One of the secretaries at Mitsubishi called me and said your father was involved with his eighteen-year-old secretary, Antonio’s mother says, and that she wanted me to know because he could lose his job because of this dalliance, and since this girl was from Barranquilla, that year he wanted to spend his birthday in Barranquilla, but his plan was to leave us at his aunt’s house in Barranquilla and for him to stay at a hotel, and so I said no, I’m not going, if you want to see your secretary I don’t have a problem with you driving there by yourself, leave me in peace with my children, moreover, I am going to the beach with your parents, no, he said, you’re going to do what I say, and that’s when he slapped me, so this is when it happened, Antonio says, because Antonio had heard about this incident years ago but hadn’t heard about the secretary from Barranquilla, although he’s heard of the other women near the house in Mirandela, whom his father would visit in the evenings, whenever he said he was going for a walk and a smoke around the block (and here Antonio declines to link his father’s extramarital activities to his own YSA activities because what would be the point of that? to say to himself see, you can’t escape that individual? — I might have contemplated leaving Ida when Eva was born, just as that individual contemplated leaving my mother when I was born, Antonio writes, but I have never contemplated doing what that individual did to my sister and his stepdaughter —), yes, Antonio’s mother says, because I didn’t obey him, and so I defended myself, and the neighbor started shouting if I hear you’re doing anything to your wife my sons and I are coming for you and we’re armed, and that’s when I called your uncle Lucho, and Lucho said I am coming there now, I’m getting that son of a bitch out of there with bullets, and you can’t stay there, you have to leave that house because you’ve endured too much abuse, and so collect the clothes you need for the kids, whatever you feel you need, and you leave that place, so when I told your father Lucho was coming, armed, he disappeared, that’s how I was able to take you out and escape from that house, well, Estela wasn’t there because she was spending the long weekend in Cartagena with my friend Blanca, so you were there by yourself, and perhaps because Antonio knows what his mother is about to say in this part of the recording, he notices her long, dispirited sigh, knowing, on the one hand, that as a mother she shouldn’t display her helplessness in front of her child (because if a mother can’t pretend life is worth living…), and on the other hand what his mother is about to say already happened, it’s irreversible, and that was tough on you, Antonio’s mother says, because at first, after hearing his shouting, you hid, but all of a sudden you were there, between me and your father, shouting to your father don’t treat my mother like that, and that’s when your father hit you — my father swats me away and my brain activates its emergency erasure mechanisms, Antonio writes, erasing that moment and, just in case, everything that came before it — and I said to your father I told you the day you touch me or the children all of this ends, you’re never leaving this house, he shouted, and since the neighbor started shouting as well, because remember the house didn’t have glass windows, only wire mesh so the neighbors could hear everything, and I called Lucho and your father heard what I’d said to him, and so after your father was gone and I was able to leave our bedroom where he’d cornered me, I went looking for you and I found you under your bed, trembling, and here Antonio pauses the recording and closes his eyes, trying to remember that moment — and when I am old and alone and banished from my loved ones, Antonio writes, I will retrieve that bed from storage and wait for the end underneath it — no, he can’t remember that moment, although he does remember having nightmares in that bed and his mother coming to assuage him at night, remembers the purple dinosaur that he would clutch in that bed, the Elmo he was scared of, I went looking for you and I found you under your bed, Antonio’s mother says, trembling, and I said no, I have not been thinking about you, I’ve only been thinking about myself, I’ve been a coward, so I picked you up, picked up some clothes, and I said we are leaving, no more, this will never happen again.