There was no one at the door, and that seemed strange, but once inside they were greeted by a man half-hidden behind the glass in the ticket window: he was the one you paid. Then you went downstairs, to the theatres. Along the floor where it met the wall there was a tube of neon light: the only light by which to guide yourself from one theatre to another. Julián laughed, a silly and excited giggle, and Pablo felt a fit of anger, the desire to slap him and hightail it out of there. Suddenly he was scared and felt an imprecise claustrophobia; it was the artificial light, so similar to the light in Adela’s house.
There were three theatres, and Julián told him they had to go first into the Wilde and then into what they called the Tunnel; he had never been, but it was the best, people said, you don’t know whose dick you’re sucking, you don’t know anything. Pablo followed him. The Wilde theatre’s only light came from the movie being shown, plus two small bulbs to mark the entrance. Some men were fucking on the seats, others were walking along the middle and side aisle, stopping to touch each other, ask for a light, or even chat. It was almost a club thanks to the music from the movie, a hetero porno with girls with plastic breasts, blonde hair, and semen in their eyes, and brutal men with hairy chests, tanning-bed skin, and disproportionate cocks. He lost Julián in the theatre. A man with his jeans unbuttoned came over and told Pablo into his ear to suck it, and Pablo knelt down and obeyed, excited, too, at obeying that thick voice, and while he sucked and the man—much older than him—grabbed his curly hair, he also unbuttoned his pants and masturbated. Much later he would think about whether he had any cuts in his mouth, or why he hadn’t looked to see if the man’s penis had sores. He got scared whenever he was careless, but once the anxiety passed, he felt desire again. Desire to meet a man on a corner and take him to the plaza and laugh when a passerby got close, wondering if they’d be reported. Desire to get into a car that stank of semen and shit. Desire to feel a strong chest on top of him, and to spend the whole night drinking wine from the bottle and snorting coke off a plate or a back, the ashtray filled to overflowing.
He found Julián again up near the screen: he was breathing heavily as if he’d been running, and when they kissed, Pablo tasted the cocaine. He asked in a low voice why he didn’t share, but Julián didn’t hear and started telling him about this breeder and that one, congratulating himself for getting them to wear condoms. He sounded proud, and Pablo thought it was the worst moment to have to worry about that, and he wondered what it had been like for older people who hadn’t given a thought to being careful or dying or getting sick, but it was also true that people used to have to hide in the closet and get married. Had it ever been good to be gay? He turned around, and at the entrance he thought he saw Andrés Sigal, with his fine gray hair, his shirt unbuttoned, and a cigarette in his hand. He should have gone straight for him, but Julián insisted on not changing course, and Pablo thought there would be time to meet Andrés. Everyone said he was crazy about much younger men.
They headed for the Tunnel. Pablo didn’t love the name, but he thought if he started to feel claustrophobic again, he could just leave. It was a basement, and it felt subterranean even in the way the sound grew more muffled at each step down. There weren’t that many men at first. They had to go down another short flight of steps. But by the time they were halfway down, Pablo could no longer see the stairs. Julián had to help him descend, struggling with the railing, with the bodies. There was no light down there. Nothing. No screen or movie. A furtive lighter revealed bodies that seemed too pale, and it was so dark you couldn’t see the walls, as if the basement were infinite.
Pablo stepped backward and someone yanked on his arm, and then he felt the unmistakable adrenaline surge of panic. Later, talking to other friends, he would say that place was really dangerous, people could die in there, the music would drown out their screams, that it was easy to imagine someone with a knife because they didn’t search you—a gay serial killer, a fag-murderer, a madman. It would be the easiest thing in the world to kill down there. And he did think that: the place was a trap. But only Gaspar and Vicky knew the truth, because only they could understand. He knew what he’d felt was the ghost hand, that same hand that had lain in wait for him so long in the dark hallway of his old house, the fevered hand that wanted to take him, and that, he thought, could leave a permanent mark if it held on too long. These days he was safe, living in the family’s La Plata apartment that his mother proudly described as having “Rationalist” architecture and “Slovenian oak floors.” He hated it, though, and wanted to move, but couldn’t afford to yet. He hated his little brother, such a spoiled brat, and the smell of frustration in the air. But he had to admit, at least the hand didn’t wait for him in its hallways.
In the Tunnel, in the movie theater’s black basement, the hand—which could have been Julián’s, though he was never able to convince himself of that rational possibility—was the same one he’d thought had left him alone. And now, instead of hair and hide and asses, he saw a man on the floor with his head between another’s legs, but the other man was a desiccated cadaver: a man had his head between death’s legs. He saw a broken bottle in the hands of an eyeless woman. He saw a man with a rope around his neck: he was missing an arm. He didn’t want to see anymore. The tunnel was a festival of the dead, it was one more room in the house that had taken Adela. He couldn’t remember if he had screamed, surely he had and the music had drowned out that humiliation, but he ran up the stairs, he fell, he felt someone dragging him back down, and he kicked a stranger in the darkness, and he also ran down the aisle to the exit, and if anyone looked at him strangely he didn’t notice, nor if anyone sounded a warning, insulted him, or expressed concern. There was nothing but the exit and Calle 2 with its linden trees and tired people heading to or from the station. He ran across the street oblivious to the traffic, and on instinct he called Gaspar from the public phone on the corner with the only token he had left. He prayed his friend would be there while he dried his tears and crouched down in the booth, trying to control the tremor in his legs and the pounding of his heart, which wouldn’t let him speak.
“Take a taxi,” Gaspar told him. “I’ll pay for it. We’ll call your folks and you can stay here. Take a taxi now.”
Pablo never went back to the Moreno Theater. Six months later Julián was infected and there was a string of hospital visits. In the hallways, Pablo would remember that basement, the armless man, the mummy with an erection. Julián died quickly, within months: he spent his final days talking in a little boy’s tiny voice about the toys of his childhood. They held the wake at the only funeral home in the city that accepted people with HIV. Max, the DJ at the Princesa and Marita’s friend, died three weeks later. She cried under the blankets in Gaspar’s bed, and she was angry, furious, and a little scared: she almost never wanted to have sex. Or she asked for exaggerated safety measures.
“You lied to him,” she said to Gaspar one afternoon when they brought flowers to Max’s grave. “You told him he wasn’t going to die of AIDS.”