Oddly, because of the four of them he was the one who listened best and argued least, Gaspar always refused to believe this version. “No way you remember that,” he’d tell her. “You were two years old. I can barely remember my mom, and she died when I was six.”
“Well, this was very traumatic,” said Adela, emphasizing the word “traumatic,” which she had learned recently.
“Are you dumb or something? My mom’s death was traumatic, too.”
“You must remember something.”
And Gaspar would repeat that sure, he remembered something, but very little, he wanted to remember so much more; his memories were like photos, short movie scenes with no connection. And nothing at all from when he was two. No one remembers being two, it was impossible, he insisted.
“Anyway, I don’t care if you lie,” he’d say, making Adela furious. “But with some things you have to lie better.”
Adela always came out of these arguments with her face and ears very red; she was freckled and exaggeratedly blonde, so light that her pale skin made her teeth look yellow. She had small brown eyes under nearly white eyelashes.
“You guys wait here,” said Gaspar when they reached Castelli Park.
They complied: Adela used her raincoat to dry off a wooden bench, and the three of them sat in silence. The park took up twelve blocks and had a school and two swimming pools—one outdoor and one indoor; Gaspar swam there on weekends, when the one at school was closed—as well as a rose garden and a huge fountain that sprayed streams at different heights, synchronized to give the impression the water was dancing. There was also a carousel in the playground area, but they were too big for that stuff, except maybe the swings; the girls, especially, loved the swings, and also the rose garden, with its nineteenth-century gazebo, dark green vines and red pebble pathways that stained your sneakers.
Gaspar returned quickly from the bike shop and organized the search: Pablo would take the part of the park that went from the school to the avenue with the church; he would take the fountain and the pools; and the girls would split the rose garden and the area around the subway entrance. Really look, he told them. She could be scared. Look behind all the trees and under all the benches. The school is closed, but I’m sure there’s a caretaker. Pablo, ring the bell and check with him. I’ll do the same at the pool. In one hour, we meet back here. The others nodded, and before they started the search, Gaspar bent over to drink from a fountain shaped like a lion’s head, made of old blue ceramic tiles. The water spilled over and left a small, bloody river over the red earthen path.
Gaspar circled the club building, its dining room open but empty of customers—surely because of the rain and the hour: people would start to arrive closer to dinner time—and went in. The owner and the only waiter both knew him: sometimes he stopped in for a snack on Saturday and Sunday afternoons after swimming, or he’d even do his homework at one of the tables that had a view of the most wooded part of the park. He did that when his father was in a very bad mood, which in the past year had been more and more frequent, to the point that Gaspar had started to miss him, as if that man who lived in his house were someone else, someone who was ever more silent, violent and distant.
He asked both of them if they had seen the dog, but neither the waiter nor the owner remembered seeing a German shepherd; there were a lot of dogs that ran around the park and they knew most of them, even gave them food, but they hadn’t noticed a new one. Gaspar accepted the glass of Fanta the owner offered him, then went on scouring the steps on either side of the fountain. The park was built on a small hill that rose up in the middle and ended at the outdoor pool, which was already closed until the following summer. He circled around the pool and stood looking at the diving board. He squeezed between the narrow bars—it was a little tight: even though he was very thin, he would soon be too big to fit through them—and called Diana with a whistle that he knew the dog would recognize. Nothing. He went around the pool and called again: strange, the caretaker wasn’t there. Maybe he’d taken the afternoon off, since it was drizzling and no one was likely to sneak into the water. Gaspar did, sometimes: he liked to swim when it was cold outside, to emerge shivering from the water, with the pool for him alone and no one watching. His father didn’t know about those escapades, of course.
He closed his eyes. His cheek hurt, and so did his knees a little; they were still bleeding a bit, he’d noticed in the bathroom, and he could already feel the skin tightening around the incipient scabs.
The dog wasn’t by the fountain or the pool, so he started checking for her around the trees. There were a lot of them in the park, and Gaspar would have liked to be able to identify them, to know which was a poplar, which a loquat; he only recognized the pines. He wished they taught that kind of thing at school, instead of about fractions or single-celled organisms. He did well in school because it was easy, but he got bored, he always had. He read on his own: his father could be erratic and he could be scary, but he let Gaspar read whatever he wanted. Now, he was reading Dracula: he had already seen about ten movie versions, and the book was totally different from them all. One phrase had stuck with him, and now the shiver he felt near the fountain wasn’t just because his jacket was lightweight: that phrase seemed terrible to him. “For the dead travel fast.” One character, a travel companion, says that to Jonathan Harker as he’s on his way to the Count’s castle. He had looked for the book in English in his father’s library while his father was distractedly drawing in one of his notebooks. He’d found it immediately and compared it with the Spanish translation, Los muertos viajan deprisa. The English book also said that the phrase was translated from the German, and that it came from a poem called “Lenore.” He asked his father if he had it—he had a lot of poetry books—and his father, without pausing in his writing or drawing, without looking at him, said no. “Is it true?” Gaspar had asked. “Is it true that the dead travel fast?”
His father had finally looked up and said, simply: “Some do.”
Gaspar went running down the steps to the open area with the sculpture of the saber-toothed tiger, then circled the park on the path parallel to Calle Miter. Vicky and Adela were already waiting at the gazebo, near the rose garden. Their faces made it clear that they hadn’t found the dog, either.
“She’ll come back, Vicky,” said Gaspar. “If you want, we can go make copies of a photo of her, and we’ll put them up in stores and on lamp posts. We’ll find her.”
Vicky was crying.
“She’s old, she’s going to get lost.”
Pablo came running up and looked at Gaspar before shaking his head.
“Are you going to offer a reward?” asked Adela. “If you offer a reward, it’s way better.”
“And what money am I going to use for that? My dad won’t pay it.”
“I’ll lend you money, no problem,” said Gaspar, and he asked Adela to go with him to the copy shop later.
They spent the rest of the afternoon putting together, on legal-sized paper, a “lost dog” poster for Diana. Vicky chose a photo with a light background so the image would stand out more. Hugo, Vicky’s father, joked to Gaspar that with inflation it didn’t make sense to offer a reward, and Vicky got so mad she locked herself in her room, crying. Adela and Gaspar finished the poster while Pablo listened to Hugo explain how the dog had escaped. He had left the door open, it was true. Just for a minute, because he’d forgotten his umbrella and he needed it—it had been raining that morning when he went to work at the pharmacy. And something had scared the dog, something fell inside the house. Maybe Virginia, Vicky’s younger sister, had thrown a toy against the wall, or perhaps her grandma, who was pretty deaf, had turned the radio up and upset the animal and made her run outside. He loved the dog too, he adored her, and he was really ticked off that Vicky had blamed him and made such a fuss.