He rumbled on in this manner for quite some time. At eleven o’clock he fell asleep. While he slept, I pulled from my pocket an old translation of a d’Arlincourt novel which I had happened to find lying about. I sat down in his room to read it, a short distance from the bed, since I would have to wake the colonel at midnight to give him his medicine. Whether it was the effects of tiredness or the book itself, before I had reached the end of the second page, I, too, fell asleep. The colonel’s shouts woke me with a start and I sprang to my feet, still half asleep. He seemed delirious and kept on shouting, finally flinging the water jug at me. There was no time to duck; the jug caught me hard on the left cheek. Blinded by pain, I lunged at the invalid and grabbed him by the throat; we struggled, and I strangled him.

When I realized he had stopped breathing, I stepped back in alarm and cried out, but no one heard me. I shook him then, trying to bring him back to life, but it was too late; the aneurism must have burst, and the colonel was dead. I went into the adjoining room and for two hours did not dare return to the bedroom. I cannot even begin to describe what went through my mind during that time. I was in a complete daze, a kind of vague, vacant delirium. It seemed to me that the walls had faces, and I could hear muffled voices. The victim’s cries, both before and during the struggle, continued to reverberate inside me, and whichever way I turned, the air seemed to shake with convulsions. Do not imagine that I’m simply making up colorful imagery for mere stylistic effect; I am telling you that I distinctly heard several voices crying: “Murderer! Murderer!”

Otherwise, the house was silent. The slow, staccato tick tick of the clock only emphasized the silence and solitude. I put my ear to the bedroom door hoping to hear a groan, a word, an insult, anything that would indicate that he was alive and restore some peace to my conscience. I would have willingly taken ten, twenty, a hundred blows from the colonel’s fists. But nothing, absolutely nothing; all was silent. I began to pace the room once again; I sat down, my head in my hands, wishing I had never come to this place. “Damn and blast their wretched job!” I exclaimed. And I cursed the priest from Niterói, the doctor, the local priest, everyone who had gotten me the job and begged me to stay just a little longer. I clung to their complicity.