I eat dinner. Everything is clean, the silence is wondrous, I feel at ease. Living is good sometimes.

I go into the dining room for another bottle of wine. I switch on the light and find myself face-to-face with Papá, in his portrait.

In his portrait, he’s forever young. He’ll never be old.

No one can ever humiliate him.

If you’re not alive, you don’t have to endure having anyone else allow you to live. Other people allow us to live but they dictate how.

Will I be old? Will I stand on a sidewalk someday in a long line of retirees?

Do you have to wait for death, like an elderly retiree, or do you have to do it, the way Papá did?

I uncork the bottle and death becomes a person for me, as if I were a small child. And not an old woman with mangy cats, either. She’s like Mae West. A little old-fashioned, I mean, and plump and sensual, legs crossed, perched on a bench, smoking, next to the bar. She waits. She’s waiting for us.

I pour her a glass of my red wine.

•

I feel a hand touching mine. It’s Mamá’s gentle way of waking me up without startling me.

“A young lady is looking for you, from the agency.”

I yawn.

“A young lady? What’s she like?”

“She has a Beetle.”

Marcela and her Citroën. I jump out of bed. She’s come up with something.

“Invite her in.”

“I did. She’s in the living room but doesn’t want to sit down. She’s in a rush, says to tell you there’s a case.”

I skip breakfast but have some black coffee in the kitchen. The glass of red wine I served Mae West is still there.

•

It happened up in the hills, which means an hour’s drive and a good chance of arriving after it’s all been cleaned up. Two students killed themselves. Either one killed the other and then himself, or each did it on his own, though together.

Marcela found out in a newsroom. She was going from paper to paper with the photos, exploiting friendships. And encountering no memory of the two cases among any reporters on the police beat.

I tell her the story of el Bebé. She finds it reasonable. “The mother had passed him over.”

I believe the story and agree with the schoolboy who thought it was a suicide. But I say the opposite, to provoke Marcela.

She doesn’t react.

I insist. “A suicide? In the cradle? Not plausible.”

She won’t be drawn into an argument. She simply shares a conviction. “We’re born with death inside us.”

I fall back on Mae West. “Death waits outside us.”

She doesn’t reply and I don’t go on because I decide it’s nothing but a word game. She said “inside,” I said “outside.” The feebleness of my reply annoys me but has exhausted my line of argument, though I wanted to express something that had meaning, a meaning that escapes me. I analyze myself and recognize that I’m a void.