When I began to find the silence too terrifying, I opened a window in the hope of hearing the sound of the wind, but there was no wind. The night was utterly still and the stars shone with the indifference of those who remove their hats when a funeral passes by but carry on with their conversation. I leaned out of the window for some time, staring into the darkness, mentally reviewing my life in the hope that this might ease my present anguish. Only then can I say that I thought clearly about my possible punishment. A heinous crime weighed upon me and certain retribution awaited. At this point, fear was added to my feelings of remorse. I felt my hair stand on end. A few minutes later, I saw three or four human shapes peering in at me from yard, as if ready to pounce; I stepped back into the room, the shapes vanished into thin air; it was a hallucination.

Before day broke, I carefully cleaned the wound on my cheek. Only then did I dare return to the bedroom. Twice I drew back, but, finally, there was no avoiding it and I went in; even then I couldn’t go near the bed. My legs shook, my heart pounded; I considered fleeing the scene, but that would be tantamount to confessing my guilt, when what I urgently needed to do was to remove all traces of it. I went over to the bed and looked at the corpse, at its staring eyes and open mouth, as if it were uttering those eternal, centuries-old words: “Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother?” I saw the marks of my fingernails on his neck; I buttoned his nightshirt as high as I could and drew the sheet up to his chin. Then I called one of the slaves, told him the colonel had died in the night, and sent word to the local priest and the doctor.

My first thought was to leave immediately, on the pretext that my brother was ill, for I had indeed received a letter from him a few days earlier saying he was not feeling well. But I realized that such a sudden departure might arouse suspicions, and so I stayed. I laid out the body myself, with the help of a shortsighted old Negro. I sat with the body, afraid others might notice something. I wanted to scrutinize their faces for some flicker of suspicion, and yet I dared not look at anyone. Everything made me jittery: the quiet footsteps stealing into the room, the whispers, the priest’s rituals and mumbled prayers. When the time came to close the coffin, my hands trembled so much that someone commented pityingly to their neighbor:

“Poor Procópio! See how moved he is, despite all he had to put up with.”