He was ashamed of his profession, but that was nothing new. In the eighties, he’d left his job as an urban planner at City Hall to travel to Central America. He’d ended up in Mexico, suffering from psychosis after a blurry five months of shamans and peyote. He never told anyone that he’d been admitted to a psychiatric clinic because he was convinced that some green xoloitzcuintle dogs were talking to him in the language of his whole family: his grandmother, his uncle, his unborn brothers and sisters, the words of Older Brother. While he liked urban planning, the thought of going back to City Hall, to the same job as before, was almost more than he could bear; his colleagues looking at him askance because they hated the fact that he’d had the courage to leave, and the nerve to return and use his contacts to get back his old position and salary. During that period his senses developed a new faculty that made him stop in the middle of the street because he’d heard a whisper in his ear or felt a persistent warmth on his left shoulder—a warmth that didn’t originate in his flesh or bones, but came from outside and had the physical presence of a hand, even though there was nothing on his collarbone but a dark red polo shirt and that persistent sensation. The first voice he clearly heard, coming from every corner of the silent house, frightened him because he guessed that he was going to start having delusions, that it was going to be an absurd repetition of the xoloitzcuintles. But that cold analysis was proof that it was something else, something non-delusional. Then he started to think differently—that’s to say, without resentment—about Older Brother—by then dead for more than twenty years—about the stigma the family never mentioned, about how he too, the favorite younger brother, had lived through everything that happened with equal shame, and how he’d never stopped dogging his elder brother’s footsteps, reading his favorite books, looking at his photographs, playing his music (since his death he’d slept with his record collection under his bed). It was all due to an obsession or something in his genes. Long, empty years went by before he was able to admit that to himself; as if his interest was of some different nature, a simple question of affinity, even justice. He remembers the day he saw Older Brother lose his mind. The memory was clear, precise: a fall afternoon, a pale brown church on the corner, the leaves of the plane trees on the sidewalks. Older Brother climbing a streetlight, chanting a passage from the Apocalypse at the top of his lungs. He looked possessed; he’d shaved his head with a knife, making nicks all over his scalp. The blood was still glistening like a fresh flower, like the gash in the side of Jusepe de Ribera’s Tityos.