Master Carlos, latex and the faggot (4)- The body

Gabriel moved without realizing he was moving, and that was the misfortune, because if he had seen it coming he would have raised some objection, although it would not have been taken into account. His things slipped into Carlos's apartment one after another and without any of them seeming important. First a toothbrush in the right-hand glass in the bathroom, because the left-hand one was Carlos's and was not touched. Then a folded T-shirt in the second drawer of the dresser, and after a few days two T-shirts, and then three. Then the gym bag, which one night stayed by the door with the intention of picking it up the next day and which he never laid a hand on again. When he finally realized, his clothes were hanging in Carlos's closet and his own were stuffed in a cloth bag under the bed, and he was unable to say at what exact moment he had stopped living in his house to live in that one.

Carlos gave him a bunch with three keys—the building entrance, the elevator, and the apartment—and told him not to lose them and not to leave them with anyone. From then on Gabriel carried them in his pants pocket and found them every time he put his hand in, small and cold, and sometimes he took them out to look at them and thought that was proof that he lived there.

The house had rules that no one had read to him, because no one had written them, and he learned them the way languages are learned, by repetition and correction. He made the bed. Carlos made the coffee. The first one he smoked in bed, before getting up.

It started as Carlos's thing: one morning, at a little after seven, he took the already-rolled joint from the nightstand, took the first drag himself, and passed it to him, and Gabriel smoked it half asleep, with one eye open and the blanket up to his chin, and ten minutes later his body no longer felt heavy. The next day he already had it rolled before the alarm went off. On the third, Gabriel rolled it himself.

He had gotten used to it in that way one gets used to things without noticing one is getting used to them: at first smoking in bed amused him, then it seemed normal, and after a month he couldn't conceive of going out into the street without that half hour. He woke up, and the first thing he did, before the shower and before the coffee, was stretch his arm toward the nightstand and light up. He smoked the first one lying down, almost without speaking, with the window half-open and the noise of the courtyard, and the smoke rose up his face and got into his eyelashes. The second he smoked sitting on the edge of the bed while he looked for his slippers. And then, if the day came crooked, a third on the kitchen windowsill, half in hiding, although Carlos knew anyway.

He liked seeing himself smoke in the mirror.

He stood in front of the wardrobe, with the joint between his index and middle finger and his elbow resting on his other hand, and watched himself do it. The smoke came out slowly, i...