Barely a week and a half ago, Valls asked me to meet him at the Café de la Ópera, in the Ramblas. I went to the meeting without saying a word to anyone, not even my husband. I was sure that this was my last chance. I was mistaken. That very night I knew something had gone wrong. In the early hours I woke up feeling nauseous. In the mirror I saw that my eyes looked yellow, and some stains had appeared around my neck and on my chest. At daybreak I began to throw up blood. Then the pain began. A cold pain, like a knife carving you up inside, making its way through your body. I grew feverish, unable to keep down liquids or solids. My hair fell out in clumps. The muscles of my entire body tensed up like cables, making me scream with pain. Blood came out of my skin, my eyes, my mouth.

The doctors and hospitals haven’t been able to help me. Juan thinks I’ve caught an illness, and there is still hope. He can’t bear the thought that I’m going to abandon him and my son Daniel, whom I have failed as a mother by allowing my desire, my yearning to save the man I thought was the love of my life, to supplant my duty.

I know Mauricio Valls poisoned me that night in the Café de la Ópera. I know he did it to hurt David. I know I only have a few days left to live. Everything has happened very fast. My only comfort is laudanum, which numbs the pain inside me, and this notebook in which to confess my sins and my faults. Brians, who visits me every day, knows that I’m writing to stay alive, to contain this fire that is devouring me. I’ve asked him to destroy these pages when I die, and not to read them. Nobody must know what I have explained here. Nobody must know the truth, because I’ve learned that in this world truth only hurts, and God loves and helps those who lie.

I have nobody left to pray to. Everything I once believed in has deserted me. Sometimes I don’t remember who I am, and rereading this notebook is the only thing that lets me understand what is happening. I will write until the end. To remember. To try to survive. I’d like to hug my son Daniel and make him understand that whatever happens, I will never abandon him. That I’ll be with him. That I love him. Dear God, forgive me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t want to die. Dear God, let me live one more day so I can hold Daniel in my arms and tell him how much I love him . . .

* * *

That night, like so many others, Fermín had gone out in the small hours to stroll through the deserted streets of Barcelona, which were sown with frost. Remigio, the neighborhood nightwatchman, knew him, and when he saw him walk by always inquired about his insomnia. He’d learned that word from a phone-in radio program for lonely women that he listened to avidly because he identified with almost all the sorrows expressed in it, including one referred to as menopause, which intrigued him no end and which he thought could be cured by vigorously scraping one’s privates with a pumice stone.