I realize it’s a spray gun, though it looks like the kind that fires bullets. But I can’t imagine what the policeman is trying to do.

Then immediately I see it: The boy has started moving, he’s slipping back toward the balcony. He was going to kill himself, then thought the policeman was about to shoot him. He felt death approaching and no longer wished to die.

Many of the spectators leave, returning to the day’s ordinary hustle and bustle, though quite a few stay, watching to see if anything goes wrong and the teenager falls.

I finish giving my report to the agency.

Like me, another person next to me was passing along a message, though hers went higher: a middle-aged woman, praying.

•

None of that actually happened. I dreamed the whole thing.

Bibi is hypnotizing me with her card catalogue and now I’m having nightmares.

There’s a story, I believe, about someone who threw himself into a river and a customs officer came along with a rifle and in the end the would-be suicide went calmly home.

All customs officers, if they don’t have a name, are called Rousseau.

•

Bibi orders gin. I hint, with some malice, at how that will end.

She assures me, gently teasing, that even if she has a little too much tonight, she won’t invite me to go for a roll with her. Piel Blanca asks with a nervous stammer what “go for a roll” means. “You see?” I accuse her. “That expression of yours gives rise to misunderstandings.” “I thought it meant something good,” Blanca says defensively. “I just wanted an explanation.” “But it’s something bad,” I tell her. “It produces no results.” Piel Blanca plunges into the wordlessness of a person who is cautious or shy.

In general, I like her quite a bit. I long to touch her.

After the waiter has served us the first drink and is distracted by other tables, the photos reappear, in her hands.

There’s a slip of paper clipped to each one. I pick up the first. A name—Adriana Pizarro—a date, a home address, a little map. The map shows the position of the body, where it fell: furniture, doors and window, bloodstains, weapon. I exchange it with Bibi for the other photo of a suicide with wide-open eyes, which bears a different name—Juan Tiflis—date, home address, and map.

Piel Blanca gives us a moment to look them over. Then she speaks.

Adriana Pizarro was a forty-six-year-old spinster, a school-teacher, with a savings account and small investments. At forty-two, she took a trip to Europe. When she returned, she said she’d have to go back. She hinted at a relationship. But never—according to her family—did she receive a letter, not from Spain, France, or Italy, as if she hadn’t met anyone. Only tourist brochures and leaflets with updated rates for hotels. Some of her relatives claimed she experienced hallucinations. “She saw things,” one testified, “and may have killed herself during a crisis.”