Betty’s eyes looked watery, as if she were sad or they were irritated. Night was falling outside, and the waiters of the nearly empty restaurant were watching a soccer game on TV.
“I’ll tell you some other day. With Adela all worked up like this I’d rather keep my mouth shut.”
“Come on!” begged Adela. “You never tell me anything.”
“That’s because you get crazy,” said Betty, kissing her forehead. “Can you help with her language and literature homework, Gaspar? She doesn’t understand a thing. They want her to diagram sentences. I’ll come and pick you up in an hour. Sound good?”
Gaspar said yes and Adela handed him her notebook. It was messy, with the edges of the pages all folded and handwriting that looked like a younger kid’s, the trembling lines of childish fingers.
Pablo was supposed to go with his parents that day to have dinner with his grandparents, but then the outing was called off. His parents had a fight before the car even pulled out of the driveway. His mother shouted that she didn’t want to see those old fuckers, and his father replied well, he didn’t want them to see her like that, all dirty and unhinged. It was true: his mother was dirty and she smoked all the time and cried in front of the TV. He’d heard her say on the phone that maybe it would help to have another baby, but that she couldn’t “handle the experience” of losing another child. Pablo didn’t want his mother to get pregnant, didn’t want a sibling if his parents weren’t getting along: he didn’t think a baby would improve things. He had classmates with younger siblings and they said their parents fought, they couldn’t sleep because the baby screamed, and they were always tired and in a bad mood.
When his mother went into her room to cry and his father drove away at a furious speed, Pablo decided to go and find Gaspar. It was always complicated because he couldn’t just call him. He could knock on the door, but sometimes—Pablo didn’t really know why—he was afraid to. Juan Peterson rarely responded if he was home: sometimes he looked out the upstairs window, and if he saw it was Pablo, he might let Gaspar know, but most of the time he just went on with what he was doing and ignored the interruption. He wasn’t afraid Gaspar’s father would open the door, because that never happened. He couldn’t say exactly what it was that scared him.
It was cold, so Pablo put on a sweater and a down jacket and ran all the way to Gaspar’s house to warm up. There was no one in the street, and the closed windows of the houses he passed blocked all but a faint murmur from the TVs, though their flickering lights were clearly on display, more brilliant when they came from a color set.
When he arrived, he froze in surprise on the sidewalk. Both doors were open, the one leading into the withered front yard and the main front door of the house. What could have happened? Pablo peered in: the house was very dark and seemed empty, but that was normal. Sometimes the only light came from Gaspar’s room, which looked out on to the street.
Pablo went inside soundlessly; the wooden door let him enter in perfect silence, without a creak when pushed it open. But as soon as he set foot in the spacious entrance hall （“foyer,” Gaspar had called it once, an odd word he had surely copied from his father）， Pablo knew something strange was happening. He hadn’t been inside that house enough times to know its sounds or its movements, but he could hear something hitting the wooden floor upstairs, and he could feel that the air inside the house was muggy, like at an indoor pool. Even the little noise there was, the knocking from above, reached him as if through water, and he couldn’t pinpoint where it came from. Maybe from the connected bedrooms Gaspar’s father used upstairs, the ones no one else was allowed to enter, or from the giant room on the first floor that was like an empty ballroom. Pablo walked around the ground floor that was lit only by the streetlights; the shutter on one of the living-room windows was open, another oversight. No one was there. The door to Gaspar’s room was open and it was empty; so was the kitchen. And the living room, which changed color every time a car went by on the street, frightened him. The best thing, he thought, would be to go back outside and wait. Gaspar must be at Vicky’s, or at another friend’s house, or running errands. If he came home he would turn on the light, and Pablo would see it from outside and get his attention the way he always did, by throwing a pebble or a stick at his window. But his heart was pounding, he was dying of curiosity, and the sounds from upstairs didn’t sound threatening. Occasionally he could hear voices, distant, filtered through that weird watery buffer. He realized he was sweating: the heat in the house reminded him of the steam in the bathroom after a very hot shower, or the kind his mom used to relieve his cough when he got sick. But there was no humidity in the air or on the walls; Pablo touched them and found them perfectly dry.
He went up the stairs with his cheeks burning; he knew they were flushed—how he hated the way he blushed. The climb grew harder with each step, like when he tried to run in dreams and his legs wouldn’t move. The stairs were wooden and usually creaked, but now the only sound Pablo could hear was his own breathing, too fast for such little effort. When he reached the first floor, he leaned against the wall to catch his breath. The bedrooms there all led off the central hall; the last three were occupied by Gaspar’s father. There was also a shorter staircase that led to a corridor with two bedrooms that served as a library; that corridor had a wooden railing, a kind of balcony or mezzanine from where you could look down at the hall with its wooden floor and, at the far end, enormous glass doors behind dark curtains, like those across a stage. On the other side of the doors was a balcony that looked out over the inner yard, which must once have been beautiful but was now as barren as the flower beds at the entrance. Panting, Pablo sat down to rest on the steps of the short staircase leading to the library. He didn’t see anyone, and the knocking had stopped. He still felt a little dazed, and he noticed his neck was soaked in sweat. Maybe the house had central heating? Gaspar had never mentioned it. On the contrary: he often complained about the cold.
Pablo was standing up to leave when a movement in the empty hall made him gasp. He crouched back down on the stairs, with his eyes just peeking over the railing. A man was in the room, and he opened the curtains and the glass doors. In the moonlight—the backyard was unlit—Pablo saw he was naked. Then Gaspar’s father came out of one of the bedrooms. He was naked too, and Pablo thought he seemed huge under the silvery light, tall and strong. The man who had opened the windows was also tall, though less so; he walked to the other end of the room, where he knelt down and lit a candle. Pablo, of course, hadn’t seen the candles before, but as he followed the movement of the naked man—who had gray hair though his face wasn’t old, not at all, he seemed like his father’s age or a little older—he counted seven. Seven candles. And then he saw that there was a drawing on the floor of the empty hall: a white circle with something else drawn inside that Pablo couldn’t really distinguish. Lines, some circles. Gaspar’s dad entered the circle as though passing through a door, and, on his knees, he waited for the other naked man. The two of them sat for a moment face to face, completely still, until Gaspar’s dad kissed the other man, without tenderness, nothing like the kisses Pablo had seen in movies or like people gave in public, and suddenly he had trouble breathing again, because he had never seen two men kiss, he’d never imagined they could, he’d thought it was . . . forbidden? Something like that. Gaspar’s father sat on the floor, and Pablo watched as the naked man did something incredible, impossible: he sat on Gaspar’s father’s penis and they started to have sex, like the pictures in the porn magazines, only moving. He’d seen it in the ones Gaspar hid in the garage, sex like that, but not between two men: he’d seen a man putting it in a woman’s ass, and he’d thought it was gross. But he didn’t think it was gross now. He did feel ashamed at what he was watching, and at the same time he couldn’t look away: Gaspar’s father made the other man get on all fours on the floor, and, very upright, shining with sweat like a wet statue, he got behind him and they did it like dogs, in complete silence except for the slapping of bodies. Pablo was afraid they would see him hiding there, spying, but it was the best moment to run away, because they were so focused on what they were doing. But how to cross the stretch between the hall and the stairs without them noticing? Now Pablo felt all his sweat dry up and turn icy—the house wasn’t hot anymore, but something worse was happening: he sensed people in the rooms. He even heard the murmur of low conversations and the rise and fall of door handles. Upstairs and down. Footsteps on the stairs. The shadows from the candles made disproportionate shapes above the men’s bodies. His legs were paralyzed with dread, and at the same time, when he looked at the men—who were face to face again—he felt dizzy, as though his blood was growing lighter, and he felt like crying even though he wasn’t sad or scared; he didn’t understand what the men were doing inside that circle but he liked it, liked the strong arms braced against the floor, the backs damp with sweat and saliva, the way they grabbed each other’s cheeks and necks when they kissed, and the sweet, metallic smell that reached him there where he hid on the stairs. What could he do? Gaspar’s dad had his eyes closed and he was different, beautiful, thought Pablo, beautiful; everyone said he was sick, how was that possible? Weren’t sick people always ugly? In the dim light of the candles and the moon Pablo could see Gaspar’s dad’s chest and the long scar, but it looked like that, a scar, not a sign of weakness. It didn’t make him any less beautiful. The other man had scars on his back, Pablo could see. It looked like the two men had been cut by a single knife stroke, or were separated Siamese twins.