Hause des Blicks, February 3, 2009.

Homero was exhausted from grief. The loss of his lifelong companion, with whom he had shared every moment from conception to the final breath of her existence, had left a profound sense of emptiness. During the night, he had one of those dreams that are never forgotten, partly due to their content and partly because they occurred the day before his birthday.

Homero had gone to bed early, which was unusual for him as he usually kept the hours of a night owl. He fell into a deep slumber quickly. He had a series of dreams, the content of which was undoubtedly his subconscious's way of processing the experiences of the days leading up to it: the ordeal of taking his mother from one hospital to another in search of timely care, the funeral, the cremation, the incomparable emotional exhaustion.

Although the dream imagery held no particular significance to be stored in the memory's compartments, near dawn, while Homero slept, he vividly sensed that someone was wandering in the hallway outside his room.

Perplexed, he initially doubted if it was an illusion, like others he had experienced in the past. He recalled, for instance, in 1984, dreaming that the country was invaded by the U.S. military, with scenes of action that included the explosion of the Pemex storage and distribution plant located in San Juanico, Ixhuatepec. Despite the considerable distance, the explosions had shaken the windows of the house. Or the time, around the same period, when his mind led him to believe that burglars had entered the house. He got up to investigate, making noise to scare off the intruders. Instead, the clumsy dupe only frightened his sister Sandra and her children, who were living in the house at the time while her divorce from her husband, the notorious lawyer Bernardo Alonso Barraza, was being finalized.

This time, in the dream, he silently got up to see who it was. He saw his mother from behind, wearing her usual puffy pink robe, moving lightly, almost floating, from her room, the master bedroom, downstairs toward the living room. He discreetly followed. He stopped to watch her over the railing from one of the high steps. She, in turn, stood in front of one of the two wingback chairs there, the one where she used to sit in life while sipping tequila, listening to music, and waiting for dinner to finish cooking, and for Homero to return from one of his jobs. The writer noticed something unusual. She held a hammer in her right hand. Suddenly, she turned to look in Homero's direction, knowing she had been discovered. Homero was horrified to see, like never before and as never would happen again, his mother's cadaveric face. Without taking her gaze off him, if cadavers have gazes, she raised the arm holding the hammer and then threw it toward the wall behind the chair, which was now adjacent to the Santería House, and it passed through it as if it were immaterial. After that, everything went dark. That's how the dream ended, and Homero continued sleeping until, a few hours later, very early in the morning, the tinkling of a strange bell in some part of the mansion awakened him.

Homero's heart raced. He waited for a moment to calm down. Skeptically, he searched the entire house. He went down to the living room and inspected one by one the bells that made up his mother's collection, until he located the one whose tinkling had caught his attention: her favorite, a delicate glass bell adorned with fine engravings.

Homero smiled, deeply moved to tears. He was sure that, just as described in "It's a Wonderful Life," one of Tere's favorite movies starring James Stewart, which TV networks often broadcast on Christmas, she had received her angel wings. The only mystery left was the meaning behind her dreadful dream. What had his mother wanted to convey in such a cryptic way? But what?

That day, Homero had a craving to go to the Chinese restaurant where he used to dine with his mother. As always, he served himself from the buffet and cracked open a fortune cookie. The slip of paper hidden inside read: "You will never know hunger."

In the evening, Homero found some voicemails on the answering machine. When he played them, all he heard was noise, except for the third message. He retrieved it to edit on the computer and, when cleaning the audio of the third message, he was stunned. Amidst sounds resembling what science fiction has imagined for alien spaceships, several female voices could be heard. The first voice, prominent, simply said: "Don't cry anymore," while the others in the background added: "We're taking care of her."

Immediately, Homero confirmed his suspicion that he was dealing with an electronic voice phenomenon (EVP). It was the second time, as the first time had occurred in the third week of April 2006 when his mother had fallen down the stairs of the house, fracturing her left wrist in an exposed manner and almost bleeding to death. Back then, he received two strange phone calls on his cell. The first was a playback of a news segment from that day, with Jacobo Zabludovsky's voice reporting on a teachers' demonstration causing traffic disruptions. The second call immediately featured a distorted female voice inquiring anxiously, "Let me know."

The first time, Homero thought it might be his aunt Pipi, who had recently passed away in the second week of April 2006, requesting updates on Tere's health, her sister. With this assumption in mind, Homero arrived home that night and, speaking to the air and his aunt's portrait, explained the situation and the medical report. He was sure she, as a radiology technician, the wife of, and assistant to, Uncle Lamberto, a thirty-third-degree Mason and pulmonologist, would understand the details.

Regarding this new EVP in his hands, he hypothesized that the prominent voice was that of his mother, and the voices in the background were her close friends who had passed away before her: Aunt Raquel, Toño's paternal cousin; Mrs. Marta Cuenca, widow of López; Carmelita Ortiz, Homero's baptism godmother, and of course, Aunt Pipi. Perhaps among them was also Mrs. Yolanda Estrada, to whom Tere owed many favors.

Several years passed. On January 25, 2014, his former brother-in-law Fausto also passed away, as they say, to a better life, at the age of sixty-seven. He had lived in Homero's house, renting a room to him for three months. It was precisely the main bedroom that had belonged to the writer's parents, and he had mustered the courage to support the man against whom his father, who had passed away months earlier, had harbored animosity. A heavy smoker, the very thin man died from the respiratory disorder known as COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).

"Fausto! Have you seen yourself in the mirror?" Homero had commented to his former brother-in-law on the penultimate day he saw him alive. It was early in the morning, and Fausto was standing at the entrance of the main bedroom, ready to go down to the kitchen for breakfast. He looked swollen and blue, weak. Homero convinced him to call the doctor and schedule an appointment. The next morning, Jolianna, Fausto's eldest daughter, had gone to pick him up to take him to the doctor and then returned with her father connected to an oxygen tank. She would collect some belongings and urgently admit him to the hospital. That would be the last image of the man that stayed in Homero's mind.

After the event, and coinciding with Tere's birthday, Homero's nieces, Fausto and Patricia's children, came to the house to collect several of their father's few possessions. He had died intestate. They also took the bed that had once belonged to Tere and in which Homero had been sleeping. This bed held special significance for Patricia, and it was logical for her to take it as a legacy. In exchange, Homero began sleeping in Fausto's former bed. Little did he imagine what he would experience the very next day when a loud noise and a frightening jolt of the bed abruptly woke him.

In an attempt to understand what had happened, Homero searched the house for something that might have caused the noise. Having ruled out all logical possibilities without success, he turned to magical thinking. He supposed that something or someone invisible had kicked the bed. He conducted an experiment and was chilled by the result when he obtained the exact sound and noticed how the bed moved. Then, offering an absurd explanation, he supposed that either a spectral Fausto had kicked the bed in protest for taking his belongings, or his father had done so in protest of allowing his disagreeable son-in-law to live his last days in what had been his room, even though he hadn't lived in the house for the previous twenty-two years. To make the latter more plausible, Homero would imagine a scene from the afterlife.

* * *

Somewhere in the realms of time and space, perhaps in another dimension.

Fausto had ceased to breathe. After a few moments, his soul had become aware of its infiniteness. Suddenly finding himself in the midst of a luminous halo, Fausto had gently traversed a kind of tunnel, without feeling his steps or any weight. At the end of the tunnel, vague figures had greeted him and drew him in. As he approached them, he recognized his father and his elder brother, both named Carlos; his mother, Doña Neti, and was surprised to see among the group, Doña Tere, Homero's mother. He had always held a special fondness and gratitude towards her, which was emphasized by Homero's gesture of allowing him to live his last days in her room. He also managed to see further back, Homero's father, Toño, a typical Leo, crouched and wearing a disapproving scowl.

"Welcome, Fausto!" Tere warmly greeted the recently departed.

"Thank you, Doña Tere. You were always so kind and accommodating. I am very grateful for how you treated me in the other life, even in the face of your husband's opposition," Fausto would have added, looking rather indiscreetly at Toño. "And I'm even more grateful because you instilled in your son, Homero, a sense of solidarity. I will be eternally grateful to him as well for providing me with the shelter of his home in what neither he nor I, nor anyone, thought would be my last months. I had my flaws, undoubtedly terrible ones, but you valued me for my virtues. The warmth of your room, Doña Tere, meant a lot to me because it allowed me to feel like a part of a noble family like yours."

"What!" Toño exclaimed from behind. He approached Fausto threateningly, looking at him with contempt. "This is the limit! You spent your last days in what was my room, my space, my territory, with my son's consent! Intolerable! I can't forgive that, Tere. If I used to playfully close the closet doors on Homero, feeding his belief in ghosts, now he'll see what someone, not just cheeky but angry, can do," he asserted, vanishing to reappear by Homero's bedside in the dead of night. Gathering his energy, he kicked the piece of furniture, jolting the writer awake, and then whispered a lament that would sting like a thorn and rub an old wound in Homero's soul: "You are not my son!"