Siglo XX, which I read without finding anything of much interest until I got to Polo Rosas’s column, where to my surprise I saw myself mentioned in a most ignominious way, that hack whom I’d met only a few times in my life when I lived in Mexico stated in the aforementioned column that I had told him that so-and-so had told me that another so-and-so had been opposed to Polo Rosas being awarded a prize for his novel ten years before, which of course left me flabbergasted not only because of the false nature of the information but also because the entire rigmarole had been drummed up to prove that I was some kind of snitch, which would have been nothing worse than insignificant gossip if I didn’t find myself at that moment carrying out a delicate task whereby the genocide perpetuated by this country’s army against the unarmed indigenous population was being documented and exposed, making me almost choke on my coffee, and I didn’t feel like even tasting my churros when I realized that this was a clear message from the Presidential High Command letting me know in no uncertain terms that they knew I was in that city, involved in what I was involved in, which wasn’t really a surprise to me, considering the high quality of the military intelligence services, the surprising aspect being that they would employ some hack with a reputation as a leftist rebel to communicate this message to me and, I then understood, to the church as well, in order to make them distrust me and my work by having Polo Rosas insinuate that I was a snitch, which of course perturbed me excessively, I almost started screaming and waving my arms around at the bar in the Café León because such libel was a vicious assault on my amour propre and at the same time unleashed my paranoia to such a degree that I no longer wanted more coffee or my churros, but instead I paid and left for the palace, choking on my rage, certain that my friend Erick and the little guy named Mynor had already read the aforementioned column and might know something more about it. But neither of them was in his office when I was so eager to discuss with somebody this dirty trick Polo Rosas had played on me, not only to extract the knife from my wounded amour propre, as mortifying as that was, but also to analyze the significance of this maneuver and discuss what means should be taken to counteract it, to which end I shut myself up in my office and called my buddy Toto, after all a farmer and a poet and therefore acquainted with the local literary fauna, and suggested that we go get a couple of beers around midday, at eleven, to be more precise, at the usual place, as I had a deadly hangover, I lied, without ever mentioning Polo Rosas’s dirty trick, so as not to give the military, which was taping every telephone call that came in and went out of the palace, the pleasure of knowing how deeply their knife had pierced me. I must admit that from eight-thirty in the morning, the moment I passed in fury and poisoned spirits through the enormous wooden door, until ten forty-five, when I passed through it again on my way to El Portalito, I couldn’t concentrate on my perusal of the one thousand one hundred page report, I spent the whole time planning one or another way of responding to the calumnious column written by that hack, whom I’d only seen twice in my life and about whom I remember nothing but his bald spot, and the impertinence and resentment he brandished about once he’d downed his first drink, nothing else, just his bald spot with a few graying tufts around the edges that, due to a highly inexplicable and circumstantial association of ideas, made me repeat again and again like one possessed a sentence written on the piece of paper on my desk, which I immediately copied into my notebook and which said: There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with logs they spilled them, which I repeated with increasing fury until I could see those magnificent logs making pieces of gray hair tufts anointed with brains fly through the air, nor could I make even a modicum of progress because neither my friend Erick nor the little guy with the Mexican mustache would be coming to the palace that morning, according to one of the secretaries, for they were attending an important meeting at the bishop’s parish church, as far as I could figure out, which further inflamed my paranoia and made me afraid that libelous rag would be the first item on the agenda. I was right to assume that my buddy Toto had not read the aforementioned column, as he confessed to me when I found him installed at the corner table, having arrived ahead of me because he really was suffering from a terrible hangover. “I don’t read that shit,” he said without attributing any importance to the matter and after criticizing me for wasting my time and even worrying about what some slum lord had written, who everybody knew was the eyes and ears of G-2, the so-called military intelligence, as I had correctly inferred, because Polo Rosas was not sensu stricto a novelist but rather the owner of many rental units in various neighborhoods in the city, whose legal representative and rent collector was a lawyer who also worked for the military, my buddy said while still half asleep in the cantina, thank God with no marimba playing and where we were the only customers other than a couple sitting lazily at the bar, which explained why the novels the old guy had published were exclusively about deserters and snitches from the ranks of the guerrillas, and even worse, it was known that said person on two occasions had joined a left-wing guerrilla group and come out of it unharmed while most of his comrades had been murdered, my buddy Toto said, without assigning too much importance to it, as if he were talking about some clerk who filched paper from the copy machine and not a slanderer who, in the light of these new revelations, had acquired a sinister aspect, I asserted with my paranoia firing up yet again after the poet and farmer stated, “Cut the shit, if the sonsabitches want to send you a message, the very least they’ll do is give you a pounding,” which was precisely what I most feared, a vicious attack with a knife in the middle of the street, and then he said that if they wanted to give me a pounding they didn’t need to go through some old bald guy with prostate disease who probably just wanted to use his newspaper column to irritate me, which is precisely what he had achieved. I didn’t have a chance to respond to Toto’s analysis because at precisely that moment we saw walk toward our table Chucky, the Killer Doll, a short stocky guy who looked just like a bulldog with blue eyes, whose subordinates, including my buddy Toto, affectionately dubbed with the name of that movie character, Chucky, the Killer Doll, as much for his appearance as for the fact that in his youth he was known as playing a leading role in all kinds of dangerous adventures in which he had risked his own life and taken the lives of others, even though he was now the respectable director of an NGO dedicated to promoting the municipal power company, where my buddy Toto worked in public relations, lives like those of the four soldiers who had tried to capture him seventeen years before when he was a daring left-wing urban guerrilla commando, when he and his main comrade-in-arms were taken by surprise by soldiers who believed they’d gotten the upper hand once they had tied their wrists together and loaded them into the back of their jeep, not expecting Chucky and his comrade to strike back so fiercely that the four soldiers in the jeep were killed while Chucky lost only his baby and ring fingers on his right hand, an adventure I had heard about many times from the mouth of my buddy Toto as well as from the hero himself, who now with a few pints under his belt brandished said stumps, which I felt when we had shaken hands, after he greeted us with the typical, “What’s happening, you faggots!?” before he sat down and started clapping loudly as if he owned the place to get the waitress to rush over and take his order. And then Chucky blurted out the morning’s good news: that a few hours ago the main opposition presidential candidate had miraculously escaped an attempt on his life in Zone 9. “You’re kidding,” my buddy Toto exclaimed, who in spite of being the public relations person for the NGO had not read the column against me nor had he heard about the assault, while his boss knew about both events, as I later discovered, when he told me that Polo Rosas was an envious old bastard nobody would ever trust enough to hire for a delicate task like the one I was performing, thanks to which Chucky was immediately transformed from a likable assassin into an intelligent and clever guy, a conclusion further re-enforced when he recounted with a flourish of colorful details an incident that had occurred fifteen years before when urban commandos under his leadership had likewise attacked the presidential candidate of the main opposition party, at that time the Christian Democrats, the difference being that in that instance the whole thing had been a mistake, Chucky said unable to hold back his laughter: all-terrain vehicles with tinted windows had been seen driving out of a fortified mansion surrounded by dozens of bodyguards, making it look like the center of operations of the right-wing death squads, and given the sense of urgency during that period and without doing any research, he had decided to launch an assault — the immediate reprisal for the death squads’ attack on a university press — that consisted of machine gunning and throwing grenades at a car driving out of the compound, after which the commandos retreated without any difficulty, until they were surprised to hear on the radio that they had just attacked the home of Vinicio Cerezo, the Christian Democratic candidate and subsequently president of the republic, who fortunately had come out of it unharmed, he hadn’t been driving in the machine-gunned car, and he was holding the right-wing death squads responsible, Chucky said with a flirtatious chuckle, because at that moment the waitress, whom he constantly called “my love,” had brought him a plate of toast smeared with beans, and that handsome guy, that blue-eyed bulldog, might even manage to score with her, but for that he needed something more than daring and bravery, and he continued recounting anecdotes that distracted me enough to draw me out of the perturbed state the newspaper column written by that treacherous bald and big-eared hack had put me in.