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of his thoughts. “How old is your son now? He must be fourteen or fifteen, isn’t he?”
    Rigoberto shuddered as he imagined Fonchito turning into someone like Ismael’s sons. Happily, his son didn’t go in for carousing.
    “I get along pretty well with him,” he replied. “And Lucrecia even better than I do. Fonchito loves her just as if she were his mother.”
    “You’ve been lucky: A child’s relationship with a stepmother isn’t always easy.”
    “He’s a good boy,” Don Rigoberto acknowledged. “Studious, well-behaved. But very solitary. He’s in that difficult period of adolescence. He withdraws too much. I’d like to see him with more friends, going out, falling in love with girls, going to parties.”
    “That’s what the hyenas did at his age,” Don Ismael lamented. “Go to parties, have a good time. He’s better off the way he is, old man. It was bad company that ruined my sons.”
    Rigoberto was about to tell Ismael the nonsense about Fonchito and the appearances of one Edilberto Torres, whom he and Doña Lucrecia called the devil, but he restrained himself. To what end—who knew how he would take it. At first he and Lucrecia had been amused by the supposed appearances of that asshole and had celebrated the boy’s luminous imagination, convinced it was another of the tricks he liked to spring on them from time to time. But now they were concerned and considered taking him to a psychologist. Really, he had to reread that chapter on the devil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus .
    “I still can’t believe all of this, Ismael,” he exclaimed again, blowing on his demitasse. “Are you really sure you want to do it—get married?”
    “As sure as I am that the world is round,” his boss declared. “It’s not only to teach those two a lesson. I’m very fond of Armida. I don’t know what would have happened to me without her. Since Clotilde’s death, her help has been invaluable.”
    “If memory serves, Armida’s very young,” murmured Rigoberto. “How many years older are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
    “Thirty-eight, that’s all,” Ismael said with a laugh. “Yes, she’s young, and I hope she reinvigorates me, like the young girl did with Solomon in the Bible. The Shulamite, wasn’t it?”
    “All right, all right, it’s your business, your life,” Rigoberto said, resigned. “I’m not good at giving advice. Marry Armida and let the world end, what difference does it make, old man.”
    “If you’re interested, we’re very compatible in bed,” Ismael boasted, laughing, while he gestured to the waiter to bring the check. “To be even more precise, I rarely use Viagra because I hardly need it. And don’t ask me where we’ll spend our honeymoon because I won’t tell you.”

 
    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