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the story of my life. The second event from my childhood that had taken root in my memory occurred at the Montessori nursery school, where I was a distinguished student, a nursery school where one morning one of my classmates had the gall to take my blocks away from me, indeed, with the height of insolence he took my blocks and refused to give them back, despite my pleas, at which point I succumbed to a process of internal combustion and then reacted in an unexpected way, because the only thing that occurred to me to do was pick up in my right hand a wooden block that was still in my possession, and, at a moment when the bully was not paying attention, attack him with all my might, bashing him on the head again and again and again; I bashed that wooden block into the head of said child until his cries of pain caught the attention of our teacher, who quickly bent down and picked me up while other teachers rushed in to help the bully, who was lying on the ground, his head a bloody mess. According to my memory, the bully was taken to the emergency room and they locked me up in the office to wait for my mother, who was an English teacher at the same nursery school, and thanks to her intercession I was not expelled but only received a reprimand of which I have no memory at all, as I also have none of my little classmate who wanted to steal my blocks and ended up with his head bashed in, a boy who from that moment on would surely think long and hard before trying to take something that didn’t belong to him; it was at that moment long ago that I understood that the origin of violence is man’s desire to take what does not belong to him, forgive me the repetition and the pontificating tone.
    Now that I was taking comfort in that second memory, and as I sipped my vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga and contemplated the pedestrians walking quickly along Insurgentes, I told myself that if they hadn’t expelled me from Montessori, if I had only received a mild reprimand, it was not because my mother worked there as a teacher but rather because my grandfather was, at the time, president of the powerful Partido Nacional, but above all because my grandmother was Doña Lena Mira Brossa, a woman with a tempestuous character and an explosive temper, whom the owner and director of the nursery school must have feared—as was only prudent—for I haven’t the slightest doubt that the instant she found out about the attempted robbery of my blocks and subsequent bloody developments, my grandmother Lena had taken my side, blaming my bully of a classmate in the harshest possible terms for not respecting private property—this was the mind-set she was famous for—and that she had threatened and berated the teacher in charge of playtime for not having paid due attention, not having stopped the young delinquent the moment he attempted to seize control of something that belonged to her little prince—that would be me—her only grandchild at the time. I savored the vodka, pleased that there was no fissure in this, my second childhood memory, and I also polished up my self-esteem a little, perhaps even puffing out my chest in that chair where I was sitting and drinking, because it was obvious that from a tender age I had been able to react decisively to injustice and take unexpected and devastating action against anyone who tried to take advantage of my apparent vulnerability.
    Glancing down the side street past Sanborns, expecting to see Félix on his way, I told myself that the half hour we had agreed upon had already passed, and I wouldn’t wait for him any longer than it took me to finish my vodka, it was almost nightfall, and I had no intention of getting drunk on an evening when I much preferred to maintain the lucidity I’d enjoyed since leaving Don Chente’s penthouse apartment. And I also told myself that it was enough already, this scrounging around in my memory, such efforts served no purpose other than the concrete one of sitting