If he kills himself at the start, it’s because we’ll go backward, and the story will be told after a leap into the past.

•

If I kill myself, I don’t only kill myself, I kill my death wish, too.

I’d like to kill others, also, but no one in particular. Some because they’re cruel swine who make the world an ugly place, and King, who’s suffering.

My death wish is also a wish to kill others.

I can’t kill them, at least not all of them. But I can do away with all of them: If I do away with myself, they’ll no longer exist for me.

•

I go home in the morning and Mamá doesn’t ask me anything, though of course she’s sad and jealous because she realizes what’s happening.

She wants to know whether I’ll have lunch with them and I say I can’t, I have to work. Have I had breakfast then? I say I haven’t, which isn’t the truth but I do it to make her happy. She serves me in the kitchen and I ask about Mauricio and he’s working and eating, doing very well, the scare is over.

Then I shut myself in my room.

I search for the letter. I put it in an envelope to preserve it from everything. It’s from her.

I find it. Her lovely handwriting. I read it, and her tender delicacy flows through it, even amid the prudent complaint, the muted alarm of the confusion I caused when I left her without giving any reason.

I set fire to it in the ashtray. Before that I caress it with the tips of my fingers.

There’s also the wooden letter opener that came by mail without any indication of who it was from. I’ve kept it all this while in case it was from her. I never used it. I think I should have used it, as she may have wished, to open a path through my readings. I’ll have to start doing that now, at last. I choose an uncut book called La veneración; I believe the title is appropriate.

•

Papá’s watch, with its worn silver plate . . . Still soft to the touch, just as before.

The gold Parker, which will be left to Mauricio.

I make out the companionable little noise of the alarm clock, audible from the night table; I haven’t been around, so it’s undoubtedly Mamá who’s been winding it.

I open a drawer, and my skin recognizes the little handle, polished smooth by my pulling on it since I was a child. Every piece of furniture bears the traces of my touch, they’ve shaped themselves to my habits, and my eyes have adapted to seeing them where they are.

A memory takes me down to a corner of the courtyard.