Yesterday, Guillermo Escalón took me to visit Jacobo Rodríguez Padilla, a Guatemalan artist who is eighty-five, exiled in Paris since the fifties, shortly after the overthrow of Arbenz and the Revolutionary Government. Tiny studio apartment: the antithesis, one could say, of Miquel’s studio. He has some very curious canvases, part surrealist and part naïve. A vague palette that allows for all colors. He showed us several very small sculptures that I liked a lot, especially one made of alabaster that made me think of an ancient Chinese work. The artist is small, very thin, and seems exceedingly fragile, like a little bird, one could say. He told me that Guillermo has told him about the project at the Archive that I have been working on. Jacobo asked several questions. I told him about the Identification Bureau. He immediately mentioned Benedicto Tun.

“Could he have been related to Francisco Tun, the painter, or not?” he asked in jest, and then, he added, in seriousness: “That man was feared. He knew a lot. He was considered a technician or a scientist more than a policeman. But we were not sure it was advisable to keep such a person at his post, after the Revolution. In any case, he stayed there.”

Later, after leaving the studio, while we walked towards Le Prosper, Guillermo told me that Jacobo’s sister was killed by the Guatemalan army.

“He has not managed to shake off his guilt over this,” he explained. “He once told me: ‘Imagine. I got her into all that. I led her to the party, and just a month later they captured her.’”

Guillermo went on to tell me that the young woman had four or five children, and that her husband, who had also gone into exile in Paris, committed suicide shortly after.

“He was crazy,” Guillermo said. “You know how he killed himself? He threw himself off the top of a cardboard replica of Mount Everest at a zoo on the outskirts of Paris. Can you believe it?”

Wednesday morning, in Guatemala.

B+ comes to pick me up at the airport, she stays over. All is well.

I listen to the messages on the answering machine. Calls from the bank, due to activity on my credit card and some deposit from a literary agency. Another call from Lucía Morán, whom I think I neglected to tell I was going to be traveling. And another from a company that offers funeral services at home.

Afternoon.

I pick Pía up from school at noon. While I wait for the violin lesson to finish, her teacher—who months ago had asked me to come and tell a story or a fable to the class—tells me that she is very worried because she believes that for some time now she has been watched. The teacher, a lady in her fifties, is a redhead with a voluptuous shape, a bit extravagant and no doubt attractive for her age.