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that everything we love can be extinguished from one moment to the next) of news that would unhinge his life.
    The guard passed several desks and leaned down to speak into the ear of a young man who was tallyingchecks on a huge adding machine. Across the distance that separated us, I was starting to feel sorry for the guy, but all of a sudden, events seemed to corroborate my theory of a catastrophe hesitating before swooping down on its target: the young fellow with the checks raised his hand and pointed to a door in the back, and it was as though that gesture of stretching out his arm had saved him from the impending misery of having lost his wife in a most brutal way.
    Báez and I looked where that arm was pointing, and almost as if in a synchronized theatrical movement, the door in the rear of the enormous room opened to reveal a tall young man with slicked-down hair combed straight back, a serious little mustache, a blue jacket, and a tightly knotted tie. In the last moments of his innocence, he walked toward the desk where the guard and the young colleague with the checks waited, eyeing him curiously.
    The guard spoke to the tall young man and indicated that we were looking for him. Now, I thought, at this exact moment, that boy has just entered an endless tunnel, one he’ll probably stay in for the rest of his life. He looked in our direction. At first he seemed surprised, but his surprise immediately turned to suspicion. The guard must have told him that Báez and I were both policemen. It’s always the same—people want the simplest image possible. A policeman is something everybodyknows. A deputy clerk in an examining magistrate’s court, Criminal Division, belongs to a more exotic species. So there we were, ready to plunge our knives into the lad’s jugular, and he was looking at us, not sure yet whether or not he should be worried.
    I walked over to the hinged counter as the young man approached it from the other side. I’d decided to introduce myself but then to let Báez do the talking. There would be time later to explain which of us was the policeman and which the judicial employee. Besides, Báez seemed to be used to communicating abominable information. As for me, when it came right down to it, I had no reason to be there at all, no fucking reason to be a witness to how one goes about shattering a young banker’s life. And if I
was
there, I owed the privilege exclusively to that jackass Judge Fortuna Lacalle and his overriding eagerness to be promoted as soon as possible to the Appellate Court.

7
    While the brand-new widower, Báez, and I sat close together in the bank’s tiny kitchen, I was reflecting on how odd life is. I felt sad, but what was it, exactly, that was making me so sad? I didn’t think it could be the boy’s bewilderment, his pallor, or his wide-open, unfocused eyes after Báez told him his wife had been murdered in their home. Nor was it the kid’s grief. Grief can’t be seen, simply because it isn’t visible, not in any circumstances. What you can see, at most, are some of its external signs. But such signs have always struck me as masks rather than manifestations. How can a man express the intolerable agony of his soul? By weeping floods of tears? By sustained howling? Disjointed babbling? Groans? Sobs? I felt that all such possible tokens of grief were capable only of insulting that grief, of belittling it, of profaning it, of placing it on the same level as free samples.
    While I stared at Morales’s frozen face and listened to Báez talk to him about going to the morgue to identify the body, I believed I understood that the reason we’re sometimes moved by another’s grief has to do with our atavistic fear that this grief may get transferred to us,too. In 1968, I’d been married for three years, and I believed, or preferred to believe, or fervently desired to believe, or was trying desperately to believe, that I was in love with my wife. And while I contemplated that