The sounds from downstairs faded or stopped entirely, and again Pablo debated leaving. The men should have been able to hear his breathing—he couldn’t control it and it was fast and noisy like after running. Gaspar’s father was kneeling with his head twisted to one side, a strange, slack position, as if he were listening to something, music coming in through the window or from the roof. The gray-haired man pulled away from his embrace and stood up; he walked alone toward the room they’d come out of, but then he stopped, and Pablo knew it was because he’d sensed his presence. The gray-haired man turned around and looked him straight in the eyes: his own were sunken and had heavy lids. Pablo could see those details in the light from the moon and the candles, while Gaspar’s father sat unmoving in the center of the circle, distant and tense, his enormous hands fully extended; the shadows made them look longer than normal. The gray-haired man didn’t speak out loud, but his lips very clearly mouthed “Get out.” Pablo nodded, and the gray-haired man kept watching him until he reached the stairs. Pablo ran down them and tried to ignore the voices that had risen up again, a woman talking about a church in ruins, another who said we need smoke and earth, a man repeating a phrase in a language Pablo didn’t know, and something that was dragging, he could hear it, it was the sound of shoes walking through dry leaves. Were there people in the other rooms? Was it some kind of club? Pablo was exhausted when he reached the door, as if he’d had to cover several blocks to get there and not just a few yards, and he ran to his house thinking about Gaspar’s father’s blond hair, about the way he’d wet his fingers with his saliva, about the strength of his arms when he’d kissed the gray-haired man. Now, as he ran toward his house, what he had witnessed seemed unreal. The voices and the suffocating heat and the circle drawn on the floor, it all made him think of something dark and deathly, of spiders and abandoned cemeteries, or the cold floor of the bathroom at night and the blood that came from between his mother’s legs and smelled like metal and meat, of the chains that the wind banged at night on the empty factory down the street and on the abandoned bricked-up house on Calle Villarreal, of the silence that came after a blackout, of dreams about cold hands that caressed his stomach until he woke up, and of the mildew stain on the ceiling that some nights looked like a fat cat and other nights like a horned animal.
Gaspar woke up before Vicky and Adela, and from the sofa bed he heard Lidia Peirano talking in low tones while she got Virginia, her younger daughter, ready for school. The girl was sniveling, still half asleep. Despite the cold, Gaspar didn’t stay curled up under the blanket; he put on his pants and ran to the bathroom. Then he went into the kitchen and had breakfast with Lidia and Virginia before they left for school. The little girl was still yawning and sniffling; I think she’s about to catch a cold, Lidia told him. She’s really cranky.
Gaspar folded up the sofa bed where he’d slept, loaded the sheets in the washing machine, and waited to see if either Vicky or Adela would appear, but the door to the room where the girls were sleeping was shut, and he heard only silence. He stayed over at Vicky’s pretty often: if it got late, they always invited him to sleep there. Sometimes he forced the invitation if he noticed his father was in an especially bad mood, or if Esteban was visiting, like last night. He preferred to leave them alone. It was less common for Adela to spend the night at Vicky’s, but her mom had supposedly gone to a friend’s wedding; the party was at a country house far away, and she’d be back late. But Adela didn’t believe that. I think she has a boyfriend, she’d said, annoyed. Adela still held out hope her father would come back.
But Adela and Vicky didn’t wake up, and Gaspar left without seeing them. It was early and he could walk to school quickly, so he passed by his house first. Esteban’s car was gone. Had he left alone? He didn’t have time to go in and check. Several times, Gaspar had seen the way his father and Esteban caressed each other distractedly, and once he’d even found them sleeping together, naked. That time he’d gotten scared: it seemed to him, from the things he’d heard, that it must be illegal for a man to have a boyfriend, and they could be arrested. But he looked into it and learned that they couldn’t. People are very prejudiced, Vicky’s mom had told him, they can’t stand people living freely. But it’s not illegal. He realized that if people at school or around the neighborhood found out, they would tease and bully him forever for being the son of a fag. Gaspar was willing to put up with it, though. Sometimes he thought that if Esteban moved in with them and they kept it a secret, things could improve. Esteban seemed capable of dealing with his father—not of controlling him, but at least he was someone Juan listened to. His father had various reactions to Esteban; at times he seemed calmer, and Gaspar could see how even his shoulders relaxed and he slept better; but sometimes, especially after Esteban left, he would lock himself in or have fits of fury or do irrational things, like cover the terrace with sharp shards of glass （last year） or make Gaspar always keep the lights off, even in the kitchen and bathroom （starting last summer, and still in force）; or else he’d disappear for several days, leaving money on the table with a short note that gave no information and that terrified Gaspar: what would happen if he didn’t come back? What if he never saw his father again?
Gaspar got out of school a little early that day because of a bomb threat. There were threats almost every week and he knew they were made by the kids in seventh grade, but the principal didn’t dare ignore them. When the calls first began, she had summoned the sixth-and seventh-graders to an assembly and given them a speech about how democracy had only recently returned to Argentina, and it could easily be lost again. Unfortunately, she said, these matters must be taken seriously, because we have lived through very hard times in this country. Many of the kids exchanged looks during the talk, not understanding what the principal was talking about. Gaspar did.
He walked home despite the cold and a slight headache that, he thought, wasn’t going to turn into a migraine. Just in case, he stopped at the pharmacy and bought a blister pack of aspirins. They didn’t have much effect on him anymore, but the doctors, including Vicky’s mom, said he was still too young to take anything stronger. He took stronger things anyway: his dad gave them to him. There’s no reason for you to suffer, he said. Gaspar agreed. Sometimes his headaches kept him from swimming; they didn’t go away even after he slept, and not long ago he’d dreamed he was scooping his own eyes out with spoons, as if they were servings of custard. It was always his eyes that hurt first, and it was hard to move them; then came that feeling of wearing a tight helmet. First, sometimes, he’d see black shapes like flowers opening, especially if he looked up: flowers in the sky. An aura, he knew it was called. It was a warning.
He swallowed the aspirins without water, and it felt like the bitter taste stuck to his palate. He went inside intending to go straight to the kitchen for some water to wash away the aftertaste, but he stopped when he found his father in the living room, sitting on his yellow sofa in front of the TV, which was on though he wasn’t watching it.