armor of a loyal knight-errant in order to enjoy the favors of said compatriot and admirer, thus it was not so very unusual that while discussing his work behind the closed doors of my office I began to fantasize that Fátima had gone up to the door and locked it, then started getting it on with him, Dulcinea herself, passionately making out with the much-admired knight as she unbuttoned his fly and extracted his lance, which she then caressed in her hands and then in her mouth and soon thereafter frenetically inserted into herself, mounting the knight who would in his alarm lose all sense of decorum, still sitting in that chair with that tasty panting morsel pounding herself against him, his gaze lost in the tall bare walls, trying not to notice the crucifix, alone and contemplative from its great height, worried that Mynor or Erick would knock on the door and discover him in such a trance or that I would suddenly appear and not only catch him with his hands in the pot but berate him for using my office to fornicate with the girl of my dreams, a betrayal capable of unleashing in me a rage that began at that very moment to inflame me against not so much the Spaniard, who was meticulously describing the methodology he used for his psychosocial research, but my own fantasies, so foolishly bent on imagining Fátima galloping on top of Joseba, instead of imagining me galloping on top of her, which would have been preferable from any and all points of view. It was the sudden irruption — after a quick perfunctory knock — into my office, which really was his office, of the Sicilian, the head capo, that shook me out of my rapture and brought me back to the scene where we were greeting each other, and he asked Joseba to accompany him to Mynor’s office, where the three of them would meet to hatch a conspiracy I was fortunately not included in, I told myself, thank God, for I already had quite enough with the one thousand one hundred pages without also getting involved in Vatican intrigues, though I cannot fail to admit that merely seeing that I was unexpectedly excluded from the circle of power, in which my friend Erick would undoubtedly be included, made me feel a certain amount of resentment, as if the priest had been suspicious of me ever since he watched how my hands moved, as if my work weren’t important enough and my opinions about the report didn’t count. “Hey, let’s have lunch together,” the hidalgo said, with a wink, before leaving with the bishop, conscious perhaps of the marginalization I had been subjected to, probably afraid of the possibility that I would express my resentment by marking up the text, something that of course never even crossed my mind, as I let him know a few hours later when we were in the Imery Restaurant, located on the other side of Parque Central, a rather dark place where the menu du jour was consumed by dozens of office workers, low-level politicians, one or another academic from the institutes of higher learning in the vicinity, as well as the staff of the archbishop’s palace, among whom Joseba and I could be counted, sitting at a corner table, where I readied myself to hear delicious secrets straight from the mouth of the gallant knight about the palace intrigues he had participated in that morning and about all the other intrigues related to the report that my friend Erick had failed to reveal to me, but as the minutes went by and we turned our attention to the main course, I ascertained that the Basque psychiatrist responded with monosyllables and evasions to my enthusiastic questions, as if prudence and caution were essential components of his nature, I thought at first, as if the heads of that religious institution had taken vows of silence that required absolute discretion even toward a trusted employee like myself, or, I then thought, as if they had discussed at that morning’s meeting to which I had not been invited how much they could trust me and their conclusions were reflected in the Spaniard’s polite negatives in response to my questioning, then I frankly grew concerned, on the verge of descending along a paranoid spiral that would in no way help my digestion and that I instantly tried to avoid by shifting the gist of the conversation, insisting instead on digging into my table companion’s private life, knowing for a fact that prudence and caution were fundamental components of his character and that he would never reveal anything about his political activities in Bilbao, would never mention anything about his past and present as an ETA sympathizer, which could be smelled from a mile away, and talked only in generalities about how well one drank and ate in that city full of always crowded and welcoming bars, of shipyards, and of the shells of abandoned factories along the length of the river. But to my surprise, perhaps once he saw that the table next to ours had remained empty, Joseba suddenly changed the vague and nonchalant tone of his discourse and began to tell me, with a conspiratorial air copied from my friend Erick, that the missing text of the second volume of said report was extremely sensitive, a detailed analysis of how the army’s intelligence services operated, he said, almost in a whisper, uncertain if any of the other diners could hear us, that at the meeting I had not been invited to that morning they had talked precisely about that analysis of the military intelligence services and had agreed that this text would not be incorporated into the report until the very last minute when it was about to be sent to the printers, not only for reasons of security but also because my friend Erick needed the maximum amount of time to finalize it, considering the fact that he was the lead investigator into the activities of the military intelligence organizations as well as the coordinator of all the other parts of the report, Joseba made clear, as if I were not already fully aware of the responsibilities of the person who had hired me, and the only new thing I now learned from his conspiratorial whisperings was that those people really didn’t trust me, and that neither my friend Erick nor the little guy with the Mexican mustache had had the courage to tell me so but instead had sent the gallant Spanish knight to me to break the news that I probably wouldn’t see or correct the report’s chapter about the military intelligence services because of a problem with the deadline. I was just about to react to such a dirty trick with the stentorian indignation it deserved without caring at that moment about the waitress who had arrived with our next course, when that cunning fox, perhaps intuiting the imminent arrival of a squall, asked me as if in passing if I knew what The Archive was, with as much candor as if he were mentioning a child’s bookshelf or the drawer he keeps his puzzles in, a question that couldn’t fail to cause me the greatest astonishment, so much so that it took me a few seconds to react, stunned by my interlocutor’s imprudence, for nobody talked about The Archive in public, much less in a restaurant just a few blocks from the presidential palace in whose chambers The Archive had its headquarters, a restaurant where more than a few officials and specialists from that sinister office undoubtedly ate on a daily basis, an office Joseba had named so light-heartedly and that I never would have named in the same way, or in any way, because suddenly I was in the grips of a panic attack, stoked by a furtive glance from the waitress before she pushed the swinging doors that led into the kitchen, a glance that in other circumstances I would have interpreted as natural feminine interest in the good looks of the hidalgo caballero, but which at that moment brought on instead a panic attack that paralyzed me, bathed me in sweat, surely made my blood pressure shoot sky high, because The Archive was in fact the office of military intelligence where the political crimes mentioned in the report had been planned and ordered, the report that lay on my desk and was written by none other than the Spanish gentleman who sat there with his mouth hanging open, at that moment waiting with such composure for me to begin to blab on about the unmentionable office, something that was not about to happen, because when I managed to overcome my stupefaction, when finally I was able to get over my panic attack, it was thanks to another shot of adrenaline produced by the fact that the waitress had brought dessert and coffee when we had just begun to eat our entrees, a common practice in restaurants serving office workers always waiting for a free table at the lunch hour, I would have thought at any other time, but not then, when such haste seemed like proof that the woman was an informer for the military, a woman who already had us in her sights and wanted only to confirm the subject of our conversation before denouncing us, at which point and without rhyme or reason I launched into a feverish long-winded speech this Joseba person didn’t expect: What I admire most about Spain is the struggle of the Basque people, I told him, stumbling over my words, and within that struggle I am most fascinated by the ETA tactic of executing its victims with one bullet to the back of the neck, their audacity to take them by surprise, to take advantage of them being unarmed civilians and having their backs turned to dispatch them without them even noticing, I told him with an intensity I achieve at moments, the idea of executing your victim under such circumstances can only be the brilliant result of a daring strategy that does not allow for the most minimal chance of defeat, the idea of training Basque youth in the practice of and admiration for such perfect crimes wherein the defenseless victim lacks any capacity to react seems to me capable of inspiring in those youth only the most distilled form of nationalism, I added almost breathlessly, while the waitress placed both cups on the table with the expression on her face of someone who is not hearing what she is definitely hearing, and Joseba was astonished, as if he didn’t know whether he was facing an insolent provocation or a delirious rant, when the only reason for my tongue’s incoherencies was to sidestep the subject that struck me with terror and to overcome my panic attack, which ceded only under the spell of my harangue, which, given my interlocutor’s discomfort and without my knowing why, led me to immediately speak about the virtues of Spanish democratic tolerance, the constitutional monarchy’s broad-mindedness, which allowed it to unflinchingly open the pages of its leading magazine to an indigenous woman who had survived the massacres thanks to which Joseba and I were earning a few dollars — he more than I, I assumed with good reason, given the dimensions and erudition of his work — as well as the Spanish royal family’s humanitarianism and that of all the other European monarchs, who not only welcomed the aforementioned indigenous woman with their most exalted protocols but also had their pictures taken with her and allowed those pictures to be published in nothing less than the magazine Hola!; a short round chubby indigenous woman surrounded by kings, princes, marquises, and counts, just like in a fairy tale, I said in the same stumbling tone of voice; an indigenous woman whom none of the white, and so-called respectable, families in this country where we were now drinking coffee would have welcomed through the kitchen door unless she were delivering tortillas, that same indigenous woman who had won the most prestigious international prizes was the only citizen of this country to have appeared in Hola! surrounded by European royalty, a truly impressive occurrence, I told Joseba, my voice almost out of control, to have appeared in Hola! was the highest honor a famous person could aspire to and something this country’s arrogant white masters would never forgive the chubby lady for because there was not then and never would be any chance of them ever appearing in those prestigious pages, though to tell the truth what had most impressed me about my most recent perusal of Hola! had been the feminine attributes of that Norwegian woman Prince Felipe was going out with, my goodness gracious, I could practically taste that Nordic flesh, I told Joseba, sucking on my teeth with relish, now a bit more relaxed, there wasn’t one princess among all of those who appeared in the pages of Hola! capable of outshining that female Viking Don Felipe took his pleasure with, I managed to say with my last breath at the same time as Joseba stood up with an indecipherable expression on his face, indicating that we should go to the cashier to pay for our food, while the prying waitress pushed on the swinging doors and entered the kitchen.