Gaspar closed the book, yawned, and curled up against Juan’s chest. Juan instinctively started to move him, thinking the boy’s weight would hurt, but it didn’t: the contact was a relief. I don’t want to die in front of him, he thought.
The bathroom door was open, and in the semiconsciousness brought on by lack of oxygen Juan thought he saw his wife’s legs, alive. Rosario spent a lot of time in the bathroom—she could easily spend an hour in there with the door locked. Now the room was no longer in a Corrientes hotel: Juan felt it transform into the Chelsea house where they had lived together in London. He remembered her coming out of the bathroom carrying a book and wearing her glasses, a short-sleeved shirt, and no underwear. Then the image disappeared. Gaspar suddenly got up from the bed—he wasn’t asleep—and closed the bathroom door. Juan wasn’t surprised by his son’s intuition, but it hurt him: he didn’t wish his life on Gaspar. Not even the good moments had been truly happy. He had to save him from the Order.
Gaspar put aside the art book and opened a collection of U.S. poetry in translation. He read slowly and badly, but Juan let himself be carried along. When the oxygen was gone and he removed the mask, he looked at his fingers and saw they were no longer blue. Though the arrhythmia had taken too many hours to pass, he knew he wasn’t going to die that night, and not in front of his son. He’d done it again; they had done it together.
Juan was surprised at how cheap the tickets were, though he had to admit he didn’t know how to manage money, nor did he understand pricing. He traveled with a wad of bills secured with a rubber band; his whole life, he had always depended on money from Rosario’s family and from the Order. How many times had they told him, “You’ll never lack for anything?” He understood his privilege and the distance that separated him from regular people. His older brother, for one: Luis had worked twelve hours a day before going into exile, and had gone to school while holding down a factory job. These past months since Rosario had died, Juan, who had never set foot in a bank, had had to make decisions: he showed Gaspar where the money was kept, explained that he could use it when he wanted and what it was for. He asked that money be brought to him once a week, by accountants or lawyers or the bodyguards themselves.
The ticket seller handed him his change through the window, and Juan felt like he was only now waking up from the months without Rosario and the slow recovery after his last surgery. It was the air, hot but strangely light—how odd, the lack of humidity here in Puerto Iguazú. It was the sense that, if he survived the Ceremonial, he and his son were going to be able to have some calm. The restorative sleep had returned some of his confidence in himself, in Stephen, in Tali. The possibility of that peace had seemed remote just a month before, when, after several sleepless nights spent trying to contact Rosario, furious with pain and worry, he had burned almost all her things in an improvised bonfire in the backyard. Gaspar had sat beside him: he had watched with dry, surprised eyes as his mother’s belongings went up in flames. He hadn’t tried to save anything. Later, Juan showed him the little that remained: some clothes, some photos, all the records, and the jewelry it didn’t make sense to burn—valuable things that belonged to Gaspar now, like the elegant art nouveau pieces that were almost a hundred years old and that Rosario had never worn. He had also saved her deck of Tarot cards and all her relics and magical instruments, but he couldn’t show those to Gaspar. Juan decided not to keep much more, not even Rosario’s letters: her clothes and a lock of her hair would be enough to petition her, to ask her to visit him, as a phantom now.
If she didn’t respond to his call and visit him, he thought now as he walked toward the park’s train station, there were only a few possible reasons: either someone was holding her back and preventing contact, or else she had gone to a place where he couldn’t reach her. That was strange: he could reach her if she was in the Darkness. He should be able to. But there were other places, many others, and so many of them were still unknown.
It had been a stupid precaution to burn everything: if someone wanted to entrap Rosario, it would still have been very easy for them to get something of hers. Many of her things, of course, were in Puerto Reyes. Her hair on the pillows, her clothes in the closets, her makeup in the drawers. But who? Why was easy: to weaken him. Who, that was more complicated. Mercedes was one candidate—she detested her daughter. Florence? Could be. But would they have dared? Rosario was the medium’s wife, the mother of his heir, and she was ambitious. Wouldn’t they fear reprisal?
“Is this a park?”
Gaspar pulled Juan out of his rumination. He had to stop thinking. Intuition came when he was able to divert his attention: it was a rule that always worked.
“It’s a park, yes, but it has a surprise. I told you that since you were so good on this trip, I was going to give you a surprise. Now we’re going to the train.”
“A train?”
“Yes, we’ll take the train to the surprise. Or we can walk.”
“Only if you don’t make me run.”
It was his way of saying it was hard for him to keep up: one step for Juan was a leap for his son, so tried to slow down. It was still early. They had reached Iguazú Falls at noon, and after eating some sandwiches off the highway they had entered the waterfall’s park at one in the afternoon. It was good timing, because while the tourists were off eating lunch, they could have the Devil’s Throat almost all to themselves. They started to walk along the path cut through the jungle. Juan had bought a cap with a visor for Gaspar, and sunscreen for both of them; luckily, both things were sold at roadside stands by the park entrance. They went slowly because Gaspar stopped to study every animal they saw: the coatis, a distant toucan in a tree, the motionless lizards. They reached the footbridge after walking for almost an hour. Juan was grateful for that slowness. He wasn’t tired and the sun didn’t affect him, but the day before had been extreme, brutal. The footbridge was a long wooden catwalk over the river, without steps. It didn’t entail any significant effort, either.
Gaspar walked on tiptoe along the catwalk. Around them, everything was opulent and fearsome: the trees that dipped into the water, the dark jungle in the distance, the huge, swift-flowing river. Juan thought that eventually the catwalk would have to be replaced by an iron structure: any flood would wash away that wood, no matter how well constructed it was. The water was clear in some parts, but in others the currents were dyed red, the colored earth mixing with the river. The product, Juan thought, of incipient deforestation. In a decade or more the falls would be all red water, like cold lava or streams of watery blood. There was a lot of water now, though: just two years back, a drought had left the riverbed bare and red with just a tiny waterfall, fine like a wellspring, domestic like a shower. He had gone to see that scene from the end of the world. It was said that cadavers had been found in the riverbed then, and though Juan was sure the military was quite capable of using the falls for tossing bodies—bearing in mind, as well, that the National Park was guarded by federal forces—he didn’t think any bodies had really been found. The Iguazú River was so strong along that stretch that it surely would have carried them away to wash up somewhere far from the falls.