“I just want to know.”

His father leaned down to his level. His eyes were as puffy as if he’d been punched, but he looked better than on other days, less tired.

“Pick whatever book you want. Read whatever you want.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Gaspar tiptoed over to the bookshelf. There was so much to choose from! Above all the books, in a wooden box on the shelf nearest the ceiling, were his mother’s ashes. Gaspar had once asked his dad to open the box so he could see them. Nothing shocking: it looked more like dirt than ashes. He had cried because his mom was nothing but that, a pile of dust in a box, but he hadn’t been scared. He wasn’t disturbed by that box in the corner. His father told him that when the moment came, he was going to throw the ashes into the river. But the years went by and they stayed right where they were.

Now Gaspar looked over the shelves and through the piles of books, turning around the ones whose spines were facing the wall. Some were in English. Dion Fortune, he read, The Training and Work of an Initiate. Others were in Spanish. Juan Carlos Onetti, El pozo, Thomas Hardy, Jude el oscuro, Françoise Sagan, Buenos días, tristeza. García Lorca, Keats, Yeats, Blake, Eliot, Neruda: the poetry books Gaspar always borrowed because he liked them. He moved to another, taller shelf: Babylonian Magic and Sorcery, Leonard W. King. The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant. Finally, at the end of one somewhat sagging shelf, he found the spine that seemed to be the chosen one: The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, by Eliphas Lévi. It was a paperback, gray and very worn. He pulled it out and showed it to his father, who nodded.

“Read anything you want.”

Gaspar opened the book randomly. Page 44 had a drawing of a six-pointed star, a little similar to the Star of David. He read: “This is why material elements which are analogous to the divine elements are thought of as four, are explained by two, and only exist in the end as three. Revelation is the duality; all verbs are twofold and suppose two.” I don’t understand a thing, he thought. He opened to the chapter called “Black Magic,” and was disappointed that it was only a single page. It started by saying that fearful people should close the book, but the warning meant nothing to him. Nor did the chapter. What it said was much less terrifying than what he’d seen himself in lots of movies. He looked curiously at his father, who smiled at him again without mockery, but with a certain sadness.

“Boring, right?”

“Can I try another one?”

“No. They’re not much different. Gaspar, that’s what I do.”

“What?”

“I study what those books say.”

“Alone? Is there a place where people study that?”

Gaspar saw his father lie down again on the sofa and toss a cushion down on the floor, close by.