Pablo broke away from his friends with a few cheek kisses, downed his glass of wine in one gulp, and returned to Gaspar, who had stayed by the drinks table. “They all want to meet you. They think you’re my boyfriend.”

“You set them straight.”

“Let them envy me a little, they’re all snakes, and on top of that they’re talentless. Let’s look at the photos, come on.”

“And what time do you plan to serve me up on a platter to the lord photographer?”

“When the lord photographer sees you, he’ll drop everything, but for now he must attend his court.”

“Good thing you two are lovers, otherwise you’d skin him with your teeth.”

Pablo shrugged.

“He’s a good guy, but he just loves for people to tell him how great he is.”

Still, the photos, Gaspar thought, were pretty great. None of them screamed dictatorship, repression, or death, but the selection was unsettling. A soldier with his bride in front of a rickety house under a cruel sun. They were both smiling. The photo was from 1979. Had that soldier with dark skin and white teeth participated in an operation? Beside that one, a shot of the road muddied by rain. A highway temple to San Güesito. Gaspar was about to tell Pablo the story of the murdered child saint, but then he stopped himself, because he didn’t remember exactly how or why he knew it (had his father told it to him when he was little?), and he also thought he recognized the place in the photo. The next image was of a child holding his fingers in the shape of a gun, pretending to shoot. It was a beautiful picture. Also beautiful was the photo of the young man dressed in a suit in a wooden shack, posing beside a boom box, surely just purchased.

“They’re really good,” said Gaspar.

Pablo had to admit it was true. A waiter carrying empanadas passed by, and they both ate one. They left their glasses on another tray, and Pablo saw Andrés wave to him from afar, still surrounded by people. Gaspar had already gone back to the photos.

They saw it at the same time. It was a bit larger than all the others. Pablo took a little longer to realize than Gaspar, because of the surprise, the shocking coincidence. Gaspar had raised a hand to his mouth but said nothing. It was him in the photo, as a child, five or six years old. He had the same round eyes and dark hair, and he was thin, he’d already lost his baby fat. He was serious, with dark circles under his eyes—he looked tired. There wasn’t much that was childlike in his expression. He was leaning against his father’s leg with calm nonchalance. The two of them against a white wall. Pablo recognized Juan Peterson. In the photo he looked healthy and majestic in a black half-open shirt, his hands in his pockets, his fine blond hair grown out long, and that face, that unforgettable face, which in the photo was full of tenderness and exhaustion but had eyes that were heavy with violence, a powerful fury that was transmitted even over the distance of death and years, as was his demonic allure. Juan Peterson was not handsome like a movie star, nor was he beautiful like a model. There was something inhuman about his appearance, and many who gazed at the photo wrinkled their brows, because the father and son didn’t seem sweet, but vaguely dangerous. Pablo felt the start of an erection, the memory of that day: Juan Peterson and the gray-haired man who was perhaps his secret boyfriend, fucking like animals in an empty room. My first time, thought Pablo.