Page 8 - Microsoft Word - Belicena respaldo

counsel to maintain in the reserved ambits of the Clinical History and the personal
expedient. But, while this was happening, the sudden death of Belicena Villca came to derange
this rational perspective and took me to think that History registers the pass of venerable
figures by the cells of famous madhouses. I remembered Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, Antonin
Artaud, the chess player Morphy, the mathematician Cantor, and many others. I reasoned that
those famous personages suffered from an acute schizophrenia, as my patient, which means
that the consciousness remains fragmented but not dissolved, and it is possible, eventually,
that some temporal lucidity states can occur where the behavior is more or less normal. I said
to myself that if Cantor elaborated the brilliant theory of the transfinite numbers in the mental
hospital and if Nietzsche during his ten years of internee could quote Homer, Empedocles, and
almost any classic, by rote, and in ancient Greek, was possible, in an infinite fewer way that the
narration of Belicena Villca was real in part. Of course, this apparently inconsistent syllogism
will surprise the reader; but all this I thought very quickly, very quickly: because Belicena
Villca was murdered.

Chapter II

That unpleasant incident perturbed the impeccable march of the Hospital submerging
us in an indescribable state of discomfort and anguish. Specially affected was our Director, the
eminent Dr. Cortez, who feared that the scandal could reach to smirch the name of the
illustrious local excellence that the Hospital had, fact that, according to his clear logic, would
influence in the checks that the powerful family of the deceased gave monthly. I will not fatigue
the reader with details because this case was very commented by the news and if it is desired
can consult the newspaper «El Heraldo» from Salta, in the editions of the week from the 7 to the
15 days of January 1980, where will find all the information. I will only remember here the
essential, due to the development of this veridical case, requires to consider the strange
circumstances in which the crime occurred and the mystery that surrounded it; ... and that still
persist, because the Police didn't achieve to clarify it and dignified functionaries manifest
doubts about if that will be possible one day. Because two elements such absurd as irrational
intervene in a definitive way in the fatal denouement, impeding any possibility to realize
coherent conjectures; the first is a verified unobjectionable fact: the crime was committed in a
cell for psychotic patients hermetically closed by a heavy steel door, between the 0:00 hrs. and
2:00 hrs. of January 6, without anyone, absolutely anyone would have entered during that
lapse. This was proved, happily, due to a fortuitous incident.

In the last night before January 5, i.e., day of celebration of the Three Wise men, part of

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