The following day, about midmorning, he set off for his first reconnoitering of the unknown territory where Daniel Santa-Clara lived with his wife. He was wearing the false beard meticulously fixed to his face and a peaked cap to throw a protective shadow over his eyes, which he decided at the last moment not to conceal behind a pair of dark glasses because, in conjunction with the rest of the disguise, they gave him an outlaw air likely to awaken the suspicions of the whole neighborhood and to be the cause of a full-scale police hunt, with the all-too-foreseeable consequences of capture, identification, and public opprobrium. He was not making this expedition in the expectation of collecting any particularly significant facts, at most he would learn something of the exterior of things, gain a topographical knowledge of places, the street, the building, but little more. It would be the most extraordinary fluke to see Daniel Santa-Clara going into the building, with remnants of makeup still on his face, and wearing the irresolute, perplexed expression of someone who is taking rather too long to emerge from the skin of the character he had been playing an hour before. Real life has always seemed to us more frugal in coincidences than the novel or other forms of fiction, unless we were to allow that the principle of coincidence is the one true ruler of the world, in which case, we should give as much value to the coincidence one actually experiences as to that which is written about, and vice versa. During the half hour that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso spent there, stopping to look in shopwindows and to buy a newspaper, then sitting reading the paper outside a café right next to the building, Daniel Santa-Clara was seen neither entering nor leaving. Perhaps he's resting in the peace of his home with his wife and his children, if he has any, perhaps, as he was the other day, he is busy at a film shoot, perhaps there is no one in the apartment, the children because they have gone to spend the holidays with their grandparents, the mother because, like so many others, she has a job to go to, either to safeguard a position of real or imagined personal independence or because the household finances cannot survive without her material contribution, for the fact is that, however quickly a supporting actor scurries from small role to small role, however often he is selected by the production company that uses him now on a more or less tacitly exclusive basis, the money he can earn will always be subordinated to the rigors of the law of supply and demand, which is never based on the objective needs of the subject but purely on the latter's real or imagined talents and abilities, those that it favors him with recognizing or those that, with unknown and usually negative intent, are attributed to him, forgetting that he might have other, less visible talents and abilities that might be worth putting to the test. This means that Daniel Santa-Clara could become a big star if fortune were to decide to have him noticed by a clever producer who didn't mind taking a risk, the sort who, while he might occasionally take it into his head to destroy a really first-rate star, has also been known, with great generosity, to polish up the shine on second-rate or even third-rate stars. Letting time do its work has always been the best option ever since the world began, Daniel Santa-Clara is still young, he has a pleasant face, a good physique, and undeniable gifts as an actor, it wouldn't be right for him to have to spend the rest of his life playing hotel receptionists or other such occupations. It is not long since we saw him playing a theater impresario in