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

I don't know if I spoke about what had happened in my delirium. But I do know that after having been released many weeks later, the sensation of having truly lived that strange experience remained, in spite of the knowledge that there are diseases that produce odd hallucinations. To convince myself, I went to visit the ancient Convent of San Jeronimo, now an official dependence and museum. Some things seemed changed; the large patio does not have the garden nor the fountains anymore, and the shape of the parlor had changed but the floor was the same, and I saw traces of the window that had overlooked the garden.

This made me consult and read old archives, everything in reference to dislocations of time, mysterious disappearances. And the events of the past began to hold, for me, a strange allure. I knew that, across time, mysterious disappearances had happened, and that the victims had never been seen again. According to the unique hypotheses of Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne, they were marooned in time, trapped in the past. From the theory of the Fourth Dimension and its enigmatic doors, sometimes gateways are opened to other times and other dimensions.

On reading works from the Colony and the life of Sor Juana I knew that all we had seen had existed. All had been real in their time. However, upon reading a biography, there was one fact that bothered me even more: "Sor Juana died on April 17, 1695, of a virus that afflicted only the convent of the San Jeronimo nuns; in the said year there was no plague in all of Mexico City. It is believed, as the investigator Efrain Castro affirms, that the water of the nearby canal was contaminated."

Sor Juana died on April 17th, and we had been there 14 days earlier! New questions surged into my mind: Was Silva contaminated by the water that he drank in the convent? Or was it the inverse: Did he contaminate the convent with the glass he left? The bricklayer that fell ill in the convent in this era, did he contract the microbe of that particular epidemic, or of subsequent ones? And finally, upon drinking from that glass, had Silva inadvertently caused the death of Sor Juana? Or had everything simply been coincidental?

All of these questions clouded my mind and nothing reasonable offered me the certainty that my experience had been real. Also, I had read about telepathy, retrocognition, and other paranormal phenomena that permit the mind to recall things that only can be known through the experience of the senses.

These questions and these doubts were making me fear for my sanity and, for that reason, I shut my mouth and refused to reveal to anyone what had happened. But, several months later, on finishing my residency, I decided to return to my city of origin, and while I was packing my things in the apartment, some letters slipped behind a heavy bookcase. I had to move it to recover them, and as I was doing it, something glittered on the floor. I picked it up, and on inspecting it, all of my doubts vanished. I knew the truth: I had in my hands a genuine coin from the seventeenth century! A coin that remained from the exchange of food for the ring, and that must have fallen from Silva's coat when I tossed it on a chair that fatal night.