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XIX
Dream is our daily practice of madness. In the moment in which we become insane, we will say, "This world is familiar to me. I have visited it almost every night of my life." And therefore when we believe we are dreaming but are awake, our rational selves feel vertiginous.
 I heard Liszt's Forgotten Waltz coming from a piano, the same waltz Emilia had played the night before. Were we still shut away in the hotel, in the midst of a sandstorm, with a young woman dead in her room? Or had I inexplicably gotten lost, to wander in time? That morning I woke feeling that I was drowning, with the blind anguished desperation to escape that some of the infirm suffer during anaesthesia's dreams. I was unable to open the window, but with a frenzy of expectation I prepared to leave the room. I opened the door: no relief, the same heaviness and the absorbed mind hearing the Forgotten Waltz.
I slowly climbed the stairs. Now, as when just returning from a dream, real things astonished me, and the music persisted, the last relic of madness. I went to find it, fearful of losing it, still nostalgic for the miracle.
I entered the dining hall. Next to the radio, from which came the Forgotten Waltz, Manning played solitaire.
"Doesn't this seem an inappropriate time for music?" I asked him.
He looked at me as if he were the one waking. "Music? I'm sorry. I didn't even hear it. I turned the radio on to catch the news. I began my game and forgot it."
I turned it off.
"You are quite the master of solitaire," I told him.
"Don't even think it," he replied. "A friend swore that a player can win 75 games of a thousand. I believe he exaggerated."
"And you're testing the theory?"
I noticed that in my dealings with Manning I was employing a for me uncommon patronizing tone. Manning was uselessly small.
While he attempted to explain something about the calculation of probabilities, I approached the window. It seemed incredible that, beyond this opaque sky over us, there were other skies bright with sun. I was disgusted by these interminable sandstorms.
In a corner of the window was a spider.
"At such a time they carry bad luck," I declared. I picked up a newspaper to smash the creature.
"Don't kill it," Manning begged me. "It came out because of the music. I put it in that corner two or three days ago. Look at the web it's woven."
I looked. There was a clutter of dirty webs and a desiccated fly.
"Huberman," a voice entoned. "We need you."
It was Cornejo. He wore white flannel pants and a sport shirt. There was something in his tone that recalled a ship's captain, taking the final precautions in the middle of a shipwreck.
"Come to the office," he went on. "They are going to close the coffin. Stay with Emilia."
It is always comforting to find those capable of appreciating my qualities as a spiritual conductor.
In the office Atuel, Montes, and the commissioner were with Emilia.
"I'm going down," Cornejo said, and he left perfectly composed.
With a warm sensation of responsibility, I attempted to approach Emilia. Atuel and Montes were conversing with her. While the commissioner and I discussed the weather, I watched them: the men, at their ease, indistinct; Emilia, uncomfortable in her chair, rigid, with the expression of an actor in a scene in which the characters are suffering. Unexpectedly I wondered if Cornejo had brought me to the office because Emilia needed me or because he needed me not to be somewhere else.
A nearby rattle of china and platters announced the approach of breakfast. I could do nothing less than dismiss my ingracious ideas. In a sense, in this daily ceremony of the first meal, I see the dispositions of the poetic emotion, which is reborn inviolable and pristine, even through all its repetitions. I drew from my pocket the vial of arsenic and released into the palm of my left hand the ten necessary drops. When I raised them to my mouth, I caught a shimmer of surprise in the honest eyes of Commissioner Aubry. I turned as red as a boy.
Cornejo appeared in the doorway. He was pale, frightfully pale, as if a sudden old age had overcome him. He leaned against the table.
"I have to speak to you, Commissioner," he said in a weary voice.
The commissioner and I drew near. Atuel seemed to be lost in contemplation of the impenetrable landscape out the window. Emilia retired, indiscreetly followed by Montes.
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