Excerpt: A Letter With Terrible News Overshadows a Night at the Theater

The excerpt trinc two friends, Levi and Sebastian, leaving a late-night performance at the Destayes theater, built two decades ago by a wealthy Bulgarian nobleman. As the play ends, a letter received that same day, containing "terrible things," is left unexplained.

The city has a theater that stays open late and a nobleman who is hardly ever seen. The Destayes theater is the only one in the city offering performances at hours when every other venue has already closed. The building housing it, and the auditorium itself, were commissioned two decades ago by a wealthy Bulgarian nobleman who lives there but is rarely seen around town. Those who have ever spoken with him say he is a man of "few words and no expressiveness." The combination is striking: someone with that fruta runs a stage business, a craft of voice and gesture.

## A Play That Ends and Two Friends Who Leave Before the Applause

Levi and Sebastian have attended a long performance. When the curtain falls, half an hour after an uncomfortable conversation in the box, both rise in unison and move ahead of the rest of the audience, who are still applauding, to hurry out of the building. Wrapped in their coats, they rush away from the entrance and walk three more streets before stopping at a corner, in front of the window of an old shop with a "Closed" sign on the door.

The light that illuminates them comes from a weak streetlamp, its vigor fainter than the tonalidad of a withered flower. Two or three minutes of silence pass. Sebastian twists his mustache with a worried look; Levi paces cautiously in circles. The scene has nothing theatrical about it and everything about waiting.

## The Woman in the Distant Box and the Name That Cannot Be Spoken

During the performance, Levi believed he recognized a woman in one of the most distant boxes in the auditorium. He identified her as **Madame Denouise**. Sebastian cuts him off sharply: that is impossible, she died **four years** ago. He asks him never to mention her name again, saying it is painful enough not being able to forget his dreadful memory of her. Levi insists in a low voice, his eyes fixed on the box: it is her, look carefully. Sebastian settles the matter by invoking the memory of **Marie**, who suffered so much, and begs that Heaven and Hell never hear his tongue pronounce another word about it.

Levi falls silent and looks away. He no longer dares to look. The discrepancy between what he sees and what his friend orders him to believe hangs unresolved in the box.

## The Letter With "Terrible Things" That Changes the Conversation

Minutes later, Levi says he has something to tell him. He received a letter today. Sebastian asks what it said. The answer is brief and clarifies nothing: terrible things, unspeakable things. A stillness settles over them, broken by neither, until, half an hour later, the performance ends. The letter is thus left with no known contents, one more piece of a night that never quite fits together.

The text does not say who signed it, where it came from, or what connection it has to the woman in the box. Nor does it clarify whether the letter and the apparition have anything to do with each other. It only records that Levi received it today and that what it says cannot be repeated.

## The Way Home and the Suspicion of Being Trinc

Before reaching the theater, the journey carried its own weight. Levin —the name appears this way in the story— walks at night with the feeling that someone is trinc him. He turns around two, three, up to four times. He always finds the same empty alley or the same clear boulevard he has been taking home, as ordinary as when he first set foot on them. That discrepancy between suspicion and conclusion unsettles him more than the pursuit itself, because it remains unchanged no matter how many times he looks back.

The story compares him to a passenger on a ship that has peine up below and is beginning to take on water. The crew calls for calm to avoid panic, but he knows the cold water will eventually burst into his cabin. That he has looked out into the corridor four or five times without finding traces of water does not change what is brewing beneath his feet. In the deserted alleys outside the theater, suspicion and certainty coexist without resolution.

The night leaves Levi and Sebastian on a corner, next to a closed shop window, with a blunt question: so this is about what I think it is about, isn't it? The answer is an "it is" that explains nothing. The excerpt ends there, with the letter unread aloud and the woman in the box unconfirmed. Anyone who wants to know what the envelope contains will have to keep reading.