Three Messages and a Warning - By Eduardo Jimenez Mayo Page 0,6

corner room. The sliding doors were ajar. Holding our breath, we turned the bolts, locked the doors with a key, and used the hammer and nails to seal up the room completely. While we worked, big drops of sweat rolled down our faces. He didn’t make a sound, seemingly fast asleep. When everything was finished, Guadalupe and I held one another and wept.

The days that followed were frightful. He survived a long time without air, light, food . . . At the beginning, he pounded on the door, threw himself against it, yelling desperately, clawing the wood . . . Neither Guadalupe nor I could eat or sleep, the screams were so terrible! Sometimes we were scared my husband would return before he was dead. If he were to find him like this . . . ! He resisted mightily, I think he made it nearly two weeks . . . Then, one day, we didn’t hear anything. Not even a cry . . . We waited two days more, however, before opening the room.

When my husband returned, we greeted him with the news of his sudden and disconcerting death.

Murillo Park

Agustín Cadena

Translated by C.M. Mayo

Monday to Friday, past two in the afternoon, at one of the shaded benches in Murillo Park, there was an appointment no one had made formally. Its witnesses were the poplars and jacarandas that are still there offering their freshness.

The office allowed me two hours for lunch, from two until four. That was a lot of time for a forty-year-old bachelor used to eating quickly and alone. So it was that, having finished up at a nearby lunch counter, there wasn’t anything else to do but kill time by walking the streets and looking at the shops; although in this once elegant but now down-on-its-luck neighborhood, there wasn’t much to see. The houses looked rickety, like those women who were lovely in their younger days and decades later preserved only the scent of wilted flowers. That’s how the houses were there: tall, shady, silent, painted in a scabby color under the smothering ivy with double-sloping roofs and the shutters always closed. On the main avenue there weren’t many shops. After a few visits I knew everything they had to sell. There was only a watchmaker’s shop, some shoe stores, a bridal boutique, and a small passageway full of coin dealers and herbalists. But there were many government offices.

I don’t like parks. They resemble refuges for bums, people looking for work in the newspapers, exhibitionist couples; worst of all at midday, when they fill with teenagers away from school on their lunch hour. But that day—the first day—I gave in. I gave in because of the heat—it was thirty-eight degrees Celsius—and because there was nothing else to do, and because I’d had a bad day. In the morning, before leaving my house, I’d had an argument with my sister over some stupidity. We were two singletons whose characters had been embittered by bachelorhood and spinsterhood and a lack of dreams. Then, in the office, I had to redo a job because of my boss, a girl just out of university and full of herself. So that’s how it happened that I went to Murillo Park, found a shady bench, and sat down.

It was fortunate that there weren’t many people: a couple in their forties, pale and about one and a half meters tall, though maybe the woman was a little bit taller; a man of about thirty, olive-skinned, with an enormous gold bracelet on his wrist; an older woman, and, on the same bench as her but at its opposite end, a handsome young man wearing a cheap and badly cut suit. Strangely, they were all asleep. It was because of the heat, I assumed. Without realizing it, I also fell asleep.

I was in a good mood the rest of the afternoon and, trying to come up with an explanation, I told myself it had been many years since I’d slept so peacefully as I had for that spell in Murillo Park. It shouldn’t be surprising that I returned the next day. Yes, I returned the next day and the next and then every day, from Monday to Friday. The siesta under the trees became my daily and obligatory portion of earthly pleasure. In time I came to have my own bench, almost my own, one that everyone recognized was for me, and they respected that; a bench that waited for me every afternoon at the same