Someone was in the room, sitting on the bed and talking to his uncle: the kid is in shock, he’s stressed, he’s depressed. Gaspar had gotten under the bed, and, from the floor, he watched what went on in the room. He didn’t even come out when a nurse came to “sanitize” his father, as they called it. They summoned him to court again and his uncle told them Gaspar couldn’t go, that he was sick, and they excused him. He found out later that a family lawyer intervened with a writ so they couldn’t summon him anymore. A psychologist evaluated him and determined that he was in no condition to give any more statements.

Gaspar felt sick and tired because sleeping meant dreaming of Adela, Adela who slipped from his hands like a little fish; they’d been in a fish tank where large eyes had seen everything. Whose eyes, only his father knew, and he was so far away, his own eyes black and opaque. Gaspar talked to him every day while his uncle watched them and cried a little.

Juan died in the early morning and Gaspar sensed it. First there was the silence: no more breathing. Then no more heartbeats were registered, just a single, continuous sound, an alarm. And then he felt the pain, so strong it forced him into a fetal position, though that was no relief. Still, after a while he stood up to look at his father. He wasn’t alone in the room: his uncle was there, and Dr. Biedma. On other occasions, especially in the hospital, Gaspar had seen her direct teams trying to revive his father. He had even seen her on top of him, pounding on his chest. She had done that just days earlier. Now she did nothing, because there was no point. Gaspar approached the head of the bed still hunched over: the pain he felt was as if invisible hands with nails like knives were tearing at his body. He saw his father’s eyes were black and open. He didn’t understand. Had he opened them to die? When he was about to ask, Dr. Biedma came over as well and closed his fixed eyes, two shining stones, and then Gaspar began to cry, and he cried standing beside his father’s bed—he didn’t dare touch him, couldn’t touch him—and then sitting on the bed where he had slept those final nights, and his uncle had to pick him up and carry him out of the room because he didn’t want to leave. Gaspar closed his eyes, and it was like turning out a light. He only had dreams. Dreams where he opened the door and found Adela. Dreams where she didn’t get away from him and he threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried her out of the house. Dreams where his father explained how to do it. Or where his father woke up and directed him in the search. Dreams where Gaspar got up from the mattress, his father already dead, already ashes on the bed, and went to the kitchen and slit his own throat with a knife, blood pouring out, drenching the walls, his pants, his face, his hands, until everything he saw was red and he could let himself die once and for all. He, too, could have black eyes.