At minute 56 in the final match Argentina was up 2–0, and they were all so crazed that Hugo Peirano broke a glass and the girls screamed so loud they had to be shushed just as loudly. You all are like animals, said Lidia. It’s like you saw a UFO. The Germans played well and tied with two almost identical goals from the left corner. The silence after the equalizer was absolute. In the eighty-fourth minute, Lothar Matth?us, the West German number 10, momentarily lost Maradona, whom he was marking. It wasn’t very obvious, just a second, but it was enough for Diego to make a long, perfect left-footed pass to Burruchaga. What a tough pass to make, thought Gaspar. And then he knew. It’s a goal, he said aloud. Shut up, shut up, said Hugo Peirano, who had also realized but didn’t want to get his hopes up. Burruchaga moved up, shot diagonally, gently, and scored the goal.
Gaspar didn’t see what happened next. He jumped up and hugged Pablo and everyone else, and the remaining five minutes, he knew, would be hard-fought, but useless to West Germany; Argentina were the champions and it felt like flying, as if nothing else existed but that moment, a moment that was forever and joyful and so sad because it couldn’t last. They had to go outside, no one could stay in. The streets were full of honking horns and curly-haired dolls wearing number 10 jerseys and flags and confetti. People were chanting, Mire mire qué locura, mire mire qué emoción, and what madness, what excitement, some neighbors brought their phones outside so family members living in other countries could hear the shouts, the drunkenness, and could cry from there, from Canada and the United States and Brazil and Mexico and Spain and France, exiled by dictatorship, working far away because there was never any work in Argentina, and some had watched the game in bars, others had listened on the radio, they all wanted to come back and be there, even in those provinces where it was raining and people were celebrating drenched, their jerseys stuck to their skin. In the park people brought speakers outside and there was dancing and grilled chorizos and wine, the empanada shop cooked for the people and everyone ended up lying in the grass come nightfall, having cried and eaten their fill and shouted themselves hoarse, dressed in blue and white from head to toe.
Gaspar would remember that day, and that night, as the last happy ones in many, too many years.
Pablo saw Gaspar as soon as he came out of school, and hurried over. It was unusual for him to be there waiting. Gaspar offered him a ride on his bike. Pablo said he would rather walk. Then Gaspar invited him to eat at the café in the park. Or were they expecting him at home?
“Is something wrong?” asked Pablo.
“I need a favor. I need to borrow your home phone to call Brazil.”
“That’s expensive, man. You’ve got a phone.”
“The money’s not a problem, I’ll pay your folks. In advance, before the bill comes.”
“But you ask them. You want to talk to your uncle? Didn’t you say he was coming back to Argentina?”
Gaspar put a hand to his forehead, as he did when he was uncertain, when he was nervous. Pablo noticed his pants were falling down because he’d lost weight. The long belt he used hung down as if he had a snake around his waist.
“He did come back, apparently. But I don’t know where he is. And his ex-wife is there, in Brazil, maybe she can give me his new number. Maybe she doesn’t have it, but it doesn’t hurt to try.”
“And you can’t call from your house.”
“My dad doesn’t want me to talk to my uncle. He says he’ll take care of it when the time is right. But, man, I don’t know if he’s right in the head.”
Pablo was silent. Gaspar continued.
“I can’t call from my house. He’ll know. I don’t want to make him mad.”
“And what are you going to talk about with your uncle?”
“I don’t really know. I’m going to tell him about Dad, I’ll tell him he needs to come, he said he was going to be here with us. Otherwise, I’m going to have to get in touch with my grandparents and that really will drive Dad crazy, he hates them. I don’t know what to do. He has to be the one to plan it. Or else they’ll send me to a home to be adopted.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Of course it is, that’s how it works, Pablo.”
“My mom is home now. We can ask her permission.”
“I have the money.”
“They might not charge you.”
“I want to pay.”
The phone conversation was very strange. The whole situation was, really. Pablo’s mom accepted payment for the call immediately, and it seemed pretty rude to Gaspar: he’d expected her to start out saying “no, no need,” then he would insist, then there’d be a resigned, “well, okay.” That’s how most people behaved. He didn’t like that woman. She was quite pregnant, sure, but she wasn’t about to burst, and she moved with an exaggerated slowness that Gaspar didn’t find believable.
At his uncle’s house in Brazil, a woman answered the phone. Gaspar knew Luis didn’t live there anymore and he was expecting a woman to answer, but until that moment he’d thought it would be a Brazilian woman. He’d even learned how to say hello and a few other words in Portuguese with a dictionary he’d consulted at the library. But the woman spoke Spanish. A strange Spanish, with an accent he didn’t know: she used tú instead of the Argentine vos, and she rolled her double r’s. But she was nice to him. She told him his uncle still didn’t have a phone at his new place, but she could give him the address. And she did. The woman told him, as well, that his uncle—she called him by his name, Luis—sometimes called her, and she would ask him to get in touch with Gaspar. He said that’d be good, thank you, and immediately regretted it, but at the same time, he thought, his uncle did call on occasion, it wasn’t so strange, there was no reason for him to say he’d received a message from his ex-wife. It occurred to him to ask that Luis not tell his dad he had called, but it seemed too complicated, and the woman clearly wanted to get off the phone. She was friendly, but after answering his questions she fell silent. Gaspar thanked her and hung up, and he looked at the address he’d jotted down.
“Do you know where Villa Elisa is?” he asked Pablo, who shook his head but knelt down to find the T-Guide his father used. They paged through it and soon found the place: it was near La Plata, the capital of the province, and the streets were numbered, just as the woman had indicated. Gaspar felt that the knot he’d had in his throat for days was loosening: now at least he had somewhere to go. He could even visit if he wanted: the T-Guide said you could get there on a train from Constitución.
The cold was good for walking Ariadna, Vicky’s new dog, who was still a puppy and pulled desperately at the leash. After what had happened with Diana, Vicky wouldn’t let her loose in the street for a second. Gaspar liked to go with her on walks around the neighborhood after school, at dusk; the leash was red, like the elastic band Vicky wore in her hair and Adela’s cable-knit sweater with one arm cut off. Her phantom limb no longer bothered her, and she told everyone about it, showing them the box Gaspar had given her. The magic box, she called it. She’d confronted her mother and her physiotherapist about the box and neither of them had given her answers. They all lie, she insisted.