a la Yul Brynner, who immediately unsheathed his Argentinean accent. “Sorry, but I don’t remember your name,” Johnny said to me, for we had been introduced in my friend Erick’s office and had never seen each other again, but he said it as coolly as he then turned back to his culinary labors assisted by Tania and Charlie, who were sitting at the table in the spacious kitchen cutting up sausages and arranging them on platters, he said it as lightheartedly as when afterward he asked me what I would like to drink, pointing to the table the bottles were set out on and then continuing his story about the excavations he was then carrying out on the outskirts of an abandoned military base in the Petén region, where they had found the bones of seventy-seven persons of all ages, including pregnant women and newborn babies, as Johnny specified. For always the dreams they are there still, I said as a kind of amen when Johnny finished his story, which created a certain discomfort among those present, especially the birthday boy, who perhaps thought my words were part of some foreign ritual he wasn’t familiar with. For always the dreams they are there still, I repeated, a splendid sentence that had lit up my afternoon at the archbishop’s palace, its sonority, its impeccable structure, which spread itself out into eternity without skipping over the moment, its use of the adverb to wring the neck of time, a sentence spoken in the testimony of an old indigenous woman from who knows which ethnic group and that could have been referring to the massacre whose bones the team of forensic anthropologists, of which Johnny was a member, were digging up, a sentence both luminous (due to its suggestion of possible meanings) and terrible (because it was in fact about the nightmare of terror and death). For always the dreams they are there still, I proclaimed for the third time, my eyebrows raised, on the verge of enthusiasm, so that they would understand once and for all its transcendence, so that the Argentinean shaved a la Yul Brynner would not again ask me if I wanted a drink, because I would follow up his question with the answer that I was taking antibiotics and was forbidden to drink alcohol, so that they could turn those recently dug-up bones into words, into poetry of the best kind, into something that wouldn’t fit into the pea-sized brains I suspected they had as they exchanged suspicious glances, that these guys needed me to repeat once again and with a slightly different emphasis, For always the dreams they are there still, as I was willing to do, but at that moment a shrill screech rang out from the ceiling of the kitchen, the front doorbell, they said, just as the dark-skinned woman named Tania announced that she would get the door and Johnny Silverman started down the hallway to go take a shower, for it really was time he did so. “Hey, that great sentence,” Yul Brynner asked, “where did you get it?” just as a peal of laughter and the sounds of people talking reached us from the living room, as if the guests had reached an agreement to all arrive at the same time. “Impressive, man. Sounds like a line from César Vallejo,” said the Argentinean with a certainty that disconcerted me, I must admit, as if that person knew what I was thinking and I had already talked to him about it, a circumstance that from any point of view would have been impossible for it was the first time I had met that shaved guy, who, I soon found out, worked for the U.N. and was an old friend of Johnny’s from when they both lived in New York, this guy with a shaved head who very cunningly segued from his remarks about Vallejo’s poetry and its relationship to indigenous languages to a subtle interrogation about my work at the archdiocese and my friendship with Erick, all packaged neatly into his conversation with me at the kitchen table, not paying any attention to calls to join the group in the living room, where things were picking up, as if he were placing me inside a bubble constructed out of his crafty questions and my inevitable answers, as if the guy had known ahead of time about the psychological problems that afflicted me and that consisted of wanting to tell everything once I’d been encouraged to start talking, down to the hairs and the smells, spill it all out to a point of satiety, compulsively, in a kind of verbal spasm, as if it were an orgiastic race that would culminate in my total abandon, until I was left without secrets, until my interlocutor knew all he wanted to know, in an exhaustive confession after which I would suffer the worst possible backlash. And that’s just what happened: I explained in detail about the one thousand one hundred pages, about my relationship with my friend Erick, about the Spanish hidalgo and the little guy with the Mexican mustache, about the memorable characters who swarmed around the archbishop’s palace, like that woman dozens of times raped, or the Toledan suffering because her boyfriend had betrayed her, or the other Spanish girl who had given me an infection I was trying to combat and thus my abstinence. And then there was a click, as if some switch had been flipped, as if the enchanted bubble had popped, as if the mention of my ailment had been repulsive to the shaved Argentinean, who suddenly had an indecipherable expression on his face, an absence, that even made me feel sorry for him because perhaps I had reminded him of some similar contagion he had once contracted. It was then, in order to try to re-establish contact, even just by changing the subject, that I asked him if he was from Buenos Aires or the countryside. “I’m Uruguayan,” he said between clenched teeth, with such an ugly look in his eyes that I managed only to ask where the bathroom was, stand up, and walk like a zombie past the other guests, with the sensation of falling into a dark, bottomless pit, because like a madman I had exposed my flanks to an astute enemy, who to Johnny was Charlie, but to his lover and other intimates was Jay Cee, Major Juan Carlos Medina, the soldier who was now hatching a plan with various options for annihilating me once I left the bathroom, because as long as I remained seated on the toilet with my guts tied up in knots of fear, he would be getting more and more incensed by the words that had senselessly poured out of my mouth, by the fact that the Spanish girl I had been talking about so disparagingly was to all appearances Fátima, although I never mentioned her name, because nobody knew better than he that the aforementioned disease had come from his own infected penis. Paralyzed, my mind gone blank, not knowing what to do, wishing that the whole thing had been some kind of nightmare from which I would soon awake, I discovered that Johnny’s bathroom was luxury itself: the walls were covered with gorgeous tiles like in a Moorish palace, there was a wide bathtub one could frisk about in with two damsels, a large cedar wardrobe, several throw rugs, modern tools and implements probably for personal grooming, which I didn’t even know existed, mirrors of various sizes that reflected my contrite face, a French window with frosted-glass panes. . Then the knocks sounded on the door, imperious, urgent. “It’s occupied,” I managed to stammer as my gut contracted, knowing that it could only be Jay Cee, who had come to make sure I hadn’t escaped and was standing by the bathroom door waiting for me to come out, where he would be able to trap me and pay me back for the horns that girl of his had perched on his head, perhaps treating me to a most humiliating beating in front of his cohorts if I came out, or dragging me out into the street with the most sinister of intentions, a possibility that sealed off my sphincter. Jay Cee banged on the door again with the same imperious urgency, which made me stand up like a shot and button up my pants, I flushed the toilet and started pacing around desperately, like a cornered rat, for that’s what I felt like, until I stopped in front of the French window with frosted-glass panes, which I opened without difficulty and through which I stepped into a corridor around an internal courtyard, dark and smelling of vegetation I could barely make out, a corridor I moved along as cautiously as possible, a shadow among the shadows searching for a place where I could hide while I put my thoughts in order, alleviate my fear, and calm the agitation I was sweating out of every pore. Avoiding the large ceramic pots and a stair here or there, always hugging the walls of the corridor, watching for Jay Cee coming through the bathroom window, I reached the far end of the courtyard, where I then came to a hallway that led to another section of that colonial mansion and down which I scampered in the hopes of finding a door leading out to the street, because the only sensible thing was for me to hightail it out of there as soon as possible, but just then I heard steps and voices coming toward me, as if the cuckolded soldier had gotten together a posse and was setting up an ambush, so I had to quickly crouch down behind a large pot and wait for my pursuer to pass by me, which didn’t happen, because none of the three guys who appeared in the hallway and entered a side door was the shaved guy I so feared, instead I recognized Johnny Silverman and my friend Erick, together with a third guy I had never seen in my life. The light they turned on in the room lit up the rear window located right next to the pot I was hiding behind, which left me in an optimal position to observe them sitting down around the table and placing a bottle of whisky on it, without them being aware of my presence thanks to the umbrageous plant growing in the pot and the darkness in the hallway, but without my being able to understand the murmurs they were conspiring in, as I soon ascertained, for the rear window allowed nothing else to filter out, just that unintelligible murmur. But even the deafest man on earth would have realized that these three men were exchanging secrets, confidential information, words forbidden for the uninitiated, which surprised me as far as my friend Erick was concerned, but which then led me to wonder what a rich New York Jew was doing digging up bones of indigenous people massacred by the army of a country where they would fry him alive for doing much less than that, and moreover what the hell was he doing conspiring with a representative of the Catholic Church, like my friend Erick, and with that other guy, who from any angle looked like a military man — upright bearing, harsh expression — in fact a high-ranking officer in civilian clothes undoubtedly a half-dozen bodyguards were waiting for outside, for my intuition never led me astray, especially not about his eyes, like those of a cobra about to attack, for a moment I was even afraid he had detected my presence behind that plant in the darkness. That was when the pathways in my mind came full circle: that intelligence officer could be none other than General Octavio Pérez Mena, the torturer of the girl of the archdiocese and the slayer of Indians, whose picture I had never seen because the sly fox knew how to remain invisible, living in the shadows was his specialty and the press couldn’t get hold of him even in their dreams. Horrified, I wanted to get away from there so as not to witness a conspiracy that could cost me my life, but I had nowhere to retreat, for surely that Jay Cee was already snooping around the courtyard and any moment would come walking down this corridor, so it was better for me to remain quietly in my hiding place, alert to the shadows behind me and the cabal behind the glass, because if the shaved man with horns appeared I could in a flash burst into the room, where my friend Erick would defend me, where I could explain to him that due to a misunderstanding that guy wanted to trounce me, so those three would never suspect there’d been an eavesdropper at the rear window nor could Jay Cee act upon his rage. Speculating about the possible subject of their deliberations I was, trying to guess what their lips they were saying, when I felt behind me a presence, so close I didn’t dare move a muscle, so devilishly close I could feel its breath upon my neck, as if the shaved one had knelt down stealthily behind me so he also could peak through the same window, so he could enjoy simultaneously the cabal behind the glass and the terror he was inspiring in me; in the face of this terror the testimony I’d corrected that afternoon popped into my head,