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Normal Restrepo's wife killed herself in the most distressing way. Late in the evening, after he had gone to sleep, she sneaked out of bed and back into her day clothes. She walked all the way back into our tiny village, as they lived several kilometers outside of it, and let herself into Normal's butcher shop.

Normal was really named Frederico. I don't remember why or when everyone started calling him Normal and I've known him since we were seven. He isn't extraordinarily plain nor is he so exceptionally strange that the word normal should serve as an irritating joke that refuses to become irrelevant. Curiously, however, its origin has. I suppose it's just one of those things that simply is because it always has been. Similarly, my grandfather was nicknamed Freight but could never recall a reason why. Nobody in our family had ever worked in the transport business nor had an overwhelming affinity for it.

At the butcher shop, Normal's wife sliced herself horizontally at the wrists and on both sides of her throat with the cleaver. She then leaped off the single story roof of the shop, leaving behind a quirky trail of blood detailing her path from around the front counter, dawdling near the drain momentarily (possibly considering a courteous suicide before opting for one with more panache) and finally heading up the rotting back ladder to the roof. Both her ankles were broken in the fall and she dragged herself almost 50 meters before stopping forever just short of the central park.

Normal receded into the bottle the way most loving husbands in his situation would have. And I moved into Bogota shortly thereafter to work at Incré Diseño, a well-known architectural firm. I told, and still tell, this gruesome story with embarrassing frequency, but didn't have the right ending for several years. New friends or barroom acquaintances would blink back at me and ask, "Well, what happened next?"

In 1997, returning home for my uncle's funeral, I ran into Normal outside the hardware store where Doña Echevarria used to sell homemade slingshots. Normal looked good and fat. Much better than he had looked in the months after his wife's death all those years ago. He asked me if I remembered the slingshots and how we could never quite master them enough to hit anything with accuracy, the way our fathers claimed they had when they were children. I barely had a chance to think about it when he added, "Also, I solved the mystery of Paola's suicide."
I said, "I remember," in response to the slingshots, not really having a chance to register his grisly addendum.
"She was possessed by the devil," he said, "no butcher's wife would ever use a cleaver for a slice job."
I nodded, "You're absolutely right."