“Let me know if you need anything.”
Gaspar waved on his way out. He missed his bike. He’d asked the mechanic to also change the light he used at night, because lately it had been flickering. Adela walked back with him: of his three friends, she was his closest neighbor. He liked to be with her—he felt he could relax with Adela, because sincerity didn’t make her uncomfortable.
“You think Diana’s going to turn up?”
Diana—her dry fur, her tongue always hanging out, that loving eagerness—Gaspar suddenly remembered it all and felt a rock form in his throat. He loved the dog. Since he wasn’t allowed to have pets, he grew attached to other people’s. Diana was his favorite.
“No, he said. “I don’t think she’ll turn up.”
“Me neither, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Maybe we’re totally wrong and she’ll come back.”
“Here’s hoping. How come you don’t have a dog?”
“Dad hates animals.”
That wasn’t exactly it; his father had told him once, “I don’t want anything alive in this house.” But that was going to sound too strange even for Adela.
“Your dad’s so mean.”
They laughed. Adela had said it mischievously, but also knowingly: Betty, her mother, drank a lot when she was sad. She wasn’t violent, didn’t mistreat Adela, just locked herself in with a bottle and sometimes threw up in the bathroom. Or in the house. Several times, Gaspar had helped Adela empty the glasses full of wine that appeared in the corners, and had sprayed air freshener in the bathroom when Betty didn’t clean up her vomit properly. She didn’t go on binges very often, but the days when she did were difficult. Gaspar slowed down, partly so he could spend more time with Adela, and partly because her missing arm meant she walked more slowly, as if she lacked an oar to propel herself forward. The rain had stopped, so Adela had left her raincoat at Vicky’s house; now she was just in a red sweatshirt, the sleeve rolled up over her stump. She always said she hated to let the empty sleeve hang down; better to let obvious things be obvious. Gaspar also liked Adela’s company because she talked a lot and wasn’t uncomfortable with his silence. Now, though, she was quiet. And it wasn’t because of the dog, who was no friend of hers—she preferred to keep her distance from dogs, a stance she held firmly to maintain her story of the Dobermann attack.
Gaspar decided to break the silence:
“Is something up with you?”
“It’s this thing that always happens to me, but lately it’s been worse.”
“Well, tell me.”
“It’s kind of gross.”
“Even better.”
Adela shoved him and he stumbled.
“Moron.”
She looked down as she spoke, as if paying close attention to her steps.
“My arm itches. This one,” she said, and moved her stump.
“So, scratch it.”
“Don’t be dumb. It itches on the part I don’t have. I already went to the doctor about it. He told me it’s called a phantom limb. It’s because the brain doesn’t register that you don’t have it anymore, and it still feels things.”
Gaspar looked at her closely under the yellow streetlights. Adela’s hair had a kind of halo around it: it bristled in the humidity.
“No way.”
She looked at him, the hostility narrowing her dark eyes.
“Why don’t you ever believe me?”
“Something that doesn’t exist can’t itch.”
“It itches a lot and you just don’t get it!” Adela yelled, and she went running toward her house, crying, her face turned away so he couldn’t see. Gaspar almost went after her, but then let her go. He was tired, he was hungry, and he would have to wait a while for the cutlets to heat up in the oven. He didn’t know if there was bread to make a sandwich. He should have accepted the dinner invitation, but he had wanted to go home, spend some time alone and see his father.
He went quietly into the cool darkness of the house, and before heading into the kitchen he peeked into the ground-floor room where his father slept.
The lamp was on the floor, an empty glass on the nightstand, and his father bare-chested and sitting up in bed; he never slept lying down anymore. Gaspar couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not: he could only see that his eyes were closed.
Gaspar turned on the light in the kitchen, the only room in the house besides the bathroom where he was allowed to use the overhead fixture. He found two milanesas in the freezer. He smelled them: parsley and breading and a little lemon, and the metallic scent of raw meat. He poured oil into a pan and lit the oven. He had to hold the knob down for a long time, almost a minute, for the flame to stay lit. If he let go before it was ready and the blue semicircle of light disappeared, he’d have to wait more than ten minutes before trying again. He didn’t dare fry the milanesas that night, he didn’t want to wake his father with the noise of sizzling oil. Plus, when he went to sleep right after eating fried food, it sometimes brought on one of his most hated nightmares, the one with the man who floated above his head and dripped hot liquid from something he carried in his arms, something small and alive that was dying—that was very clear in the dream. He couldn’t tell if it was a person or an animal, he couldn’t see it, all he saw was the floating man’s feet and a little of his legs, pale like bones, just overhead. So, oven-baked milanesas it was. And a tomato cut in half, with a little oil and oregano.
He liked to cook. He wished he could cook more for his father, who lately ate little and without any appetite. Gaspar knew he was very ill, he’d always known that, but now he felt something worse that he didn’t want to think about: he sensed his father was going to die soon. He was always so tired now, so angry, so weak, so incredibly delicate—his father, always so tall and powerful, with such large hands that, in a tender moment, they could hold Gaspar’s whole head, and when they hit him, they were like boxing gloves without the protection of the fabric and padding, the pure fury of bones in the heavy palm and the brutal backhand.
He took off his sneakers and socks, which were wet, and took some dry socks off the line in the kitchen. He wasn’t sleepy, so, after serving himself a milanesa with tomato, he set the political map of Asia that he had to fill in next to his plate. He looked at the lines demarcating the countries, and although the teacher allowed them to use an encyclopedia for homework, he tried to remember the names without consulting one, as that’s how it would be in the test. China, capital Beijing. Almost as a joke he colored the enormous country yellow. The island above it was Japan. Tokyo. He made it red. He liked geography. He didn’t like math, especially not geometry, but for that he had Belén, his classmate who wanted to be an engineer and with whom he traded solutions and protractor diagrams for English and languages homework. The exchange was perfect, except for the fact that he really liked Belén. He liked other girls too, but he didn’t think any were as pretty as Belén, and none made him so nervous and so happy at the same time. He liked her even more because she wanted to study engineering: she was different from the other girls.