“Don’t forget your backpack,” he said, and got up from the bed. He went to the bathroom to put alcohol on his wound; it didn’t sting. He tried not to look at himself in the mirror. Then he went to get his bag from Tali’s room. Before leaving, he put the envelope with his son’s hair on the table beside the note, so Tali could use it later. He waited for Gaspar in the sun of the patio.
“Is the car gonna be hot?”
Juan looked around. The green was awful, beautiful, so many shades that it was unfair to call them all by the same name. The car was parked in the shade of a willow tree.
“A little, but the sun wasn’t on it, the seats won’t burn.”
“If I look at the sun, my head hurts. I see those weird flowers in the sky.”
“Don’t look, then.”
Juan also saw black flowers in the sky before a migraine. He and his son were oddly and exactly alike in that respect. What other things did they share? That was the question.
He started the car and struggled to maneuver on the gravel until they reached the highway. On the curve of the exit, he saw the checkpoint where police were stopping people and opening trunks: there was a long line of waiting cars. He glanced over as he passed, feigning curiosity, and one of the policemen waved him on: he held a gun in his hand as if he were about to use it, or needed it to defend himself. Juan sped up a little, not so much that the cop would think he was fleeing, enough to show he’d understood the order. From the backseat, Gaspar’s alarmed eyes met his in the rearview mirror.
“Come on up front,” Juan told him.
The Order had never used police or soldiers as sacrifices. Their ideological consistency was impeccable, thought Juan. They only sacrificed people their friends were after, helping them that way. He contributed, but he didn’t feel complicit. He felt innocent. He was a prisoner, too.
The landscape now was dotted with pink hydrangeas, and they caught glimpses of the light reflecting off the river through the still willow branches. Beside the highway they started to see women with long hair, heavy and tangled, who sat and sold braided baskets that they wove tightly with light green and ivory reeds. The women were silent while their children ran about, dangerously close to the road. Women and baskets, willows, children, and crosses. Gaspar wanted to know about the crosses; the small, dark, malnourished children didn’t interest him. They’re for people who died on the road, in accidents. Are they buried here? No, the crosses are put up to remember them, they’re buried in the cemetery like everyone else.
Not everyone, thought Juan, but that would have been too much information just then. Beside the sign that said Bella Vista 80km was an enormous white cross decorated with pink crepe paper, several rosaries, and ribbon for wrapping presents. A new cross with its decoration intact, not faded yet by heat or rain. A recent death. How long until Gaspar saw one? He himself was staying closed off while they traveled: he didn’t want to see an accident victim stumbling along the road, not after seeing Rosario on the metal bed in the morgue, the split femurs that had broken through the skin of her legs and peeked out pink with blood, her face smashed in where the wheel had run it over. Like a half-moon, he’d thought, because that’s what it looked like from where he was, kneeling on the ground because he couldn’t stand up, her features caved in, her nose destroyed, her eyes somewhere in her brain and her forehead and chin sticking out in an almost perfect half-circle. He’d covered her after a while, after caressing her unscathed arms and extended hands. Someone handed him a little plastic bag with Rosario’s rings and expensive bracelets. Juan couldn’t remember if that person had been a doctor or nurse, a man or woman, but he did remember asking who he needed to call. And he or she had explained patiently and clearly. Juan had taken mental note, but before doing anything, before calling Adolfo and Mercedes, before informing the guards and the lawyers, he stopped a taxi at the hospital entrance and gave the driver the address of Gaspar’s school. He couldn’t do all those tasks alone. He understood that it wasn’t his son who should go with him to organize the funeral. He understood that he should take care of everything and then console Gaspar, explain to him gently about his mother’s death. Still, he didn’t care what normal people did. None of them were normal, not Gaspar nor Rosario nor Juan himself.
“Mom doesn’t have a cross in the street?”
“No, they don’t do that in the city.”
“Why not?”
“It’s only a custom along the highway.”
“Can we make one for her?”
Gaspar went quiet, his hands on the glovebox. Outside, the low trees seemed tousled, disorganized, and were definitively ugly. Juan didn’t dare pass the truck that stank of fertilizer and was slowing him down. When it finally turned down a dirt road through the trees, the highway opened up on jacarandas and ceibas; suddenly everything was violet and red, and Juan breathed deeply to control the palpitations he felt in his chest and neck.
“Gaspar, hand me the water.”
The boy climbed into the backseat and passed him the glass bottle—it had originally held Orange Crush, which Gaspar loved—full of cool water. The simple Styrofoam cooler was working well.
“What’s that?”
Juan looked where he was pointing.
“That’s a shrine.”
He slowed down to see what saint it was: it wasn’t Gauchito, it was missing the characteristic red bandanas.
It was San Güesito.
Who is it, who is it? Gaspar insisted. It’s a boy your age, more or less. He was killed by some drunks. Why, was he bad? The drunks were bad, not him. He was a poor boy who lived on the street. Or not on the street, really, but around here, in the jungle, near the highway.
Gaspar sat thinking, very focused. I can’t tell him the truth, thought Juan, I can’t explain that they raped Güesito before killing him. How many were there? No one remembered; some said five, others ten. They’d mutilated his body and used his head for rituals. That’s how he was found, bloodless and headless at the side of the road, over twenty years ago. He was buried in the Goya cemetery, and his grave was covered with all the toys he hadn’t had in life.
“I don’t want to get out,” said Gaspar.
Juan felt the same. He didn’t like El Güesito or his effigy, a dark-skinned, half-naked figure with eyes painted on in a vaguely Egyptian style, outlined and blind. He was curious about what had been placed in the little brick house that sheltered him, but it was better to keep going.
A sign announced 78km. He could reach Bella Vista in an hour and there was time to talk to his son on the way. It was easier in the car: the movement seemed to hypnotize the boy. They would spend the night in a good hotel in Corrientes. He needed proper sleep before attempting what he had planned. He also needed to summon a certain type of sexual energy that would be difficult to find in these small towns. He could leave that problem for later.
“Gaspar, have you seen any other women like the one at the hotel?”
“Women, no.”
Juan adjusted his sunglasses. He liked how Gaspar understood exactly what he was asking. He looked at his son, who had taken off his shirt in the heat, and saw a bruise spreading over his shoulder. From hitting the floor earlier, when he’d knocked him from the stool. Juan softly ran his finger over the dark spot.