“Your friend Vicky—does her father tell her what he does, for example?”
“Yeah. He’s a pharmacist.”
“And what else does she know, other than that he’s a pharmacist? Does she know how many antibiotics he sells in a week? Does she know how the prices change? Whether insulin is free? Does she know if he’d like to have a specialized section for homeopathy?”
Gaspar clenched his teeth.
“Maybe she does.”
“Of course she doesn’t know. What does Pablo’s father do?”
“Something with gas.”
“What does he do with gas?”
“I don’t know! Puts it in cars.”
“Why is it put into cars? You think Pablo knows more than you?”
Gaspar gave in.
“But it’s not the same thing. What you do is weirder.”
“How many times have we had this conversation before? It’s boring, Gaspar.”
“I just want to know.”
His father leaned down to his level. His eyes were as puffy as if he’d been punched, but he looked better than on other days, less tired.
“Pick whatever book you want. Read whatever you want.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Gaspar tiptoed over to the bookshelf. There was so much to choose from! Above all the books, in a wooden box on the shelf nearest the ceiling, were his mother’s ashes. Gaspar had once asked his dad to open the box so he could see them. Nothing shocking: it looked more like dirt than ashes. He had cried because his mom was nothing but that, a pile of dust in a box, but he hadn’t been scared. He wasn’t disturbed by that box in the corner. His father told him that when the moment came, he was going to throw the ashes into the river. But the years went by and they stayed right where they were.
Now Gaspar looked over the shelves and through the piles of books, turning around the ones whose spines were facing the wall. Some were in English. Dion Fortune, he read, The Training and Work of an Initiate. Others were in Spanish. Juan Carlos Onetti, El pozo, Thomas Hardy, Jude el oscuro, Fran?oise Sagan, Buenos días, tristeza. García Lorca, Keats, Yeats, Blake, Eliot, Neruda: the poetry books Gaspar always borrowed because he liked them. He moved to another, taller shelf: Babylonian Magic and Sorcery, Leonard W. King. The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant. Finally, at the end of one somewhat sagging shelf, he found the spine that seemed to be the chosen one: The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, by Eliphas Lévi. It was a paperback, gray and very worn. He pulled it out and showed it to his father, who nodded.
“Read anything you want.”
Gaspar opened the book randomly. Page 44 had a drawing of a six-pointed star, a little similar to the Star of David. He read: “This is why material elements which are analogous to the divine elements are thought of as four, are explained by two, and only exist in the end as three. Revelation is the duality; all verbs are twofold and suppose two.” I don’t understand a thing, he thought. He opened to the chapter called “Black Magic,” and was disappointed that it was only a single page. It started by saying that fearful people should close the book, but the warning meant nothing to him. Nor did the chapter. What it said was much less terrifying than what he’d seen himself in lots of movies. He looked curiously at his father, who smiled at him again without mockery, but with a certain sadness.
“Boring, right?”
“Can I try another one?”
“No. They’re not much different. Gaspar, that’s what I do.”
“What?”
“I study what those books say.”
“Alone? Is there a place where people study that?”
Gaspar saw his father lie down again on the sofa and toss a cushion down on the floor, close by.
“I’m self-taught. I’m too old and sick to go to the university. Sit down.”
“You’re not old. How old are you? Did you ever teach, like Mom did?”
“No. I’m thirty-four, but it feels like two hundred.”
Gaspar sat down on the cushion, and his knee almost knocked over a bottle. His father steadied it to keep it from spilling, then picked it up and took a long drink. How had he not smelled the alcohol on his breath? Now Gaspar understood why he was receiving so much information: his dad was drunk. Again.
“Do you study that stuff because you could always predict things, or is it the other way around? Did you study in order to be able to predict things? Did you always see people?”
“Yes, but they don’t bother me. There’s a technique to avoid seeing them—you can turn it off at will, and I’m good at it.”
“It never fails?”
“Everything fails, but I’m not afraid of them. They’re echoes. Manifestations. They can’t touch us. It’s just disconcerting.”
“What does disconcerting mean?”
“Something that surprises you, that catches you unawares. What kind of vocabulary do they teach you at that school of yours?”
“They’re not bad teachers,” Gaspar insisted, “I just don’t use the dictionary that much.”
“If you say so.”
“Dad, am I going to see those things, those echoes?”
“No. But if you did, you’d know, no question.”
Gaspar sat thinking. Another long drink. The book his father had been reading fell to the floor and Gaspar looked at the title out of the corner of his eye: Selected Poems, John Keats. Then he picked it up, opened it, and read: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness . . .” He tried to translate it into Spanish: Estación de nieblas. Temporada de nieblas.
“Can I take it?”
“It’s hard. Use the dictionary. You’ll like Keats. He died very young, you know. At twenty-five. What else are you up to, son? I want to know what normal things you’ve been doing. Talk to me.”
Gaspar leaned his head against his father’s legs and decided that the episode of the box of eyelids wasn’t important, it had been part of a nightmare, it was forgiven, forgotten. He felt his father’s hand caressing his hair as he told him how Adela hadn’t liked his gift of the mirror box.
“Sick people are different,” his father told him.
“She’s not sick,” replied Gaspar.
“I know, but still, people who have physical problems are all alike, and we’re different from healthy people. If, for example, you gave me a wheelchair, I wouldn’t thank you for it.”
“Do you need one?”
“No, not yet. But if someone gave me a wheelchair, I’d burn it. You don’t need to understand it, you just need to know.”
“Will she get over being angry?”
“Probably—missing a limb isn’t the same as being about to die.”
“Don’t say that, Dad.”
“How do you want me to say it? Anyway, what else? Do you have a girlfriend? I heard you talking to a girl on the phone.”
“You heard? You were locked in here, I didn’t think you could hear anything. I had one, but she broke up with me. Her name’s Belén.”
“She broke up with you?”
“Yeah, she gave me a note saying she didn’t want to be my girlfriend anymore.”