On my reading desk—a low table of Kaqchikel craftsmanship—I have a number of the photocopies of the Police Yearly Reports that were made at the General Archive of Central America. I see three photographs of the woman “known as Angela Fuentes when she was alive” and her remains. The caption under the first photo reads: “The macabre torso being examined by the coroner in the anatomical theater.” (The title of the article, which comes from the previous page, is “The Monstrous Crime of Majadas, or the Beheaded Woman.”) The caption for another photo, showing the skull, reads: “The detached head was found 200 meters from the body.” Date: November 20, 1945. The author of the article: Benedicto Tun.

Tuesday the 13th.

At about eleven o’clock I call Benedicto, the son, again. He apologizes for not calling a few days ago, as he had agreed to do, and tells me that he has found more documents that could be of use to me. He proposes that we meet further down the line, in order to come to an agreement as to what documents I will use, and how. We agree to talk again tonight at seven o’clock.

Later, I call the chief. He also apologizes, and “so as not to further delay our meeting,” he gives me an appointment for tomorrow afternoon at two, after lunch, at the cafe next to Taco Bell on Avenida de las Américas.

Nighttime.

I definitely want to go back to the Archive. I want to see the place again, with its army of researchers that make me think of Kafka characters, with their outlandish clothes, their piercings and tattoos under their ocher-colored lab coats with optimistic bright green badges that say “Archive Recovery Project”: the older folk, with gray hair and stooped shoulders, and the frustrated revolutionaries who work there for the salary but also diligently, with a kind of dull determination, because they want to make the dead speak. I could almost guarantee that, as in my case, no one (except perhaps the cleaning crew and the accountants) is there completely disinterestedly or innocently. Everyone there, in some way, files and records documents in favor of or against their own interest, with anticipation, and perhaps sometimes with fear as well. Nobody knows, as they say, whom they work for, and even less whom they have worked for.

Wednesday, March 21, afternoon.

“When you get back from Oaxaca,” the chief said to me, “you can go back to visiting the Archive.” I must call him upon my return.

During our last interview, I made the blunder of not letting him finish telling me about his children’s friend who had died a few days before in a traffic accident in Totonicapán: something about the bonds of friendship that united them, from their childhood in a “beehive”—which was the term used to refer to the shelters for the children of members of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.