He did not sleep well, he dreamed of a cloud of words that fled and scattered as he chased after them with a butterfly net, pleading, Stop, please, don't move, wait for me. Then, suddenly, the words stopped and gathered together in a clump, one on top of the other, like a swarm of bees waiting for a hive they could swoop down on, and he, with a cry of joy, lunged forward with his net. What he had caught was a newspaper. It had been a bad dream, but it would have been worse if the albatross had returned to prick out the eyes of the doctor's wife. He woke early. He pulled on some clothes and went downstairs. He no longer went out via the garage, through the tradesmen's entrance, now he went out through the main door, what one might call the pedestrian entrance, he greeted the porter with a nod of his head if he happened to see him in his lodge or exchanged a word or two with him if he was outside, but it wasn't necessary, he - the superintendent, not the porter - was, in a way, merely there on loan. The streetlights were still on, the shops wouldn't open for another two hours. He looked for and found a newspaper kiosk, one of the larger ones that receives all the papers, and he stood there waiting. Fortunately, it wasn't raining. The street lights went out, leaving the city plunged for a few moments in a last, brief darkness, which vanished as soon as his eyes grew accustomed to the change, and the bluish light of early morning descended upon the streets. The delivery van arrived, unloaded the bundles of papers and continued on its way. The newsagent started opening the bundles and arranging the newspapers according to the number of copies received, from left to right, from large to small. The superintendent went over to him, Good morning, he said, I'll have a copy of all of them. While the man was putting his purchases into a plastic bag, the superintendent looked at the rows of newspapers and saw that, with the exception of the last two, they all carried the photograph on the front page under banner headlines. The arrival of this keen customer with sufficient means to pay has got the newspaper kiosk off to good start this morning, indeed, we can safely say that the rest of the day will be no different, for every one of the newspapers will be snapped up, apart from those two piles on the right, of which only the usual number of copies will be sold. The superintendent was no longer there, he had run to catch a taxi he had spotted on the nearby corner, and having given the driver the address of providential ltd, and apologized for the shortness of the journey, he was now nervously taking the papers out of the bag and opening them. Alongside the group photo, with an arrow indicating the doctor's wife, was an enlargement of her face in a circle. And the headlines were, in red and in black, Revealed At Last - The Face Behind The Conspiracy, Four Years Ago This Woman Escaped Blindness, Mystery Of The Blank Ballot Papers Solved, Police Investigation Yields First Results. The still faint morning light and the swaying of the car as it bumped over the cobbled surface prevented him from reading the smaller print of the articles beneath. In less than five minutes the taxi had deposited him outside the door of the building. The superintendent paid, left the change in the driver's hand and rushed in. He raced past the porter without bothering to greet him and got into the lift, his state of excitement almost making him tap his toes with impatience, come on, come on, but the machinery, which had spent its whole life carrying people up and down, listening to conversations, unfinished monologues, tuneless fragments of songs, the occasional irrepressible sigh, the occasional troubled murmur, pretended that this was none of its business, it took a certain amount of time to go up and a certain amount of time to come down, like fate, if you're in that much of a hurry, take the stairs. The superintendent finally put the key in the door of providential ltd, insurance and reinsurance, turned on the light and made straight for the table on which he had spread out the map of the city and where he had eaten a last breakfast with his now absent assistants. His hands were shaking. Forcing himself to slow down and not to skip any lines, he read, word by word, the articles in the four newspapers that had published the photograph. With a few small changes in style, with slight differences in vocabulary, the information was the same in all of them and one could sense a kind of arithmetic mean calculated by the editorial consultants at the ministry of the interior to fit the original font. The primitive prose read more or less like this, Just when we were thinking that the government had decided to leave it to time, to that same time by which everything is worn away and transformed, the job of isolating and shrinking the malignant tumor that so unexpectedly grew in this nation's capital, taking the abstruse and aberrant form of the mass casting of blank ballot papers, which, as our readers know, vastly exceeded the number of votes cast for all the democratic political parties put together, our editorial desk has just received the most surprising and gratifying news. The investigatory genius and persistence of the police, in the persons of a superintendent, an inspector and a sergeant, whose names, for security reasons, we are not authorized to reveal, have managed to uncover the individual who is, in all probability, the head of the tapeworm whose coils have kept the civic conscience of the majority of the city's inhabitants of voting age entirely paralyzed and in a state of dangerous atrophy. A certain woman, married to an ophthalmologist, and who, wonder of wonders, was, according to reliable witnesses, the only person to escape the terrible epidemic four years ago that made of our homeland a country of the blind, this woman is now considered by the police to be the person responsible for the current blindness, limited this time, fortunately, to what used to be the capital city, and which has introduced into political life and into our democratic system the dangerous germ of perversion and corruption. Only a diabolical mind, like those of the greatest criminals in the history of humankind, could have conceived what, according to reliable sources, his excellency the president of the republic has so eloquently described as a torpedo fired below the water line of the majestic ship of democracy. For that is what it is. If it is proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, as everything indicates it will be, that this doctor's wife is guilty, then all those citizens who still respect order and the law will demand that the full rigor of justice falls upon her head. How strange life is. Given the singularity of her case four years ago, this woman could have become an invaluable subject of study for our scientific community, and, as such, would have deserved a prominent place in the clinical history of ophthalmology, but she will now be singled out for public execration as an enemy of her country and of her people. One is tempted to say that it would have been better if she had gone blind.