“Which means,” I say, “that while the father dozed off during his blackmailing of the young lady, the son was passing over to the other world without asking permission or giving any warning signs. But only if we choose to overlook the suspicion that the whole thing is a contemptible farce invented out of whole cloth to convince you to feel sorry for him and give him what he would call your ‘intimacy.’”

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.