Every night that week he stood outside the seminary, and just when he was on the point of concluding that he’d been mistaken, he saw Older Brother—his oversized raincoat, slight hunch, and rather clumsy gait—pass through the entrance to the building. Everything he’d thought until that moment was turned upside down and he told himself that the universe of delusions didn’t exist only on an imaginary plane. Something existed, and illness might be just an excuse, the lid covering the other life his brother lived behind everyone else’s backs, perhaps even his own. He climbed the wall and walked among the tulip trees in the garden. Even though he hadn’t heard any dogs barking the last time he was here, he imagined a mastiff running out from behind the boxwood hedge. Lying on the lawn, he examined the windows; if a seminarian noticed him, he’d take him for a beggar or a park thief, if such a thing existed. When he got home, at two in the morning, he was overcome by a sense of unreality so profound that he was unable to sleep. He was shivering; his feet refused to warm up even when he rested them on the radiator. The following day he made a date with Emilia, a model with blond locks and ginger pubic hair whom he’d sketched in charcoal. He didn’t go to classes, he didn’t stand outside the seminary. Instead, he invited Emilia to a hotel and lost his virginity to her almost without noticing—his hard-on only lasted the three seconds it took to penetrate her—and then he slipped into grotesque sullenness. He didn’t respond to anything she said; he put his right hand in a sock to make a puppet and repeatedly went to the bathroom to move his bowels without closing the door, as if he wanted Emilia to leave but only had the courage to tell her in this pathetic, inconsiderate way. In fact, he didn’t know what he wanted, and Emilia eventually left. He was very close to suffering an attack, and if he managed to get ahold of himself—he’d suspect much later—it was only because he spent almost two weeks in bed with a virus and a fever that produced a momentary repair of one of the letters on the keyboard in his head that had stopped functioning.