Summary

When the story opens, we learn that a truck driver has misjudged the clearance of a pedestrian overpass. His truck hit the bottom of the bridge and knocked part of the overpass down into the street. The narrator’s uncle, Ramón, and Ramón’s wife, Matilde, both lived in the neighborhood, which is known in the city as The Thousands; they were both blind and worked as interpreters for a company downtown. That morning, on their walk to work, they climbed up the stairs for the pedestrian overpass and, unable to see that it had collapsed, fell off it and died. The narrator was named executor of their estate.

The narrator, who is a lawyer, went to Ramón and Matilde’s office and met one of their coworkers, an elderly man named Del Piero. Del Piero told the narrator that...