"Stop him! Stop him! Murderer!"
You can imagine what the effect of these words would have been in such a tranquil neighbourhood. The man in question, the same one I had seen in the tram that afternoon, was arrested. I, for my part, did not stop shouting:
"He's the one who prepared the poison for the Countess, the one who murdered the Countess."
There was a moment of indescribable confusion. He affirmed that I was mad, but we were both placed in police custody. Afterwards I lost all notion of what was happening around me. I do not remember what I did that night in the place where they locked me up. The most vivid recollection that I have of such a strange event was to have awoken from the deep sleep I fell into, a veritable drunken stupor morally produced, I know not how, by one of the passing phenomena of alienation that science now studies with great care as one of the heralds of madness.
As you can surmise the event did not have consequences because the unsympathetic person I baptized with the name of Mudarra was an honourable grocer who had never in his life poisoned any countess. But for a long time afterwards I persisted in my self-deception and was wont to exclaim: "Poor countess. Whatever they say, I'll stick to my guns. No-one will persuade me that you did not end your days at the hand of your irate husband."
Months needed to pass for the shadows to return to the unknown place from whence they had come forth driving me mad and for reality to gain the ascendance in my head. I always laugh when I remember that journey and all the consideration I had lavished beforehand on my dreamed-of victim I now devoted to—who do you think?—my travelling companion on that anguished expedition, the irascible English woman, whose foot I dislocated when I hastily left the tram to run after the alleged butler.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Novel on the Tram, by Benito Pérez Galdós