Libido’s Last Death Rattles – Matías Bragagnolo

October 26, 2025

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of
God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23

Once, one day in my earthly life, I saw a Japanese film, one of those that deal with the main erotic fantasy of the Japanese: the rape of teenagers. Angel Guts, or something like that, it was called. Halfway through the film, a young girl is about to be raped by a gang of bikers on a train track. She’s hiding between two cars when one of the gang members catches her with her tongue half out, biting it, trying to cut it off so she can bleed to death. The Japanese know about that too, suicide. Add it to the list. About the rape of teenagers and suicide. They can improvise a suicide even if they find themselves locked between four bare walls. They’re the MacGyvers of suicide.
        But in Angel Guts, or whatever the hell it’s called, the thug, while getting even by beating the poor still-virgin girl up, explains the true mechanics of her chosen method. “If you bite your tongue, the blood loss doesn’t kill you. You die when the base of your tongue droops and blocks your windpipe.” And, choking her, he proceeds to give her a free taste of the fate that would have awaited her had he not interrupted her.
        Here in Limbo, there’s no fire, as we all know, but there’s no wind either. Despite that detail, I still like to imagine that I’m telling all these things to the wind, and that sooner or later my words will be overheard by some medium in some seance. And if I’m lucky, and they’re given paper and a pencil, they’ll be able to take advantage of one more act of automatic writing to record all this misery that’s being told by me to the ether of the first circle of hell. After all, I’ve been designated one of the Apostles of Limbo, and while it’s one of those infernal noble titles that has little practical use, and also, as a melancholy nineties song said, it’s “too late to discover peace of mind,” there’s nothing wrong with warning the souls of the living about the paths to hell they should avoid. Of the earthly hell, that’s clear, right? Few admit it, but hell itself, the afterlife, is a mere Peter Greenaway movie compared to the shit that is being alive on planet Earth. And things get worst if, to top it all off, you have to live in Argentina, somewhere alike to the nine circles of hell rolled into one, ruled by a lobotomized demon.
        How I came to work in such a cruel structure as the San Roque System S.A. is easy to explain, even if it ends up being incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been a doctor in Fucking Argentina. I was a doctor in public hospitals. Close your eyes and imagine this, which I’m reciting from memory, from a novel I once read: “damp floors and carcinogenic death throes, gauze stained with blood, pus, and iodine tincture, cracks that cause leaks of human secretions into the hallways and pathogenic waste incinerated in industrial furnaces.” Now assume in your cynical and unempathetic minds that this was the environment in the hospitals where I worked. If you’re a man, touch your crotch, feel your genitals, try to gauge their size: that’s how small my salaries were. If you’re a woman, do something similar with any lump you’ve recently detected in your breasts or neck that’s keeping you up at night. But don’t wait too long, because then they won’t be as little as my state fees for 48-or-72-hour on-call shifts.
        And that’s how I ended up at Sistema San Roque Inc., as a sort of hybrid employee, in the classic Argentine way of evading employers’ tax obligations: a meager basic salary, legally registered as a part-time worker, plus a biweekly piecework payment outside the law. This leaves the employee unable to ever take a vacation: taking a vacation is equivalent to not working for a week or two, and not working in Sistema San Roque is equivalent to not receiving the portion of the salary paid under the table, since this is calculated on the number of work units performed per fortnight. What did each work unit consist of, so to speak. Don’t worry. We’ll get to that.
        Sistema San Roque Inc. was a private, multimillion-dollar company that was responsible for sending doctors to needy homes where a medical emergency was occurring. An elderly woman having a heart attack could be one example, if you want a completely hackneyed but critical example. Instead of sending an equipped ambulance to transport the patient to the nearest hospital, they sent me, with a briefcase that barely held a defibrillator, a blood pressure monitor, a flashlight, and a first aid kit. The pen was used to write the weekly reports I had to submit to the company and to perform tracheotomies.
        Of course, this wasn’t a company founded for altruistic purposes. To begin with, there’s nothing altruistic about leaving a person to die in the hands of a doctor who lacks the instruments and the ability to transport a dying person. Let’s start with the fact that I didn’t even have my own means of transportation. Bus, subway, taxis… All of them were out-of-pocket expenses, which the company refunded only when they paid the next two weeks’ paycheck, a week after that two weeks’ paycheck had been payment due. That is, each of my, let’s say, salaries was reduced by 20% each month by a loan I made to this multimillion-dollar company: the expenses for my transportation and to be able to fulfill my duties, which were, precisely, the company’s main business.
        But, once again, you may be wondering where the profit was for a private company assisting indigent people on the verge of death. Simple: it did so with state funds. It paid the salaries of telephone operators, doctors, and administrative staff with state funds, and state funds also contributed to the fees the company received for each poor person it caused to die due to lack of appropriate medical care. In this way, Sistema San Roque Inc. helped the State to get Buenos Aires city rid of the poor, and no one took any notice of this euthanasia method used to exterminate the poor: the State was apparently assisting the dying indigents through a private medical company. What more could a needy person ask for? Not even in Perón’s time had this people received so much medical care.
        The reality, jokes aside, was that Sistema San Roque turned out to be the corporate version of the archangel Azrael, doing the dirty work assigned by the State itself, which in turn you could say was the closest thing to a Christian God within the context of the dystopia in which my last years of life took place.
        My main tool was a ankylosed cell phone. Its screen cracked from a thousand streets falls, and the gaps between the cracks in the glass filled with semen from the masturbations that underpinned my midnight sex life (what other sex life could a dying man have?), when my girlfriend was still with me but too tired from her job to stay up awake, accompanying my nervous insomnia, a couple of hours after I’d gotten home from work to spend the two or three hours a day we could see each other on weekdays. I also worked on Saturdays, and I spent Sundays sleeping, in a somewhat futile attempt to recover lost rest. It wasn’t as if I had enough strength left for anything else.
        Verónica was what you’d call a porn actress in the age of social media, when the healthy habit of renting or buying a good porn DVD was already dead. Everything happened through platforms like OnlyFans, where sex workers produced their own videos from their bedrooms, with varying degrees of professionalism, sometimes live, and then the scenes were available for purchase online. That’s what the market for healthy masturbators had been reduced to in the dystopian times that still prevail. Verónica’s material consisted primarily of masturbations, many of them fulfilling requests from clients who required the resulting video for personal use, effectively shutting it out of the market. They were the ones who paid the best.
        Sometimes she would film herself having sex with a colleague (“collaborations,” they called them), and they would both share the endless array of sex toys that filled our apartment. Back in the days when I could still get an erection at will, she often required my help. All I had to do was film my penis from above, while she or they sucked it or inserted it inside themselves. While rolling I was constantly thinking about the disgusting things I’d seen in the hospital, or about the “actions” of Sistema San Roque (that’s what they called each of my useless interventions in each simulated euthanasia case, almost as if they were referring to the artistic carnage perpetrated many decades earlier by the Viennese Actionism). That way, I managed to delay ejaculation for as long as the video or the client required, and when the actresses instructed me to, I stopped thinking about the naked, shit-ridden dying man tied to the hospital bed and let my load out wherever they told me to. Just like the black maid in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, where only the feet and lower half of the legs were visible, with the stockings falling down, of my body only the erection, the testicles, part of my thighs and part of my belly were visible. My belly by then had already begun to shamefully show the fluid retention caused by the number of hours I spent standing in or wandering around public streets.
        But that ended as the months of work at Sistema San Roque went by. The ten or thirteen hours a day spent on the street began to take their toll on my mind almost simultaneously with my body. I almost ignored the physical aspect. Not only because we physicians don’t give a damn whether we’re alive or dead, but because the mental issue was a little more bothersome than the chilblains on my ears that the winter weather brought out, the constant and at times deafening ringing of tinnitus, the anal fissures resulting from the fecal masses that formed in my large intestine because I couldn’t access a bathroom all day (my income didn’t allow me to go to a bar for lunch or a snack), the hormonal imbalance that deformed my body by accumulating fat in the least convenient places, the wrinkles and premature gray hair, the allergic rhinitis that not even corticosteroids could calm, the summer rashes on my inner thighs and testicles…
        The mental issue, that’s it. Let’s leave aside the anxiety attacks that kept me from breathing but were cured with anti-anxiety pills I made myself steal from pharmacies in well-known hospitals because my budget didn’t allow for them. Let’s ignore the glottic spasms that would occasionally wake me up in the middle of the night, the air whistling through my throat muscles and the sensation of being strangled for a minute, the approximate duration of the sudden agony. Let’s pretend I had eyebrows and eyelashes, that I hadn’t plucked them out as a result of that nervous compulsion called trichotillomania. Let’s ignore the crying fits that would come with seeing an abandoned cat or dog on the street—I’d already lost all hope for humans. All of that was child’s play compared to the depression that the stress (I became a complete Captain Cortisol), the loneliness, and the humiliation (financial and professional) of my job at Sistema San Roque Inc. plunged me into. Not even the days literally spent inside hospitals with a work environment halfway between that of a medieval lunatic asylum and that of a brothel for sex slaves had been able to make me another hostage to clinical depression.
        First, they tried to keep it under control with Prozac. For a few months, almost a year, it worked. They combined it with Risperidone. Several dose increases later, fluoxetine threw in the towel. Sistema San Roque was too much, even for the most famous and cool antidepressant. Then came desvenlafaxine, and for a while, it seemed to have hit the nail on the head.
        But Sistema San Roque Inc. wasn’t just a company, a corporation: it was an evil entity. I wouldn’t be able to give a definitive conclusion, not even now that I’ve moved on to another plane and am supposedly endowed with a knowledge beyond that of any scholar of the occult. But even then, in life, I could assure, for thousands of verifiable reasons, that the abusive practices against its employees, the very corporate purpose of that corporation, the perfidious idiosyncrasy of the administrative staff and those who assigned us the more than one hundred actions per month, the perverse decisions of the board of directors, and even the very location of the different commercial offices throughout the city—points that, joined together, formed a hexagram, an esoteric symbol that has led to nothing good throughout history, no matter how much the Zionists try to convince us otherwise—had ended up exuding such kinetic energy that, strengthened day after day, it had ended up giving life to an autonomous entity chained to the purposes of Sistema San Roque, generating among all those involved decisions and attitudes that bordered on clairvoyance, always in the service of wickedness. A kind of mega-elemental of evil replete with tentacles and obsessed with labor exploitation.
        Returning to psychiatric medication, after adjusting the dosage, desvenlafaxine had to be helped. The poor pill could no longer keep my depression at bay. By now, this illness had been accompanied by suicidal thoughts that worried Verónica or my closest friends more than me. Close friends whom I never saw again after my job at Sistema San Roque began: our relationship was limited to WhatsApp conversations. Anyway, quetiapine entered the fray, an antipsychotic that, used in minimal doses, works as an adjuvant to desvenlafaxine. Of course, the day came when half a pill of quetiapine at night ended up being doubled. And not long after, my squalid life ended.
        But first, a few more details I’d like to finish outlining from this limbo about the actions of Sistema San Roque and their consequences on the bodies of its employees, those bodies over which it believed it had absolute control. Don’t take me for a fool: I’ve already accepted that, as is commonplace in times of global dystopia, and even more so in a place like Argentina, the country of “every man for himself” par excellence, no one could care less about the misfortune of others, whether it comes from Sistema San Roque or anywhere else. But I have nothing to lose by telling you all this; I have all eternity to wallow in the shit of my past.
        I spent my days wandering the streets in complete solitude, developing the mental behavior typical of a prisoner. I was, as that other song goes, “a prisoner in my city,” except that it would never have occurred to me to call such an ugly and putrid place “my city.” You could say that during working hours—that is, for half of the 24-hour day—I lived inside my head. All I needed was the glimpse of a sliver of sunlight on a tree leaf or a rooftop while walking through some non-central neighborhood to evoke happy moments in my life, moments when I had a life, and to dwell in them, or rather, in the essence of them, for a good while. Or it could be a smell, the freshness of a breeze on my face, or a melody heard as I passed by, that allowed me to mentally escape from the prison that were the city streets, the streets of a job that prevented me from being with my girlfriend, being with friends, reading, watching a movie, listening to music, or having a beer.
        And that was until my cell phone rang with a message from one of the commercial offices. A mailing address, no matter how far or how close I was, despite being just one of several doctors “appointed” by the company, hired to “care” for the dying needy. I’d head there as fast as I could, using public transportation. If the call of duty found me eating a sandwich, sitting on the front steps of an abandoned house, or on a park bench, I’d have to cut my lunch short: there were no lunch hours for proxy doctors.
A good portion of the terminally ill were homeless. Argentina’s Federal Capital had become a 200-square-kilometer Skid Row. And I would show up at the indicated address, where the dying person was usually lying in agony against the wall of a closed-down commercial establishment, wrapped in the same blanket they’d been sleeping with for months on sidewalks filthy with vomit, dog dung, and smokers’ spit. The company didn’t provide me with disposable gloves, and I was tired of paying for them out of my own pocket, so I would grab one of those grimy wrists and take their pulse. It was the first thing I did, to avoid further unnecessary tests. And if they were still alive, I would try to talk to them. At least complete a mock anamnesis. Sometimes, hearing them mumble their incoherent thoughts, I would spend a while talking to them myself, emitting my own glossolalia. It was all a drill, after all. I’d pull out a form, write a report. I didn’t even have an aspirin to give them. I’d crouch down beside them for a while. Sometimes I’d sit next to their head. If they had any wine left, I’d drink with them.
        And if they were still alive when I left, the hypocrites at the company expected me to perform a medical follow-up, the same way I should do with those who did have a roof over their heads. In seven years of working for those criminals, I never again came across the same dying bum, even though I virtually lived on the streets during that time.
        Of course, when the phone rang again, giving me another address, it didn’t matter if there was even a chance I could save the unfortunate man’s life. It wasn’t about saving anyone, I’ve already said that. It was just a pose, and I was the instrument of that pose. Sistema San Roque Inc. was a perfected pagan version of Mother Teresa and her famous houses for the dying.
        The day came when my libido began to desert me. I barely saw Verónica, but her work as an independent porn actress continued. Otherwise, we’d have been thrown out on the street, with the expensive rent for the studio apartment, the rampant inflation of a murderous local economy, and my salary completely eroded over time, despite all the proxy doctors asking the board of directors of the meat grinder that employed us for raises. Why didn’t I change jobs? I wasn’t going back to a public hospital. Even less to a private one, because they paid less. And have any of you tried to find work in Argentina when you are over forty?
        Why didn’t I commit suicide? Because I’m a coward. I was and still am, except that in my current situation in the underworld no one is going to question my courage, because there’s no need to bring it out.
        I returned home repeating to myself: “Tomorrow is another shitty day.” I had abandoned all hope, as the sign in the lobby of this other dimension says. I took the elevator thinking I’d find her filming some scene with another guy, something Verónica had always sworn she’d never do. I opened the front door, and she came to greet me joyfully, even though she was about to encounter a living corpse. She hugged me, kissed me, and had my snack ready, even though it was almost dinner time. I had left home at nine in the morning. I worked harder than a miner, because miners come home when the sun sets.
        And when I say the day came when my libido began to desert me, I’m not talking about suffering from impotence due to exhaustion, nor as a side effect of psychiatric medication. I hadn’t lost my sexual desire. Of course, my physical energy in general was depleted; that was inevitable. Living on the streets ruins you, and running around to complete work tasks is the equivalent of jumping in place for hours, in case whoever reads this harbors another misconception. Work-related stress isn’t physical activity; physical activity is working out in a gym, and I didn’t have the money or time for that. The longing for sexual satisfaction was alive within me, somewhere in my overwhelmed and saddened psyche and somewhere in my deteriorating organism. I could get an erection, of course, even though the survival instinct no longer existed. If you look into the apartment next door and can’t see your neighbor having dinner or watching television, it’s because there’s a dividing wall blocking your view, not because you’re blind. The same thing happened with my sexual drive. I told myself I was dead in life, but I couldn’t stop longing for even a moment when my mood would allow me to stop being a martyr in Verónica’s eyes and thus gain access to the climate conducive to sexual intercourse. A climate that became less and less conducive when I stopped bathing. The combination of depression, physical exhaustion, and lack of time ensured that, with luck, I managed to get under the shower once or twice a week. I had even become violently embarrassed by the mere thought of coming into contact with water.
        We hadn’t had sex for months, and it had been almost a year since Vero had last required my services as a “stunt cock” for her scenes. My sex life had been reduced, as I believe I’ve already mentioned, to locking myself in the bathroom while she was asleep and masturbating to porn I watched on the cracked screen of my cell phone, the same one I used all day working for Sistema San Roque I didn’t have the money to buy another one; the company wanted us to use a cell phone, but it wouldn’t provide us with one or pay our mobile internet bill, whose monthly cost, around the time I’m about to discuss, was equivalent to what I was earning for treating five poverty-stricken dying patients (five actions, in the terminology of this evil entity).
        And if you want another sad fact, let me tell you that more than once I resorted to Verónica’s videos to masturbate. I had the password to her OnlyFans account, and so I could access her videos for free. That’s why I assume—although she never admitted it—that it was deliberate on her part to give me the opportunity to stumble across a new heterosexual sex video, amidst the bulk of her lesbian and masturbatory output.
        This time, the cock was circumcised, and the skin on the shaft had a slightly darker hue than mine. It was shorter and thicker, too.
        I confronted her without any anger. The deal regarding porn had been that she wouldn’t share scenes with other men, but in my situation, I couldn’t blame her. I almost felt relieved. I loved her enough to always want her to be happy, with or without me, and only a necrophiliac can be happy with a corpse. She swore he was just a faggot she’d hired for the scene, and I tried to calm her down. I wasn’t interested in living with someone who would break a pact of that nature, but I couldn’t blame her either.
        I was ready to go live on the streets, truly live, without a home to return to every time the workday finally ended. In fact, more than once recently, I hadn’t returned home, sleeping in the hallways of shops that were already closed. I had the idea that by returning, I would contaminate the apartment with the same dark aura that System San Roque S.A. imbued me with.
        But Veronica decided she would be the one to leave. I couldn’t imagine how I wouldn’t end up living on the streets without her income supporting mine, but I let her go. She had plenty of time the next day to make her move. When I arrived that evening, I found myself single again. I barely ate dinner and started completing reports I owed the company, a job that I spent many an early morning on. I would never masturbate again.
        I believe the episode with the little girl from Corrientes took place about two months later, when I had already convinced myself that I could no longer support myself financially unless I resigned from Sistema San Roque Inc. and turned to male prostitution or something similar. All these lapses I mention, I clarify, are merely estimates. The frenetic, random, and completely disinterested in my physical endurance schedule that Sistema San Roque imposed on my daily life had completely altered my notion of the passage of time. A week was equivalent to a month, or vice versa; something that in my memory happened last year could have happened two or three years earlier. It was a bit like the theory of relativity in short circuit.
        The assignment for patient A-97GO6K came in while I was trying to get the people at the business office who had assigned me to the previous patient to deign to give me the full address of the home I was to go to. The apartment of the thirty-something man with bone cancer, dying without treatment thanks to the cutbacks in state-subsidized cancer treatments, was located in one of Villa Lugano’s 118 housing projects, each building 14 floors and four apartments per floor. The person in charge of assigning the home had forgotten to enter the apartment number into the computer system—just a small detail, one of those that the perpetually underqualified staff of Sistema San Roque could never take into account.
        I’d been waiting for a response for over twenty minutes when the case of patient A-97GO6K came in, and since it was, as was often the case, walking the fine line between the duty of a police officer and the Hippocratic oath, I decided to abandon the cancer patient and ran toward the border between Lugano and Mataderos, to the clandestine settlement where the dying child was supposedly located. That night I would use my report to expose the underachieving employee who had thwarted the operation at the housing project and thus perhaps I would avoid one of the work suspensions that the company so liked to impose on proxy doctors.
        The details of the memo received were as follows:
        Two-year-old girl, raped by her father and his friends. Her torso was wrapped in a jacket so she couldn’t defend herself with her arms or bite. Possible death by asphyxiation. Check if she’s still alive; if not, terminate the investigation.
        It was all quite dramatic and unpleasant, but it was still a source of anger (“anger is the energy”) and an excuse for yet another labor injustice by Sistema San Roque. If that little girl was already dead by the time I got there, the company would pay me less than half of my salary, classifying my work as “action not completed.”
        That’s what made me decide, under a gloomy, overcast sky, to walk the twenty blocks to the settlement instead of looking for some kind of motorized transportation. It had rained, and the mud was getting deep.
        I was advancing through what looked like a countryside, but I managed to find the dirt road that led me to a group of halfway decently built houses. It wasn’t hard to find the one the company had assigned: in what could be considered a front yard, without fence or wire fencing along any of its imprecise boundaries, there was a thin wooden board serving as a tombstone, with two black balloons, evidently inflated with helium, tied to two splintered portions of the headboard. On either side of the tomb itself—a rectangular, stone-lined grave about the size of a child’s coffin—there were two skulls, presumably made of clay or something similar, painted. They were not painted with the motifs of Mexican sugar skulls, but with something that appeared to be honey or a very thick varnish. A lighted candle had been placed on top of each of the skulls.
        I stood for a long time looking at the grave, almost as if offering condolences based on circumstances known only through information provided in a telegram. I was about to leave, ready to collect those measly pesos for an unfulfilled action, when a guy of no more than fifty years old but with the appearance of an old man, a man who surely had had his children at twenty and had done nothing but work in construction since he was fourteen, came out of the house through the front door.
        “They’re not here,” he said with a Corrientes accent. “My daughter’s house is…” and began giving me directions. It wasn’t too far, but there was a fair stretch to cover, skirting a shantytown adjacent to the settlement. Only then did I realize, feeling like an idiot, that the portion of land located in the quadrangle that the improvised nameless tombstone would shade when the sun returned did not seem to have been dug yet.
        I walked a long way along a long row of rusty sheds, on a thin road of flagstones, among the undergrowth left green and untouched by the wet winter of the Río de la Plata. Behind the last shed, the settlement’s dwellings resumed.
        The girl’s mother’s family home consisted of two rooms in a precarious but spacious amorphous house, kind of a prism made of hollow, unplastered cement bricks. Who knows how many other families shared that building with crooked walls. I introduced myself, and with a smile on her face, she calmly led me down a hallway smelling of ammonia. The walls were covered with newspapers—instead of wallpaper, I assumed. The room I entered was dimly lit, with the shutters of the only window closed.
        I had seen so much in those seven or eight years of working for Sistema San Roque, but I didn’t expect to find this. Still smiling, speaking tenderly, the young woman explained to me that they had given the child a potion that a local healer had prepared for her. And that the little girl was going to wake up “a little bit dizzy.” The mother had the same Corrientes accent as the grandfather.
        The child was lying on a table, looking faint, but I couldn’t see any signs of her breathing. She had dark skin, but even in the dim light she looked very pale. She was wearing a burgundy dress. The skirt barely reached her knees, and there were no signs of any obvious bleeding on her little legs; it was clear they had bathed her. But I had no doubt she was anemic.
        I made a move to take her wrist to check the pulse, but the stares of three men sitting against the back wall dissuaded me. It wasn’t hard to figure out which of the pairs of eyes that the cloudy daylight revealed to me through the cracks in the shutters were those of an incestuous pedophile. My initial impulse to perform CPR fell flat. I had never been a person afraid of confronting other men, even if they outnumbered me, and especially back then, when I didn’t care whether I was alive or dead. But I couldn’t help but imagine that exemplary father stabbing me to death when he saw me trying to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his incestuous little girlfriend.
        Completely frustrated and powerless, I asked the accomplice mother: “Do you know what the healer gave her?” Her voice exuded ignorance and well-carried innocence when she gave me her negative answer, revealing the admiration and trust she felt for the slum witch. “Do you want to wait here next door, and if the baby wakes up, I’ll call you?”
        “Next door” was a neighboring room, of similar dimensions, but without furniture. I pretended to be casual, walked to the back wall, and sat on my briefcase. It didn’t take me too many minutes to convince myself that it was time to call Daniela, a police officer I’d met in the area less than a week before. She’d given me her phone number after assisting me in the case of a pauper who’d shot himself after his wife had left him, the bullet ricocheting off his skull. Since I didn’t even have the courage to try to save that little girl’s life—if she was still alive—or escape from those criminals, I decided to accept the offer. I texted Daniela briefly detailing my situation and waited.
        She never answered, and I was about to run out the door and hope my briefcase wouldn’t be enough of a nuisance to get to the outside world when I saw her coming down that newspaper-lined hallway. She wasn’t running, but she looked determined. She was wearing a peaked cap and the bulletproof vest police wear in those neighborhoods, and she nodded for me to go behind her and leave the house. Standing in the doorway of the other room, I saw her pull the slide of the Ithaca 37 for the first time and decided to obey.
        Just as I was almost tiptoeing, with the door of the room where the child lay to my left, Daniela pulled the trigger for the first time, opening a hole in the stomach of one of the rapist father’s two friends. With astonishing speed, she repeated the action with the second, who was also flanking the father, and I stopped looking and continued on my way as the degenerate leader’s face exploded, leaving a red hole in his head.
        Outside, a police motorcycle was waiting for me, and I climbed on the back. We were quickly speeding away from the settlement, while I wondered how I was going to disguise this incident in my report that evening.
        But there was no report that night. In the elevator assigned to take me to the floor of the apartment whose rent I had no longer been able to pay that month something happened that I, incapable of committing suicide despite having longed for accidental death for years, had always feared would happen. Thanks to my stupid habit of going up with my left shoulder and head resting against the button panel, at the height of physical and mental exhaustion, seeking an unattainable nap of seconds—I had even tried to sleep while walking, such was the fatigue I was living with—one of the ends of my knitted wool scarf became trapped by the inner scissor door.
        When the elevator started, part of the scarf fragment protruding from the closed door caught on the edge of one of the crumbling metal folding corners of the elevator’s outer scissor door on the ground floor. Of course, the use of double scissor doors had been banned for several decades, but no municipal inspector seemed to have noticed the violation inside that building.
        Because of the way I wore the scarf, the way I wrapped it around my neck, when the loose end was fully threaded onto the metal edge the wool quickly tightened, just taut enough to prevent any kind of clever maneuver on my part—if, I still wonder, that was even possible. What would Houdini have done in my place?
        Anyway, a couple of floors later, with that piece of scarf stretched taut and my head on the elevator floor, against the junction between the floor and the metal bars of the scissor gate, my neck cleanly snapped. Crack.
        And then, the irony of it all. The joke. The mockery. The ignominy of fate, of the universe. The erection of the hanged men occurred, and was experienced by me as a self-violation, as a humiliating event. Belated. Futile. Anachronistic. Uchronic, if you will.
        That was partly why my soul didn’t end up in the Suicide Forest, back in the Seventh Circle. I died like an idiot, because the scarf eventually frayed, the elevator moved on, and I was found dead with my groin full of semen. If I’d been given one last chance to speak, I would have told the neighbor who found my body, an old man on the eighth floor who called the elevator a few minutes later: “This is nothing. You should have seen me when I was alive.”
        I clearly remember the reason for my distraction as I closed the second elevator door that night. I remember wondering at that moment—I still don’t understand why—whether the little girl from Corrientes had been baptized. It never ceases to seem interesting to me. Strange, actually. I didn’t know, nor did I have to know, at the time, that Limbo is filled with legions of pagan infants who died without being baptized.
        Sometimes I try, in vain, to remember if I, running out of the house, heard one or two Ithaca shots before Daniela left. I completely refused to get rid of the doubt, afraid to say too much while she rode the motorcycle in complete silence, during the journey that would take me to my final moments of life. All of which often forces me to wonder if I’ll ever see that poor little girl scamper past among the trees of this forest of souls.
        Other times, I wish I knew if the episode with that child was what turned me into the virtuous pagan who allowed me to send my soul towards this circle and stop it from descending further into hell. I can’t imagine another event capable of granting me this kind of redemption, another worthy event within the unforgivable mediocrity that constituted my life.