He hits my chest and something is carried away when he moves his hand away. I look at myself but I am the same, nothing seems to have changed in me, but I feel hollow. Above him, perhaps out of cowardice, after the unexpected blow he ran away. And in the pain of that blow, of that flight, the emptiness in me is getting bigger and bigger. I tell myself then that all this is nonsense, that if he is angry about such a minor thing, he speaks ill of him, that he should not be taken seriously. I tell myself that and also that the blow had been sly, effeminate, and that it had not harmed me at all, if it had not left a bruise ... but behind those words, that bland speech that I am saying to myself hides an atrocious fear, a fear that grows without my wanting it, a fear that tells me that perhaps he had stolen my heart, and that is why I felt hollow. Quickly my memory comes to certain Filipino healers who had had their television fame for operating with their hands. They plunged - in a swift and accurate blow - their hands between the ribs of their patients, and before the patient knew it, they removed their hands with a piece of bad meat between their fingers, which according to what they explained on television was what traditional medicine calls a tumor. That image appears in my memory and also - and almost at the same time - that of certain priests - I think Mayans - who in pre-Columbian America, when performing human sacrifices, also buried their hands in the chest of those who were offered to the gods, but that instead of tearing a piece of bad meat from the body, they would remove the heart, and before the empty gaze of someone who was dying, they would show him what until recently was lying inside him, and that was still beating. All that appears in my mind, and the fear is atrocious, and the fear is getting bigger.

I forget my words, those that distracted me, and with my right hand I try to locate my pulse on my left. I'm very nervous, I can't find it, I try on the neck, then where the heart should be. Nothing. Not a shadow of a heartbeat. I start running after him, he's already ahead of me, he's already gone. I run aimlessly, until my legs no longer respond, until my agitated lungs cause me convulsions. I stop and vomit. And between my vomiting, between my helplessness, I begin to cry. I've lost my heart