The Discreet Hero

III

Felícito Yanaqué received the second letter signed with a spider a few days after the first, on a Friday afternoon, the day he always visited Mabel. Eight years ago, when he set her up in the small house in Castilla, not far from the Puente Viejo, a bridge that had since fallen victim to El Niño’s devastation, he’d see her two, even three times a week; but over the years the fire of passion had subsided, and for some time now he saw her only on Fridays after he left the office. He’d spend a few hours with her, and they almost always ate together, in a nearby Chinese restaurant or in a Peruvian restaurant in the center of the city. Sometimes Mabel cooked him a dried-beef stew, her specialty, which Felícito dispatched happily with a nice cold beer from Cusco.

Mabel took good care of herself. In these eight years she hadn’t gotten fat: She still had her gymnast’s figure, her narrow waist, pert breasts, and round, high ass that she still shook joyfully when she walked. She was dark, with straight hair, a full mouth, very white teeth, a radiant smile, and laughter that infected everyone around her with joy. Felícito thought she was as pretty and attractive as she’d been the first time he saw her.

That was in the old stadium in the Buenos Aires district during a historic match: Atlético Grau, which hadn’t been in the first division for thirty years, took on and defeated none other than Alianza Lima. For him it was love at first sight. “You’re in a daze, compadre,” joked Colorado Vignolo, his friend, colleague, and competitor — he owned La Perla del Chira Transport — with whom he would go to soccer games when the teams from Lima and other departments came to Piura to play. “You’re staring at that little brunette so hard you’re missing all the goals.” “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” Felícito murmured, clicking his tongue. “She’s absolutely fantastic!” She was a few meters away, accompanied by a young man who put his arm across her shoulders and from time to time caressed her hair. After a while, Colorado Vignolo whispered in his ear, “I know her. Her name’s Mabel. You’re primed and loaded, compadre. That one fucks.” Felícito gave a start: “Are you telling me, compadre, that this delicious girl is a whore?”

“Not exactly,” Colorado corrected himself, nudging him with his elbow. “I said she fucks, not that she whores around. Fucking and whoring are two different things, my friend. Mabel is a call girl, or something like that. Only with certain privileged men, and only in her own house. Charging an arm and a leg, I imagine. Do you want me to get you her phone number?”

He did, and, half dead with embarrassment — for, unlike Colorado Vignolo, who had been living high and whoring since he was a kid, Felícito had always led a very austere life, dedicated to his work and his family — he called her, and after beating around the bush, arranged a meeting with the pretty woman from the stadium. She met him for the first time at the Balalaika, a café on Avenida Grau near the benches where the old gossips, founders of CILOP (Center for the Investigation of the Lives of Other People), would gather to enjoy the cool breeze at nightfall. They had lunch and talked for a long time. He felt intimidated by so pretty and young a girl, wondering from time to time what he would do if Gertrudis or Tiburcio and Miguelito suddenly appeared in the café. How would he introduce Mabel to them? She played with him like a cat with a mouse: “You’re pretty old and worn out to fool around with a woman like me. Besides, you’re really a runt, with you I’d always have to wear flats.” She flirted with him all she wanted, bringing her smiling face close to his, her eyes flashing, grasping his hand or arm, a contact that made Felícito shiver from head to toe. He had to go out with Mabel for close to three months — taking her to the movies, inviting her to lunch or dinner, taking a ride to the beach at Yacila and the chicha bars in Catacaos, giving her a good many presents, from lockets and bracelets to shoes and dresses that she picked out herself — before she would allow him to visit her in her little house north of the city, near the old San Teodoro cemetery, on a corner in the labyrinth of alleyways, stray dogs, and sand that was the last remnant of La Mangachería. The day he went to bed with her, Felícito Yanaqué cried for the second time in his life (the first had been the day his father died).

“Why are you crying, old man? Didn’t you like it?”

“I’ve never been so happy in my life,” Felícito confessed, kneeling and kissing her hands. “Until now I didn’t know what it meant to feel pleasure, I swear. You’ve taught me happiness, Mabelita.”

A short while afterward, without further ado, he offered to set her up in what Piurans called a casa chica, a permanent love nest, and give her a monthly allowance so she could live without worries or concerns about money, in an area better than this one filled with streetwalkers and Mangache pimps and bums. Surprised, all she could find to say was: “Swear you’ll never ask me about my past or make a single jealous scene for the rest of your life.” “I swear it, Mabel.” She found the little house in Castilla, near the Salesian fathers’ Don Juan Bosco Academy, and furnished it as she pleased. Felícito signed the lease and paid all the bills without once arguing about the price. He paid her monthly allowance punctually, in cash, on the last day of the month, just as he did with the clerks and workers at Narihualá Transport. He always consulted her about the days he’d come to see her. In eight years he’d never shown up unexpectedly at the little house in Castilla. He didn’t want the bad experience of finding a pair of trousers in his lover’s bedroom. He also didn’t check on what she did on the days of the week they didn’t see each other. True, he sensed that she stepped out on him and silently thanked her for doing it discreetly, without humiliating him. How could he have objected? Mabel was young and high-spirited; she had a right to have a good time. She’d already done a great deal by agreeing to be the mistress of an old man as short and ugly as he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, not at all. When he occasionally saw Mabel in the distance, coming out of a shop or a movie theater with a man, his stomach twisted with jealousy. Sometimes he had nightmares in which Mabel announced, very seriously, “I’m getting married, this will be the last time we see each other, old man.” If he could, Felícito would have married her. But he couldn’t. Not only because he already was married but because he didn’t want to abandon Gertrudis the way his mother, that cruel woman he’d never known, had abandoned him and his father, in Yapatera, when Felícito was still on the breast. Mabel was the only woman he’d ever really loved. He’d never loved Gertrudis; he married her out of obligation, due to that youthful mistake and, maybe, maybe, because she and the Boss Lady set a good trap for him. (He tried not to think about this because it embittered him, but it was always running through his mind like a broken record.) Even so, he’d been a good husband. He gave his wife and children more than could have been expected from the poor man he’d been when he married. That was why he’d spent his life working like a slave, never taking a vacation. That had been his whole life until he met Mabel: working, working, working, breaking his back day and night to make something of his small capital until he could open the transport company he’d dreamed of. The girl had revealed to him that sleeping with a woman could be something beautiful, intense, moving, something he never imagined the few times he’d gone to bed with the whores in the brothels on the road to Sullana or with a woman he’d meet — once in a blue moon, as it turned out — at a party, but that never lasted more than a night. Making love with Gertrudis had always been something convenient, a physical necessity, a way to calm anxiety. They stopped sleeping together after Tiburcio was born, more than twenty years ago. When he heard Colorado Vignolo tell stories about all the women he’d bedded, Felícito was stupefied. Compared to his compadre, he’d lived like a monk.

Mabel greeted him in her robe, affectionate and chatty as usual. She’d just watched an episode of the Friday soap opera and talked about it as she led him by the hand to the bedroom. The blinds were already closed and the fan turned on. She’d put the red cloth over the lamp because Felícito liked looking at her naked body in the reddish light. She helped him undress and fall back on the bed. But unlike other times — all the other times — this time Felícito Yanaqué’s sex did not give the slightest indication of getting hard. It lay there, small and chagrined, encased in its folds, indifferent to the affectionate caresses lavished on it by Mabel’s warm fingers.

“So what’s wrong with him today, old man?” she asked in surprise, giving her lover’s flaccid sex a squeeze.

“It must be because I don’t feel very well,” an uncomfortable Felícito apologized. “Maybe I’m getting a cold. I’ve had a headache all day and I keep getting the shivers.”

“I’ll fix you a nice hot cup of tea with lemon and then I’ll give you some loving and see if we can wake up this sleepyhead.” Mabel jumped out of bed and put on her robe again. “Don’t you fall asleep on me too, old man.”

But when she came back from the kitchen holding a steaming cup of tea and a Panadol, Felícito had dressed. He was waiting for her in the living room with its crimson flowered furniture, withdrawn and serious beneath the illuminated image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“You have something more than a cold,” said Mabel, curling up beside him and scrutinizing him in an exaggerated way. “Maybe you don’t like me anymore. Maybe you’ve fallen in love with some cute little Piuran out there.”

Felícito shook his head, took her hand, and kissed it.

“I love you more than anybody in the world, Mabelita,” he said tenderly. “I’ll never fall in love with anyone else, I know I’d never find another woman like you anywhere.”

He sighed and took the letter with the spider out of his pocket.

“I received this letter and I’m very worried,” he said, handing it to her. “I trust you, Mabel. Read it and see what you think.”

Mabel read it and reread it, very slowly. The little smile that always fluttered around her lips was fading. Her eyes filled with uneasiness.

“You’ll have to go to the police, right?” she said at last, hesitatingly. She seemed disconcerted. “This is a shakedown and I guess you have to file a complaint.”

“I already went to the police station. But they didn’t take it very seriously. The truth is, sweetheart, I don’t know what to do. The police sergeant I talked to said something that’s true all of a sudden. Since there’s so much progress now in Piura, crime is increasing too. Gangs are demanding money from merchants and businesses. I’d heard about it but never thought it could touch me. I confess I’m a little nervous, Mabelita. I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re not going to give them the money they’re asking for, are you, old man?”

“Not a cent, absolutely not. I don’t let anybody walk all over me, you can be sure about that.”

He told her that Adelaida had advised him to give in to the extortionists.

“I think this is the first time in my life I’m not going to follow the inspiration of my friend the holy woman.”

“You’re so naïve, Felícito,” was Mabel’s irritated response. “Talking about something so important with that witch. I don’t know how you can swallow all the fairy tales that hustler feeds you.”

“With me she’s never been wrong.” Felícito regretted having mentioned Adelaida; he knew Mabel detested her. “Don’t worry, this time I won’t follow her advice. I can’t. I won’t do it. That must be what’s making me upset. It feels like something awful is bearing down on me.”

Mabel had become very serious. Felícito saw those pretty red lips pursing nervously. She raised a hand and slowly smoothed his hair.

“I wish I could help you, old man, but I don’t know how.”

Felícito smiled at her, nodding. He stood, indicating that he’d decided to leave.

“Don’t you want me to get dressed so we can go to the movies? It’ll take your mind off this for a while, come on.”

“No, sweetheart, I don’t feel like the movies. Another day. Forgive me. I’m going to bed instead, because what I said about a cold is true.”

Mabel walked with him to the door and opened it so he could go out. And then, with a start, Felícito saw the envelope attached beside the doorbell. It was white, not blue like the first one, and smaller. He guessed instantly what it was. A few steps away some boys were spinning tops on the sidewalk. Before opening the envelope, Felícito went to ask them if they’d seen who put it there. The kids looked at one another in surprise and shrugged. Naturally nobody had seen anything. When he went back to the house, Mabel was very pale, and a gleam of distress flickered deep in her eyes.

“Do you think that…?” she murmured, biting her lips. She looked at the unopened white envelope in his hand as if she could make it disappear.

Felícito went inside, turned on the light in the small hallway, and with Mabel hanging from his arm and craning her neck to read what he was reading, he recognized the capital letters in the same blue ink.

Señor Yanaqué:

You made a mistake going to the police station in spite of the recommendation made by the organization. We want this matter to be resolved privately, through dialogue. But you’re declaring war on us. You’ll have it, if that’s what you prefer. And if that’s the case, we can promise you’ll lose. And you’ll be sorry. You’ll have proof very soon that we’re capable of responding to your provocations. Don’t be obstinate, we’re telling you this for your own good. Don’t risk what you’ve achieved after so many years of hard work, Señor Yanaqué. And above all, don’t bring your complaints to the police again, because you’ll regret it. Think of the consequences.

May God keep you.

The drawing of the spider that substituted for a signature was identical to the one in the first letter.

“But why did they put it here, on my house?” Mabel stammered, clutching tightly at his arm. He felt her trembling from head to toe. She’d turned pale.

“To let me know they know about my private life, what else could it be?” Felícito put his arm around her shoulder and hugged her. She shuddered, and it made him sad. He kissed her hair. “You don’t know how sorry I am that you’ve become mixed up in this because of me, Mabelita. Be very careful, sweetheart. Don’t open the door without checking the peephole first. Better yet, don’t go out alone at night until this is straightened out. Who knows what these guys are capable of?”

He kissed her hair again and whispered in her ear before he left: “I swear on the memory of my father, the holiest thing I have, that nobody will ever hurt you, love.”

In the few minutes that had passed since he’d gone out to talk to the boys spinning tops, it had grown dark. The old-fashioned lights in the area barely lit the sidewalks that were filled with large cracks and potholes. He heard barking and obsessive music, the same note over and over again, as if someone were tuning a guitar. Even though he kept tripping, he walked quickly. He almost ran across the narrow Puente Colgante, now a pedestrian walkway, and recalled that when he was a boy, the nocturnal lights reflected in the Piura River frightened him, made him think of a whole world of devils and ghosts in the depths of the water. He didn’t respond to the greeting of a couple coming toward him. It took him almost half an hour to reach the police station on Avenida Sánchez Cerro. He was sweating and so agitated he could barely speak.

“We don’t usually see the public this late,” said the very young police officer at the entrance, “unless it’s a very urgent matter, señor.”

“It’s urgent, extremely urgent,” Felícito said in a rush. “Can I speak to Sergeant Lituma?”

“What name shall I give him?”

“Felícito Yanaqué, Narihualá Transport. I was here a few days ago to file a complaint. Tell him something very serious has happened.”

He had to wait a long time out on the street, listening to the sound of male voices speaking obscenities inside the station. He saw a waning moon rise over the surrounding roofs. His entire body was burning, as if he were being consumed by fever. He recalled his father’s fits of shaking when he suffered attacks of tertian fever back in Chulucanas, and the cure was to sweat it out, wrapped in a heap of burlap. But it was fury, not fever, that made him tremble. At last the very young, beardless policeman returned and had him go in. The light inside the station was as dim and sad as on the streets of Castilla. This time the officer didn’t show him to Sergeant Lituma’s tiny cubicle but to a larger office. The sergeant was there with a higher-ranking officer — a captain, judging by the three stripes on the epaulets of his shirt — short, fat, and with a mustache. He looked at Felícito without joy. His open mouth revealed yellow teeth. Apparently Felícito had interrupted a game of checkers. He was about to speak, but the captain cut him short with a gesture.

“I’m familiar with your case, Señor Yanaqué, the sergeant brought me up to date. I’ve already read the letter with spiders that they sent you. You may not remember, but we met at a Rotary Club lunch in the Piuran Center, a while ago now. There were some good carob syrup cocktails, as I recall.”

Without saying anything, Felícito deposited the letter on the checkerboard, disturbing the pieces. He felt that his rage had risen to his brain and almost kept him from thinking.

“Sit down before you have a heart attack, Señor Yanaqué,” the captain said mockingly, pointing to a chair. He chewed on the ends of his mustache and his tone was arrogant and provocative. “Oh, by the way, you forgot to say good evening. I’m Captain Silva, the chief of police, at your service.”

“Good evening,” Felícito said, his voice strangled by irritation. “They just sent me another letter. I demand an explanation, officers.”

The captain read the paper, bringing it closer to the lamp on his desk. Then he passed it to Sergeant Lituma, muttering, “Well, well, this is heating up.”

“I demand an explanation,” repeated Felícito, choking. “How did the gangsters know I came to the station to file a complaint about this anonymous letter?”

“In many ways, Señor Yanaqué.” Captain Silva shrugged, looking at him with pity. “Because they followed you here, for example. Because they know you and know you’re not a man who lets himself be extorted but goes to the police and complains. Or because somebody you told that you’d filed a complaint repeated it to somebody else. Or because, suddenly, we’re the ones who wrote the letters, the villains who want to extort you. That’s occurred to you, hasn’t it? That must be why you go around in such a bad mood, hey waddya think, as your fellow Piurans say.”

Felícito repressed his desire to tell him yes. At this moment he was angrier with the two officers than with whoever wrote the letters.

“You found it the same way, attached to your front door?”

His face burned as he replied, hiding his embarrassment.

“They attached it to the front door of a person I visit.”

Lituma and Captain Silva exchanged glances.

“This means, then, that they have a thorough knowledge of your life, Señor Yanaqué,” Captain Silva commented with malicious slowness. “These bastards even know who you visit. They’ve done a good job of intelligence, it seems. So we can deduce that they’re professionals, not amateurs.”

“And now what’s going to happen?” the trucker asked. His rage of a moment ago had been replaced by a feeling of sadness and impotence. What was happening to him was unfair, it was cruel. What were they punishing him for up there? Holy God, what crime had he committed?

“Now they’ll try to scare you to soften you up,” the captain explained as if he were chatting about how mild the night was. “To make you believe they’re powerful and untouchable. And pow! That’s where they’ll make their first mistake. Then we’ll begin to track them down. Patience, Señor Yanaqué. Though you may not believe it, things are going well.”

“That’s easy to say when you’re watching from the audience,” the trucker philosophized. “Not when you’re receiving threats that upset your life and turn it upside down. You want me to be patient while these outlaws plan something bad against me or my family to soften me up?”

“Bring Señor Yanaqué a glass of water, Lituma,” Captain Silva ordered the sergeant with his usual sarcasm. “I don’t want you to have a fainting fit, because then we’ll be accused of violating the human rights of a respectable Piuran businessman.”

This cop wasn’t joking, thought Felícito. Yes, he could have a heart attack and drop dead right here on this filthy floor covered with cigarette butts. A sad death in a police station, sick with frustration because some faceless, nameless sons of bitches were toying with him, drawing spiders. He recalled his father and was moved as he evoked his hard face: the lines like knife wounds, always serious, very dark, the bristly hair and toothless mouth of his progenitor. “What should I do, Father. I know, not let them walk all over me, not give them a cent of what I’ve earned honestly. But what other advice would you give if you were alive? Spend my time waiting for the next anonymous letter? This is making me a nervous wreck, Father.” Why had he always called him Father and never Papa? Not even in these secret dialogues with him did he dare to use the informal tú. Like his sons with him. Tiburcio and Miguel had never used tú with him. But they both did with their mother.

“Do you feel better, Señor Yanaqué?”

“Yes, thank you.” He took another sip from the glass of water the sergeant had brought him and stood up.

“Let us know about any new developments right away,” the captain urged him as a way of saying goodbye. “Trust us. Your case is ours now, Señor Yanaqué.”

The officer’s words sounded sarcastic to him. He left the station profoundly depressed. For the entire walk along Calle Arequipa to his house he moved slowly, close to the buildings. He had the disagreeable sensation that someone was following him, someone who liked to think he was demolishing Felícito bit by bit, plunging him into insecurity and uncertainty, a real cocksucker so sure that sooner or later he’d defeat him. “You’re wrong, motherfucker,” he murmured.

At the house, Gertrudis was surprised he’d come home so early. She asked whether the Truckers’ Association of Piura board of directors, of which Felícito was a member, had canceled their Friday-night dinner at Club Grau. Did Gertrudis know about Mabel? How could she not know? But in these eight years she’d never given the slightest hint that she did: not one complaint, not one scene, not one innuendo, not one insinuation. How could she not have heard rumors or gossip that he had a girlfriend? Wasn’t Piura a pretty small world? Everybody knew everybody’s business, especially what they did in bed. Maybe she knew and preferred to hide it to avoid trouble and just get along. But sometimes Felícito told himself no: Given the quiet life his wife led — no relatives, only leaving the house to go to Mass or novenas or rosaries in the cathedral — it really was possible she didn’t know a thing.

“I came home early because I don’t feel very well. I think I’m getting a cold.”

“Then you didn’t eat. Do you want me to fix you something? I’ll do it, Saturnina’s gone home.”

“No, I’m not hungry. I’ll watch television for a little while and go to bed. Anything new?”

“I had a letter from my sister Armida, in Lima. It seems she’s getting married.”

“Ah, that’s nice, we’ll have to send her a present.” Felícito didn’t even know Gertrudis had a sister in the capital. First he’d heard about it. He tried to remember. Could she be that little barefoot girl, very young, who ran around El Algarrobo boardinghouse where he met his wife? No, that kid was the daughter of a truck driver named Argimiro Trelles who’d lost his wife.

Gertrudis agreed and went off to her room. Ever since Miguel and Tiburcio had left to live on their own, Felícito and his wife had separate rooms. He saw her shapeless bulk disappearing in the small dark courtyard, around which the bedrooms, dining room, living room, and kitchen were located. He’d never loved her the way you love a woman, but he felt affection for her mixed with some pity, because even though she didn’t complain, Gertrudis must be very frustrated with a husband who was so cold and unloving. It couldn’t be otherwise in a marriage that wasn’t the result of falling in love but of a drunken spree and a fuck in the dark. Or, who knows. It was a subject that, in spite of doing everything he could to forget it, came to Felícito’s mind from time to time and ruined his day. Gertrudis was the daughter of the owner of El Algarrobo, a cheap boardinghouse on Calle Ramón Castilla in the area that back then was the poorest in El Chipe, where a good number of truck drivers would stay. Felícito had gone to bed with her a couple of times, almost without realizing it, on two nights of carousing and cane liquor. He did it because he could, because she was there and was a woman, not because he wanted the girl. Nobody wanted her. Who’d want a broad who was half cross-eyed, slovenly, and always smelled of garlic and onion? As a result of one of those two fucks without love and almost without desire, Gertrudis became pregnant. That, at least, is what she and her mother told Felícito. The owner of the boardinghouse, Doña Luzmila, whom the drivers called the Boss Lady, filed a complaint against him with the police. He had to go and make a statement and acknowledge before the police chief that he’d gone to bed with a minor. He agreed to marry her because it bothered his conscience that a child of his might be born without a father and because he believed the story. Afterward, when Miguelito was born, the doubts began. Was he really his son? He never got anything out of Gertrudis, of course, and he didn’t talk about it with Adelaida or anybody else. But for all these years he’d lived with the suspicion that he wasn’t. Because he wasn’t the only one who went to bed with the Boss Lady’s daughter during those little parties they had on Saturday nights at El Algarrobo. Miguel didn’t look anything like him; the boy had white skin and light eyes. Why did Gertrudis and her mother make him the one responsible? Maybe because he was single, a decent guy, hardworking, and because the Boss Lady wanted to marry off her daughter any way she could. Maybe Miguel’s real father was some white guy who was married or had a bad reputation. From time to time the question returned and ruined his mood. He never let anyone know about it, beginning with Miguel himself. He always treated him as if he were as much his son as Tiburcio. If he sent him into the army, it was to do him a favor, because the boy was leading a dissipated life. He’d never shown any preference for the younger son who was his spitting image: a Chulucano cholo from head to foot, with not a trace of white in his face or body.

Gertrudis had been hardworking and self-sacrificing during the difficult years. And afterward too, when Felícito had opened Narihualá Transport and things got better. Even though they had a nice house, a servant, and dependable income, she still lived with the austerity of the years when they were poor. She never asked for money for anything personal, only food and other daily expenses. From time to time he had to insist that she buy herself shoes or a new dress. But even though she did, she always wore flip-flops and a robe that looked like a cassock. When had she become so religious? She wasn’t like that in the beginning. It seemed to him that over the years Gertrudis had turned into a piece of furniture, that she’d stopped being a living person. They spent entire days not exchanging a word except for good morning and good night. His wife had no women friends, she didn’t pay visits or receive them, she didn’t even go to see her children when they let days go by without coming to see her. Tiburcio and Miguel dropped by the house occasionally, always for birthdays and Christmas, and whenever they did she was affectionate with them, but except for these occasions, she didn’t seem to have much interest in her sons either. Once in a while Felícito suggested going to the movies, taking a walk along the seawall, or listening to the Sunday band concert on the Plaza de Armas after noon Mass. She agreed docilely, but these were excursions during which they barely said a word, and Gertrudis seemed impatient to get back to the house, to sit in her rocking chair at the edge of the small courtyard, beside the radio or the television, inevitably tuning in to religious programs. As far as Felícito could recall, he’d never had an argument or a disagreement with this woman who always yielded to his will with total submission.

He stayed in the living room for a while, listening to the news. Crimes, muggings, kidnappings, the usual. One of the news items made his hair stand on end. The announcer said that a new method for stealing cars was becoming popular with thieves in Lima. They took advantage of a red light to throw a live rat inside a car driven by a woman. Overcome by fear and revulsion, she’d let go of the wheel and bolt out of the vehicle, screaming. Then the thieves would take it, very calmly. A live rat on their skirts, how indecent! Television poisoned people with so much blood and filth. Usually, instead of the news, he’d put on a Cecilia Barraza record. But now he anxiously followed the commentary of this newscaster on 24 Horas, who stated that crime was on the rise all over the country. “You’re telling me,” he thought.

He went to bed at about eleven, and even though he fell asleep immediately, no doubt because of the intense emotions of the day, he woke at two in the morning. He could barely close his eyes again. He was assaulted by fears, a sensation of catastrophe, and, most of all, the bitterness of feeling useless and impotent in the face of what was happening to him. When he did doze off, his head seethed with images of diseases, accidents, and misfortunes. He had a nightmare about spiders.

He got up at six. Next to his bed, watching himself in the mirror, he did qigong exercises, thinking, as usual, about his teacher, the storekeeper Lau. The posture of the tree that sways forward and back, from left to right and around, moved by the wind. With his feet planted firmly on the floor, trying to empty his mind, he swayed, looking for his center. Looking for his center. Not losing his center. Raising his arms and lowering them very slowly, a very light drizzle that fell from the sky, refreshing his body and his soul, calming his nerves and his muscles. Keeping the sky and the earth in their place and not allowing them to join, with his arms — one raised, stopping the sky, the other lowered, holding down the earth — and then, massaging his arms, his face, his kidneys, his legs to get rid of the tensions stagnating everywhere in his body. Parting the waters with his hands and bringing them together again. Warming the lumbar region with gentle, slow massage. Opening his arms the way a butterfly spreads its wings. At first the extraordinary slowness of the movements, the slow-motion breathing that was meant to keep the air passing to every corner of the organism, made him impatient, but over the years he’d grown accustomed to it. Now he understood that in this slowness lay the benefit brought to his body and spirit by the delicate, deep inhalation and exhalation, the movements with which, by raising one hand and extending the other against the ground, his knees slightly bent, he kept the stars in place in the firmament and averted the apocalypse. When, at the end, he closed his eyes and remained motionless for a few minutes, his hands clasped as if in prayer, half an hour had gone by. Now the clear, white light of a Piuran dawn was coming through the windows.

Some loud knocks at the street door interrupted his qigong. He went to open it, thinking that this morning Saturnina was early, because she never came before seven. But when he opened the door, the person he found on the threshold was Lucindo.

“Run, run, Don Felícito.” The blind man from the corner was very agitated. “A gentleman told me your office on Avenida Sánchez Cerro is on fire and you should call the fire department and get over there fast.”