Gaspar pedaled to the woodshop. Though it was only two blocks away, he’d felt like riding his bike. He hadn’t seen his father that morning. He was still mad at him, and scared. It was always the same when he saw, whether by accident or not, some fragment of the secret world his father lived in. Why would he show him those things? Later, Juan would seem remorseful. Or worse: Gaspar felt it was like in those movies about people who were possessed, as though something got inside him and transformed him into someone else; the person who had shown him that box was not his father. He couldn’t explain it. The box with eyelids had been one of the most horrible souvenirs his father had let him see, but, like the others, it gradually transformed into a dream, the memory withdrew to a region where it was hard to access, where it lost strength. Gaspar realized that, even while the numb forgetting was comforting, it was also a strange thing. The incident with the box had not been a dream, that was clear, but he felt it like one, and it was more bearable like that. It was the same way he had almost forgotten the red handprints on the walls upstairs. Or the voice that had resounded in his head one night, so powerful he ran upstairs and banged on his father’s bedroom door until he opened it, disheveled and with something like a film of oil over his eyes. Or when he’d found his dad walking like a sleepwalker through the house with something written on his inner arm, two words he couldn’t forget: Solve and Coagula. He’d looked them up in the dictionary, but it turned out they weren’t Spanish words: they were Latin. There was a Latin dictionary in his school’s library, but it was always checked out. And anyway, sometimes he preferred not to know. His father had disappeared for a week after showing him the box of eyelids. Now he was back, but they hardly saw each other.

Gaspar had to pick up his present for Adela at the woodshop. He’d found the diagram in a book in the library at his house, and he’d torn out the page and given it to the carpenter so he could copy the design. The workshop was open but there was no one at the counter; Gaspar clapped and the sound of his hands echoed in the warehouse. Then he heard a door open, and when Don Sixto saw him, he shouted: Oh, wait just a sec, kiddo. And then he came from the back with the diagram and the box.

“Let’s see if it’s what you wanted,” he said.

Gaspar looked first at the diagram to be sure it was at least similar.