“Hopelessly sad, right?” said Gaspar, pressing pause. “That’s how it was all that night. I shot some girls who were talking and drinking champagne, they’d brought a bottle outside to the park. It’s a really nice hall, have you been there? La Casona, in City Bell. Anyway, so they offered me some champagne, but I try not to drink when I’m working, not because I get drunk, I don’t, but it looks bad. The parents see you drinking with the girls and it makes a bad impression, they’re fifteen years old. The thing is that whenever the girls talk to me, they tell me stuff or they flirt, the way girls always get with older guys. These girls started telling me how they were all being treated at the Melchor Romero outpatient clinic, which has a center for eating disorders. I looked at them and they were really skinny, dark circles under their eyes, really sick. That’s how it all was all night long. One of them told me “hunger hurts but starving works,” in English. They were from a really good bilingual school, really posh.”

“Were they pretty?”

“I don’t like girls that skinny. I don’t know.”

‘People always tell you things. You’ve got something about you. That look that says, “I have the power of a dark experience, come to me.”‘

“Don’t be mean.”

“I don’t mean it in a bad way. You have it, Vicky has it, Pablo too. Your uncle, from being in exile. Negro. I don’t have anything. Sometimes I feel like I’m so boring. You have no idea.”

Since Marita didn’t say anything else, Gaspar went back to work. They finished a version of the video that was an hour and three minutes long. Gaspar would come back alone during the week to do the final edit. They’d had several beers. Gaspar wasn’t drunk, Marita was a little, though she’d eaten two bags of potato chips. They talked about other things, mostly about anorexic girls, about Marita’s classmates who wore oversized clothes and then looked at themselves in the bathroom mirror, sucked in their stomachs, made their ribs stick out, cut themselves and let the blood trickle down over their pubis. I’ve never been like that, she told him as they were crossing Plaza Moreno.

“Why do you keep saying that?”

Marita ran her hand over her short hair and tugged on it a little.

“Because I want to say something else and it won’t come out.”

“I can’t keep walking with you if you’re going to give me the runaround. This is new, you never used to torture me, really, and I don’t like it.”

Marita said sorry, sorry, and hugged Gaspar before taking his face in her hands.

“Is that why you were with me? Because I don’t have any issues, I’m just a normal person with no drama?”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“Not that it’s bad, it’s just really boring.”