Gaspar lit a cigarette for her.
“We’ll sit here until the car starts; I’ve got nowhere to be.”
The move to La Plata was becoming torturous. The apartment Vicky had rented was dark, had no balcony, and the tiny kitchen couldn’t fit two people. She wondered what size refrigerator she’d have to buy: the one her father had offered her, an old model that still worked, was too big. She signed the lease anyway: the rent was low, befitting its miserable appearance. At the realtor’s office, the owner consoled her by saying the place was well located and convenient for the university.
Vicky had only asked her if the electricity went out in the building or the neighborhood. If there were blackouts. Gaspar had gone with her to sign the lease, since he was on vacation—and he was alone: Luis and Julieta had gone to Brazil, and he’d decided to stay in Villa Elisa to spend the summer with Marita—and he arched an eyebrow when he heard that question, sensing the anxiety in Vicky’s trembling voice. It never went out when I lived there, the owner assured her, except during Alfonsín’s programmed blackouts.
Now, as they sat in the car and smoked, Gaspar wanted to know why she had asked about the electricity.
“So it’s not true, then,” he said.
“What’s not true?”
“That you’re over what happened with Adela.”
“I am over it. I just have these residual effects. I’m scared of the dark. I can’t stand blackouts. When a lamp flickers, I panic. I can’t control it.”
Gaspar flicked ash out the window and scratched the scar on his arm. It was hot.
“Can you sleep without socks?”
“What about you? Do you still see Adela in corners?”
“Less often. I told Marita everything.”
“And?”
“She feels sorry for me, I think. I don’t care. At least she’s not afraid of me.”
Vicky leaned against Gaspar’s shoulder.
“I’m happy for you and Marita. She really cares about you, I can tell.”
“Let’s go to the Princesa tonight. You have a place now, or else you can stay with us. Pablo’s got his drawings up and Marita told me Andrés Sigal came to see them.”
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t be ignorant, he’s famous. He’s a photographer. He directs the photography gallery at the Fine Arts School and he has his own gallery. He’s big time.”
“I’m in med school, my friend. Different ball game. Anyway, sure, I’ll go tonight.”
The engine finally turned over, and Gaspar thought he should never leave Vicky alone in the dark. He had to make sure she got a phone line soon so she could call him or Pablo if there was a blackout. In summer, the city often had outages: the apartment’s owner had been lying. Plus, Gaspar had noticed some disturbing details about the woman. Her socks, for example. They were visible under her pleated and seemingly elegant skirt, and they were men’s socks, one of them army green and the other navy blue. The army green one seemed to cover a wound, and he imagined a slash that hadn’t come from a cat or the corner of a table, the kind of accidents he could imagine for a woman of her age. It was more like a claw mark. He thought of the hand that touched Pablo. It wasn’t cold the way one imagines ghostly hands. It was a fevered hand, a knife heated in fire. A tool to mark with. The woman’s makeup was exaggerated, as if to cover up bloodless skin, especially under her eyes, where cheeks start to sag at a certain age. And when she looked at him, Gaspar saw a horrible desire, a kind of envy: that woman would be capable of biting him. Isabel had often told him those sensations he experienced could be auras, manifestations of epilepsy, very personal hallucinations. Though he trusted in Isabel, above all in her good intentions, for some time now, whenever she explained his symptoms, he nodded without believing. He was no longer sure. That woman intuited something, she was hiding something, or he had simply provoked something in her that had been asleep, lurking.
And that’s why Vicky should never be alone in the dark. If she was alone, she could be caught. Taken, the way Adela had been taken. He couldn’t explain this intuition or any other, just as he couldn’t explain his aversion to certain houses, certain corners, abandoned lots. In his father’s notebook he’d found a fragment of a Neruda poem that had left an impression on him. Julieta liked Neruda—she read poems about love and politics, typical of her. He was a shitty old man, she said, he was awful to women, but what a poet. Gaspar had shown her the poem fragment copied out in his father’s nervous but clear handwriting, and she had told him what book he could find it in. Now he had it in his room, on the towering pile on his nightstand. “And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses, into hospitals where the bones fly out the window, into shoeshops that smell like vinegar, and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin. There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines / hanging over the doors of houses that I hate.”
Houses that I hate. He hadn’t felt hatred in the ugly apartment Vicky had rented. He didn’t think it was dangerous, despite the dead skin its owner was trying to hide. Still, he was going to visit a lot to be sure it was a safe place. He couldn’t lose anyone else.
The Moreno Theater may have had an illustrious name, but it was the only porno theatre in La Plata, and anyone who more or less knew anything about the street and the night understood it wasn’t a place for pencil pushers or kids looking to jack off, nor was it for dipping your toes in the water. It had been once, but by 1992, people who wanted to see porn had video stores. And now the theatre was the epicenter of cruising, the place where the city’s gay men found each other to have sex at any hour, any day—except Monday, when a discreet cleaning was done, testified to by the persistent smell of cheap disinfectant.
“That’s where I caught the bug,” said Max, the Princesa’s DJ and general sound engineer, while he wiped his grease-covered fingers; he also took care of the precarious maintenance. “I won’t set foot in there again. It’s a hospital full of the infected.”
“Still, I want to see what’s up, but I’ll be careful,” said Pablo. “You know I double bag.”
“Look, Paulie, if you’ve got a death wish that’s your problem. I’m not taking you and I won’t come running if they raid the place. I’m not in the psychophysical condition to be bailing out fags from police stations, I’ve done that enough. Especially underage kids.”
Gaspar declined the mate Max offered him.
“I’m curious, that’s all. And I’m not underage, I turned eighteen months ago. You’re getting senile.”
“Well, isn’t she sassy? Do what you want, no one can stop a damsel in heat. Don’t go alone, take a little boyfriend with you. But you,” he said, pointing at Gaspar, “don’t even think about going with him to experiment. With how pretty you are you’ll be gang-raped.”
“Not a chance I’d go in there.”
“This kid is such a breeder, and with that tragic face, it drives me crazy.”
Max had just finished rehanging the bathroom door, which had fallen off several nights before. He wanted to make the place presentable because Andrés Sigal had come in for the second time now, and he was hoping, at least, for a donation. Surely the big-name fag could take up a collection for us, the poor cutting-edge fags, he’d say. Pablo’s drawings were now sharing space with photos of transvestite girls who all lived together in a squatter hotel near the station. Andrés, who was a collector, had bought one: the girls were celebrating a birthday around a cake covered with meringue, and they looked happy. It was the only happy photo. Andrés was rich because he took photos of Argentina’s tourist spots, and his books were sold in hotels and airports and souvenir shops. In addition to those commercial photos, Andrés had traversed the country several times to document the lives of gays and transvestites from the time of the dictatorship through the early eighties. On his last visit, he’d talked about wanting to do a mixed retrospective with a little of everything, the photos of Argentina, of gay men, of all the people he had met in almost fifteen years of coming and going.