But Marcela thinks he’s sincere.

He’s not. His son’s action suggested to him, after the fact, a new chapter for his own biography. A father and son cannot commit suicide on the same date without any prior agreement, without either one knowing what the other is doing. I can’t conceive of that, I wouldn’t be able to understand it. I am a normal man.

I don’t argue. I’ve warned her about intimacy. Really, if I got worked up, it was only because I’m defending her.

•

We’re in the Citroën, Marcela and I, racing toward a boy who’s climbed up to a high place.

We reach an area where all traffic has ground to a halt.

I see him. His arms and legs are wrapped around the iron base of a giant billboard that tops a monolithic eight-story apartment building. He doesn’t move, neither letting go nor starting to climb back down.

I question the people around me. They say he’s been up there half an hour. What’s he waiting for? To be saved, says a man, incredulously.

Maybe not. Maybe he’s only postponing the plunge. I think he’s just beginning to understand a very important thing: If he jumps, his body will feel the horrible suck of the void for the full twenty-five meters down and will then be crushed against the pavement. He’ll die, for sure, but only after that. Certainly, when he was considering this from street level, it didn’t strike him the same way.

The firemen’s mechanical ladder reaches the eighth floor and one of them climbs up.

Marcela is busy with her work. First she leans out a window with the telephoto lens, then she goes off to stand on a nearby rooftop.

I glimpse a fortuitous pay phone, just inside the door of a pharmacy. I call the agency and ask to speak to the boss. I tell him I can give a blow-by-blow account of the whole thing without losing sight of it. He gives me the okay and starts taping the conversation.

A silence that doesn’t exist in this city has fallen, punctured only by the sound of brakes and engines at the edge of the traffic jam. The crowd wants to hear. But the fireman who’s reached the top of the ladder is so close to the individual that the two can negotiate without raising their voices.

No doubt he’s trying to convince him to get down, and his gestures keep the spectators as riveted as they are ignorant. Until the young man explodes: “Stop looking at me! That’s enough!” The fireman seems to calculate that if he pushes any harder the guy will throw himself off the billboard.

The fireman gives up, but the moment he’s down the ladder a policeman goes up.

Decisive, courageous, he reaches the top swiftly, takes out a weapon, and aims it at the would-be suicide.

The crowd lets out a universal exclamation.