Then I went back to the living room and Coffeen was still there, standing, staring at a point in vacant space, and although when he heard me emerge from the passage (as one might emerge from a spaceship) he turned his head and looked at me, I knew immediately that he wasn't looking so much at me, his unexpected visitor, as at the life of the world outside, the life he had spurned, which, nevertheless, was eating him alive, even though he feigned a regal indifference. And then, more out of stubbornness than desire, I burned the last of my boats, sat down, uninvited, on the battered sofa, and repeated Lilian's words, telling him that she wouldn't be coming home that night, that he shouldn't worry, first thing next morning she'd be back, and I added a few words of my own, which weren't strictly relevant, banal remarks on the home of the poet and the painter, such a nice location, close to the center but in a calm, quiet street, and since I was there, I thought it wouldn't do any harm to inform him of the interest a number of people had expressed in his work; I said that I found his drawings, which his mother had shown me, interesting, an adjective that hardly seems adjectival at all, so varied are its functions, from describing a film that you don't want to admit you found boring to remarking on a woman's pregnancy. But interesting is also or can also be a synonym of mysterious. And I was talking about mystery. That was what I was really talking about. I think Coffeen understood, because after looking at me again with those exile s eyes of his, he took a chair (for a moment I thought he was going to hurl it at my head), and straddled it backward, gripping the bars of the backrest like a minimalist prisoner.

Then, as if I had heard the shot that signals the beginning of the hunting season, I remember I began to spout whatever came into my head. Until I ran out of words. Sometimes it seemed that Coffeen was about to fall asleep, and sometimes his knuckles clenched as if he was about to burst or as if the backrest of the chair that stood between him and me was about to fly apart, explode, disintegrate. But there came a point, as I said, when I ran out of words.

I don't think it was long before sunrise.

Then Coffeen spoke. He asked me if I knew the story of Erigone. No, I don't, but the name's familiar, I said (lying), afraid I was putting my foot in it. For a moment, with a sinking heart, I thought he was going to tell me about an ex-lover. We all have an old love affair to talk about when there's nothing left to say and day is breaking. But it turned out that Erigone was not one of Coffeen's ex-lovers but a figure from Greek mythology, the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. That's a story I do know. A story I did know. Agamemnon goes off to Troy and Clytemnestra becomes Aegisthus's mistress. When Agamemnon comes back from Troy, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra kill him, and then get married. Electra and Orestes, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, decide to avenge their father and regain control of the kingdom. This involves killing Aegisthus and their own mother. Horror. I could get that far on my own. But Coffeen Serpas went further. He spoke of the daughter of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Erigone, Orestes's half-sister, and said that she was the most beautiful woman in all Greece; her mother's sister, after all, was none other than Helen of Troy. He spoke of Orestes's vengeance. A spiritual hecatomb, he said. Do you know what a hecatomb is? I associated that word with nuclear warfare, so I thought it better not to reply. But Coffeen kept asking. A disaster, I said, a catastrophe? No, said Coffeen, a hecatomb is the sacrifice of a hundred oxen all at once. It comes from the Greek hekaton, which means one hundred, and bous, which means ox. There are even records from classical times of five hundred oxen being slain. Can you imagine that, he asked. Yes, I can imagine anything, I replied. The sacrifice of a hundred or five hundred oxen: you would have been able to smell the stench of blood for miles around. Imagine so much death, all around you; it must have been stupefying. Yes, I imagine it was, I said. Well, the vengeance of Orestes was something like that, said Coffeen. The terror and the irreparability of parricide, the shame and the panic, he said. And in the midst of that terror: Erigone, exquisite, immaculate, observing the intellectual Electra and the eponymous hero Orestes.

The intellectual Electra and the eponymous hero Orestes? For a moment I thought that Coffeen was pulling my leg.

But no, not at all. In fact Coffeen was talking as if he were alone: with every word that came out of his mouth I was farther and farther away from that apartment on the Calle República de El Salvador. Although at the same time, however paradoxical it might seem, I was also more present, as an absence, as if the features of the immaculate Erigone were supplanting my invisible or reality-faded features, so that although, in a sense, I was disappearing, in another sense, as I disappeared my shadow took on the features of Erigone, and Erigone was present there, in the decrepit living room of Lilian's apartment, summoned by the words that Coffeen was reeling off, like a gossip or a busybody (as Julio Torri, who liked this sort of story, would have said), oblivious to my worried look, since although I was reluctant to leave him that night, I also realized that the path on which he had set out was perhaps the preamble to a nervous breakdown brought on by the absence of his mother, or by my unexpected presence, which was no compensation.

But Coffeen went on with his story.

And so I discovered that after the murder of Aegisthus, Orestes proclaimed himself king, and the followers of Aegisthus had to go into exile. Erigone, however, remained in the kingdom. The still Erigone, said Coffeen. Still under the vacant gaze of Orestes. Nothing but her extraordinary beauty can momentarily placate his homicidal fury. One night Orestes loses control, gets into her bed, and rapes her.

He wakes up at first light the next day and goes to the window: the lunar landscape of Argos confirms his suspicion. He has fallen in love with Erigone. But someone who has killed his mother is incapable of love, said Coffeen looking me in the eye with a charred smile, and Orestes knows that Erigone is poison to him, as well as being a blood relative of Aegisthus, which is sufficient justification for leading her to slaughter. Over the following days, Orestes's followers persecute and eliminate the followers of Aegisthus. At night, like a drug addict or a wino (Coffeen's similes), Orestes visits Erigone's bedchamber and they make love. In the end, Erigone gets pregnant. Having found out, Electra confronts her brother and explains why this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Erigone, says Electra, will give birth to a grandchild of Aegisthus. There is no longer a single man in Argos who is a blood relative of the usurper. Having taken it upon himself to fell that tree, how can Orestes weaken now and allow a new shoot to spring up? But it's my child too, says Orestes. It's the grandchild of Aegisthus, Electra insists. So Orestes accepts his sister's advice and decides to kill Erigone.

Nevertheless he wants to sleep with her one last time, so he does. She suspects nothing and gives herself to Orestes without fear. Although young, she has quickly learned how to handle the new king's madness. She calls him brother, my brother, she implores him, sometimes she pretends to see him and sometimes she pretends to see only a dark and solitary silhouette taking refuge in a corner of her bedchamber. (Was that Coffeen's idea of erotic ecstasy?) Before dawn, a besotted Orestes reveals his plan. He proposes an alternative. Erigone must leave Argos that very night. Orestes will provide a guide, who will take her out of the city and far away. Horrified, Erigone looks at him in the darkness (they are sitting at opposite ends of the bed), suspecting that Orestes's words conceal her death sentence: the guide that her brother says he is prepared to provide will turn out to be her executioner.