Then I ask her to think, about me, more or less as she’s done up to this point. She asks me how and I tell her I’m only pretending to see things clearly. She understands, she was aware of that. She tells me that seeing things clearly is very difficult. I tell her that what I require from her, what I need her to try to do for me, is help me take one step further. She agrees and I ask her to explain what she meant when she said, “Mamá saved me.”

She nods and tells me that Tía Adriana herself would write the letters, to herself, but that she copied her handwriting, Emilia’s.

•

After she leaves, I keep on thinking about Adriana.

There’s no longer any doubt; she wanted to go down and to take the girl down with her.

But for a long time—when she pretended to hear voices, or when she heard them and confided it to her sister, when she wrote letters to herself and after receiving them from the postman did her best to make everyone notice that someone was inciting her to kill herself—she was sending out signals. As if she were letting everyone know. “Help me,” “Love me,” “Don’t leave me alone,” “Don’t let me die.”

Now I, in my turn, abandon Adriana. I give myself over to stillness, like a traveler at rest. I now know Adriana’s story, or whatever part of it can be known, its share of reality, its share of fiction and misdirection.

The seductive cohabitation with madness ends there. Emilia has shut it down.

All that remains at the bottom of the glass is one final dreg: Why was terror joined to somber pleasure? (The question no one knows how to answer.)

For my part, I’ll go on living. At least provisionally.

•

From the darkroom, Marcela summons me to come and admire the developed negatives.

She holds them up to the light and I see the “ghosts” of the señora and her nude portrait, but not King.

She asks whether it was important to include him. I say it isn’t, though in some incidental way he could be considered significant.

About the hand, she says the señora spoke only one paranoid sentence: “Who knows what ritual the grave defilers may have used it in . . .”

Marcela says she’s sorry about the dog. “It was impossible, she had him locked up.”

“She couldn’t let him out?”

“It was a punishment. She said if she let him out too soon he’d develop bad habits.”

I observe that she’ll be able to take photos again once the dog has served its time.

Marcela tells me that when the señora leaves the apartment, whether for one hour or many, she shuts him up in the bathroom so he doesn’t make a mess everywhere.