Gaspar went back to his father’s room. He paged through the notebooks he was going to take with him in his backpack. He had the feeling one was missing: he remembered a notebook with drawings, a lot of symbols that his father went over and corrected very attentively. They weren’t doodles; he didn’t know what meaning those geometrical signs held, and his father had always lied and said he drew them for fun. You always thought I believed your lies, Gaspar said in a low voice as he opened the backpack. But I was also inside your head. Not so much, I could never break through the barrier, but I knew there was a barrier, Dad, I felt it. Why did you have to put it up? That’s what I wonder.

He looked for the notebook in every drawer, even in the kitchen. He couldn’t find it. He asked his uncle, who said I didn’t touch anything. I don’t know if your dad’s friend had a key, I don’t know if he took anything. Esteban: Gaspar could imagine him taking the special things, the ones they shared, the secrets they surely kept. The notebooks he did take, though, had some unnerving notes. One said: “ ‘When we call upon the devil with the required ceremonies, the devil comes and we see him. In order not to die, struck down by this vision, in order not to become cataleptic or insane, one must already be crazy.’ Levi.” So that’s what you did. You invoked the Devil. Or maybe his dad was only interested in the subject out of pure boredom. From spending all his time alone in bed with no one to talk to. But no, there was something more, it wasn’t boredom. The cuts, the ones he’d given Gaspar and the ones he’d given himself. The night they’d scattered his mother’s ashes in the river. The way he could divine things. His father could find what was lost. His father knew when someone was going to die. His father had talked to him about the dead who rode in on the wind. The dead travel fast.

His last year of high school, Gaspar discovered the Princesa Cultural Center, just two hundred meters down from his school. The façade was painted red and the paint was recent, because that color was impossible to miss—it looked like blood had been spilled over the house. Also, the name of the place was in both graffiti and neon, so it could be seen at night. That first time, at seven in the evening with the neon already lit and the music drifting out through the open door, the place attracted Gaspar enough that he ran across the street, ignoring the car horns. It was raining a little, and his black sneakers got wet.