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.

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.