It was during one of those moments of taking liberties with Older Brother’s condition that something arose which he’d always suspected deep down, although never in that way, as though he’d been carrying around a toy knife and suddenly found a painful, bleeding wound in his abdomen.

Architecture students had to make drawings of the urban environment. And given that his brother believed the devil presided over the city, it occurred to him to view its buildings from a demoniacal perspective. He noted down outlandish ideas, such as that the façade of Nuestra Señora de Cristo Santo had a stained glass window with circles containing inverted pentagrams, or that in the Pasaje de la Rueca in San Blas there were numerous paintings of Baphomet. One night, while jotting down one of these observations over a beer in a tasca in La Cornisa, he thought he saw his brother entering the Seminario Conciliar. He went to a pay phone and called the clinic. The doctor on duty informed him that his brother wasn’t there and reminded him that he himself, as the legal guardian, had decided against their advice that the patient should enjoy a level of independence. He returned to the seminary and climbed the wall, convinced that Older Brother would be in one of the rooms overlooking the garden. At that hour, with the clouds gathering over the Parque de Atenas and the building swathed in a fine mist, the pointed tips of the cypresses had a spectral quality. He sat on the grass for a long time without seeing anything besides light streaming from windows, until the building merged with the shadows and he felt more anxious than ever as the whole city sank into profoundly sinister darkness. The only sound was the immense solitude of nocturnal Madrid, its harshness, its surliness, the empty parks, the bars where no songs were being sung. He was afraid that his brother was watching him, but at some point he fell asleep, had a tough, irascible dream, and woke feeling as if several trains had passed over him. The next day he behaved normally during his visit to his brother, not wanting to interrogate him, although he had the feeling that everything he said was filled with ambiguity.