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eighties, when they were in their twenties, a good age for the first and perhaps the worst time for the second. He walked up the street toward his house. He realized he was almost running. His house was old but in good condition, it was the same one he had livedin when he was a boy, and had been rebuilt after the disaster. He went in and hurried to the bedroom in the rear. He opened the door.
    “Mamacita?”
    Félix Chacaltana Saldívar walked to the chest of drawers where his mother kept her clothes and costume jewelry. He took out a skirt and blouse and laid them on the bed. It was a beautiful bed, small, with a canopy of carved wood.
    “I should have come in this morning. I'm sorry. It's just that there was a homicide, Mamacita, I had to run to work.”
    He brought the broom from the kitchen and quickly swept out the room. Then he sat on the bed, looking at the door.
    “Do you remember Señora Eufrasia? She used to drink
mate
with you? She's sick, Mamacita. I sent her a Virgin so she'd get better. You pray too. I only pray a little.”
    He felt sheltered in an old, warm mist. He caressed the cloth of the sheets.
    “And pray for the man who died today, too. I will. That way the fear goes … I think the terrorists are coming back, Mamacita. It isn't certain, I don't want you to worry, but this is very strange.”
    He stood and passed his hand along the clothing he had laid on the sheets. He smelled it. It had the scent of his mother, a scent kept for many years. He opened the window to air out the room. The afternoon sun shone directly on his mother's bed.
    “I have to go now. I only … I only needed to come here for a while. I hope that doesn't annoy you … It doesn't annoy you, does it?”
    He crossed himself and opened the door to go back to his office. He gave a last look inside. It hurt him to verify once again, as he had every day for the past year, that there was no one in the room.
    As he returned to the office he felt calmer, unburdened. His mother's room relaxed him. He spent hours there. Occasionally, often at night, he would recall some new detail, a photograph, analtarpiece that had decorated his mamacita's room in his childhood. He would hurry to look for it in the market and order it if there was no copy exactly like the one in his memory. Little by little, the room had become a three-dimensional portrait of his nostalgia.
    When he reached his desk, he found an envelope containing an invitation to the institutional parade on Sunday. He made a note of it in his date book, wrote an account of the complaint for the police, and made copies of the forensic report for each envelope. The chocolate smudges were well hidden on the photocopies. They looked like ink. Then he wrote a request for information to the Ministry of Energy and Mines asking what source could have produced sufficient heat to burn the body. And another request to the municipality of Quinua asking that they send him copies in quadruplicate of missing persons reports dated subsequent to January 1 of the current year.
    He spent the rest of the afternoon taking care of other pending matters, such as the complaint of a citizen against his neighbor, whom he accused in his statement of being a faggot. The prosecutor composed a reply to the report stating that homosexuality in any of its variants does not constitute a misdemeanor, infraction, or serious crime since it is not duly specified as such in the penal code. However, he added, if the individual engaged in relations with a human or judicial person without verifying that it was a concomitant voluntary act by the aforesaid person, he might commit a crime against honor as specified under the classification of violation.
    He asked himself how to sanction the violation of one man by another. He realized he could not marry them because there was no relevant procedure to do so. Perhaps the situation deserved another brief.



The institutional parade at Lent had been established by decree in 1994 at