In the first days, he had made inappropriate offerings. True magic is not done by offering the blood of others, he’d been told. It is done by offering one’s own, and abandoning all hope of recovering it. Juan took the razor blade he had placed beside him and cut the palm of his hand diagonally, vaguely following the line they called the mind or the head. It was an unbearable wound that never healed, the worst possible kind, and for that very reason the kind that worked. When he felt the warm blood in the darkness, he pressed his hand on to the sign drawn in ashes on the floor. He said the necessary words and waited. The silence was dizzying. Juan knew it was a symptom of his own loss of power. Whether it was because he was very sick or too depleted, he didn’t know, but the feeling of weakness was undeniable. This kind of summons required hardly any effort: the world of the dead was very near for him, just beyond a lightweight revolving door. If it had been another ritual, almost any other, he could have questioned his ability to perform it. Not this one. This was like stretching his legs.

He washed his hand resignedly and used a towel to clean the blood from the floor. He no longer got angry when the ritual didn’t work. After his first failed attempts he had cursed Rosario, he’d smashed furniture and nearly broken his fingers from punching the floor so much. Now, he just calmly cleaned up afterward and placed the lock of hair back in its box. “For the dead travel fast,” he thought again. It was true, in general. He, however, was denied that habitual speed.

Gaspar was still asleep, though a long time had passed: the ritual of the sign of midnight seemed short for whoever performed it, but in reality it took several unnoticed hours. Juan tended to his slashed hand. Dawn was breaking when he poured a little alcohol over the wound that never healed because he had to keep cutting and cutting in the same place, feeding blood to the ashes that brought him nothing but a stillness so suspicious that it made him imagine his wife silenced, her lips sewn shut by someone who wanted to keep them definitively apart.

The hotel breakfast was served in a dining hall with white walls and tables spread with checkered tablecloths. The décor was piscine: fish paintings, preserved fish mounted behind glass, and another fish tank, larger than the one at reception. Esquina was a sort of fishing capital. Juan had never fished a day in his life. And, if the hotel’s recurring theme was of aquatic fauna, he didn’t understand why it was called Panambí, which means “butterfly” in Guaraní. There were no butterflies anywhere, not even in the hotel’s logo. He drank weak tea and spread dulce de leche on slices of toast for Gaspar, who was very quiet.

“What’s wrong?”