I don’t know who the man on the train was. I thought about reporting him, but what would I say? I could have been hallucinating. I wonder if my inability to find the house and my encounter with that man aren’t all one big hallucination. Or if, on the other hand, it’s all part of a plan with rules I don’t know. I can barely leave my house without looking over my shoulder. I’m even afraid the armless man will take my daughter, who is the same age Adela was when she disappeared. As I put a final stop to this article, I have my doubts about publishing it.

VI

Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky

1987–1997

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted

Emily Dickinson

Luis Peterson moved into a neglected house he had bought cheap with money he’d saved up in Brazil. A house in Villa Elisa, near La Plata, and it was falling down but it was beautiful, and Luis wanted to restore it. And so he started working obsessively on restoring the house and on restoring Gaspar.

The boy was angry, and when he wasn’t angry, he was depressed, an adult depression that collapsed him into bed. He couldn’t go to school. He barely ate a few mouthfuls at mealtimes, slowly nibbling a prosciutto sandwich (that was all he wanted to eat: prosciutto and cheese on French bread), and he’d cry heavy tears that left little puddles on the wooden table, like the first fat drops of a summer rain.

The treatment with the first psychologist had been a disaster. She told Luis she thought Gaspar was schizophrenic, and recommended a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist accepted the diagnosis outright and prescribed pills. Gaspar took them sometimes; sometimes he threw them back up. His headaches made him writhe in bed. He fought with the psychiatrist and shouted to Luis that he never wanted to see him again, that they were going to lock him up, that it was obvious they wanted to get rid of him. Why do they say I can’t tell what’s real? he screamed one night in the kitchen, with ice wrapped in a cloth held to his temple to alleviate the migraine. But as long as he kept saying the inside of the house on Villarreal had been different from the outside, there weren’t many possibilities for a second opinion. That wasn’t true for the other kids, and Luis could guess why: Gaspar was the one who came from a strange family, the widower’s son, the boy who raised himself. The weird kid. The others, the judge had told him, were only following his lead.