However, he needed to have a wash before he could leave the room—he stank. And maybe also to cut his hair a little. Gaspar could use a bath too, though it wasn’t as urgent. He got up from the bed with the boy in his arms and carried him to the shower. He turned on the hot water and waited a while until his suspicion was confirmed.
“No way, not with cold water!” cried Gaspar.
“Come on, it’s hot out! No? Okay then, I’ll clean you off with a towel after I’m done.”
Juan got into the shower and Gaspar sat on the toilet lid and told him about what he’d been reading and what he had seen from the hotel window. Juan heard his voice but didn’t pay attention. The showerhead was too low and he had to bend over to wash his hair, but at least the hotel provided shampoo and soap. Then, with a towel around his waist, he stood in front of the mirror: his wet hair came down past his shoulders and there were dark circles under his eyes.
“Bring me the scissors, they’re in the small bag.”
“Can I cut it? Just a little?”
“No.”
Juan stood looking at his reflection, his broad shoulders, the dark scar that ran down the middle of his chest, the burn on his arm. Rosario had always cut his hair, and had also shaved him sometimes. He remembered her big earrings that she never took off, sometimes not even when she slept. He remembered how she’d cried once, kneeling naked on the bathroom floor, over the weight she had gained during pregnancy. How she crossed her arms when she heard something she found stupid. He remembered her shouting at him in the street, furious; how strong she was when she hit him with her fists in a fight. How many things did he not know how to do for himself? How many had he forgotten, how many had he never learned because she always did them? He combed his hair and then cut it as neatly as he could. He left one lock longer in front and used the hairdryer to see if it was a disaster. The results seemed acceptable. He had a little stubble, but it was only noticeable because he was so pale. He gathered up the cut hair, which he’d let fall on to a towel, and flushed it down the toilet.
“Let’s go see if we can find something to eat.”
The hotel hallway was very dark and smelled of damp. The room they’d been given was right in the corner next to the stairs. Juan let Gaspar go out first, but instead of heading straight downstairs, the boy took off running down the hall. At first Juan thought he was making for the elevator. But then he realized Gaspar had sensed the same thing he had, though with one big difference: instead of avoiding it—Juan was so used to those presences that he ignored them—he was drawn to it and was going toward it. The thing that was hiding at the end of the hallway was very frightened and wasn’t dangerous, but it was old, and like all ancient things, it was voracious and wretched and covetous.
It was the first time his son had had a perception, at least in his presence. He’d been waiting for this moment; Rosario had insisted it was going to happen soon, and she was usually right about these things. But discovering that Gaspar really had inherited his ability took his breath away, and he felt his throat closing off. He hadn’t held out much hope that his son would be normal, but there in that hallway the little hope he’d held on to had vanished entirely, and Juan felt the dismay constrict him like a chain around his neck. An inherited condemnation. He tried to feign calm.
“Gaspar,” he said without raising his voice, “it’s this way. Down the stairs.”
The boy turned around in the hallway and looked at him with a confused expression, as if just waking up in a strange room after sleeping for days. The look only lasted a second, but Juan recognized it. He knew he had to teach the boy how to close himself off to that floating world, to those sticky wells, how to avoid falling into them. And he had to start soon, because he remembered the terrors of his own childhood, and there was no reason Gaspar should go through the same thing.
My son will be born blind, the presence at the end of the hall intoned over and over; it had no hair and wore a blue dress. It didn’t seem like Gaspar could hear it, though perhaps he had seen it. That’s what he had been talking about in the bathroom earlier: a woman sitting in the plaza across from the hotel who stared at his window with her mouth open. Juan hadn’t paid attention because the boy wasn’t afraid as he told the story, and that was good. Gaspar was intuitively right: there was nothing to fear, that woman was nothing but an echo. There were a lot of echoes now. It was always like that in a massacre, the effect like screams in a cave—they remained for a while until time put an end to them. There was a long way to go until that end, and the restless dead were moving quickly, they wanted to be seen. “The dead travel fast,” he thought.
They went down the stairs in silence to keep from waking other guests. A woman who was surely the owner of the hotel was leafing through a magazine at reception. She looked up when she they came in, and then she stood; with a single quick movement she smoothed her blouse and her hair, which was dark and somewhat tousled.
“Hello there,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”
Juan walked over to the counter and rested one hand on the phone book that was open beside the lamp.
“Good evening, ma’am. Is there by chance anything open where we could get something to eat?”
The woman cocked her head.
“You might be able to find something at the fisherman’s club grill, but let me call and ask, because it’s a hike to get there.”
A hike, thought Juan. Impossible—in this little town nothing could be very far. He took in the lobby walls with wood panelling halfway up, the laminated brown floor, the keys dangling from a board. Gaspar had gone over to a small tank and his finger was following a little swimming fish. No answer, said the woman, after letting it ring for a while. Okay, said Juan, guess we’ll just go to bed without eating. He smiled, and noticed that the woman—who was young, not yet forty, though she looked older in the sad light of that hushed hotel—was openly staring at him. I fell asleep, he explained. It’s a long drive from Buenos Aires, and I was already tired.
Outside, the silence was total. He saw the blue lights of a patrol car pass by but barely heard its engine. So, they patrolled even this tiny town?
“Excuse my indiscretion,” said the woman, coming out from behind the counter. She was fanning herself, though the ceiling fan was spinning. “Are you in room 201? My front desk clerk told me he thought the guest in 201 wasn’t feeling well. We were worried, but since we didn’t hear anything and you didn’t call, we didn’t want to disturb you.”
“How do you know he was talking about me?”
Somewhere between shy and flirtatious, the woman replied:
“The clerk described a very tall, very blond man with a child.”
“Thanks for your concern, ma’am. I’m feeling okay now, I just needed to rest. I had surgery six months ago, and sometimes I think I’m fully recovered and I end up overexerting myself.”
And deliberately, theatrically, Juan lightly rested a hand on the dark shirt he wore unbuttoned halfway down his chest, making sure she couldn’t miss his enormous scar.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll make you some sandwiches, at least. Does the little one eat pasta? We’ll just steam it with a little butter, nothing to it.”