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By Root 1136 0

or asleep, till the end of his days, and—who knows?—they were perhaps to continue to torment him in his next reincarnation. He had turned the light out at an early hour, had heard the regular breathing of the sensitive young man in the bed next to him, and, pleased and relieved, had thought to himself: He’s dropped off to sleep. He felt himself getting sleepier and sleepier too, and had heard the bells of the cathedral and the uproarious laughter of a drunk somewhere off in the distance. Then he had fallen asleep and peacefully dreamed the most pleasant and reassuring of dreams: in a castle with a pointed tower, on whose walls were hung shields, titles of nobility, parchments with heraldic flowers and family trees tracing his ancestral lineage back to Adam, the Lord of Ayacucho (he himself!) was receiving abundant tribute and fervent homage from hordes of lice-ridden Indians who were thus simultaneously feeding his coffers and his vanity.

Suddenly—had fifteen minutes or three hours gone by?—something that could have been a noise, a presentiment, the faltering footfalls of a spirit, awakened him. In the darkness relieved only by a dim streak of light from the street filtering through the slit between the curtains, he managed to make out a silhouette rising from the bed next to his and silently floating toward the door. Still half asleep, he presumed that the constipated young man was going to the bathroom to try to move his bowels, or that he was feeling bad again, and asked in a low voice: “Ezequiel, are you all right?” Instead of an answer, he heard, very clearly, the bolt on the door being slid home (it was rusty and creaked). He did not understand, sat halfway up, and slightly alarmed, asked again: “Is anything the matter, Ezequiel? Can I help you?” He then was suddenly aware that the young man (cat-men so lightfooted they seem to be everywhere at once) had come back across the room and was now standing right next to his bed, blocking the little streak of light from the window. “Ezequiel, please answer me, what’s the matter with you?” he murmured, fumbling about in the dark for the switch of the bedside lamp. At that instant he received the first knife thrust, the deepest jab of all, the one that sank into his chest as though it were butter and pierced a collarbone. He was certain he had screamed, cried for help, and as he tried to defend himself, to free himself of the sheets tangled round his feet, he was surprised that neither his wife nor his daughter nor any of the other boarders came running to his aid. But in fact no one heard anything at all. Later, as the police and the judge reconstructed the gruesome assault, they had all been amazed that Don Sebastián had not been able to disarm the criminal, since he was so robust and Ezequiel so frail. They had no way of knowing that in the bloody shadows the medical detail man had appeared to be possessed of a supernatural strength: Don Sebastián had managed to give only imaginary cries and try to guess the trajectory of the next knife thrust in order to ward it off with his hands.

He received fourteen or fifteen of them (the doctors were of the opinion that the gaping wound in his left buttock might have been—extraordinary coincidences that turn a man’s hair white in a single night and make a person believe in God—the result of two blows in exactly the same place), evenly distributed all over his body, with the exception of his face, which—a miracle owed to El Señor de Limpias, as Doña Margarita thought, or to Saint Rose of Lima, as the latter’s namesake claimed?—had not received so much as a scratch. The knife, as was learned later, belonged to the Berguas, a razor-sharp blade eight inches long that had mysteriously disappeared from the kitchen a week before and that left the body of the man from Ayacucho with more holes and gashes than that of a hired ruffian.

To what did he owe the fact that he didn’t die? To chance, to God’s mercy, and (above all) to an even greater quasi-tragedy. No one had heard anything; with fourteen—fifteen—knife wounds in his body, Don Sebasti