Tired of walking back and forth across his apartment, and since it had been months now and Jorge Rodolfo’s faith in Borges seemed impossible to recover via introspective methods or by voluntarily turning his back on the world, he decided to plan and build a temple to the Master, right in front of the aparthotel. The inhabitants of the caravans and trailers agreed to let him use part of their packed-earth esplanade, on the proviso that once it was built they’d receive a cut from any visiting tourists or browsers. This suited Jorge Rodolfo. The following months were spent in a reclusion even greater than the one he had hoped to escape: day and night he read and reread the Master’s works, making notes on aspects of the oeuvre that were apt to be turned into symbols, searching around for the building materials to best suit his symbolic world, working on blueprints and more blueprints, making more and more alterations to the blueprints, in short using up his energy, his sight, and his small savings on what would come to be his life’s work. The regulars at the Budget Suites often came by to see him, bringing food, cereal or corn crackers, and that was when he began to relax, even speaking to them, though never making any reference to the temple, saying things instead about how to beat the roulette at this or that casino, or the nutritional advantages of rice over pasta based on anthropological studies of the miraculous survival of peoples in the Third World; diversions, in short, from the issue at hand, the construction of the temple, the details of which he had no intention of revealing. After six and a half months, construction began. A single space, 60 feet by 60 feet at the base and 60 feet high, with a pyramidal roof. The material would be the metal cubes of cars from the breaking yards, crushed to their minimum size by machines squeezing them from four directions. 63 days, the construction took. And, just as Jorge Rodolfo had envisioned, these perfect blocks possessed an aleatory gleam, from whichever angle the sun struck them, and the gamut of colors of the original cars could be seen. Sometimes at the surface, as though born naturally out of the blocks themselves, a back door handle will show, or a speedometer, or, apparently, a clump of woman’s hair—if the car was in a crash. And as he had envisioned it, piled one on top of the other like bricks, they form a never-before-seen composition. Also, as befits the temple of an inexistent divinity, this metallic mishmash would intensify the cold unbearably in winter, and in summer provoke a temperature far above average, resulting in an unvisitable temple; the portrait of the Master, hanging in the exact center, would never be sullied, the entranceway would be a purely theoretical entranceway, as no one would ever want to open it, much less pass through it, and the air surrounding the Master would remain immaculate. The caravan dwellers who gave over the parcel of land have as yet not been able to go in. People approach, look puzzled, take a few photos, and go away again. It shines in the late evening light, making the Las Vegas Boulevard glittering on the horizon seem minor by comparison, and at that point, overcome, Jorge Rodolfo sheds a tear. He has to leave one February night via his back window when the people who have been swindled, several dozens of them, come after him.