He still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to ask her out or to go steady. He knew the other girls teased her about their names: Belén, or Bethlehem, Jesus’s birthplace, and Gaspar, one of the three wise men. It was a joke. Put together, his name and that of the girl he liked were a joke. And she was arrogant, so pretty with her wide mouth and her dark eyes and skin so delicate it looked transparent, you could see all the blue veins in her cheeks; Gaspar thought it also looked like a kind of map. And the socks she used, white, pulled up over her shins, and the silver ring on her pinkie.
Now he couldn’t remember the capital of Iran. Tehran or Baghdad? Tehran, he decided, and he colored the country purple. He still had several more countries, the ones he always confused: he remembered the names—Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia—but he couldn’t identify their shapes on the map. He didn’t feel like going upstairs now to get an encyclopedia; he could look it up tomorrow.
In his socks, he walked to his room: it looked out on to the street, or rather the front yard, which was narrow and had several dry flower beds. The window was shut with the blinds down, and Gaspar didn’t open them. He looked at the books on his nightstand but none of them appealed to him, not even the poetry books, which were his favorites even if he didn’t always understand them, because sometimes when he read two words aloud and they brought about a beautiful effect, he almost felt like crying. Nor did he feel like listening to music on the new Walkman his uncle had sent him from Brazil for Christmas. Nor could he watch movies, because he’d lent the VCR to Pablo. He needed to sleep. He took off his pants but left his T-shirt on, and tossed his hoodie on the chair. The scrapes on his knees were dry now; the next day they would itch and he’d pull off the scabs and then they’d take forever to heal; he always did the same thing.
Before getting under the covers, after folding the pillow in half and arranging it just so, he opened the bedside table drawer and took out a booklet that his mother had written, part of a series on indigenous and popular art; her photo was on the back. There were other articles of hers in different books in the house, some of them in English. Gaspar had memorized the titles of all of them. “The Tupí-Guaraní World on the Eve of Conquest,” “If God were a Jaguar: Cannibalism and Christianity among the Guaraní,” “The Sociocultural Dimension of Epilepsy: An anthropological study among Guaraní communities in Argentina,” and many more, and on other subjects, but none of those chapters or monograms had her photo. This booklet did. It was part of a collection with ten installments, his father had told him, but they only had five in the house. Your mom was proud and also very angry that she was the only woman in the collection, his father had said. Why angry? Gaspar had asked. For a lot of reasons. Because there weren’t many female anthropologists, because the few that existed weren’t invited to lectures and conferences, because she was tired of working only with men.
The collection was published by the Center for Visual Arts at the Museo del Barro in Paraguay, as it indicated on the first page. The title was Indigenous and Mestizo Art of Aboriginal Guaraní Groups. It began with a four-page text without images that was very difficult, at least for Gaspar, explaining the indigenous “linguistic families” and defining “popular” or folk art . . . it was boring. But the next ten pages had photos, in color, which he loved: a wooden carving from the seventeenth century of Christ’s bloodied head, another full-length Christ that was called At the Column, with Christ all wounded and with his hands tied to a post that came up to his waist; a very strange Virgin—a kind of legless torso with the heart, made of tin, outside the chest and pierced by swords—was titled Dolorosa; then there was a painting where the crucified Christ had blood pouring out of the side of his chest that an angel was collecting, holding a golden chalice like a bucket. The second part of the booklet was titled “Popular Santeria,” and it was his favorite. There were four photos of skeletons, all different, called San La Muerte. In one, a very tall skeleton held a scythe in its left hand and a broom in its right; in another, the skeleton was fat and short, with a smiling mouth drawn on, and it held a short scythe that looked more like a knife: that one was funny. The next one was not: a skeleton in a black-painted coffin, serious and half sitting up. And the last one was the strangest: the caption said it was carved in bone （it didn’t specify whether animal or human） and was only five centimeters tall, and the skeleton was sitting down with its head in its hands, as if it were waiting on a bench. Then came San Son, a man dressed in red with a sword in his hand, on a jaguar: that one was made of wood. And then Santa Librada, a crucified woman. The final section, of indigenous drawings, was the most boring: birds and armadillos and enormous spiderwebs between trees, fish in the river, crocodiles, people planting large vegetables that looked like squash.
The back cover had his mother’s photo and biography. It said: “Rosario Reyes Bradford was born in Buenos Aires in 1949 and was the first Argentine woman to earn a doctorate in Anthropology at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom. She specializes in symbolic anthropology, anthropology of religion, and Guaraní ethnography. She is a professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. She has published over twenty articles in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the United States, England, France, and Belgium. She is the author of the book Tekoporá: Anthropological explorations on Guaraní history, religion, and ontology.”
Beside the photo was text his mother had written in which she thanked Cristino Escobar, director of the museum, the publisher, the Mbyá communities of Misiones and southern Paraguay, and a number of other people, and then came what interested Gaspar most. It said: “Thanks to Tali, my sister, my best friend, and my research partner. I am grateful to Juan for his unconditional love and to Gaspar, the love of my life, who put up with his mother’s absences bravely and received her with joy and without reproach every time she came back.” Gaspar had asked his father why she referred to Tali, a friend of the family whom he saw on occasion, as her “sister,” and Juan told him it was a figure of speech, because they loved each other a lot. Gaspar was disappointed: he was hoping she was his aunt; he could use a little more family.
He tried to call up all the memories he had of his mother: he remembered her walking down the stairs, putting a cold cloth on his forehead when he had a headache; he remembered her telling him she’d be right back and to stay nice and still （he remembered the “nice and still” very clearly）， then walking down a hallway—but where was that hallway? He also remembered a walkway or pier like the ones in the ocean, but instead of water, there were trees beneath it. Treetops. She was holding his hand and her hair was very dark. He remembered her in bed, teaching him what the cards meant. He remembered her kissing his father on tiptoe while Juan bent down, holding her waist.
The photo beside the acknowledgments showed his mother looking straight into the camera. The booklet was from 1979, but his father had told him that the photo, in black and white, was taken before that. She was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt: her arms were very thin but—and Gaspar was a little ashamed at this thought—she had large breasts. She was very pretty, that’s the thing, and he didn’t like to think that about his mother, but she was very pretty, with her hair loose and a little messy and very full lips. His father had told him once that she had always worn very little makeup, which was unusual for women at that time. Ask any of your friends for photos of their mothers from ten years ago, you’ll see. And Gaspar had asked, and it was true: Vicky’s mom wore so much dark eye shadow she looked like the raccoon from the cartoons, and her mouth was smeared red and her cheeks stained with pink powder. The eyebrows were the worst. Pablo’s mother, for example, simply didn’t have eyebrows in her wedding photos; or no, she had really thin eyebrows drawn on to her skin. His mother, in this photo and others, had normal eyebrows. Why did women get rid of their eyebrows? Gaspar had wanted to know, and his father, smiling, had replied that his mother had wondered the same thing. Your mom was crazy about clothes and fashion, he’d said, but she didn’t look like anyone else. In the photo she was wearing a thick bracelet: if you looked closely, you could see it was a snake with its mouth half-open and a forked tongue that rested on her wrist.