“This kid’s turned out all James Bond,” said Negro. “Must be his drop of English blood.”
“My, how unrefined,” said Gaspar. “This drink is Italian.”
“There’s nothing better than giving work, and it drives me nuts to have to turn people away every day. Every day, some kid comes by asking for a job, wearing a helmet left over from another site. We need people, but I can’t take anyone on. Some of them leave cursing, which is fine, but a lot of them go away resigned. Just two years ago, we used to grill out at lunch. Now we’ve got pork shoulder sandwiches.”
That day, Marita wanted to be a part of that family again. She stayed at the house even after Gaspar left, without saying where he was going. She suspected he was going to meet a girl, and she enjoyed the stab of jealousy she felt. A few days later she ran into Luis at the university cafeteria, and he told her that Gaspar had gone by the site to bring the workers barbecued meat and some sausages. He seemed moved, and Marita smiled, because Gaspar still had that way of listening, thinking, and acting without announcing anything. Still, Luis told her, I’m worried. He’s not doing well, he’s depressed. I don’t know if he’s taking his medication. He won’t listen to me at all now, he’s all grown up. Talk to him if you can, Marita, you’d be doing me a favor.
She hadn’t been able to talk to him, not yet. She would try the next time.
Take four hours and make it one. It was always easy to cut, but in this case, this particular party, a ten-minute video would have been ideal. An hour was too long. The editing bay at the journalism school was a windowless room, and Gaspar hated it; he liked to smoke when he edited, and in that confined space even the most insistent smoker would feel suffocated. He didn’t have much time: he rented the suite on Saturdays, when there were no classes. Marita was with him that day; she had asked him to show her his videos before they went for a beer. She was curious. Gaspar hoped she didn’t laugh. He detested it when people laughed at these parties where people were just trying to be happy.
Now he had her sitting there beside him, Marita and her worn-out jeans, sleeveless white shirt, dark skin, and her hair a little longer, but still short. I can’t let it grow out, she’d say, because it gets too frizzy. It’s the genes from my Uruguayan grandfather, who was black. He gave me great skin and complicated hair. Gaspar didn’t want to think about the fact that Marita wasn’t wearing a bra and he didn’t want to look at the way her jeans emphasized her hips, so he handed her a notebook and asked her to mark times. She had taken an audiovisual class and knew how.
The fifteen-year-old girl. Valentina. He had filmed her with tears in her eyes too many times. Her hair mussed. Totally, overwhelmingly aware that her party was falling apart. The adults drunk. Her own father trying to touch her classmates’ asses. Her mother yelling at the waiters because they brought the food out cold and always late. A DJ so bad he couldn’t get anyone to dance.
“I’ve never seen anything more depressing,” said Marita, while Gaspar decided to cut a full hour of small catastrophes, including a shot of the cake ruined by the clumsy hand of a well-intentioned grandma who, when she tried to adjust the pink-dressed figure that crowned the layers of sponge cake and meringue, had pushed it and almost demolished it. The only option left was a backup shot: he’d filmed the cake in the kitchen of the event hall, before they brought it out to the guests. The Carioca carnival was a disaster of sweaty men, women dodging their horny advances, and an exodus of teenage girls: some of the kids had made fun of the quincea?era. Valentina. A lovely name.
“Hopelessly sad, right?” said Gaspar, pressing pause. “That’s how it was all that night. I shot some girls who were talking and drinking champagne, they’d brought a bottle outside to the park. It’s a really nice hall, have you been there? La Casona, in City Bell. Anyway, so they offered me some champagne, but I try not to drink when I’m working, not because I get drunk, I don’t, but it looks bad. The parents see you drinking with the girls and it makes a bad impression, they’re fifteen years old. The thing is that whenever the girls talk to me, they tell me stuff or they flirt, the way girls always get with older guys. These girls started telling me how they were all being treated at the Melchor Romero outpatient clinic, which has a center for eating disorders. I looked at them and they were really skinny, dark circles under their eyes, really sick. That’s how it all was all night long. One of them told me “hunger hurts but starving works,” in English. They were from a really good bilingual school, really posh.”
“Were they pretty?”
“I don’t like girls that skinny. I don’t know.”
‘People always tell you things. You’ve got something about you. That look that says, “I have the power of a dark experience, come to me.”‘
“Don’t be mean.”
“I don’t mean it in a bad way. You have it, Vicky has it, Pablo too. Your uncle, from being in exile. Negro. I don’t have anything. Sometimes I feel like I’m so boring. You have no idea.”
Since Marita didn’t say anything else, Gaspar went back to work. They finished a version of the video that was an hour and three minutes long. Gaspar would come back alone during the week to do the final edit. They’d had several beers. Gaspar wasn’t drunk, Marita was a little, though she’d eaten two bags of potato chips. They talked about other things, mostly about anorexic girls, about Marita’s classmates who wore oversized clothes and then looked at themselves in the bathroom mirror, sucked in their stomachs, made their ribs stick out, cut themselves and let the blood trickle down over their pubis. I’ve never been like that, she told him as they were crossing Plaza Moreno.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
Marita ran her hand over her short hair and tugged on it a little.
“Because I want to say something else and it won’t come out.”
“I can’t keep walking with you if you’re going to give me the runaround. This is new, you never used to torture me, really, and I don’t like it.”
Marita said sorry, sorry, and hugged Gaspar before taking his face in her hands.
“Is that why you were with me? Because I don’t have any issues, I’m just a normal person with no drama?”
“What’s so bad about that?”
“Not that it’s bad, it’s just really boring.”
“I’m the boring one,” said Gaspar. “Not you. You care about people, you want to change things, you don’t lose hope over stupid stuff. Everyone loves you. Same as my uncle. I can’t think of anything better than that, truly. Nothing.”
Marita kissed him. Gaspar took off his backpack and took a deep breath.
“I left Hueso,” she said. “I want to be with you. Do you want to get back together with me?”
Setting up a house could bring some relief. It had worked the first time: ride out the constant headache by trying to get a table into the kitchen. Ignore the dreams and hallucinations by painting a wall with a roller, up and down, right to left, tape on the door moldings so they wouldn’t get spattered, the penetrating smell in his hair and on his skin washed away in the afternoon shower. Choosing lamps and fearing electrocution while he stood on the penultimate step of a lopsided ladder. Now that he was having what the neurologist called déjà vu—and what he preferred to call memories—at least once a day, he was setting up house with Marita. Rented, for now, at his uncle’s recommendation. You have a lot of cash and a lot of houses: take your time, you need to choose well when you buy. So now there he was, painting the walls purple, a purple house like Paisley Park, that was Marita’s dream, and, after painting, two cups of wine while they sat on the floor like in a TV commercial, installing programs on the computer. When she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, he disentangled himself from her legs and stared at the ceiling and felt the exhaustion of sex and the unhappiness like a weight around his neck. That Marita was there only brought him moments of relief, pleasant pangs. He didn’t want to describe for her the visions that made him so afraid. He wasn’t going to tell her, he didn’t tell her, that he couldn’t go back to the actual house where Adela had disappeared because they’d demolished it, but he went back almost every night in dreams and searched for her desperately behind hundreds of doors. The dreams were terribly long, like full-length movies; Gaspar didn’t know if normal people had such long dreams. The neurologist had said he was experiencing visual and emotional flashbacks from a dream or a series of dreams. That was his latest conclusion. He had déjà vu of dreams. Gaspar had asked, how can that be, and the doctor had told him it was rare, but entirely consistent with epileptic symptoms, that it was unusual but not unheard of, and on and on. Vicky agreed. Marita said it seemed like a science fiction plot, straight out of Philip K. Dick. How can you have déjà vu of forgotten dreams? Sounds like you should get a second opinion.