Before continuing I should state clearly that I felt especially safe with Toto, not only because we were in his city and he knew his way around easily, but also because he looked like a landowner — the wide-brimmed hat, the military boots, and the loose-fitting jacket — thereby commanding a certain respect, who knows why, and he probably was carrying a loaded pistol on his belt — forewarned is forearmed — and Toto defined himself as a farmer and a poet, a fact I alone knew, given our close friendship, but to the rest of the cantina’s clientele he would look like just a landowner, a feared species in this country due to its aggressiveness and the little consideration it showed for other peoples’ lives, as might be gathered from reading the one thousand one hundred pages that lay on the desk in the archbishop’s palace and about which my buddy Toto now started to interrogate me. I told him that my friend Erick had stuck it in me crooked and without lubrication, the clever asshole. Instead of the five hundred pages we had agreed on, I would have twice that amount of text to edit without Erick showing any willingness to also double my remuneration. He was confident that at that stage I wouldn’t change my mind because three hundred of those pages were lists of massacres and victims’ names and the other eight hundred were very well written, as I was soon to discover, and as he assured me, so my job was to only polish and touch up the final version, although of course I had carte blanche to change anything I thought necessary, without of course altering the focus — and his trust in me was such that it wasn’t necessary to go into much detail, he said. And the truth was, I admitted to my buddy Toto, that the fifty pages I had read this morning were very carefully written indeed, I would even say they were impeccable, in spite of the antiseptic and slightly academic style of the psychiatrist who had written this first part of the report, a Basque by the name of Joseba, whom I didn’t know and who was now out of the country, whose method consisted of proposing several theses about the effects that the specific and generalized drawing and quartering had had on the physical, mental, and emotional health of the surviving population, only to then support his theses with the testimonies of some of those survivors, carefully chosen out of hundreds and hundreds of cases that were in the archives, some of which, read this morning, had unsettled my sick imagination, I admitted to my buddy, who drank his beer a little too quickly, or rather drank while I was talking and so got ahead of me, for example the case of the village deaf-mute, I continued, I don’t remember in which far-flung village up in the highlands this happened, I read it just before leaving the office, I was even mulling it over on my way as I crossed the city’s main plaza, known as Parque Central, in front of the cathedral, because the poor deaf-mute had the misfortune of being interrogated by soldiers who didn’t know he was deaf, the misfortune of being beaten to make him spill the names of those who had collaborated with the guerrillas, in front of the other inhabitants of the village and without saying a word the deaf-mute was beaten without saying a word after each question the sergeant who commanded the unit asked him, without anybody in the village daring to tell the sergeant that the deaf-mute couldn’t answer even when they tied him to that tree in the plaza and the sergeant began to make incisions on his body with a saber to his shouts of “Speak, you Indian sonofabitch, before I really get pissed off!” but the deaf-mute just opened his bulging eyes so wide that it looked like they were going to pop out of his sockets from terror, unable to answer the sergeant, who, of course, interpreted his silence as defiance and unsheathed his machete to get him to spew out words as fast as a sports announcer and so that this herd of horrified Indians watching the scene would understand that the worst thing they could ever think of doing was to defy authority, a sergeant who was pretty stupid if we consider that he cut the deaf-mute to pieces without even realizing that his screams were not just screams of pain but also the only means for the deaf-mute to express himself. “What a stupid deaf-mute, why didn’t he make signs with his hands?” my buddy Toto commented as he picked some potatoes and onions off the plate the waitress had just brought to the table, as if he had no idea that the first thing the soldiers do is tie a victim’s wrists to immobilize him and as if I hadn’t explained that with the first swing of the machete the god-damn hands of the deaf-mute went flying, tied and all, and that at that point nobody was about to start giving explanations with hand signals; therefore, after the deaf-mute every single other inhabitant of the village was worked over with the machete even though they knew how to talk and said they were willing to denounce the people who had collaborated with the guerrillas, but it didn’t do them any good, the orgy had commenced and only a couple of them managed to survive and come and tell about it twelve years later, I said at the same moment my buddy Toto ordered his third beer while I still had half of my second one, which seemed wise, I must confess, given the fact that it would have been quite inappropriate for me to arrive drunk and disorderly at work on my first afternoon, to pound on the enormous wooden door so that they would let me in to keep reading stories like the one about the deaf-mute or to pick through the testimonies to find sentences like, I am not complete in the mind, just one of the many that astonished me as I went through the pages, I explained to Toto, powerful sentences spoken by Indians for whom remembering the events they told about surely meant bringing back their most painful memories, but also meant entering the therapeutic stage of confronting their past, bringing out into the open those bloody ghosts that haunted their dreams, as they themselves admitted in those testimonies, which seemed like concentrated capsules of pain and whose sentences had so much sonority, strength, and depth that I wrote down some of them in my personal notebook, I said at the same moment I took my little reporter’s notepad out of the inside pocket of my tweed jacket, realizing that my buddy Toto had stopped paying attention because the cantina was filling up and some not-so-bad-looking girls were sitting at a few of the other tables. You’re a poet, just listen to this beaut, I said before reading the first sentence, taking advantage of the marimba having just ended, and in my best declamatory voice, I read: Their clothes stayed sad. . and then I observed my buddy, but he in turn looked back at me as if he were waiting, so I immediately read the second sentence in a more commanding tone of voice, if that were possible: The houses they were sad because no people were inside them. . And then, without waiting, I read the third one: Our houses they burned, our animals they ate, our children they killed, the women, the men, ay! ay!. . Who will put back all the houses? And I observed him again because by now he must have fathomed those verses that expressed to me all the despair of the massacres, but not to my buddy Toto, more of a landowner than a poet, as I sadly discovered, when I heard him mumble something like “Cool. .,” to be polite, I guessed, because then he stared at me with that your-money-or-your-life look in his eyes and said that I should take it in stride, that editing one thousand one hundred pages of stories about Indians obsessed with terror and death could break even the strongest of spirits, infect me with malignant and morbid curiosity, the best thing for me to do was to distract myself, counter the effects, and, according to him, I should forget about my work as soon as I was out of the office, pointing accusingly at my notebook, I should be grateful that for security reasons they didn’t allow me to take the manuscript out of the palace, because living with a text like that twenty-four hours a day could be fatal to someone as compulsive as I was, it would ratchet up my paranoia to truly unhealthy levels, you shouldn’t take that out of the priests’ quarters, and he pointed again at my notebook — just think of it as any other office job, my buddy Toto said and pointed with his chin to the table next to us and behind me, where a couple of damsels were conversing with some jackass, as if this were the appropriate moment to start flirting, as if I had read him those sentences out of my notebook to convince him of the righteousness of a just cause I was committing myself to, when what I really wanted, as I told him now a little pissed off by the circumstances, was to show him the richness of the language of his so-called aboriginal compatriots, nothing more, assuming that he as a poet might have been interested in their intense figurative language and their curious syntactic constructions that reminded me of poets like the Peruvian César Vallejo, and I proceeded to read, now with more resolve and without letting myself be intimidated by the marimba that again started up, a longer fragment so that Toto could have no doubts whatsoever: Three days I am crying, crying I am wanting to see him. There I sat down on the earth to say, there is the little cross, there is he, there is our dust and pay our respects we will, bring a candle, but when we bring the candle, the candle there’s nowhere to put it. . And this sentence, tell me, I rebuked him, now decidedly more pissed off, if this isn’t a great verse, a poetic jewel, I said before reciting it with greater intensity: Because for me the sorrow is to not bury him myself. . That was when I detected alarm in my buddy Toto’s eyes, as if I were shooting my mouth off and some informer were taking down notes without my realizing it, which sent chills up and down my spine, and I had the reflex to look nervously at the customers sitting at the tables around us, some of whom could well have been military informers, it wouldn’t even have surprised me if many of them were, given the state of affairs in that country, more reason for me to put my little notebook away in my jacket pocket and motion to the waitress to bring me my third and last beer. “To not desire, this alone I now desire,” my buddy recited with a mocking smile, wiping the foam off his mustache, then said, “Quevedo.”