It was Pilar herself who shook me out of my nightmare by asking how things had gone the night before, if I had had a good time with Fátima, all with a mischievous smile, probably enjoying how disappointed I had been upon discovering that her friend had a boyfriend, without suspecting that the disappointment might have even been comical if I hadn’t woken up the way I had: in a stupor from the overdose of Lexotan and regretting that I had not been awake when Fátima got up and left the apartment and therefore couldn’t ask her to forget everything that had happened the night before, to erase the tape and never speak about it with anybody, least of all her boyfriend, Jay Cee, a petition for silence lodged in my esophagus from the time I got out of bed until the moment I reached the archbishop’s palace and started wandering around looking for Fátima in vain — because at some moment during the night she informed me that she would spend that day meeting her beloved boyfriend and packing up her belongings for the move — until I shut myself up in the bishop’s office and focused my attention on the testimony of the woman I had just seen in the corridors, making me momentarily forget my anxiety about the consequences that might result from the night I had spent with Fátima, an anxiety that shot through me again because of the trick question I posed to Pilarica in front of the fountain. What kind of a guy is this Uruguayan soldier? I asked, trying to take the bull by the horns, for my nerves were in no state for any kind of subterfuge, and if I had to prepare myself for the worst it was better to know it once and for all. But I already suspected that the Toledan’s response would be full of a lot of ingenuousness, for she thought Jay Cee was a great guy, the best thing that could have happened to Fátima, he had nothing in common with the local military men, those brutes, but was rather an educated guy, very well traveled, super nice, very cool, she said, I just had to meet him, she had no doubt that we would get along really well. Suddenly I felt my mouth get parched, I felt like pushing Pilarica so she’d fall backward into the fountain, her legs in the air, then dashing out of there without knowing where I was going, but instead I managed to barely mumble in a thick pasty voice that I had to get back to my office to continue copyediting the one thousand one hundred pages for time was running out.