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some provocations in the house that formed the boy who became Héctor, a house four kilometers away that smelled of medicines and disinfected floors, in which a childhood had unfurled that I had little knowledge of, barely a fistful.
    Once, my mother had told me, when I was small and crying in my room because Papá was angry and I’d been bad and had to be punished, Your father’s good to you, you know, he never hits you like his father did with him . I was spoiled, the one who was not hit, escaping the fate of Héctor, and of Lolo. When we visited my grandfather, I saw a man who everyone said was ill but who seemed to possess a terrible charm, wearing his Navy colonel’s jacket just to sit at his own kitchen table, capable of mesmerizing a child, launching his special game that sent me hiding in the house without any seek, no one to come after me, no one to find me and pull me by the arm into the light. Yet still I breathed with quick exhilaration in the dark, counting to sixty as instructed, and then emerged a changed girl, always a changed girl, to find my grandfather talking to the grown-ups and to wait patiently (eyes on his feet, trying to discern which one had wounded Lolo years ago) until he looked at me and smiled, saying, Well? And I’d say, Well , not knowing what else to say. Did you hide in the dark? I nodded. Darkplaces were always the best, the only true ones, for hiding. How was it? I never knew how to answer, what the right response was for the game, but no matter what I said, he always sent me out again. This time count to eighty, if you can .
    The wet man awoke as I lit up my third smoke.
    “Good morning.”
    His body had not moved. His eyes wide open.
    “Did you sleep well?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I tapped ash into the saucer on the table and tried to smile. “I’m staying home with you today.”
    He glanced at the window without moving his head. He looked back at me. Eyes from the depths. Octopus eyes.
    I got up, went to the kitchen, and returned with a glass and pitcher. “Hungry?”
    He nodded, as if to say, I am voracious, I could devour the sea.
    As I held the glass to the mouth of my guest, I felt terribly sad, and the sadness gaped inside me, faceless, formless, bottomless, ready to draw everything down into it, books, skies, cigarettes, the very texture of the day. It was not an unfamiliar sensation, but one that always came without warning. I struggled to keep it concealed, as I usually do, but this time the effort was futile: he stared at me with eyes so clear they could have read the emotions of a stone.
    Sometimes, to hide your sadness, you have to cut yourself in two. That way you can bury half of yourself, the unspeakable half, and leave the rest to face the world. I can tell you the first time I did this. I was fourteen years old, standing in a bathroom stall holding the last note I would ever receive from my friend Romina, a note consisting of a single question in furious capital letters.
    We had been in class together for years, but did not grow close until we were thirteen, when Romina began to have her experience .That was her own word for it, experience , spoken in a hallowed tone that gave it an aura of great mystery.
    “An experience ,” I repeated blankly, the first time I heard of it.
    “Come over tonight, I’ll show you,” Romina said.
    I nodded. I wondered whether the experience had something to do with breasts. If so, Romina’s change was no great secret: on the contrary, it was sudden and astonishing, and had rapidly transformed a perennially mousy girl into an axis of hushed attention. Boys and also girls had started glancing sidelong at the blouse of her school uniform, under which those early and voluminous globes hummed—surely they hummed!—and pushed out curves that incited whispers and giggles and stares. They were fecund; they were bolder than their bearer; they sang themselves into the rounded air. I was fascinated by them too; I wanted (though I