That time didn’t last. When we are given fair warning, does what happens next not always seem inevitable? When the generals came from the city and arrived at Three Winds in their dark cars, I met them at the top of the drive, brought them to the house, and served them glasses of lemonade on the beaten copper tray. We stood on ceremony. They toured the grounds. In the little chapel of Saint Francis, one of them got down on his knees and crossed himself. When they were getting ready to leave, the same general couldn’t find his sunglasses, and the landscape architect fell to the floor and began crawling frantically among the chairs of the long dining table. I’d never seen him like that, like a dog or a cockroach, and I wanted to shout at him to get up, but at the same time I knew there was no choice but to join him. At that moment I remembered the chapel. I ran back to it, and sure enough there were the sunglasses, glinting under the empty pew. The general examined them to make sure they were intact, and then he smiled at me and slowly rubbed away my fingerprints with a handkerchief.

And soon afterward, very soon after that, the lower gardens in the heart of the public park in the city were replaced on the plans by a shimmering lake, a lake so deep that no one could reach the bottom, which anyway was concrete. The bulldozers rolled in to tear up the ground, wildly scooping up shrubs, and the dark loam was carted away in trucks that rumbled up and down the alley of imperial palms. Four days passed, during which the hole gaped under the blank sky. At last they came one night, the people who are in the business of what lies at the bottom. They buried what the generals wished to bury, then they poured the concrete. If there was gunfire, or screams, or if there was only the silence of the dead, I don’t know. We were far away, cloistered in Three Winds, where the grandfather clock from Leipzig gently ticked off the hours. It must have taken a small army of them, with their trucks and floodlights, because in the morning the concrete had already dried in the sun that never ceases to shine. A few weeks later the lake was filled, the sun busied itself on the blue surface, and an official message came from the Supreme Chief of the Nation himself: paddle-boats. That was all. The birds arrived on their own, as soon as the duckweed and water lilies were laid in.