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By Root 1083 0

beaches, tanning himself beneath a glorious sun as round as a soccer ball, watching giant tortoises slowly lumbering along amid tall palms with tapering fronds and the roguish fornications of dolphins in the blue waves. This time (determination and foolhardiness of the man who has undergone baptism under fire) he took another taxi to the Laboratories and during the trip there he wept on perceiving that the only effect that riding through life was having on him was not the deathly fear, the cosmic anxiety of days gone by, but merely a slight dizzy feeling. He ran to kiss the Amazonian hands of Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui, calling him “my wise counselor, my savior, my new father,” a gesture and words that his superior accepted with the deference that every self-respecting master owes his slaves, while at the same time (Calvinist possessed of a heart impervious to sentiment) pointing out that, cured or not of his homicidal complexes, he was to show up for work on time at Rodent Exterminators, Incorporated or be fined.

It was thus that Lucho Abril Marroquín emerged from the tunnel that, following the accident amid the dust of Pisco, his life had been. From that time on, things began to straighten out. The sweet daughter of France, recovered from her trials and tribulations thanks to pampering by her family and invigorated by a Norman diet of runny Camemberts and slimy snails, returned to the land of the Incas with glowing cheeks and a heart full of love. The couple’s reunion turned out to be a prolonged honeymoon—intoxicating kisses, compulsive embraces, and other emotional dissipations that brought the amorous spouses to the very edge of anemia. The medical detail man (serpent with redoubled energies after shedding its skin) promptly regained the preeminent position he had formerly held in the Laboratories. At his own request, wishing to prove to himself that he was the same capable man as before, he was again entrusted by Dr. Schwalb with the responsibility of visiting the cities and towns of Peru, by air, land, river, and sea, to acquaint doctors and pharmacists with the virtues of Bayer products. Thanks to his wife’s thrifty habits, the couple were soon able to pay off all the debts they had contracted during the crisis and buy a new Volkswagen on credit—a yellow one, naturally.

To all appearances (but doesn’t popular wisdom recommend “not trusting in appearances?”), there was not a single cloud on the horizon threatening to darken the life that the Abril Marroquíns were leading. The Bayer representative rarely remembered the accident, and when he did, he felt proud rather than remorseful, a fact which (being a mesocrat who respected social conventions) he was careful to keep to himself. But within the privacy of his own home (a nest of turtledoves, a fire blazing on the hearth to the accompaniment of Vivaldi violins), something had survived (light that continues to shine in space when the star that emitted it has ceased to exist, fingernails and hair of the dead man that continue to grow) from Professor Acémila’s therapy. On the one hand, an inordinate penchant, at Lucho Abril Marroquín’s age, for playing with wooden figurines, Meccano sets, toy trains, tin soldiers. Little by little the apartment became cluttered with toys that annoyed the maids and bewildered the neighbors, and the first shadows cast upon the conjugal harmony of the couple made their appearance the day the little French wife began to complain that her husband spent all his Sundays and holidays sailing little paper boats in the bathtub or flying kites from the roof terrace. But even more serious than this exaggerated fondness for toys, and obviously incompatible with it, was the phobia toward children that had continued to linger in Lucho Abril Marroquín’s mind ever since the days of the “Practical Exercises.” It was not possible for him to meet one of them on the street, in a park, or in a public square, without inflicting what the vulgar would call cruelty on him, and in conversations with his wife he was in the habit of using such scornful expressions