The internal fire extinguisher will work and the plane will land with no difficulty, but no one will have realized that only you, an old man of seventy-one, maintained his composure. You will feel proud of yourself, without showing it. You will think that you have done so many cowardly things that it's easy for you to be brave. You will smile and say to yourself no, no, it isn't a paradox: it's the truth and perhaps even a general truth. You will have made the trip to Sonora by car-a 1959 Volvo, license plate DF 712-because some government officials were misbehaving badly and you would have to go all that way just to make sure those people remain loyal, the people you bought-bought, that's right, you will not fool yourself with words from your own annual speeches: I'll convince them, I'll persuade them. No, you'll buy them-and then they'll impose tariffs (another ugly word) on the truckers who carry fish on the Sonora-Sinaloa-Mexico City route. You will give the inspectors ten percent, and because of those middlemen, the fish will be expensive when they reach the city, and your personal profit will be twenty times larger than the original value of the fish. You will try to remember all this, and you will carry out your desire even if all this seems a fit subject for an editorial in your newspaper and you think that, after all, you're wasting your time remembering it. But you will insist, you will go through with it. You will insist. You would like to remember other things, but above all you would like to forget the condition you're in. You will excuse yourself: You're not at home. You will be. They will carry you in a faint to your house, you will collapse in your office; the doctor will come and say that it will take a couple of hours to make the diagnosis.