Gaspar brought both hands to his head and suddenly, before Luis could stand up and move to stop him, pounded the table with his wounded hand, over and over, hard, and Luis stopped him when he was about to start hitting his head again. He embraced him from behind and asked him into his ear to calm down, the way he’d done when Gaspar was little. But it was harder to restrain him now that he was a man, the two of them the same height and Gaspar in extraordinary physical shape, with all the strength of a trained athlete.
“What do you want, son?”
“I want someone to beat the shit out of me,” said Gaspar, and although his voice came from a hardened throat, though his voice was thick, he wasn’t crying and he wasn’t going to cry. “To be beaten to death, that’s what I want. I killed a girl, I deserve it all. Marita left me, she’s with another guy, I’m a piece of shit.”
“You didn’t kill anyone. This again?”
Luis grunted and let go of Gaspar, who rested his hands on the table and stayed quiet.
“You brought her to the house. But to go from there to thinking you killed her. How many times with the same thing, Gaspar? Well, in this house you will not be punished for what you didn’t do. You can go get your ass kicked over some girl if that’s what you want. You’re not going to lack for girls. Are you really that mad? You really love her?”
Gaspar got up to get a bottle of water from the fridge and held it against his head. Then he poured two glasses. He was shaking. Luis asked him for wine. They drank in silence for a while.
“We all screw up, son. I cheated on Mónica, and you can’t imagine how much I loved her. You might just end up forgiving Marita.”
“If she didn’t want to be with me, she could have broken up with me a long time ago. Two-timing me is an asshole move.”
“Don’t be so hard on her. Life is different in practice.”
It was getting dark outside and Luis said he was going to cook something, if Gaspar wanted to eat. Gaspar decided to wait for the food in a lounge chair, looking up at the night sky. His head had started to hurt and, as always before a migraine, he was having minor hallucinations. Right now, for example, the tenuous light of the stars was producing a strange reflection, a kind of furrow that shook and opened, the first flower. The black flowers that grow in the sky. Suddenly, his father’s presence was so overwhelming that Gaspar could sense him standing there behind him, but he wasn’t afraid. He raised his good hand, to see if he could feel his father touch it.
Gaspar fell asleep on the lounge chair and didn’t wake up even when his uncle put a blanket over him before eating his dinner, alone, at the kitchen table. Julieta hadn’t wanted to come out of her room. She was really angry.
When he woke up and went inside to the sofa, the house smelled of grass, milk, and Julieta’s perfume. His headache was aggressively making itself known behind his right eye; his face was numb and he could barely extend his fingers, but still, he felt a kind of euphoria.
He heard his uncle’s unmistakable steps headed to the bathroom; he had to cross the living room to get there.
“What are you doing there? You startled me.”
Instead of going back to bed, when he came out of the bathroom his uncle brought a glass of wine from the kitchen. He couldn’t sleep either. He didn’t turn on the lamp: the moon illuminated the living room, and the patio light was on and the window curtain was open.
Gaspar reached his arm out toward Luis. It was the arm with the mark, the dark scar of a deep wound.
“This wasn’t an accident, Uncle Luis. Dad did this to me.”
The wine glass froze halfway to Luis’s mouth.
“He did what to you?”
“He cut my arm with glass. He bit me, too. Pablo is the only one who knows.”
“You fell in your house, you smashed into the window, Gaspar.”
“No. That’s the lie I told. I covered for him. He didn’t ask me to, though, he didn’t give a damn. Well, I don’t know: maybe he did care. Sometimes I think he needed to do this to me.”
“Needed to, dear God. What are you saying?”
“It has a shape, see? I remember how he gave it a shape. He moved my arm like he was drawing the cut. He didn’t stop even when the glass hit the bone. He was like that, and maybe I’m like that too.”
Luis got up from the sofa and sat beside Gaspar to hug him, but he found that the scarred arm, extended as it was, kept him from getting close. That, and Gaspar’s eyes, which wanted no comfort. After a while, Luis spoke. He wanted details. He wanted to know how much of this Gaspar had told Isabel. He didn’t doubt his nephew. For Gaspar, the confession brought no relief. Quite the contrary. Now his scar was burning, and he could well imagine his father’s contemptuous expression as he called him lazy, and a traitor. Especially a traitor. He felt he had denounced his father.
Vicky liked that summer at the hospital, the first of her internships. She even preferred being at the hospital to going to school, despite the tension and the many sleepless hours and that fevered state of forced insomnia. Some of her colleagues took stimulants—amphetamines, most of them; coffee, everyone; cocaine, some—but she had learned that after a while the lack of sleep became a kind of burning pilot light: she was alert, she smoldered and conserved energy. There was no need to stoke the fire.
The hospital was short on gauze and gloves, its mattresses were old and many stank from the dampness of years, and some of its rooms had cracks and leaks. The staff worked well nonetheless, though on early Saturday mornings they sometimes had to make room for the drunks and knife-fight victims in the hallways, and they sometimes had to argue with patients’ friends and family whom no one controlled or stopped from barging in from the ER waiting room, sometimes violently. The head doctor was a young man, very arrogant and very attractive. Some months back, Vicky had caught his attention after a strange afternoon. A young woman had come in with a drooping eyelid, difficulty swallowing, and a numb face. One of her colleagues said it could be facial paralysis. The head doctor was leaning toward a cerebrovascular accident, when the girl added that she was hypertensive and her head sometimes hurt. Then Victoria had a certainty that was so clear she even raised her voice to argue in its favor. It’s myasthenia, she said. The others didn’t overrule her, but they did rule out starting the exploration there, because, said the head doctor, it was statistically the least likely possibility. It’s what she has, insisted Victoria, and she was emphatic. When she saw she was about to lose the argument, she asked the patient if she saw double. The girl said yes. That she’d thought she needed glasses, or maybe she was just tired. Vicky had a very simple idea. Let’s do a radiograph of her chest, she said. Myasthenia can be caused by a thymoma. If she has a thymoma, we’ll know I’m right. And it’s just a radiograph, two minutes, it’s routine.
There was something about her insistence and the specificity of her questions （whether the girl had trouble speaking, pronouncing the double r sound, for example; whether sometimes she got very tired at night, to the point where she couldn’t move her arms） that pierced through the head doctor’s barrier of apathy, and he ordered the radiograph. In effect, it showed an enlarged thymus. Victoria received congratulations that made her feel euphoric, and only later did she realize that her correct diagnosis was a catastrophe for the patient, and she hadn’t even explained to the girl what the discovery meant. Later, when she told Pablo the story, he replied that when it came to that part of medicine, empathy, Vicky wasn’t so advanced. She gave him a shove, offended but also really hurt, because there was some truth in what he said. She had trouble seeing the people behind the pathologies. Her mother had told her maybe she should specialize in a scientific branch of medicine—like your sister, who’s going to do pharmacology. Vicky couldn’t and didn’t want to force warmth. She didn’t believe it was her job. She had to be efficient and accurate in order to heal. Let someone else take care of drying the tears and calming the panic: she was too busy.