When he recovered, he reduced the amount of time he spent with Older Brother, only going with his sister on the regular Saturday visits. Curiosity, however, eventually got the better of him. One morning he played hooky from university and stood outside the clinic. He saw his brother come out at midday with his medicated grin and an unusual air of determination and board a bus. He got off in Hortaleza, where he walked to a makeshift church with an asbestos cement roof. Leaving his car and standing near the church, he heard a cry of relief. It wasn’t the sound of a man or a woman, but wasn’t a child either. There were three voices coming from inside the ramshackle construction, and one of them was his brother’s. As he returned to his car, his legs felt weak, as if he’d been kicking a killer. It occurred to him that Older Brother might be a mentor in some kind of spiritual discipline. The next week, another cry, similar to that previous one, broke the silence of a modest house in the Tetuán neighborhood, and he heard yet another in the hallway of an apartment building he’d managed to sneak into. He’d seen an elderly woman wearing an expression of horror open the door for his brother and make the sign of the cross as if he were a saint. She was crying. Standing on the musty terrazzo stairs, he heard two voices, one of them sounding like it came from a cave, the other belonging to Older Brother. There was a furious argument, the voices were fighting to the death, and then he had no idea what to think because, rather than producing images or words, his body began to shiver uncontrollably. His architecture studies were no help when it came to abandoning his espionage, his obsession; during the final weeks of the semester, the students were expected to spend most of their time either sketching in the street or drawing up plans for various assignments. He attempted to find ways of combining these two activities with his investigation; he imagined himself carrying a visibly huge folder, his fingers red with chilblains, surrounded by curious passersby who’d stopped to ask if he was a professional artist. He had to work with incredible speed to ensure that his drawings met the approval of the School, but when he showed them to his tutor he was told that the sketches didn’t meet the guidelines, and that he should focus on a single building in its context.