But in fact, things had begun to go wrong before that, when his brother went away for a whole year. His mother had covered up for him. Suddenly toys started to arrive. A Scalextric. Cowboys and Indians. Jump ropes. A Dulcita doll for the little girl. Santa Claus stopped by his home every two or three weeks; Santa Claus was his brother. “Your brother was here last night,” his mother would say. “But he had to go. It was really late and you were already in bed. He’s working very hard right now, but he brought you this.” Laurita fell for it, swallowed the whole story about those things being presents from an invisible brother, a cutout brother, a hopscotch brother, a Hula-Hoop brother, a Rin Tin Tin brother, “Wake us up next time, Mommy.” He, however, had been trusted with the secret. “I’ve got an important mission. I have to leave.” That farewell on a Sunday at six in the morning had been no dream, even if his mother’s charade might suggest otherwise. But he didn’t have the courage to contradict her. It was as if he were obliged to believe them both, believe that the two explanations could coexist: leaving and being here in a ghostly way, like something nocturnal, invisible, that only appeared at specific times. Two years later, after three months of sporadic visits, of turning up for breakfast, for instance, or to take them out on a cold evening in a hired Dodge Dart—before that he’d come in a black Mercedes, sometimes with a driver—and travel through the night to an icy dawn in Roncesvalles, he suffered a full-blown bout of insanity. He saw giant beetles, thought a man was following him. He used to recite from books. To his parents’ shock, he moved back into the house, and when he wasn’t smashing his fists into the furniture or lowering the blinds because he’d spotted the person who was trying to catch him, he’d be howling with laughter or dissolving packets of Chino Mandarín flan in the bathtub. He, for his part, believed Older Brother’s claim that someone was spying on them, and thought it was fun to see him taking a bath in flan mix, singing The Phillipics in Latin and talking to invisible people. When his brother climbed the streetlight with a strength and agility that bore no relationship to his scrawny frame and was then taken away in an ambulance, he couldn’t understand why no one was suspicious, why they didn’t look behind the hedges to see if someone was lurking there, why they didn’t get a medium to check if the house was haunted. He searched carefully among the cypresses and demanded silence at the turn in the hallway where his brother had held conversations with the voices. But he never saw or heard anything. The house was dead and his brother also seemed to have died. His mother moved around like a shadow. Her time was spent between her bed and the couch, she didn’t give orders to the domestic staff, scarcely ate, and their aunt Puri came to live with them. Puri took them to school, and in the evenings made them sit still for three hours to do their homework. Even his sister, who was too young for homework, didn’t stir from her chair as she filled the pages of her exercise book. Each day their aunt repeated that what had happened to their brother was the result of a pact with the Devil. Once their mother was capable of doing something other than lying on the bed or the couch, she had an argument with their aunt and Puri packed her bags, never to return. Then one morning, their grandmother Carmen woke them: