‘My theory,’ he began, ‘is the following. The mystery novel represents in the twentieth century what the romance of chivalry represented in the time of Cervantes. I will go even further: I think that something similar to Don Quixote could be done with a mystery: a satire of a detective novel – just as the Quixote was a satire of the chivalric romance. Imagine an individual who has spent his life reading mystery novels and has reached such a point in his madness that he believes the world functions the way it does in a novel by Nicholas Blake or Ellery Queen. Then imagine that this poor fellow sets off finally to solve crimes, and to act in real life the way a detective in a mystery novel does. I think such a book could be entertaining, tragic, symbolic, satirical … beautiful.’

‘Then why don’t you do it,’ Mimí asked mockingly.

‘For two reasons: I am not Cervantes … and I am very lazy.’

‘I think the first reason is sufficient’ was Mimí’s comment.

Then, worse luck, she turned to me:

‘This man,’ she said, jabbing her ridiculous cigarette holder in Hunter’s direction, ‘rails against mystery novels because he is not capable of writing one – even though they are the most boring novels on earth.’

‘Give me a cigarette,’ Hunter said to his cousin, and only then replied:

‘When will you learn not to exaggerate? In the first place, I did not “rail” against mystery novels. I simply said that it should be possible to write a kind of contemporary Don Quixote. In the second place, you are mistaken if you think I am totally without talent in that regard. I once had a brilliant idea for a mystery.’

‘Sans blague,’ Mimí limited herself to saying.

‘Oh, but I did, I tell you. Now: a man has a mother, a wife, and a little boy. One night the mother is mysteriously murdered. The police investigations lead nowhere. A while later the wife is murdered: same story. Finally, the little boy is murdered. The man is out of his mind with grief, because he loves them all, especially the boy. Desperate, he decides to investigate the crimes himself. Using the usual inductive, deductive, analytical, synthetical, and on and on, methods of those geniuses of the detective novel, he arrives at the conclusion that the murderer must kill a fourth time, on a certain day, at a certain hour, and in a certain place. His conclusion is that the murderer must now murder him. On the appointed day and hour, the man goes to the place where the fourth murder is to be committed, and awaits the murderer. But the murderer doesn’t come. The man reviews his deductions: he might have miscalculated the place; no, the place is correct. Perhaps he miscalculated the hour; no, the hour is correct. The conclusion is intolerable: the murderer is already there. In other words: he is the murderer, he had committed the crimes in some psychic state. The detective and the murderer are the same person.’

‘Too original for my taste,’ commented Mimí. ‘And how does it end? Didn’t you say there had to be a fourth murder?’

‘But that is obvious,’ Hunter drawled. ‘The man commits suicide. The doubt remains whether he killed himself out of remorse, or whether the murderer “I” kills the detective “I,” as in an ordinary crime. Do you like it?’

‘It’s amusing enough. But it’s one thing to tell it like that, and another to write the novel.’

‘That’s true,’ Hunter admitted tranquilly. (The Tunnel)

The waiting was interminable. I do not know how much time passed on the clock, that nameless and universal time of clocks that is alien to our emotions, to our destinies, to the inception and ruin of love, to a death vigil. But by my own time it was a vast and complex temporal space filled with figures and turnings back, at times a dark and tumultuous river and at times a strange calm like a motionless, eternal sea where María and I stood facing each other with ecstatic happiness; then again it was a river pulling us back as if in a dream to our childhoods, and I saw her galloping her horse wildly, her hair streaming in the wind, her eyes hallucinated, and I saw myself in my small town in the south, in my sickroom, with my face pressed to the windowglass, watching the snow, my eyes, too, hallucinated. And it was as if the two of us had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side, like souls in like times, finally to meet at the end of those passageways before a scene I had painted as a kind of key meant for her alone, as a kind of secret sign that I was there ahead of her and that the passageways finally had joined and the hour for our meeting had come.

The hour for our meeting had come! As if the passages had ever joined; as if we had ever really communicated. What a stupid illusion that had been! No, the passageways were still parallel, as they always had been, only now the wall separating them was like a glass wall, and I could see María, a silent and untouchable figure … No, even that wall was not always glass; at times it again became black stone, and then I did not know what was happening on the other side, what had become of her in those unfathomable intervals; what strange events might be taking place. I was even convinced that during those moments her face changed, that her lips curled with scorn and she was perhaps laughing with some other man, and that the whole story of the passageways was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life. And in one of those transparent sections of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naïvely believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world, the unbounded world of those who did not live in tunnels; and perhaps out of curiosity she had approached one of my strange windows, and had glimpsed the spectacle of my unredeemable solitude, or had been intrigued by the mute message, the key, of my painting. And then, while I kept moving through my passageway, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of people who live outside, that curious and absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety, and frivolity. And sometimes it happened that when I passed by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and anxious (why waiting for me? why silent and anxious?); but at other times she did not come in time, or she forgot that poor caged being, and then I, my face pressed against the wall of glass, watched her in the distance laughing or dancing without a care in the world or, which was worse, I did not see her at all, and imagined her in obscene places I could not reach. At those times I felt that my destiny was infinitely more lonely than I had ever imagined. (The Tunnel)