If Ramón Valenzuela had remembered what that old woman told him twenty-two years ago, his body would now be anywhere else, except on that dissection table. The show was really unbearable.

Dr. Hortensio López approached the body and took the sheet to cover it but stopped; with his hand in the air as if he were supporting the neck of a ghost, he looked at the holes in the flesh of the cheeks and re-enacted that terrible night when Valenzuela, a store clerk, said goodbye to life.

The doctor had read the diary entry so many times that he could replay the events in his head as if he were seeing them. Marta Discaldo had confessed to the crime, now she was in the Los Hornos prison, waiting for two things: on the one hand, the trial; on the other, the son who would be born at the end of November. Because at the time she killed her husband, she was expecting her first child. The doctor closed his eyes and began to recall the confession.

*

- Do not be silly! It won't be heard yet!

The man, with his ear resting on her wife's belly, told her that she was wrong, that he could hear it. She was looking at her curls, caressing them while he listened to her for the heartbeat of her baby. Marta took one of the rollers and stretched it until it was taut, like a violin string, and then released it.

- Will you buy me a chocolate ice cream? She told him, still playing with her husband's hair.

He continued a few more minutes in the fruitless search for her. He stood up, put his hands on her waist and said “a room?”. "No, tie up, bring a kilo, that's it for the night" she replied. "A kilo? But if I don't drink ice cream” said Ramón. To which she replied, "You should."

She poured herself a mate, already cold, and before leaving the kitchen she told him that if she tried a single spoonful of ice cream she would get diarrhea. Before closing the front door, he heard Marta yell at him: "That's because you're a shit." The man smiled and walked away, with his hands in his pockets, to the ice cream parlor.

That night they made love. Like the night before. And like every night until the night of the crime. Marta's sexual avidity had always been high, but since her test had given her a positive result, she had become a true panther. That's what Ramón told him: “stop, old man, I can't give any more, you're a panther”; she laughed covering her mouth, sitting tiny and naked in the middle of the bed, showing her teeth, roaring, advancing on all fours, moving her shoulders – like a true feline – towards him. She got close to her ear. Ramón felt the hot air of her breath. She shivered but she liked that game. "How do you know panthers are horny?" he asked her in a whisper.

In her second control, the doctor made her wait outside her with the alibi of talking to the "nervous gentleman." When the professional closed the door, Ramón began to apologize for her anxiety. The doctor approached him and told him “we all get like this with our first child, don't worry, it's normal… what's not normal is his wife's being overweight. It can bring complications. Try, for the good of both, her and the baby, to eat more vegetables and not so much chocolate, ice cream, creams... do you understand?

One afternoon Ramón drove to the Distributor's Carrefour, while she was singing a letter by Fabiana Cantilo at the top of her voice. When she finished the song, the announcer announced her presence on the program of the famous Venezuelan tarot reader Aranza Chivas. She turned up the volume a little more. He glanced at her and smiled. Marta was fond of those things. He does not. He had known her that way. At a newsstand on Calle 7, a few years ago. The time and day coincided in which each one went to look for his own. He, the diary. She "some little thing about meditation, tarot, spirituality... whatever you have, no problem". One day they started talking. And now they were expecting their first child. Her first and last child.

- For! What do you do!? He told her as she gobbled down a whole chocolate donut, sprinkled with sugar and pink sprinkles, in the bakery section of the hypermarket.

- Like. What am I going to do?

- But they're going to shit us, we have to pay first.

- Pay what? She said with a triumphant smile, sugar filling the corners of her mouth. It's gone... if there's no body, scary kid, there's no crime.

He was going to tell her a whole tangle of words about this and that, but she was already walking towards the meat section, carrying in front of her a little monkey full of sweet things. She took her hands to her waist, a gesture that characterized him above any other, she sighed and, reaching her, put her arm around her waist.

At night, after making love, she told him: "Thirteen days to go." He stopped brushing his teeth and leaning out the door of her room, his mouth full of foam, he looked at her questioningly. Putting on his panties, he sat on the bed, propped an L-shaped pillow between the mattress and the wall, and sank down. “For the moon to come closer to the earth” she said as she put a potato chip in her mouth. Ramón rinsed his tongue under the stream of water, spat and left the bathroom.

He was wearing blue underpants with yellow polka dots. She looked at him and said: "there weren't more ridiculous, right?". “Again with those potatoes? Three days ago you have them crouched under the bed, what is a package of twenty kilos? he told her crouching down and looking under her.

What he saw, for some reason, chilled the skin on his back. Open and closed packages of cookies. Three plates with remains of something difficult to identify. Crumbs, candies, sugar packets, empty mayonnaise packets. Small bones, like chicken.

And there was something else. At first his mind denied it. His heart pumping a thousand begged her to leave him. Stop and forget about this whole thing. But the rational part of his brain told her clearly and with alarm: Reach out and get it. Marta began to purr and toss out a series of profanity words to her while she took off her panties again. He clenched his fist under the bed, then pulled her arm out. Marta looked at him amused. "Aren't you coming?" she told him as she went around in a circle, crawling. Ramón opened his hand and his flesh prickled. It was the yellow collar with the blue bell of Rusa, the neighbor's cat.

- Now there are three days left for the moon to approach the earth.

They were sitting in Plaza Belgrano, looking at nothing. He looked at nothing. She did not lose sight of a series of pigeons that pecked here and there in the grass. She felt like her stomach was growling. Suddenly there was one whiter, bigger, fatter than the rest of her and she felt her mouth watering.

- Eighty thousand times the moon approached the Earth, I don't know what's so special about it now.
He said nonchalantly.

She hugged him from behind and whispered in his ear: "The Venezuelan said it was the first time in history that she was going to be so close."
"You already have a belly... you're beautiful." “Yes, besides having a tummy I'm hungry. I have a craving for roast.” "It's eight in the morning". "Please…". Ramón defrosted a piece of meat and put it in the oven.

- It's crazy, Marta, crazy. By God, by God.

- Just a little bit. A very small one. Go ahead. Go ahead. It's a whim.

- You are crazy? Marta, put down that knife.

- A bit, come on, you're not going to die for a bit.

- Marta, for God's sake, put down that knife.

- From the shoulder, it won't hurt, don't be a shit. A little bit.

- Marta, please, you're really scaring me...

- Don't be a moor… you have 75 kilos of meat, I only ask for a piece, a hundred grams, come on, come on.

Ramón, who was a willing man and who loved his wife. Ramón who was naked in a corner of the room. Ramón who saw Marta approach with a Tramontina in hand. Finally, Ramón who, with horror, listened to the improbable creak of his wife's belly and saw those hungry panther eyes; Ramon made a seemingly wise decision to save his life. Only in appearance.

- Give me the knife, Marta, I promise you I'll cut off a bit of my shoulder if you promise me you'll calm down later. And you swear to me that tomorrow we'll seek professional help, do you promise?

- Professional Help? For pregnant cravings?

- Promise me.

Hunger made him promise. Ramón, clenching his teeth, cut a slice off his shoulder. His blood stained her arm with incredible speed. Ramón dropped the knife and stretched out a trembling and bloody hand, a hand that was holding a piece of meat, he stretched it towards his wife who opened her mouth and swallowed it without chewing.

Then everything happened at the speed of light. Marta launched herself with a deep bite on her husband's bare chest, he thought of kneeing her but even in the midst of her pain he thought of her baby. The second bite from her tore off an ear. The third of hers ripped open his throat. Marta devoured kilo by kilo while outside, above, at night, the moon shone with a strength and closeness worthy of a horror story.

But Ramón Valenzuela could not remember the enigmatic words that medium, witch, fortune teller -he never knew what to call her- told him in front of her mother when she invited him to accompany her to "pay a visit to the future". Her mother was a regular there. Ramón had not opened his mouth, however, before leaving, the old woman grabbed him by the wrist and told him “never feed the woman with an inhabited womb of your own free will when the moon descends”. Who can blame Ramón? Who among us, in that room, would have remembered and interpreted the oracular words in time?

The coroner dropped the sheet over the man's eaten body. The only time Hortensio López had witnessed such a laceration of a body was the time a worker fell unconscious into a drainage well and was found a week later: rats had eaten his legs, head and back.

Ramón Valenzuela's body showed greater damage, much greater damage. Because the human mouth is bigger and bites harder.