The lost day - short story - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

My last vision of Sor Juana was that of a comprehending smile illuminated by a ray of light, which the setting sun had reflected from the glass of water my companion had left.

We departed with a strange urgency.

"Now what happens?" I asked.

"Have you not understood?" Silva asked me. "We must be in the same place, on the corner of the Alameda, at the same time. That's the secret disguised ladder.... If not, we would have to wait, who knows how long. And we can't--we can't--wait...."

Silva was sweating copiously, and began to speak as if hallucinating....

"Let's go, I tell you! Let's go! We have less than an hour left and we have to be there, without fail...."

From what followed I only remember brief bits, like a nightmare. That frantic crossing through streets already in shadow, the unspoken anxiety that someone or something was impeding us from arriving at our destiny. We almost didn't notice how the city was populating itself with shadows, nor how the windows displayed oscillating silhouettes projected by candles. We continued until we arrived at the Alameda. There Silva stopped, panting.

"I can't go on," he claimed.

"Lean on me," I encouraged him, and passed his arm over my shoulders. His skin was abnormally hot and damp, and I understood that something evil was happening to him. This knowledge increased my effort, and, without seeing anything that surrounded us, with my mind and sight fixed on the corner that we had so carelessly crossed the night before and that now appeared infinitely far away, I looked at my watch; it was already almost eight. And at that hour, give or take a little, everything had happened.

With a last push we arrived, Silva with progressively less energy; we turned the corner gasping for breath....

"You have to wait awhile, only awhile," whispered my friend.

The darkness and the strange buzz invaded us anew; and little by little, like an image that focuses itself, we could see the lights from the lampposts, from the cars that crossed the roadway, and, urgently, we continued our walk without detaining ourselves by looking back.

"Finally! Home...."

Laboriously we ascended the stairs of the apartment. Silva seemed to have exhausted all his energy and lay in a strange stupor. I deposited him on the couch, throwing aside the white lab coats that had hindered us, and examined him conscientiously. He looked bad, very bad.

"Get up," I told him. "We're going to the hospital, they'll take care of you there."

Again we returned to the Alameda, but this time nothing happened and, almost running, we entered the hospital.

"Doctors!" said a nurse. "What happened to you?" They had been searching for us all day. It was very urgent. "Oh, Dr. Silva! Let's go ... let's go...."

What follows is, so far, a bundle of blurry and disjointed memories. The news that the bricklayer we had attended had died of plague ... The apprehension we felt about the possibility of this becoming widespread news ... The confirmation that Dr. Silva himself had contracted the fatal illness. His death a day later.... My week-long sickness that was believed to be the same affliction.... The long quarantine.... The disinfecting and burning of all of the objects that could have been contaminated.... The obligatory silence about such news ... All of this caused the strange event of our arrival at the hospital on April 4th to be forgotten, even though we had been fruitlessly sought by doctors for examination on suspicion of contamination on April 3rd, but were nowhere to be found. It was supposed that the illness caused us to seek a strange refuge, about which we didn't remember anything....