he couldn’t possibly have been aware of what he was doing. Palomino observed him without moving, overwhelmed by thought, with his eyes fixed, hanging on that maneuver that caused in him intense expectation and distressing anxiety. Then the worker’s hands proceeded to assemble a lead ingot between other bars resting on the workbench. Palomino took his eyes off him and, dumbfounded, absorbed, downcast, he superimposed circles on the wounded fantasy of suspicion, released affinities, discovered more knots, reharnessed fatal intentions and summited sinister staircases … Another day a mysterious guest came in off the street. She went up to the typesetter and spoke to him at length: their words were indecipherable with all the noise of the shop. Palomino jumped up, stared at her carefully, studying her from head to toe, pale with fear … ‘Look, Palomino!’ I consoled him. ‘Just forget about it; there’s no way.’ And he, in every response, rested his forehead on his hands, stained from being shut in and abandoned, defeated, powerless. Only a few months after they brought me here, he was the closest, most loyal and righteous friend I had.”
Solís becomes visibly emotional and so do I.
“Are you cold?” he asks with sudden tenderness.
For a while the large room has been filled with a dense fog that turns blue in strange veils around the hourglasses of red light. Through the high-reaching windows one can see that it’s still raining. It really is quite cold.
Notes dispersed from distant sight-singing, as if from between compacted cotton impregnated by swarfs of ice. It’s the penitentiary band rehearsing the Peruvian national anthem. Those notes resound, and in my spirit they exert an unexpected suggestion, to the extent that I almost feel the very lyrics of the song, syllable after syllable, set in, nailed with gigantic spikes into each of the wayward sounds. The notes crisscross, iterate, stamp, squeal, reiterate, and destroy timid bevels.
“Ah, what torture that man endured!” the prisoner exclaims with rising pity. And he continues narrating between ongoing silences, during which he undoubtedly tries to ensnare terrible memories:
“His was an indestructible obsession to keep from falling, consolidated by God knows who. Many people said, ‘Palomino is mad.’ Mad! Is it possible for someone to be mad who, under normal circumstances, is concerned for his endangered existence? And is it possible for someone to be mad who, suffering the claws of hate, even with the very complicity of the justice system, takes steps to avoid that danger and to try to put an end to it with all his exacerbated might of a man who deems everything possible, based on his own painful experience? Mad? No! Too sane perhaps! With that formidable persuasion over such unquestionably possible consequences, who gave him such an idea? Although Palomino had often exposed the hidden grim wires that, according to him, could inwardly vibrate to the very threat of his existence, it was hard for me to clearly see that danger. ‘Because you don’t know those wicked men,” Palomino grumbled undaunted. After arguing with him all I could, I fell silent. ‘They write to me at my house,’ he said to me another day, ‘and they make me see it all over again; while my release could come soon, they’d pay any sum to keep me from getting out. Yes. Today more than ever, danger is at my side, my friend …’ And his final words choked me with thrashing sobs. The truth is that, facing Palomino’s constant despair, I ended up suffering, at times, and especially as of late, sudden and profound crises of concern for his life, admitting the possibility of some form of even the darkest treachery, and I even verified for myself, arguing with the rest of the inmates, thereby testing, with who knows what kind of unexpected grounds of decisive weight, the sensibility with which Palomino was reasoning. But that’s not all. Occasions also arose when it wasn’t doubt I was feeling, but an indisputable certainty of the danger, and I myself left him and went to the meeting with new suspicions and vehement warnings of my own, about the horror of what could transpire, and this is exactly what he did when he was calmly standing in some visionary oblivion. I loved him very much, it’s true; his situation was of great interest to me, always scared stiff from head to toe; and I tacitly helped him search for the carabids59 of his nightmare. In the end, I actually investigated the concealed pockets and minor actions of countless inmates and officers at the establishment, in search of the hidden hair of his imminent tragedy … all this is true. However, given what I’ve said, you’ll also see that by taking so much interest in Palomino, I slowly became his torturer, one of his own executioners. ‘You be careful!’ I’d say to him with foreboding anguish. Palomino would jump in place and, trembling, turn in every direction, wanting to escape and not knowing where to go. And then we both felt terrible despair, fenced in by the invulnerable, implacable, absolute, eternal stone walls. Of course, Palomino barely ate. How could he be expected to? He barely drank too. He might not have breathed. In each morsel he saw latent deadly poison. In each drop of water, each atom of the atmosphere, his tenacious scrupulousness nuanced to the brink of hyperesthesia made the most trivial movements of other people seem related to nutrition. One morning, someone at his side was eating a roll. Palomino saw him lifting the piece of stale bread to his lips, and in an energetic expression of repulsion, he spat in his face repeatedly. ‘You better always be careful!’ I’d repeat more often each day. Two, three, four times a day this alarm would sound between us. I’d let it out, knowing that this way Palomino would take better care of himself and thereby stay further away from the danger. It seemed to me that when I hadn’t recently reminded him of the fateful disquiet, he just might forget it and then—woe betide him! … Where was Palomino? … Thrust forward by my vigilante fraternity, in a snap I made my way to him and whispered in his ear these garbled words, ‘You better be careful!’ Thus I felt more at ease, since I could be sure that for the next few hours nothing would happen to my friend. One day I repeated this more times than I ever had before. Palomino heard me, and after the ensuing commotion, he surely was thanking me in his mind and heart. But, I must remind you once more: on this road I crossed the limits of love and goodness for Palomino and I turned into his principle torturer—his personal henchman. I started realizing the double meaning of my behavior. ‘But,’ I said to myself in my conscience, ‘be that as it may, an irrevocable command of my soul has invested in me the power to be his guardian, caretaker of his security, and I shall never turn back for anything.’ My alarming voice would forever beat alongside his, on his angst-filled nights, as an alarm clock, as a shield, as a defense. Yes. I wouldn’t turn back, not for anything. Once, late into the night, I awoke in a sweat, as a result of having felt a mysterious vibrant shock in the middle of a dream. Perhaps an open valve of strife was throwing a bucket of cold water on my chest. I woke up, possessed by immense joy, a winged joy, as though an exhausting weight had suddenly been lifted, or as if a gallows had jumped out of my neck, all busted up. It was a diaphanous, pure, blind joy, I don’t know why, and in the darkness it stretched out and fluttered in my heart. I fully woke up, regained consciousness, and my joy reached its end: I’d dreamed that Palomino had been poisoned. By the following day, that dream had overwhelmed me, with increasing palpitations at the crossroads: Death—Life. In reality I felt utterly seized by him. Harsh winds of unnerving fever charged my wrists, temples, and chest. I must’ve looked sick, no doubt, since my temples and head were heavier than ever and my soul mourned its grave sorrows. In the evening, it fell to Palomino and me to work together at the press. As they do now, the black steel bits were clanging, smacking into one another as if in an argument, scraping against one another. Hell-bent on saving themselves, they were spinning madly and faster than ever. Throughout the entire morning and into the afternoon, that stubborn irreducible dream stayed with me. And, yet, for some reason, I didn’t shy away from him. I felt him at my side, laughing and crying in turn, showing me, impulsively, one of his hands, the left one black, the other one white, extremely white, and both always coming together with strange isochronism, at an impeccable terrifying crossroads: Death—Life! Life—Death! Throughout the day (and here I also forget why) not once did the vigilant alert from before reach my lips. Not once. My prior dream seemed to seal my mouth shut to keep from spilling such a word, with its right whitening luminous hand of fleeting, limitless, blue luminosity. Suddenly, Palomino whispered in my ears with a contained explosion of pity and impotence: ‘I’m thirsty.’ Immediately, driven by my constant obliging fraternity with him, I filled a reddish clay pitcher and brought it for him to drink. He thanked me fondly, clutching the handle of the mug, and he quenched his thirst until
