For a few seconds, before I took off like a shot, I enjoyed that hour in the afternoon when the sun had not yet set, the transparent light, a warm breeze blowing through the streets at the same pace as my own steps, and that’s no joke, because I was walking as fast as my legs could carry me, first on one side of the street, then on the other, crossing impetuously in the middle of the block, not so much to prevent somebody from following me, how deluded could I be on such a crowded street, but rather to avoid the ambush I always feared, the one in which two pseudo-muggers — really army intelligence operatives — would corner me and stab me to steal something I didn’t have on me so the priests would finally get the message, I was a foreigner whose murder in the course of a street crime would have no repercussions. At all costs avoid the always-feared ambush: I had this goal in mind every time I went out, obsessed, electrified, just like that afternoon they didn’t pay me my advance and I threaded my way down Octava Avenida, a street stinking of piss and garbage that led from the archbishop’s palace to the central market, a dunghill behind the cathedral I walked through with long strides, constantly scanning the field — behind, in front, to the sides — as if by descrying the murderer’s face I could guarantee my escape, down a stretch of sidewalk crowded with people and street vendors, another stretch on the asphalt the old buses clambered down noisily, overusing their horns, not slowing my pace until I reached Novena Calle and turned up toward Pasaje Aycinena, my improvised destination, because before going to my apartment I wanted to have a few drinks, I wanted some distraction, and the place I picked was a shabby bar-café named Las Mil Puertas, which, despite the name, had only two doors, not a thousand, territory of recycled communists but above all frequented by young men and women with artistic inclinations, bohemians, rebels perhaps, in any case an ambience as different from the archbishop’s palace as could be, tender slabs of young flesh to lift my spirits, I told myself once I was inside and sitting at the corner table, ready to order a soda to catch my breath, because in that joint they served flat water, which I prefer, from the tap, a dangerous circumstance I’d learned about during my previous visits, when I had also sat at the corner table where the walls were marked up with those horrible verses written by mediocre left-wing poets, hawkers of hope, verses written without humility, in big prison-style lettering, but even so, a table that was preferable to those outside, along the Pasaje Aycinena, a deserted walkway that led from Novena Calle to the entrance of Parque Central. So I ordered a whisky with soda and set about clearing my head of all mental associations related to my work at the palace, just as my buddy Toto had advised me to do, taking note instead of every single one of the girls in this bar-café, the good-looking ones, of course, who were few in number but enough to distract me, one of them in particular, a thin girl with lively eyes, oriental eyebrows, and a laugh that was flirtatious for being somewhat timid, whose features sparked my imagination so powerfully that I could picture, within seconds, as I rubbed the palms of my hands against my eyes, that girl’s face as she was being possessed, penetrated, shaken by my rhythmic assault, and I could also see her expression of total abandon at the moment of orgasm and almost hear her plaintive moans, like a satisfied cat, an exercise in fantasy that managed to stabilize my mood and even generated a weak current through my groin, nothing to worry about, even less so now that they had brought me my whisky and soda and after relishing the delightful tickle of that first sip, I finally recovered my equilibrium and relaxed, capable now of observing the flow of my thoughts while remaining separate from them, not identifying with them, as if they were somebody else’s mental movie I was watching with a certain amount of indifference, a mood propitious for achieving spiritual peace but which I couldn’t hold on to for as long as I wanted due to the arrival of a group of persons whom I identified at first glance as belonging to the office I had recently fled and which at that moment I didn’t want to remember anything about, a truly impertinent interruption, for their appearance not only shook me abruptly out of my mood but also forced me to ask myself what the hell I was doing with my life, committing myself to such a project and having to dash madly around a foreign city, which is what I had just done by taking the longest route so as to throw off any possible pursuers, according to my thinking, as if in the end I wasn’t going to find my way to this joint where any wretch could nab me if he wanted to. But I wasn’t going to allow that group of so-called defenders of human rights to ruin my whisky for me, I told myself as I took another sip, and I proceeded to take my notebook out of the inner pocket of my jacket intent on calmly relishing those sentences that seemed so astonishing from a literary point of view, an observation I would never again share with insensitive poets like my buddy Toto, sentences I could, with luck, later use in some kind of literary collage, but which surprised me above all for their use of repetition and of adverbs, such as this one that said, What I think is that I think. . Wow. And this one, So much suffering we have suffered so much with them. .: its musicality perplexed me when I first read it, its poetic quality too high not to suspect that it came from some great poet rather than from a very old indigenous woman who with this verse had brought to an end her wrenching testimony, which wasn’t the point at the moment. Both sentences should have been written on the walls of this bar-café instead of those horrible verses by leftist poetasters, I thought as I put away my notebook, asked the waitress for the check, and took one last look at the girl with oriental eyebrows whose face had fired up my imagination. Upon leaving I walked right by the table where my colleagues were sitting, though I refrained from greeting them, still irritated by their inopportuned appearance, and they didn't greet me either though there passed between us one or another look of recognition.