“He tried to protect me?”

“He would never have taken your body. Never.”

Gaspar couldn’t reply.

“This one’s not going to die, is he? Let’s see if we can make him eat, he’s emaciated. One fuck-up after another.”

They visited him every afternoon in the room they’d reserved for him. He had a view of the garden and not much more. It was the ground floor, so he couldn’t jump out the window. In any case, the window had bars. There were the two women and a man the same age as them, who spoke to him in English. The women would leave him alone with the man. He explained techniques. Death posture. Inhale the sigil. He laid Gaspar on the bed and taught him to breathe. If he resisted, the guards were there to persuade him with some form of pain. The man sometimes frowned or scowled: maybe he didn’t agree with the methods, but the women dominated him, and so did something else, something that, like Betty said in the article, lived in the jungle. My family has worshipped it for centuries. His family. The man believed that Gaspar could establish contact with the thing that lived in the jungle, just like his father had. Gaspar didn’t want to talk to them and he didn’t know if he was even allowed to, or if it would mean more beatings, more prodding, more fingernails yanked out, more submerging of his head in water. But he did tell the man in English: I can’t give you what you want. I am not my father.

The man insisted as if his life depended on it. Maybe it did. Shut the lid of your unconscious. You know how to do this, I’m sure your father taught you.

The same thing every day. Gaspar had started to enjoy the old man’s visits. He was teaching him a kind of meditation that allowed him to think less. And after the old man left, he went back to his usual method, the same one he used to try to sleep. The letter A. A poet’s last name. The first line, or whatever he remembered, of a poem by a poet named A. If it was in English, translate it. Example: A. Ashbery. “Alone with our madness and favorite flower.” How appropriate. Solos con nuestra locura y nuestra flor favorita. B. Blake. His father’s favorite. Or one of them, at least. The other: Keats. “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.” Aquel cuyo rostro no de luz nunca se convertirá en una estrella. C. Cendrars. “It is my star / It is in the shape of a hand.” D. A difficult letter. There weren’t many D’s, or he didn’t know many. D’Annunzio. He couldn’t remember any lines. Darío. Obviously. “La princesa está triste . . . qué tendrá la princesa?” E. Eliot. More than one line. “. . . fiddle with pentagrams / Or barbituric acids, or dissect / The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—/ To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams.” Tombs and dreams. Messages, pentagrams. His father’s copy of Eliot was almost illegible from so much underlining.