“Beatriz” (which is also the name of her godmother). “But not your Beatriz.”

“Why is her name Beatriz?”

I laughed.

“How old is she?”

“About forty.”

“Forty!” Pía exclaimed, and kept playing and stopped asking.

Tuesday.

I call Benedicto Tun from a pay phone. His voice is that of a sixty-year-old man, perhaps a bit older. He is a criminal lawyer, and yes, he is willing to talk to me about his father. His voice sounds happy when he talks about the old man. “At one point, around 1961 or 1962, we thought about starting a private research laboratory together. I wanted him to leave the Bureau, but he kept postponing and postponing his retirement. Finally, when he actually retired, at seventy-four, we set up the laboratory. He died ten years later.” He mentions again the pension that his father received when he retired, and the lack of recognition by the government and the National Police for his work and career.

“That’s how the state has behaved with men like him. I was a little hurt, I can’t lie to you,” he says.

I tell him that it seems natural to me.

“I have a few things, but just scraps,” he continues to say, “of what he left written, apart from what he wrote for the Yearly Reports. I believe that he had even started writing his personal memoirs, but there is very little of that, because of the accident.”

He asks me for a number so that he can call me when he finds those papers.

“Although I don’t know if they will be of any use for what you say you are writing,” he adds.

I explain that I would like to write a history of the Guatemalan police in the twentieth century, and I think that his father’s biography could possibly serve as a connecting thread.

We agree to talk again in the near future to arrange for an interview.

Monday, February 26.

The front pages of today’s newspapers report the death of four high-ranking police officers. The policemen had been imprisoned two or three days earlier, charged with “credible” evidence, for the brutal murder of three Salvadoran congressmen and their driver, about thirty kilometers from Guatemala City on February 19 of this year.

The chief of the Archive Recovery Project, who returned from his trip a few days ago, had given me an appointment at the Ombudsman’s Office to speak about my suspension. Before leaving my home, I call to confirm our appointment.

“I’ve hit a snag, my friend,” he says. “A friend of my children was killed in an accident yesterday. They crashed on the road to Totonicapán. Everyone in the car died. A tragedy. I’m at the cemetery.”

He gives me another appointment for tomorrow at three.

Tuesday.