For the last couple of months, at dusk, the time of day when the pigs become unruly and begin to squeal [a sound that travels unechoingly across the Armenian steppe], Vartan Oskanyan has been seeing the silhouette of a man in the environs of the building. Usually walking in the same way, neither approaching nor going away, and moving in circles though not very precise circles, before sometimes sitting down between the clumps of grass so that only his head can be seen above them; he sits still, doing nothing other than being there, looking sometimes at the building and sometimes off toward the horizon. As he sits he also eats what seems to be a sandwich and drinks some sort of liquid that Vartan cannot make out. And always at such a distance that he remains no more than a moving patch, a smudge, a Bélmez face without the wall. The old man Arkadi has suggested that Vartan might have brought this upon himself by keeping that record sleeve in the pig farm, the one with all those faces of people neither fully alive nor fully dead. They discuss the idea at length.