Marita had accepted Gaspar’s invitation to have a beer after they’d run into each other at the Princesa. She’d seen him there, like so many other times, sitting on one of the sofas and smoking, with his thin legs, black sneakers, his high, delicate cheekbones and hands with their long fingers always flecked with scrapes. He was thinner now. For the first time since she’d met Gaspar, she felt intimidated, and not because he acted any different. The girl who was reciting had a dramatic, declamatory style, and her poem was about the lack of work, the shipyards, the country’s roadblocked highways. It was political poetry, better than the Morrison emulators but extraordinarily bad, and Marita had been hit by a fit of laughter. It was terribly bad form to laugh at someone talking about those subjects, so she went outside. Gaspar followed her; when they met on the sidewalk, he bent over with his hands on his knees, and the shared, stifled laughter was a relief for Marita. Gaspar imitated the girl’s affected style and then, sitting beside Marita now, he told her that this girl may have been a debacle, but lately there’d been some incredible poetry readings at the Princesa.

“You’ve gotta come more often.”

“I have a lot of work at school. I’ve started practice teaching, working as a TA.”

“Meaning, they don’t pay you anything.”

“It could help me later on.”

“The other day this guy no one knew came in. First there was a really pathetically bad poet who acts all suicidal and reads something à la Pizarnik, a disaster. Then there was a more conventional girl, boring, Orozco with no heart. And then this guy got up, this stranger. He recited “I Explain a Few Things” by Pablo Neruda in full, without reading. Most people looked at him like he was a crazy old man, you know how they are, condescending. It made me cry, though.”

“Yeah right, you cried.”

Marita knew Gaspar hardly ever cried in public.

Then Gaspar recited some parts of the poem, the ones he remembered, and he ended with, “and through the streets the blood of the children / flowed easily, like the blood of children,” and shook his head.

“It was incredible, Mari. And to see those people who didn’t understand a thing, I just hated them.”

And they looked at each other while, inside, the music started up. Something from the eighties. Bronski Beat. Marita thought they were going to kiss, but Gaspar took a sip from his beer bottle.

“I miss how you used to read to me in bed,” she said.