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“Your dad suffered a lot, and there are people who turn bitter when they have such a bad time of it.”
“Tell them to wait for me, because I think I’m getting better.”
Gaspar told Julieta that he wanted to “know things,” that being sick had “made him dumb.” That when he was with his friends, they’d listened to music, watched movies.
Plus, there was nothing in the house. Nothing dangerous, nothing evil. The house was clean. The things he saw, the apparitions of his father or Adela, belonged to him, not the house. He would bring them wherever he went.
Gaspar felt he couldn’t ascend to that level with them. He’d said as much to Isabel. It’s like we’re all going up a flight of stairs together and at a certain point I say “this is as far as I go.” And on that step, higher up, they’re all happy and I watch them from below.
He could dance when he was alone, he could get emotional in his room with a book, but when the party started he disconnected, the others turned into a movie that he could watch but not participate in. So he acted like he was invisible, which wasn’t hard when everyone was drunk. And he withdrew into his room, where he felt the purest kind of relief.
Later he heard Negro say to his uncle, “He’s a sad kid.” And he waited for his uncle’s agreement, his yes, his disappointment. But Luis surprised him. No, he told Negro. He’s not sad. It’s his temperament. And even if he was sad, so what? He is the way he is. Getting plastered and shouting to high heaven isn’t for everyone. We make noise to fill the hole we have inside.
but he thought: sometimes you have to lie to take care of someone. I already lie to you. I hide things. And I’m going to keep lying to you.
He hated change: that was it. If only things could always be the same, if only this house, so like a port in a storm, could be standing forever, and always for us, no additions, no time, no future.
and now this limbo—stabilized, it was called. He was stable, so balanced
Evil places wait for evil things to reoccur, or else they seek it out. “It’s like a magnet,”
but when he got in the shower and the hot water hit the back of his neck, he felt a ferocious urge to hurt himself. He hadn’t been able to keep Marita with him. She knew it didn’t make sense to stay with a crazy, sick man, a ruined person. What could he give her? They didn’t even get drunk together, he and his pills kept her from having fun; he often had to go to sleep early because he was dead tired. He talked to her about poets and his childhood in an empty house. He’d gone with her to bury her friends because he knew all about that, about death and friends who were never coming back.
“I want someone to beat the shit out of me,” said Gaspar, and although his voice came from a hardened throat, though his voice was thick, he wasn’t crying and he wasn’t going to cry. “To be beaten to death, that’s what I want. I killed a girl, I deserve it all. Marita left me, she’s with another guy, I’m a piece of shit.”
Well, in this house you will not be punished for what you didn’t do.
“Don’t be so hard on her. Life is different in practice.”
Vicky liked that summer at the hospital, the first of her internships. She even preferred being at the hospital to going to school, despite the tension and the many sleepless hours and that fevered state of forced insomnia. Some of her colleagues took stimulants—amphetamines, most of them; coffee, everyone; cocaine, some—but she had learned that after a while the lack of sleep became a kind of burning pilot light: she was alert, she smoldered and conserved energy. There was no need to stoke the fire.
It was soothing to think of illness as an answer and disorder as an explanation. But the truth had a way of rising to the surface, of scratching at the skin, of kicking you in the back of the neck.
For him, alcohol loosened something that was tightly fastened, a chain whose lock he’d been trying for years to find.
As she was now, distant and with a different life, he liked Marita even more.
and, more importantly, the police couldn’t enter university buildings because they were autonomous.
It was a dance, Gaspar thought now. A way of pushing him away by insinuating the desire to keep him, a very smart way of going in circles. Julieta loved him. Julieta had saved him just as much as his uncle had. But now she wanted to get away from him.
She was attracted to him, that was never the problem. The day she’d seen him for the first time outside the Princesa, shy, just out of high school, beautiful, with his dark hair combed back, she’d thought he had a tragic face that reminded her of all those dangerous and delicate boys she fell for, James Dean looking at the stars, Motorcycle Boy playing pool. That first sensation had diluted over time, and in their last months together, all that had remained was his melancholy, and also his anger: if he got mad, he could destroy something valuable (she remembered how he’d once thrown a camera
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She understood that, in part, she was fed up. Activism was surprisingly homogeneous, the discussions were circular, the offenses identical, the dues to be paid insurmountable.
That day, Marita wanted to be a part of that family again.
and she enjoyed the stab of jealousy she felt.
“People always tell you things. You’ve got something about you. That look that says, ‘I have the power of a dark experience, come to me.’ ”
That Marita was there only brought him moments of relief, pleasant pangs.
She wanted to hear about the years they’d spent apart. And he told her how, little by little, things had stopped interesting him.
“And I can’t get interested in anything.
I mean, you still like to read, you’re still into that.” “That’s the only thing, yeah. Reading.
‘In my temples it throbs, throbs. The shadow. The cold muzzle of the gun. Ten tons. In my heart a half-tone in minor key.’
“ ‘There will be stars over the place forever; / Though the house we loved and the street we loved are lost…’ ”
There was a black heart that needed him and someday he would fulfill its wishes, because when you can’t fight, the only way to be at peace is to surrender.
She was late for her appointment with the university press’s director, all because Gaspar had been too furious to let her get a good night’s sleep. And she had to work. Gaspar was selfish sometimes: his drama came before everything else. She knew, though, that when she got home that evening, he would probably have calmed down and would apologize. She was aware that they had to break that cycle somehow, and she trusted that they would, with the correct therapy.
Mental illness is terrible, Marita, it can devastate a person.
And at the end, she was just a shadow of herself.
Sometimes Marita could be complicated, too, though she had the reputation of an easygoing girl.
but Luis had taught him anyway, because he believed a person needed to know how to drive, otherwise they weren’t fully free.
Gaspar was so different from the child he remembered. It had been a real blow to see him in ruins: at twenty-five years old his beauty was simply extraordinary, healthy but so heavy with death.
He was a servant. Esteban had told him that he was a servant, too. But no, Gaspar had told him. It’s one thing to be the black sheep. You’re the black sheep, the prodigal son, the family’s shame. You could conform. All I can do is rebel. My dad could only rebel. Nonconformity is only possible for those who are not slaves. Everyone else has to fight.
Gaspar had killed his family and he stayed on in the house, unsteady, meandering, but with no intention of leaving. If he puts a bullet in me one night, thought Gaspar, it’s fair. Still, he felt safe.
At night, when he went out to the beach to smoke, Gaspar thought about the procession he had led. It had been another sacrifice, like Adela’s, but this time he’d known what he was doing. He didn’t regret it. He wasn’t afraid of retaliation. He slept with a peace he had never known before. Stephen, on the other hand, though he had guided Gaspar in the massacre, and had planned it for so long with Juan, was as disconsolate as the last speaker of a dying language.
Or maybe they were going to be two solitary men sharing a secret in that still house, year after year, who would run into each other in the early-morning hours, unable to sleep, incapable of forgetting how the hanged man swaying in the wind had no shadow.
In the Other Place, time was a different thing.
When someone is gone, their voice is the first thing you forget. “I’m going to come back,” he told her. “I need time. I was never brave. I’m learning.”
