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.

IV

Chalk Circles

1960–1976

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse

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