hole, willing to do anything to make the apes reconsider their men’s punishment — refusing to move, standing firm for all time, like loyal, rabid she-dogs. The female guard, then, and her wandering hand, were the source of the double, triple, quadruple memories piling up and merging together, Meche at a loss to stop, remedy it, repress a dumb yet absolutely unavoidable attitude of acquiescence, which the bitch savored with a nervous quiver and fitful panting — almost ferocious, breathing only through her nose, actually just like Albino; at which Meche’s own belly seemed to transform, indeed was transformed — by dint of a rebellious transposition — into his belly (Meche, good God, as if letting herself take the man’s role in relation to the bitch) while the image of Albino seeped into her latest sensations, scenes from their first performance, when he straddled her at eye-level, infusing the figures from the Brahmanic tattoo with spine-chilling and prodigious life, and now Meche imagined that it was she who in that moment made her belly dance — identical, albeit secret, invisible undulations — like a seduction technique aimed at the bitch, her eyes closing in, meaning that not only did she not put up any resistance, but, without knowing why, impelled by the mysterious force dictating these new internal relations between Albino, herself, and the guard — which overtook those strangers by chance — she lay down, barely metaphorically speaking (one word would be enough to make her do it for real), in the same position as that other Meche beneath Albino’s body, completely and utterly intoxicated by those Hindustani teenagers. Meche couldn’t formulate in any coherent or logical way, either in words or in thoughts, what was happening to her: what type of rarefied event and new language — secret, with exclusive and singular peculiarities — was now being expressed, although it wasn’t things in general or taken all together, but rather each thing separately, specifically, each thing apart, with their own words, emotions, and subterranean network of communications and significances, which connected them beyond time and space, regardless of the differences between them, so turning them into symbols and codes that were indecipherable to all those who fell outside of the biographical conspiracy by which things constituted themselves in their own particular hermetic disguise. Archaeology of passion, emotion, and sin, in which the weapons, tools, and abstract organs of desire and the tendency of every imperfect deed to seek out its consanguinity and completion in its own twin — however incestuous this may seem — get closer to their goal by means of a long, dogged, and tireless adventure of superimpositions, which slowly begin to assume the image of that whose form is but an unfulfilled yearning, condemned to be merely the nameless foundation of an eternally grasping proximity, restlessly clamoring signs that wait, febrile, for the moment when they finally unite with their twin meaning, and are decoded by their mere presence. So something — a face, a look, an expression, together constituting the object’s defining feature — is distilled and complemented in another person, another love, and even in other circumstances entirely, like archaeological horizons where details from each period — a frieze, a gargoyle, an apse, a surround — are but the moveable parts of a kind of despairing eternity that time contracts, and where hands, feet, knees, the way in which one looks at another, a kiss, a stone, a landscape, through repetition are perceived by senses which no longer belong to that then, even if the past refers to just a minute ago. When Meche crossed the first barred door into the yard leading onto numerous wings, radiating outward from a corridor, or rather a roundel, in the center of which loomed the watchtower — a raised iron polygon constructed to monitor every inch of the prison from above — her mind was still imprinted with the image of the black and fatally eloquent eyes of the female guard, her motionless, imperturbable, terrible eyes that might have been staring at her forever. Polonio could no longer bear to have his head lodged awkwardly against the metal hatch, so he decided to cede his lookout post to Albino, but, on shooting a sideways glance back inside the cell, he thought he noticed a strange movement, and at just at the same instant he realized that the Prick had stopped moaning for the first time since being punched in the gut. Using great care and attention, slowly and cautiously, Polonio folded the ear poking through the hatch and drew back his head, worrying the whole time that Albino might have finally succeeded in choking the cripple. Truth to tell — he thought — there were more than enough reasons to do so, but Albino must keep his cool, at least for now, they would kill him under more favorable circumstances, as soon as the drugs were safely in their hands, not a moment earlier and not in that cell, since the plan might come crashing to the ground, and, whether they liked it or not, the Prick’s mother was a vital part of the equation. It was a question of carefully planning where and how to kill him in the future (or the not too distant future, if that’s what Albino wanted) — but all in good time. In reality, the Prick hadn’t stopped moaning ever since Polonio had pummeled him in the stomach. His moans were irritating, repetitive, and ingeniously false, revealing quite openly and in perfect detail the monstrous state of his perverse, contemptible, despicable, abject soul. The beating hadn’t even been that bad — his miserable body was used to even more brutal and violent ones — so this phony anguish, affected purely to humiliate himself while pleading for pity had the opposite effect, producing a mounting hatred and disgust, a blind rage that unleashed the most lurid desires, from the very depths of his heart, that he should suffer to ridiculous extremes, that someone should inflict more pain, real pain, capable of leaving him in shreds (and here a childhood memory), just like a malign tarantula, the same sensation that invades the senses when the spider, under the effects of boric acid, goes into a frenzy, shrivels into itself — making a furious but impotent sound — curling up inside its own legs, completely out of its mind, but doesn’t die, it doesn’t die, and you’d like to squash it but you don’t have the energy for that, you don’t dare, and not being able to go through with it is enough to drive you to tears. He whimpered in a hoarse, weak, sticky voice, every now and then feigning a woeful and shameless death rattle, while with his tearful, dirty eye he managed to hold his gaze still, a profoundly imploring gaze pierced with piety, full of self-pity, hypocrisy, falsehood, a distant malevolence. Polonio and Albino had only teamed up with the cripple because his mother was willing to help them, but once their business was done, he could go to hell, could go fuck himself, killing him was the only way out, the only way of recovering any peace or tranquility. “Leave him be!” Polonio barked at Albino, putting all his weight into giving him a hefty shove. Now released from Albino’s clutches, the Prick was slumped like a lifeless sack in the corner. In fact, Albino had very nearly choked him to death, and now he didn’t dare moan or kick up a fuss. Shaking and clumsily raising one hand to his chest, he rubbed his neck and massaged his Adam’s apple between his fingers as if attempting to put it back in place. Now his one eye glinted in silent horror, so stupefied that suddenly he seemed unable to make sense of anything at all. The minute they pulled off the plan and the situation took a new turn, he planned to tell his mother — recounting all his terrible woes, and how nothing mattered to him, nothing