IN THE PAINTING BY ALONSO CANO, DEATH places a frozen kiss on the lips of a sleeping boy.
After leaving the office, Cornejo had gone in the direction of Mary’s room. He wanted someone, aside from the undertaker and some predictable policeman, to bid farewell to the dead girl at the moment of sealing her coffin. On his way, he met up with the undertaker who told him that he was going downstairs to look for some tools. Going along the hallway, Cornejo tore three pages off the “Lobster” espadrilles calendar to bring it up to date (I carefully list these details as if they were important to the story, or perhaps to the narrator, or simply to keep him from getting distracted, as in the case of the plans he had traced the other night on the tablecloth). Then he went into Mary’s room. At this point Cornejo fell suddenly silent, shuddered, and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. We thought he was going to faint. What he had witnessed was atrocious: a rush of intensity comes over us when we first recount the experiences we have by ourselves. What Cornejo saw (he assured us) was so horrible that ever since that moment, the mere image of the door to that room, in his memories and his dreams, would be utterly terrifying. In the lonely center of that room, in the heart of the silence and utter stillness of that house buried in the sand, he saw—in the wavering candlelight that seemed to project the shadows of some invisible foliage—Miguel, a mere child, kiss the lips of the dead girl.
“When he saw you, what did the boy do?”
“He ran away,” Cornejo replied, after a pause.
“Who remained in the room with the dead girl?”
“When I left, the typist entered. That boy has to be questioned immediately.”
“Doesn’t seem wise to me,” Aubry observed. “We’ll get into trouble with his aunt.”
I agreed.
“Children are very impressionable,” I said. “He might be traumatized by us, scarred for life.”
Doctor Cornejo looked at me as if he didn’t understand Spanish.
“If we speak to him so soon after the event,” the Police Chief remarked, “we’d be forcing him to lie. And you know very well that one fib leads to another …”
I was about to say something, but the Commissioner stopped me.
“Don’t say a word,” he begged me. “Don’t add anything to what you’ve said. What you’ve already said is perfect. It reminds me of Hugo’s words about harsh experiences when they happen too early in life, that they construct in the souls of children a formidable sort of scale upon which they weigh God.”