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He is dreaming. The dream will soon turn into a nightmare, but he doesn’t know that yet. At the moment he’s trying to figure out what he and Román are doing in the middle of the jungle. He wants to ask him where he’s been all this time, but really there’s no need, because they’re ten years old again, and they have mustaches and their Roman law texts under their arms. And Román’s face still bears the same sullen expression, the same haughty aloofness.

They push through the foliage for hours, creating openings in the bush that seem to lead nowhere, until at last they come across his father. He’s sitting in the armchair in his study. He has something in his hand. Or rather he doesn’t have anything, not even hands; at first they see only his face, an enormous face twisted into a scowl. They have broken a window with a rubber ball, it’s Román’s fault, or maybe Carlos’s—it doesn’t matter, the window is broken and the repair has cost two soles. He tells them, “You’ve cost me two soles, you troublemakers.” And another fourteen soles when, intentionally or unintentionally—it was never entirely clear—they bathed and dried the household mastiffs on the Persian rug in the parlor. And then there was the music box they broke while playing with it and later buried in the courtyard—it cost thirty dollars because of the gems and mother-of-pearl inlay, though it cost the servant accused of stealing it even more dearly. And now Don Augusto is rebuking them for all of that. He is holding something in his hand again. But they don’t look at it yet; they look at his mouth opening and closing, detailing their disobediences. “Two soles for the window,” he says. “Fourteen for the soiled rug,” he says. “Thirty dollars for the music box,” he says. “Four hundred dollars for the virtue of that foreign whore.” And then, raising the pulsing bundle he has in his hand, blood dripping between his fingers, he adds, “And now tell me, you leeches, tell me how much this poet’s heart is going to cost me.”