At four o’clock I tell Marcela to go take some pictures of the widow Tiflis with her painting and her dog to use with the story, and to ask the señora again about the severed hand and see if she can get anything out of her. The lawyer gave me the runaround and didn’t tell me a word about it. “What lawyer?” “I’ll tell you about that later. Right now I’m expecting the Candé girl.”

•

At five o’clock the Candé girl hasn’t shown up and I’m snoozing on the sofa.

She arrives at six in her school uniform with her books.

I want the portrait and pictures from Europe back, she says. Since Marcela’s the one who has them, that will have to wait. I’m about to tell her she’ll need to work that out with Marcela and not make me waste my afternoon when I realize she knew perfectly well who had the photos, and that it wasn’t me. It must be a pretext for starting a conversation because she has something to tell me.

I probe, going back over what I talked about with her aunt and uncle. I ask her, as I asked them, if it was only Adriana who heard voices, and whether Adriana really did hear voices or only pretended to hear them.

At that point she breaks her attentive silence to correct me.

“They weren’t voices.”

I pause. All right, they weren’t voices. Yet another version. What were they, then?

“Letters.”

“Letters?”

“Letters.”

“They summoned her in writing to somewhere?”

“They didn’t summon her. They told her she had to kill herself.”

“They ordered her to kill herself?”

“No. They told her she had to do it, without forcing it on her.”

“Why?”

“Because being alive is not worth the trouble.”

That’s when I turn to face her. “Who thinks that? You?”

Her cold lucidity vacillates for a moment but she recovers immediately. “No. That was what the letters said.”

“You wrote the letters?”

“Is that an accusation?”

“No. Nevertheless,” I state with a certain discouragement, “at this stage it will be impossible to convince me that your aunt Adriana actually did everything and endured all her brother and two sisters say she did. All they do is try and distract us from the truth, so no one will investigate, or even if someone does investigate, the truth won’t come out. They’re covering for someone, for you.”

“You’re mistaken. My mother and my aunts and uncle have all told the truth . . . some of it.”

“What’s the other half? The letters?”

“Yes.”

“And if that’s the truth and no one’s managed to find it out yet, was it necessary for someone to know?”

“Yes, it was necessary.”

“To see what happens?”

“To see what happens.”

“Why choose me?”