The day Luis found a knife under Gaspar’s mattress he almost agreed with the doctors, and he was afraid. But he called the kid in, put the knife on the table between them, and asked why he’d hidden it. Gaspar sighed, but didn’t cry. To kill myself, he said. I was wondering if it’s better to stick it into my neck, and he pointed to his jugular, or here in my chest. But I think that would be harder because of the bone. Luis didn’t know him very well yet, but he was sure Gaspar wasn’t lying, that he wasn’t planning to use the knife to attack him or anyone else. That same afternoon, after hiding the knife, he decided to talk to Julieta, the woman he’d met just after moving back from Brazil, a young and unexpected lover who was surrounded by psychologist friends. He hadn’t seen her in months, not since he’d had to move into Juan’s house. She would understand, he thought. He left Gaspar with Negro Sánchez, a comrade from their activist days in the seventies, an ex-delegate like him who’d been one of his best friends before he went into exile and who now lived nearby; he’d helped Luis find the cheap house. Luis trusted Negro Sánchez more than anyone else in the world.

At a bar in La Plata, he told Julieta everything. How the judge had made him Gaspar’s guardian, and the boy was technically his son now. He told her about the knife under the mattress and how Gaspar had said he wanted to die, that he didn’t want to live if he was crazy. They’d diagnosed him with schizophrenia. He insists he isn’t crazy. They told me it’s normal for him to deny it, that he can’t distinguish reality from his own hallucinations. But, I don’t know why, Julieta, I believe Gaspar. I know it’s absurd, he’s a kid, how can he know more than the doctors? But he’s very rational. He talks like an old man.

He told her what he knew about his brother’s final years. He told her about Rosario’s death, about the psychiatrist and how Gaspar couldn’t go to school because the pills gave him a headache and a terrible exhaustion and there he was, at thirteen years old, doing nothing all day but thinking about himself, banging his head against the wall when he couldn’t stand the guilt about his friend Adela anymore; it’s obscene, Luis told Julieta, it’s obscene to see this in a boy of his age.

What do you want me to do? she asked.

I want you to meet him and help me find a good professional, not this son of a bitch who just wants to put him on drugs, lock him up, or whatever the hell else.