They were waiting for him, they wanted to see him. He had said no. Over the phone, Vicky had threatened to show up at the house without warning. You already tried to push us away and this is how it turned out, this is how it ended. You can come back. No one is looking for you. They know you had nothing to do with what happened to Luis. Don’t ever talk to me about Luis, Gaspar had shouted. Never. Who gave you this number? Tali, Vicky replied, but just then Gaspar didn’t think about her. He thought: I have to call right now to change the number, or just cut off the phone. Pablo argued with less conviction. They wouldn’t come to him if he didn’t want to see them, if he didn’t ask them to. The conversations were tense. Gaspar had cut off the last one and hadn’t answered again. Stephen—that’s what he called him now, as Stephen had asked him to—wandered around the house without saying much, but he listened to what Gaspar needed to tell him. Pablo and Vicky had received compensation from the Other Place—he’d been calling it by almost the same name his father had given it, without realizing. They both had good lives. He didn’t want to ruin them.
“You don’t need them anymore,” Stephen told him. “All this is yours. You decide.”
We went to visit your aunt, Vicky had told him. The man who lives with you told us where she was and we visited her. She wouldn’t let us near your house, and we complied. Gaspar felt another wave of rage. Tali. He remembered her well. His father had never told him she was his mother’s sister, and she had never said so either. Another liar. And why was Stephen going around sharing out information? Anyway, for now, he couldn’t face her. He couldn’t look at Tali or listen to her explanation. She could be his ally, but not yet.
Stephen didn’t abandon him. Gaspar had killed his family and he stayed on in the house, unsteady, meandering, but with no intention of leaving. If he puts a bullet in me one night, thought Gaspar, it’s fair. Still, he felt safe. He wasn’t sure what to do with Stephen, and it seemed to him Stephen didn’t know either whether he should leave Gaspar. For the moment, they had only been capable of resolving practical matters. Going into town to eat. Buying food. Talking, in the bar in Puerto Libertad, a little drunk. Stephen talked about Gaspar’s father evasively and in detail at the same time. They would need to hire workers for the house. Unemployment was so high in the country and in the area that it wouldn’t be hard, but Gaspar remembered a woman who had sung him to sleep, her patchwork apron. He didn’t remember her name, but Stephen did: Marcelina. We could find her. You can do whatever you want. There’s no one to answer to anymore.
“Are you sure they aren’t alive, in the Other Place? They can’t come back?”
“You’re sure, too. There’s nothing left of them. That place was starving.”
At night, when he went out to the beach to smoke, Gaspar thought about the procession he had led. It had been another sacrifice, like Adela’s, but this time he’d known what he was doing. He didn’t regret it. He wasn’t afraid of retaliation. He slept with a peace he had never known before. Stephen, on the other hand, though he had guided Gaspar in the massacre, and had planned it for so long with Juan, was as disconsolate as the last speaker of a dying language. One night, Gaspar had seen him disappear along the path leading to his father’s Place of Power. Hours later he’d heard an explosion. He ran. An underground explosion. The tunnel with the iron door. He asked Stephen why he’d blown up the tunnel and he said because it brought him memories. It was empty, he added. Gaspar didn’t believe him, but once it seemed safe, he would visit the ruins. After the explosion, Stephen left for several days. To meet up with Tali, he said. Maybe he also had a lover. A week of absence. No more than that. In the house he ate little and drank a lot. Maybe one morning Gaspar would find his body on the beach, washed up by the river. Or maybe they were going to be two solitary men sharing a secret in that still house, year after year, who would run into each other in the early-morning hours, unable to sleep, incapable of forgetting how the hanged man swaying in the wind had no shadow.
After smoking every night, Gaspar went back along the catwalk, past the orchid garden, and along the path that led from the lookout tower to the guesthouse. He climbed the stairs to the first floor. The door hadn’t been bricked over, despite Stephen’s insistence. The carved wood was still there, the bronze doorknob, the silent hallway.
He hadn’t opened it again, not yet. He knocked, timidly, as he did every day.
“Adela,” he said.
There was no answer. He closed his eyes. He saw a blonde, naked girl walking under a starless sky. Lost, but not scared. He saw her dancing on a red dirt path, strands of yarn hanging from her arm and her legs, unfettered, frenzied. He saw a black planet above the river. He saw his grandmother without lips or nose. He saw candles in the forest and a young woman on all fours crawling over bones. He saw men and women running, all of them mutilated, some without legs, who dragged themselves or spun in circles. He saw a starving white dog, its spine like metal balls encrusted into its back. He saw a girl in a red dress sitting beside the swamp; something that came from the water was eating her legs, but she didn’t protest. He saw a pale torso in a field of yellow flowers.
He could come and go and search in that land. He was welcome in that land. If she was still there, he could find her. Would she still be a child? What had she been given to eat? Had the place been a mouth for her? He had to be sure. In the Other Place, time was a different thing. He could look for her.
He walked away from the door.
“Adela.”
He heard no knocks. Nor did he hear Adela’s voice, though he didn’t remember it. When someone is gone, their voice is the first thing you forget.
“I’m going to come back,” he told her. “I need time. I was never brave. I’m learning.”
And he left the door, the hallway, the guesthouse. He ignored the phone that rang every day. It was Vicky or it was Pablo. He still hadn’t disconnected it. He wanted to see how quickly they gave up. He expected the calls would grow more sporadic, no longer sirens in the jungle, and then fade away. If it was raining, he didn’t cross the park at a run. He liked the short, violent rains of Misiones, the rivers of red earth, the prelude to the hot, black night with its stars throbbing in the sky. A flash, silence, another flash, like an exhausted heart.