After they set up the house, they started going out into the city. Sometimes they talked lying in the grass around the cathedral, Marita smoking pot while the light faded and the lamps in Plaza Moreno blinked on. Sometimes they drank beer and ate peanuts in the bars of Diagonal 74 while they complained about the music. Sometimes they spent the afternoon at the artificial lake in the park that people called the Forest, and Marita always pointed out the rats swimming in the stagnant water and wondered how it didn’t smell, how people could keep using the boats as if it were a romantic outing and not what it was, muck and sludge, and how they could eat at the food stands that no doubt also received visits from rodents.
She wanted to hear about the years they’d spent apart. And he told her how, little by little, things had stopped interesting him. As a kid, he said, he’d been an obsessive soccer fan. And he’d never gotten that back. That’s for the best, she said, those people are raving lunatics. I get it, though. There’s a joy there. When Estudiantes wins the championship, my dad is truly happy, nothing else makes him that glad. Not even when he comes into some cash or things go well for me or my brother. It’s a different kind of happiness, it must be awful to have lost it.
“And I can’t get interested in anything. You’re going to start working at the newspaper, you’re planning a book, a radio show. Pablo works like a beast, always planning, he’s got seven notebooks of sketches. He’s going to be famous. Vicky’s a genius. And I film bullshit. I started filming because I loved movies when I was little. Now, I like them, they distract me, but they don’t interest me much. I used to cry in movies, I acted out scenes. That gradually went away too.”
“You’re depressed, sweetheart.”
“Yeah, of course I’m depressed. Sometimes I think I film the quincea?eras because there’s something there, I don’t know how to express it, some kind of elemental trust in life, and it’s a relief. Is that crazy?”
“No. I’m thinking. You still like to read, you’re still into that.”
“That’s the only thing, yeah. Reading. And girls. I never stopped being into girls.”
“Go to hell.”
“Wait. Still, there was something kind of bitter about girls, you know, I had this really stubborn refusal to commit, I made thousands of excuses, refused to feel. Or it wasn’t even a refusal: I didn’t feel anything. You’re the only one, and that worries me.”
“Why?”
“Because you shouldn’t be with me.”
“Gaspar, I hate that kind of self-pity, it’s rotten and it really pisses me off. That’s excuse number one for guys, ‘I’m no good for you,’ ‘It’s not you it’s me,’ always the same shit.”
“I don’t mean it like that.”
“That’s why I’m not leaving right now, because I know you’re depressed. What does Isabel say?”
“Isabel is old and she knows me too well. I need to get a new therapist. I can’t keep going to my childhood doctor, it’s shockingly immature, I think. Some of the epilepsy medications are antidepressants. So there: I’m already medicated.”
“You should go to school. You could major in literature. I can see you as a professor.”
“I don’t understand why I have to study.”
“That’s what we middle-class kids do, right? Although I guess you’re rich.”
“Don’t you start in on that, too.”
Before going to sleep, Gaspar read to Marita from the poets he’d discovered. This one died at twenty-two, it’s crazy. I found him when Pablo did that show of photos and poets, remember? He was Slovenian. I don’t know how to pronounce his first name, but his last name is Kosovel. He wrote about a thousand poems, and supposedly they’re all good, at least for a kid. I like this one: “In my temples it throbs, throbs. The shadow. The cold muzzle of the gun. Ten tons. In my heart a half-tone in minor key.” And my dad would write names down randomly in his notebook. You can tell they were writers he wanted to read. Here he wrote Sara Teasdale. I’ve been translating her. She’s great.”
“You could teach English, for example. I don’t like you reading about suicides.”
“I’m not going to kill myself. And I don’t need money. That’s the only good thing I have.”
“Enough with the poor me. That account where they deposit your money, is it here? Because it should be in Colonia. Let’s go one day and deposit cash in Colonia.”
“It’s already in Colonia, been there for years.”
“Let’s go anyway. I went when I was little, it’s lovely. Read me some Sara Teasdale.”
“ ‘There will be stars over the place forever; / Though the house we loved and the street we loved are lost . . .”“
“I used to want to study astronomy. But I don’t know how to divide by two digits, that’s why I majored in journalism.”
“You never told me that.”
“I don’t regret it, though. Whenever you want, I can teach you the names of the constellations, I’m sure you don’t know them. No one does, it’s weird how people aren’t interested in space. They must be easier to see from Colonia, right?”
That’s what she wanted: to travel. To go to Patagonia and write about the Welsh colonies there. She wanted to go to Valparaíso, though she was afraid of earthquakes. And to Minneapolis, to see Prince’s house. She deserved a better partner. It didn’t matter that she was sincere about wanting to be with him. He had to go, to leave her, and it was so hard. I want us to travel together, she said, and Gaspar replied of course, and he kissed her neck and left his lips there on her throbbing pulse and thought that he would never take her anywhere, because he could only go toward those who were seeking him. There was a black heart that needed him and someday he would fulfill its wishes, because when you can’t fight, the only way to be at peace is to surrender.
Though the tension between him and Julieta remained unspoken but clear, Gaspar attended Negro’s birthday party in Villa Elisa: they were celebrating at Luis’s house. The guests included the workers from his uncle’s building site, some of Negro’s neighbors and students, and his daughter. Gaspar didn’t feel like helping with the salads or the table this time. He was tired. Julieta’s lips were thin with disapproval and he knew why: in a recent argument with Luis, Gaspar had punched the door so hard it still had the hole his fist had left. A week later, he was still pulling splinters from his knuckles. His uncle had reacted as he always did to those fits of rage: fearlessly, his outstretched arms reaching for Gaspar’s neck like a dominant animal, subduing him in an affectionate hug until Gaspar had no choice but to take deep breaths and open his hands. When he was little, his father used to pry his fingers from the palm of his hand to correct that anxious gesture. Luis had done the same for a long time. Even today, he would occasionally touch Gaspar’s arm under the table to make him realize he needed to relax his fingers.
Julieta had been frightened by the punch to the door. It’s all under control, Luis had said, and, unable to hold back, she had almost screamed at him, her voice thick with reproach: