“What’s pasta?” asked Gaspar, who had left the fish tank.
“Noodles, mitaí,” the woman told him, kneeling down. “You like them with butter and cheese?”
“Yeah. With sauce, too.”
“We’ll see what we can do for you.”
“Can I watch you cook?”
“He likes to cook,” said Juan, shrugging his shoulders in bemusement.
An hour later Gaspar had learned to use the can opener, they’d both eaten somewhat sticky pasta with a delicious sauce and had drunk some fresh ice water, and the woman had joined them with a glass of sweet wine and a few cigarettes. When they finished, Juan offered to wash the dishes so she could return to reception, and the woman agreed; I hope you get well soon, she told him before she left. Gaspar helped dry, first thanking the woman with his tomato sauce–stained lips; she gave him a kiss on the forehead in return.
Gaspar refused to go into the room: as he stood motionless in the doorway, his eyes shone and he seemed scared.
“Daddy, there’s a lady in the room,” he said. Juan blinked and attuned his senses: it was the same woman from the hallway earlier.
“Don’t look at her.” He took Gaspar’s face in both his hands; they were so big they nearly encircled the boy’s head. “Just look at me.”
Then he sat on the floor and turned on the bedside lamp. Luckily Gaspar couldn’t hear what the woman was saying. It was always better to only see. Juan listened for a moment out of curiosity. It was the same desperate and solitary repetition of death, the same echoing of death. Then he went deaf to her but didn’t expel her; his son would have to learn how to do that, and fast. Juan didn’t want him to be afraid a single minute longer.
“Listen to me closely now.”
“Who is it, Daddy?”
“It’s not a person. It’s a memory.”
He rested a hand under his son’s sternum and felt his heart, fast, strong, and healthy. His mouth went dry with envy.
“Close your eyes. Feel my hand?”
“Yeah.”
“What am I touching?”
“My belly.”
“And now?”
With two fingers of his other hand, he found the vertebra behind the boy’s stomach.
“My back.”
“No, not your back.”
“My spine.”
“Now you have to think about what’s between my two hands, like when your head hurts and you tell me it feels like there’s something in it. Okay, think about what’s in here.”
Gaspar squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lower lip.
“Got it.”
“Okay, now tell the lady to go away. Don’t tell her out loud. You can say it in a quiet voice if you want, but tell her as if this part of you that’s between my hands could speak. Understand? It’s important.”
This could take all night, Juan knew.
“I told her.”
Juan looked at the woman, who remained beside the bed, pregnant and open-mouthed, surely still talking about her first child, her eyes empty.
“Again. As if you were talking from here, as if you had a mouth inside.”
“Should I say it loud?”
Where did he get that question? The boy deserved an answer worthy of such a pertinent query.
“Yes, today you should.”
The image of the woman vanished slowly, like dissipating smoke. The air in the room seemed cleaner, as though they had opened the windows. The light from the lamp shone brighter.
“Very good, Gaspar, very good.”
Gaspar looked around the room in search of the woman who had gone. He looked serious.
“And she won’t come back?”
“If she does, you do the same thing you just did.”
Gaspar was shaking, a little from the effort, a little from fear. Juan remembered the first time he had expelled a discarnate: it had been just as easy for him, maybe even easier, given the circumstances. Hopefully this would be the only ability Gaspar had inherited. Hopefully he would never achieve the level of contact Juan was capable of. Rosario had been sure the boy would inherit all his gifts. Suddenly, the memory was so vivid that he felt it, like accidentally touching an insect in the dark: stubborn Rosario sitting on the bed in her white cotton underwear, her hair pulled back in a high ponytail. Gaspar was going to inherit everything, everything that Juan himself bore. He felt his eyes grow hot.
“Now I’m going to go back to sleep, because in a while I’ll need to drive.”
“I want to sleep with you.”
“Don’t be scared. Go to your bed. If you can’t sleep, read your book. The light doesn’t bother me.”
But Gaspar didn’t want to read. He lay faceup and waited for sleep to come with a discipline that was strange for his age. Juan hadn’t lowered the blinds, so the few streetlights illuminated the room a little, casting the shadows of tree branches on the walls. Juan waited until Gaspar’s breathing indicated he was asleep, and then went over to look at him: lips parted, small baby teeth, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
He could do it sitting in his own bed with Gaspar beside him, but he didn’t want the boy to wake up and see him. The bathroom was as good a place as any. He didn’t need much: just silence, Rosario’s hair, a sharp instrument, and the ashes.
Sitting on the cold tiles, he balled up the lock of Rosario’s hair that he carried with him, stored in a little box. You promised me, he said in a quiet voice. And it had been a serious promise, a promise made in blood and wounds, not in sentimental words.
He took a handful of ashes from the plastic bag and scattered them on the floor in front of him so that he could draw the sign of midnight. He had done this every night since Rosario’s death, always with the same result: silence. A desert of cold sand and dull stars. He had even tried more rudimentary methods, and the reply was always the same: wind blowing over the abyss.
He repeated the words, caressed the lock of hair, summoned her in the virulent language that must be used in the ritual of ashes. With his eyes closed, he saw empty rooms and corners, quenched bonfires, abandoned clothes, dry rivers, but he went on wandering until he returned to the hotel bathroom, to its silence and his son’s distant breathing, and then he summoned her again. Not a touch, not a tremor, not a feint, not even a treacherous shadow. She wasn’t coming and she wasn’t within his reach, and, since her death, he hadn’t received a single sign of her presence.
In the first days, he had made inappropriate offerings. True magic is not done by offering the blood of others, he’d been told. It is done by offering one’s own, and abandoning all hope of recovering it. Juan took the razor blade he had placed beside him and cut the palm of his hand diagonally, vaguely following the line they called the mind or the head. It was an unbearable wound that never healed, the worst possible kind, and for that very reason the kind that worked. When he felt the warm blood in the darkness, he pressed his hand on to the sign drawn in ashes on the floor. He said the necessary words and waited. The silence was dizzying. Juan knew it was a symptom of his own loss of power. Whether it was because he was very sick or too depleted, he didn’t know, but the feeling of weakness was undeniable. This kind of summons required hardly any effort: the world of the dead was very near for him, just beyond a lightweight revolving door. If it had been another ritual, almost any other, he could have questioned his ability to perform it. Not this one. This was like stretching his legs.