On the table is a list of two hundred and ninety-eight names, rather fewer than usual, one hundred and fifty-two men and one hundred and forty-six women, and the same number of violet-colored envelopes and sheets of paper are ready for the next mailing, or death-by-post. Death added to the list the name on the letter that had been returned to sender, underlined it and replaced her pen in the pen holder. If she had any nerves at all, we could say that she felt slightly excited, and with good reason. She had lived for far too long to consider the return of the letter unimportant. It's easy enough to understand, it takes very little imagination to see why death's workplace is probably the dullest of all those created since cain killed abel, an incident for which god bears all the blame. Since that first deplorable incident, which, from the moment the world began, demonstrated the difficulties of family life, and right up until the present day, the process has remained unchanged for centuries and centuries and more centuries, repetitive, unceasing, uninterrupted, unbroken, varying only in the many ways of passing from life to non-life, but basically always the same because the result was always the same. The fact is that whoever was meant to die died. And now, remarkably, a letter signed by death, written in her own hand, a letter warning of someone's irrevocable and un-postponable end, had been returned to sender, to this cold room where the author and signatory of the letter sits, wrapped in the melancholy shroud that is her historic uniform, the hood over her head, as she ponders what has happened, meanwhile drumming on the desk with the bones of her fingers, or the fingers of her bones. She's slightly surprised to find herself hoping that the letter will be returned again, that the envelope will carry, for example, a message denying all knowledge of the addressee's whereabouts, because that really would be a new experience for someone who has always managed to find us wherever we were hidden, if, in that childish way, we thought we might escape her. However, she doesn't really believe that the supposed absence will be marked on the back of the envelope, here the archives are updated automatically with every gesture or movement we make, with every step we take, every change of house, status, profession, habit or custom, if we smoke or don't smoke, if we eat a lot or a little or nothing, if we're active or indolent, if we have a headache or indigestion, if we suffer from constipation or diarrhea, if our hair falls out or we get cancer, if it's a yes, a no or a maybe, all she will have to do is open the drawer of the alphabetical file, look for the corresponding folder, and there it will all be. And it shouldn't astonish us in the least if, at the very moment we were reading our own personal file, we saw instantaneously recorded there the sudden pang of anxiety that froze us. Death knows everything about us, and that perhaps is why she's sad. If it's true that she doesn't smile, this is only because she has no lips, and this anatomical lesson tells us that, contrary to what the living may believe, a smile is not a matter of teeth. There are those who say, with a sense of humor that owes more to a lack of taste than it does to the macabre, that she wears a kind of permanent, fixed grin, but that isn't true, what she wears is a grimace of pain, because she's constantly pursued by the memory of the time when she had a mouth, and her mouth a tongue, and her tongue saliva. With a brief sigh, she took up a sheet of paper and began writing the first letter of the day, Dear madam, I regret to inform you that in a week your life will end, irrevocably and irremissibly. Please make the best use you can of the time remaining to you, yours faithfully, death. Two hundred and ninety-eight sheets of paper, two hundred and ninety-eight envelopes, two hundred and ninety-eight names removed from the list, this is not exactly a killingly hard job, but the fact is that when she reaches the end, death is exhausted. Making that gesture with her right hand with which we're already fa miliar, she dispatched the two hundred and ninety-eight letters, then, folding her bony arms on the desk, she rested her head on them, not in order to sleep, because death doesn't sleep, but in order to rest. When, half an hour later, once recovered from her tiredness, she raised her head, the letter that had been returned to sender and sent again was back, right there before her empty, astonished eye sockets.