Summary

When this story begins, the narrator Nelson tells us, “I’d been out of the conservatory for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died” (49). (We soon learn the conservatory is one for acting.) After Raúl’s death, Nelson’s father Manuel brought him from the unnamed country’s capital city, where they live, to the town where Raúl had lived – Manuel’s hometown, and where Nelson had spent summers as a boy with his brother Francisco – to clean up and sign over Raúl’s house. On the drive south, Nelson and his father stopped for lunch in a beach town and witnessed two men having a fistfight there. The fight had to do with, Nelson learned, a dead man named Joselito. A crowd began to gather around the fight and, Nelson observed, the men became more performative once...