After they set up the house, they started going out into the city. Sometimes they talked lying in the grass around the cathedral, Marita smoking pot while the light faded and the lamps in Plaza Moreno blinked on. Sometimes they drank beer and ate peanuts in the bars of Diagonal 74 while they complained about the music. Sometimes they spent the afternoon at the artificial lake in the park that people called the Forest, and Marita always pointed out the rats swimming in the stagnant water and wondered how it didn’t smell, how people could keep using the boats as if it were a romantic outing and not what it was, muck and sludge, and how they could eat at the food stands that no doubt also received visits from rodents.

She wanted to hear about the years they’d spent apart. And he told her how, little by little, things had stopped interesting him. As a kid, he said, he’d been an obsessive soccer fan. And he’d never gotten that back. That’s for the best, she said, those people are raving lunatics. I get it, though. There’s a joy there. When Estudiantes wins the championship, my dad is truly happy, nothing else makes him that glad. Not even when he comes into some cash or things go well for me or my brother. It’s a different kind of happiness, it must be awful to have lost it.

“And I can’t get interested in anything. You’re going to start working at the newspaper, you’re planning a book, a radio show. Pablo works like a beast, always planning, he’s got seven notebooks of sketches. He’s going to be famous. Vicky’s a genius. And I film bullshit. I started filming because I loved movies when I was little. Now, I like them, they distract me, but they don’t interest me much. I used to cry in movies, I acted out scenes. That gradually went away too.”

“You’re depressed, sweetheart.”

“Yeah, of course I’m depressed. Sometimes I think I film the quinceañeras because there’s something there, I don’t know how to express it, some kind of elemental trust in life, and it’s a relief. Is that crazy?”

“No. I’m thinking. You still like to read, you’re still into that.”

“That’s the only thing, yeah. Reading. And girls. I never stopped being into girls.”

“Go to hell.”

“Wait. Still, there was something kind of bitter about girls, you know, I had this really stubborn refusal to commit, I made thousands of excuses, refused to feel. Or it wasn’t even a refusal: I didn’t feel anything. You’re the only one, and that worries me.”

“Why?”

“Because you shouldn’t be with me.”

“Gaspar, I hate that kind of self-pity, it’s rotten and it really pisses me off. That’s excuse number one for guys, ‘I’m no good for you,’ ‘It’s not you it’s me,’ always the same shit.”

“I don’t mean it like that.”

“That’s why I’m not leaving right now, because I know you’re depressed. What does Isabel say?”