Pablo broke away from his friends with a few cheek kisses, downed his glass of wine in one gulp, and returned to Gaspar, who had stayed by the drinks table. “They all want to meet you. They think you’re my boyfriend.”
“You set them straight.”
“Let them envy me a little, they’re all snakes, and on top of that they’re talentless. Let’s look at the photos, come on.”
“And what time do you plan to serve me up on a platter to the lord photographer?”
“When the lord photographer sees you, he’ll drop everything, but for now he must attend his court.”
“Good thing you two are lovers, otherwise you’d skin him with your teeth.”
Pablo shrugged.
“He’s a good guy, but he just loves for people to tell him how great he is.”
Still, the photos, Gaspar thought, were pretty great. None of them screamed dictatorship, repression, or death, but the selection was unsettling. A soldier with his bride in front of a rickety house under a cruel sun. They were both smiling. The photo was from 1979. Had that soldier with dark skin and white teeth participated in an operation? Beside that one, a shot of the road muddied by rain. A highway temple to San Güesito. Gaspar was about to tell Pablo the story of the murdered child saint, but then he stopped himself, because he didn’t remember exactly how or why he knew it （had his father told it to him when he was little?）， and he also thought he recognized the place in the photo. The next image was of a child holding his fingers in the shape of a gun, pretending to shoot. It was a beautiful picture. Also beautiful was the photo of the young man dressed in a suit in a wooden shack, posing beside a boom box, surely just purchased.
“They’re really good,” said Gaspar.
Pablo had to admit it was true. A waiter carrying empanadas passed by, and they both ate one. They left their glasses on another tray, and Pablo saw Andrés wave to him from afar, still surrounded by people. Gaspar had already gone back to the photos.
They saw it at the same time. It was a bit larger than all the others. Pablo took a little longer to realize than Gaspar, because of the surprise, the shocking coincidence. Gaspar had raised a hand to his mouth but said nothing. It was him in the photo, as a child, five or six years old. He had the same round eyes and dark hair, and he was thin, he’d already lost his baby fat. He was serious, with dark circles under his eyes—he looked tired. There wasn’t much that was childlike in his expression. He was leaning against his father’s leg with calm nonchalance. The two of them against a white wall. Pablo recognized Juan Peterson. In the photo he looked healthy and majestic in a black half-open shirt, his hands in his pockets, his fine blond hair grown out long, and that face, that unforgettable face, which in the photo was full of tenderness and exhaustion but had eyes that were heavy with violence, a powerful fury that was transmitted even over the distance of death and years, as was his demonic allure. Juan Peterson was not handsome like a movie star, nor was he beautiful like a model. There was something inhuman about his appearance, and many who gazed at the photo wrinkled their brows, because the father and son didn’t seem sweet, but vaguely dangerous. Pablo felt the start of an erection, the memory of that day: Juan Peterson and the gray-haired man who was perhaps his secret boyfriend, fucking like animals in an empty room. My first time, thought Pablo.
Gaspar started toward Andrés and Pablo tried to stop him, because from the way Gaspar was walking, he could intuit a certain rage, and he knew that when his friend had those attacks of ire, things could end badly. But he didn’t need to intervene: Gaspar changed his mind and changed course toward the bathroom. Pablo followed him. Gaspar blocked the door with a chair that was beside the sink. He was mad, but also shocked. That’s why he had gone into the bathroom: he needed to calm down.
“Had you seen it? Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Gaspar. His voice shook.
“How could I see it and not tell you? I’ve never seen it.”
Gaspar leaned against the marble sink so hard his fingers turned white.
“Sorry,” he murmured between his teeth. And he rubbed his eyes as if they burned, fighting back tears. Pablo embraced him, and when he heard someone banging on the door he shouted “occupied.” He could stay in that bathroom forever, holding Gaspar’s waist, his taut belly. I love him so much, he thought. I don’t care about the others, Andrés, this gallery. If only you’d stay with me. I’d set up house for you. I’d cook for you, I’m not afraid of anything. Just talk into my ear on the motorcycle. The sun and the wind in our faces, and then we’ll fuck all night long. For ever or as long as it lasts.
Pablo kissed Gaspar’s forehead, and Gaspar stiffened a little and gently pulled away from the hug. He took some paper towels and used them to dry his face. He saw a ghost, thought Pablo, and he must have been afraid he’d have one of those attacks that Pablo had never seen himself, but had heard described so many times.
“Sorry,” Gaspar repeated. “Open up, they’re going to kill us.”
They went out and stood under the stairs beside the bathroom, in the shadows. Upstairs, on the second floor, were the gallery’s offices. Gaspar said: I don’t remember that photo. It must be from when we went to the waterfall, I’ve told you about that trip many times. I got upset because of the surprise, but also because, though I don’t remember much, something really specific came to me, I don’t know where or when it was, but I remember that my head hurt and my dad laid me in a bed. It was hot. He left me alone, but it was okay.
“You want to talk to Andrés?”
Gaspar wiped his face again and said yes. Andrés saw them coming and opened his arms wide to welcome them. He was standing next to the central photo of the show, an image of some soldiers kneeling in a church, praying, in the foreground; in the background and a little out of focus, children were taking Communion. In command of the room, he shook off a thin woman holding a long cigarette between two fingers and her elegant friend with perfect, salon-styled gray hair. He hugged Pablo long enough that those who didn’t yet know would realize that this attractive young man was his lover. Then he gave Gaspar a kiss on the cheek, but there was something in the boy’s expression and his pale face that made him stop his flirting and turn serious.
“What’s wrong?”
Gaspar pointed to the wall behind him, the photo, the people gazing at it.
“That’s my dad. His name was Juan. And that’s me when I was little. I wanted to know where you took the picture. I don’t remember it. I mean, I don’t remember where you shot us. I can’t believe it’s a coincidence to find it here, I can’t believe we know each other and didn’t realize, I can’t believe you chose that photo today.”
“Holy Mother of God,” said Andrés. “Forget this bullshit. Let’s go upstairs to my office.”
Gaspar opened the diagrams of the two houses: the original house on Calle Villarreal and the one that had taken Adela, superimposed. He had started another sketch based on the Chapel of the Devil and the Karlen Grocery, the places Andrés Sigal had told him about. The chapel was real; he had called the tourism office in Corrientes to confirm its existence. It was an architectural rarity. The photos Andrés had taken of it hadn’t turned out well, so he had never shown them. As he told it, he’d been able to enter through a window, expecting something sinister, but inside there was just an eccentrically carved altar, an unsubtle imitation of Bosch in bas-relief, with clumsy, grotesque lines. Then Andrés had taken a fruitless detour to Posadas. His intuition was that maybe Juan and Gaspar were trying to cross the border. It was 1980, the worst years of the dictatorship were past, and he thought they were going into exile. He thought, even, that the scars Juan claimed were from an operation could really be from an armed confrontation. Gaspar confirmed they were not. And Andrés opened an unexpected door for him when Gaspar told him it was true what his father had said: they were going to his grandparents’ house. He barely remembered it. A wooden walkway over trees. The river. A park that had an orchid garden. Not much more. A nearby zoo—he remembered some colorful birds and a strange game of hide-and-seek with his grandfather and other adults. Andrés fell silent a moment and then asked his mother’s last name. Holy Mother, that house is Puerto Reyes! he said excitedly. Legendary. They have private police so no one can get in to take pictures of it. The family, your family, hasn’t let anyone near it in decades. You can catch a glimpse of it from the zoo, which also belongs to the family but is open to the public. Still, you can’t see much. It’s high up so the river won’t reach it if it rises, so from a certain point on the nearest road you can just see the rooftops. There are photos from the forties in the local history museum in Puerto Iguazú. It’s a marvel. It’s going to be yours? Why didn’t you ever go back? Will you invite me to the house once it’s yours? I would love to photograph it.