“What else was I going to say?”
“He thought he was going to survive. He talked about the Sun, said it was the best card. Was that a lie, too?”
“It is the best card, but it was inverted for him. When they’re dealt upside down, they mean the opposite.”
Marita sat on a gravestone and dried her tears.
“I don’t want you to lie to me, don’t ever lie to me.”
Gaspar said okay and kissed her mascara-streaked cheeks, but he thought: sometimes you have to lie to take care of someone. I already lie to you. I hide things. And I’m going to keep lying to you.
Pablo had asked Gaspar for a reading after Max’s wake. It said the same thing as his tests: he wasn’t in danger. It was true that he was careful, that after the theater scare he’d decided not to go for any more dangerous encounters, but he was amazed to be the only healthy person in the hurricane of illness. That winter had seen the deaths of two more friends who frequented the cultural center. One was older, around twenty-six. The other had just started college. At the march that Marita organized with Max before he died, some people had been so weak they attended in wheelchairs. They still sang and took the microphone on the stage in front of the Ministry of Health; they always finished by cursing, and then it was back to the singing and the sequins in the air.
That winter, too, Gaspar’s childhood home had finally been rented out. A young family with kids. The rent was high. It’s a pricey house, Luis would say, because it’s an exceptional house. Your dad didn’t make much effort in its upkeep, but still, it doesn’t have any major problems, not even dampness.
Those months had been so sad and intense that Gaspar had paid almost no attention to Julieta’s pregnancy, which was an event from the start because the news had led him to fight with his uncle. Gaspar had asked him: aren’t you a little old to have a baby? And the question had unleashed an argument full of reproaches （you want a normal kid, huh, the crazy son’s not enough for you?）， and taunting （you going to take him to soccer with a cane?）。 The fight had escalated, and in one of the fits of rage that sometimes consumed him, Gaspar had thrown a pitcher of pomegranate juice: the red liquid had spattered the floor and tablecloth. Luis had demanded he clean it up, and Gaspar had refused with a slam of the door.
Julieta wanted to be a mother: she was young, but not so young, and if she was going to have kids the time was now. That information had not been shared with Gaspar, but after all, he could have and should have assumed it. His anger passed the next day, and he apologized so much that Luis told him to hush. At least congratulate me, goddammit, you sure can get jealous, if you only knew how much I love you. Gaspar wasn’t jealous, he didn’t think. He hated change: that was it. If only things could always be the same, if only this house, so like a port in a storm, could be standing forever, and always for us, no additions, no time, no future. That the baby was actually twins was a strange bit of news: two babies would be expensive and a lot of work, and meant Julieta would have to stop working for much longer than she’d planned.
The babies were born by cesarean and baptized Salvador and Juan. Gaspar got dizzy when he realized he felt nothing but a vague tenderness for them, and a whole lot of boredom. I’m never going to have kids, he thought when he held them and wanted only to hand them back, to get away from the smell of milk and the excited smiles, from the money worries and the price of disposable diapers, from the tears. What was he going to do if Marita wanted a baby? They had never talked about it, and lately they weren’t having much sex, either, because she was paranoid. Or something more. He didn’t know. He understood she was in mourning for her friends and it was difficult; he didn’t pester her. If she got the idea to get pregnant, he thought, better for her to tell him, because he would have to leave her. No matter how much he loved her. When the twins came home they turned out to be fussy and annoying, and, in Gaspar’s opinion, they took up too much room even though they were so small. Despite the silent request in his uncle’s and Julieta’s eyes, he decided not to take care of the babies for one second, which meant spending less and less time at home. He had plenty of places to stay, even to sleep. His uncle wanted him to go to college, but Gaspar didn’t know what to study or why he should even study anything, and he spent all his time at the Princesa. Pablo had practically moved in there. We’ve both been exiled by babies, he said to Gaspar one day. My brother is evil incarnate, and my mom doesn’t want me near him because she’s afraid I’ll infect him. The Princesa was a squat, and the owners had never turned up to reclaim the place. Marita had investigated, because a house so close to downtown was very valuable and she didn’t want to be kicked out. Nor, she said, did she have the energy to dig in and defend the place. There were owners, she had their names, but as long as they didn’t complain, the house was there for them to use.
Gaspar had been unsettled by that information about the owners. Just like the house on Villarreal: no one claimed it. He had never sensed anything disturbing in the Princesa and he trusted his instinct, but he didn’t much care for ghost owners, he didn’t like houses no one wanted that beckoned to visitors with their windows like half-closed eyes, houses like whores showing their legs on the corners, their mouths red and their lights neon, the sickly light that was the same as the lights at the hospital where their friends died and where Vicky did her internships and where he’d said goodbye to his father, whose eyes, at the end, had been black like beetles, and like Omaira’s, who still came back to touch Vicky’s feet at night, black and shining like insects, like the bugs that hit against the patio lights at the Villa Elisa house on summer nights. He had to think less, sometimes, deactivate the connections. Marita always wanted him to smoke pot—it’ll relax you, she’d tell him.
Pablo was finishing his latest project: drawings and photos of lovers with the faces of poets. Gaspar helped him make the masks and was also teaching him to read poetry. I want them all to be thirty and under because the project’s going to be called “30 under 30,” and there’ll be thirty guys, some in photos, others in drawings. Now that I think about it, I could really include some women.
Gaspar had started researching. He knew of several poets who had died before the age of thirty, but he had to hit the library to find more. His father’s books also helped a lot. His list for Pablo grew every day. Sylvia Plath, she was thirty, she just makes it. She killed herself by sticking her head in the oven, her kids were in the next room and she closed the door off with tape, towels, and rope so the gas wouldn’t reach them, and she left them milk. Why’d she kill herself? asked Vicky, who didn’t come to the cultural center much because medicine was a demanding program. Sylvia had just gotten separated, and apparently that made her really depressed. Emily Bront? also just squeaks through, thirty, she died of tuberculosis. Keats. He was my dad’s favorite, and I love him too. He died of tuberculosis when he was twenty-five. I had a hard time reading him when I was younger, but now he’s one my favorites. Chatterton, I think he was seventeen, he killed himself with arsenic. Shelley drowned at thirty, he was the husband of Mary Shelley, the one who wrote Frankenstein. Novalis, tuberculosis, twenty-eight. There’s one who’s older, thirty-five, he fell down when he was drunk, in London, but hold on, he was a closeted gay guy and a cousin of Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend. Lionel Johnson was this drunk’s name, he was really crazy. I like him a lot. A book of my dad’s had a selection of his poems chosen by Yeats. You don’t know Yeats? He won the Nobel. Doesn’t matter. Use Lionel Johnson, he’s old, but he fits. Asunción Silva shot himself in the heart, he made his doctor mark the place he had to shoot. What an ass the doctor was, if he didn’t realize, said Vicky. Georg Trakl, twenty-seven, died of a cocaine overdose, can you believe it, in those days? Teresa Wilms Montt, a high-class Chilean girl. She killed herself in Paris at twenty-eight. I found her in the library and I photocopied everything. You see one photo and you fall in love. There’s one from around here, too, from La Plata, this is really crazy, apparently they found his body mummified at the Tolosa Cemetery. His name was Matías Behety. He died crazy and drunk, but they put the mummy in the chapel for a while and he had believers, apparently he could cure illnesses and they set up a kind of altar to him. He was also over thirty, but just tell me the story isn’t fantastic. I looked up his poems, but the poor guy was really bad. Why don’t you quote the poems, the good ones, I mean? Trakl has some tremendous poems, really dark. You could put the photos or drawings and a quote. Yeah, said Pablo, only I don’t want it to be too systematic. Quotes if they fit and from the ones that make sense. You choose the quotes for me; you have a clearer idea. Then I’ll veto them or not. And don’t bring me older ones, even if they have really good stories. Especially not that one about the mummy, I don’t want to hear anything about mummies.