I should stop this foolishness, I told myself, throwing back the sheet and jumping energetically out of bed, on my way to the bathroom to take a shower, determined to control once and for all my fantasies, committed to my goal of not jacking off so as not to squander my mental energy, of not wallowing in any of the testimonies that I would never turn into a novel, because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples, and it was the last straw that on the weekend I would carry on in the same vein as I did when I was in the archbishop’s palace as if they were paying me to poison my days off, I scolded myself, while I waited for the water coming out of the shower head to warm up, hoping that Fátima would be as good-looking as Pilar but without those emotional cobwebs left behind by embittered loves, as I’d already gone a month and a half without a fuck, ever since I arrived in this city I had been condemned to chastity as if they were getting me ready to don the habit, I thought once I was under the stream of warm and comforting water, soaping my groin and my balls, pulling on my penis but with my mind set on scrutinizing my wardrobe, for I was determined to look handsome and sporty so the girls would sigh, to which end I chose a polo shirt, salmon-colored, faded blue-denim pants, and brown leather loafers. Putting on my shoes, there I was, when five shots rang out in the street below, five unexpected and piercing shots that I began counting after the first rang out, which I guessed had come from a nine-millimeter-caliber gun, but five, not six as the doorman claimed later, with the inanity so typical of a fool who doesn’t pay attention and just gets scared, because he had to dash into the building to take refuge while I jumped up and looked out my fifth-floor window, trying to catch a glimpse of something, smelling the scent of gunpowder that rose from the street, eager to try to discover the source of such an unexpected event, for after a month and a half in this downtown apartment these were the first gunshots I had heard, my curiosity spurring me on so strongly that one minute later I was in the lobby of the building arguing with the foolish doorman, who insisted that there had been six shots and that it was a car chase, like in the movies when the car doing the chasing shoots at the car being chased, so there were neither victims nor traces of the shootout in the street, he told me already back at the front door, where I could ascertain that apparent normality reigned among the street vendors settled under their plastic shades on the sidewalk. I walked over to the guy who sold pirated CDs, encrusted into the corner of Sexta and Once, about ten steps from the entrance to the building, to ask him what he had seen. “Nothing, I threw myself on the ground,” said the short fat mestizo man without looking me in the eyes, as if I were a policeman who had come to investigate the incident, when all I wanted to know was how many shots he had heard, five like I — who had paid attention — claimed, or six like the doorman — who lost his concentration when he rushed inside — claimed, to which the vendor responded that he also hadn’t paid attention, there could have been five or six, he mumbled, the height of imprecision; so I insisted, explaining to him that there could only have been five shots because after the first one I began counting out loud, an old habit I had acquired during the war in my own country, saying, two, three, four, five, and I remained with the word six in my mouth because there was no sixth shot, and moreover I could be certain that they’d come from a nine-millimeter gun, that my ear wasn’t just any old ear, and if we looked for the bullet casings down the street we would be able to prove the truth of my assertion that the shots had come from a nine-millimeter gun, I told the vendor, who pretended not to know what I was talking about, and, pretending to be busy, he began to dust off the pirated CDs with a flannel rag. I crossed the street, there was very little traffic that day, and in front of McDonald’s I bought two Sunday newspapers — but not that rag that I will never again mention in whose pages I had been maligned — hoping to eat my breakfast while perusing the articles and also so I could ask the newspaper vendor about the shooting that had just occurred, but he turned out to be a worse case than the guy selling pirated CDs, so from there I decided to continue walking down Sexta Avenida under the splendid morning sunshine, not allowing the bad smells and the garbage in the street to soil my soul, content to think that no passerby or street vendor could intuit my thoughts, walking in the direction of the restaurant of the Hotel del Centro, where the buffet of local cuisine would be my Sunday breakfast throughout my stay in that city, at a time of day when the only disturbance came from a marimba that at regular intervals attacked the clientele, but such disturbances were a plague common to all restaurants.