Gaspar had taken a sheet of the very large sketch paper his uncle used for his designs. And there, little by little for the past year, they’d been reconstructing the house they had seen when Adela disappeared. Pablo sketched it out. It had taken them some time to remember where the shelves were. The doors. The piano. The old clothes. The medical books. What could those books be, and why were they there? One was green, said Vicky. Pablo remembered it as sky blue. In the drawing they didn’t color it. They wrote beside the sketch: “uncertain color.”
“Write that it wasn’t red,” Vicky said once. “We can at least narrow it down.”
She had recently started to talk about the buzzing and the voices she had heard. It was hard to remember what they’d said, but she remembered certain tones. An authoritative voice, a frightened voice, a monotonous voice.
Pablo talked about the hand that had touched him in the house. On his back, especially. And his arm. Always his arm. Maybe the hand that grabbed him in hallways wasn’t a ghost hand, but a memory that materialized, thought Vicky.
“I saw, you heard, Pablo felt,” said Gaspar. “We’re going to get somewhere with this.”
Vicky, leaning against the wall, put on an album she liked and said:
“We’re not going to find Adela, Gaspar.”
He touched the drawing, the blueprint, and clicked his tongue in displeasure because it seemed incomplete. He didn’t answer Vicky. They all thought it was possible to find her. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been there, recalling the steps in the darkness with the buzzing in their ears.
“Oh,” he told Pablo, changing the subject. “I found two more poets. Rupert Brooke, who died of an infection in the war when he was twenty-six. World War One. They called him the handsomest man in England, look up his photos. Did you read This Side of Paradise? Well, the title is from a poem of his. You guys don’t read enough. He was gay or bisexual. And Wilfred Owen, he was younger, twenty-five, and he died a week before the war ended, seriously. He’s great.
“Where’d you find them?”
“In a book of my mom’s about art and World War One. It has some incredible paintings. It’s a really sad book.”
He hadn’t been surprised when he found out, because Marita had been looking for an excuse for months. Gaspar hadn’t known what to do, so he decided to go running. He’d had the same circuit for a long time now, out where the paved streets of Villa Elisa ended and the dirt roads began, first with weekend houses on both sides, and then empty fields, and then small farms until it was open countryside. Now he was slowly drinking water before heading back, sitting in the grass. He’d seen it coming. She never wanted to go out with him anymore, or, if she finally did agree, suddenly she got a headache or she was cold and wanted to stay home. She had also yelled at him over the phone after a silly argument over some albums he had forgotten to return. Fucking kid, she had called him, trying to hurt him. She wanted to make him mad. And now Gaspar knew why. He hadn’t been surprised to find out she was cheating on him. What did surprise him was his own rage. He barely knew the boy in question. His name was Guille. Gaspar knew he was with Marita because he followed them. He’d seen them drinking beer at the Meridiano bar. Guille was the son of someone important, Gaspar wasn’t sure who, a politician, a legislator. Tall and dark, he wore military coats and combat boots and Gaspar thought he looked more Nazi than punk. He knew him the way everyone knew each other in La Plata: from going to pick up tickets to get into clubs on Calle 8, from shows, from protests, even from the Princesa. He didn’t like or dislike him, he’d never given a thought to the guy. Until now, when imagining him with Marita made him crazy with jealousy. He’d seen them kiss at the bar. Guille put his fingers under Marita’s shirt, a black-and-white-striped one that Gaspar knew well. She’d spray it with her favorite perfume, Calvin Klein Obsession, which was expensive, so sometimes she’d get her dad’s friends to buy it for her at duty-free when they traveled to Uruguay. Still, sometimes the shirt stank of grilled meat, because Marita’s house had poor ventilation and the smell of food would often impregnate her clothes if she left her bedroom door open. Guille’s other hand rested on her jeans, some very tight ones Gaspar hated because they were hard to take off. He didn’t touch her hair, the dumbass. Marita’s hair smelled like the rain on dry earth.
He hadn’t been able to sleep after seeing them, and that’s why he was running now, wide awake and exhausted, his knees a little shaky and his chest closed off like an asthmatic’s. He’d wanted to run until he passed out, but his body didn’t work like that. It wasn’t weak. He went back home thinking about whether he should fight Guille or call Marita, but when he got in the shower and the hot water hit the back of his neck, he felt a ferocious urge to hurt himself. He hadn’t been able to keep Marita with him. She knew it didn’t make sense to stay with a crazy, sick man, a ruined person. What could he give her? They didn’t even get drunk together, he and his pills kept her from having fun; he often had to go to sleep early because he was dead tired. He talked to her about poets and his childhood in an empty house. He’d gone with her to bury her friends because he knew all about that, about death and friends who were never coming back. He hit his forehead against the bathroom tiles and the pain gladdened him, filled his body with euphoria, so he kept going until he saw the blood mixing with the water. He got out of the shower and looked at himself in the mirror, his forehead wounded, his pupils dilated, his longish hair dripping on to his shoulders. He gave the medicine cabinet a punch, and another, until it shattered, and then he pulled out the glass to cut himself. He’d read that it had to be a vertical cut in the inner arm, it wouldn’t work on the wrists, you didn’t hit any arteries there.
He had started sawing at his skin when Luis came into the bathroom.
“Gaspar, what are you doing?” he cried, and grabbed the shard of glass from Gaspar’s hand. Gaspar flew into a rage and tried to hit him, but Luis was fast and grabbed him from behind, squeezing his belly until he couldn’t breathe, immobilizing him, and then dragged him out of the bathroom. With a single movement he picked up Gaspar’s pants and shirt. He didn’t mention the cut on his arm or what he had seen. He didn’t say suicide, didn’t talk of attempts, nothing. He only said: Gaspar, dry off and get dressed. Then meet me in the kitchen.
Gaspar obeyed, but he was furious. When he came into the kitchen, he grabbed the wine bottle that was on the table and hurled it at the floor. The glass flew everywhere. Julieta came out of the bedroom carrying one of the babies.
“What the fuck is going on?” she shouted.
“Nothing, we’re working it out,” said Luis in a calm voice.
“Control that brat, you hear me?” Julieta slammed the door and Luis sighed deeply.
“What?” said Gaspar. “You afraid to argue with her? You’re chickenshit. That’s why you ran away from this country, isn’t it?”
Luis pushed Gaspar into a chair and then sat down facing him across the table.
“You’re not going to piss me off, Gaspar. You’re not even going to get a rise out of me. You don’t know what I went through and what I didn’t, and your opinion about my decisions doesn’t matter to me. Not in the slightest. If you’re trying to get me to lay a hand on you, know this: I will never, ever hit you. You can call me a coward for hours if it floats your boat.”