“I don’t know if you’re going to have enough poets, but there are painters, too,” said Gaspar.
“I know about those,” said Pablo. “And I already thought about it. I don’t want them. Only poets. And I especially don’t want musicians, that’s too obvious and really tacky.”
I’ll keep looking, said Gaspar, and he spent nights with Marita asleep beside him, underlining dead poets, most of them suicide victims. Sometimes he read to her in bed and she asked him to repeat some parts. Aren’t you going to use Rimbaud? she’d asked. He was punk. And he was beautiful, like you. Gaspar snorted. He wants them to be younger, all thirty or under, plus, there’s a famous photographer who already did a similar project using Rimbaud’s face.
“Oh, so he’s copying,” said Marita.
“He calls it ‘citing.’ ”
“They’re kids in New York with Rimbaud’s face,” Gaspar told her. “Some of the photos are taken in an abandoned building near a river. They’re wearing Rimbaud masks and they’re really skinny. Some are shooting up heroin in their arms, others are reading a newspaper, others are walking around the city at night. Pablo has the photos. They’re really good.”
“What’s the photographer’s name?” asked Marita, and she pulled the blanket over her bare legs.
“I don’t remember, but he died of AIDS a few years ago.”
“Ugh, no, enough with all the dying,” she said, and asked him to turn off the light. When Gaspar tried to caress her belly, she turned over with a low complaint, as if she were sleepy. He knew it wasn’t tiredness or a bad mood, it was rejection, and how was he going to manage that rejection, he wondered. It would pass, it was a phase, she didn’t love him anymore, everything he wanted to ask her was left hanging in the darkness of the room, in the flickering bedside light, in the unease of two bodies together that wanted to be apart.
Marita had yelled at him during a fight, telling him she had a right to be in their meetings, after she had put up with so much from him. Gaspar only half-understood the meaning of the reproach, but he knew it wasn’t jealousy. Marita was, as his uncle said, extracting her pound of flesh. But he couldn’t let her come to his meetups with Vicky and Pablo. They were theirs. Those who weren’t with us are against us, he again cited his uncle, who had apt phrases for everything: he was the most old-fashioned and the most modern guy in the world, thought Gaspar. And Luis had never extracted any flesh, not after years of taking care of him, years of dealing with a crazy nephew and neurologists, psychiatrists, diagnoses, schizophrenia, epilepsy, hallucinations, and now this limbo—stabilized, it was called. He was stable, so balanced that Luis had dared to start his own family.
After the first few months, Luis had stopped asking Gaspar to help with the twins. The meaning behind that wasn’t so good—Luis trusted Gaspar except in one respect: every once in a long while, but with real ferocity, Gaspar got angry. And when he got angry, he broke things and hurt himself and was unstoppable, strong—there was something of the terrified animal about him. He had kicked in the wardrobe, which still had the holes. Another night it was all the dishes, after a fight that wasn’t even about anything important. He had thrown his own clothes out into the street, and one time he’d intentionally hurt himself in front of his uncle: sitting at the table during an argument, nervously tapping his fork, he had suddenly stabbed the utensil into his own hand. Isabel, the psychiatrist, talked about anger management, but hadn’t recommended anything as being urgent. “My daughter screams at me that she hates me, quit your bitching, he’s a great kid,” Gaspar had overheard one night during a barbecue; Negro talked too loud when he was drunk. So far Gaspar hadn’t gotten violent with anyone except himself. But sometimes, when he was coming back from swimming or from Marita’s house or from the soccer field, it occurred to him that he could insult someone in the street just because, start a fist fight to get the release. The desire to break something or someone was sometimes like the desire to run, or like thirst: urgent. Soothing.
The house was big enough to have privacy, in any case. In the spacious backyard, Luis and some worker friends had built a small enclosed porch, nothing fancy, but well made. Since the parties at the house had grown less frequent after the babies were born, Gaspar had taken it over, and no one objected. It was his studio apartment, warm in winter and cool in summer: the porch had a heater and a fan. He brought out his mattress, his stereo, he took one of the small TVs, his books. It became a much more convenient place to be with Marita, who had left some of her things there. Underwear, a pair of pants, pads in the nightstand, all with her little touches: the pants with black hearts drawn on with marker, the underpants white and cotton, the pads inside a black faux velvet pouch so no one could guess what it held.
There, on that double mattress in the studio, the heater on and the window cracked, Vicky, Gaspar, and Pablo would gather whenever they could, and they often could. Marita was not invited to those meetings. They sat and remembered and talked about things that were still going on now. When they were together, it wasn’t bad for them to remember. Sometimes, when the memories got very intense, Gaspar had to take a deep breath and announce that he was stopping, because otherwise he would feel the horrible caress of a fear that paralyzed him, that drove him into bed, that even fixed his pupils. A neurologist had explained how some epilepsies had symptoms that were only mental, like the sensation of fear—sometimes of euphoria—and of déjà vu, and sometimes the fear was paralyzing. They had never found definitive signs of epilepsy or a brain injury in Gaspar. The tests were always questionable, indeterminate. He took medication erratically—mostly, he pretended to take it. Vicky got mad—Doctor Vicky, the rational one. For a long time migraines used to be diagnosed as epilepsy, she told him, and you have them really often, too often. True, but his father had suffered from migraines, his uncle did too, and neither of them was epileptic.
Still, they didn’t talk about that. They talked about Adela and about the house. It had recently been demolished with authorization from the owners, who had never managed to sell it and clearly never would. Vicky had gone to the site several times; her parents still lived a few blocks away. There was some graffiti on the only wall that was still standing, but not much. The place scared everyone. It had the look of a spot where something bad has happened: an expectant air. Evil places wait for evil things to reoccur, or else they seek it out.
“It’s like a magnet,” said Pablo, who had walked by it on a visit to Vicky’s parents. “It always was.”
And Gaspar said he would rather avoid visits to his old neighborhood. He felt bad about Hugo and Lidia Peirano, because he missed them. I don’t want them to think I’m ungrateful, he told Vicky, and she reassured him. Call them every once in a while. That’s enough for them. Gaspar sometimes felt about the Peiranos the same way he did about Esteban or Tali: he didn’t understand why they’d stopped seeing him. Or why they’d left, like Betty, Adela’s mother. As if his father had ordered everyone not to bother him.