“You could have given it back, you could have brought it with you just now. I said I took it home to go over it but that excuse is only good until tomorrow.”

I say, “I know Barbuján. I’m going to have to go knock some sense into him.”

Now I’m the one who’s exaggerating. I feel like doing it, I really do, but I won’t.

Julia takes me seriously and grows alarmed: “No, no. Don’t have anything to do with him. And don’t even think about the principal. You’ll only cause more trouble for me.”

You’ll cause trouble for me. What a perfect egotist. Though, of course, she’s right to be one.

I take a taxi home and return with the stack of pages.

“Will I see you tomorrow?”

“No. It’s Saturday.”

Why does she ask? She knows. Saturday means boxing.

•

I tuck into my dinner long after midnight and without much appetite. But I don’t ignore it because it would pain my mother to find the dishes she prepared for me untouched.

I reread the notes that Bibi the Card Catalogue gave me.

“Another brother . . . who two years earlier had declared in terrifying despair that he would not escape their fate, also kills himself.”

“My brother killed himself at age sixty. I had never thought about it seriously, but when I reached fifty, the memory came back to me more vividly and now it never leaves me.”

I realize only a few words would have to change.

“My father killed himself at thirty-three. I had never thought about it seriously but as I began approaching that age, the memory came back to me more vividly. . .”

Up to that point, in fact, it fits. But not the ending: “and now it never leaves me.”

I’m aware that I’m protecting myself by pretending that I don’t think about it constantly. And at the same time, distant scenes filter into my memory, scenes that are predominantly visual.

First, I’m walking through a special place—a sanatorium—with my father. I don’t see him. I don’t remember what he looked like then. I feel his hand, a man’s hand, and my own hand, a child’s, entrusted to his.

Then his hand has left me. I find myself in the sanatorium’s courtyard surrounded by tiled walls. I’m on a strange, circular, sky-blue wicker bench, with a planter in the middle.

Later I get up from the bench. (I’ve grown tired of waiting, Papá’s not coming back, I’m a little afraid of this place.) I walk toward the room I watched him go into. It’s summer and the door is wide open. I reach the threshold and stop. There’s a bed, and Papá is next to it. In the bed lies Paolo, his face tilted up, his head against a high mound of pillows. His eyes are closed. He has trouble breathing.

(Paolo is my cousin, my oldest cousin. He fired a shotgun into his stomach.)