“Come on, Dad, we have to go.”
Juan ignored him and only left the cemetery gates behind—not bothering to lock them—once his son’s hands were clean again. He didn’t remember the guard until much later, when they were nearly at the hotel.
When Juan awoke, it was night again; he realized he had slept for over ten hours. He looked around for Gaspar in the room’s semidarkness and saw him curled up in the other bed, asleep. It was time to begin the deception.
Many hours of sleep—that always happened after contact with a demon. But his exhaustion was extreme this time. He went to the bathroom, took his medication with tap water, and washed his face. Whenever he looked in the mirror, he never saw what others saw. To him, his face was tiredness and defeat, and the scars on his chest and belly and back were a map of illness. He hated being weak, hated his body. Other people saw an exceptionally attractive man, they desired him, they were moved. Juan put the nape of his neck under the tap and wet his hair. He felt so raw and tired, despite the long hours he’d slept, that he was capable of hearing colors.
Gaspar was asleep in the fetal position with his mouth open. He hadn’t gotten undressed. Juan didn’t remember how they’d gotten back to the hotel, but it wasn’t strange to forget. He woke Gaspar with a hard shake of his shoulder. The boy took his time opening his eyes, but before he could focus his gaze, Juan told him:
“You were screaming! What were you dreaming about?”
Distrust, confusion. The boy knew, and it would be hard to throw him off.
“I didn’t dream anything,” he murmured.
“You were dreaming something! You were shouting like crazy.”
Blinking and doubt.
“It wasn’t a dream, we went to a cemetery and you made me light candles and then you told me not to look.”
“You had some awful nightmare.”
Gaspar started to cry, and Juan let him.
“It wasn’t a dream!” the boy shouted, his nose running.
“But we never left this room! We took a nap, and look, we just woke up now to go eat.”
“There was a guy who was dripping blood.”
“A guy who was dripping blood. Okay, enough. You’ll forget soon enough. People forget their dreams if they think about something else.”
“I promise, you fainted and I stayed there with the candles.”
“You’re just scared because I’m sick. Don’t worry about me so much.”
“It wasn’t a dream.”
Juan felt the violence hardening in his stomach, and he thought about beating the boy until he had no choice but to believe the lies.
“Yes, it was. Tell me everything, but let’s go down first, I’m dying of hunger. We’re going to eat a fantastic dinner, come on.”
He picked Gaspar up to wash his face in the bathroom. The boy let him do it. He was frowning and his left hand was squeezed into a fist. Juan opened it gently. If he tells me again it wasn’t a dream, I’ll break his finger, he thought. Gaspar took a deep breath before he started to talk: he remembered details of the long periods he’d spent awake while Juan was unconscious. Now he was afraid: Juan heard his voice shaking.
I could have killed him last night, he thought.
Gaspar went on relating his “dream” in the elevator. And Juan, though he listened, was thinking. She is with those who speak to you. It wasn’t a lie, but he could have interpreted it incorrectly. There were many who spoke to him, many who had spoken to him, so why was he so convinced it meant Rosario was in the Darkness? Who else could those who spoke to him be? She belongs to those who speak to you, that was the most exact translation of what the demon had told him. It was a sphinx’s riddle. And he had asked the wrong question, because he was in pain, tired, in mourning. Because he’d lost his mind. And because he’d thought, arrogantly, that Rosario would be capable of such a sacrifice for him. That she would be capable of abandoning her son.
He covered his face with his hands. Now Gaspar was talking about the demon he’d seen. A floating thing. And Juan didn’t have the strength to take away the memory with a sign of forgetting, not right now.
“And did the guy talk?” Juan asked Gaspar as he felt tears dampening his hands.
“I don’t remember.”
“See, we forget our dreams.”
Gaspar hadn’t heard it. Maybe he was incapable of hearing it. Maybe the demon hadn’t even spoken. Sometimes they stayed silent. Maybe he was the one who’d imagined hearing words.
They went into the hotel dining room and Juan dried his tears on his shirt. Some people eyed him curiously, but he couldn’t care less. The waitress, who was very young, couldn’t look him in the eye when he ordered: she was embarrassed to see him cry. Juan ordered chipá and hot chocolate for Gaspar. He didn’t want anything himself. He stank, he realized now: the dried sweat had stiffened his shirt under his armpits. He hadn’t even thought about showering.
“I don’t want to eat,” said Gaspar when his chocolate milk and bread arrived.
Juan felt the violence ignite in his stomach. His heartbeat was too fast, and irregular: it made him dizzy, it wasn’t going to let him rest. He wasn’t sleepy, but he needed more hours of repose. Juan rested his hands on the tablecloth. His fingertips were blue. His lips must be blue, too. He tried to take deep breaths, but that was no solution. He needed oxygen, and soon.
“Eat fast, Gaspar. And wait for me here.”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
His son’s whining filled him with a rage so clear and so dark that he practically ran out of the dining room and toward the garage where the car was parked. He opened the trunk and took out the oxygen tank, which he stashed in a bag: he didn’t want the other guests or hotel personnel to see it. From outside the dining room, he knocked on the window and signalled to Gaspar to finish eating immediately and come with him to the room.
Juan sat on the bed, set the tank—its white paint peeling a little—on the night table, and with a quick and practiced movement opened the nozzle and brought the mask to cover his mouth and nose. He stretched the elastic behind his ears and patted the mattress beside him. Gaspar sat down and Juan leaned against the wall. The slight noise of the oxygen wasn’t enough to drown out his pounding heart; the pain in his chest burned and made it even harder to breathe. So, this was all Tali’s talisman could do to help him? Would he be able to open the Darkness? Would this be the last time he did it? Gaspar watched him attentively, his round, blue eyes frightened but unsurprised, simply alert. Juan took off the mask for a second and told him:
“Bring me the hardcover book that’s in the bag.”
“Are you okay, Dad?”
“I’m going to be okay. Bring it here.”
He had brought a copy of Gombrich’s The Story of Art to look at with Gaspar. It was, as well, a safe book for the trip: any soldier who searched the car wouldn’t find it suspicious. He motioned for Gaspar to open it, and, as usual, the boy flipped to the final pages: he never started at the beginning. Gaspar rested the book on the bed, on a clear space on the sheets where they could both see. And then he did something strange—at least, something he’d never done before: he peered closely at a painting—Kokoschka’s Children Playing, Juan saw—and started to make up the story of the two children, the girl in her pink dress and the boy in a blue jacket, and blended into the story were adventures from Gaspar’s school that Juan already knew and games with the girl he’d met at Tali’s house. When he tired of that one, he turned some pages and went on inventing. Juan felt a shiver run through his body and he squeezed his fists to keep from losing consciousness: Gaspar was talking about a castle, and he made up a story of some princes who were locked in “the round part” （the tower or turret, thought Juan）， and he realized his son was talking now about St. Paul’s, Wren’s cathedral in London, because the book also included architectural images. He couldn’t sleep, but he could spend hours listening to Gaspar’s voice: the boy understood, he did the right thing, he sustained him. He had learned this from his mother. He was imitating her. How many times had he seen her entertaining Juan like that? She talks you back to life, Florence would say, and she was right, Rosario talked to return him to life.