The Princesa Cultural Center had become a lightning rod of agitation in La Plata. Max and Marita, who were good friends and knew each other from high school, ran the place but were very flexible. The poetry readings overflowed with people. There were local poets who read their own work and others who interpreted poems of famous authors; the Pizarnik and Plath nights were great successes. The space had also given rise to the city’s one and only—so far—gay pride march, sparsely attended but intense. Marita, as well, had started to record conversations with Max’s HIV-positive friends. She was interested in finding out about how they were treated by their neighbors, their families, their doctors; about their difficulties getting medication; whether they were discriminated against, whether they felt represented by the activists in Buenos Aires, whether they knew about ACT UP. Sometimes Pablo stayed to listen to these conversations, occasionally interrupting with questions of his own. Marita was delighted to have him. She wanted, one day, when the right medication or vaccine was discovered—and she was sure this would happen—to write a book using those testimonials, or to simply publish them as they were. She was studying journalism, and had thousands of plans. One night, after making out on the sofa at the empty house in Villa Elisa, Marita had asked Gaspar why he didn’t feel uncomfortable around so many gay guys. Gaspar, toying with her skull earrings, had told her without thinking: I think my dad was gay. Or bisexual, because I know he loved my mom and he had women as lovers, or one, at least. Tali. Catalina.
“Really? And he was open about it?”
“Nothing was open with my dad. But he had a boyfriend, yes, a lover, though they didn’t see each other much.”
“You haven’t seen the boyfriend again?”
“He disappeared, and I think it’s so shitty of him that I don’t ever want to see him again. My problem is with him, though, not because he was my dad’s boyfriend. It was the opposite: I wanted them to live together.”
“So that’s why you’re so comfortable.”
“I don’t know why I wouldn’t be.”
And he wasn’t lying: he felt as at ease in the company of gay people as he did with his five-a-side soccer teammates. Sometimes Gaspar thought maybe it was because he couldn’t really get close to anyone, and so he found it easier to accept everyone. At the Princesa, too, when the parties made the walls sweat and everyone danced and shouted and clutched their cups of beer, he had to go outside. It’s fear of losing control, said Isabel. For many years, because of the chaos you lived with, you needed to be in control, on the alert. Excess could destabilize you, that’s what you believe. I’d like to change, he’d told Isabel, but she, as always when he expressed a desire, smiled and stayed silent.
“Gaspar, my love, do me a favor,” said Max when he’d finished wiping off his right thumb. “Did you bring the cards, like I asked?”
Marita, who was in charge of the kettle—mate water was her obsession, she thought no one else was capable of getting the temperature right—said:
“Don’t bug him about that, he doesn’t love doing readings.”
“You’re so overprotective.”
“OK, maybe I am: My boyfriend’s half-schizo and my best friend has AIDS. So fine, I’m overprotective. Don’t give me shit.”
“That’s cos you’re hot for crazy guys and you run with the gays. You can’t go all Florence Nightingale now. Please. I don’t know how you put up with her. Sure, she’s pretty, but swarthy chicks like her are a dime a dozen.”
Gaspar told them to quit bickering and took out his cards. Max had to shuffle them and hand them back. The deck hadn’t been used much, except for one card, the Hanged Man, which had been handled so much it seemed to come from a different deck. Why had his father touched that one card so much, the strangest card of all, and the one Gaspar found the most frightening?
Pablo wiped off the table so the cards wouldn’t get wet. Gaspar took the deck from Max’s hands and looked at him before laying them out. Max was serious. His dark eyes were shining, maybe from fever. Marita leaned back on some cushions and Gaspar felt her hand, rings on all her fingers, caressing his back.
“Do you tell me, or do I ask?”
“Ask.”
“I’ve got some heavy questions.”
Gaspar raised his left eyebrow. It was an expression he’d inherited from his father, and he couldn’t help it, though he tried.
“All questions are. Heavy, I mean. I don’t know anyone who asks dumb questions when the cards are down. That doesn’t happen.”
And to himself he thought: Tarot is an old language. He’d read in one of his father’s books—skimming through, but he hadn’t forgotten this—that the cards hold the secret to something that perhaps has been forgotten. The cards are that secret.
“Ask if I’m going to die of AIDS.”
“Oh, Max,” said Marita, and she stopped rubbing Gaspar’s back, as if she didn’t want to distract him.
Gaspar was expecting the question, so he didn’t react. Whenever he read, and he didn’t do it much, it was always the same: he had the calm of an expert. He chose a simple spread, the one his mother had taught him when he was very little. So little he hardly remembered that lesson. He laid the cards on the table and didn’t make any mysterious pauses, because he never put on an act, the same way he couldn’t fake the abandon of parties.
“You’re going to be okay, Máxima, so I’m going to have less patience with you. Look, down here, it’s the only one that matters because it’s . . . the future, let’s say? The conclusion. And it’s the Sun, which is the best card. Of course, you may die of something else.”
Max couldn’t hide a tremor in his throat, so it was a few seconds before he spoke. Gaspar’s eyes seemed to blink infrequently, like the eyes of certain reptiles, and that fixity gave them a special coldness; it also provoked a certain distrust, as though he belonged to a hybrid species.
“If you’re lying, I’ll kill you.”
“You won’t be able to kill me from your deathbed.”
Max rubbed his eyes with his fingertips and then said:
“Now I want to ask about the breeder at the vegetable shop.”
“I can answer that without the cards: put the moves on him and he’ll punch your lights out.”
“You’ve sure got a lot of faith in breeders, dollface.”
Gaspar stacked the cards, put them back in the deck, and looked around.
“You don’t want me to read for you?” he asked Pablo.
“Not today. Tomorrow, if I see you.”
Of course they would see each other. They saw each other every day. Pablo was studying art and he was already so good in his first year that they’d offered him a position as an unpaid teaching assistant. Gaspar had seen some of his projects and drawings. He was bold and brilliant. If Andrés Sigal gave him a hand, he would be a star.
Pablo thought seven in the evening was too early to go to the theatre, but Julián told him that’s how it worked, you went early to avoid the police. The owners paid them off, but sometimes they missed a payment and then the pigs could raid the place, and they were vicious with the fags, mocking and violent. Julián was a boy Pablo had met at the Princesa, and with whom he often went dancing at other clubs—less artsy, more fun ones; someone he could be silly and drunk with and kiss random people. He thought Julián was cute and nothing more, but he was the ideal companion for this foray into the theatre, to help him learn how older fags met and found each other, and what it was like to fuck someone faceless in the dark.