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Leonilda thinks she sees rage and perhaps evil in this case, a chicken thief who was stabbed to death in a cell packed with men who supposedly were asleep, an act as risky as it was savage, an act without apparent justification, one which would have needed a whole rosary of complicity for the perpetrator to get away with it.

Leonilda asks herself why a man like this could have met with such a violent death. Jealousy, money, envy, revenge, sex. Rage.

49

Half past two in the morning.

Ursula’s window is slightly open, the curtains are drawn, the blind is halfway down; the room is dimly lit and she has just placed the telescope on the tripod she assembled a moment ago. Five floors below, a taxi rumbles along the cobbles of Calle Sarandí, a homeless guy drags a rattling shopping cart over the irregular surface, a stray dog limps by, trailing one of its hind legs. She observes them from her watchtower, a sentinel in her improvised observation post. Improvised? Not exactly. It’s no coincidence that she is here at the window at this time of night putting the finishing touches to her lookout station; it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. We ought to talk about why she can’t get to sleep, why she gets up in the middle of the night, what she is furtively searching for right now, but to do that we’d need to delve back into the distant past, which isn’t possible. Ursula doesn’t like digging around in her memories; even with her analyst she is unable to do that.