Juan wasn’t the first man I had sex with. Before I left, when he found out, he got one of my grandfather’s shotguns and shot at Mercedes’ crystal glasses and French ceramics. The police came because the neighbors reported the gunshots. It was a few days before Christmas, and we lied and said the fireworks we were storing for the festivities had exploded in the heat. They partially believed it. My first lover was a long-distance runner I’d met at the Regatta Club. He attracted me because he seemed to understand my feeling of haste, of time running out. He had told me that as an athlete, he had a different notion of time. The runner wasn’t very good-looking and I never saw him again, but I think of him often because he talked to me of the importance of seconds, how nothing was more complicated than fighting against them, two or three made all the difference, and at the same time it was so stupid, so futile, to fight every day against thousandths of a second, against something the clocks barely registered, something almost no one else even noticed.

My grandfather said, Damn, Juancito knows how to shoot, who knew?, and that was it. He was already very depressed in those days, and he killed himself a few years later. I miss my grandfather every day, even though it’s a predictable fate for members of the Order and we’re taught to accept it. The house smelled like gunpowder for weeks—weeks that Juan spent locked in his room. When he came out, I told him he could find someone else too, and he shouted, Who’s going to want me? I told him, Oh, anyone will, you can take your pick, but he dismissed my words with a gesture of defeat. He never has realized what disquiet and fascination he provokes in other people. I was telling him the truth. At fifteen, Juan didn’t look like a teenager, and though he was delicate and pale, he had all the look of a man, with his broad back, prominent veins in his arms, that sad and arrogant look in his eyes.

I departed at night and left him crying: the driver was waiting for me, the suitcases already in the car. The drive to Ezeiza was long but hypnotic, and I didn’t feel sick until I boarded the plane. I didn’t know how much I was going to miss Juan or how unbearable his absence would be, but I felt free and distant and alone. It was what I wanted. Vomiting during the entire trip was a cleansing.