rather attempting to figure out what difference it would make as she was reaffirming her fidelity to her boyfriend, who would arrive the following morning and whom I had just found out about, if she had given me a blow job or been penetrated, a difference that was frankly difficult for me to discern, much more so when she tried to talk without taking my member out of her mouth, saying something like “ca-cu-ca-ci,” and looking at me worriedly and without diminishing the flurry of her movements she mumbled over and over again in a guttural way “ca-cu-ca-ci,” with such concern in her eyes, until I told her that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, that she should take my member out of her mouth before talking, which she did immediately and then she clearly repeated what before I had heard only as “ca-cu-ca-ci,” which in fact was the question, “Are you happy?” I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this situation surpassed all my expectations, for Fátima posed such a question with the vocal intonations of a young whore, just starting out, anxious and eager to please her client, insecure about her ability to employ techniques she had so recently learned. “Ca-cu-ca-ci,” I repeated to myself in disbelief while she stuck my member back in her mouth and carried on with her dazzling performance without me being able to fully enjoy such suckling efforts, given the alienation that awkward and unprecedented situation — so much for adjectives — had immersed me in, but without, thank God, my member failing me, in which case I don’t know what would have happened. And soon my absence would become unpleasant, my state of withdrawal would succumb to an overwhelming attack on the senses, when she, thoroughly excited by my member in her mouth, finished taking off the garments she was still wearing, including a pair of military boots and thick socks that seemed to me vulgar and unattractive garments to wear under a summer skirt, a fashion shared by most of her European colleagues and that I had assumed was nothing more than a youthful whim without any further consequences, but that at that moment acquired a sinister dimension when an odor issued forth from those military boots that tore my nasal passages to pieces and made me feel the strongest possible revulsion, an odor that undoubtedly permeated her feet, perhaps beautiful and appetizing from afar, but which I didn’t even dare to look at because I had thrown my head back against the couch, my eyes closed, my face wearing the enthralled expression of a man overwhelmed by pleasure, when the truth was that the most diverse images and thoughts were racing through my mind, thoughts and images I clung to tenaciously so as not to succumb to the overpowering assault on my nostrils emanating from the odor of Fátima’s feet. No other circumstance explained how I could have been unaware of the precise instant she stopped blowing me and in one abrupt movement climbed on top of me, only my total state of distraction made it possible for Fátima to begin to gallop on top of me with my member inside her without my realizing it, because by the time I was able to react she was already being penetrated by my member and the only thing I could do was pull her toward me so I could bury my face in her neck so as to filter out as much as possible the unbearable stench, which by then had permeated the small living room of my apartment and would probably be difficult to remove from the rug where she was digging in her feet to better ride me. Lucky me that my irrigation systems didn’t let me down, for flaccidity at that moment would have been the last straw, and while she was well on her way to a state of frenzy and even as I was attempting to use all possible means to press my nostrils against her skin, my mind was bouncing around like a ping-pong ball from her previous absolute refusal to fuck me to her little shouts now presaging orgasm, from the question about my preference for a blow job or a hand job to the unintelligible “ca-cu-ca-ci,” from the baneful military boots to the boyfriend who would arrive the following day; a ping-pong ball bouncing with increasing intensity as Fátima approached her orgasm and shouted, “my love,” “my dearest love,” as if I were the boyfriend she awaited so anxiously, whereas the only circumstance of any urgency for me was to get her off me so I could quickly go and get the air-freshener out of my bathroom. That nature is capricious I understood once she, satiated and breathless, noticed that I was still aroused, an erection that didn’t correspond even remotely to my state of mind and in the face of which Fátima decided to stick my member back in her mouth after saying, “Hey, man, aren’t you ever going to come?” at which point I reproached myself for not having the courage to push her aside, I hated that obsessive need I had to make a good impression and my fear of hurting someone that prevented me from asking her to stop, from telling her that it had all been a big mistake, that she should relax and go to the bathroom to take a shower while I made the bed, though I really would have preferred to call a taxi that would take her home right away. But I didn’t say anything, instead I let her keep at it until I suddenly understood that coming would be the healthiest thing to do, that I should cut the crap, concentrate on the suction she was applying and forget everything else if only to prevent my balls from cramping up and in the hope of recouping some of my losses from that nonsensical night, but it was already too late and after a while she took my wilting member out of her mouth and said she was tired, that we should go to the bedroom and get under the sheets, which I agreed to, since the situation had already spun totally out of control. And she walked in front of me, giving little flirtatious jumps without me sighing for any of her body’s undeniable attributes, all obscured by the disagreeable idea that the stench of her feet would permeate my bed and oblige me to ask for a change of sheets ahead of time, my bed that would no longer be what it had been, even less so when she, already lying down, immediately began telling me about the boyfriend she was expecting the following day, a major in the Uruguayan army stationed in this country as a member of the U.N. forces overseeing the implementation of the peace accords signed by the government and the guerrillas, a tender, affectionate guy who at that very moment was probably packing his bags in a New York hotel room, his heart set on the girl who the following day would meet him at the airport and who now lay beside me, naked under the sheets; a military man she affectionately called Jay Cee, for that was what he liked to be called, Fátima explained to me, even though his name was Juan Carlos Medina, Major Juan Carlos Medina, to be more exact, he preferred that she and his friends call him thus, Jay Cee, two initials that I repeated to myself, without speaking them, on the verge of panic, while Fátima revealed to me her decision to go live with Jay Cee in a few days, that the plans had already been made and she would move her belongings from Pilarica’s place to the large and modern apartment Jay Cee had rented in the city’s exclusive Zone 14, a move that — as she herself admitted as she was curling up in bed — betrayed some of her principles, especially those related to the poverty and suffering of the indigenous peoples she worked with, and that would also be somewhat inconvenient given the scarcity of public transportation in that wealthy neighborhood. But her relationship with Jay Cee was above and beyond all that, she said, lying face down, the sheet half-covering her back, he was an incomparable guy, mature, twelve years older than her, very understanding, so much so that they shared everything that happened in their lives, including “parallel encounters” as she called them, referring to their infidelities, because they had spent several periods of time apart, when he worked at the U.N. headquarters in New York and she traveled into the highlands, she mumbled sleepily between yawns, though until then, throughout their entire seven-month relationship, only Jay Cee had confessed with total frankness to one insignificant “parallel encounter,” which Fátima had understood and forgiven, though she had not had anything to confess. You’re not going to tell him about us, I whispered cautiously, for my fear had by now become too much, knowing that the girl falling asleep beside me was the fucking property of a soldier, shit, that I was on the verge of sliding away headlong on a sled of terror and was searching blindly for the tiniest branch to grab onto, but Fátima barely even turned her head, the palms of her hands joined under her cheek like a pillow, she told me that of course she would tell him, that was their agreement, to always tell each other the truth, to always trust each other totally, and that she hated pretending and lying more than anything else. I didn’t want to turn her over to see for myself, nor argue in favor of silence, but instead I figured this was a joke, her way of making fun of me, even though her tone of voice didn’t leave any room for doubt, sooner rather than later she would reveal our relationship to the soldier, and he would react like any cuckolded man, with the same blind rage, but even worse given the fact that we were talking about a soldier accustomed to resolving his problems through the use of arms, and since he wouldn’t shoot her, he would shoot me, most probably, or both of us, I told myself as I descended into an expanding maelstrom of paranoia. I was then going to ask Fátima not to be unreasonable, that she shouldn’t let her mouth run away with her, to tell the truth sometimes is foolishness itself, even suicidal, as was the case here, when it was obvious the soldier had tangled her up in his web of full confessions for his own sinister reasons, that she would drag my dignity through the mud between her feet and in the most irresponsible way she would put my life in danger; I was about to demand that Fátima not be so naïve, that she use some common sense, when she started snoring shamelessly, curled up in a little ball, serene in her deep sleep, untouched by my anguish, leaving me in a suffocating state of internal agitation, right on the verge of collapse and the only thing I could think to do was turn off the light and lie down in the bed as stealthily as possible, as if we could thus go unnoticed, as if in this way I could erase once and for all that equivocal night, nothing but torture for me, a night in which the pleasures of the flesh had been but a thin pretext for plunging me into the inferno of the mind, as I already said, because in that semidarkness penetrated by suspicious sounds I understood that I had become the target of that Jay Cee, that it would be effortless for him to kill me and blame my death on the local military thanks to the fact that I was the copyeditor of the one thousand one hundred pages that documented the genocide they had perpetrated against their so-called compatriots, or what was even worse, I thought, tossing and turning in bed, the bloodhounds of army intelligence, already informed about my “parallel encounter” with Jay Cee’s girl, would liquidate me and turn my death into a crime of passion, a magnificent three-pronged strike that would allow their act to simultaneously resonate among the priests of the archdiocese, their Spanish colleagues, and the U.N. forces, all of whom were determined in one way or another to cause the army problems. There’s no question at all that I was in the grips of the worst of all terrors, as if death were breathing alongside me, as if the snores of sleeping beauty were the blast of the trumpet announcing the arrival of the black heralds, what a thought, for fear distorts everything and I was experiencing tachycardia, sweating, probably with my blood pressure sky high, absolutely certain that now I was really in danger. I’d had enough: I stood up, my anxiety gushing out, and went to the living room where I could pace like a prisoner in the tower, that’s how I felt, with the death sentence snoring in my bed and the prospect of a long and sinister night, unless I could gulp down a triple whisky, a substance I didn’t possess, or take a strong dose of Lexotan, the sedative I was supposed to take 1.5 milligrams of in the morning and a similar dose at night, as the doctor had prescribed several months before, when I suffered from such episodes after the publication of my article about the first African president of my country, which forced me into exile, a sedative I religiously kept at arm’s length, not taking the prescribed dosage, afraid as I am of addictions and knowing that with my compulsive personality I would have taken it until I’d overdosed. I swallowed two pills of 1.5 milligrams each, and I sat down to read the long information sheet that came with the medicine, a glass of water in my hand, determined to distract myself, to no longer think about the consequences of my relationship with Fátima, to reduce my anxiety so that I could then go to bed and try to sleep, which — according to the text I was reading — would happen in no sooner than thirty minutes, the time it took the pill to take effect, so that while still in the throes of dejection all I could do was collapse onto the couch, the scene of the catastrophe, and pick up my notebook from the coffee table and leaf through it and focus my attention on other voices, other rooms, but as soon as I opened it I found the last sentence I had written down before leaving the archbishop’s palace, a sentence that perturbed my spirit even further, the sentence, If I die, I know not who will bury me, spoken by an old Quiche man whom the army had left in the direst possible situation after killing his children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and all his other family members, in such an extremely dire situation that this survivor’s last lament in his testimony was, If I die, I know not who will bury me, the poor old man, a matter I immediately questioned myself about, a question that landed on my snout like a black butterfly because I didn’t have anybody to bury me in case either this Jay Cee or the specialists of the so-called military intelligence decided to eliminate me, nobody to take care of my mortal remains if something happened to me, I thought with sadness, not even the few remaining family members in my own country, and no one I knew in this foreign country would take care of my bones, I bemoaned in a state of self-pity, perhaps only my buddy Toto had enough affection for me to take up a collection for the funds needed to give me a dignified burial, so my cadaver wouldn’t remain in the morgue until it was sold as so much offal to some medical school, I told myself with tears in my eyes, on the verge of despair, because I felt utterly forsaken, not suffering as much as the old indigenous man whose statement had gotten me into such a state of mind, I must admit, but almost as alone and abandoned as him, even though a girl was sleeping in my bed, the intensely desired girl who had possessed me without my getting any pleasure out of it at all and whose imprudence now threatened to push me to my death. I returned to the bedroom to lie down under the sheets, to breathe rhythmically, trying to concentrate on the air coming into and going out of my nostrils, ignoring the stench of Fátima’s feet, for I had other worries now, determined as I was to make that ping-pong ball bounce less and less, until I finally fell asleep.