“How do you want me to say it? Anyway, what else? Do you have a girlfriend? I heard you talking to a girl on the phone.”

“You heard? You were locked in here, I didn’t think you could hear anything. I had one, but she broke up with me. Her name’s Belén.”

“She broke up with you?”

“Yeah, she gave me a note saying she didn’t want to be my girlfriend anymore.”

“And what did you do?”

“Nothing. Pablo told me that if I wrote her back and asked to stay together, she would say yes, because that’s what girls do. But I didn’t feel like it.”

“You don’t like her?”

“Yeah, I like her, but I don’t know what to talk to her about, she doesn’t talk much.”

Gaspar heard his father laugh softly. “I can’t help you there, son, I don’t know a thing about women.”

They were silent for a while. Gaspar closed his eyes. There wasn’t a sound in the house. He felt his father stroking his hair, slowly, with an almost feminine gentleness. What he hadn’t told him was that Belén’s letter, short and written in all uppercase letters, had made him punch the tiles in the bathroom. Not so much because of her—she bored him a little, except when she let him kiss and touch her—but because he was mad at himself for not knowing how to keep her. He shifted on the cushion to stretch out his legs and lean his head against his father’s ribs. He remembered how it had felt to sleep beside him when he was little, beside that enormous body and the heart with its violent and irregular beat.

“Gaspar, your friend is at the door.”

“What friend?”

“Adela, I think.”

“How do you know?”

“She was calling you. She threw something, a pebble, at your window. You dozed off.”

“I’d rather stay here with you.”

“And I’d rather you went. She’s waiting for you, go on.”

Gaspar stood up grumpily; he had drifted off, it was true, he could taste the sleep in his mouth. He picked up the Keats book and stood looking at his father from the door. He was going to say something (what? That he loved him?), but his dad had already taken another drink from the bottle, and his eyes were closing.