He took two steps and crossed, with diagonal steps, the road to the Continuadores Square. Two peddlers showed him silver watches; they made choruses of decreasing prices, simulated putting the watch on his wrist, but Cardoso had no time to look at the curved numbers under hurried, timeless hands. The journalist stepped forward. He smelled damp sleep from the grave of death and had screaming tracks on his face. The same screams that had exploded from his mouth when he died. His white beard swung in the locks of his mustache neatly arranged by time.

He entered a café where in the doorway Cistac's body, spilled to the floor, was planting blood clots on the ground. He took a step back. He watched Cistac's body vibrating the last movements of life. He wept for Cistac's death because he too had died and he knew that death was a hard alphabet to read. There was nothing Cardoso could do at that moment. On his side passed a herd of reddened siren cars, their hips escorted by motorcycles and soon drew a line between Cistac's body and the cars dissolving in the light of speed.

He made a fan out of the folded newspaper, "Metical," that he carried on his armpit hanger and stifled the heat that dripped down his sweaty face. He had a cup of coffee. He checked the time on the watch he didn't have on his wrist. A humpbacked screen, with two metal antenna branches, stuck in a crate in the corner of the coffee shop, brought Cardoso images of his country. It was a stuck screen, talking about a free country. The obese lettering captioning of the images thinned out and came out through the bars into Cardoso's eyes.

Suddenly Cardoso remembered that it was November 22. He had the second round of death. He had to die again. He tidied himself up in the café, left the bill on a paper towel, drank the last images of the arrested screen, read the necrology of the newspaper about his death, handcuffed the words with the bullet buttons and returned to death.