“I don’t know if you’re going to have enough poets, but there are painters, too,” said Gaspar.

“I know about those,” said Pablo. “And I already thought about it. I don’t want them. Only poets. And I especially don’t want musicians, that’s too obvious and really tacky.”

I’ll keep looking, said Gaspar, and he spent nights with Marita asleep beside him, underlining dead poets, most of them suicide victims. Sometimes he read to her in bed and she asked him to repeat some parts. Aren’t you going to use Rimbaud? she’d asked. He was punk. And he was beautiful, like you. Gaspar snorted. He wants them to be younger, all thirty or under, plus, there’s a famous photographer who already did a similar project using Rimbaud’s face.

“Oh, so he’s copying,” said Marita.

“He calls it ‘citing.’ ”

“They’re kids in New York with Rimbaud’s face,” Gaspar told her. “Some of the photos are taken in an abandoned building near a river. They’re wearing Rimbaud masks and they’re really skinny. Some are shooting up heroin in their arms, others are reading a newspaper, others are walking around the city at night. Pablo has the photos. They’re really good.”

“What’s the photographer’s name?” asked Marita, and she pulled the blanket over her bare legs.

“I don’t remember, but he died of AIDS a few years ago.”

“Ugh, no, enough with all the dying,” she said, and asked him to turn off the light. When Gaspar tried to caress her belly, she turned over with a low complaint, as if she were sleepy. He knew it wasn’t tiredness or a bad mood, it was rejection, and how was he going to manage that rejection, he wondered. It would pass, it was a phase, she didn’t love him anymore, everything he wanted to ask her was left hanging in the darkness of the room, in the flickering bedside light, in the unease of two bodies together that wanted to be apart.

Marita had yelled at him during a fight, telling him she had a right to be in their meetings, after she had put up with so much from him. Gaspar only half-understood the meaning of the reproach, but he knew it wasn’t jealousy. Marita was, as his uncle said, extracting her pound of flesh. But he couldn’t let her come to his meetups with Vicky and Pablo. They were theirs. Those who weren’t with us are against us, he again cited his uncle, who had apt phrases for everything: he was the most old-fashioned and the most modern guy in the world, thought Gaspar. And Luis had never extracted any flesh, not after years of taking care of him, years of dealing with a crazy nephew and neurologists, psychiatrists, diagnoses, schizophrenia, epilepsy, hallucinations, and now this limbo—stabilized, it was called. He was stable, so balanced that Luis had dared to start his own family.