Pablo was standing up to leave when a movement in the empty hall made him gasp. He crouched back down on the stairs, with his eyes just peeking over the railing. A man was in the room, and he opened the curtains and the glass doors. In the moonlight—the backyard was unlit—Pablo saw he was naked. Then Gaspar’s father came out of one of the bedrooms. He was naked too, and Pablo thought he seemed huge under the silvery light, tall and strong. The man who had opened the windows was also tall, though less so; he walked to the other end of the room, where he knelt down and lit a candle. Pablo, of course, hadn’t seen the candles before, but as he followed the movement of the naked man—who had gray hair though his face wasn’t old, not at all, he seemed like his father’s age or a little older—he counted seven. Seven candles. And then he saw that there was a drawing on the floor of the empty hall: a white circle with something else drawn inside that Pablo couldn’t really distinguish. Lines, some circles. Gaspar’s dad entered the circle as though passing through a door, and, on his knees, he waited for the other naked man. The two of them sat for a moment face to face, completely still, until Gaspar’s dad kissed the other man, without tenderness, nothing like the kisses Pablo had seen in movies or like people gave in public, and suddenly he had trouble breathing again, because he had never seen two men kiss, he’d never imagined they could, he’d thought it was . . . forbidden? Something like that. Gaspar’s father sat on the floor, and Pablo watched as the naked man did something incredible, impossible: he sat on Gaspar’s father’s penis and they started to have sex, like the pictures in the porn magazines, only moving. He’d seen it in the ones Gaspar hid in the garage, sex like that, but not between two men: he’d seen a man putting it in a woman’s ass, and he’d thought it was gross. But he didn’t think it was gross now. He did feel ashamed at what he was watching, and at the same time he couldn’t look away: Gaspar’s father made the other man get on all fours on the floor, and, very upright, shining with sweat like a wet statue, he got behind him and they did it like dogs, in complete silence except for the slapping of bodies. Pablo was afraid they would see him hiding there, spying, but it was the best moment to run away, because they were so focused on what they were doing. But how to cross the stretch between the hall and the stairs without them noticing? Now Pablo felt all his sweat dry up and turn icy—the house wasn’t hot anymore, but something worse was happening: he sensed people in the rooms. He even heard the murmur of low conversations and the rise and fall of door handles. Upstairs and down. Footsteps on the stairs. The shadows from the candles made disproportionate shapes above the men’s bodies. His legs were paralyzed with dread, and at the same time, when he looked at the men—who were face to face again—he felt dizzy, as though his blood was growing lighter, and he felt like crying even though he wasn’t sad or scared; he didn’t understand what the men were doing inside that circle but he liked it, liked the strong arms braced against the floor, the backs damp with sweat and saliva, the way they grabbed each other’s cheeks and necks when they kissed, and the sweet, metallic smell that reached him there where he hid on the stairs. What could he do? Gaspar’s dad had his eyes closed and he was different, beautiful, thought Pablo, beautiful; everyone said he was sick, how was that possible? Weren’t sick people always ugly? In the dim light of the candles and the moon Pablo could see Gaspar’s dad’s chest and the long scar, but it looked like that, a scar, not a sign of weakness. It didn’t make him any less beautiful. The other man had scars on his back, Pablo could see. It looked like the two men had been cut by a single knife stroke, or were separated Siamese twins.