Gaspar stared at the doctor and then at his father, who didn’t seem troubled. He felt the humiliation filling his cheeks with blood.
You’re telling me I have amnesia like we’re in a soap opera. You’re treating me like I’m stupid. Then he pointed a finger at his father, who remained impassive. It was you, he shouted. You did this to me.
His father finally spoke. Slowly, like the doctor. The scrapes are from when we pulled you from the car. The bruises are from the crash. I wasn’t driving, I didn’t hurt you.
You’re lying, said Gaspar, and he got out of bed again. Putting weight on his foot was terrible, but he tried. He took three steps; the doctor, following an order from his father—a slight hand movement—let him go. Gaspar hopped to the door; outside, in the hallway, Esteban was waiting. He had a bandage around his neck, and his right arm—he was wearing a dark, short-sleeved shirt—was covered in bloody scrapes. When he saw that, Gaspar hesitated: what if it was true about the accident? No. Amnesia, they’d said. He wouldn’t let them lie to him like that, it was ridiculous. He acted fast: on one side, the hallway led to more bedrooms, but to his right there was light—a yard? He ran toward it. Now it didn’t hurt to take steps. His gym teacher always said you shouldn’t run when you’re wounded, that you wouldn’t feel the pain because of the adrenaline, but he didn’t care. No, not a yard: it was a luminous great room, with an enormous window with two types of panes, one clear and the other mustard-colored, in the form of a chessboard; the floor—he glimpsed it as he ran across—was of ceramic tiles forming shapes like in a kaleidoscope. The door was open and led out to a park. Gaspar, before speeding up as much as he could—he was limping now, and could no longer run—heard his father shout, Let him go!, and he thought the shout was surely directed at Esteban, who, he thought, was following him. Outside, he went down a cement path that led to a table with chairs, all made of stone and decorated with tile mosaics, and then to a tree with a swing, and then to the edge of the park, marked off with a wire that, even injured, he had no trouble lifting up and going under. Then, open fields, idle land, and Gaspar ran as best he could, which wasn’t very well; his foot made him cry out in pain, but as he ran he remembered, he was on a table and his father was on another and there were people, not many, it looked like something medical, an operation, his father looked asleep, Gaspar tried to wake up but he couldn’t, and he couldn’t distinguish the people’s faces, or were they too far away? He remembered someone grabbed him by the arms, hard, as if their fingers were metal, fingers that closed around his arms. Maybe that was in the car?
No, the story about the car was a lie. He still felt dirty under his skin, he couldn’t explain it, had they injected him with oil? He looked at his arms. There were needle marks. He ran. His ankle twisted again and he fell, and when he tried to get up he couldn’t do it, the pain immobilized him now. There was no point in crawling. He had fallen face-first and his lips were bleeding. He turned over and looked at the sky. It was dark gray, a compact, cloudless mass that looked very close, about to crush him. Only once before had he seen the sky like that, in the city, and from that low darkness had come powerful hail, chunks of ice, some as large as golf balls or plums. His entire body hurt, even more so after the fall, and his foot was on fire, but he tried to get up again when his father’s face appeared, his transparent eyes taking on the gray of the sky. Gaspar moaned when he tried to stand, and he fell again on to his back. He wanted to believe the story of the crash and the amnesia, but, with a certainty that he recognized and wasn’t about to ignore, he knew that his father had hurt him. In a deep and unimaginable way, of which the bruises and cuts and the bump on his head were merely slight, superficial vestiges.
He couldn’t get up: the pain in his foot made him lose his balance. And then his father, with an incredible strength—wasn’t he dying? Shouldn’t he be weak?—held him down on the ground, on the grass, resting his enormous hand on his chest, an elephant’s foot, the wheel of a truck.
“Gaspar, I’m not going to argue about what you’re feeling. But I didn’t hurt you. I’m protecting you the best I can and as far as I know how to do it.”
“Protecting me from what?”
Gaspar felt his father’s hand letting up, reducing the pressure on his chest, but he didn’t run away. He sat up. He was crying, he realized only then: the tears had soaked his neck. His father looked calm and aloof, as before.
“I don’t believe you,” said Gaspar.
“That’s okay. I wouldn’t believe something I didn’t understand either. But I need you to trust me. What do I have to do for you to trust me? When I die, I’m going to leave you protected. It’s the last thing I’m going to do, and I know I’ll make it in time.”
Gaspar saw Esteban standing next to his father. He was looking up, sniffing the storm, his jaw tense. He had taken the bandage off his neck and the wound—the one from the supposed crash—looked bad, dark, with very red edges. It looked like a bite.
“Prove it. If I was in the hospital and they did X-rays, I want to see them.”
“All right. Let’s go now.”
Gaspar watched as his father stood up. Esteban came over and offered him his shoulder to lean on, but Gaspar refused it. The house was about half a block away; he hadn’t run very far. He wanted to get ahead of them so they wouldn’t have an advantage. He fell twice on the way back: the electricity from the storm, the humidity, the blow to his head—it was all making him dizzy. Esteban and his father let him have his head start.
Esteban brought him to the bedroom so he could get dressed—his clothes were in a bag, no one had unpacked them and put them into the empty drawers—then helped him into the front seat of the car. Gaspar wasn’t so suspicious of Esteban, at least not as much as he was of his dad. The wound on Esteban’s neck somehow made him feel that maybe he had defended him. His dad didn’t have a scratch on him.
His father’s hands had grown: very large hands. He had that image, that memory—where had it come from? His father with very long fingers, like an animal’s? With golden claws? He didn’t want to look at him. The sky was black now and Dr. Biedma stated the obvious, that a storm was coming and they needed to hurry. She and Juan rode in the backseat. Gaspar saw his father rubbing the short beard he’d let grow. How could he be so calm? Gaspar knelt on the seat, hugged the backrest, and peered over: that way he was in line with his father’s face.
“What did you do to me? Tell me what you did.”
His father was losing patience, and Gaspar felt the stifling heat in the car and the danger in the air, the electricity of the storm that made the hairs on his arms stand up. For a second he thought about opening the door and jumping out on to the road.
“I didn’t do anything to you. You’re wrong, and you’re stupid.”
“Don’t call me stupid.”
“You’re behaving like a stupid person.”
“Then help me.”
“I pulled you out of the car. And you remember that.”
“Liar. I don’t remember.”