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He managed to brake then, so abruptly that the steering wheel hit him in the chest, and with his mind a blank and his ears ringing, he got out of the car immediately, and tripping over his own feet, thinking: “I’m an Argentine, I kill children,” he ran over to the little girl and picked her up in his arms. She looked to be about five or six years old, and was barefoot and poorly dressed, with crusts of dirt and filth on her face, hands, and knees. There were no visible signs of blood, but her eyes were closed and she didn’t seem to be breathing. Staggering like a drunk, Lucho Abril Marroquín looked all about and shouted to the sand dunes, to the wind, to the distant waves: “An ambulance, a doctor!” As though in a dream, he could hear a truck coming down the mountainside and perhaps he noted that its speed was excessive for a vehicle approaching an intersection. But if in fact he noticed this, his attention was immediately diverted on seeing a Guardia Civil come running out of one of the buildings, headed his way. Panting, perspiring, a custodian of law and order out to do his job properly, he looked at the little girl and asked: “Is she knocked unconscious, or is she dead?”

For all the rest of his life Lucho Abril Marroquín would ask himself what the right answer would have been at that moment. Was she just badly hurt, or had she been killed? He never did answer the panting Guardia Civil because the latter had no sooner asked that question than suddenly such a horrified expression came over his face that Lucho Abril Marroquín turned his head just in time to realize that the truck that was coming down the mountainside was hurtling straight toward them, its horn blaring madly. He closed his eyes; a tremendous roar tore the little girl from his arms and plunged him in a darkness full of tiny stars. He could still hear a terrible din, screams and cries, as he fell into an almost-mystical stupor.

Much later he was to learn that he had been knocked down, not because there was such a thing as immanent justice, charged with fulfilling the equitable proverb: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” but because the brakes of the truck from the mines had failed. And he was also to learn that the Guardia Civil had died instantly from a broken neck and that the poor little girl—a true daughter of Sophocles—had not only been killed in this second accident (if in fact the first one had not been fatal), but her body crushed spectacularly flat (a joyous devils’ carnival) as the double rear wheel of the truck ran over her.

But with the passage of the years Lucho Abril Marroquín was to tell himself that of all the instructive experiences of that morning, the most unforgettable had not been either the first or the second accident but what happened afterwards. Because, curiously enough, despite the violence of the impact (which was to keep him for many weeks in the Social Security Clinic as they mended his body, which had suffered countless broken bones, dislocations, cuts, and contusions), the medical detail man had not lost consciousness, or at most had been unconscious for only a few seconds. When he opened his eyes, he realized that the accident had happened only instants before, because he could see—though the sun was still shining directly in his eyes—ten, twelve, perhaps fifteen skirts and pairs of pants come running toward him from the flimsy roadside buildings. He couldn’t move, but he felt no pain, only relief and a calm reassurance. The thought came to him that he didn’t have to think any more; he thought of the ambulance, doctors, devoted nurses. They were there, they’d already arrived. He tried to smile at the faces bending down toward him. But then, feeling fingers tickling him, poking him, prying at him, he realized that the newcomers were not helping him: they were yanking his watch off, putting their hands in his pockets, snatching his wallet, jerking off the medal of El Señor de Limpias that he’d worn