or do you think it is?”
Pablo shook his head. “I think it’s waiting. I was afraid of seeing you again, too, I told you that. I thought if I saw you, the hand would immediately come and find me again, and it wouldn’t let go. But it was the opposite.”
“Let’s go,” said Gaspar. He had started to feel a slight twinge in his eye, the sign of a migraine; he had to take something before it got worse, and his pills were in his backpack. Pablo followed him down the bare corridor. They passed the empty room that had once served as a place of punishment; they looked at the hall, which seemed to be waiting for a party, guests, laughing people, everything that had never happened in that house. When they went down the stairs, Gaspar saw that the glass in the window that had wounded him had been repaired; he hadn’t noticed before. Who had replaced it? Pablo put his arm around his waist just when he started to shake. Let’s go down together, he said into his ear, it’s okay.
The care, the constant care; Gaspar was sick of all the protection, which seemed excessive, and now he understood his father and his refusal, the confrontations with his doctors and sometimes with him or Esteban. Still, he could let himself be cared for by Pablo. They understood each other, he trusted Pablo, though he had changed a lot. All three of them had changed, but Pablo’s change was more significant because he was homosexual （Pablo preferred to call himself gay, and they were all getting used to that much nicer word）， he didn’t hide it now, and he had his group of girlfriends from school who went out with him, called him, acted as his companions and his shield against cruel boys. Plus, he wanted to study art, and he painted graffiti. He had slept with several classmates, he said. Watch out, warned Vicky, be careful, you can’t imagine how many patients my mom sees at the hospital. Oh, don’t be dumb, I’m careful, he replied, plus, it’s older people who get infected.
Gaspar went back to his father’s room. He paged through the notebooks he was going to take with him in his backpack. He had the feeling one was missing: he remembered a notebook with drawings, a lot of symbols that his father went over and corrected very attentively. They weren’t doodles; he didn’t know what meaning those geometrical signs held, and his father had always lied and said he drew them for fun. You always thought I believed your lies, Gaspar said in a low voice as he opened the backpack. But I was also inside your head. Not so much, I could never break through the barrier, but I knew there was a barrier, Dad, I felt it. Why did you have to put it up? That’s what I wonder.
He looked for the notebook in every drawer, even in the kitchen. He couldn’t find it. He asked his uncle, who said I didn’t touch anything. I don’t know if your dad’s friend had a key, I don’t know if he took anything. Esteban: Gaspar could imagine him taking the special things, the ones they shared, the secrets they surely kept. The notebooks he did take, though, had some unnerving notes. One said: “ ‘When we call upon the devil with the required ceremonies, the devil comes and we see him. In order not to die, struck down by this vision, in order not to become cataleptic or insane, one must already be crazy.’ Levi.” So that’s what you did. You invoked the Devil. Or maybe his dad was only interested in the subject out of pure boredom. From spending all his time alone in bed with no one to talk to. But no, there was something more, it wasn’t boredom. The cuts, the ones he’d given Gaspar and the ones he’d given himself. The night they’d scattered his mother’s ashes in the river. The way he could divine things. His father could find what was lost. His father knew when someone was going to die. His father had talked to him about the dead who rode in on the wind. The dead travel fast.