Gaspar circled the club building, its dining room open but empty of customers—surely because of the rain and the hour: people would start to arrive closer to dinner time—and went in. The owner and the only waiter both knew him: sometimes he stopped in for a snack on Saturday and Sunday afternoons after swimming, or he’d even do his homework at one of the tables that had a view of the most wooded part of the park. He did that when his father was in a very bad mood, which in the past year had been more and more frequent, to the point that Gaspar had started to miss him, as if that man who lived in his house were someone else, someone who was ever more silent, violent and distant.

He asked both of them if they had seen the dog, but neither the waiter nor the owner remembered seeing a German shepherd; there were a lot of dogs that ran around the park and they knew most of them, even gave them food, but they hadn’t noticed a new one. Gaspar accepted the glass of Fanta the owner offered him, then went on scouring the steps on either side of the fountain. The park was built on a small hill that rose up in the middle and ended at the outdoor pool, which was already closed until the following summer. He circled around the pool and stood looking at the diving board. He squeezed between the narrow bars—it was a little tight: even though he was very thin, he would soon be too big to fit through them—and called Diana with a whistle that he knew the dog would recognize. Nothing. He went around the pool and called again: strange, the caretaker wasn’t there. Maybe he’d taken the afternoon off, since it was drizzling and no one was likely to sneak into the water. Gaspar did, sometimes: he liked to swim when it was cold outside, to emerge shivering from the water, with the pool for him alone and no one watching. His father didn’t know about those escapades, of course.

He closed his eyes. His cheek hurt, and so did his knees a little; they were still bleeding a bit, he’d noticed in the bathroom, and he could already feel the skin tightening around the incipient scabs.