His uncle had sat beside him while he devoured some empanadas at the hospital restaurant, which was so nice and had such good food it was like a regular restaurant. He clearly didn’t know what to say, but first he apologized for having gotten angry. He said he “understood,” and they were just getting up to “mischief,” that it was normal for him to try to “escape” what was happening. Uncle Luis, said Gaspar, Adela got away from me. I tried to grab her in the house and she got loose. I let her go. She wanted to go inside and I took her and that was wrong, but on top of that I let her go. It’s not your fault, don’t do that to yourself, his uncle told him. Someone took her. Because of me, said Gaspar. Who else could be to blame?
He went back to his father. If he hasn’t died yet it’s because he wants to talk to me, he thought. Leaning over, he insisted: You know where she is. You know how I can find her. You helped me find the dog. This is the last thing I’m asking. You owe me. Open your eyes. I could open the door, the first one, but not the second. Why can I open some but not others? You have to talk to me.
Pablo came to see him. For Pablo, he left his father’s room and sat down in the restaurant. They ordered coffee with milk. Pablo told him the police had gone into about twenty houses. Including his. Raids. Then he said the police hadn’t seen doors in the house, or pretty much anything else. And no one believed them. They say what we saw in there was an optical illusion. From the shock. They don’t believe us about the teeth. Apparently, they found clothes in the house, new clothes, and they think they might belong to the guy who took Adela. They say maybe the guy put light in the house to attract us. They say someone kidnapped Adela. Was it the guy who was in the house?
“We don’t know if there was someone in the house,” said Gaspar. “That house is a trick. It told us a big lie. I’m going back to my dad.”
“Not yet,” said Pablo, and he went on talking: “A TV channel came round and interviewed the neighbors, including Hugo. They interviewed Vicky after she gave her statement in court. They’re talking about Adela on TV,” he said. “Haven’t you seen?”
“I’m not watching TV.”
“They want to interview you because I told them you got us out.”
“I’m not going to talk to anyone.”
Gaspar stood up, though he hadn’t touched his croissants. He looked at Pablo, who bowed his head, and suddenly he felt alone. Without thinking, he pushed the table aside to get closer to his friend, who, astonished, stood up. Gaspar hugged him tight, without tears. I have to get back to my dad, he said. I miss you guys. Vicky too, but I have to be with him.
Someone was in the room, sitting on the bed and talking to his uncle: the kid is in shock, he’s stressed, he’s depressed. Gaspar had gotten under the bed, and, from the floor, he watched what went on in the room. He didn’t even come out when a nurse came to “sanitize” his father, as they called it. They summoned him to court again and his uncle told them Gaspar couldn’t go, that he was sick, and they excused him. He found out later that a family lawyer intervened with a writ so they couldn’t summon him anymore. A psychologist evaluated him and determined that he was in no condition to give any more statements.
Gaspar felt sick and tired because sleeping meant dreaming of Adela, Adela who slipped from his hands like a little fish; they’d been in a fish tank where large eyes had seen everything. Whose eyes, only his father knew, and he was so far away, his own eyes black and opaque. Gaspar talked to him every day while his uncle watched them and cried a little.
Juan died in the early morning and Gaspar sensed it. First there was the silence: no more breathing. Then no more heartbeats were registered, just a single, continuous sound, an alarm. And then he felt the pain, so strong it forced him into a fetal position, though that was no relief. Still, after a while he stood up to look at his father. He wasn’t alone in the room: his uncle was there, and Dr. Biedma. On other occasions, especially in the hospital, Gaspar had seen her direct teams trying to revive his father. He had even seen her on top of him, pounding on his chest. She had done that just days earlier. Now she did nothing, because there was no point. Gaspar approached the head of the bed still hunched over: the pain he felt was as if invisible hands with nails like knives were tearing at his body. He saw his father’s eyes were black and open. He didn’t understand. Had he opened them to die? When he was about to ask, Dr. Biedma came over as well and closed his fixed eyes, two shining stones, and then Gaspar began to cry, and he cried standing beside his father’s bed—he didn’t dare touch him, couldn’t touch him—and then sitting on the bed where he had slept those final nights, and his uncle had to pick him up and carry him out of the room because he didn’t want to leave. Gaspar closed his eyes, and it was like turning out a light. He only had dreams. Dreams where he opened the door and found Adela. Dreams where she didn’t get away from him and he threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried her out of the house. Dreams where his father explained how to do it. Or where his father woke up and directed him in the search. Dreams where Gaspar got up from the mattress, his father already dead, already ashes on the bed, and went to the kitchen and slit his own throat with a knife, blood pouring out, drenching the walls, his pants, his face, his hands, until everything he saw was red and he could let himself die once and for all. He, too, could have black eyes.
IV
Chalk Circles
1960–1976
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse
1
My mother’s hair is fine and gray and her scalp shows through it. She’s nearly bald above her forehead, and for a long time now she hasn’t taken the trouble to comb her hair over the bare spot there. My mother’s family loses their hair very early, and they also go gray very young, as if they suffered from premature old age. It hasn’t happened to me, and my father assures me his creole blood saved me; he raises his fist to the sky when he says it, but never his eyes.
I was born in Buenos Aires, in the family residence on Avenida Libertador. The three of us—I’m an only child—got the fourth floor. My maternal aunt inherited the fifth, and my uncle, the third. The bottom two floors were used for parties and dinners and other rare social occasions, so they were almost always empty, though impeccable, with polished floors and shining dishes. I never liked that solemn building with its dark and heavy furniture, the floors of such expensive wood that we could never wear shoes, and my father’s art collection that didn’t leave a single blank space on the walls.
I liked our country house in Chascomús a little more. We never went to the other estates, which were more comfortable—some of them magnificent—because my mother preferred this modest quinta, the first house her family had occupied when they came to Argentina from England two hundred years ago. Near the house is the cemetery that in town they call “English,” even though it’s mostly Scottish people buried there. It’s small and very well cared for. My grandmother is buried there: she died really young and I used to like to visit her in my black dress and patent leather shoes. The cemetery is ours, in a way, because it’s my family that pays the expenses of the church, which is always empty, and of cleaning, keeping the place up for the very few tourists who are interested in this pampa curiosity, with its Celtic crosses and its dark green moss that will stick to your clothes.