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“In you go, sir.”

“Thanks, boys.”

Diego hears loud decisive steps, heels clicking along the corridor. He looks up and sees Antinucci approaching. It’s as if a military march is playing inside the man’s head. Antinucci greets Diego with a martial nod, and Diego observes the hand moving forward with a precise movement, like a switchblade. The lawyer takes Diego’s hand slackly; the contact is flaccid and cold, a jellyfish that passes, touches and then goes on its way. Antinucci places his chair so he is 11sitting directly opposite Diego. He sits down and opens the leather case, takes out a folder, also leather, which he places neatly on the table. He opens it and extracts a few sheets of paper. The cartapacio, thinks Diego, as he recognizes the worn dark leather spine that he has already seen before, on another visit; the lawyer guards this folder the way he guards his own life, or the way he thinks he should guard his own life. The object makes Diego shiver. Who knows why? The lawyer’s Ray-Bans erect a barrier between the two men. Diego has no way of knowing where the eyes behind the lenses are focused. He doesn’t know if the eyes are looking at him or are attending to the precise ritual of laying out each individual sheet of paper, a pencil and a couple of ballpoints, blue and red, a mobile phone, an eraser – and a watch that he removes from his wrist and places behind everything else, propped up so it is facing him. Diego prefers to believe that the lawyer is not looking at him and he, in turn, avoids looking at the glasses; he avoids them the way somebody avoids a revelation he knows he will, ultimately, have to hear.