Later he would remember that exactly: the yellow skin and the mole he kept staring at, and then the stumps of teeth, yellow too, growing crosswise and irregularly in the mouth, that he saw when it opened, the cadaver-like figure saying: “Hey there!. . .” then putting out his hand, calmly shoving aside the rifle barrel aimed at his stomach, Georges’s eyes now following the fleshless hand, watching his rifle describe a half-circle, in other words lowering his eyes at the same moment that his arms felt the pressure transmitted to his own body by the weapon, discovering the latter then, with that same astonishment, that same blasé surprise he had felt discovering his unknown face a moment earlier in the mirror, trying unsuccessfully to remember how he had turned around, cocked and aimed the rifle, while now his muscles were contracted, trying to resist the push and to turn the barrel towards the man again, then suddenly no longer struggling, turning away, looking for the chair he knew he had seen a moment before and sitting down, the rifle butt again resting on the floor, his right hand holding it by the barrel again, not quite at the end, the way an old man sitting down holds a stick or a cane, that is, the rifle serving as a support, a prop, for the arm, the left forearm and hand lying flat on the left thigh, exactly like an old man, and not even feeling like laughing as he thought: “And that would have been my first dead man. And that would have been the first shot I fired in this war that was almost what it took to . . .” then too tired even to finish the sentence, to go on to the end, hearing as in a dream the cadaver and the jockey quarrelling now, the man shouting in front of the open wardrobe, the clothes thrown on the floor, saying: “And first of all who let you come in here anyway, who . . .” and the voice calm, low, not irritated, not aggressive, not even impatient, but merely full of that patient and inexhaustible faculty of astonishment Iglésia seemed to possess: “There’s a war on dad Don’t you read the papers?”—the man (the cadaver) not seeming to hear, picking up the clothes now and examining them one by one the way an old-clothes vendor would do in order to make a price for the lot, an estimate before throwing them one after the other onto the bed, still insulting them and calling them thieves, until he (Georges, and probably the cadaver too, for he suddenly stopped fuming, stood perfectly still, half bent over, a woman’s dress—or at least something soft, shapeless and limp that, compared to a man’s clothes, could not lie in any one direction, look like anything except on a woman’s body, even if it too were limp or shapeless—in his hand) heard the noise, the double and abrupt click in both directions of a breech locked, Iglésia now holding his own rifle aimed at the man’s chest, still saying in the same plaintive (and almost whining and bored rather than irritated, and resigned rather than threatening) voice: “And what if I shot you down? Would you call the police? I could kill you without making any more fuss than if you were a fly All I have to do is pull this trigger and we’ll have one more body around And with all that are out there rotting on the road already one more or less won’t make much difference you know,” the man motionless now, still holding the limp piece of cloth in his hands, saying: “All right boy All right We’re not going to,” Georges still sitting in his chair like an old man taking the sun on the bench of an old-age home, thinking “He’s perfectly capable of doing it,” but still not moving, not even finding the strength to open his mouth, merely thinking with dejection: “It’s still going to make a terrible noise,” preparing himself, stiffening in anticipation of the shot, the explosion, then hearing Iglésia’s plaintive voice saying: “All right stop whining We haven’t broken anything All we want are some clothes to wear.”