Plus, Gaspar is really cute, thought Pablo, but then he bit his lower lip because he knew he wasn’t supposed to think about that. Just last week his father had grabbed him by the hair, all because Pablo had taken a long time choosing what he was going to wear to his uncle’s birthday party. His dad had never done such a thing before: his mouth reeked of mate when he said: “You wouldn’t be a little bit faggy now, would you?” Pablo liked to dress well. He’d said as much to his father, who had nearly hit him for it. When they got home from the birthday party he’d come up with a plan: he listed all his clothes on the last page of a school notebook, in three columns, and then he linked everything with arrows, a kind of summary chart using different colored pens, the way he’d learned to link sentences in class. He had to memorize the combinations or check them quickly before going out, and that way he wouldn’t waste any more time trying to see if the brown corduroy pants went with the green shirt or not.
Gaspar never had those problems. Right now, Pablo was watching him walk up with his bike in a thin, mustard-colored sweatshirt that was a little too big for him, with blue jeans and Topper sneakers, and there was nothing so great about those clothes, but they sure looked great on Gaspar. Even if he wore something weird it came off cool: for example, he’d wear really long leather belts that hung off him. They were his father’s, and sometimes he had to wrap them twice around his waist. Still, the men’s buckle and the worn leather didn’t look like a costume, they provided just the right touches to make him stand out from the rest. Of course, it wasn’t just his clothes: it was his way of brushing his hair from his face, it was his long legs and dark blue eyes, round and seemingly innocent—at least until he smiled or got mad. Then something really weird happened, because the expression in his eyes would shift just slightly; Pablo didn’t know how to describe it, but it was something he both liked and distrusted—it reminded him of his cat, the way he’d purr as you petted him and then suddenly strike for no reason, with no real intention to wound, just to make it clear that he’d gotten what he needed.
When he reached Pablo, Gaspar pulled a piece of gum from his back pocket and offered it to him, a little squashed. They started to blow bubbles on the sidewalk, under the protection of a balcony that acted as a roof, because it had started to rain.
“Will you come with me to the park?” Gaspar pointed to the bike. “I went flying, you should have seen it, but I didn’t get hurt.”
He said this calmly, and Pablo knew he probably hadn’t even felt scared when he fell. There was something tough about Gaspar: they were the same age, but Pablo felt like his friend was much older. Maybe it was because he didn’t have a mom, because his father was sick, because he didn’t have family nearby, because he was so alone. He didn’t laugh much, and he listened attentively. Pablo’s mom said he was a traumatized child; Vicky’s mom said he was a sad child. Then there was Adela, who rounded out their group of inseparable friends, and Adela’s mom, who said: Juan is a widower and he’s sick, it’s not easy to raise a child alone, Gaspar is just fine.
When the downpour lessened to a drizzle, Pablo zipped up his jacket and said: “Let’s go.” The park was very close, just two hundred meters away. Thanks to the bad weather that afternoon it would be empty; when it was sunny, there was almost no room to play soccer or to sit down to drink a soda, because the whole neighborhood spent the afternoon on the neglected grass, under the centenary trees lining the pathways of red earth. They were about to cross the street when they saw Vicky and Adela running toward them. Vicky, her dark hair loose and shining, had tears streaming down her face. Adela, who was holding her hand, was wearing a giant yellow raincoat that looked like a tent and completely covered the stump of her left arm.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” asked Gaspar, and he went over to Vicky. She flung her arms around his neck and cried that Diana was lost; they hadn’t seen her since the morning. Diana was one of Vicky’s two dogs, the one she loved the most, an eight-year-old German shepherd who’d been with her for practically her entire life.
“My jerk dad let her get away,” said Vicky. And amid her tears and complaints she told them how her father had left the back door open with Diana off her leash, and how the dog had run out to the sidewalk. He’d yelled at her, but she hadn’t obeyed. They expected her to come back, but Victoria and her mother had insisted on going out in the car to look for her. Nothing. That had been at nine that morning.
“So now we’re looking for her ourselves. Now that there aren’t so many cars, maybe she’s calmed down,” said Adela, brushing a lock of damp hair from her face with her only hand.
“She could be in the park,” said Gaspar.
“That’s where we’re going now.”
“Us too. I’ll drop my bike off at the shop and go with you.”
The four of them walked down the street lined with English-style houses toward the park. Adela, as always, walked beside Gaspar. She started talking to him about dogs that came back, the dogs that waited in hospital doorways for their sick owners to be discharged, the ones that lived in cemeteries because they had stayed with their owners until the end. Adela was imaginative and theatrical and she’d been lying more and more, but her friends put up with it, and not just out of pity. She was fun. Adela lived with her mother in an apartment at the end of a passageway, a somewhat dark apartment because it was in the middle of the block and the light was obstructed by the buildings around it, and even by the trees in the neighbors’ large yards. Still, it was quite a pretty house; Betty, her mother, had a good eye for choosing fabrics and art reproductions, and the furniture was simple but comfortable and colorful, sometimes covered by blankets with Andean designs. The house was kind of hippie, thought Pablo, and very different from his own, with his grandmother’s old glass ornaments, orange birds and white swans, black toucans with yellow beaks and pink flamingos, all of which he was forbidden to touch. Adela didn’t have a father and no one really knew why, whether he had died or left. No one dared say out loud that he could be disappeared, though some ventured to insinuate that it was the opposite, that he was a cop who had died in a confrontation.
It was also a mystery why she was missing an arm. The stump was small and proportionate, as if she had suffered a clean cut above the elbow. Adela’s mother said she’d been born that way, that it was a congenital defect. A lot of kids were afraid of it, or disgusted by it. They laughed at her, called her little monster, butt-ugly, half-baked; they said she should get a job at the circus, that her photo probably appeared in medical books. It all hurt her and sometimes she cried, but she had decided to always meet the mockery with more jokes or insults. She didn’t want to use an orthopedic arm. Generally, she didn’t hide the stump. If she saw repulsion in another kid’s eyes, or even an adult’s, she was capable of touching it to their faces, or of sitting very close and brushing the other person’s arm with her useless appendage until they were on the verge of tears.
Adela’s version of the story of her absent arm was dramatic, typical of her. She claimed that a dog had attacked her, a black Dobermann. The dog had gone crazy—it happened with Dobermanns a lot, Adela said, the breed had a skull too small for the size of its brain, so their heads hurt all the time and it drove them mad. She said the dog had attacked her when she was two years old. She also claimed to remember it: the pain, the growling, the sound of chewing jaws, the blood spraying over the grass. She had been at her grandparents’ summer house, and it was her grandfather who had murdered the dog: his aim had been excellent, because when the bullet hit the animal, it was still gripping little Adela in its teeth.