I had dinner last night with Alice Audouin, whom I had not seen for years. I talked to her about the Archive. She asked if working on something like that didn’t put me in physical danger. I answered—with a bit of exaggeration—that in a country like Guatemala everyone lives in constant physical danger. Alice said: “Ah, the danger, the dignity of danger, here we have lost it.”

I got back to Miquel’s house around midnight. I called B+ several times, both her home and her cell phones. She does not answer. In Guatemala it would be four in the afternoon.

Saturday.

I read Balzac, the short biography by Zweig. He says this about some manuscripts by Balzac: “One can see how the lines, which at first are neat and orderly, then swell up like the veins of an angry man.” Something similar could be seen in my writing, I think.

About Fouché, Napoleon’s minister of police, of whom Zweig also speaks in the work about Balzac: “He needed intrigue as much as nourishment.”

Lunch with Guillermo Escalón, the cameraman. It’s the birthday of his son Sebastián, who is thinking of going to live in Guatemala for a while.

“Why?” I ask him.

“I’m fed up with Paris,” he says. And also fed up with the magazine (by France’s National Scientific Research Center), where he has been working as a reporter for a few years).

I eat dinner alone at the Pick-Clops, near Miquel’s studio.

Then a very late, amorous call from B+. Alluding to a comment of mine about her habit of scolding me, she recites these verses by her beloved Sor Juana: Listen to me, if you can, with your eyes . . . / since my rough voice does not reach you, / hear me, deaf one, as I complain in silence.

“But I cannot see you,” I say.

“That does not matter, silly.” she answers. “It is not about that; you can see me in your imagination, no?”

I ask her what she is wearing.

Sunday.

First night of normal sleep since I arrived in Europe a week ago. A beautiful sunny day. Appointment with Claude to have lunch in Montmartre.

Vague memory of a dream with Roberto Lemus, who works in the Archive and is one of the possible kidnappers of my mother. He is a pallid man, medium height, with drooping shoulders, a round belly, and a certain intellectual air, which, in the dream, makes me think of Allen Ginsberg. He has light green eyes and big jug ears. He reads a newspaper aloud. He has a nasal, phlegmatic voice. (I must listen to the cassettes we recorded during the kidnapping negotiations; that voice could be the voice of the negotiator, I think when I wake up.)