The question that I think I should be asking myself about Tun and his work at the National Police is this: in such an environment, could he have been a decent man, or even more than that, an exemplary man?

It is necessary, says Pascal, that we explain to ourselves the amazing contradictions that conjugate in us.

Voltaire: There are no contradictions in us, or in nature, in general. What we find everywhere are inconveniences.

It occurs to me to go to Opus Magnum, the tailor shop, with the pretext of getting a suit made. I would like to talk with the owner, a former schoolmate of mine as well as brother of one of the police officers whose name has been in the newspapers lately, in connection with the crime that people call “the Salvadoran pork roast,” and who, as a result of this, has just resigned. Jaime Gonzales, the police officer and my tailor’s brother, graduated as a doctor in 1989, and practiced in the Police Hospital between 1991 and 1997. According to some reporters and columnists, he always had a reputation for being violent. I would like to ask the tailor what he thinks of this rumor. And if he knows why his brother decided to become a policeman.

Let us find comfort in not knowing what connections might exist between a spider and a ring of Saturn and let us continue instead to examine what is within our reach.—Voltaire.

Who was that contemporary of Asturias who argued that in order to think up a nation-building project valid for Guatemala it would be necessary to allow the indigenous people to become full citizens, not deprived of their rights as they were then—and in many cases, still are today? I fail to remember his name, and yet he did exist, that contemporary writer or historian unfairly forgotten. He is one of a few authors whom I have read who is not seduced by the idea of a “eugenic nation” and the absurd project of “importing European blood to improve the race,” advocated by Miguel Ángel Asturias.

Email from Homero Jaramillo, who asks me for a letter of recommendation for an asylum program in Canada. He attached this:

Case H. Jaramillo.

Date of threat: November 2005.

Nature of threat: Two midnight phone calls to my parent’s house, where I used to live, saying that I was going to be killed because of what I wrote in my book Profiles of the Underground published a few days before the threats.

Identity of persons carrying out threat: Anonymous. They did not identify themselves.

I write this letter, or rather, I recycle it, because I have already used the text on another occasion:

Dear Sirs at Canadian Cities of Asylum,