La vida es sueño, Life Is a Dream, began, a boring wordy play that I barely paid any attention to because my eyes were glued to Antolín’s expressions and gestures, just as Mr. Rabbit had recommended: that I engage with the subject as much as possible through intense observation, that I even try to get inside his head to see the world as he sees it in order to predict his probable reactions, something impossible to do in a theatrical setting like the one we were in, where Antolín was not Antolín but rather Segismundo, the main character in the play. And while I was observing him in his period costume and listening to him speak in that affected voice, I began to wonder what Eva could possibly have seen in such a specimen, what could have attracted her to him, what had she found in him that I didn’t have, questions that began to grate on me and plunged me into a state of odium and a desire for revenge toward someone I was seeing for the first time, someone who had already fucked my woman to his heart’s content and in whose face — hooked nose and all — I began to discern the expression of scorn he was reserving just for me, an expression that would turn into terror and entreaty when I began to make him pay for every single paroxysm he had wrung out of Eva. As bad luck would have it, I ran into Carmen, a friend and colleague of Eva’s, in the lobby as we were leaving the theater, which made me a little nervous, for although I only said hi to her quickly from a distance, I noticed a look of surprise on her face, as if she already knew about the romance between my wife and that two-bit actor and was wondering what I was doing at his play, as I mentioned to Mr. Rabbit when we met at his pickup truck in a spot in the parking lot where we had a view of the theater’s main doors as well as the back exit, because I didn’t know if Antolín had a car (the question would have made Eva suspicious); the plan was to tail him all night to learn his every movement, find out where he lived, and thereby decide on the best moment to annihilate him. Not even fifteen minutes had passed since the show had ended when we saw the leading man leave through the main door and walk toward a white Volkswagen bug, which he got into without suspecting that we’d be following him with the discipline and efficacy of an expert in urban guerrilla warfare, which Mr. Rabbit was, and with the hope that he was on his way home to spruce himself up before going out for the night, thereby to discover his lair and assess the option of eliminating him there, though not that night. Tailing him was easy: he drove to the Periférico going south, then got onto Viaducto and took the Avenida Cuauhtémoc exit, which made me think that luck was on our side and our subject was on his way home, seeing that I knew he lived in Colonia Narvarte thanks to Eva’s first confession, though she hadn’t wanted to name the street for fear that I would act impetuously, nor did I insist, not wanting to arouse suspicion. The whole twenty minutes we tailed him, adrenaline was pumping through my body, I was talking nervously, saying whatever popped into my mind, a bit in a frenzy, to be honest, whereas Mr. Rabbit maintained strict silence, as usual, focusing his attention on the Volkswagen bug until it stopped on Anaxágoras Street and parked, whereas we kept driving by slowly to look for a spot to park a little farther on but with our eyes glued to the rearview mirror, because the worst thing would have been to lose the subject at that moment. “Wait for me here,” Mr. Rabbit ordered when he turned off the engine, in a tone of voice I assumed he used for clandestine operations, and, without giving me time to respond, he got out of the car and walked toward the two-bit actor, who at that moment was entering the five-story building where he probably lived. Mr. Rabbit entered behind him and I stayed put, plunged into a state of extreme anxiety, not knowing what to do besides squirm in my seat for a few minutes that seemed to last forever. What would Mr. Rabbit do? Would he simply note the apartment number or would he also enter into contact with the subject? Why had he taken the initiative when I, supposedly, was the one who should have approached the two-bit actor? Soon, I saw my friend returning with slow but steady steps and that impenetrable expression on his face. “Done,” he said as he started the car, without me understanding at first exactly what he was talking about, though I assumed he meant he’d found out the subject’s apartment number, which is what I told him, but Mr. Rabbit was pokerfaced and withdrawn, not unusual for him, until a few blocks later when we stopped at the first red light and he took the opportunity to take a small pistol out of his jacket pocket and remove the silencer. “It’s still warm,” he said as he handed me the short tubular device that had muffled the sound of the shot; those fumes of gunpowder were proof that Mr. Rabbit had fired his weapon, I told myself in dismay, suddenly afraid to have the silencer in my hands and throwing it into his lap as if it were burning me. “What the fuck, what have you done!?” I exclaimed, beside myself, because then I fully understood that Mr. Rabbit had just liquidated Antolín. “The plan for today was just to follow him!” I shouted, in shock, truly choking on what had just occurred. “Don’t take it personally, but it really was for the best,” Mr. Rabbit mumbled, just as calmly, putting the silencer back into his jacket pocket, while I failed to recover from the shock. “Consider it a favor. It’s no problem for me to do something like that, I learned how to a long time ago, out of necessity, but you’ve never done it, and it’s better for you not to,” he said emphatically, as if thereby putting an end to the subject. And I sat there, speechless, in unfamiliar torment, as if suddenly a huge mass of guilt had slammed into my cerebellum, and instead of the joy that should have swept over me at the death of the person who’d cuckolded me, I experienced a sensation of drowning, suffocation, though it wasn’t air I was lacking but something else, because then I realized that it had never been anything but bluster, my true intention had never been to kill said two-bit actor but rather to prove who knows what to myself and Mr. Rabbit about how I could be as brave and resolute as he, about how nobody was going to make a mockery of me without paying with his life, a mockery of the magnitude this Antolín character had made of me could only be paid for with his life, as had now happened without me being able to do anything to fix it. Slunk down in the seat of the pickup next to Mr. Rabbit, who, with a serenity that was diametrically opposed to my all-consuming anguish, was driving toward La Veiga, where we were going to have a couple of drinks to celebrate the “decisive and impeccable” operation, as he defined it while maneuvering the car into a parking place, I understood that deep down I always knew that I would never have had the nerve to kill Antolín, that the whole so-called decision I had boasted about was simply the pretense of a person who knows that at the very last moment he will find the perfect justification to avoid taking action; but Mr. Rabbit’s initiative had thrust me into a situation I was not prepared for, because the moment I closed the door to the pickup — still with a modicum of control over myself, even if completely crushed by guilt — I knew that an extremely severe bout of paranoia was enveloping me and that I’d gotten myself into a hell I never thought I’d fall into and hadn’t the slightest idea how to get out of. “Don’t tell me now that you didn’t really want to do it, that you’re having regrets,” Mr. Rabbit said as we sat down at a table in front of a group of old Spaniards, pachyderms who could be found drinking coffee there at any hour of the day; but uttering a single word would make evident my state of collapse, so I just barely managed to respond with a wave of my hand that meant “it doesn’t matter,” though at that moment I was becoming terrifyingly aware that the police would not have to dig very deep to find clues that would lead them to me; Eva herself, when she found out what had happened, would undoubtedly point her finger at me, and I wouldn’t have an alibi, nor could I accuse Mr. Rabbit, because that person simply didn’t exist, he was a clandestine cadre of the Salvadoran guerrillas in Mexico responsible for delicate logistics, someone with false papers, whose address I didn’t know, and whom I was able to see only when he contacted me, for I had no means of finding him due to the strict measures of compartmentalization and security he operated under — I didn’t even know the license plate number of his pickup truck. “What happened?” I asked in a wispy voice as I waited anxiously for the waitress to bring the vodka tonics. “I caught up with him on the landing. He didn’t know what hit him,” he said. I tried to imagine the scene — Mr. Rabbit slipping in before the street door closed, the moment he drew his gun, the expression on the face of the person I had known as Segismundo — but I was so agitated that I could not even hold on to these images. “Don’t worry, I didn’t leave a single clue,” he said. The fact that he had wiped off his fingerprints didn’t mean that he hadn’t left any clues, I told him, my nerves exposed and frayed and I on the verge of losing control, because the plan I had previously deemed well reasoned now seemed idiotic, as was demonstrated by the fact that Eva’s officemates would know about her romance with that two-bit actor — women tell one another everything — and Antolín himself had probably bragged to his friends about the great piece of ass he’d had and who’d then left him so abruptly, not to mention Carmen, who’d seen me leave the theater that night. I was completely lost, plunging over a cliff, and my fall would end only with my arrest, imprisonment, and the confession the Mexican police would wring out of me without a savage beating, because I was already broken, an irrepressible urge to confess was already choking me, regret was already gnawing at my chest: I was repentant and ready to be punished. “Calm down,” Mr. Rabbit told me when he saw me gulping down my whole vodka tonic in desperation and noticed the queasy expression on my face, as if I were about to keel over. That’s when the stern expression on Mr. Rabbit’s face relaxed, and I thought I saw a sneer of mockery— now, to top things off, I would become my friend’s laughingstock, I thought in a flash of rage, but I deserved all of it, I told myself, now with another pang of remorse. “Nothing happened,” he said, smiling, just to try to make me feel better, help me free myself from those tangled webs of guilt, because killing some sonofabitch wasn’t such a big deal, that’s what he was telling me. And then he laughed, now heartily, and exclaimed, “The guy’s safe at home; I didn’t do anything to him.” But I refused to believe him, he had to be lying to me, otherwise why the smell of gunpowder and the warmth of the silencer, as I pointed out, and the mocking smile that never left his face. “I fired into a flower pot on the landing,” he said, now doubled over in laughter at the sight of me so totally perplexed: should I get angry that I’d been the victim of a sinister joke or delight in having had my life handed back to me? “Still want us to break his neck?” he asked, unable to stop laughing.