“But at some point you reopened that drawer.”

Kloster nodded slowly. “Years passed-three, four, I forget how many. I didn’t think about any of it again, and in the meantime wrote other books. Until one day I read a short article in the paper about premonitions in dreams. You know what I mean: one night someone dreams about the death of a loved one and the next day it comes true, as if the dream were really a prediction, an arrow shot at the target. The article was written by a professor of statistics, and the tone was rather mocking. He did a simple sum calculating the probabilities and showed that the likelihood of a premonition in a dream coming true was very low, but not so low that, in a big city like Tokyo or Buenos Aires, the coincidence between two events-person X having the dream and their loved one Y dying-didn’t routinely occur. Of course to the person who has the dream the coincidence is astonishing and they see it as a psychic phenomenon, the manifestation of a supernatural power; but for someone who could look down on an entire city at night and keep count of everyone’s dreams, it would be no more surprising than a bingo-caller hearing someone shout out ‘Bingo’. The article was very persuasive and made me think differently about the scene I’d written and the death of Luciana’s parents. I was rather ashamed of having given in to the fundamentally arrogant and superstitious belief that my writing could have had such an effect on reality. With hindsight, it seemed obvious that it had simply been a coincidence between two unrelated events. That night there must have been an army of writers imagining, as I was, some death or other. It just happened that what I’d imagined subsequently took place. A lottery number in a sea of statistics, assigned to me by chance. I opened the drawer again and reread the novel to where I’d left it. But now I was surprised by something else: it was the best thing I’d ever written. And, stranger still, I couldn’t distinguish between his writing and mine. I could no longer point out which sentences had been dictated to me. The whole text seemed to be both familiar and written by someone else. This had happened before when I’d gone back to some of my books and found passages I didn’t recognise, but what I’m trying to say is that I decided to believe-wanted to believe-that it was me who had written every one of those pages. That all the ideas were mine alone. I wanted to take possession of the book. But really I should say that it took possession of me once again. I couldn’t resist continuing. I realised that there was no doubt it would be my masterpiece, perhaps my only great novel. So you see, I gave in to that other arrogant superstition: wanting to create something ‘great’. Anyway, I returned to it, night after night. Until the time came to imagine the brother’s death.”

“Even when you knew what might happen?”

“In the novel, the process of revenge had to continue,” said Kloster, as if it were too late for regrets. “But I did waver. I had months of doubts, of scruples. As in De Quincey’s tale, I felt the thin line, on the edge of the abyss, between dabbling in murder and becoming a fully fledged murderer. Then I thought I’d found a solution. But I was wrong. I thought if I simply devised a highly improbable death, a set of extreme coincidences, it wouldn’t be replicated in real life. Luciana had once mentioned that while he was at medical school her brother had been on a work placement in the prison service. It was the only thing I knew about him. In addition, I had, as you know, corresponded with a number of prisoners in different jails. I linked the two and imagined a convict in a high security prison pretending to have a seizure so as to be taken to the infirmary. Luciana’s brother, now a junior doctor, would be on duty that night and the convict would stab and kill him while trying to escape. As I wrote the scene, I added a few details, from the little I knew about the inside of prisons, that would make the chain of events seem more believable, yet, subtly, more unlikely. But it happened again. Once again, in a slightly different way; once again, as if it were a version revised by someone bolder, crueller. And, as if it were part of the joke, in an even more bizarre sequence of events. The convict hadn’t tried to escape: his own jailers had opened the door so he could leave to burgle people’s houses. Luciana’s brother no longer worked at the prison but during his time at the infirmary he’d met, of all the wives of all the prisoners, the wife of the most vicious. I first found out about it, as you did, as everybody did, in the papers. That morning I read, and reread in disbelief, the name of Luciana’s brother. Same age, same profession, and from the photo I could see they looked very alike. Yes, it had happened again.”

“And once again there was something savage, primitive, about it,” I said, at last seeing the connection I’d missed. “The man killed him with his bare hands, without using his gun.”

“Exactly. It bore his stamp, I could tell immediately. I was beginning to understand his methods, his preferences: the wild sea waves, the natural poison of fungi, the cruelty of one man attacking another like a beast with claws and teeth, as at the dawn of time. A few days later that policeman, Ramoneda, came to see me and showed me the anonymous letters. They were uncouth but precise, and effective. I almost told him everything, as I’m telling you now. But he had his own theory. He spotted a book by Poe on my bookshelves and started talking about The Tell-Tale Heart, of the desire to confess that he’d seen again and again in murderers. I realised from the way he spoke about Luciana that he suspected her. He asked if I had any samples of her handwriting. I gave him the letter she had sent me a few years earlier, in which she asked for forgiveness. He read it carefully and while he was comparing the handwriting he confided that Luciana had spent time in hospital, with a syndrome known as ‘morbid guilt’. Sufferers secretly feel guilty about some harm they’ve done for which they haven’t been punished. Indirectly, and in different ways, they seek to punish themselves. Ramoneda said Luciana was obsessed with the thought that she’d had something to do with my daughter’s death. Hearing this, so many years later, caused me a sort of belated, bitter joy. I’d wanted her to have to think of Pauli every day of her life, and that wish had also been granted. Ramoneda said nothing more and I was sure that, whatever his suspicions, he’d keep them to himself and not do anything. After all, he had his culprit and pressure from the entire government to close the case and hush up the scandal over the convict’s escape.

“Once he’d left, though, I found myself wondering whether this wasn’t another possible explanation. A rational explanation. I considered each death again in this new light. Luciana could have put some substance in her boyfriend’s coffee: she studied biology, she’d have known what to use that would go undetected in a postmortem and she was there with him every day. And the following year, Luciana could have planted poisonous fungi in the little wood, during the same kind of lightning visit to Villa Gesell that she accused me of. Wasn’t she the one who knew all there was to know about fungi? And finally, Luciana could have written the anonymous letters. She probably knew about her brother’s relationship with that woman. But I had to dismiss this possibility before it went very far: Luciana could never have achieved the insane synchronicity between the dates of the deaths and the progress of my novel.

“Even so, considering another hypothesis, one that came, unexpectedly, from an outside source, made me regain hope that there was room for a rational explanation, even if I couldn’t come up with one. As you see, there was still something stubborn in me. I couldn’t accept, intellectually, that what had already occurred twice might occur again. So I set out to challenge him. I proceeded like a sceptic who deliberately walks under a ladder. I decided to write one more death, to test him. The scientific test of repetition. At least that was how I justified it to myself at the time, but I know there was something else. I don’t mind admitting it now: I didn’t want to stop writing the novel, even though I knew another person might die as a result. Even knowing this, I couldn’t resist. So I started devising the next death. As I said earlier, I visited several care homes and considered several ingenious variants. What I really wanted was a murder that was the opposite of his style. That was anti-thetical to all that he was. Strangely, it was you who gave me the idea, when we spoke about Luciana’s grandmother and you said that it wouldn’t count against me if she died a natural death. As soon as you’d said it, I knew that’s what it had to be. It was simple, perfect-a natural death. And to a certain extent it left me with a clean conscience. I wouldn’t be imagining and writing a murder, but a merciful release for someone who’d been bedridden for years. This afternoon I made up my mind at last to write the first draft. One death. One person.