One day, after the World Cup, Adela had asked for a meeting with Vicky and Gaspar. She’d said it like that. I want a meeting. Not with Pablo, because he gets idiotic. And at the meeting, which was held in Vicky’s room, she told them how during the trip to the south, her mom had gotten drunk one night.
“She was a different kind of drunk this time,” Adela told them. “She started to cry about my dad. And I took my chance to get information, because she never talks to me about him. She told me he’d been murdered, that he’s one of the disappeared.”
Gaspar and Vicky drew sharp breaths, but exchanged glances: what if this was another story, like the one about her arm and the Dobermann?
Then, Adela went on, her mom hadn’t wanted to tell her anything else, and she’d gone into the bathroom.
“I didn’t even realize that happened,” said Vicky.
“It was in Esquel, when we were at the cabin. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, I don’t know. Plus, she told me something really important: that she dreams about Dad, a lot, and she always dreams he’s in the house on Calle Villarreal. I asked her if he’d ever hidden out there and she said yes, but I don’t know if it’s true, because she was pretty out of it. At a certain point when she’s drunk, she gets kind of delirious and she’ll say anything, she’ll say yes just to get out of something, for example. But maybe he did hide there, right?”
“Did you ask her again?” Vicky asked.
“Now she denies everything, same as she always does, but she was really clear when she talked about the house.”
“Come on, Adela,” huffed Gaspar. “Don’t make stuff up. I know you want to go in, but not like that.”
“What do you know?” Adela had shouted. “Everyone lies. I do want to go in, yeah, I want to see if I can find anything of my dad’s in there.”
Gaspar had left the meeting irate, but the anger had passed quickly. He was too worried about his own father to stay offended about the imaginary disappearance of Adela’s.
Vicky ran, pulled along by Ariadna, and they turned on to Villarreal. She instinctively crossed so as not to pass the door of the house, and Gaspar followed her, but Adela didn’t. She went over to the iron door and then into the yard. Gaspar and Vicky waited for her on the opposite sidewalk.
“I haven’t heard it in a long time,” said Vicky.
“The buzzing?”
“Yeah, that noise like of insects I heard before is gone. Maybe it’ll come back in summer.”
“Maybe it was a generator.”
“You know it wasn’t.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Don’t fight with me.”
“I’m not fighting. What’s she doing?”
“She wants to see if the door can open. But even if she breaks it, there’s a padlock on it.”
“It won’t open. I’ll take you both when you want to go in.”
“She wants to climb on to the roof.”
“There’s nowhere to grab hold. There’s not even a tree, it’s all dry, it looks like my house.”
And when he said that, when he said “it looks like my house,” Gaspar felt a shiver run through his entire body.
“Adela, come on, the dog’s going crazy,” shouted Vicky. And then she told Gaspar: “Now she thinks her father was a guerrilla fighter and she’s reading books and magazines about the dictatorship.”
Gaspar said nothing. Adela came running over.
“When are you going to help me go in?” she asked Gaspar. “You said after the World Cup.”
“In spring we’ll go in.”
Gaspar looked at the house. The two bricked-up windows, the yellow grass, the gray walls. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt like the house was challenging him. Let’s just see if you can get in, it was saying. Was he crazy? Pablo had told him he’d had to cover Adela’s mouth to get her to stop talking about the house, but not just because he was sick of it: he was scared. Ariadna saw another neighbor coming toward them with his dog and she dragged Vicky, who had to struggle to keep her away. And so they left the house behind, but Adela shot Gaspar one of her definitive looks: it would be in September, and now no one was going to take that date, that goal, away from her.
It was winter vacation, and Gaspar spent a lot of time at the heated club pool. He also stayed home a lot, waiting for his uncle to call. His enthusiasm for watching soccer had evaporated after the World Cup, and the only thing he wanted now was to hear the phone ring. But when he finally found out his uncle had called, the news took him by surprise. His father informed him, calmly, while drinking a cup of tea in the dried-up backyard. He’d been feeling better for a few days now.
“Why did you call your uncle without telling me, son?” he asked, downing the rest of the tea. “Don’t try to lie to me.”
Juan set the mug down in the yard and went inside. Gaspar followed him, angry.
“Because you’re never going to call him!” he shouted. “You’re going to leave me with I don’t know who, or all alone. Maybe you want me to be alone.”
“You don’t know anything, son.”
Gaspar saw his father was heading up to the first floor. If he went into the upstairs room, he’d get away. And he didn’t want to let him hide. He wanted to tell his father what he was feeling. He grabbed him by the arm on the stairs and felt the rage burning in his eyes. He managed to make his father stop and turn around. He looked so tall there, two steps up, looking down at him with his eyes that were a little yellow and a little green, beside the stairway window that looked out on to the patio.
“Gaspar, your uncle is going to come when I ask him to.”
Gaspar smiled and pressed on his temples.
“I don’t want to be with you,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go sooner, you can’t stop me. I have my uncle’s address. Or else I’ll look for my grandparents. Maybe they do want to see me. Maybe you’re the problem. I know you’re sick but I don’t know, let your friends take care of you. I can’t take this anymore.”
His father gave him a look that was so different, so deeply disappointed and furious that Gaspar got scared. He’d seen him angry thousands of times, but now he felt he was in danger, the same kind of danger he’d felt at the Chascomús estate. He turned around to go down the stairs, to retreat from the confrontation, but he couldn’t move. His father had grabbed him by the waist. Gaspar thought he was going to hit him and he cowered; the punch he was expecting landed on the glass window, which shattered and left sharp, jagged edges. And then, quickly and unexpectedly, Juan turned Gaspar back toward him. Terrified but also surprised, Gaspar watched as his father yanked his arm to the window and pierced it with the broken glass; he cut the skin with precision, with cruelty and precision, as if he were drawing a design. Gaspar screamed; the pain was cold and unbearable and it blinded him, and when he heard the glass hit bone, he felt dizzy and moaned. There was a hot wetness on his pants: he was pissing himself, and when he looked at his father to plead for mercy, he saw he was completely concentrated on the wound, studying it. The pain made his body go slack and he hung there, and the only thing keeping him from rolling down the stairs was his wounded arm that his father held on to, and he screamed again when Juan brought his lips to the wound and licked it, sucked it, filled his mouth with blood. Without letting go of Gaspar, he cut his own arm with a shard of broken glass. Brutally, he pressed his own wound against Gaspar’s lips.