There was something in that hot morning and the boy’s slippery skin in his hands that made him feel Rosario beside him. He remembered her shivering from the cold in the English countryside, remembered her singing him a song that said tonight will be fine, dancing to a Bowie song and complaining that they never played good music on the radio; he remembered her neck, and her breasts, which were large though she never wore a bra, not even after Gaspar was born, and the mornings when he woke her up and she protested, Let me sleep, but after a while she returned his embrace, and he lifted up her legs, put them over his shoulders, and caressed her with his tongue and fingers until she was wet.

He couldn’t find her. He could see that poor pregnant woman at the hotel, he could see hundreds of murder victims every day, and yet he couldn’t reach her. He had said to her once when she was alive, as a joke, imitating a character in a novel, Please don’t leave me alone, haunt me. He’d said it in English, “haunt me,” because there were no words in Spanish for that verb, not embrujar, not aparecer, it was haunt. She had laughed it off. He was supposed to die first—it was the most logical thing. It was ridiculous he was even still alive.

Sometimes he thought Rosario was hiding. Or that something was keeping her from reaching him. Or that she had gone too far away.

“What now?”

“Now put your head underwater. But without holding your nose.”

“I’ll drown.”

“You definitely won’t drown.”

They practiced holding their breath above water. Gaspar filled his cheeks with air, and Juan started to feel the unmistakable pain in his temples. Too much time in the sun. But he wasn’t going to leave the river until the boy learned to hold his breath.

Back under the tree, he poured cold soda into a cup and added some of the ice cubes that by now were floating in the cooler. He swallowed two pills and closed his eyes, lying back against the exposed roots until the pain retreated a little. His head was still pounding, but at least it now throbbed in a regular, slow rhythm.

“I didn’t drown,” Gaspar said suddenly.

“See? Swimming is easy, you’ll learn fast.”

“Are you going to wake up?”

“I’m not sleeping, I’m resting.”

“Want a sandwich?”

“No, we’ll eat later. And tonight, we’ll see Tali.”

“Can I make a sandwich for me?”

The best way to get one’s bearings on the way to Tali’s house was to keep a lookout for an old, rusty iron bridge by the highway; it had fallen out of use and had been overtaken by the unstoppable vegetation of the Argentine littoral region, with its lianas and flowers. Once you passed the bridge, you’d see the old Chapel of the Devil appear, and then you just had to go straight along a dirt road that became impassible if it was muddy. The chapel was the formal entrance to Colonia Camila. Tali loved living there, in that town of two hundred people and two corner stores.