JAVIER MARÍAS

A Heart So White

Translated by MARGARET JULL COSTA,
with an introduction by JONATHAN COE

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PENGUIN BOOKS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

Margaret Jull Costa is the translator of many Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, among them Javier Marías, Bernardo Atxaga, Fernando Pessoa and Eça de Queiroz. She has won many awards, most recently the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey.

Jonathan Coe has written many novels, including The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club and The Rain Before It Falls. He is also the author of Like a Fiery Elephant, a critical biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson.

For Julia Altares
despite Julia Altares

and for Lola Manera of Havana,
in memoriam

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK ON ME

‘Marías is one of the best contemporary writers’ J. M. Coetzee

‘It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out … When you take up a Marías novel, or even a short story, you are at once enclosed in a strange world that becomes increasingly and addictively familiar’ Wendy Lesser, The New York Times

‘He has something of W. G. Sebald’s sense of consciousness in flux … but he is sharper about people and sexual attachment’ Marina Warner, Guardian

‘Javier Marías is a novelist with style … His readers enter, through him, a strikingly and disturbingly foreign world’ Margaret Drabble

‘No wonder W. G. Sebald spoke of him as a “twin writer”: their narrators are commonly in states of malaise or fever; their narratives are interested in those same patterns of association that exhaust all possibilities; their prose exerts an almost opium effect over the reader as time slows down, expands or is still’ Sarah Emily Miano, Guardian

‘His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility’ Wyatt Mason, New Yorker

‘Javier Marías is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length’ Scotsman

My hands are of your colour; but I shame

To wear A Heart So White.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Introduction

I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore – often blindly – the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.

This was Javier Marías’s response to an online interviewer who asked him, ‘What is the purpose of writing?’, and it not only provides an unexpectedly lucid answer to that intimidating question, it also directly illuminates Marías’s own practice, and that of A Heart So White in particular. For this is a novel which asks the profoundest, most unsettling questions about knowledge itself: about human curiosity, about the keeping of secrets, about our need to know the truth and our (sometimes equally pressing) need not to know it; and about language, too – for knowledge can only be imparted in words, and words, as writers know only too well, are slippery, unreliable, and have a tendency to falsify the very truths they are meant to impart.

Most novelists have a ‘breakthrough’ book, the one that introduces them to a wider public: in the case of Marías it was All Souls (Todas las almas), published in 1989. Offering up the simple pleasures of traditional fiction rather more willingly than some of Marías’s subsequent work, it tells the story of a Spanish academic who comes to Oxford and has an affair with a fellow-tutor, and has some points of contact with the ‘campus novel’ genre so beloved of Anglo-Saxon comic writers. A Heart So White (Corazón tan blanco) followed in 1992, hard on the heels of that success, but there is not much sense here of a writer compromising himself in order to accommodate a larger, less specialized readership. The wisp of a plot can be summarized in a few words – newlywed translator learns the deadly secret behind his father’s three marriages – but it is a more opaque, demanding work than its predecessor. The novel’s long, looping opening sentence sets the agenda at once:

I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests. (p.3)

Notice, first of all, what a strange, violent temporal journey we make while negotiating the jumble of tenses in that sentence. We start (‘I did not want to know’) at some unspecified point in the past, then (‘have since come to know’) move forward, then (‘when she wasn’t a girl anymore’) rewind even further into the past and then (‘hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon’) locate ourselves a little more exactly within this timeframe, and so on. Any promise of a conventionally linear narrative is immediately shattered, and we are already made aware, subliminally, of one of the novel’s major themes: the evanescence of human experience, the fact that everything belongs to the past as soon as it has happened, the fact that ‘everything is constantly in the process of being lost’.

This might, of course, easily be described as a Proustian theme, and indeed the length and complexity of Marías’s sentences have evoked stylistic comparisons with Proust, as well as with Henry James and Thomas Bernhard. But we would do well to remember that, earlier in his career, Marías had a distinguished parallel life as a translator, and probably his most celebrated translation was his Spanish rendering of Tristram Shandy. Because he is not the most obviously humorous of novelists, it might be tempting to downplay the extent of Marías’s affinities with Laurence Sterne: but they seem to me just as strong as his links with the great twentieth-century European writers. Like Sterne, Marías is prey to a radical scepticism about the novel’s capacity to render the complexity of subjective human experience in anything other than the crudest, most approximate way. Like Sterne, too, he is possessed by the notion that some of the smallest and most fleeting events in our lives are also the most significant; that these events occupy a space in our memories which seems quite out of proportion to their original duration; and that writers must therefore develop ever more inventive strategies that will give such transient but momentous events their narrative due.

There the resemblance more or less ends: for Marías, unlike Sterne, inclines towards narrative subversions which are po-faced rather than zany or farcical. One of his methods, for instance, is a highly distinctive form of repetition. Many novelists are scared of repetition, assuming that readers will take it for laziness or carelessness. Marías, on the other hand, realizes that our thought processes are often repetitious, and he wants to render this quality as scrupulously as possible. Thus we will find the narrator of A Heart So White reflecting that,

What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. (p.28)

Almost two hundred and fifty pages later, when the narrator has overheard a crucial conversation between his wife and his father, and has at last become privy to his father’s secrets, he writes:

Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. (p.272)

Among other things, there is a certain rueful world-weariness about this technique: one of the things Marías is trying to tell the reader, it seems, is that no matter how much we experience, no matter how shocking or intense our experiences are, we remain locked within the same patterns of thought and reflection. One usually closes a Marías novel with the sense that human experience is immutable, and that people themselves rarely change. The precedent, again, might come from Sterne, although again Marías expresses the idea calmly and regretfully, with little of Sterne’s cavorting humour.

The notion that ‘what we experience is identical to what we never try’ has another consequence: not for Marías’s characters, this time, but for his literary aesthetic. It makes him sceptical of the line dividing fiction from non-fiction: a scepticism he shares with many other European writers poised on the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Two obvious examples might be Milan Kundera (whose books were, as our narrator is somewhat tiredly aware, highly fashionable at the time when A Heart So White was written) and W. G. Sebald. Like Sebald, Marías likes to include photographs in his fictions (there are photographs in both All Souls and Your Face Tomorrow), leaving the reader with nagging uncertainties as to whether they are real or fake. And, like Sebald, he is just as interested – more interested, it might be argued – in reflection and analysis than he is in narration. A typical Marías sentence might begin with the description of an event, but this act of telling will rapidly morph into something discursive.

This is more than just a stylistic tic: it is part of Marías’s deadly serious attempt to keep the novel, as a form, alive and evolving. To put it crudely, for the first few centuries of its existence, one of the great virtues of the novel was assumed to be that it collapsed the distinction between the general and the particular: reading the story of one individual errant knight by the name of Don Quixote, you also knew that you were reading the story of every man and woman (including yourself) who had ever suffered from delusions and thwarted dreams. Modernism swept that certainty aside, and called into question the novel’s authority, its claim to be able to speak for every reader equally, irrespective of culture, politics or gender. After the modernist revolution, most novelists blithely carried on as before, as if it had never taken place, but a handful of writers have since applied themselves to the task of rebuilding things – recalibrating the novel’s relationship between the general and the particular – and Marías’s lithe, unreliable sentences are among his contributions to this enterprise. They insist on reminding us that the relationship between the two is liquid, slippery, and in a constant state of flux.

Even punctuation has its part to play. Marías rarely – if ever – uses colons or semi-colons mid-sentence, instead entrusting the frail and vulnerable comma with the task of keeping up a barrier between what is particular and what is general, and then relishing the inevitable breakdown, the inevitable seepage between the two. Opening A Heart So White at random, I quickly chance upon the following example:

Luisa had suddenly become angry, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I hadn’t told her what I acknowledged I’d heard or if her anger was aimed at Guillermo, or perhaps at Miriam, or even at men in general, women have more of a community feeling than we do and often get angry with all men at the same time. (p.137)

Most writers would have put something stronger – a colon or a dash – between ‘men in general’ and ‘women have more’. We are moving swiftly, after all, from a character’s individual perception (‘I couldn’t tell’), to a broad and lofty generalization (‘women have more of a community feeling’): two quite different modes of discourse. But by separating them only with a comma, Marías doesn’t allow his readers any space to pause, or reflect, as they negotiate the transition. In fact, we soon become so accustomed to the smooth but convoluted rhythms of his prose that we stop noticing how often these transitions take place, how frequently and seamlessly he carries us from a narrative mode to a discursive one. In this respect, Marías’s novels are best viewed as part stories, part essays: one of their greatest achievements being to make us see that there can essentially be no difference between the two forms.

But perhaps this analysis risks making A Heart So White sound too dry. Readers daunted by Marías’s sentences, or by his commitment to the legacies of high modernism, should rest assured that there is one other, more readily loveable characteristic to be found in his work, a characteristic without which no novelist, in fact, is worth his or her salt: a healthy streak of narrative vulgarity. The novel begins with a bloody and dramatic suicide. Murder, or the threat of murder, is central to the plot. If it is not a whodunnit, exactly, it is certainly a why-did-she-do-it, or a what-did-he-do. (Just as, by the same token, Marías’s epic trilogy Your Face Tomorrow can be enjoyed as a series of spy novels, if the reader so chooses.) Pop culture references abound, and our cerebral narrator also turns out to be a big fan of Jerry Lewis and Family Feud. In short, he likes a good story too, and however much it might sometimes feel that he’s trying to disguise it, he knows how to tell one. I cannot help feeling that it is this quality – just as much as Javier Marías’s own searching and omnipresent intelligence – that makes A Heart So White a novel to treasure.

Jonathan Coe, 2012

A HEART SO WHITE

I DID NOT WANT to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests. When they heard the shot, some five minutes after the girl had left the table, her father didn’t get up at once, but stayed there for a few seconds, paralysed, his mouth still full of food, not daring to chew or swallow, far less to spit the food out on to his plate; and when he finally did get up and run to the bathroom, those who followed him noticed that when he discovered the blood-spattered body of his daughter and clutched his head in his hands, he kept passing the mouthful of meat from one cheek to the other, still not knowing what to do with it. He was carrying his napkin in one hand and he didn’t let go of it until, after a few moments, he noticed the bra that had been flung into the bidet and he covered it with the one piece of cloth that he had to hand or rather in his hand and which his lips had sullied, as if he were more ashamed of the sight of her underwear than of her fallen, half-naked body with which, until only a short time before, the article of underwear had been in contact: the same body that had been sitting at the table, that had walked down the corridor, that had stood there. Before that, with an automatic gesture, the father had turned off the tap in the basin, the cold tap, which had been turned full on. His daughter must have been crying when she stood before the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and felt for her heart with the gun, because, as she lay stretched out on the cold floor of the huge bathroom, her eyes were still full of tears, tears no one had noticed during lunch and that could not possibly have welled up once she’d fallen to the floor dead. Contrary to her custom and contrary to the general custom, she hadn’t bolted the door, which made her father think (but only briefly and almost without thinking it, as he finally managed to swallow) that perhaps his daughter, while she was crying, had been expecting, wanting someone to open the door and to stop her doing what she’d done, not by force, but by their mere presence, by looking at her naked, living body or by placing a hand on her shoulder. But no one else (apart from her this time, and because she was no longer a little girl) went to the bathroom during lunch. The breast that hadn’t taken the full impact of the blast was clearly visible, maternal and white and still firm, and everyone instinctively looked at that breast, more than anything in order to avoid looking at the other, which no longer existed or was now nothing but blood. It had been many years since her father had seen that breast, not since its transformation, not since it began to be maternal, and for that reason, he felt not only frightened but troubled too. The other girl, her sister, who had seen the changes wrought by adolescence and possibly later too, was the first to touch her, with a towel (her own pale blue towel, which was the one she usually picked up), with which she began to wipe the tears from her sister’s face, tears mingled with sweat and water, because before the tap had been turned off, the jet of water had been splashing against the basin and drops had fallen on to her sister’s face, her white breast, her crumpled skirt, as she lay on the floor. She also made hasty attempts to staunch the blood as if that might make her sister better, but the towel became immediately drenched and useless, it too became tainted with blood. Instead of leaving it to soak up more blood and to cover her sister’s chest, she withdrew it when she saw how red the towel had become (it was her own towel after all) and left it draped over the edge of the bath and it hung there dripping. She kept talking, but all she could say, over and over, was her sister’s name. One of the guests couldn’t help glancing at himself in the mirror, from a distance, and quickly smoothing his hair, it was just a moment, but time enough for him to notice that the mirror’s surface was also splashed with blood and water (but not with sweat) as was anything reflected in it, including his own face looking back at him. He was standing on the threshold, like the other two guests, not daring to go in, as if despite the abandonment of all social niceties, they considered that only members of the family had the right to do so. The three guests merely peered round the door, leaning forwards slightly the way adults do when they speak to children, not going any further out of distaste or respect, possibly out of distaste, despite the fact that one of them (the one who’d looked at himself in the mirror) was a doctor and the normal thing would have been for him to step confidently forward and examine the girl’s body or, at the very least, to kneel down and place two fingers on the pulse in her neck. He didn’t do so, not even when the father, who was growing ever paler and more distressed, turned to him and, pointing to his daughter’s body, said “Doctor” in an imploring but utterly unemphatic tone, immediately turning his back on him again, without waiting to see if the doctor would respond to his appeal. He turned his back not only on him and on the others but also on his daughters, the one still alive and the one he still couldn’t bring himself to believe was dead and, with his elbows resting on the edge of the sink and his forehead cupped in his hands, he began to vomit up everything he’d eaten including the piece of meat he’d just swallowed whole without even chewing it. His son, the girls’ brother, who was considerably younger than the two daughters, went over to him, but all he could do to help was to seize the tails of his father’s jacket, as if to hold him down and keep him steady as he retched, but to those watching it seemed more as if he were seeking help from his father at a time when the latter couldn’t give it to him. Someone could be heard whistling quietly. The boy from the shop – who sometimes didn’t deliver their order until lunchtime and who, when the shot was first heard, had been busily unpacking the boxes he’d brought – also stuck his head round the door, still whistling, the way boys often do as they walk along, but he stopped at once (he was the same age as the youngest son) when he saw the pair of low-heeled shoes cast aside or just half-off at the heel, the skirt hitched up and stained with blood – her thighs stained too – for from where he was standing that was all he could see of the fallen daughter. As he could neither ask what had happened nor push his way past, and since no one took any notice of him and he had no way of finding out whether or not there were any empties to be taken back, he resumed his whistling (this time to dispel his fear or to lessen the shock) and went back into the kitchen, assuming that sooner or later the maid would reappear, the one who normally gave him his orders and who was neither where she was supposed to be nor with the others in the corridor, unlike the cook, who, being an associate member of the family, had one foot in the bathroom and one foot out and was wiping her hands on her apron or perhaps making the sign of the cross. The maid who, at the precise moment when the shot rang out, had been setting down on the marble table in the scullery the empty dishes she’d just brought through and had thus confused the noise of the shot with the clatter she herself was making, had since been arranging on another dish, with enormous care but little skill – the errand boy meanwhile was making just as much noise unpacking his boxes – the ice-cream cake she’d been told to buy that morning because there would be guests for lunch; and once the cake was ready and duly arrayed on the plate, and when she judged that the people in the dining room would have finished their second course, she’d carried it through and placed it on the table on which, much to her bewilderment, there were still bits of meat on the plates and knives and forks and napkins scattered randomly about the tablecloth, and not a single guest (there was only one absolutely clean plate, as if one of them, the eldest daughter, had eaten more quickly than the others and had even wiped her plate clean, or rather hadn’t even served herself with any meat). She realized then that, as usual, she’d made the mistake of taking in the dessert before she’d cleared the plates away and laid new ones, but she didn’t dare collect the dirty ones and pile them up in case the absent guests hadn’t finished with them and would want to resume their eating (perhaps she should have brought in some fruit as well). Since she had orders not to wander about the house during mealtimes and to restrict herself to running between the kitchen and the dining room so as not to bother or distract anyone, she didn’t dare join in the murmured conversation of the group gathered round the bathroom door, why they were there she still didn’t know, and so she stood and waited, her hands behind her back and her back against the sideboard, looking anxiously at the cake she’d just left in the centre of the abandoned table and wondering if, given the heat, she shouldn’t instead return it immediately to the fridge. She sang quietly to herself, picked up a fallen salt cellar and poured wine into an empty glass, the glass belonging to the doctor’s wife, who tended to drink quickly. After a few minutes watching while the cake began to soften, and still unable to make a decision, she heard the front doorbell go, and since one of her duties was to answer the door, she adjusted her cap, straightened her apron, checked that her stockings weren’t twisted and went out into the corridor. She glanced quickly to her left, at the group whose murmured comments and exclamations she’d listened to intrigued, but she didn’t pause or approach them and walked off to the right, as was her duty. When she opened the door she was met by a fading trail of laughter and by a strong smell of cologne (the landing was in darkness) which emanated either from the eldest son of the family or from the new brother-in-law, who’d recently returned from his honeymoon, for the two had arrived together, perhaps having met in the street or downstairs at the street door (they’d doubtless come for coffee, although no one had made any yet). Infected by their gaiety, the maid almost laughed too, but stood to one side to let them pass and just had time to see how the expressions on their faces changed at once and how they rushed down the corridor towards the crowd standing round the bathroom door. The husband, the brother-in-law, ran behind, his face terribly pale, one hand on the brother’s shoulder, as if trying to prevent him from seeing what he might see, or as if to hold on to him. This time the maid didn’t go back into the dining room, she followed them, quickening her step as if by assimilation, and when she reached the bathroom door, she again noticed, even more strongly this time, the smell of good cologne emanating from one or both of the gentlemen, as if a bottle of it had been smashed or as if one of them had suddenly begun to sweat and the smell was thus accentuated. She stayed there, without going in, along with the cook and the guests, and she saw, out of the corner of her eye, that the boy from the shop was walking, still whistling, from the kitchen into the dining room, doubtless looking for her; but she was too frightened to call out to him or to scold him or to pay him any attention at all. The boy, who’d already seen quite enough, no doubt hung about for a good while in the dining room and then left without saying goodbye or taking with him the empty bottles, because hours later, when the melted cake was finally cleared away, wrapped in paper and thrown into the wastebin, a large part of it was found to be missing, although none of the guests had eaten any, and the wine glass belonging to the doctor’s wife was once again empty. Everyone said how unlucky for Ranz, the brother-in-law, the husband, my father, being widowed for a second time.

THAT WAS a long time ago, before I was born, before there was the remotest chance of my being born, indeed it was only after that that I could be born. Now I myself am married and not even a year has passed since I returned from my honeymoon with Luisa, my wife, whom I’ve known for only twenty-two months, a hasty marriage, well, fairly hasty considering the amount of thought everyone always says should go into such a decision, even in these precipitate times so different from those other times, even though those other times were not so very long ago (only a single, incomplete or perhaps already half-lived life ago, my life, for example, or Luisa’s), when everything was considered and deliberate and everything had its weight, even foolish things, though not death, and certainly not death by suicide, like the death of the person who would have been and yet never could have been my Aunt Teresa and was only ever Teresa Aguilera, whom I’ve gradually come to know about, though never from her younger sister, my mother, who was almost entirely silent during my childhood and my adolescence and who subsequently died and was thus silent for ever, but from more distant, incidental people and, finally, from Ranz, who was the husband of both sisters as well as of a foreign woman to whom I’m not related.

The truth is that if, in recent times, I’ve wanted to know about what happened all those years ago, it’s precisely because of my marriage (in fact, I did not want to know, but I have since come to know about it). Ever since I contracted matrimony (the verb has fallen into disuse, but is both highly graphic and useful) I’ve been filled by all kinds of presentiments of disaster, rather as you are when you contract an illness, the sort of illness from which you never know with any certainty when you will recover. The expression “to change one’s marital status or state”, which is normally used quite casually and so means very little, is the one that most adequately describes my case and, contrary to the general custom, I give it great weight. Just as an illness changes our state to such an extent that it obliges us sometimes to stop everything and to keep to our beds for an unforeseeable number of days and to see the world only from our pillow, my marriage disrupted my habits and even my beliefs and, more importantly still, my view of the world. Perhaps that was because it came rather late, I was thirty-four years old when I contracted marriage.

The principal and the most common problem at the beginning of any fairly conventional marriage is that, regardless of how fragile an institution marriage is nowadays and regardless of the facilities for disengagement available to the contracting parties, you traditionally experience an unpleasant sense of having arrived and, therefore, of having reached an end, or rather (since the days continue implacably to pass and there is no end), that the time has come to devote yourself to something else. I know that this feeling is both pernicious and erroneous and that giving in to it or accepting it is the reason why so many promising marriages collapse no sooner have they begun. I know that what you should do is to overcome that initial feeling and, far from devoting yourself to something else, you should devote yourself to the marriage itself, as if confronted by the most important structure and task of your life, even if you’re tempted to believe that the task has already been completed and the structure built. I know all that but, nevertheless, when I got married, even during the honeymoon itself (we went to Miami, New Orleans and Mexico, then on to Havana), I experienced two unpleasant feelings, and I still wonder if the second was and is just a fantasy, invented or dreamt up to mitigate or combat the first. That first feeling of unease is the one I’ve already mentioned, the one which – judging by what one hears, by the kind of jokes made at the expense of those getting married and by the many gloomy proverbs about it in my own language – must be common to all newlyweds (especially men) at the beginning of something which, incomprehensibly, you feel and experience as if it were an ending. This unease is summed up in a particularly terrifying phrase: “Now what?” and I have no idea what other people do to overcome it.

As with an illness, this “change of state” is unpredictable, it disrupts everything, or rather prevents things from going on as they did before: it means, for example, that after going out to supper or to the cinema, we can no longer go our separate ways, each to his or her own home, I can no longer drive up in my car or in a taxi to Luisa’s door and drop her off and then, once I’ve done so, drive off alone to my own apartment along the half-empty, hosed-down streets, still thinking about her and about the future. Now that we’re married, when we leave the cinema our steps head off in the same direction (the echoes out of time with each other, because now there are four feet walking along), but not because I’ve chosen to accompany her or not even because I usually do so and it seems the correct and polite thing to do, but because now our feet never hesitate outside on the damp pavement, they don’t deliberate or change their mind, there’s no room for regret or even choice: now there’s no doubt but that we’re going to the same place, whether we want to or not this particular night, or perhaps it was only last night that I didn’t want to.

On our honeymoon, when this change of state came about (and to say that it “came about” makes it sound too gradual, for it’s a violent change, one that barely gives you time to catch your breath), I realized that I found it very difficult to think about her and utterly impossible to think about the future, which is one of the greatest conceivable pleasures known to anyone, if not the daily salvation of us all; to allow oneself to think vague thoughts, to let one’s thoughts drift over what will or might happen, to wonder without too much exactitude or intensity what will become of us tomorrow or in five years’ time, to wonder about things we cannot foresee. On my honeymoon it was as if the future had disappeared and there was no abstract future at all, which is the only future that matters because the present can neither taint it nor assimilate it. That change, then, means that nothing can continue as before, especially if, as usually happens, the change has been preceded and foreshadowed by a joint effort, whose main visible manifestation is the unnatural process of creating a home for you both, a home that had no prior existence for either of you, but which must, unnaturally, be inaugurated by you both. In that particular custom or practice, which is, I believe, widespread, lies the proof that, when they contract matrimony, the contracting parties are, in fact, demanding of each other an act of mutual suppression or obliteration, the suppression of what each of them was and of what each of them fell in love with or perhaps simply perceived as being potentially advantageous, since falling in love doesn’t always happen before marriage, sometimes it happens afterwards and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. It can’t. The obliteration of each of the parties, of the person they knew, spent time with and loved, involves the disappearance of their respective homes, or is somehow symbolized by that. So two people who had been used to living their own lives and being in their own homes, used to waking up alone and often going to bed alone, find themselves suddenly artificially joined in their sleeping and waking, and in their steps along the half-empty streets heading in one direction only or going up together in the lift, no longer with one as host and the other as guest, no longer with one going to pick up the other or the latter coming down to meet the former, waiting below in the car or in a taxi, instead neither has any choice, they have a few rooms and a lift and a front door that once belonged to neither of them but which now belong to both, with one pillow for which they will be obliged to battle in their sleep and from which, like the invalid, they will also end up seeing the world.

As I said before, this initial feeling of unease came upon me on the first leg of our honeymoon, in Miami, which is a hideous place but has excellent beaches for newlyweds, and got worse in New Orleans and in Mexico and worse still in Havana, and for nearly a year now, since we returned from that trip and inaugurated our home together in that extremely unnatural way, it’s continued to grow or rather has become lodged inside me, perhaps inside us both. But the second feeling of unease only appeared in full force towards the end of the trip, that is, only in Havana, where, in a sense, I come from, or, to be more precise, where a quarter of me comes from, for it was there that my maternal grandmother (the mother of Teresa and Juana Aguilera) was born and from there that she came to Madrid as a little girl. It happened in the hotel where we were spending three nights (we didn’t have that much money and our stays in each city were only brief), one afternoon when Luisa was taken ill while we were out walking, indeed so ill that we interrupted our walk and came back to the room at once, so that she could lie down. She was shivering and felt slightly nauseous. She literally couldn’t stand up. No doubt something she’d eaten had disagreed with her, but we didn’t know that for certain then and I immediately wondered if perhaps she’d caught something in Mexico, one of those illnesses to which Europeans are so susceptible, something serious like amoebic dysentery. The unspoken presentiments of disaster that had accompanied me since the wedding ceremony took different forms and one of them (the least hidden, that is, not left entirely unspoken), was the threat of an illness or sudden death overtaking the person with whom I was going to share my life as well as both the concrete and the abstract future, despite my impression that the latter was no more and that my life was already half over; as, perhaps, was our life together. We didn’t want to call a doctor immediately in case it passed off of its own accord, and I put her to bed (in our hotel bed, our marriage bed) and left her to go to sleep, as if that might make her better. And she did appear to fall asleep and I remained silent so that she could rest and the best way of keeping silent without growing bored or being tempted to make some noise or speak to her was to go out on to the balcony and watch the outside world, watch the people of Havana passing by, observe how they moved, how they dressed, and listen to the murmur of their voices in the distance. But although I was looking out, my thoughts were still directed inwards, behind me, to the bed that Luisa was lying diagonally across, and so nothing in the outside world really held my attention. I was looking out rather like someone arriving at a party from which he knows the only person who really interests him will be absent, having stayed at home with her husband. That one person was in bed, ill, behind me, watched over by her husband.

Nevertheless, after a few moments of this looking without seeing, I did pick out one particular person. I picked her out because, during all that time, unlike the others, she hadn’t moved or shifted or disappeared from my field of vision, but had stayed on the same spot. She was a woman who, from a distance, looked about thirty and was wearing a yellow blouse with a scoop neck, a white skirt and white high-heeled shoes, and she carried a large black handbag over one arm, like the handbags women in Madrid used to carry when I was a child, big handbags carried over the arm, not over the shoulder the way they carry them now. She was waiting for someone, her attitude was unmistakably that of someone waiting, because every now and then she would walk up and down, just one or two steps, and on the last step she would – quickly, lightly – drag her heel along the ground, in a gesture of suppressed impatience. She didn’t lean against the wall, as people who are waiting usually do, to avoid getting in the way of the other people who are passing by and not waiting; she stood in the middle of the pavement, never going beyond those three measured steps that always returned her to the same spot, and so she frequently collided with passers-by; one passer-by said something to her and she responded angrily and threatened him with her voluminous bag. Every now and then she would look behind her, bending one leg and smoothing her tight skirt with one hand, as if fearing that some crease might be spoiling the line of her skirt at the rear, or perhaps she was simply adjusting the elastic of a recalcitrant pair of knickers through the fabric covering them. She didn’t look at her watch, she wasn’t wearing one, perhaps she was being guided by the hotel clock, somewhere above my head, invisible to me, with rapid glances I hadn’t noticed. Perhaps the hotel didn’t have a clock facing on to the street and she had no idea of the time. She looked like a mulatto, but from where I was standing, I couldn’t be sure.

Suddenly night fell, almost without warning, as happens in the tropics, and although the number of pedestrians didn’t instantly diminish, the loss of light made her seem more solitary to me, more alone and more condemned to wait in vain. The person she was supposed to meet would never arrive. She was standing with her arms crossed, her elbows cupped in her hands, as if, with every second that passed, her arms weighed more heavily, or perhaps it was her handbag that was growing heavier. She had strong legs, strong enough to withstand the wait, legs that seemed to dig into the pavement with their thin, high, stiletto heels, but her legs were so strong, so striking, that they became one with her heels and it was her legs that dug solidly in – like a knife in wet wood – every time she returned to her chosen spot after that minimal movement to right or left. Her heels stuck out over the backs of her shoes. I heard a slight murmur, or perhaps a moan, coming from the bed behind me, from Luisa, who was ill, from my new wife, about whom I was so concerned, who was my chosen task. But I didn’t turn my head, because it was a moan made as she slept, one quickly learns to distinguish the sounds made in their sleep by the person one sleeps with. At that moment the woman in the street looked up at the third floor where I was standing and, I think, noticed me for the first time. She peered up as if she were myopic or as if she were looking through grubby contact lenses and she seemed disconcerted, staring up at me, then looking away slightly, then screwing up her eyes to see better and again staring and looking away. Then she raised one arm, the arm without the handbag, in a gesture that neither greeted nor beckoned, I mean it wasn’t the way one would beckon to a stranger, it was a gesture of appropriation and recognition, finished off by a swift flourish of the fingers: it was as if, with that gesture of the arm and that rapid flutter of fingers, she was not so much trying to attract my attention as to grab hold of me. She shouted something I couldn’t hear because of the distance and I was sure that she was shouting at me. From the movement of her lips I could only make out the first word, and that word was “Hey!”, uttered with great indignation, as was the rest of the phrase that failed to reach my ears. As she spoke, she started walking, in order to get nearer, and to do so she had to cross the street and traverse the broad esplanade which, on our side of the road, separated the hotel from the pavement, distancing and protecting it a little from the traffic. When she took more than the few repetitive steps she’d ventured during her wait, I noticed that she walked slowly and with difficulty, as if she were unaccustomed to wearing high heels, or as if her strong legs weren’t used to them, or as if her handbag threw her off balance or as if she were dizzy. She walked rather in the way Luisa had walked after being taken ill, when she came into the room and fell on to the bed, where I had then half-undressed her and covered her up (tucking her in despite the heat). But in that uneasy gait of hers you could sense a certain grace too, albeit absent at that moment: when she was barefoot, the mulatto woman would walk elegantly, her skirt would float about her, dashing itself rhythmically against her thighs. My room was in darkness, no one had put on the light when night fell. Luisa was ill and asleep, I hadn’t moved from the balcony, I was watching the people of the city and then that woman, who was still stumbling towards me, still shouting words which, now, I could hear:

“Hey! What you doin’ up there?”

I was surprised when I understood what she was saying, but not so much because she was saying it to me as because of the way she said it, confidently, furiously, like someone ready to settle accounts with the person closest to them or the person they love, who is a source of endless irritation. It wasn’t because she felt she’d been being watched by a stranger from the balcony of a hotel intended for foreigners and had come to reproach me for having observed with impunity her fruitless wait, but because, when she looked up, she’d suddenly recognized in me the person for whom she’d been waiting for who knows how long, certainly since long before I’d first spotted her. She was still some way off, having crossed the road, dodging the few cars, not bothering with the traffic lights, and had now reached the edge of the esplanade, where she’d stopped, perhaps to rest her feet and her remarkable legs or to smooth her skirt again, more earnestly now that she could be seen by the person deemed worthy to judge and appreciate the way her skirt fell. She still kept looking up at me and then looking away again, as if she had a slight squint, her eyes kept shifting slightly to my left. Perhaps she’d stopped and stood at some distance in order to make it clear that she was angry and not prepared to meet me once she’d finally found me out, as if she hadn’t already suffered or been wronged enough up until only a few minutes before. Then she said other things, all accompanied by that same gesture made with her arm and her mobile fingers, that grasping gesture, as if she were saying: “Come here you” or “You’re mine”. But her voice was saying – and she had a vibrant, sonorous, unpleasant voice, like that of a television presenter or a politician giving a speech or a teacher in class (although she seemed illiterate):

“What you doin’ up there? You don’t see how I been waitin’ one hour down here? Why you don’t tell me you gone up already?”

I think that’s how she said it, with that slight change in the word order and that odd turn she gave to the tenses, different from the way I or, I suppose, anyone else from my country would have said it. Although I was still startled and beginning to be afraid that her shouting might waken Luisa who was sleeping behind me, I could see her face more clearly now, the face of a very light-skinned mulatto, perhaps a quarter Black, more evident in her large lips and her rather flat nose than in her skin colour, which was not so very different from that of Luisa, lying on the bed, who’d spent several days tanning herself on the beaches for newlyweds in Miami. The woman had her eyes screwed up but even so they seemed to me to be pale, grey or green or perhaps hazel, but maybe, I thought, she’d had some tinted lenses made, the reason for her deficient vision. In her rage, her nostrils were vehemently flared (which made her look as if she’d been running) and she moved her mouth a lot (I would have been able to read her lips without any difficulty had I had to), grimacing in the way women in my own country do, expressive, that is, of utter scorn. She continued to approach, growing more and more indignant at my lack of response, still repeating the same gesture with her arm, as if she had no other means of expression, just a long bare arm beating the air, her fingers simultaneously darting forth for a moment as if to catch me and drag me towards her, like a claw: “You’re mine” or “I kill you”.

“You got no sense? You lost your tongue? Why you don’t answer?”

She was quite close now, she’d taken some ten or twelve steps across the esplanade, enough for her strident voice not only to be heard, but to begin to thunder round the room; enough too, I thought, for her to see me quite clearly, however short-sighted she was, and it therefore seemed certain that I was the person with whom she’d arranged this important meeting, the person who’d worried her with my lateness and had offended her by my silent vigil on the balcony, a vigil that continued to offend her. But I knew no one in Havana, more than that, it was the first time I’d ever been to Havana, on honeymoon with my new wife. I turned round at last and saw Luisa sitting up in bed, her eyes fixed on me but not yet recognizing me or realizing where she was, the feverish eyes of the sick person who wakes up frightened, having received no warning while they slept that they were about to waken. She was sitting up and her bra had shifted to one side as she slept or with the brusque movement she’d just made when she sat up: it had slipped to reveal her shoulder and part of one breast, it must be uncomfortable, in her ill, drowsy state she must have trapped it unknowingly with her own body.

“What’s wrong?” she said apprehensively.

“Nothing,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

But I didn’t dare go over to her and stroke her hair to calm her down properly and help her back to sleep, as I would have done under normal circumstances, because what I didn’t dare do at that moment was abandon my post on the balcony, or even take my eyes off that woman who was convinced she had an arrangement to meet me, or to shrink any longer from the abrupt dialogue being demanded of me from the street. It was a shame we spoke the same language and that I understood her, because what was not as yet a dialogue was becoming increasingly violent, perhaps precisely because it wasn’t a dialogue.

“I kill you, you bastard! I swear, I kill you here and now!” the woman was shouting from the street.

She was shouting this from her position at ground-level, unable to see me, because just at the moment I’d turned round to say a few words to Luisa, the mulatto woman had lost a shoe and fallen over, without hurting herself but instantly dirtying her white skirt. She was shouting: “I kill you”, and getting to her feet, she’d taken quite a tumble, her handbag still over her arm – she hadn’t let it go for an instant, she wouldn’t let go of that bag if they flayed her alive – she was trying to dust herself off or clean her skirt with one hand and she had one foot bare, raised in the air, as if she wanted at all costs to avoid putting it down on the ground, not even the tips of her toes, and thereby dirty the sole of her foot, the foot that the man whom she’d finally found would see, close to, upstairs, and later on, possibly touch. I felt guilty about her, about her wait and her fall and my silence, and guilty too about Luisa, my new wife, who needed me now for the first time since the ceremony, even if only for a moment, the moment it would take to dry the sweat beading her forehead and her shoulders and to adjust or remove her bra so that it didn’t cut into her and to talk her back into the sleep that would make her better. I couldn’t give her that moment just then, how could I? I had a strong sense of their two presences almost paralysing and silencing me, one outside and one inside, before my eyes and behind my back, how could I? I felt a duty towards both of them, there must be some mistake, I had no reason to feel guilty towards my wife for anything, apart from a minimal delay at the moment when she needed me to tend to her and calm her, and still less towards an offended stranger, regardless of her conviction that she knew me and that I was the person who had offended her. She was wobbling about trying to put her shoe back on without touching the ground with her bare foot. Her skirt was a little too tight to accomplish this manoeuvre successfully, the bones of her feet were too long, and she wasn’t shouting while she was engaged in this, she was merely muttering, you can’t pay much attention to other people when you’re struggling to regain your composure. She had no option but to put her foot down, where it was instantly dirtied. She lifted it up again as if the ground were contaminated or red hot and brushed off the dust the way Luisa brushed off the dry sand from her skin just before leaving the beach, sometimes when night was already falling; she put her toes into the shoe, into the instep, then, with the forefinger of one hand (the hand not holding the handbag), she adjusted the heelstrap that stuck out beneath the strap on the instep (Luisa’s bra strap would still be awry, but I couldn’t see it at that moment). Her strong legs stepped firmly again, stamping the pavement as if they had hooves. She gave three more steps without looking up and when she did, when she opened her mouth to insult me or threaten me and began for the nth time to make that prehensile movement, like a lion’s claw, the grasping gesture that meant: “You won’t get away from me” or “You’re mine” or “I’ll see you in hell”, she left it raised in mid-air, her bare arm frozen in action, like that of an athlete. I saw her newly shaved armpit, she’d shaved it carefully for her date. She glanced again to my left then back at me, glanced to my left and again at me.

“What is going on?” asked Luisa again from her bed. Her voice was fearful, full of a double fear, internal and external, she was afraid of what was happening to her body, so far from home, and of whatever it was that was going on out there, on the balcony, out in the street, of what was happening to me and not to her, for married couples soon get used to the idea that whatever happens, happens to them both. It was night and our room was still in darkness, she must be feeling so confused that she hadn’t even thought to switch on the bedside lamp next to her. We were on an island.

The woman in the street stood there with her mouth open, not saying anything, and put her hand to her cheek, the hand which, disappointed and ashamed, had slipped gently down from on high. There was no misunderstanding now.

“Oh, sorry,” she said after a few seconds. “I thought you someone else.”

All her anger dissolved in an instant and she realized what had happened – that was the worst part – that she realized she’d have to go on waiting, perhaps on the same spot she’d been before, not beneath the balconies, she’d have to return to her original place on the other side of the street beyond the esplanade, to perform that same swift, furious dragging of her sharp heel after every two or three steps, three blows with an axe followed by a stab, or a stab followed by three blows with an axe. She was suddenly disarmed, docile, drained of all her rage and energy, and I don’t think she was worried so much about what I might think of her mistake and of her bad temper – in her green eyes, I was after all a stranger – as about the fact that she still ran the risk of her date not turning up. She was looking at me with her vague, grey gaze suddenly lost in thought, a little apologetic, a little indifferent, though only slightly apologetic, for what predominated was bitterness. Should she leave or go on waiting, having thought the waiting was over?

“No problem,” I said.

“Who are you talking to?” asked Luisa, who, without my assistance, was emerging from her stupor, although not from the darkness (her voice was rather less hoarse now and her question more precise; perhaps she couldn’t understand why it was so dark).

But I still didn’t reply or go over to the bed to calm her and smooth her sheets, because at that moment the doors of the balcony to my left were flung noisily open and I saw two male arms appear and lean on the iron balustrade, or rather grab hold of it as if it were not in fact fixed, and then call out:

“Miriam!”

Hesitant and confused, the mulatto woman looked up again, there was no doubt this time about the direction of her gaze, to my left, towards the balcony doors that had been flung open and the strong arms that were all I could see, a man’s long arms, a man in shirtsleeves, the white sleeves rolled up, the arms hairy, as hairy or even hairier than mine. I’d ceased to exist, I’d disappeared, I too was in shirtsleeves, I’d rolled my sleeves up when, some time before, I’d gone out to lean on the balcony, but now I’d disappeared because I was myself again, that is, because for her I was once more no one. On the ring finger of his right hand the man was wearing a wedding ring like mine, except that I wore mine on my left hand, I’d done so for only two weeks now and was still not used to it. The man wore his large, black watch on the wrist of the same arm, whilst I wore mine on the other. He was probably left-handed. The mulatto woman wore neither watch nor rings. I realized that the figure of that man must have been half-visible to her all the time, unlike me, clearly visible as I stood with my elbows resting on the balustrade. Now the positions were reversed, I’d been wiped out at a stroke and was invisible and now it was the man I couldn’t see, just as I couldn’t see Luisa, to whom my back was still turned. Perhaps that man had been repeatedly going over to the windows then moving away again, though never opening the balcony doors, according to whether or not he could feel the grey-green eyes of the woman in the street – that myopic, inoffensive gaze – fixed on him. He’d been blithely playing hide-and-seek, or rather neither hide nor seek, and she was right in fact, her date had already gone up to the hotel room without telling her, to watch her waiting from a distance, to observe her anxious pacing up and down – three steps forward, three steps back – and then her stumbling advance and her fall, her putting on of her shoe again, just as I had done.

The odd thing was that Miriam’s response was nothing like her response to me had been when she thought I was someone else, that I was that man with the long, strong, hairy arms, who wore both watch and wedding ring on his right hand. When she saw him and knew for certain that it was he, when she saw the person she’d waited for so long and heard him call her name, she didn’t gesture or shout at him. She didn’t insult him or threaten him or say: “I’ll get you” or “I kill you”, brandishing her bare arm and her impetuous fingers at him, perhaps because, unlike me, when she thought I was him, he’d spoken to her and said her name. The woman’s expression changed: a look of relief, just for an instant, and then promptly – almost gratefully, a gratitude aimed at no one in particular – with more elegance in her step than she’d shown up until then (as if she were walking barefoot and her legs were not so stiff), she crossed the stretch of esplanade still separating her from the hotel and went in carrying her large black bag, which apparently weighed less heavily now, thus disappearing from my field of vision without addressing another word to me, reconciled to the world again with those few short steps. The balcony doors on my left closed and then opened again to stand ajar, as if the breeze had blown them open or the man had simply thought better of it a second after closing them (there wasn’t any breeze) and wasn’t sure how he’d want to have them when the woman was upstairs with him, any minute now (the woman would be coming up the stairs). And then finally (although very little time had passed and Luisa must have felt that she’d still only just woken up), I left my place at the window, switched on the bedside lamp and went solicitously over to our bed, a somewhat delayed solicitude.

I STILL FIND that delay inexplicable and even then I sincerely regretted it, not because it might have any consequences, but because of what, in an excess of scruple and zeal, I thought it might mean. And whilst it’s true that I immediately linked that marital tardiness with the first feeling of unease I mentioned, and with the fact that since our wedding it had become increasingly difficult for me to think about Luisa (the more corporeal and continuous her presence, the more removed and remote she seemed), the appearance of the second feeling of unease, which I’ve also mentioned, was due not to my laconic contemplation of the mulatto woman and to my brief moment of negligence, but to what happened once I had ministered to Luisa and dried the sweat from her forehead and her shoulders and undone her bra so that it wouldn’t cut into her, leaving her to decide whether to keep it on, even though it was unfastened, or to take it off. With the light on, Luisa brightened up a little and wanted to drink something, and once she had, she felt better, and once she felt better she was in the mood to talk a little, and when she’d calmed down and saw that the sheets were less clammy and that she felt more composed with the bed in order and, above all, understood and accepted the idea that it was now night and that for her, whether she liked it or not, the day had ended and there was no possibility of resuming anything and all she could do now was to try and forget about her illness and bury it in sleep until the next morning, when, presumably, everything would return to the somewhat anomalous normality of our honeymoon and her body would have sorted itself out and would once more be fully corporeal, then she remembered my moment of inattention, which she’d certainly not perceived as such or, rather, what she remembered was that I’d said: “No problem” to some unknown person in the street below and that voices and shouts heard in dreams or in half-sleep had risen up from the street and woken her and possibly frightened her.

“Who were you talking to earlier on?” she asked again.

I saw no reason not to tell her the truth and yet I had the feeling as I did so that I wasn’t doing so. At that moment, I was holding a towel one corner of which I’d moistened with water and was busy cooling her face, her throat, the back of her neck (her long, dishevelled hair clung to her skin and a few stray hairs lay across her forehead like fine lines sent by the future to cast a momentary shadow over her).

“No one, a woman who mistook me for someone else. She mixed our balcony up with the one next door. She must be very shortsighted, because it was only when she was right up close that she realized I wasn’t the man she’d arranged to meet. He’s in there.” I indicated the wall that separated us from Miriam and the man. There was a table against the wall and above it a mirror, in which, when we moved or sat up, we could see ourselves from the bed.

“But why was she shouting at you? She seemed to shout a lot. Or did I dream it? I’m so hot.”

I left the towel at the foot of the bed and stroked her cheek and her round chin several times. There was still something nebulous about her large, dark eyes. If she’d had a temperature before, it had gone down now.

“I’ve no idea, since it wasn’t me she was shouting at but the other man she’d mistaken me for. God knows what they can have done to each other.”

While I was taking care of Luisa (though without paying much attention, because I was tending to her and doing various other things at the same time and going to and fro between the room and the bathroom), I’d heard the tapping of high heels reach the door along from ours and heard how it opened without her knocking and then, apart from a slight creaking (only briefly) and the gentle thud as it closed again (very slowly), there was nothing but an indistinguishable murmur, whispered words that I couldn’t make out despite their being spoken in my own language and despite the fact that, according to the noise I’d heard shortly before, their balcony doors were ajar and I still hadn’t closed ours. My concern at the inexcusable delay was joined by another, my concern at my feeling of impatience. I felt as if I were impatient not only to calm Luisa and smooth her sheets and, as far as I could, alleviate the effects of her transitory illness, but also to stop her asking me any more questions and simply go back to sleep, for there was no time to explain my curiosity to her nor was she in any state to interest herself in anything outside her own body, and while we exchanged a few words and I went to the bathroom to moisten the corner of the towel and gave her a drink and stroked her chin, the chin I was so fond of, the slight noises I myself was making and our own short, fragmented sentences prevented me from paying attention and attuning my ears to any individual word I might be able to make out amongst the murmurings next door which I was impatient to decipher.

And I was impatient because I was aware that what I didn’t hear now I never would hear; there would be no instant replay, as there can be when you listen to a tape or watch a video and can press the rewind button, rather, any whisper not apprehended or understood there and then would be lost for ever. That’s the unfortunate thing about what happens to us and remains unrecorded, or worse still, unknown or unseen or unheard, for later, there’s no way it can be recovered. The day we didn’t spend together we never will have spent together, what someone was going to say to us over the phone when they called and we didn’t answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of that lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you. But even if we were together that day or at home when that person phoned or we dared to speak to them, overcoming our fear and forgetting the risks involved, even then, none of that will ever be repeated and consequently a time will come when having been together will be the same as not having been together, and having picked up the phone the same as not having done so, and having dared to speak to you the same as if we’d remained silent. Even the most indelible things are of fixed duration, just like the things that leave no trace or never even happen, and if we’re far-sighted enough to note down or record or film those things, and accumulate loads of souvenirs and mementos and even try to replace what has happened by a simple note or record or statement, so that, right from the start, what in fact happens are our notes or our recordings or our films and nothing more, even in that infinite perfecting of repetition we will have lost the time in which those events actually took place (even if it were only the time it took to note them down) and while we try to relive it or reproduce it or make it come back and prevent it becoming the past, another different time will be happening, and in that other time we will doubtless not be together, we will pick up no phones, we will not dare to do anything, unable to prevent any crime or death (on the other hand, we won’t commit any or cause any) because, in our morbid attempt to prevent time from ending, to cause what is over to return, we will be letting that other time slip past us as if it were not ours. Thus what we see and hear comes to be similar and even the same as what we didn’t see or hear, it’s just a question of time, or of our own disappearance. And, despite that, we cannot stop focusing our lives on hearing and seeing and witnessing and knowing, in the belief that these lives of ours depend on our spending a day together or answering a phone call or daring to do something or committing a crime or causing a death and knowing that that was how it was. Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences, by its apparent repetitiveness, gradually cancels itself out, negates itself, until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable. What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. Or perhaps there never was anything.

It may be that not one word passed between Miriam and the man during all the time I thought I might be missing what they said. Perhaps they just looked at each other or stood locked in a silent embrace or went over to the bed to get undressed, or perhaps she simply took off her shoes, showing the man the feet she’d so carefully washed before leaving home and which were now tired and aching (the sole of one of them dirty from contact with the pavement). They obviously didn’t hit each other or become embroiled in a fight or anything like that (I mean in hand-to-hand combat), because when you do that you immediately start breathing hard and shouting, either just before or afterwards. Perhaps, like me (although I was doing it for Luisa’s benefit and going to and fro), Miriam went to the bathroom and shut herself in without saying a word, to look at herself and regain her composure and do her best to erase from her face the accumulated expressions of anger and tiredness and disappointment and relief, wondering which would be the most appropriate, the most advantageous face to wear to confront the left-handed man with the hairy arms who’d found it amusing or diverting to have her wait for no reason and to have her mistake me for him. Perhaps now she’d make him wait for a while, with the bathroom door shut, or perhaps that wasn’t what she wanted at all, perhaps she just wanted to sit on the lid of the toilet or on the edge of the bath weeping secret tears, having first taken out her lenses if she wore them, drying her eyes and burying her face in a towel until she managed to calm down, wash her face, put on her make-up and be in a fit state to come out again and pretend that everything was all right. I was impatient to start listening, and for that I needed Luisa to go back to sleep, to stop being corporeal and continuous, to remove herself and become remote, and I needed to sit still in order to listen through the wall on which the mirror hung or through the open balcony doors or, stereophonically, through both.

I speak and understand and read four languages including my own and that’s why, I suppose, I’ve spent part of my working life as a translator and interpreter at congresses, meetings and seminars, especially political ones, sometimes at the highest level (on two occasions I’ve acted as interpreter between two heads of state; well, one was only a prime minister). I suppose that’s why I have a tendency (as does Luisa, who is also an interpreter, except that we don’t share exactly the same languages and she’s less career-minded than I am and works less than I do, and so the tendency is not so marked in her) to want to understand everything that people say and everything I hear, both at work and outside, even at a distance, even if it’s in one of the innumerable languages I don’t know, even if it’s in an indistinguishable murmur or an imperceptible whisper, even if it would be better that I didn’t understand and what’s said is not intended for my ears, or is said precisely so that I won’t catch it. I can disconnect, but only in certain irresponsible states of mind or by making a great effort, and that’s why sometimes I’m glad that murmurs really are indistinguishable and whispers imperceptible and that there are so many languages that are strange and impenetrable to me, because then I can rest. When I know and accept that however much I want or try to understand, I simply can’t, then I feel calm and indifferent and I can rest. There’s nothing I can do, it’s out of my hands, I’m useless, and my ears can rest, as can my head, my memory and my tongue, because, when I do understand, I can’t help but translate, automatically and mentally, into my own language and quite often (luckily not always, perhaps even without being aware that I’m doing it), if what reaches my ears is in Spanish, I even translate that in my head into one of the other three languages I speak and understand. I often even translate the expressions, glances and gestures, it’s a substitute, a habit, and it seems to me that even objects say something when they come into contact with those gestures, glances and expressions. When all else fails, I listen to the sounds which I know to be articulated, meaningful, and yet, nevertheless, remain indecipherable: I can’t separate them out into individual sounds or units. That’s the chief curse of the working interpreter, when for some reason (terrible diction, a thick foreign accent, my own absent-mindedness), you can’t separate or select and you lose the thread and everything you hear sounds identical, a jumble or an uninterrupted flow, that might just as well have remained unuttered, since the fundamental thing is to distinguish individual words, the way you have to distinguish individuals if you want to get to know them. But when that happens and you’re not at work, it’s also your main consolation: only then can you rest completely and not pay attention or remain alert, and find pleasure instead in listening to voices (the insignificant murmur of speech), which you know not only have nothing to do with you, but which you are, besides, unqualified to interpret or transmit or memorize or transcribe or understand. Nor even to repeat.

But in that hotel room which, I believe, had once been the Sevilla-Biltmore or was built on the site where the latter had once stood (but that might not be the case, I don’t really know, I hardly know anything about the history of Cuba, despite being a quarter Cuban), I felt inclined neither to rest nor to ignore the murmur coming from the room next door, as I had before, for example, when I heard the more general murmur of people walking the city streets outside below my balcony, on the contrary, I realized that, without meaning to be, I was in fact extremely alert and, as they say, with my ears pricked, and that if I was to hear anything I required absolute silence, with no clinking of glasses or rustling of sheets or the sound of my own footsteps coming and going between the room and the bathroom, nor the sound of running water from the tap. Nor, of course, Luisa’s enfeebled voice, even though she wasn’t saying very much or attempting to hold a proper conversation with me. There’s nothing worse than trying to listen to two things at once, two voices; there’s nothing worse than trying to understand when two or more people all talk at once, without waiting their turn. That’s why I wanted Luisa to go back to sleep, not only for her own good and so that she would get better, but above all so that I could apply all my interpretative faculties and experience to listening to what Miriam and the left-handed man would be saying to each other in that low murmur.

The first words I could make out clearly were spoken in a tone of exasperation, like someone repeating for the nth time something that the person who’s heard it all before neither believes nor understands nor accepts. It was a mitigated exasperation, habitual, and that was why the voice, the man’s voice, wasn’t a shout but a whisper.

“I tell you my wife is dying.”

Miriam responded at once, infected by the exasperation in which both, I suddenly realized, must be permanently immersed, at least when they were together: her words and the man’s first sentence formed a group, which I suddenly heard with scarcely any effort at all.

“But she never die. She been dyin’ for a year now and still she never die. Why you don’t just kill her? You got to get me out of here.”

There was a silence and I didn’t know whether it was because he was saying nothing or because he’d dropped his voice still further in order to reply to Miriam’s plea, which was, perhaps, not her habitual one.

“What do you want me to do, smother her with a pillow? I can’t do any more than I’m already doing, which is quite enough. I’m letting her die. I’m doing nothing to help her. I’m pushing her towards death. I don’t always give her the drugs the doctor prescribes for her, I ignore her, I don’t treat her with any affection, I make her suffer, I feed her suspicions, I take away from her the little will to live that remains to her. Isn’t that enough? There’s no point in making a wrong move now. Even if I divorced her, things would drag on for at least a year and, on the other hand, she could die at any moment. She might be dead now. Do you realize that the phone could ring this very minute to give me the news?” The man paused and added in a different tone of voice, as if he were saying it incredulously, half smiling despite himself: “She’s probably dead already. Don’t be a fool. Don’t be so impatient.”

The woman had a Caribbean accent, presumably Cuban, although my grandmother remains my only real reference point (the Cubans are not assiduous visitors to international congresses) and she’d left Cuba in 1898 at a very early age along with the rest of her family and, according to what she said when she spoke of her childhood, there was a tremendous variety of accents on the island; she, for example, could distinguish someone from the province of Oriente, someone from Havana and someone from Matanzas. The man, on the other hand, had the same accent as me, a Spaniard from Spain or rather from Madrid, neutral, correct, like the accent they used to use for dubbing films, the accent I still have. Their conversation was almost routine, it probably only varied in the details, Miriam and the man must have had that conversation hundreds of times. But for me it was new.

“I’m not bein’ impatient, I been patient a long time and still she don’t die. You make her suffer you say, but you never tell her about me and that telephone never rings. How I know she really dyin’? How I know it not one big lie? I never see her, I never been to Spain, for all I know, you not even married and this is all one big story you make up. Sometimes I think you don’t even got a wife.”

“Oh, really. And what about my papers and the photos?” said the man. He had the same accent as me but his voice was very different. Mine is deep and his was sharp, almost shrill amidst the murmurs. It didn’t seem the right voice for such a hairy man, more like that of a crooner, who makes no effort at all to vary his natural or artificial timbre when he speaks, it would harm his singing voice. His voice sounded like a saw.

“What I know about photographs? Could be your sister, could be some other person, could be your lover. You could have other lover and me. And don’t talk to me about papers. I don’t trust you no more. Your wife she been goin’ to die every day tomorrow for one year now. Either she die pronto or you better leave me.”

That’s more or less what they said, as far as I can remember and transcribe it. Luisa seemed to be dozing and I’d sat down at the foot of the bed, my feet on the floor, my back straight, not leaning against anything, watching over her, my body slightly tensed so as not to make any noise (the springs, my breathing, my clothes). I could see myself in the mirror on the wall, that is, I could if I wanted to, because when you listen very intently you don’t see anything, as if any sense strained to breaking point excludes the use of all the others. Had I looked I would also have seen the shape of Luisa beneath the sheets, curled up behind me, or rather, only her body, which, since she was lying down, was all that appeared in the field of vision of the half-length mirror. To see more of her, her head, I would have had to stand up. After Miriam’s last words (though it may simply have been that I now had enough information to imagine what I couldn’t see or hear) I thought I heard her get up angrily and walk once or twice around the room, doubtless identical to ours (as if she wanted to leave but was still unable to do so, still waiting for something, for her own anger to pass), because I heard the creak of floorboards: if I was right, she must have taken her shoes off, for I didn’t hear the tap of high heels but the pad of bare heels and toes, perhaps she was naked, perhaps both of them had got undressed during the period when I could still hear nothing, perhaps they’d begun their embraces and then interrupted or abandoned them in order to speak in the exasperated tones that were normal and habitual to them. A couple, I thought, who depend and feed on the obstacles in their lives, a couple who will fall apart when there are none, unless they’re driven apart first by those same wearisome, stubborn obstacles, which, nevertheless, they will still have to feed and tend and do their best to eternalize, if they’ve already reached the point of being unable to do without you and without me, that is, one without the other.

“Do you really want me to leave you?”

There was no reply or perhaps he just didn’t wait long enough for one, because then, more steadily this time but still in that wounding whisper, the saw-like voice went on:

“Tell me, is that what you really want? You don’t want me to phone you any more when I come here? You don’t want to know that I’ve arrived, that I’m here, and when? Do you want two months and then three months and then another two months to go by without seeing me or knowing anything about me, not even if my wife has died?”

The man must have got up too (from the bed or from an armchair, I don’t know) and gone over to where she was standing, probably not naked, only barefoot, no one stands naked in the middle of a room for more than a few seconds, unless they’ve paused on their way somewhere else, the bathroom or the fridge. Even if it’s very hot. It was very hot. The man’s voice went on, more calmly now and perhaps, because of that, no longer in a whisper, but still in the artificial tone of a singer saving his voice even in an argument; he had an extremely sharp voice when he spoke normally too, it shook, like the voice of a preacher or a gondolier.

“I’m your only hope, Miriam. I have been for a year now and no one can live without hope. Do you think you’re going to find another man that easily? No one in the colony, that’s for sure, no one’s going to want to poke around anywhere I’ve already been.”

“Guillermo, you one real bastard,” she said.

“Think what you like, it’s up to you.”

A brisk exchange of words, Miriam perhaps accompanying her words with some new gesture of her expressive arm. And then silence fell again, the silence or pause required for the person doing the insulting to retreat and ingratiate him or herself, though without withdrawing the insult or apologizing, when the abuse is mutual it dissolves of its own accord, the way it does in quarrels between brothers and sisters when they’re still young. Or else it accumulates, until the next time. Miriam must have been thinking. She must have been thinking about something she knew only too well and had thought about on innumerable occasions and which I was thinking about even though I knew nothing about the situation nor what had gone on before. I was thinking that the man, Guillermo, was right, he held all the cards. I was thinking that Miriam’s only option was to go on waiting and to do her best to make herself ever more indispensable to him, by whatever means, however fraudulent, and to try to pressurize him as little as possible and certainly not order or demand the violent death of the wife lying ill in Spain, who knew nothing about what happened every time her husband, the diplomat or industrialist or, perhaps, businessman, went to Havana on business or on a mission. I thought Miriam might well be right in her suspicions and complaints, that it was all a lie and there was no wife in Spain, or perhaps there was but she was in perfect health and unaware that for an unknown mulatto woman on another continent she was a dying woman whose death was awaited with expectation and desire, a woman whose death was perhaps prayed for and, worse still, anticipated or hastened in thought and word, in that city on the other side of the world.

I didn’t know whose side to take, because when you’re privy to an argument (even if you don’t actually witness it, but only hear it: when you’re privy to anything and get to know something about it) it’s almost impossible to remain totally impartial, to feel neither sympathy nor antipathy, animosity or pity for one of the contenders, or for a third party of whom they speak, that’s the curse of the person who does the seeing or listening. I realized that, given the impossibility of knowing the truth, I had no idea which side to take, not that I’ve always considered that to be a deciding factor when it comes to taking sides about things or people. Perhaps the man had ensnared Miriam with false promises that became increasingly untenable, but it was just as likely that he hadn’t done so at all, and that she, on the other hand, was merely using Guillermo to escape from her isolation and poverty, from Cuba, to better herself, to get married or rather to be married to him, so as not to have to go on occupying her own place in life but to occupy someone else’s instead, most people only move in order to give up their own position in the world and to usurp that of another, and for one reason only, to forget about themselves and to bury what they were, we all at some time grow unutterably weary of being who we are and who we were. I wondered how long Guillermo had been married. I’d only been married for two weeks and the last thing I wanted was for Luisa to die, on the contrary, it was precisely the fear of that, provoked by her brief illness, that had been worrying me only a short time before. What I heard through the wall did nothing to calm me or to dispel the feeling of unease which, as I’ve explained, had been haunting me in various guises ever since the wedding ceremony. That overheard conversation was intensifying my sense of impending doom and I suddenly looked at myself in the dimly lit mirror on the wall opposite (the only light was some way off), at my figure sitting in the half-dark, with my shirtsleeves rolled up, still young if I took a benevolent or retrospective view, willing to recognize in myself the person I had been up until then, but almost middle-aged if I took a long-term or pessimistic view, imagining what I would be like in the not so distant future. In the room next door, beyond the shadowy mirror, was another man for whom I’d been mistaken by a woman in the street and who, therefore, possibly bore some resemblance to me, he might be a little older and, for that reason, it could be assumed that he’d been married longer than I had, long enough, I thought, to desire the death of his wife, to push her towards death, as he’d put it. At some time in his life, whenever that was, he must have gone on honeymoon too, he must have had the same feeling I now had of something that was simultaneously beginning and ending, he must have risked his concrete future and lost his abstract future, until he too felt forced to seek out some hope of his own on the island of Cuba, where he often went on business. Miriam was also his hope, someone to think about, someone to worry about and to fear for and someone, perhaps, to be afraid of (I couldn’t forget that grasping, claw-like gesture, when it had been directed at me, “You’re mine”, “I’ll get you”, “Come here”, “You owe me”, “I kill you”). I looked at myself in the mirror and sat up a little, so that I could see my face more clearly in the distant light of the lamp on the bedside table and so that my features would look less sombre, less shadowy, less bereft of a past, less cadaverous; and as I did so, Luisa’s head, more brightly lit because nearer the lamp, also came into the mirror’s field of vision and I saw then that her eyes were open, her gaze somehow absent, her thumb brushing her lips, stroking them, a gesture typical of someone listening, or rather typical of her when she’s listening. When she saw that I was watching her in the mirror, she immediately closed her eyes and stopped moving her thumb, as if she wanted me to continue to believe that she was asleep, as if she didn’t want to give rise to any conversation between us, either now or later, about what both of us – I now realized – had overheard between our compatriot Guillermo and the light-skinned mulatto Miriam. She must, I thought, feel the same unease I was feeling, only more intensely, in double measure (a woman aspiring to the role of wife, a wife aspiring to the role of corpse), so much so that she preferred each of us to listen separately, alone, not together, and to keep to ourselves, unexpressed, the thoughts and feelings aroused by the conversation next door and the situation it implied, and to know nothing of what the other thought or felt, even though those thoughts or feelings might well be the same. That aroused the sudden suspicion in me that perhaps, contrary to appearances (she’d seemed so happy during the ceremony, had given me unreserved proof of her excitement, she was enjoying the trip so much, she’d been so angry that her indisposition forced her to miss an afternoon’s sightseeing in Havana), she also felt threatened by and concerned about the loss of her future, or by its sudden arrival. There was no dishonesty between us and so whatever we said, whatever we might say or argue about or reproach ourselves with (whatever might one day cast its shadow over us), wasn’t going to disappear of its own accord or be swallowed up by silence, but would be given its due weight, would influence whatever happened afterwards, whatever that might be (we still had half a lifetime to spend together); and just as I’d abstained from putting into words what I’m putting into words now (my presentiments since the wedding), I realized that Luisa was closing her eyes to ensure that I wouldn’t make her share in my impressions regarding Guillermo and Miriam and his ailing Spanish wife, nor would she make me share in hers. It wasn’t out of dishonesty or lack of comradeship nor out of a desire for concealment. It was simply a matter of accepting the belief or superstition that what one doesn’t say doesn’t exist. And it’s true that the only things never translated are those never spoken or expressed.

While I was immersed in these reflections (only briefly) and having spent some seconds (very long seconds, possibly minutes) looking at Luisa’s head in the mirror and seeing that she was now keeping her eyes firmly shut, when before they had been open and thoughtful, I temporarily lost concentration, lost all sense of time (I was too busy looking to listen), or perhaps Guillermo and Miriam were still silent and were taking advantage of that pause to effect a wordless reconciliation, or else they’d dropped their voices so much that they were no longer speaking in those sharp murmurs, but in whispers that were completely inaudible from my side of the wall. I began listening again and, for a while, I heard nothing, there was nothing to hear, I even wondered if, during those few moments of distraction, they had, in fact, left the room without my noticing, had decided, perhaps, to call a truce and go downstairs to eat something, maybe they’d originally met in order to do just that and had had no intention of meeting upstairs at all. I couldn’t help thinking that their wordless reconciliation, if that’s what it was, would necessarily have been a sexual one, because sometimes where there’s mutual dishonesty one can only find reconciliation through sex, and that perhaps they would be standing up, fully clothed, in the middle of that room identical to mine, where they would have been standing before Miriam had said the final words I’d heard her say: “Guillermo, you one real bastard”, which she would have said barefoot. Those strong legs of hers, I thought, could survive any amount of standing, any attack, without weakening or retreating or looking for support, just as they’d waited in the street, stabbing the pavement like knives, she would no longer be worried about recalcitrant creases in her skirt, always assuming she still had it on of course, perhaps the skirt would be all in creases by now and her bag at last put aside, or perhaps her skirt would be draped over a chair. I don’t know, there wasn’t a sound, not even the sound of breathing, and that’s why, very carefully, but in fact not that carefully since I knew Luisa was awake and, besides, would certainly continue pretending to be asleep, I got up from the foot of the bed and went out on to the balcony again. By then it was night-time according to the clocks as well and the people of Havana would be having supper, the streets I could see from the hotel were almost empty, it was just as well that Miriam wasn’t still out there waiting, abandoned by everyone. The moon was mellow and there wasn’t a breath of wind. We were on an island, in a distant corner of the world whence, in a quarter part, I originated; both Madrid, the place in which our relationship had taken shape and where we would live together, and our marriage, seemed far, far away, and it was as if being far from the place that had brought us together had the effect, while on honeymoon, of slightly forcing us apart, perhaps that sense of distance came from our refusal to share what was a secret to neither of us, but which was, nonetheless, becoming a secret by virtue of our not sharing it. The moon was still mellow. Perhaps, I thought, leaning on the balcony rail, you can only desire or hasten the death of someone so close to you from afar. Perhaps doing it from a distance, planning it from a distance, makes it all into a game, a fantasy, and in fantasies everything’s allowed. Not so with facts, from which there’s no going back, no possible amendment, only concealment. And when it comes to overheard words there isn’t even that; with luck, there’s only a final forgetting.

Suddenly, from the balcony, through the doors rather than through the wall, through their balcony doors which had remained ajar and ours which had remained open and where I was now leaning on the balustrade, I again clearly heard Miriam’s voice and now she wasn’t talking but singing to herself and what she sang was this:

“Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake’s gonna eat me up, yen yen yen.”

She stopped almost as suddenly as she’d started and with no change of tone (no hint of exasperation either) she said to Guillermo:

“You must kill her.”

“All right, all right, I will, but for the moment just keep doing that with your hand,” he said. But that didn’t upset or worry or shock me (though I don’t know how Luisa felt) because he said it like a weary mother who says the first thing that comes into her head, if it will satisfy an importunate child wanting the impossible. More than that, his reply confirmed to me that if the woman in Spain did exist, Guillermo wouldn’t harm her and that the only person certain to get hurt in that situation, that affair, was Miriam. It confirmed to me that Guillermo was lying (lying about something) and I imagined that Luisa, accustomed, as I was, to translating and picking up the least tremor in someone’s voice and the sincerity or otherwise of the speaker, would also have realized and would have felt relieved not for Miriam but for the sick wife.

And Miriam – who would not at that point have picked up on Guillermo’s insincerity or would have decided to drop the matter and not give it any importance or allow herself to be taken in once more or simply give up for a while on her most cherished dream – started singing to herself again and I knew what she would sing. More time had passed than I thought, I thought, it wasn’t possible, there hadn’t been enough time for them to have had their regulation act of silent sexual reconciliation that would have brought them peace. But that’s what must have happened, because it seemed now that the two of them were quietly recumbent, Miriam was even somewhat abstracted, singing abstractedly to herself, breaking off every now and then the way people do when they sing softly without even realizing that they are, while they’re having a wash or caressing the person at their side (a child they’re singing to). And what she sang was this:

“Mother-in-law, she lyin’, yen yen yen, we jus’ playin’, yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen.”

Those words did startle me, even more than the first words she’d sung, because they only confirmed my initial reaction (sometimes you hear correctly but you can’t believe your ears) and I felt a slight shiver run through me, the way Luisa had shivered when she began to feel ill. And Miriam added in a neutral almost languid tone, again without any change of tone:

“If you don’t kill her, I kill myself. Then you get one woman’s death on your hands, either her or me.”

Guillermo didn’t reply this time, but my sense of surprise and the shiver that had run through me were provoked not by Miriam’s words but by the song, which I knew from way back, because my grandmother used to sing it to me when I was a child, or rather, she didn’t exactly sing it to me, because it wasn’t really a song for children but, in fact, formed part of a story or tale, which wasn’t meant for children either, but which she told me simply to frighten me, to fill me with pleasurable, lighthearted fear. But there were times too, when she was bored with sitting in an armchair in her apartment or in mine, fanning herself and watching the afternoon pass by until my mother came to fetch me or to take over from her, and then she’d sing songs without realizing she was doing so, to distract herself without intending to, she’d sing without even noticing what she was doing, in the same lacklustre, indifferent tone, in the same accent as Miriam by her half-open balcony doors. That unconscious singing intended for no one was the same song that maids used to sing when they were scrubbing floors or pegging out washing or hoovering or languidly dusting on days when I was ill and stayed away from school and saw the world from my pillow, listening to them in their morning mood, so different from their evening one; the same mindless singing my own mother went in for when she sat in front of the mirror brushing or pinning up her hair or when she stuck a large decorative comb in her hair and put on long earrings to go to Mass on Sundays, that almost muttered feminine song sung between clenched teeth (with pegs or hairpins clenched between those clenched teeth) which isn’t sung in order to be heard, still less interpreted or translated, but which someone, the child nestling amongst his pillows or leaning at a door other than his own bedroom door, hears and learns and never forgets, even if only because that song, unintended, intended for no one, is, despite everything, transmitted and not silenced or diluted once it’s sung, when followed by the silence of adult, or perhaps I should say masculine life. In the Madrid of my childhood, that involuntary, fluctuating song must have been sung in every house, every morning for years, like a meaningless message knitting together the whole city, binding it together and making it harmonious, a persistent veil of contagious sound covering everything, filling courtyards and doorways, wafting in at windows and down corridors, into kitchens and bathrooms, up stairways and rooftops, wearing aprons, pinafores, overalls and nightdresses and expensive gowns. All the women used to sing it in those days, days that are not so very long ago, maids sang it first thing in the morning as they yawned and stretched, ladies of the house and mothers sang it a little later on, as they were getting ready to go out shopping or perform some unnecessary errand, all of them united and made equal by that continuous, communal song occasionally accompanied by the whistling of young boys not yet at school and who, therefore, still participated in the world of women in which they moved: the delivery boys with their bikes and their heavy boxes, sick children in beds scattered with comics and coloured prints and storybooks, working children and idle children, whistling and envying one another. That song was sung all the time every day, by joyful voices and sorrowful voices, voices that were strident and downcast, dark-haired and melodious, tuneless and blonde, in every state of mind and in every circumstance, regardless of what was going on in the houses, unjudged by anyone: it was sung by a maid while she watched an ice-cream cake melting in my grandparents’ house, when they were not yet my grandparents because I hadn’t even been born, nor was there even a possibility of my being born; whistled by a boy on that same day in that same house as he walked down the corridor to the bathroom where, only shortly before, a woman full of fear and drenched in tears and water had also perhaps hummed some tune. And in the afternoons, that song would be sung by the more cracked and tenuous voices of grandmothers and widows and spinsters sitting in their rocking chairs or armchairs or on sofas keeping an eye on their grandchildren, keeping them occupied, or casting sideways glances at the portraits of people who’d already departed this life or whom they’d been unable to hold on to, sighing and fanning themselves, their whole lives spent fanning themselves even in autumn, even in winter, sighing and singing and watching past time passing. And at night, the song, more intermittent, more disparate, could still be heard in the bedrooms of those more fortunate women, who were not yet grandmothers or aunts or spinsters, a quieter, sweeter, more resigned song, a prelude to sleep, an expression of weariness, the same song Miriam had inadvertently sung to me in her hotel room identical to mine, after nightfall in Havana, such a hot night, on my honeymoon with Luisa, while Luisa neither sang nor spoke, but merely pressed her face into her pillow.

The songs my grandmother used to sing came mainly from her own childhood, songs from Cuba and from the black nannies who’d looked after her until she was ten years old, the age when she left Havana and moved to the country across the ocean where she and her parents and her sisters imagined they belonged but which they knew only by name. Songs and stories (I can no longer separate them out in my memory) full of animal characters with absurd names – Verum-Verum the Cow, Chirrinchinchín the Monkey – sombre stories, African stories, for example, as I remember it, Verum-Verum the Cow was much loved by the family who owned her, she was a beneficent, friendly cow, rather like a nanny or a grandmother, and yet one day, goaded by hunger or by evil thoughts, the members of the family decided to kill her and cook her and eat her, which, understandably enough, poor Verum-Verum the Cow found hard to forgive in people with whom she lived so closely, and right there in the dining room, the moment each member of the family ate a piece of her butchered, aged flesh (thereby participating in a kind of metaphorical anthropophagy) a cavernous voice that never ceased issued forth from their stomachs, tirelessly repeating in the booming voice affected by my grandmother, trying hard not to laugh: “Verum-Verum the Cow, Verum-Verum the Cow”, issuing ceaselessly forth from their stomachs for ever and ever. As for Chirrinchinchín the Monkey, his adventures were, I think, so multifarious that I’ve forgotten what they were, but I have the impression that the fate he suffered proved no kinder and that he ended up roasting on the spit of some unscrupulous white man. The song Miriam had sung in the next room had no meaning for Luisa and, in that respect, as regards our knowledge or understanding of what was going on and being said through the balcony doors and the wall, there was now at least one definite difference. Because my grandmother used to tell me that fragment of a story learned from her black nannies, a story whose obvious sexual symbolism I’d never noticed until that moment, when I heard Miriam singing it or, rather, when I heard her sing the gloomy, slightly comical song that formed part of the story my grandmother used to tell me to frighten me, to fill me with a fear that was both transitory and tinged with humour (it taught me what fear was and how to laugh at it): the story told how a young woman of great beauty and even greater poverty was sought in marriage by a very rich, handsome stranger with excellent prospects, a foreigner who’d installed himself in Havana amidst a show of great luxury and ambitious plans for the future. The girl’s mother, a widow who was dependent on her only daughter or rather on the success of her very necessary marriage, was beside herself with joy and gave the man her daughter’s hand in marriage without a moment’s hesitation. Throughout the wedding night, the mother kept a distrustful or knowing watch on the door of the newlyweds’ room and, again and again, she heard her daughter sing this plea for help: “Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake’s gonna eat me up, yen yen yen.” Any possible alarm the greedy mother might have felt was assuaged by her son-in-law’s repeated and eccentric reply, which he too sang again and again through the door, throughout the long night: “Mother-in-law, she lyin’, yen yen yen, we jus’ playin’, yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen.” The following morning, when the mother, and now mother-in-law, decided to go into the newlyweds’ bedroom to bring them breakfast and see their happy faces, she found only a huge snake coiled on the bloody, rumpled bed and not a trace of her dear, unfortunate daughter, so full of promise.

My grandmother, I remember, used to laugh when she told me that macabre tale to which, now that I’m an adult, I may perhaps have added some even more macabre detail (I don’t think she said anything about blood or how long the night was); she’d laugh that rather girlish laugh of hers (perhaps the laughter of her ten-year-old – possibly even younger – self, her resolutely Cuban laughter) and fan herself, making light of the story and ensuring that I and my ten-year-old – possibly even younger – self would make light of it too, or maybe any fear the tale could arouse was a uniquely female fear, a fear proper to daughters and mothers and wives and mothers-in-law and grandmothers and nannies, a fear that belonged in the same category as the instinctive singing of women throughout the day and at dead of night, in Madrid and in Havana and everywhere, the song in which boys also share only to forget it once they cease to be boys. I’d forgotten it too, but not entirely, for you can only be said truly to have forgotten something if you can’t even remember it when someone requires you to. I hadn’t thought of that song for years but Miriam’s resigned, abstracted voice didn’t need to insist or require in order for it to surface in my memory on my honeymoon with my wife Luisa, who was lying in bed ill and, on that night of mellow moonlight, was seeing the world from her pillow or was perhaps not ready to see it at all.

I returned to her side and stroked her hair and the back of her neck, which were again sticky with sweat, she had her face turned towards the wardrobe, her forehead perhaps, as before, crossed by fine hairs, like false, premonitory lines. I sat down at her right side and lit a cigarette, the end glowed in the mirror, I didn’t want to look at myself. Her breathing was not that of someone asleep and I whispered in her ear:

“You’ll feel better tomorrow, my love. Go to sleep now.”

I sat on our bed on the sheet and smoked for a while, hearing nothing further from the room next door: Miriam’s singing had been both the prelude to sleep and an expression of tiredness. It was too hot, I’d had no supper, I wasn’t sleepy, I wasn’t even tired, I didn’t sing or put out the light. Luisa was awake but not talking to me, she didn’t even respond to my good wishes, as if she were angry with me because of Guillermo, I thought, or because of Miriam, and didn’t want to show it, best let it dissolve into the sleep that refused to come. I thought I heard Guillermo close the balcony doors, but I was no longer leaning on my balcony and I didn’t go over there to check. I tapped the ash on my cigarette too hard, misjudged my aim, and it fell on to the sheet, and before picking it up with my fingers and putting it in the ashtray where it would bum itself out without burning anything else, I watched as it began to make a hole fringed with red on the sheet. I think I let it grow for longer than I should have, I watched it for some seconds, watched how the circle grew and widened, a stain that was at once black and fiery, consuming the sheet.

I’D MET LUISA, through my work, almost a year before, in a way that verged simultaneously on the comic and the solemn. As I’ve mentioned before, we both work mainly as translators or interpreters (in order to make a living); although I work more than she does, at least on a more regular basis, which in no way implies that I’m more competent at my job, she is, or was judged to be so on the occasion of our first meeting, or perhaps she was merely judged to be generally more reliable.

Luckily we don’t just work at the sessions and meetings held by international organizations. Although that does give one the incomparable luxury of having to work for only six months of the year (two months in London, Geneva, Rome, New York or Vienna or even Brussels and then two months at home, before returning for a further stint of two months or so in the same places), the task of the translator or interpreter of speeches and reports is boring in the extreme, both because of the identical and fundamentally incomprehensible jargon universally used by all parliamentarians, delegates, ministers, politicians, deputies, ambassadors, experts and representatives of all kinds from every nation in the world, and because of the unvaryingly turgid nature of all their speeches, appeals, protests, harangues and reports. People who have never done this kind of work might think it must be fun or, at the very least, interesting and varied, or more than that, they might even think that in a sense one is at the heart of world decisions with firsthand access to highly detailed and important information about every aspect of the lives of different races, political information, urban and agricultural information, information about armaments, cattle-raising, ecclesiastical matters, physical, linguistic, military and Olympic information, information about police matters and tourism, chemistry and propaganda, sex and television and viruses, sports and banking and cars, hydraulics and war studies and ecology and local customs. It’s true that, during my working life, I’ve translated speeches and texts by all kinds of people on the most unexpected subjects (at the start of my career I was chosen to utter the posthumous words of Archbishop Makarios, just to name one unusual example), and I’ve proved myself capable of repeating in my own language, or in any of the other languages I understand and speak, long diatribes on such absorbing subjects as the different types of irrigation in Sumatra or minorities in Swaziland and Burkina (formerly Burkina-Faso, capital city: Ouagadougou), who, like everyone else, are having a bad time of it; I’ve reproduced complicated justifications for providing children with sex education in the Venetian dialect, or the embarrassment of so doing; on the feasibility of continuing to finance the lethal and expensive weapons made by the South African factory Armscor, since, in theory, they can’t be exported; on the possibilities of building a replica of the Kremlin in Burundi or Malawi, I think it was (capital cities: Bujumbura and Zomba); on the need to split off from the Spanish peninsula the whole of the east coast (including Murcia) thus making it an island and avoiding the annual torrential rains and floods that are such a burden on the national budget; on a disease attacking marble in Parma, the spread of AIDS in the islands of Tristan da Cunha, the infrastructure of football in the Arab Emirates, low morale in the Bulgarian navy and, as happened a few years ago in Londonderry by order of a mayor who ended up being sacked, a strange ban on burying the dead, who instead were piled up in a stinking heap on a bit of waste ground. All this and more have I religiously translated and transmitted and repeated, exactly as spoken by others, by experts and scientists and luminaries and wise men from every discipline and from the most distant countries, unusual people, exotic people, erudite and eminent people, Nobel prizewinners and professors from Oxford and Harvard who would submit reports on the most surprising topics at the request of their governments or by representatives of their governments or by delegates or even by the deputies of those representatives.

The truth is that the translations are the only fully functioning element in these organizations, which are, in fact, gripped by a veritable translatorial fever, somewhat morbid and unhealthy, for every word pronounced (in session or assembly) and every scrap of paper sent, whatever the subject, whoever it is, in principle, addressed to or whatever its objective (even if it’s highly confidential), is immediately translated into several languages, just in case. When we’re working, we translators and interpreters do nothing but translate and interpret, indiscriminately and almost without a break, for the most part without anyone knowing why something is being translated or for whom it’s being interpreted, more often than not, if it’s a written text, it’s purely for the files and, if it’s a speech, for the few odds and sods who don’t understand the second language we’re translating into anyway. Some idiot has only to fire off some idiotic remark to one of these organizations for it to be instantly translated into all six official languages, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. Everything gets turned into French and into Arabic, into Chinese and Russian, be it the foolish thoughts of some enthusiast on the sidelines or some other idiot’s bright idea. Even if nothing is ever done about them, they get translated. I’ve often had passed to me for translation invoices that merely needed paying. I’m convinced those invoices will be kept in a file somewhere until the end of time, translated, at the very least, into French and Chinese, Spanish and Arabic, English and Russian. Once I got an urgent phone call in my booth asking me to translate an (unwritten) speech about to be given by a politician who, as I myself knew from the headlines splashed across the front pages of the papers two days before, had been killed in his own country during a coup d’état that had successfully achieved its goal of overthrowing him.

The greatest sources of tension in these international fora are not the fierce discussions between delegates and representatives on the verge of declaring war, but the occasions when, for some reason, there’s no translator available to translate or, and this is not an uncommon occurrence, when the translator collapses in the middle of some report for physical or psychological reasons. You have to have a cool head in this job, not so much because of the difficulties of understanding and transmitting what is said as it is said (which is difficult enough) but because of the pressure we’re under from politicians and experts, who get upset and even angry if they think there’s a chance that something they say might not be translated into one of those six celebrated languages. They watch us all the time, as do our immediate but remote bosses (civil servants all of them), to make sure that we’re always at our posts converting everything, omitting not a single word, into the other languages even though almost no one understands them. The one thing delegates and representatives really care about is being translated and interpreted, not having their speeches and reports approved of and applauded or having their proposals taken seriously or implemented, something which almost never happens (no approval, no applause, no being taken seriously, no implementation). At a meeting of the Commonwealth countries that took place in Edinburgh, at which, therefore, all the conference members spoke English, an Australian speaker called Flaxman was outraged when he saw that the interpreters’ booths were empty and that not one of his colleagues was listening to him through the headphones provided, but were, instead, sitting in their plump seats listening to him direct through the microphone. He demanded that his words be translated and when reminded that there was no need, he frowned, uttered a foul oath and began to exaggerate his already thick Australian accent to the point where it became unintelligible to members of other countries and even to certain members of his own, who all started complaining and immediately fell victim to the reflex action of the hardened congress member who reaches for the headphones the moment anyone utters anything he can’t understand. On finding that, contrary to custom, nothing issued forth from those headphones (not the slightest sound, clear or confused), they grew even more vociferous in their protests, and Flaxman threatened to go in person to one of the cabins and act as his own interpreter. He was already halfway down the aisle when someone intervened and an Australian interpreter was swiftly found to occupy the cabin and to turn into standard English the words his compatriot, a real “larrikin” to use the term he himself would have employed, was proclaiming from the platform in his incomprehensible accent typical of the inner city areas and docklands of Melbourne, Adelaide or Sydney. When he saw that a translator was now at his post duly mirroring the ideas contained in his speech, representative Flaxman immediately calmed down and, without his colleagues even noticing, since by then they’d all decided to listen to him indirectly through their headphones, through which everything sounds somehow both much more hesitant and much more important, resumed his normal, neutral, more or less correct diction. This was the culmination of the translatorial fever that pervades and dominates international fora, a translation from English into English, not entirely accurate either it would seem, since the rebellious Australian congress member spoke too fast for the inexperienced Australian interpreter to be able to repeat it all at the same speed, omitting nothing.

It’s odd how, deep down, all assembly members have more confidence in what they hear through their headphones, that is, through the interpreters, than in what they hear (the same thing only more coherently expressed) directly from the speaker, even if they’re perfectly capable of understanding the speaker’s own language. It’s odd because, in fact, no one can be sure that what the translator translates from his isolated cabin is correct or true and I need hardly say that, on many occasions, it’s neither one nor the other, due to ignorance, laziness, distraction or malice on the part of the interpreter doing the interpreting, or a bad hangover. That’s the accusation levelled at them by translators (that is, translators of written texts): whilst every invoice and every scrap of nonsense laboured over by the translators in their gloomy offices is relentlessly exposed to malicious revisions, and every error detected, denounced or even fined, no one bothers to check the words that the interpreters launch unthinkingly into the air from their cabins. Interpreters hate translators and translators hate interpreters (just as simultaneous translators hate consecutive translators and consecutive translators hate simultaneous translators) and, having worked as both translator and interpreter (though now I work solely as an interpreter, the advantages outweigh the fact that it leaves you utterly drained and affects your psyche), I’m familiar with the feelings associated with both jobs. Interpreters think of themselves as being some kind of demigod or demidiva simply because they’re on view to politicians and representatives and deputy delegates, who live only for them, or rather for their presence and the work they do. There’s no denying that they are on view to the world’s leaders, which is why they’re always so impeccably turned out, dressed up to the nines, and it’s not uncommon to glimpse them through the glass walls of their booths applying lipstick, combing their hair, adjusting the knot of a tie, plucking out hairs with tweezers, brushing off specks of dust from their suit or trimming their sideburns (they always have a vanity mirror to hand). This, of course, creates unease and rancour amongst the translators of written texts, hidden away in their squalid, shared offices, but also a sense of responsibility that makes them feel infinitely more serious and competent than the vain interpreters with their nice little individual booths, transparent, soundproof and even perfumed in some cases (favouritism is not unknown). Everyone despises and detests everyone else, but we all have one thing in common, which is that not one of us knows a thing about any of the fascinating topics I mentioned earlier. Despite the fact that I translated all the speeches and texts I spoke of before, I can barely remember a single word, not that I ever did and not because there’s a limit to how much information the memory can retain, but because, even at the moment I was translating I could remember nothing, that is, even then I had no idea what the speaker was saying nor what I said subsequently or, as one imagines happens, simultaneously. He or she said it and I said or repeated it, but in a mechanical way that has nothing whatsoever to do with intellection (more than that, the two activities are completely at odds), for you can only repeat more or less accurately what you hear if you neither understand nor assimilate any of it (especially if you’re receiving and transmitting without pause) and the same thing happens with written texts of this type, which have no literary merit whatsoever and which you never get the chance to correct or ponder over or go back to. So all the valuable information to which people might imagine we translators and interpreters working in international organizations are privy, in fact, escapes us completely, from beginning to end, from top to bottom, we haven’t a clue about what’s brewing or being plotted and planned in the world, not the slightest glimmer. And even if, sometimes, in our rest periods, we stay behind to listen to the great men without translating them, the identical terminology used by all of them is utterly incomprehensible to anyone in his or her right mind, so that if occasionally, for some inexplicable reason, we do manage to retain a few phrases, the fact is that we then deliberately forget them as quickly as possible, because keeping that inhuman jargon in your head for any longer than the time it takes to translate it into the second language or second jargon is an unnecessary torment, positively harmful to our battered equilibrium.

What with one thing and another, I often wonder with some alarm if anyone understands anything of what anyone says during those meetings, especially in the strictly rhetorical sessions. For, even if one accepts that the assembly members do understand each other’s primitive argot, there’s still nothing to stop the interpreters making any changes they like to the content of the speeches and no possibility of any real control or available time for denials or amendments. The only way to control us completely would be to have a second translator there, equipped with headphones and microphone, who would simultaneously translate us back into the original language, in order to check how effectively we were saying what was being said in the room at that moment. But, in that case, you’d need a third translator, similarly equipped, who would, in turn, check the second translator and re-translate their words and perhaps a fourth to watch over the third and thus, I’m afraid, ad infinitum, translators checking interpreters and interpreters checking translators, speakers checking congress members and typists checking orators, translators checking politicians and ushers checking interpreters. Everyone would watch everyone else and no one would listen to or transcribe anything, which, in the long run, would lead to the suspension of all sessions and congresses and assemblies and the permanent closure of all international organizations. It’s therefore preferable to take a few risks and put up with the incidents (sometimes serious) and the misunderstandings (sometimes enduring) that inevitably arise from interpreters’ inaccuracies and even though we rarely add jokes of our own (we’d risk losing our job), it’s hard sometimes to resist slipping in the occasional falsehood. The international representatives and our immediate bosses have no option but to trust us, likewise the leading politicians from the different countries where our services are required outside of the international organizations, at the meetings known as “summits”, or on the official visits they all make to each other on friendly, enemy or neutral territory. It is, however, true that on such lofty occasions, upon which depend important commercial agreements, non-aggression pacts, plots against third parties and even declarations of war or armistice, some greater control over the interpreter is sometimes attempted by using a second translator who will not, of course, actually re-translate (that would cause tremendous confusion), but will listen intently to the first translator and keep an eye on him and confirm that he is, in fact, translating what he’s supposed to be translating. That was how I met Luisa, who, for some reason, was considered more responsible, trustworthy and loyal than I and was chosen as supervisory interpreter (security interpreters they’re called, or safety-net interpreters, so that they end up being called the “net”, very ugly) to ratify or repudiate my words during the extremely high-level private meetings held in our country about two years ago between our representatives and those of the United Kingdom.

Such scrupulousness doesn’t really make much sense, in fact, since the more high-ranking the politicians, the less important is what they say amongst themselves and the less serious any error or transgression on our part. I suppose they take these precautions just to save face and so that in press photos and in television shots, there are always these stiff individuals perched uncomfortably on a chair between the two leaders, who, on the other hand, usually occupy plump armchairs or wide-screen sofas; and the sight of two individuals sitting, notebook in hand, on those extremely hard chairs only heightens the impression TV viewers and newspaper readers will take away with them of a particularly icy summit. But the fact is that on these visits these high-ranking politicians are always accompanied by a whole team of advisors, experts, scientists and specialists (doubtless the same people who write the speeches which the high-ranking politicians give and we translate), who, whilst almost invisible to the press, hold their own behind-the-scenes meetings with their counterparts in the country they’re visiting. They’re the ones who discuss and decide and actually know things, they write the bilateral agreements, establish the terms of co-operation, deliver the veiled or overt threats, make public any disputes, indulge in mutual blackmail and try to get the best possible deal for their respective states (they usually speak more than one language and are extremely devious, sometimes they have no need of us at all). The politicians, on the other hand, haven’t the faintest idea about what’s going on or only find out when it’s all over. They simply lend their faces to the photos and the filming, take part in some vast supper or gala ball and put their signature to the documents their advisors hand them at the end of the trip. What they say to each other, therefore, is of minimal importance and, what is even more embarrassing, they often have absolutely nothing to say to each other. All translators and interpreters know this, but we must nonetheless always be present at these private encounters for three main reasons: the highest-ranking politicians generally know no other language but their own; if we weren’t there they’d feel that not enough importance was being given to their chatter; and should an argument break out they can always put the blame on us.

On that occasion the high-ranking Spanish politician was male and the high-ranking British politician was female and it was, presumably, considered appropriate that the first interpreter should in turn be male and the second, the “net”, should be female, in order to create an atmosphere of complicity and sexual balance. I sat perched on my purgatorial chair between the two leaders and Luisa sat on her equally penitential chair a little to my right, that is, between the female leader and myself but a little behind me, like some threatening, supervisory figure, watching the back of my neck, and whom I could only just glimpse out of the corner of my left eye (though I did have a perfect view of her long crossed legs and her new shoes from Prada, the brand name being the nearest thing to me). I won’t deny that I’d already taken a good look at her (that is, involuntarily) when we first went into the small, intimate room (decorated in the worst possible taste), when she was introduced to me and before we sat down, while the photographers were taking their photos and the two high-ranking politicians were pretending to talk to each other for the benefit of the television cameras. They had to pretend because our high-ranking politician knew not a word of English (well, when he said goodbye he did risk a “Good luck”) and the high-ranking British politician knew not a word of Spanish (although she did say “Buen día” to me as she gave me an iron handshake). So while the former was mumbling gibberish in Spanish, inaudible to cameras and photographers, all the time keeping a broad smile trained on his guest, as if he were regaling her with interesting banter (what he said was not, however, inaudible to me: I seem to remember that he kept repeating “One, two, three, four, five, what a lovely time we’re going to have”), the latter was muttering nonsense in her own language, and smiling even more broadly than him (“Cheese,” she kept saying, which is what all English people being photographed are told to say, and then various untranslatable onomatopoeic words such as “Tweedle tweedle, biddle diddle, twit and fiddle, tweedle twang”).

I must admit that, for my part, I too involuntarily smiled a lot at Luisa during those early stages when our intervention was as yet unnecessary (she only half-smiled back at me, after all she was there to check up on me); and when it was necessary and we were sitting down, there was no way I could continue to look at her or smile at her, given the position of our two murderously uncomfortable seats. However, just what form our intervention would take was not immediately apparent since, as soon as the journalists had been ushered out (“That’s enough now,” our high-ranking politician had said, raising one hand, the hand he wore his wedding ring on), and a chamberlain or factotum had gone out closing the door behind him and leaving the four of us alone ready for lofty conversation, I with my notebook and Luisa with hers on her lap, an abrupt silence fell, completely unexpected and extremely awkward. My mission was a delicate one and my ears were extra alert as I waited for the first meaningful words to be uttered, which would give me the tone of the conversation and which I would then have to translate. I looked first at our leader and then at their leader and then back again at ours. She was gazing down at her pale fingers some distance away from her and studying her nails with a look of perplexity on her face. He was feeling the pockets of his jacket and trousers, not like someone who genuinely can’t find what he’s looking for, but like someone pretending not to find what he’s looking for in order to gain time (for example, someone looking for a non-existent train ticket when asked to show it to the conductor). It was like being in a dentist’s waiting room and for a moment I was afraid our representative might get up and start handing out magazines. I glanced round at Luisa, raised my eyebrows questioningly and she made a gesture with her hands (not a severe gesture) recommending patience. At last, the high-ranking Spanish politician took a metal cigarette case (rather a vulgar one) out of his pocket, which he’d already felt at least ten times, and asked his colleague:

“Listen, do you mind if I smoke?”

I hurriedly translated his words:

“Do you mind if I smoke, madam?” I said.

“Not if you blow the smoke upwards, sir,” replied the British leader, abandoning her study of her nails and smoothing her skirt, and I again translated.

The Spanish leader lit a cheroot (it was the size and shape of a cigarette, but dark brown, what I would call a cheroot), took a couple of puffs and carefully expelled the smoke up towards the ceiling, which, I noticed, was stained. Silence reigned once more and, after a while, he got up from his comfortable armchair, went over to a small table perhaps rather too crammed with bottles, poured himself a whisky on the rocks (I thought it odd that no waiter or butler had poured him one before) and asked:

“You don’t want a drink, I take it?”

And I translated, as I did the reply, although again adding “madam” at the end of the question.

“It’s too early for me so, no, I won’t join you, if you don’t mind.” And the Englishwoman again tugged unnecessarily at her skirt.

These long pauses and that smattering of talk or rather the dull interchange of isolated phrases were beginning to bore me. The other time I’d acted as an interpreter between two leading figures, I’d at least had the feeling that I was pretty much indispensable, given my thorough knowledge of the languages I speak. Not that they were saying anything of great importance (one was Spanish and the other Italian), but I had to reproduce a highly complicated syntax and vocabulary which would have been beyond the grasp of anyone with only an average knowledge of those languages, unlike the present situation: a child could have translated everything that had been said so far.

Our leader sat down again with his whisky in one hand and his cheroot in the other, he took a sip of his drink, sighed wearily, put down the glass, looked at his watch, smoothed the tails of his jacket, which had got caught up beneath him, again felt in his pockets for something, inhaled and exhaled more smoke, smiled – unenthusiastically now (the British leader smiled too, even less enthusiastically, and scratched her forehead with the long nails she’d looked at with such amazement at the start, and the air was filled for a moment with grains of face powder), and I realized then that the thirty to forty-five minutes we were to spend there, as if in the ante-room of a tax inspector or a notary, might well be spent simply waiting for the time to pass and for the office boy or the servant to open the door for us again, like a university porter announcing apathetically: “Time!” or a nurse shouting out in a grating voice: “Next!” I again turned round to Luisa, this time to say something under my breath to her (I think I was planning to mutter something like: “What a drag!”), but I found that she was smiling back at me, her index finger firmly to her lips which she tapped several times, indicating to me that I should remain silent. I know that I’ll never forget those smiling lips crossed by that index finger which, nevertheless, failed to conceal her smile. I think it was at that moment (or more clearly at that moment) that I first thought it would be a good idea to get to know that woman, younger than me and extremely well shod. I think it was also the conjunction of her lips and her index finger (her open lips and the index finger sealing them, her curved lips and the straight line of the index finger dividing them) that gave me the courage to abandon accuracy altogether when I translated the next question that our extremely high-ranking politician finally asked, once he’d removed from his pocket a heavy keyring loaded with keys, which he started jingling in the most unseemly manner:

“Would you like me to order you some tea?” he said.

And I didn’t translate, I mean that the English I put into his mouth was not his polite question (which it must be recognized was as trite as it was tardy), but this other question:

“Tell me, do the people in your country love you?”

I could feel Luisa’s astonishment behind me, more than that, I noticed that she immediately uncrossed her startled legs (the long legs that were never out of my sight, like the expensive new Prada shoes, she certainly knew how to spend her money, unless someone else had given them to her), and for a few long seconds (I felt the back of my neck pierced by her sense of shock), I waited for her to intervene and denounce me, to correct or reprimand me, or rather for her, the “net”, to take over from me at once, that’s what she was there for. But those few seconds passed (one, two, three, four) and she said nothing, perhaps (I thought then) because the high-ranking British politician didn’t seem in the least offended and replied at once, with a kind of contained vehemence:

“I often wonder the same thing myself,” she said, and for the first time she crossed her legs, forgetting about her sensible skirt and revealing two very square, white knees. “The people vote for one, indeed they do so more than once. One is elected, again more than once. And yet, it’s odd, one still doesn’t have the feeling of being loved.”

I translated very precisely, only leaving out part of the first phrase in my Spanish version so that her words would appear to our high-ranking politician to be the product of some spontaneous thought which, it must be said, seemed to please him as a subject of conversation, since he looked at the woman with very little surprise and a great deal more sympathy and replied, gaily jingling his many keys:

“You’re quite right. Votes don’t give you any reassurance on that score, however much we need them. Do you know what I think? I think that dictators, rulers in countries where there are no democratic elections, are more loved than we are. And more hated too, of course, but they’re still more intensely loved by those who do love them, whose numbers, moreover, are always on the increase.”

I considered that this final remark was a little exaggerated, not to say inaccurate, so I translated everything except that phrase (I omitted it, in short, censored it), and I again awaited some reaction from Luisa. She quickly crossed her legs again (her knees were rounded, golden), but that was the only sign she gave of having noticed the liberties I was taking. Perhaps she didn’t in fact disapprove, I thought, although I believed I could still feel her stupefied or possibly indignant gaze fixed on the back of my neck. It was just a shame that I couldn’t turn round to look at her.

The British politician seemed to brighten up:

“Oh, I agree,” she said. “People love one in large measure because they’re obliged to. That happens in personal relationships too, don’t you think? How many couples are there who are only in a couple because one of the two, and only one, insisted that they become a couple and obliged the other one to love him or her?”

“Obliged or persuaded?” asked the Spanish politician, and I saw that he was pleased with the subtlety of his question, so I simply translated exactly what he’d said. He was still jingling his innumerable keys, making far too much noise – he was a nervous type – so that I couldn’t hear very well, an interpreter needs silence to carry out his work.

The lady politician looked at her long, manicured nails more with unconscious coquetry than with unease or distrust, as she had done before when she was pretending indifference. She tugged vainly at her skirt again, her legs still crossed.

“It comes to the same thing really, don’t you think? There’s just a difference in chronology, which comes first, which comes before, because, inevitably, one becomes the other and vice versa. It’s what the French call a fait accompli. If you order a country to love its rulers, it will end up convinced that it does love them, at least much more easily than if you didn’t order them to do so. We can’t force them to, that’s the problem.”

I was in some doubt as to whether her last remark was not perhaps too extreme for the democratic ears of our high-ranking politician and, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance at the other, far superior legs watching me, I decided to suppress “that’s the problem”. The legs didn’t move and I immediately realized that my democratic scruples were entirely unjustified, because, banging the keys down assertively on the low table between them, the Spanish official replied:

“That’s the problem, it’s certainly our problem, that we can’t force them to, I mean. You see, I can’t do what our dictator, Franco, used to do, which was to call the people together in an act of solidarity in the Plaza de Oriente” – here I was obliged to translate this as “in a large square”, because I felt that the introduction of the word “Oriente” might prove disconcerting to the Englishwoman – “in order that they might acclaim us, the cabinet, I mean, after all that’s what we are, aren’t we, just members of a cabinet? He did it with impunity, on the slightest pretext, and they say that people were obliged to go along and cheer him. That’s true, but it’s equally true that they used to fill the whole square, there are photos and documentaries to prove it; now they couldn’t all have been forced to go there, especially in the latter years when the repression wasn’t so harsh, or at least only if you were a civil servant who might risk punishment or dismissal. A lot of people were still convinced that they loved him, and why? Because before, for decades, they’d been obliged to do so. Love is a habit.”

“My dear friend,” exclaimed the lady politician, “I know just what you mean. What I’d give for such an act of solidarity. Unfortunately, in my country, the only time you see the spectacle of a cheering, united nation is when they’re protesting about something. It’s very discouraging to hear the insults they hurl at us without even listening to or reading our laws, insulting the whole cabinet, as you so rightly say, with their offensive placards, terribly depressing.”

“And then there are the slogans,” said our politician, “they shout slogans too.” But I didn’t translate that because it didn’t seem to me to be very important and I didn’t have time either, for the Englishwoman was continuing her lament without taking any notice of him:

“Couldn’t they acclaim us, just once? I wonder, do we never do anything right? I’m only acclaimed by the people in my party and, of course, I can’t entirely believe in their sincerity. The only time we get any support is when we go to war, I don’t know if you know that, it’s only when we send the country to war that …”

The British leader remained thoughtful, leaving the sentence dangling, as if she were remembering the cheers of yesteryear that would never again return. She uncrossed her legs again, modestly and carefully, and once more tugged energetically at her skirt, miraculously managing to pull it down a further two inches. I didn’t at all like the turn the conversation was taking, and it was all my fault. Good grief, I thought (but I would like to have said so to Luisa), these democratic politicians all have dictatorial longings, for them any achievement and any form of consensus will always only be the pale realization of a deeply totalitarian desire, the desire for unanimity, for everyone to be in agreement, and the closer they get to this partial realization of an impossible totality, the greater their euphoria, although it will never be enough; they extol the plurality of ideas, but in fact to them it’s just a curse and a nuisance. I duly translated everything the woman had said except for her final mention of war (I didn’t want our politician to get any ideas), and in their place I put the following plea in her mouth:

“Would you mind very much putting away those keys? I’m terribly sensitive to noise lately. I’d be so grateful.”

Luisa’s legs didn’t change position, and so, once our politician had apologized, blushing slightly, and returned the large bunch of keys to his jacket pocket (they must have been making a hole in it they were so heavy), I decided to betray him yet again, for he said:

“But, naturally, if we do something well nobody organizes a demonstration to show us how pleased they are.”

I decided on the contrary to lead him into more personal territory, which seemed to me less dangerous and also more interesting, and I made him say in crystal-clear English:

“If you don’t mind my asking and you don’t think I’m being too personal, have you, in your own experience of love, ever obliged anyone to love you?”

I realized at once that the question was too daring, especially when addressed to an Englishwoman, and I was convinced that this time Luisa wouldn’t just let it pass, more than that, she’d finally deploy her net, denounce me and expel me from the room, scream blue murder, How can you possibly do this, you’ve gone quite far enough, lying and pretending, this isn’t a game, you know. My career would be ruined. Attentively, fearfully, I watched her gleaming legs independent of her skirt, on this occasion, moreover, they had ample time to reflect and to react, for the Englishwoman was also taking time to reflect for some seconds before responding. She was looking at our politician with her mouth half-open and an appreciative expression on her face (she was wearing too much lipstick and it had leaked into the cracks between her teeth), and he, confronted by this new silence which he had not provoked and which, of course, he couldn’t understand, took out another cheroot and lit it with the butt of the previous one, causing (I think) a very bad impression. But Luisa’s dear legs didn’t move, they remained crossed although they may have been swaying a little: I noticed only that she seemed to sit up a little straighter in her murderously uncomfortable chair, as if she were holding her breath, perhaps more frightened by the possible reply than by the now irrevocable indiscretion; or, I thought, perhaps she was also intrigued to know the answer, now that the question had been asked. She didn’t betray me, she didn’t contradict me, she didn’t intervene, she remained silent, and I thought that if she allowed me that, she would allow me anything for the whole of the rest of my life, or rather for the half of my life as yet unlived.

“Hmm. Yes, I think I have, more than once,” the Englishwoman said at last, and there was a tremor of distant emotion in her sharp voice, so distant that it was perhaps only recoverable in that form, as a sudden tremor in that imperious voice. “In fact, I wonder if anyone has ever loved me without being obliged to, even my children – well, one’s children are the most obliged of all to love one. It’s always been like that, but I also wonder if it isn’t the same for everyone. You see, I don’t believe in those stories you see on television, people who unproblematically meet and fall in love, both of them free agents, both of them available, neither one of them with any doubts or regrets. I don’t think that ever happens, ever, not even amongst the very young. Any relationship between two people always brings with it a multitude of problems and coercions, as well as insults and humiliations. Everyone obliges everyone else, not so much to do something they don’t want to do, but rather to do something they’re not sure they want to do, because hardly anyone ever knows what they don’t want, still less what they do want, there’s no way of knowing that. If no one ever obliged anyone to do anything, the world would grind to a halt, we’d all just float around in a state of global vacillation and carry on like that indefinitely. All people really want to do is to sleep, the thought of future regrets would paralyse us, imagining the consequences of acts we haven’t even committed is always dreadful, that’s why we politicians are so necessary, we’re here in order to take the decisions that others would never take, immobilized as they are by their doubts and their lack of will. We listen to their fear. ‘The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,’ Shakespeare said and I sometimes think that that’s all people are, paintings, asleep today and dead tomorrow. That’s why they vote for us and why they pay us, in order for us to wake them up, in order for us to remind them that their hour, though it will arrive, has not yet come, but that, meanwhile, we’ll make their decisions for them. But, of course, we still have to do it in a way which they believe they’ve chosen, just as couples get together believing that both have chosen to do so, with their eyes wide open. It’s not just that one of them has been obliged to do so by the other – or persuaded to do so if you prefer – it’s that, at some point in the long process that brought them together, both of them have been obliged, don’t you think, and are then obliged to stay together for some time, even until death. Sometimes they’re obliged by some external factor or by someone who’s no longer in their lives, the past obliges them, their own discontent, their own history, their own wretched biography obliges them. Or even things they know nothing about or which are beyond their comprehension, the part of our inheritance we all carry within us and of which we’re all ignorant, who knows when that whole process actually began …”

While I was translating this long meditation (I didn’t bother to translate the “Hmm” and I began with “I wonder if anyone” in order to make the dialogue between them more coherent), the woman kept pausing while she was speaking to look at the floor with a modest, absent smile, a little embarrassed perhaps, her hands splayed out, resting on her thighs, the way women of a certain age with nothing much to do often sit to watch the afternoon pass by, although she did have things to do and it was still only the morning. And while I was translating her speech, almost simultaneously, and wondering where that quotation from Shakespeare came from (“The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,” she’d said and as I heard the words leave her painted lips, I’d hesitated over whether to translate “the sleeping” as “the sleepers” and “pictures” as “portraits”), and I was wondering too if our politician would be capable of thoroughly understanding such a long speech, of not getting lost, of coming up with a suitable reply, I could feel Luisa’s head growing closer to mine, closer to the back of my neck, as if she’d shifted her position or bent forwards a little in order to hear the two versions more clearly, unconcerned about keeping a distance, that is, the short distance that now separated her from me, and which now, with that movement forward (a forward movement of her face: nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks), had grown still shorter, so that I could almost hear her light breathing by my ear, her slightly troubled, rapid breathing almost brushing my ear, the lobe of my ear, as if it were a whisper so quiet that it lacked any message or meaning, as if her breathing, or the act of whispering itself, was all that was to be transmitted, that and perhaps the slight stirring of her breast, that didn’t brush against me but which I could feel was much closer now, almost touching, unfamiliar. It’s always the chest of the other person we lean back against for support, we only really feel supported or backed up when, as the latter verb itself indicates, there’s someone behind us, someone we perhaps cannot even see and who covers our back with their chest, so close it almost brushes our back and in the end always does, and at times, that someone places a hand on our shoulder, a hand to calm us and also to hold us. That’s how most married people and most couples sleep or think they sleep, the two turn to the same side when they say goodnight, so that one has his or her back to the other throughout the whole night and feels backed up by the other person, and in the middle of the night, when he or she wakes up startled from a nightmare, or is unable to get to sleep, or is suffering from a fever or feels alone and abandoned in the darkness, they have only to turn round and see before them the face of the person protecting them, the person who will let themselves be kissed on any part of the face that is kissable (nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks, the whole face) or perhaps, half-asleep, will place a hand on their shoulder to calm them, or to hold them, or even to cling to them.

NOW I KNOW that the quotation comes from Macbeth and that Shakespeare places that particular simile in the mouth of Lady Macbeth, shortly after Macbeth has returned from murdering Duncan while he slept. It’s just one of a string of desperate arguments, or rather disconnected phrases, that Lady Macbeth keeps interjecting in order to minimize the importance of what her husband has done or has just done and which is now irreversible and, amongst other things, she says that he shouldn’t think “so brainsickly of things”, which is difficult to translate, since the word “sickly” means both weak and ill, although here it’s used as an adverb; so, literally, she’s saying to him both that he shouldn’t think about such things with so sick a brain and that he shouldn’t think so weakly, I don’t quite know how to say it in my own language, but fortunately, on that occasion, those weren’t the words the Englishwoman quoted. Now that I know that the quotation comes from Macbeth, I can’t help but realize (or perhaps remember) that also behind us, at our backs, is the person urging us on, the person who whispers in our ear, perhaps without our even seeing him, his tongue at once his weapon and his instrument, like the drop of rain that falls from the eaves after the storm, always on to the same spot so that the earth becomes softer and softer until the drop penetrates and makes a hole, perhaps a channel. Not like a drip from a tap that disappears down the plughole without leaving the slightest trace in the basin, or like a drop of blood that can be instantly soaked up by whatever is to hand, a cloth or a bandage or a towel or sometimes even water, or if the only thing that is to hand is the hand of the person losing the blood, assuming that person is still conscious and the wound not self-inflicted, the hand raised to stomach or breast to stop up the hole. The tongue in the ear is also the kiss that most easily persuades the person who appears reluctant to be kissed, sometimes it isn’t the eyes or the fingers or the lips that overcome resistance, but simply the tongue that probes and disarms, whispers and kisses, that almost obliges. Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what’s going on, our cars don’t have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late. It isn’t just that Lady Macbeth persuades Macbeth, it’s above all that she’s aware that he’s committed a murder from the moment he has done so, she’s heard from her husband’s own lips, on his return: “I have done the deed.” She hears his confession of this deed or act or exploit and what really makes her an accomplice is not that she instigated it or that she prepared the scene beforehand, nor that she collaborated afterwards, that she visited the newly dead corpse and the scene of the crime in order to make the servants look like the guilty parties, but the fact that she knew about that deed and its accomplishment. That’s why she wants to diminish its importance, perhaps not so much in order to calm the terrified Macbeth by showing him her bloodstained hands, but so as to minimize and banish her own knowledge, her own thoughts: “The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures”; “You do unbend your noble strength to think so brainsickly of things”; “These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so, it will make us mad”; “Be not lost so poorly in your thoughts”. These last words she says after she had gone boldly out and then returned having smeared the faces of the servants with the blood of the dead man (“If he do bleed …”) to make them seem the guilty parties: “My hands are of your colour,” she says to Macbeth, “but I shame to wear A Heart So White”, as if she wished to infect him with her own nonchalance in exchange for infecting herself with the blood shed by Duncan, unless “white” here means “pale and fearful” or “cowardly”. She knows, she knows what happened, and therein lies her guilt, but she was still not the person who committed the crime, however much she may regret it or claim to regret it; staining her hands with the blood of the dead man is a game, a pretence, a false alliance that she makes with the person who did the killing, because you cannot kill someone twice, and the deed is done; “I have done the deed” and there is never any doubt about who that “I” is: even if Lady Macbeth had plunged the knife again into the chest of the murdered Duncan, not even then would she have killed him or contributed to his murder, it was already done. “A little water clears us of this deed,” she says to Macbeth, knowing that for her it’s true, literally true. She likens herself to him, thus trying to liken him to her, to her heart so white: it’s not so much that she shares his guilt at that moment as that she tries to make him share her irremediable innocence, her cowardice. An instigation is nothing but words, translatable, ownerless words that are passed from voice to voice and from language to language and from century to century, always the same, provoking people again and again to the same act for as long as there have been people and languages and ears in the world to hear them. The same actions that no one is even sure they want to see carried out, the actions that are always involuntary, no longer dependent on words once they’ve been carried out, rather they sweep them away and remain cut off from any “before” or “after”, isolated and irreversible, whilst words can be reiterated and retracted, repeated and rectified, words can be denied and we can deny that we said them, words can be twisted and forgotten. One is guilty only of having heard them, which is unavoidable, and although the law doesn’t exonerate the person who spoke, the person who speaks, that person knows that, in fact, he’s done nothing, even if he did oblige the other person with his tongue at their ear, his chest pressed against their back, his troubled breathing, his hand on their shoulder, with his incomprehensible but persuasive whisper.

IT WAS LUISA who first put her hand on my shoulder, but I think that I was the one who first began to oblige her (to oblige her to love me), although that task is never one-sided and never constant, and its efficacy depends in good measure on the person obliged occasionally taking over the role of obliger. I think, however, that I was the one who began it and, until a year ago, at least until the time of our marriage and our honeymoon, I was the one who proposed everything that was subsequently accepted: seeing each other regularly, going out to supper, going to the cinema together, accompanying her to her door, exchanging kisses, changing our shifts in order to spend a few weeks together abroad, occasionally staying the night at her flat (that was what I proposed, but I always ended up leaving after the kisses and lying awake in each other’s arms), looking for a new apartment for the two of us later on, once we’d decided to get married. I think I was also the one who proposed that we should get married, perhaps because I was older, perhaps because I’d never done it before, either getting married or proposing marriage, or rather I’d only once before proposed marriage, half-heartedly and because I’d been given an ultimatum. Luisa eventually accepted, certainly without knowing if she really wanted to or not, or perhaps (purely by chance) knowing it without actually having to think about it, I mean, simply doing it. Since we got married we’ve seen less of each other, which is what people say tends to happen, but in our case this is not due to the general falling away that often accompanies what appears to be an end or a conclusion, but to external and temporary factors, an imbalance in our work timetables: Luisa was less and less prepared to travel and spend her eight weeks abroad, and I, on the other hand, had to continue doing so and even to prolong my stays abroad and increase their number in order to pay for our new home and its unnatural inauguration. For nearly a year, on the other hand, the year prior to our marriage, we’d tried to coincide as much as possible, with her in Madrid when I was in Madrid, with her in London when I was in Geneva, and even, on a couple of occasions, with both of us working in Brussels at the same time. For nearly a year, however, our first year of marriage, I’ve been abroad much more often than I would have wanted and have been unable properly to accustom myself to my married life or to the shared pillow or to the new apartment which, before, belonged to no one, and she’s spent almost all her time in Madrid, organizing the apartment and getting to know my family, especially my father, Ranz. Every time I came back from a trip during this period, I’d find new items of furniture or new curtains and even a new picture and I’d feel strange and have to relearn the domestic itineraries I’d learned on the previous occasion (for example, there’d be an ottoman where before there’d been none). I also noted certain changes in Luisa, very tenuous changes that affected things which, although quite secondary, I nevertheless always noticed: the length of her hair, a pair of gloves, shoulder pads in her jackets, a different colour lipstick, a slight change in the way she walked although she was wearing the same kind of shoes she always wore. Nothing very obvious, but still noticeable after eight weeks’ absence and even more so after another eight. In a way it bothered me to find that these minimal changes had taken place without me, it bothered me not to have been present when they were made, as if the fact that I wasn’t a witness to them (not having seen her after her visit to the hairdresser’s, not having expressed an opinion about the gloves) necessarily excluded any possible influence I could have on them and on our marriage, which is, without a doubt, the state that most influences and alters people, and is, therefore, the state that requires most vigilance in its early stages. It was changing Luisa in the usual ways, just small things at first, as always happens with women when they’re undergoing a process of profound transformation, but I began to have doubts about whether it was in fact me, myself in the context of our marriage, who was dictating that transformation or at least conditioning it. Nor did I like the fact that, here and there, our new apartment, whose possibilities were infinite, began to reveal a taste that was neither exactly Luisa’s nor my own, although I was accustomed to it and had, in part, inherited it. Our new apartment began to bear a faint resemblance, began to be slightly reminiscent of my childhood home, that is, of Ranz, my father’s home, as if he’d made suggestions during his visits or, by his mere presence, had created certain needs, which, since I was not a continuous presence there and Luisa had no very fixed ideas on the subject, had quickly been taken up and fulfilled. My desk, about which I’d given only vague instructions, was almost a replica of the one that my father had ordered, giving very precise instructions twenty-five years before, from a carpenter in Segovia, the famous Fonfrías, whom he’d met in passing one summer: an enormous table, too large for my few tasks, in the form of a rectangular U and crammed with drawers that I had and have no idea how I could possibly fill. When I came back from one of my trips, the shelves, which (although I forgot to mention it) I would have preferred to have painted white, were instead mahogany (only painted, of course, they weren’t actually made of mahogany), and that wasn’t all; my father, Ranz, had gone to the trouble of unpacking the boxes awaiting me and arranging my books as he’d always arranged his, divided by language not subject and, within that division, in chronological order of the author according to their year of birth. As a wedding present he’d given us some money (quite a lot, he was very generous), but shortly afterwards, while I was away, he also gave us two valuable paintings that had always been in his house (a small Martín Rico and an even smaller Boudin) and so they came to be mine, Venice and Trouville, they were both lovely, yet I’d have preferred to continue seeing them where they’d hung for decades and not in the living room of my own home which, with Venice and Trouville there, albeit in miniature (they showed the dry dock at San Trovaso and the beach), inevitably reminded me of the living room in his apartment when I was young. A rocking chair arrived, again without my knowledge, a piece of furniture much favoured by my Cuban grandmother, his mother-in-law, when she came to visit us during my childhood and which, once she was dead, my father had appropriated, not so much so that he could sit there rocking on his own, as to provide a backdrop against which to strike original poses during the gatherings of couples and friends which he often held at home.

Not so much so that he could sit there rocking. Not so much so that he could sit there rocking on his own, not that anyone can ever possibly know what anyone else does when they’re alone. But my father would never have rocked, on the contrary, he would have seen it as a kind of private shirking of his duty, as a confirmation of what he’d always tried or rather always managed to avoid doing: becoming old. Ranz, my father, is thirty-five years older than me, but he’s never been old, not even now. He’s spent his whole life postponing that state, leaving it for later on or perhaps denying all knowledge of it, and although one can do little about the evolution of one’s appearance or one’s gaze (one can, perhaps, do slightly more about the former), he’s someone in whose attitude or spirit I’ve never noticed the passing of the years, never the slightest change, never a hint in him of the heaviness and fatigue that gradually appeared in my mother as I grew up, nor was there any dimming of the light in his eyes, the light which the glasses my mother sometimes wore when her eyes were tired would unexpectedly extinguish in hers, nor did he seem vulnerable to the setbacks and upsets that mark the existences of all individuals, nor did he once in his entire life neglect his appearance, being always smartly turned out from the morning onwards as if he were off to attend some ceremony, even if he wasn’t actually going out and no one was coming to visit him. He’s always smelled of a mixture of cologne, tobacco and mint, with a suggestion of alcohol and leather, like someone from the colonies. Almost a year ago now, when Luisa and I got married, he looked the image of the vain, smiling, older man, smugly youthful, affecting a mischievous frivolity. For as long as I can remember, he’s always worn his overcoat over his shoulders, he never puts his arms in the sleeves, as if he were both defying the cold and demonstrating his firm belief in a compendium of external details that produced, as their end result, an elegant, or at least, self-confident man. Until a year ago he still had almost all his hair, white and thick and extremely well-groomed with a parting on the right (a very precise parting like that of a little boy), with not a hint of yellow, a head that was fleecy, even polar white and which emerged very erect from immaculately ironed shirts and brightly coloured ties in agreeable combinations. Everything about him has always been agreeable, from his superficially passionate nature, to his soberly free-and-easy manner, from his lively gaze (as if everything amused him, or as if he could see the funny side of everything) to his endless cheerful jokes, he’s a man who can be both vehement and jovial. His features are by no means perfect and yet he’s always been considered to be a very handsome man, who’s enjoyed the fact that women like him, but has perhaps grown used to the idea that this would happen only at a distance. Up until only a year ago, anyone who met him (and Luisa met him for the first time only shortly before that) would certainly have seen in him a former ladykiller, rather faded but defiant in the face of his declining powers, or perhaps the reverse, a purely theoretical Don Juan whose powers were therefore unspent, someone who’d had all the necessary qualities for the intense life of the gallant and who, nevertheless, because of certain declared fidelities or for lack of any real opportunity or even for lack of daring, had never burned his fingers by putting them to the test; someone who, just as he had with old age, had postponed putting his seductions into practice, perhaps in order not to hurt anyone. (But we children know nothing about our parents, or it takes us a very long time to become interested.) His most noticeable feature were his extraordinarily alert eyes, sometimes startling in the devotion and fixity of their gaze, as if what they were seeing at any given moment was of extreme importance, worthy not just of being seen but of being scrutinized, of being observed in the most exclusive manner, of being apprehended in order that each captured image could be stored in his memory, like a camera that couldn’t entirely depend upon its mechanical processes to register what it perceived and so had to try extra hard, to make a real effort. His eyes flattered what they looked upon. They were very pale in colour without a hint of blue in them, of a brown so pale that, by dint of that extreme paleness, they gained in clarity and brilliance, when the light fell directly on them they were almost the colour of white wine when the wine is not too young and, in the shadows or at night, they were almost the colour of vinegar, liquid eyes, more like the eyes of a bird of prey than of a cat, who are the creatures most likely to have eyes that colour. However, his eyes were not as still or as perplexing as those other eyes, they were mobile and glittering, fringed by long, dark eyelashes that took the edge off the rapidity and tension of their constant shiftings. They regarded things with respect and fixity and, at the same time, missed nothing else that was happening in the room or in the street, they were like the eyes of an experienced viewer of paintings who doesn’t need a second glance to know what’s in the background of a painting, instead his all-embracing eyes – had they also happened to be skilled in drawing – would have been capable of instantly reproducing the whole composition, after just one glance. The other striking feature of Ranz’s face, and the only one that I’ve inherited, was his mouth, which was plump and rather too well-defined, as if it had been added at the last moment and belonged to someone else, slightly out of keeping with his other features, separate from them, a woman’s mouth in a man’s face, as people have so often said of mine, a red, feminine mouth that must come from some unknown great-grandmother or ancestor, some vain woman who didn’t want it to disappear from the earth along with her, and thus it was passed on to us, regardless of our sex. And there was a third characteristic, the thick eyebrows that were always arched, either singly or together, gestures he probably learned in his youth from the primitive actors of the early thirties and which lingered on after that rather like an odd, involuntary quirk, a detail forgotten in the systematic process of obliteration to which time submits us, the obliteration of what we are and what we do. My father would arch his thick eyebrows, at first the colour of straw and later white, for any reason or for no reason at all, as if arching them were the histrionic complement to his extraordinarily precise way of looking.

He’s always looked at me like that, ever since I was a child and had to look up to him at his great height, unless he crouched down or was sitting or lying. Now we’re more or less the same height, but his eyes still look at me with that slightly ironic tilt of his eyebrows, open like sunshades, and the brilliant fixity of his pupils, black spots on his solar irises, like the two centres of a single target. Or at least that was how he always used to look at me up until a short time ago. That was how he looked at me on the day of my marriage to Luisa, the young wife of the man who was no longer a child but whom he’d known and treated as such for too long to be able to consider him anything else, whilst he’d known her, the bride, only as an adult, or more than that, as a fiancée. I remember that at one point during the reception, he drew me aside, led me out of the room we’d hired in the lovely, old Casino de Madrid in Calle de Alcalá into a small adjoining room, after the signing by the witnesses (false witnesses, testimonial friends, purely decorative). He placed a hand on my shoulder (yes, a hand on my shoulder) while the other guests came and went, until at last we were left on our own. Then he closed the door and sat down in an armchair and I leaned against the table, my arms folded; we were both very dressed up for the wedding, he more than I, even though it had only been a civil wedding. Ranz lit a slim cigarette, the sort he used to smoke when he was in public and which he smoked without inhaling. He raised his eyebrows extravagantly high, so that they formed two peaks, then gave an amused smile and fixed his fervent gaze on my face, which at that moment was higher than his. And he said to me:

“So, now you’re married. Now what?”

He was the first person to ask that question, or rather to formulate the question that I’d been asking myself since the morning, since the ceremony and even before that, since the previous night. I’d spent a restless night, I probably had slept, albeit lightly, even though I felt as if I hadn’t, dreaming that I wasn’t sleeping and every now and then waking up for real. Around five o’clock in the morning I’d wondered if I should turn the light on since, as it was spring, I could already see through the raised blind the beginnings of the dawn filtering into the street below and I could make out the objects in my bedroom, the furniture. “I won’t sleep alone any more,” I thought, as I pondered whether to put the light on or simply to watch the dawn encroaching on buildings and trees, “except occasionally or when I’m travelling. From tomorrow onwards, and I imagine for many years to come, I’ll no longer experience the desire to see Luisa, because I’ll see her the moment I open my eyes. There’ll be no wondering what she’ll look like today or what she’ll be wearing, because I’ll see her face the moment I wake and maybe even watch her getting dressed. She might even dress the way I want her to, if I tell her my preferences. From tomorrow onwards, there’ll be no more of the small unknowns that have filled my days for nearly a year now, or have meant that my days were lived in the best way possible, that is, in a state of vague expectation and ignorance. I’ll know too much, I’ll know more than I want to know about Luisa, I’ll be confronted by what I find interesting about her and what I don’t find interesting, there’ll be no possibility of selection or choice, the minimal, tenuous daily choice involved in arranging a date, meeting, standing watching at the doors of a cinema or searching amongst the tables of a restaurant, or getting dressed up and going out to see the other person. I won’t see the result but the process, which I might not find interesting. I don’t know if I want to see how she puts on her tights and how she adjusts them at the waist and the groin or to know how much time she spends in the bathroom in the morning, if she puts cream on her face before going to bed or what mood she’s in when she wakes up and sees me at her side. At night, I don’t think I want to find her already under the sheets in her nightdress or pyjamas, I’d rather take off her street clothes, strip her of her daytime appearance, not of the appearance she’ll have taken on before my eyes, alone in our bedroom, perhaps turning her back to me. I don’t think I want that intermediate phase, just as I probably don’t wish to know that much about her faults, nor be obliged to be fully informed of any faults that may surface with the passing of the months and years, but of which other people who see her, who see us, will know nothing. I also don’t think that I want to speak about us, to say we went or we’re going to buy a piano or we’re going to have a baby or we’ve got a cat. We may have children, I don’t know if I want them or not, although I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea. I know, on the other hand, that I am interested in seeing her asleep, in seeing her face when she’s unconscious or drowsy, to know what her expression is like then – gentle or cruel, tormented or calm, childlike or suddenly old – while she thinks of nothing or is unaware that she’s thinking, while she’s inactive, while she’s not behaving in any studied manner, as we all do to some degree when someone else is present, even if that person is of no importance to us, even if they’re our own father or wife or husband. I’ve already seen her asleep on a few nights, but not often enough to be able to recognize her in her sleep, a state in which we do after all sometimes cease to resemble ourselves. That’s doubtless why I’m getting married tomorrow, because of that day-to-day life, but also because it’s the logical thing to do and because I’ve never done it before, the most important things in life are always done for reasons of logic and out of a desire to experience them or, which comes down to the same thing, because they’re inevitable. The random, inconsequential steps you take one night can, after enough time or enough of the abstract future has elapsed, end up carrying you into some unavoidable situation and, confronted by that situation, we sometimes ask ourselves with incredulous excitement: What if I hadn’t gone into that bar? What if I hadn’t gone to that party? What if I hadn’t answered the phone that Tuesday? What if I hadn’t accepted that job on that particular Monday?’ We ask ourselves these things naïvely, believing for an instant (but only for an instant) that in that case we would never have met Luisa and we wouldn’t be poised on the brink of this unavoidable but logical situation, which, precisely because it is unavoidable and logical, we can suddenly no longer tell if we want it or if it terrifies us, we cannot know if we want what, up until today, we seemed to want. But we always do meet Luisa, it’s naïve to ask such questions because everything is like that, being born depends on a chance movement, a phrase spoken by a stranger at the other end of the world, an interpreted gesture, a hand on the shoulder and a whisper that might never have been whispered. Each step taken and each word spoken by anyone in any circumstances (hesitant or assured, sincere or false) have unimaginable repercussions that will affect someone who neither knows us nor wants to, someone who hasn’t yet been born or doesn’t know that they’ll have to suffer us and become, literally, a matter of life and death. So many lives and deaths have their enigmatic origin in something no one notices or remembers, in the beer we decided to drink after first having wondered if we had time, in the good mood that made us be nice to someone we’d just been introduced to – not knowing that she’d just been yelling at someone or hurting them – in the cake we were going to buy on the way to lunch at our parents’ house but didn’t, in our desire to listen to a voice regardless of what it might say, in the risky phone call that we made anyway, in our unsatisfied wish to stay at home. Going out, talking, doing, moving, looking and hearing and being seen all place us at constant risk, not even closeting ourselves at home and sitting very still can save us from the consequences, from those logical and unavoidable situations, from what is today imminent and from what, almost a year ago, or even four or ten or one hundred years ago, or even yesterday, is so unexpected. I’m thinking that tomorrow I’ll be getting married to Luisa, but it’s already 5 a.m. and it’s today that I’m getting married. According to us, the night belongs to the previous day, but not according to the clocks, my watch is on the bedside table and says that it’s a quarter past five, whilst the alarm clock says that it’s five fourteen, neither accord with the sense I still have that it’s yesterday and not yet today. In seven hours’ time. Perhaps Luisa isn’t asleep either, lying awake in her bedroom at a quarter past five, not putting on the light, alone, I could call her since she’s as alone as I am, but I might startle her, alone for the last time apart from on exceptional occasions and when I’m away – the two of us do travel a lot, we’ll have to change that – she might think I was calling her in the middle of the night to cancel everything, to go back on my word, to go against what is logical and to provide a remedy for the irremediable. No one can ever be sure of anyone, no one can be trusted, and she’ll be thinking: ‘And now what, now what?’, or she’ll be thinking that she’s not sure she wants to see me shave every day, the razor makes a noise and there are a few grey hairs in my beard, I look older when I don’t shave and that’s why every day I go through the noisy process of shaving, I’ll do it when I get up, it’s late and I can’t sleep and tomorrow I need to look my best, in seven hours’ time I will state before witnesses, before my own father, before her parents, that I’m going to stay by Luisa’s side, that that is my intention, I’ll state it legally and in public, and it will be recorded and set down.”

“That’s what I want to know,” I said to my father. “Now what?”

Ranz smiled even more broadly and left an extravagant cloud of uninhaled smoke dancing in the air. He always smoked in that ornamental way.

“I like the girl a lot,” he said. “I like her more than any of the others you’ve brought to me over all these years of playing the part of some absurd Lothario – no, don’t protest, that’s what you were, a Lothario. I have fun with her, which is unusual when there’s such an age gap, although I can’t tell if she’s been making such a fuss of me because she knew she was going to marry you, or because she didn’t quite know if she was or not, just as you will have been charming to those idiot parents of hers and will doubtless cease to be after a few months. Marriage changes everything, down to the smallest detail, even nowadays, although I know you young people don’t believe it does. Whatever your relationship has been like up until now, it will bear little resemblance to your relationship in future years, you’ll probably even notice a slight change after today. At most, all you’ll be left with from before are a few worn-out old jokes, shadows, which you won’t always find easy to recapture. That and a deep mutual affection, of course. You’ll miss these past months when you forged alliances against the rest of the world, against anyone, I mean the small, shared jibes, in a few years’ time the only alliances you’ll forge will be one against the other. But nothing too serious, don’t worry, the inevitable resentments of a life lived in prolonged proximity, a bearable tedium, and one which, in general, no one would give up.”

He spoke slowly, as he usually did, choosing his words with great care (Lothario, alliances, shadows), more for effect and to ensure that he had your attention than for the sake of precision. He obliged you to remain alert, even if you’d heard what he was saying a thousand times before. Not that he’d ever said this to me before, not that I could remember, and I was surprised at the ambiguous tone he used, as ironic as ever but less friendly: he sounded almost like a killjoy, even though there had been moments, ever since Luisa and I had fixed the date of the day that was now today, when I might have thought similar or even worse things. I’d thought better things too, but it’s different hearing someone else saying them.

“That’s nice,” I said, “that’s very encouraging. I didn’t expect this of you. You seemed quite happy a moment ago.”

“Oh, I am, I am, believe me, really I am, ask anyone, I’ve spent all day celebrating it, since before the ceremony. Alone at home, before I left, I drank a toast to you both in front of the mirror with a glass of Rhine wine, a Riesling, I opened the bottle especially, the rest will go to waste. So you can see how happy I am, wasting a good bottle of wine in order to drink one small, solitary morning toast.”

And having said that, he raised his eyebrows innocently, an innocence composed this time of a mixture of pride and feigned surprise.

“What are you trying to tell me, then?”

“Nothing in particular. I just wanted to be alone with you for a few moments, they won’t miss us, once the ceremony’s over we’re not important any more, the wedding reception is for the guests not for those who’re getting married or for those who organized it. It was a good idea coming here, wasn’t it? I only wanted to ask you that one question: And now what? But you didn’t answer.”

“Now? Nothing,” I said. I was feeling slightly irritated by his attitude and anyway I wanted to return to Luisa’s side and to my friends. In so far as I was in need of reassurance, I wasn’t finding Ranz’s company at all reassuring. In a way, it was just like my father to take me aside at the least opportune moment, in another, it was quite unlike him. It would have been more like him to have simply clapped me on the back and wished me good luck, although he’d have done so rhetorically and taken his time over it. He pulled up his socks before carefully crossing his long legs.

“Nothing? What do you mean nothing? Come on, this is no way to begin, you must be able to think of something. You’ve left it very late getting married and at last you have, or perhaps you don’t realize that. If you’re afraid of making me a grandfather, don’t worry, I’m about the right age for the task.”

“Was that what you meant by ‘And now what’?”

Ranz rather smugly patted his polar-white hair, as he did sometimes without realizing he was doing it. He smoothed it down or rather made as if to smooth it down, barely brushing it with the tips of his fingers, as if his unconscious intention was to smooth it down but as if the actual contact startled him and made him realize what he was doing. He always carried a comb with him but he never used it in public, even if the public in question was his son, the child who was no longer a child or who, in his eyes, continued to be so despite having used up half his life.

“No, not at all, I’m in no hurry, nor should you be, I don’t want to meddle but that’s how I feel. I just want to know how you intend confronting this new situation, right now, at this very moment. That’s all, it’s just curiosity really.”

And he spread his hands out before me, like someone showing that he’s carrying no weapons.

“I don’t know, I’m not confronting it in any particular way. I’ll tell you later on. I think the very least I could expect from you is not to be asked that question, today of all days.”

I was leaning against the table, on it still lay the useless signatures of our last-minute witnesses. I stood up a little straighter, the first sign that I felt the conversation was over and I wanted to go back to the party; but he didn’t join me in my gesture by putting out his cigarette or uncrossing his legs. For him, the conversation needed to go on a little longer. I thought that he must want to say something concrete to me, but didn’t know how or wasn’t sure that he wanted to. That was entirely like him, for he often forced others to answer questions he hadn’t even asked or to discuss some subject that he hadn’t mentioned, even if that subject was the one thing on his mind, beneath that striking head of hair white as talcum powder. I knew him too well to help him out.

“The least you could expect,” he said. “I don’t think anything can be expected. I, for example, no longer expected you to get married. Only a year ago I would have laid bets to the contrary. In fact, I did do so with Custardoy, and with Rylands by letter, and I’ve lost a fair bit of money too, because here we are. The world is full of surprises and of secrets. We think we know the people close to us, but time brings with it more things that we don’t know than things we do, comparatively speaking we know less all the time, there’s always a greater area of shadow. Even if the illuminated area grows larger too, the shadows still win. I imagine you and Luisa have your secrets.” He remained silent for a few seconds and, seeing that I didn’t respond, added:

“But, of course, you can only know about yours, because if you knew about hers they wouldn’t be secrets.”

There was still a smile on Ranz’s oddly defined lips, those lips identical to mine, although his had lost their colour and were invaded by vertical lines that rose up from his chin and from beneath the place where his moustache would be, the moustache he’d worn as a young man according to photos taken at the time, although I’d never seen him with one. His words seemed somehow malevolent (at first I thought he must know something about Luisa and had waited until after the wedding to tell me), but his tone was different now, it wasn’t even ambiguous. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I described his tone of voice as helpless. It was as if he’d got lost shortly after he began to speak and now no longer knew how to get back to the path he originally set out on. I might help him, then again I might not. He was smiling in a friendly manner, a slim cigarette in one hand, burned down, with more ash than filter, he hadn’t got rid of the ash for some time now, he probably refrained from putting it out in order not to increase his sense of helplessness. I picked up the ashtray and held it out to him and then he stubbed out the cigarette and rubbed his fingertips together, the burning filter smelled bad. He interlaced his fingers, which were large like the rest of his body and like his flour-white head of hair, they showed their age a little more, but only a little, not much, they were lined but were unmarked by age spots. As was his custom, he was smiling affably, almost pityingly now, though without a trace of mockery, his eyes were very clear – those eyes like plump drops of whisky or vinegar – we were more in the shade than in the light. As I said before, he wasn’t an old man, he never was, but at that moment I saw that he’d aged, that is, I saw that he was afraid. There’s a writer called Clerk or Lewis who wrote about himself after the death of his wife, and he began by saying: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Perhaps it was grief that I could glimpse in Ranz’s smile, in my father’s smile. Everyone knows that mothers cry and feel something like grief when their offspring marry, perhaps my father was feeling his own particular happiness and also the grief that my mother would have felt, my dead mother. A vicarious grief, a vicarious fear, a grief and a fear that came from another person whose face we’d both slightly forgotten, it’s odd how the features of those who no longer see us and whom we can no longer see become blurred, out of anger or absence or attrition, or how they become usurped by their photographs fixed for ever on a particular day, my mother, for example, isn’t wearing her glasses, the reading glasses she tended to wear rather too often in her latter years, she’s remained fixed in the picture I’ve chosen of her when she was twenty-eight years old, a woman younger than I am now, her face calm and a slightly resigned look in her eyes, which she did not, I think, normally have, her eyes were usually smiling like those of my Havana-born grandmother, her mother. The two of them used to laugh together, often, but it’s also true that sometimes in the eyes of both of them I would glimpse a prolonged look of grief or fear, my grandmother would sometimes stop rocking in her rocking chair and sit gazing into space, her eyes dry and unblinking, like someone who’s just woken up and can’t quite remember where they are, sometimes she’d sit looking at the photographs or the painting of the daughter who’d disappeared from the world before I was born, she’d look for a minute or perhaps more, certainly without thinking, without even remembering, but feeling grief or retrospective fear. My mother also looked at her like that sometimes, at her distant sister, she’d interrupt her reading and take off her glasses, keeping one finger between the pages of the book so as not to lose her place and, holding her glasses in the other hand, she’d sit looking sometimes at nothing in particular and sometimes at the dead, at the faces she’d watched grow up but not grow old, three-dimensional faces that had grown flat, mobile faces that we suddenly become used to seeing only in repose, not them but their image, the living face of my mother would stop to look at them, her eyes made melancholy perhaps by the barrel-organ music that used to drift up from the street in Madrid during my childhood and which, when it started, always made everyone in the house stop for a moment, mothers and lazy or sick children and maids, who would look up and even lean out over the balcony or from the window in order to see again the same scene, a man with a tanned face wearing a hat and playing a barrel organ, a mechanical man who would interrupt the women’s singing or would provide a channel for that singing and for a moment – or in my mother’s case for more than a moment, for grief and fear are not fleeting emotions – would fill with melancholy the eyes of the people living in the house. Mothers and children and maids always reacted to that sound by looking up, raising their heads like animals, and they reacted the same way to the swooping whistle of the knife-grinders, the women wondering for a moment if the knives in the house were as sharp as they should be or if they should run down to the street with them, making a pause in their labours or their indolence to remember and to think about knife-blades, or perhaps becoming suddenly absorbed in their secrets, the secrets they kept and the secrets they suspected, that is those they knew about and those they didn’t. And it was at that moment sometimes, when they raised their heads to listen to the mechanical music or to a repeated whistle that came advancing down the street, when their gaze would fall upon the pictures of those who were absent, half a lifetime spent glancing at eternally enigmatic photographs or paintings with fixed eyes or foolish smiles, and another lifetime, or half a lifetime, that of the other person, the son or the sister or the widower, receiving those same fixed, foolish glances in the photograph, which even the person looking at the photo cannot always remember when it was taken: my grandmother glancing at her dead daughter and my mother at her dead, supplanted sister; my father and I looking at her and myself now preparing myself to look at him, at Ranz, my father; and my beloved Luisa, the newlywed in the room next door, unaware that the photographs they’ve taken of us today will one day be the object of her glances, when she no longer has half her lifetime ahead of her and mine is over. But no one knows the order of the dead or of the living, no one knows who will be the first to feel grief or fear. Perhaps Ranz now embodied the grief and fear which had reappeared in his expression, smiling, compassionate and calm, and his now cigaretteless hands, the fingers interlaced and idle, and his socks pulled up so that not an inch of bare flesh was showing, flesh as old as that of Verum-Verum the Cow, fodder for photographs, in his patterned tie a little too wide for today’s taste but the colours of which were perfectly matched, the immaculate knot also a little too large. He seemed comfortable sitting there, as if he were the owner of the Casino de Madrid rather than someone who’d hired it, but in a way he seemed uncomfortable too and I wasn’t helping him to tell me what it was that was bothering him, what he’d decided to tell me – or had still not told me – on the day of my wedding when he’d taken me aside into that room next door to the party and placed one hand on my shoulder. Now I understood: it wasn’t that he couldn’t, it was superstition that was paralysing him, not knowing what might bring good luck and what bad, speaking or remaining silent, not remaining silent or not speaking, letting things follow their natural course without invoking them or deflecting them or intervening verbally to affect that course, verbalizing them or saying nothing, alerting the person to danger or not putting ideas in their head, sometimes the very people who warn us against certain ideas end up putting those ideas in our heads, they give them to us precisely because they warn us about them and make us think about things that would never have occurred to us otherwise.

“Secrets? What are you talking about?” I said.

Ranz blushed a little, or so it seemed to me, the culmination and conclusion of his momentary helplessness; but he immediately banished the colour from his cheeks – older people rarely allow themselves to blush – and with it his smiling, somewhat foolish expression of grief or fear or both. He got up, we’re now both about the same height, and again placed his large hand on my shoulder, but he did so from in front this time and looked at me from very close to, intensely but with no particular intent, his hand on my shoulder felt almost like the flat of a sword knighting someone who was no knight: he’d opted for the middle path, for insinuation, he’d reached no resolution, or perhaps it was just a postponement. He spoke calmly and seriously, no longer smiling, his few words were uttered without the smile that played almost constantly on his plump lips so similar to mine, a smile which, once the words were spoken, instantly returned. Then he took out another slim cigarette from his old-fashioned cigarette case and opened the door. The noise from the party rushed in and in the distance I saw Luisa talking to two girlfriends and to an old boyfriend of hers whom I disliked, but she was looking at the door which until then had been closed. Ranz made a gesture with his hand, a gesture of farewell or warning or encouragement (as if he were saying “See you later” or “Cheer up” or “Take care”) and he left the room ahead of me. I saw how he immediately took up his frivolous persona again and started making jokes and laughing uproariously with a woman I didn’t know, doubtless someone from Luisa’s half of the guest list, the half of the guests at my own wedding whom I’d never seen before and would doubtless never see again. Or perhaps, now that I think about it, it was someone my father himself had invited: he’s always cultivated strange friendships, or friendships I know almost nothing about.

This was the whispered advice that Ranz gave me: “I’ll just say one thing,” he said. “If you ever do have any secrets or if you already have, don’t tell her.” And smiling again, he added: “Good luck.”

The witnesses’ signatures remained in the room and I’ve no idea if anyone picked them up or not or where they are now. Perhaps they were thrown out with the rubbish along with the empty trays and the leftovers from the party. And I, of course, didn’t pick them up from the table on which I’d been leaning for a while, all dressed up in my bridegroom’s clothes, just as I was supposed to be that day.

YESTERDAY, I was surprised to hear coming up from the street the sound of a barrel organ, there are hardly any left now, they’re a relic of the past. I looked up immediately as I used to do when I was a child, it was too loud and was keeping me from my work, the noise was too evocative for me to be able to concentrate on anything else. I got up and looked out of the window to see who was playing, but I could see neither musician nor instrument, they were farther round the corner, hidden by the building opposite which, however, since it’s a low building, doesn’t block my light. It doubtless only just concealed them, since, on the corner itself, I could see a middle-aged woman, her hair caught back in a gypsy plait but otherwise dressed in an unfolkloric manner (she was wearing ordinary clothes), who was standing side on to me and holding in her hand a tiny plastic saucer, almost the size of a coaster, that wouldn’t hold many coins before it had to be emptied again, its contents slipped into her pocket or a bag, though there were a few coins, for money calls to money. I listened for quite a while, first to a chotis, then to some unrecognizable Andalusian air, then a paso doble, before going out on to the balcony to see if I could spot the organ-grinder from where the plantpots were, I went out knowing that I wouldn’t be able to, for although the balcony – which, like all balconies, projects slightly – brought me a little closer to the street, it was in fact situated to the right of my window, that is, it offered even less of a view of what was hidden round the corner, since I was looking towards my left. There weren’t many passers-by, so the woman with the plait kept shaking her plastic saucer in vain, rattling the few coins in it, coins she’d perhaps placed there herself, because money calls to money. I went back to my desk and tried to ignore the music coming up from the street but I couldn’t, so I put on a jacket and went downstairs with the intention of putting a stop to the music. I crossed the pavement and, at last, saw the swarthy-complexioned man: he was wearing an old hat and had a neat, white moustache, leathery skin and a friendly face with large, smiling eyes that seemed slightly dreamy or absorbed as he turned the handle of the barrel organ with his right hand and kept time on the pavement with the opposite foot, his left foot, both feet shod in weavework shoes, brown with a white instep, almost swamped by his rather long, baggy trousers. He was standing on the corner near my building playing a paso doble. I took a banknote out of my pocket and, holding it out to him, said:

“I’ll give you this if you’ll move to the next corner along. I live over there and I’m working at home today. There’s no way I can work with the music playing. Would you mind?”

The man’s smile broadened and he nodded, at the same time gesturing to the woman with the plait, although that wasn’t in fact necessary: she’d come over to us with her half-empty saucer the moment she’d seen the note in my hand. She held the saucer out to me and on it I placed the green note, it remained there for less than a second, leaving the saucer almost empty again and the note in her pocket. In Madrid money never passes from hand to hand.

“Thanks,” I said. “You’ll move down to the next corner, right?”

The man again nodded and I returned to my apartment. When I got to my room on the fifth floor I looked a little distrustfully out of the window, but, although the music was still audible, it was quieter now, farther off, and would no longer disturb my concentration. Nevertheless, I leaned out to see with my own eyes that they had indeed left my corner. “Yes, sir, right away,” the gypsy woman had said obediently, and she’d been as good as her word.

Today I realized two things: the first and less important of these is that I shouldn’t have insisted once they’d accepted the money and the deal, I shouldn’t have said: “You’ll move down to the next corner, right?”, already placing in doubt that they’d do what we agreed. The worst thing was that offensive “right?”. The second point is more serious, and that is this: because I have money, I was able to decide the movements of two people yesterday morning. I didn’t want them to stay on a certain corner (my corner) and I sent them off to another which they hadn’t chosen; they’d chosen mine, perhaps by chance, but also perhaps for some other reason, perhaps they had a good reason for being on my corner and not on the other, and yet that didn’t concern me at all and I didn’t bother to find out, I simply made them move on a block, to stand where they hadn’t chosen to stand of their own free will. I didn’t force them, it’s true, it was a transaction, a pact, it was worth my while spending the money in order to be able to work in peace (I’d earn more money while I worked) and it couldn’t have been of vital importance to them to be on my corner, they doubtless preferred moving somewhere farther off and keeping my money to staying on my corner without the money and that’s why they accepted and moved on. It might also be considered to have been easy money, it could have taken them hours to earn that much from the loose change that the scarce and stingy passers-by might have given them. It’s not a serious matter, just a minor incident, insignificant, not harmful to anyone, indeed everyone gained from it. And yet it does strike me as a serious matter that, because I had money and could afford to spend it, I could decide where the man with the swarthy complexion could play his barrel organ and where the woman with the plait could hold out her saucer. Yesterday morning I purchased their steps, I bought their pitch, I also, for a moment, bought their power of choice. I could have asked them to do it as a favour, I could have explained the situation to him and left it up to him to decide, for they were working too. It felt safer to offer him money and place a condition on him getting it: “I’ll give you this”, I said to him, “if you’ll move to the next corner along.” Then I provided him with explanations, which were, in fact, unnecessary, I could easily not have done so after offering him the money, to him it was a lot and to me it was nothing, I was sure he’d take it, the result would have been the same if, instead of going on, as I did, to mention my work, I’d said to him: “Because I’d like you to move on.” That is, in fact, how it was, although I wouldn’t have said so, I sent him off to stand on another corner because I felt like it. He was a very pleasant chap that organ-grinder, there aren’t many like him now, a relic of the past and of my childhood, I should have treated him with more respect. The worst thing is that he would probably prefer that things were as they were and not as I now think they should have been, that is, he would have preferred my money to my respect. I could have explained the situation to him and then asked him if he’d move and given him the money afterwards if he proved agreeable and understanding, a tip rather than a bribe, “For any inconvenience caused” instead of “Clear off”; but there’s no real difference between the two, both cases involve an “if”, and it little matters whether it’s explicit or implicit, whether it comes afterwards or before. In a way, what I did was clearer and cleaner, with no hypocrisy or false sentiment, it suited us both and that’s that. However, there’s still no denying that I did purchase and determine his steps, and on that other corner to which I sent him he could have been knocked down by a delivery van that went out of control and ploughed on to the pavement, it would never have run him over if the man had stayed on the first corner he’d chosen. No more chotis, his hat fallen to the ground and his short moustache all bloodied. The reverse could have happened too, of course, and then, I suppose, I would have saved his life by moving him on.

But all this is pure conjecture and hypothesis, yet there are times when the lives of others, of another (the configuration of a life, its continuation, not a few mere steps), do depend on our decisions and vacillations, on our cowardice or daring, on our words and on our hands, and sometimes on the fact that we have money and they do not. Near Ranz’s house, that is, near the house where I lived during my childhood and adolescence, there’s a stationer’s. The owner’s daughter, a girl almost my own age, slightly younger, began working there when she was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was a modest, old-fashioned establishment, one of those places that progress forgets and leaves on one side in order to highlight its totalitarian achievements, and for many years it remained almost entirely unrenovated, although latterly some work has been done on it, it’s improved since the father died, they’ve modernized it somewhat and will doubtless make more money as a consequence. But then, when I was fourteen or fifteen, they probably made very little and that was why, at least in those days, the girl worked there in the afternoons. She was very pretty, I really liked her and I used to go to the stationer’s almost every day just to see her. Instead of buying what I wanted all in one go, I’d buy a pencil one day and a notebook the next, an eraser one afternoon and the following day an inkwell. I invented needs I didn’t have, I spent a lot of pocket money in that stationer’s. And I would linger before leaving the shop and whistle while I waited to be attended to, the way boys of my age did at the time, I’d do my best to make sure that she was the one who served me (I’d watch to see when she was free before opening my mouth) rather than her father or her mother, I’d take much longer than was necessary and I’d feel happy for the rest of the afternoon if I got a smile from her or a look that was friendly or at least interpretable, but above all, I’d leave contentedly thinking about the abstract future, there was time enough for everything, she was in the shop afternoon after afternoon, always in the same place, and there was no reason why the future should ever become concrete, should ever stop being future. I didn’t stay the age I was then, nor did the girl, who grew and continued to be lovely for several years, she was there in the mornings too by then, from the time she was sixteen years old or so she was there all day, she served in the shop all the time, while I went to university, she no longer studied. I didn’t talk to her when we were both at school and I didn’t talk to her later on either, at first because I didn’t dare to and later because the time for it had passed; that’s the worst thing about the abstract future when it remains just that: although I used to look at her, my mind was on other things, concerned with the variable present, and I used to visit the stationer’s less often. I never said a word to her other than to ask her for paper and pencils, files and erasers and to say thank you. So I’ve no idea what she’s like, what kind of person she is or what she likes doing, if she’s pleasant to talk to, if she’s good-tempered or moody, her opinions on any particular topic, if she laughs, how she kisses. All I know is that when I was fifteen years old I loved her the way one does love then or the way one loves things that haven’t yet begun, that is, believing that it will last for ever. But I’d go further and say that her way of looking and smiling (the way she had then) deserved to be loved forever and that was nothing to do with my being fifteen years old, but with what I’m saying now. Her name was and is Nieves. Another fifteen years or more have passed since I lived in Ranz’s house, but sometimes, when I go there or when I’ve been to visit him or to pick him up before going out to lunch together at La Trainera or to some other restaurant further off, I’ve gone into the stationer’s before going up to his apartment, out of a habit, which I still haven’t entirely lost, of always buying something there, and every time, during all these years, I’ve found that girl who is now no longer a girl, I’ve seen her at twenty-three, at twenty-six, at twenty-nine and at thirty-three or thirty-four, which is the age she must be now. I saw her one day shortly before getting married to Luisa. She’s still a young woman, she must be, because I’ve always known her age, more or less, and she was only a little younger than me. She must be but she doesn’t look it, she’s no longer lovely and I don’t understand why, since she’s still at an age when she could be. She’s probably spent too many years stuck in that stationer’s morning and afternoon (although not at night or on Sundays or on Saturdays after midday, but that’s of no account), serving her goods to children who won’t now see her as their equal or their beloved but, for some time now, as a grown-up. Not one of those children will admire her, perhaps no one admires her, not even I do, now I’m no longer a child, or perhaps she has a husband who does, some chap from the neighbourhood, who will have spent too many years stuck in some other shop morning and afternoon, selling medicines or in a garage changing tyres. I don’t know, perhaps there’s no husband either. All I know is that this young woman, who no longer seems like a young woman, has dressed the same way for far too long, in jerseys and round-necked blouses, in pleated skirts and pale stockings, has spent too long going up and down her ladder in search of typewriter ribbons, with her broken, inkstained nails, her slim figure going to fat, the breasts, which I watched blossom, becoming flaccid, the bored look in her eyes and the ever darker shadows beneath them, the puffy eyelids from lack of sleep hiding eyes that were once so lovely; or maybe they’re puffy because of the future she’s had to look forward to ever since she was a child. The last time I was there and I saw her, shortly before my planned wedding, before going up to get my father in order to go out together for a jolly lunch, I had a vain thought of which I’m rather ashamed and which, nevertheless, I can’t entirely dismiss, or rather, it comes back to me occasionally like something we’ve forgotten a thousand times already and recalled another thousand times and are still too lazy to do anything about, and so we prefer it to remain alternately forgotten and recalled in equal measure so that it never is completely forgotten. It occurred to me that Nieves, the girl in the shop, would be a different person, a better person, if I’d loved her and not only from afar, if once adolescence was past I’d spoken to her and got to know her and she’d wanted to kiss me, which is something I’ll never know, if she’d have wanted to or not I mean. I know that I know nothing about her, she’s probably not restless or ambitious or curious enough, but I’m sure of at least two things: she wouldn’t dress the way she does now and she’d no longer work at the stationer’s, I’d have made sure of that. She might still be lovely and still look young, I know that’s putting it strongly, but the mere possibility that it could have been that way is enough to make me feel indignant, not with myself because I never spoke to her about anything other than pencils, but with the simple fact or, again, the possibility, that the apparent age and appearance of a person can depend on whoever happened to take an interest in them and on having money. Money means that the stationer’s could, without hesitation, have been sold and thus attracted more money, money reduces fear and buys new clothes every season, money means that a smile and a look can be loved as they deserve and may last longer than they otherwise would. Probably other people in Nieves’ situation would have left already, they’d have managed to escape from the cosy abstract future and from the open space slowly closing in on them; however, I’m not talking about hypothetical people, but about that particular girl whose never very concrete figure sustained my nights when I was fifteen years old. That’s why my rather vain thought wasn’t just a presumptuous, pathetic variant on stories about princes and pretty peasants, about professors and flower-sellers, about gentlemen and chorus girls, although there was something presumptuous about it, perhaps it was provoked by my imminent wedding and because, for a moment, I felt treacherous and superior and saved, superior and treacherous towards Nieves and saved from being like her. I wasn’t thinking about myself but about the path her life would take, about how it would go on, thinking for a second that I might have been capable of changing it, even that I still had time to do so, much as, yesterday morning, I changed the steps of the friendly organ-grinder from my past and of the woman with the plait and moved them on. I know that the girl in the stationer’s would have seen other things and other countries and not just in the month of August, I know that she would have met different people from those she meets and mixes with now, I know that she’d have more money and wouldn’t have been buried beneath pencil shavings and eraser rubbings. What I don’t know is how I dared to think all that, how today I still don’t just banish that vain thought definitively but allow it to return, how I could simply assume that a life with me would have been better for her, better generally. There is, I believe, no such thing as “generally”, and I thought only about what kind of person she’d have become, not recognizing that I wouldn’t be the same person either and that I might have spent my days in the stationer’s with her.

“Do you have any refills for this pen?”

That was what I asked her, taking out of my pocket a German pen I’d bought in Brussels and which I very much like for its matt black nib.

“Let me have a look,” she said, opening up the pen and studying the nearly empty cartridge. “I don’t think so, but if you wait just a moment I’ll have a look in the boxes up above.”

I knew that she wouldn’t have the right cartridges and I thought that probably she knew that too. Nevertheless, she dragged the old stepladder over, placed it to my left on her side of the counter and clambered wearily up, as if she were twenty years older than she actually was (years spent going up and down the ladder), until she was on the fifth rung and then she rummaged in various cardboard boxes none of which would be of any use to us. I watched her from behind, in her low-heeled shoes and her check skirt like some antiquated schoolgirl, her spreading hips and the slightly loose strap of her bra showing through beneath her blouse, and the back of her neck, still charming, the one thing that had remained unchanged. She was looking in the boxes and holding my open pen in her hand in order to see the cartridge and be able to compare it, she was holding it with great care. If I’d been at the same height as her at that moment I would have placed a hand on her shoulder or stroked the back of her neck, affectionately.

It’s hard to imagine me spending my days there since I’ve always had money and curiosity, curiosity and money, even when I don’t have large amounts of it and I have to work to earn it, like now and ever since I left Ranz’s house, some time ago, even though I only work six months of the year. Anyone who knows they’re going to have money already has it in a way, people lend it to you, I know that I’ll have a lot of money when my father dies and that then, if I want to, I’ll hardly have to work at all, I had money when I was a child in order to buy all those pencils and I inherited a part of it when my mother died, and a smaller amount before that, from my grandmother, even if they didn’t actually earn it, deaths enrich those who weren’t rich and never could have become rich on their own, widows and daughters, or sometimes perhaps all that’s left is a stationer’s shop that simply imprisons the daughter and solves nothing.

Ranz always lived well and, as his son, so did I, never extravagantly or only as extravagantly as permitted, or indeed prompted, by his profession. My father’s one extravagance, and indeed the basis of his fortune, has always been the acquisition of paintings and the occasional sculpture, but more especially paintings and drawings. He’s retired now, but for many years (during the Franco years and beyond) he was one of the in-house experts at the Prado, he was never director or deputy director, never anyone very visible, apparently just another civil servant who spent every morning at the office, so much so that, at least as a little boy, his son never had a very clear idea of how his father spent those mornings. I found out gradually afterwards. My father did, in fact, spend his days shut up in an office next door to the great and not so great works of art in his beloved field of painting. He spent whole mornings in the vicinity of extraordinary pictures, blindly, unable to peer out and see them, or to see how other visitors saw them. He examined, catalogued, described, uncatalogued, researched, passed judgement, compiled inventories, made phone calls, bought and sold. But he wasn’t always there, he also travelled widely on behalf of both institutions and individuals who gradually came to hear of his talents and employed him to give opinions and draw up condition reports (a rather ugly term but that’s the one used by the experts themselves) or appraisals. He ended up as advisor to several American museums, amongst them the Getty Museum in Malibu, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and the Gardner Museum in Boston, as well as being advisor to several foundations or fraudulent South American banks and to private collectors, people too rich to come to Madrid and to his house, and so he was the one who travelled to London or Zurich, Chicago or Montevideo or The Hague, gave his opinion, recommended or advised against sale or purchase, took a percentage or bonus, and came back. He earned more and more money over the years, not only from the percentages and from his salary as an expert at the Prado (which wasn’t that large), but also from his gradual, benign corruption: not that he’s ever made any bones about his semi-fraudulent practices to me, indeed, he’s even boasted about them in so far as any sly deceit practised on the cautious and the powerful is in part worthy of applause as long as it remains unpunished and undiscovered, that is, if not only the perpetrator but also the deceit itself remains unnoticed. Corruption in this field isn’t a particularly serious matter anyway, it consists simply in changing sides, without anyone noticing or knowing, and representing the interests of the vendor rather than those of the buyer, who’s normally the person who employs the expert (and who, one day, may well be a vendor himself). The Getty Museum or the Walters Art Gallery, who paid my father, would be informed about the authorship, condition and state of preservation of a painting they were considering acquiring. My father would report to them honestly at first, but keep back some fact which, had it been taken into account, would have considerably diminished its value and its price, for example, the fact that the canvas in question was lacking several centimetres which someone, during the course of centuries, had cut off in order to make it fit the office of one its owners, or the fact that a couple of minor figures in the background had been retouched, if not repainted. Reaching an agreement with a vendor to keep quiet about such details could mean doubling his percentage on a much higher sale price, earning a lot of money for the person who kept silent and even more for the vendor; and if, later on, his mistake is discovered, the expert can always say that it was exactly that, a mistake, no expert is infallible, on the contrary, it’s inevitable that at some point he’ll be mistaken about something, all he has to do to preserve his reputation is to be right about a lot of other things, and in this way mistakes can be managed. I’m sure that my father has a good eye and an even surer hand (you have to touch a painting to know about it, it’s absolutely essential, sometimes you even have to lick the surface, though not enough to cause any damage), and over the years this has proved invaluable in countries like Spain, during the time when they didn’t know about or couldn’t afford chemical analyses (which, it should be said, aren’t infallible either) and the reputation of experts depended solely on the emphasis and conviction with which they gave their verdicts. Private collections in Spain are full of counterfeits (so are public collections but to a lesser extent), and their owners get very upset when they decide to sell them and take them to a serious auctioneer’s. Ladies have been known to faint on the spot when they’ve found out that the small, divine El Greco they’ve always had in the family was a small, divine, fake El Greco. Venerable gentlemen have threatened to slash their wrists when they heard the news, which left no possible room for doubt, that the much-loved Flemish panel they’ve always had in the family was a much-loved fake Flemish panel. In the offices of auctioneers real pearls have rolled to the floor and fine wooden walking sticks have been broken. Sharp objects are now kept under glass ever since an employee was stabbed and no one is surprised by the occasional presence of straitjackets and ambulances. The men in white coats are always welcome visitors.

For decades, appraisals in Spain had been made by anyone with the necessary vanity, impudence or audacity: an antiquarian, a bookseller, an art critic, a guide in the Prado (the sort who walk around with a placard), a museum guard, a seller of postcards or even one of the cleaning ladies, everyone had an opinion and was prepared to deliver a judgement, all judgements were taken as gospel and all given equal weight. Anyone who really did know about these things proved invaluable, as is still the case all over the world, but especially in the Spain of that time. And my father did know about them, he still knows more than most people. However, I’ve always had a nagging doubt that amongst his minor corruptions there wasn’t something more serious about which he never boasted. Apart from those already mentioned, the expert has another two or three ways of growing rich. The first is legal and consists in buying a painting for oneself from someone who knows no better or who’s in difficulties (for example, during and after a war, at times like that, masterpieces are handed over for a passport or a slice of bacon). For years and years Ranz has been buying things for his own home, not only for the people who hired him: from antiquarians, booksellers, art critics, guides in the Prado (the sort who walk around with placards), from museum guards, sellers of postcards and even from cleaning ladies, from all kinds of people. He’s bought marvellous things from them for next to nothing: with the money paid to him by Malibu, Boston and Baltimore he invested in art for himself, or rather, he didn’t invest or, if he did, it was for the benefit of his descendants, for he’s never wanted to sell anything he owned and it’ll fall to me to sell them. My father owns a few real gems that cost him nothing and about which nothing is known. In the Kunsthalle in Bremen, in Germany, a painting and sixteen drawings by Dürer disappeared in 1945, and, so the story goes, they were either destroyed during the bombing raids or carried off by the Russians (most people favour the latter theory). Amongst those drawings there was one entitled “Head of a Woman with Her Eyes Closed”, another called “Portrait of Caterina Cornaro” and a third, known as “Three Linden Trees”. I neither confirm nor deny anything, but in the collection of drawings owned by Ranz there are three that I would swear were by Dürer (but I’m in no position to say so, and he just laughs when I ask him and won’t answer me), one of them is of the head of a woman with her eyes closed, another I feel certain is the exact likeness of Caterina Cornaro and the last appears to show three linden trees, not that I know much about trees. This is just one example. Bearing in mind the volatile nature of prices on the art market, I’ve no idea what the whole of his collection would be worth (my father also laughs when I ask him that, and replies: “You’ll find out soon enough, when you have to. That kind of thing changes every day, like the price of gold”), but it’s possible that I’d only have to sell one or two pieces when he dies, and it’s up to me whether I sell or not, in order, if I were so minded, to stop working as a translator and stop travelling.

When asked about the best paintings on permanent display in his apartment (not that many), Ranz has always told friends and visitors that they were merely copies (with the occasional reasonable exception: Boudin, Martín Rico and other similar works), excellent copies made by Custardoy the Elder and the occasional more recent one by Custardoy the Younger.

The second way an expert has of becoming rich is by placing his knowledge not at the service of interpretation, but of action, that is, by advising and guiding a forger so that his work can be as perfect as possible. One assumes that any expert acting in that capacity for a forger would abstain from informing anyone else about those forgeries, the ones carried out under his supervision and advice. But, on the other hand, it’s likely that the forger would give him a percentage of what he earns from the sale of one of those paintings to some private person or museum or bank once they’ve been given the OK by another expert, just as it’s likely that the first expert would be more than ready to report on the forgeries overseen by the latter. One of Ranz’s best friends was Custardoy the Elder, just as Custardoy the Younger now is, both of them magnificent copyists of almost any painting from almost any period, although their best copies, those in which original and copy could easily be confused, were of French painters of the eighteenth century, who for a long time were undervalued (and so no one took the trouble to forge them) and are nowadays overvalued, partly because of a reassessment made in recent decades by the experts themselves. In Ranz’s house there are two extraordinary copies, one of a small Watteau and the other of a tiny Chardin, the first by Custardoy the Elder and the second by Custardoy the Younger, which Ranz commissioned only three years ago, or so he says. Shortly before his death, now more than ten years ago, Custardoy the Elder ran into some problems and had a few nasty shocks: he was even arrested only to be released shortly afterwards without going to trial; doubtless my father made a few phone calls from his office in the Prado to people who, despite Franco’s death, had still not entirely lost their influence.

But, however tidy a sum of money Ranz may have earned and added to, thanks to Malibu, Boston and Baltimore, Zurich, Montevideo and The Hague, to certain personal favours and to more discreet services rendered to vendors, even perhaps to expert advice he may have given to Custardoy the Elder and occasionally to Custardoy the Younger, his one extravagance and the basis of his fortune, as I’ve already said, has been his personal collection of drawings and paintings and the odd sculpture, although I don’t yet know, nor will I know for the moment, how much the fruits of his extravagance, his fortune, are worth (1 hope that when he dies he leaves a very precise and expert appraisal). He’s never wanted to get rid of anything, not of his supposed copies nor of his guaranteed originals, and in that one must recognize, despite his minor acts of corruption, the sincerity of his vocation and his real passion for painting. When you think about it, giving us the tiny Boudin and Martin Rico for our wedding must have cost him dear, even though he’ll still see them in our home. When he was working at the Prado I remember his enormous concern over any accident or loss, over the slightest deterioration or imperfection in a work, as well as concern for the museum guards, who, he used to say, should be paid a fortune and kept extremely happy, since they were responsible not only for the safety and care but also for the very existence of the paintings. He used to say that “Las Meninas” is still in existence thanks to the benevolence and the day-to-day mercy of the guards, who could, if they chose to, destroy it at any moment, which was why you had to keep them proud and happy and in a satisfactory emotional state. On various pretexts (it wasn’t his job, it wasn’t anyone’s job), he took it upon himself to find out how things were with the guards, if they were feeling contented or upset, if they were overwhelmed by debts and just getting by, if their wives or husbands (the staff are mixed) were treating them well or beating them up, if their children were a cause of happiness or were young psychopaths driving them crazy, he was forever asking questions and looking after them all in order to safeguard the works of the masters, to protect them from the guards’ possible rages or furies or resentments. My father was keenly aware that any man or woman who spends the day shut up in a room, always seeing the same paintings, for hours and hours every morning and on some afternoons, just sitting on a stool doing nothing but watch the visitors and watch the canvases (they’re even forbidden to do crosswords), could easily go mad, become a menace or develop a mortal hatred for those paintings. For that reason he took it on himself, during the years he spent in the Prado, to change the postings of the guards every month, so that they would at least only see the same paintings for thirty days at a time and their hatred might thereby be assuaged, or the target of that hatred changed before it was too late. The other thing he was very conscious of was this: the risk of punishment and of being sent to prison wouldn’t deter a guard if, one morning, he decided to destroy “Las Meninas”, “Las Meninas” would then be as thoroughly destroyed as the Bremen Dürers – assuming, of course, that they were destroyed by the bombs – since there’d be no guard to prevent their destruction, for the guard himself would be doing the destroying, with all the time in the world to carry out his fell deed and no one to stop him apart from himself. The loss would be irretrievable, there would be no way of restoring the painting.

On one occasion Ranz left his office at around closing time, when most of the visitors had gone, and he found an old guard called Mateu (who’d worked there for twenty-five years) playing with a disposable lighter and the edge of a Rembrandt, with the lower left edge of the painting entitled “Artemisa”, dated 1634, to be precise, the only authenticated Rembrandt in the Prado, in which the above-named Artemisa, who looks very like Saskia, Rembrandt’s wife and frequent model, is looking out of the corner of her eye at an intricate goblet being held out to her by a young servant girl kneeling down, with her back almost turned to us. The scene has been interpreted in two ways, as being either Artemisa, Queen of Halicamassus, who is on the point of drinking the contents of a goblet containing the ashes of Mausolus, her dead husband, for whom she’d had a tomb built which went on to become one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (hence the word “mausoleum”), or Sophonisba, the daughter of the Carthaginian Hasdrubal, who, in order to avoid falling into the hands of Scipio and his men, had laid formal claim to her, asked her new husband, Masinissa, for a cup of poison as a wedding present, a cup which, according to the story, was procured for her in the name of endangered fidelity, despite the fact that Sophonisba had not been his wife alone and had been married before to another, to Syphax, the chief of the Numidians, from whom, in fact, her second husband (the above-named Masinissa), another sacker of cities, had just stolen her during the chaotic capture of Cirta, modern-day Constantine, in Algeria. So, standing in front of the painting, it’s difficult to know if Artemisa is about to drink marital ashes in honour of Mausolus or if Sophonisba is about to drink marital poison to protect the honour of Masinissa; although, given the sideways glance of both women, it looks more as if one or the other were, in fact, considering ingesting some adulterous potion. Whatever the true subject of the painting, in the background there is the head of an old woman who’s much more interested in the goblet than she is in the servant girl or in Artemisa herself (if the subject is Sophonisba, it’s possible that it was the old woman who placed the poison in it), you can’t see her very well at all, the background is veiled in an overly mysterious or overly murky penumbra, and the figure of Sophonisba is so luminous and takes up so much space that it makes the old woman seem even more obscure.

At that time, there were no automatic fire alarms in the Prado, but there were fire extinguishers. My father wrenched the nearest one off the wall and, although he didn’t know how to use it, he held it behind his back, concealing it as best he could (it weighed a ton and was a most conspicuous colour), then went slowly over to Mateu, who had by then scorched one corner of the picture frame and was now holding the flame very close to the canvas, moving it up and down and from corner to corner, as if he wanted to light up the whole painting, the servant girl and the old woman and Artemisa and the goblet, as well as a bedside table on which there are a few written pages (possibly Scipio’s formal claim) and on which Sophonisba is leaning her rather plump left hand.

“What are you doing, Mateu?” my father said to him calmly. “Are you trying to get a better look at the painting?”

Mateu didn’t turn round, he recognized my father’s voice at once and knew perfectly well that, every day, when Ranz finished work, he used to take a random stroll around a few rooms just to make sure that they were still intact.

“No,” he replied in a neutral, dispassionate tone, “I’m thinking of burning it.”

My father said that he could have struck Mateu’s arm and made him drop the lighter, thus rendering it harmless, and then deftly kicked it away. But his hands were occupied by the fire extinguisher behind his back and, besides, the mere possibility of failing and making the guard even angrier convinced him not to try his luck. He thought that perhaps it was best to divert him from using the flame (thus igniting bituminous substances) until the non-refillable lighter had run out of fuel, but that could take a long time (if, by some misfortune, the lighter had only been bought recently). He also thought of shouting for help, someone would appear, Mateu would be arrested and the fire wouldn’t spread to the other paintings, but in that case it would be goodbye to the one authentic Rembrandt in the Prado, goodbye to Sophonisba and Artemisa, and even to Mausolus and Masinissa and to Saskia and Syphax. He asked him another question.

“But, Mateu, do you really dislike it that much?”

“I’m fed up with that fat woman,” replied Mateu. Mateu was referring to Sophonisba. “I don’t like that fat woman with the pearls,” he insisted. (And it’s true that Artemisa is fat and, in the Rembrandt, is wearing a string of pearls around her neck and her forehead). “The little servant girl holding out the goblet to her looks prettier, but you can’t see her face properly.”

My father couldn’t resist giving a mocking, or rather, a surprised and logical reply:

“Of course,” he said, “it was painted like that, with the fat one facing us and the servant girl with her back to us.”

The pyromaniac, Mateu, flicked the lighter off for a few seconds, but didn’t remove it from the canvas, and after those few seconds had passed he lit it again and held it close to the painting. He wasn’t looking at Ranz.

“That’s the worst thing,” he said, “that it’s fixed like that for ever and now we’ll never know what happened next. You see, Señor Ranz, there’s no way of seeing the girl’s face or of knowing what that old woman is doing in the background, all you can see is that fat trout with her two necklaces who never actually picks up the goblet. I wish she’d just bloody well drink it and give me a chance to look at the girl, if she’d turn round that is.”

Mateu, a man who knew what painting was about, a man of sixty who’d spent twenty-five of those years in the Prado, suddenly wanted to know what happened next in a Rembrandt painting that he didn’t understand. (No one understands it, there’s a world of difference between Artemisa and Sophonisba, the difference between drinking the ashes of a dead man and drinking death, between celebrating life and dying, between prolonging life and killing oneself). It was absurd, but Ranz still kept trying to reason with him:

“But you know that’s not possible, Mateu,” he said. “The three figures are painted, can’t you see that? Painted. You’ve seen plenty of films and this isn’t a film. You must see that there’s no way you’ll ever see them looking any different. This is a painting, a painting.”

“That’s why I’m going to do away with it,” said Mateu, again caressing the canvas with the flame from the lighter.

“Besides,” added my father trying to distract him and out of a desire for exactitude (my father is a pedant), “what she’s wearing on her forehead isn’t a necklace, but a diadem, even if it is made out of pearls.”

But Mateu paid no attention to this. He mechanically blew a few specks of dust from his uniform.

Holding the fire extinguisher behind him was killing Ranz’s wrists, so he gave up trying to hide it and instead held it in his arms as if it were a baby, it’s bright crimson casing clearly visible. Mateu noticed the fire extinguisher.

“Now look here, what do you think you’re doing with that,” he said reproachfully to my father. “Don’t you know you’re not allowed to take them off the wall?”

Mateu had at last turned round when he heard the noise caused by my father’s clumsy handling of the fire extinguisher, which in its journey from behind his back to his arms had bumped against the floor causing splinters to fly, but my father didn’t dare take advantage of that moment of alarm. It made him think though.

“It’s OK, Mateu,” he said. “I’m taking it away with me because it needs mending, it doesn’t work.” And he took the opportunity, with great relief, to place it on the floor. He took out the cherry-red silk handkerchief adorning his jacket pocket and mopped his brow; the handkerchief was pleasant to the touch and to the eye, ornamental rather than of any practical use, the red matched the fire extinguisher.

“Like I said, I’m going to do away with it,” repeated Mateu, and he made a threatening gesture with the lighter in Saskia’s direction.

“The painting’s worth a lot of money, Mateu. It’s worth millions,” Ranz said to him, in an attempt to see if the mention of money would bring him back to his senses.

But the guard went on playing with the lighter, flicking it on and off and on again, and opted for scorching the frame a little more, a very fine, antique frame.

“That just makes matters worse,” he replied scornfully. “Bloody hell, to top it all, the great fat cow is worth millions.”

The fine frame was turning black. My father thought that perhaps now was the moment to mention prison, but immediately dismissed the idea. He thought for a moment, and then for another, and finally changed his tactics. He suddenly picked up the fire extinguisher from the floor and said:

“You know, you’re quite right, Mateu, you’re absolutely right. But don’t burn it because then you might set fire to the other paintings. Let me deal with it. I’ll throw this fire extinguisher at it, it weighs a ton. All I have to do is drop this ton weight on the fat cow and that’ll be that.”

Ranz lifted the fire extinguisher and held it above his head with his two hands like a weightlifter, ready to hurl it violently at Sophonisba or Artemisa.

Mateu became very serious at that point.

“Look here,” Mateu said to him solemnly, “what do you think you’re doing? You’ll damage the painting.”

“I’ll ruin it,” said Ranz. There was a moment’s hesitation, my father with his arms in the air, holding aloft the bright red fire extinguisher, Mateu with the lighter in his hand still lit, the flame still flickering. He looked at my father, then at the painting. Ranz couldn’t hold the weight much longer. Then Mateu flicked off the lighter, put it in his pocket, spread his arms wide like a wrestler and said to him threateningly:

“Now you hold still, eh? And don’t make me do anything I might regret.”

Mateu wasn’t dismissed because my father didn’t tell anyone about the episode. Nor did the guard denounce him for having threatened to destroy the Rembrandt with a faulty fire extinguisher. No one else noticed the scorch mark on the frame (apart from Mateu’s bribed replacement and one indiscreet visitor who was advised not to ask any questions), and shortly afterwards it was changed for one very similar, though not antique. According to Ranz, if Mateu had been a zealous guard for twenty-five years, there was no reason why he shouldn’t continue to be so once he was over his momentary attack of rage. More than that, he attributed his action and his attack to the lack of action and attacks by other people, and took as proof of his trustworthiness the fact that, when he saw the painting he bore a grudge against threatened by someone else, someone who was, moreover, his superior, his sense of responsibility as a guard had prevailed over his sincere desire to bum Artemisa. He was immediately transferred to another room containing work by primitive painters, whose figures are less rotund and less likely to irritate (and some are palinschematic, that is, the surface or space they inhabit illustrates a complete story). For the rest, my father merely showed more interest than ever in Mateu’s life, talking encouragingly to him about his imminent retirement and never taking his eyes off him during the parties that were held twice a year for all the museum staff, on a day when the museum was closed, usually in the large Velázquez room. All the employees and their respective families, from the director (who made only a token appearance for a minute or two and proffered a limp handshake) to the cleaning women (who were the people who made the most noise and had the most fun because they’d have to stay on afterwards and clear up the mess), would gather together to eat and drink and converse (though “converse” is not quite the word for it) and generally disport themselves in a sort of biannual beanfeast which was my father’s idea, basing himself on the model of or the reasoning behind Carnival, in order to keep the guards happy and to allow them to relax and loosen up a bit in the very place where, on other days of the year, they’d have to be on guard. He himself took care to serve only food and drink which, if spilled, couldn’t ruin or damage the paintings, and that way all kinds of excesses and abuses were allowable: as a child, I myself saw lemonade spilt on “Las Meninas” and meringue smeared over “The Surrender of Breda”.

FOR MANY YEARS, as a child and later too, as an adolescent and as a very young man, when I was still gazing with irresolute eyes at the girl in the stationer’s, all I knew was that, before Ranz married my mother, he’d been married to my mother’s older sister, that he married Teresa Aguilera before he married her sister, Juana, the two girls that my grandmother used to refer to sometimes when she was telling anecdotes about the past, or rather she’d just say “the girls” to differentiate them from their brothers, whom she called “the boys”. It isn’t just that children take a long time to show any interest in the people their parents were before they knew them (in general that interest arises only when the children reach the age their parents were when they did, in fact, first enter their lives, or when they in turn have children and, through them, remember themselves as children and wonder, perplexed, about the tutelary figures whom they now resemble), it’s also that parents become accustomed to arousing no curiosity and to keeping quiet about themselves to their children, silencing the people they were or have perhaps forgotten. Almost everyone feels ashamed of their youth, it isn’t true that we feel nostalgia for it, rather we banish it or flee from it and, with varying degrees of ease or difficulty, we confine our origins to the sphere of bad dreams or novels, or to what never existed. Our youth is something hidden, a secret to those who never knew us when we were young.

Ranz and my mother never hid the fact that Ranz had been married to the woman who would have been my Aunt Teresa had she lived (or rather would not have been), it had been an extremely brief marriage about which I knew only that it had been terminated by her early death, but, on the other hand, for many years I didn’t know (nor did I ask) the reason for that death, and for many more years I thought I did know in essence, but I was wrong; when I did finally ask they lied, which is another of the things parents become accustomed to, lying to their children about their forgotten youth. They told me about some illness, that was all, for many years they spoke only of an illness, and it’s difficult to doubt something you’ve known since infancy, it takes a long time before you begin to question it. Consequently, my idea of that brief marriage was that it had been an understandable mistake, in the eyes at least of a child or an adolescent, who would prefer to think of his parents being together as an inevitability, in order to justify his own existence and, therefore, his belief in his own inevitability and justification for living (I’m referring to lazy, normal children, the ones who don’t go to school if they’ve got a bit of a temperature, the ones who don’t have to deliver groceries by bike every morning). It was only a very vague idea and I explained the mistake by telling myself that Ranz could have believed that he loved one sister, the elder sister, when in fact he loved the other one, the younger sister, perhaps too young when they first met for my father to take her seriously. Perhaps that’s what I was told, it’s possible, by my mother or rather by my grandmother, I don’t remember now, a brief and perhaps deceitful reply to a childish question; Ranz, of course, never talked to me about such things. It was easy enough too for another factor to appear in a child’s imagination, a compassionate one: consoling the widower, replacing the sister, easing the husband’s despair, taking the dead woman’s place. My mother might have married my father a little out of pity, so that he wouldn’t be alone; or perhaps not, she might have loved him secretly from the start and have secretly desired the disappearance of the obstacle, her sister Teresa. And when that happened, she might have been glad of her disappearance, at least in that respect. Ranz had never told me anything. Some years ago, when I was already a grown man, I tried to ask him about it and he treated me as if I were still a child. “What’s it got to do with you?” he said, and changed the subject. When I insisted (we were at a restaurant, La Dorada) he got up to go to the toilet and said to me teasingly, giving me his most brilliant smile: “Listen, I don’t feel like talking about the distant past, it’s in bad taste and reminds one how old one is. If you’re going to continue in the same vein, I think it would be best if, by the time I came back, you’d left the table. I want to eat in peace, today, not on some other day forty years ago.” He told me to leave as if we were at home and I was a little boy who could be sent to his room, he didn’t even consider the possibility of getting angry or that he should be the one to leave the restaurant.

The truth is that almost no one ever mentioned Teresa Aguilera, and that “almost” has become superfluous since the death of my Cuban grandmother, the only one who did occasionally talk about her, as if without meaning to or as if she couldn’t help it, although in her house Teresa was still very much a visible presence, in the form of a posthumous portrait in oils based on a photograph. And in my house too, that is, in my father’s house, there used to be and still is the black-and-white photograph that served as the model, at which Ranz and Juana would now and then give a passing glance. That photograph shows Teresa with a trusting, serious face, a pretty woman with fine eyebrows, as if drawn in with a single stroke, a slight dimple in her chin – like a notch, a shadow – her dark hair caught back and with a centre parting emphasizing what used to be called a widow’s peak, she has a long neck, a large, feminine mouth (but quite different from my father’s or mine), her eyes are very dark too and very wide-set, they look frankly at the camera, she’s wearing discreet earrings, mother-of-pearl perhaps and, despite her extreme youth, she’s wearing lipstick, as nice girls did at the time when she was young and alive. Her skin is very pale, her fingers interlaced, her arms resting on a table, perhaps a dining table rather than a desk, although you can’t see enough to know for sure and the background is very blurred, perhaps it’s a studio photograph. She’s wearing a short-sleeved blouse, it may have been spring or summer, she must be about twenty, perhaps less, she may not yet have known Ranz or may just have met him. She was single then. There’s something about her which now reminds me of Luisa, despite having looked at that photograph for many years before Luisa even existed, every year of my life except for the last two. This may be due to the fact that one tends to see the person one loves and with whom one shares one’s life in everything. But they share the same trusting expression, Teresa in her portrait and Luisa in person now, as if they were afraid of nothing and as if nothing could ever harm them, that’s the case with Luisa, at least when she’s awake; when she’s asleep her face is more vulnerable and her body seems more open to danger. Luisa is so trusting that the first night we spent together she dreamed, she told me, of pieces of gold. She woke up in the middle of the night, disturbed by my presence, and looked at me a little strangely, stroked my cheek with her nails and said: “I was dreaming of pieces of gold, they were extraordinarily bright and shaped like fingernails.” Only someone very innocent could dream such a dream and, more to the point, then tell someone about it. When I’ve looked at the photo of Teresa in my father’s house since meeting Luisa and sleeping with her, I’ve often thought that Teresa Aguilera could have dreamed of those gleaming pieces of gold on her wedding night. I don’t know when they took that photograph of Teresa and probably no one knew for certain: it’s very small, set in a wooden frame, on a shelf, and since she died no one would have looked at it save very infrequently, the way people look at the china or the ornaments or even the paintings in houses and stop looking at them with any attention or pleasure once they’ve become part of the daily landscape. Since my mother’s death, her photograph, a larger one, is there too, in my father’s house, and there’s a portrait of her as well, though not a posthumous one, which Custardoy the Elder painted when I was still a child. Of the two sisters my mother, Juana, looks the jollier one, although they are somewhat alike, the neck and the shape of the face and the chin are all identical. My mother is smiling in both the photograph and the painting, in both she’s already older than her elder sister in the small photograph, in fact older than Teresa ever was, for by virtue of her death she came to be the younger sister in a way, now even I’m older than she was; premature death has a rejuvenating quality. My mother smiles almost the way she used to laugh; she laughed easily, like my grandmother; as I’ve already said, the two of them often used to roar with laughter when they were together.

But I didn’t know until a few months ago that my aunt, who could never have been my aunt, had killed herself shortly after returning from her honeymoon with my own father, and it was Custardoy the Younger who told me so. He’s three years older than I am and I’ve known him since childhood, when three years seems a lot, although then I avoided him as much as possible and I’ve come to tolerate him only as an adult. The friendship or business relationship between our fathers sometimes brought us together, although he was always closer to the adults, more interested in their world, as if impatient to form part of it and to act independently, I remember him as a child old before his time or a frustrated adult, a man condemned to remain too long in the incongruous body of a boy, obliged to endure a fruitless wait that consumed him. It wasn’t that he took part in the adults’ conversations, he was devoid of pedantry – he just listened – it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he’s not yet allowed to enter, like a prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or refraining from doing anything just because he’s not there and that his own time is disappearing along with the world rushing by him; it’s a common experience amongst the dying too. He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited to being only themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity. When he came to our house and had to wait in my company for his father’s visit with mine to be over, he’d go over to the balcony window and turn his back on me for fifteen or twenty minutes or half an hour at a time, ignoring the various games I ingenuously proposed to him. But despite his immobility, there was nothing contemplative or peaceful about his standing figure or about the bony hands with which he parted the lace curtains then gripped them, like a man only recently taken captive accustoming himself to the feel of the bars, as if he still couldn’t quite believe in their existence. I’d carry on playing behind his back, trying not to be noticed, feeling intimidated in my own bedroom, not even looking at his shaven neck, still less at his eyes, the eyes of a man who envied the outside world and longed to be able to see it and to act independently. Custardoy did achieve a measure of independence, at least in so far as his father taught him the trade very early on, the trade of copyist and possibly forger of paintings, and he was paid for some of the work commissioned from him in his studio. That’s why Custardoy the Younger had more money than most boys his age and enjoyed an unusual autonomy, for he gradually began earning his own living; he was interested in life in the streets, not at school, at thirteen he already went with prostitutes and I was always a little afraid of him – not so much because he was three years older than me, which meant that he invariably got the better of me during our occasional quarrels, when the tension in him grew so great he’d finally explode – as because of his character, which was crude and rough, but also cold, even in fights. Whenever he fought with me, however much resistance I put up before giving in, I always noticed the complete lack of passion or rage in him, nothing but cold violence and a will to dominate. Although I sometimes visited him in his father’s studio, which is now his, I never actually saw him working, neither on his own paintings, which have met with no success at all, nor on one of his perfect copies, from which he makes his money along with commissioned portraits, technically excellent but very conventional: perhaps all those hours sitting still, confined, wielding a paintbrush, concentrating on tiny details and staring at a canvas, explain his permanent state of tension and his desire to be many. Ever since he was a boy, he’s never concealed his exploits, especially his sexual exploits (during my adolescence and even before that I learned almost everything I knew about sex from him), and sometimes I wonder if the fondness my father has shown for him in recent years, since the death of Custardoy the Elder, isn’t in some way related to those stories he tells. As restless men grow older the more they want to go on living, and if their own faculties no longer allow them to do so fully, then they seek out the company of those who can bring them news of an existence beyond their grasp and thus prolong their life vicariously. My father probably enjoys listening to him. I know of prostitutes who, after spending a night with Custardoy the Younger, have left, terrified, and have always refused to talk about what happened, even if he’d taken two of them to bed and they could therefore encourage and console each other, for, even as a very young man, Custardoy’s desire to be many has meant that one person was never enough for him and he’s long favoured having his women in twos. With the years, Custardoy has grown more discreet and, as far as I know, has never explained what he does to provoke such fear, but perhaps he has in private to my father, who for him is a kind of godfather. My father probably enjoys listening to him. The fact is that they’ve been seeing each other regularly for years now, once a week. Custardoy visits Ranz or they go out to supper together and perhaps go on to some old-fashioned bar or keep each other company on some errand or visit some third party, me, for example, or, in my absence, Luisa, the new daughter-in-law. My father presumably finds Custardoy entertaining. Now almost forty, Custardoy sports a pigtail on his once closeshaven neck, the kind favoured by pirates or bullfighters, and his sideburns are a little too long for the times and very noticeable anyway since they’re curly and much darker than his straight, blondish hair; perhaps he wears his hair like that, I mean, the pigtail and the sideburns, so as not to feel out of place in the archaically bohemian milieu of night-owl painters, although at the same time he dresses conventionally and with extreme correctness – he always wears a tie – he aspires to elegance in the way he dresses. He wears a moustache for a few months and then shaves it off for another few months, either out of irresolvable doubt or perhaps it’s just his way of seeming to be more than one person. As he’s got older, his face has brought out to the full what was already hinted at when he was a child and even more so when he was an adolescent: his face is like his character, crude and rough and cold, with a broad forehead and receding hair, a slightly hooked nose and long teeth that light up his face when he smiles in a way that is friendly but never warm, and his eyes are very dark and large and quite wide-set and almost lashless, and it’s those last two factors that make his leering gaze so unbearable, the gaze he bestows on the women he picks up or buys and on the men who are his rivals and on the world that flows past now with him very much a part of it, the most turbulent part.

He was the one who, some months ago, nearly a year now, shortly after my return from my honeymoon in Havana and Mexico and New Orleans and Miami, told me what had really happened to my Aunt Teresa nearly forty years before. I was going to visit my father at home, to say hello to him after my return and tell him about my trip, when I bumped into Custardoy the Younger in the doorway, his slim silhouette motionless in the twilight.

“He’s not in,” he said. “He had to go out.” And he indicated with his eyes that he meant Ranz. “He asked me to wait a few minutes for you to let you know. He got a phone call from an American from some museum or other and had to rush off. He’ll call you tonight or tomorrow. Why don’t you and I go and have a drink together?”

Custardoy the Younger took my arm and we walked off. I noticed the cold hand and the iron grip that had been all too familiar to me from childhood onwards; as a boy and now as a man he’d always been extremely strong, a sinewy, concentrated strength. The last time I’d seen him had been some weeks before, on my now distant wedding day, to which he’d been invited by Ranz, not by me, Ranz had invited several people and I had no reason to object, neither to the others nor to Custardoy. I hadn’t had time to talk to him then, he’d simply congratulated me when he arrived at the Casino with his amiable, slightly scornful smile, and afterwards, during the party, I saw him from afar looking eagerly about him, like the familiar presence he was. He looked avidly at everything, at women and at certain men – shy men; wherever he went his eyes gripped just as his hands did. He didn’t have a moustache that day, but now, some weeks later, it had almost, but not quite, grown back again. He’d let it grow during my time away with Luisa. In the Balmoral he ordered a beer, he never drank anything else which was why his slimness was beginning to give way to a beer gut (always concealed by his tie). For a while he talked to me about money, then about my father, who, he thought, seemed to be in good spirits, then again about how much money he was earning, as if the last thing in the world he was interested in was my new marital status, he didn’t ask me anything, either about the trip, my work or my future trips to Geneva or London or even Brussels, he couldn’t have known about them, he would have to have asked, but he didn’t. Since my father had gone out, I wanted to get back home to Luisa and perhaps go out to the cinema, I’ve never had much to say to Custardoy. My father must have had to go out because someone had called him from Malibu or Boston or Baltimore, they rarely called him now, although his critical eye and his knowledge were as sharp as ever, possibly even sharper; people rarely consult old men unless it’s about something very important, someone was probably passing through Madrid and had no one to have supper with, he probably thought they wanted him to give his opinion on something, some painting that had been unearthed, some deal in Madrid. I made as if to leave but Custardoy placed his hand on my arm again – his hand was like a weight – and stopped me.

“Stay a little longer,” he said to me. “You still haven’t told me anything about that pretty wife of yours.”

“They’re all pretty as far as you’re concerned. Besides, there’s not much to tell.”

Custardoy was flicking his lighter on and off. He was smiling, showing his long teeth, and watching the flame appear and disappear. For the moment he wasn’t looking at me, or only very briefly out of the corner of one of his wide-set eyes, which were otherwise busy checking out the clientele.

“I presume she must have something special for you to get married after all these years, you’re no spring chicken. She must have bewitched you. People only get married when they’ve no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn’t bear to lose. It’s always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness. Come on, tell me what your particular madness is. Tell me what it is she does to you.”

Custardoy was vulgar and a little childish, as if his endless childhood wait to reach manhood had left something of that childhood forever linked to it. He talked too freely, although with me, he reined himself in slightly, when he was with me on his own, that is, I mean, he kept his lax, brutal terminology to a minimum and softened its tone. With any other friend he’d have asked him straight out to describe his wife’s cunt or quim and to tell him if she was a good fuck, difficult words to translate but words which, fortunately, are never used in the international organizations I work for; I merited a certain degree of circumlocution.

“You’d have to pay me first,” I said, trying to make a joke out of his remark.

“All right, I’ll pay, how much do you want? Let’s see, another whisky to start with.”

“I don’t want another whisky, I don’t even want this one. Stop hassling me.”

Custardoy had put his hand in his pocket, he’s one of those men who carry notes loose in their trouser pockets, as do I, to tell the truth.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, we won’t. To your health and to that of your lady.” And he took a sip of his beer. Licking his lips, he scanned the room: there were two women of about thirty talking at the bar, one of them, the one facing us (but possibly both of them), was showing her thighs, either intentionally or unintentionally. Her thighs were too brown for the time of year, an artificial mulatto brown, brown from her visits to the swimming pool or, more likely, from some fake tanning lotion. Then Custardoy fixed me with his lashless, naked eyes and added: “Anyway, I hope you have better luck than your father, not, touch wood, that I want to be a jinx or anything. He’s got quite a record, worse than Bluebeard’s, it’s just as well he hasn’t continued in the same vein, he’s getting on a bit.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said. I immediately thought of my Aunt Teresa and my mother Juana, both of whom were dead, Custardoy was referring to them, uniting them in their death with his exaggerated words or perhaps his malice. “Worse than Bluebeard,” he’d said. “Jinx,” he’d said. Worse than Bluebeard. No one knows who Bluebeard is any more.

“Oh no?” he said. “Well, your mother put a stop to all that, if it had gone any further, you wouldn’t even exist. But look, he survived her too, he’s unbeatable. May she rest in peace, eh?” he added with mocking respect. He spoke of Ranz with approval, perhaps almost admiringly.

I looked at the women, who weren’t taking the slightest notice of us, they were deep in conversation (doubtless the latest episode of some on-going story), of which from time to time I heard the odd phrase spoken in a louder voice (“That’s really disgusting,” I heard the one with her back to us say in genuine amazement, the other was casually revealing her thighs and, from another angle, I imagined, you could probably have seen her knickers; her strong, brown thighs made me think of Miriam, the woman in Havana of a few days ago. Or rather, made me remember her image and think to myself that I should think about her at some point. Perhaps Guillermo, like us, had also come back a few days ago).

“That’s just a coincidence, no one can predict the order of death, it could just as well have been him, just as he might bury us. My mother lived to a good age.”

Custardoy the Younger then lit a cigarette and put the lighter down on the table, he abandoned the flame and drew on the ember. From time to time he’d turn round a little to look at the two thirty-something women sitting at the bar and blow smoke in their direction, I hoped he wasn’t thinking of getting up and going over to talk to them, it was something he often did, with great aplomb, without even having exchanged a glance, without exchanging a single glance with the woman to whom he would suddenly be speaking. It was as if he knew instantly who wanted to be approached and why, in a bar or at a party or even in the street, or perhaps he was the one who provoked both disposition and intention. I wondered who he would have approached at my party at the Casino, I’d hardly seen him. He turned back to me again and looked at me with his disagreeable eyes to which, however, I was quite accustomed.

“All right, a coincidence if you like. But three times is a lot of coincidences.”

“Three times?”

That was the first time in my life I’d heard anyone mention the foreign woman to whom I’m not related and about whom I now know something but not enough, I’ll never know very much, there are people who’ve been in the world for years and years and about whom no one remembers anything, as if in the end they’d never existed and that first time, I didn’t even know that he was referring to her or who he was referring to, I still didn’t know of her existence (“three times is a lot of coincidences”). At first I wanted to believe that it was a mistake or a lapse and, at first, Custardoy let me think it was, perhaps he’d only foreseen talking to me about my Aunt Teresa or perhaps he hadn’t foreseen telling me anything, things which, at that time, full of presentiments of disaster and taking my first steps in matrimony, I would have preferred not to know, although once you know about something, it’s difficult to know whether you wanted to know about it or would have preferred to remain in ignorance.

“I mean two,” said Custardoy quickly, perhaps it was all quite unpremeditated and without evil intent, although it was unlikely there was no intent at all, be it good or otherwise, Custardoy isn’t a reflective man but he is full of intent. He gave a brief smile (his long teeth lent his face a sharp cordiality, well, almost) at the same time blowing more smoke in the direction of the two women: the one with her back to us, not realizing where it was coming from, waved it away with an irritated hand, as if it were a mosquito. Custardoy added without a pause: “But let me make it absolutely clear that I’ve nothing against your father, quite the contrary, as you very well know. But for one of them to go and kill herself right after the wedding doesn’t look like coincidence. That can’t be fitted into the order of death you were talking about.”

“Kill herself?”

Custardoy bit his lips in a gesture that was too expressive to be spontaneous. He then snapped his fingers at the waiter to call him over and took the opportunity to glance salaciously over at the women, who were still paying us not the slightest attention (although one of them had already noticed our smoke the way one might notice a mosquito). The one facing us said in a very loud, jolly voice: “I know, I know, but I just find it so disgusting.” She said this in a gleeful voice, almost slapping her brown thighs. Custardoy, on the other hand, was paying as much attention to them as he was to his conversation with me, he was always torn, always wanting to be more than one, to be wherever he wasn’t. I thought he was about to get up and to stop him doing so, I said: “What do you mean ‘kill herself’?” But he just asked the waiter for another beer.

“Another beer, please. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

Custardoy stroked his still sparse moustache and repositioned his short pigtail with a gesture that was unavoidably feminine. I don’t know why he affected that ridiculous, greasy pigtail, he looked like an eighteenth-century artisan or rustic. He blew into his beer. Although he was almost forty he was still a follower of fashion, still with enough energy to try and keep up. Or perhaps in his case it was the influence of the painting world.

“Too much froth,” he said. “You know, it’s not bloody fair,” he added, “that you don’t know anything, I mean, it’s not fair the way families don’t tell their children things, God knows the things you must know about my family that I’m completely in the dark about.”

“I don’t know,” I said quickly.

He was playing with the flame of his lighter again. He’d done a rather inefficient job of putting out his cigarette, so that it smelled bad.

“I seem to have put my foot in it. Ranz will go up the wall. I didn’t realize that you didn’t know how your mother’s sister had died.”

“From an illness, that’s what they’ve always told me. I never asked much. So, what do you know?”

“It’s probably not true. My father told me years ago.”

“What did he tell you?”

Custardoy sniffed twice. During that time he hadn’t as yet visited the toilets for his usual line of coke, but he sniffed as if he had. He flicked the flame on and off.

“Don’t tell Ranz I told you, OK? I wouldn’t want him to take against me because of this. I may well have misremembered it or else misunderstood.”

I didn’t reply, I knew he’d tell me even if I didn’t make him that promise.

“What is it that you remember? What did you understand?”

Custardoy lit another cigarette. All this primness was entirely false; he felt relaxed enough to take two long drags on his cigarette and blow out a cloud of smoke (which is much more abundant and slower moving than if inhaled) in the direction of the two women. The woman with her back to us turned round for an instant, very mechanically, and blew to one side to get rid of it. She was showing her thighs too, but it was clear that they hadn’t as yet paid a visit to the swimming pool. Her eyes had alighted on Custardoy now, although only for a few seconds, the time it took her companion to say in confident, disdainful tones of the person they were discussing: “The guy’s crazy about me, but I don’t like the look of him, even if he is loaded. What would you do?”

“Your aunt shot herself soon after coming back from her honeymoon with Ranz. You knew that, didn’t you, that she married him I mean?”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“She went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father was in the dining room with other members of the family and some guests. That’s what I remember my father telling me.”

“In my grandparents’ house?”

“That’s what I understood.”

“Was my father there?”

“Not at the time, he arrived shortly afterwards, I think.”

“Why did she kill herself?”

Custardoy sniffed, perhaps he had a slight spring cold, he might be a follower of fashion but he wasn’t the kind of man to suffer from hay fever, much too common. He shook his head.

“I’ve no idea, and I don’t think my father knew either, at least he didn’t say so. If anyone knows it’s your father, but he probably doesn’t know either, it’s not easy to know why people kill themselves, not even people close to us, everyone’s crazy, everyone’s having a rough time of it, sometimes for no reason but almost always in secret, people just turn their face to the pillow and wait for the next day. Then one day they stop waiting. I’ve never spoken to Ranz about this, how do you ask after a friend’s wife who shot herself after marrying him? Even if it was years ago. I don’t know, I could ask you if it happened to you, not that I want to be a jinx, touch wood. But I couldn’t ask a friend who’s so much older than me and whom I really respect. Respect inhibits certain conversations, and so you end up never having them.”

“Yes, respect can be inhibiting.”

He’d used the word “jinx” again, I automatically tried to translate it into English, French or Italian, my languages, I didn’t know the term in any of them, well, I knew “evil eye” and “jettatura”, but it’s not the same thing. Every time he said “touch wood” he didn’t, he touched the glass his beer was in. I, on the other hand, was touching my chair.

“I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”

“They give children watered-down versions of anything that happens or has happened and I suppose later on it’s difficult to disabuse them. Maybe they can’t find the right moment, after all, when do you stop being a child? It’s difficult to draw a line, when is it the right time to acknowledge an old lie or reveal a hidden truth? They let time pass, I suppose, and the person who told the lie comes to believe it or else forgets, until someone like you puts their foot in it and shatters the studied silence of a lifetime.”

I couldn’t recall what “evil eye” was in French either. I had known but I couldn’t remember, then it came back to me, guignon. “I hope you don’t bring me bad luck saying things like that,” I heard the blonde woman with the brown skin saying, she was very expansive, her voice hoarse, she was one of those Spanish women who don’t moderate the tone of their voice or the reach of their words or the harshness of their gestures or the length of their skirts, all too often Spanish women exude a sense of scorn in what they say and in how they look, in their despotic gestures and their crossed legs, Miriam’s arm had been proof of the Spanish legacy in Cuba, as had her shouts and her high heels and her legs like knives (“You’re mine”, “I kill you”). Luisa isn’t like that, the new generations are just as scornful, but they express it in a more controlled fashion, Luisa is gentler, although with a sense of rectitude that at times makes her wax very serious, sometimes you just know that she’s not joking, she thinks I’m with my father now, but my father has had to go out unexpectedly and that’s why I’m listening to these revelations from Custardoy, if they’re true; they must be, he’s never had any talent for invention, in all his stories he’s always kept close to the facts or to what actually happened to him, perhaps that’s why he has to experience things and live out his doubleness, because then he can talk about them afterwards, that’s his way of being able to conceive of the inconceivable; there are people who know only the fantasies that they themselves experience, who are incapable of imagining anything and so have little insight, using one’s imagination avoids many misfortunes, the person who anticipates his own death rarely kills himself, the person who anticipates that of others rarely murders, it’s better just to think about murdering someone or killing yourself, there are no consequences, it leaves no traces, even the distant gesture made with a grasping arm, it’s all a question of distance and time, if it’s a little too far away, the knife stabs the air instead of someone’s chest, it doesn’t plunge into dark or pale flesh but through the empty air and nothing happens, its passage isn’t recorded or registered and so remains unknown, you can’t be punished for intentions, failed attacks are often not even spoken of, they’re even denied by the intended victims, because everything goes on as before, the air is the same, there’s no wound to the skin, there’s no change in the flesh, no tear, the pillow pressed down on no one’s face is inoffensive, and afterwards everything is exactly the same as before because the mere accumulation of events and the blow that strikes no one and the attempt at suffocation that suffocates no one are not enough in themselves to change things or relationships, neither is repetition or insistence or a frustrated attack or a threat, that aggravates the situation but it doesn’t change anything, reality can’t be summed up like that, they’re just the same as the grasping gestures that Miriam made and her words (“You’re mine”, “You owe me”, “I’m gonna get you”, “I’ll see you in hell”), which did nothing to prevent the subsequent kisses and her singing in the room next door as she lay by the side of the lefthanded man, Guillermo by name, to whom she’d said: “Then you get one woman’s death on your hands, either her or me.”

“I’ve put my foot in it,” said Custardoy the Younger, “but I think it’s better to know about things, better to find out about something late than never at all. It happened a long time ago and, anyway, what does it matter how your aunt snuffed it?”

My father had known one death, a real death, the sort that, in fact, cannot be considered part of the normal order of death, as Custardoy had said before. Those who kill themselves seem to die more somehow, and if someone dies by my hand they die still more again. He’d also said: “Three times is a lot of coincidences,” and then corrected himself. I wasn’t sure whether to go back to that, whether, if I insisted, he’d end up telling me what had happened or what he’d found out, I knew he would tell me, something, however partial or erroneous, but it’s easy to want to know nothing when you still don’t know, once you do, you’ve no choice, he was right, it’s better to know about things, but only once you do know them (and I still didn’t). It was then that a memory returned to me, one lost since childhood, something tiny and tenuous that could not but be lost, one of those insignificant scenes that return fleetingly as if they were songs or images or the momentary perception in the present of what is past, the memory itself is called into question even as you remember. I was playing on my own with my soldiers in my grandmother’s house and she was fanning herself, exactly as she had on so many other Saturday afternoons when my mother would leave me with her. But that time my mother was ill and it was Ranz who came to pick me up just before supper. I’d rarely seen them alone together, my father and my grandmother, my mother was always there mediating or in the middle, but not on that occasion. The doorbell rang as it was growing dark and I heard Ranz’s footsteps advancing along the infinite corridor, following the footsteps of the maid to the room where I was sitting with my grandmother, finishing my final game, and she was humming and singing and sometimes laughing at my remarks, as grandmothers do with their grandchildren, on the slightest pretext. Ranz was still young then although he didn’t seem so to me, he was a father. He came into the room with his raincoat over his shoulders, and his gloves, which he’d just taken off, in his hands; it was cool, it was springtime, my grandmother always started using her fan before it was strictly necessary, perhaps it was her way of evoking summer, although in fact she fanned herself all the year round. Before Ranz said anything, she asked him: “How’s Juana?” “She seems better,” said my father, “but I haven’t come straight from home.” “Has the doctor been yet?” “He hadn’t when I left, he said he wouldn’t be able to come until later, he might be there now. We can phone if you like.” They probably said something more, or perhaps they did phone, but my memory (as I sat across the table from Custardoy) fixed itself on one thing my grandmother said to my father: “I don’t know how you can go off about your business when Juana is ill. I don’t understand why you don’t start praying and crossing your fingers every time your wife gets a cold. You’ve already lost two, my son.” I remembered, or I thought I did, that immediately afterwards my grandmother raised her hand to her mouth, my grandmother covered her mouth for an instant as if to stop the words she’d just said from coming out, words which I’d heard and which, at the time, I took not the slightest notice of, or perhaps I did – as is clear now – only because she covered her mouth to suppress them. My father didn’t answer, and it’s only now that that gesture made twenty-five or more years before takes on meaning, or rather, it did so about a year ago, while I was sitting opposite Custardoy and thinking about what he’d said: “Three times is a lot of coincidences”, only to correct himself, and then I remembered that my grandmother had also said and then regretted saying: “You’ve already lost two, my son.” She’d called Ranz “my son”, her son-in-law twice over, her double son-in-law.

I didn’t press Custardoy, I didn’t want to know more just at that moment, and besides he’d moved on to something else.

“Do you fancy those two?” he said suddenly. He’d turned almost right round now and was looking straight at the two women, who in turn noticed the direct gaze from those wide-set, lashless eyes and lowered their voices, or didn’t speak at all for a moment, feeling themselves observed and considered, or perhaps admired sexually. The last words, before their conversation was interrupted or muted, were uttered by the one with her back to us and had reached my ears almost at the same time as Custardoy’s question, perhaps they’d heard what he said despite the superimposition, Custardoy had doubtless asked me knowing that they would hear, so that they would know, so that they would be aware of his presence. “I’ve had enough of blokes,” the woman with the white thighs had said. “Do you fancy those two?” Custardoy had said (it’s easy enough to be heard, all you have to do is raise your voice). Then they’d held their breath and looked at us, the pause necessary to find out the identity of the person who desires us.

“You’re forgetting, I’m a married man now. You can have both of them.”

Custardoy took another sip of beer and got up with his cigarettes and lighter in his hand (there was no froth now on his beer). His few steps towards the bar sounded metallic, as if he were wearing tap-dancing shoes or metal tips on the soles or perhaps they were lifts, for it struck me that he did look taller as he walked away.

The two women were already laughing with him when I took my money out of my trouser pocket and placed it on the table and left to go home to Luisa. I didn’t say goodbye to Custardoy (or I did so with a gesture of my hand from a distance) nor to the two thirty-something women who would become his strange and frightened intimates after a brief interlude of beer and chewing gum and gin and tonic and ice, and cigarette smoke and peanuts and laughter and a few lines of coke and his tongue in their ear, and also of words that I wouldn’t hear, the incomprehensible whisper that persuades us. The mouth is always full, abundance itself.

THAT NIGHT, seeing the world from my pillow with Luisa by my side, as is normal amongst newlyweds, with the television in front of us and in my hands a book I wasn’t reading, I told Luisa what Custardoy the Younger had told me and what I hadn’t wanted him to tell me. Real togetherness in married couples and indeed in any couple comes from words, not just the words that are spoken – spoken voluntarily – but the words one doesn’t keep to oneself – at least not without the intervention of the will. It isn’t so much that there are no secrets between two people who share a pillow because that’s what they decide – what is serious enough to constitute a secret and what is not, if it is not told? – rather it’s impossible not to tell, to relate, to comment, to enunciate, as if that were the primordial activity of all couples, at least those who have become couples recently and are still not too lazy to speak to one another. It isn’t just that with your head resting on a pillow you tend to remember the past and even your childhood, and that remote and quite insignificant things surface in your memory, come to your tongue, and that all take on a certain value and seem worthy of being recalled out loud; nor that we’re disposed to recount our whole life to the person resting their head on our pillow, as if we needed them to be able to see us from the very beginning – especially from the beginning, that is, from childhood – and to witness, through our telling, all those years before they knew us and during which time, we now believe, they were waiting for us. Neither is it simply a desire to compare, to find parallels or coincidences, the desire to know where each of you was in all the different eras of your two existences and to fantasize about the unlikely possibility of having met each other before; lovers always feel that their meeting took place too late, as if the amount of time occupied by their passion was never enough or, in retrospect, never long enough (the present is untrustworthy), or perhaps they can’t bear the fact that once there was no passion between them, not even a hint of it, while the two of them were in the world, swept along by its most turbulent currents, and yet with their backs turned to each other, without even knowing one another, perhaps not even wanting to. Nor is it that some kind of interrogatory system is established on a daily basis which, out of weariness or routine, neither partner can escape, and so everyone ends up answering the questions. It’s rather that being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and again when you speak, marriage is a narrative institution. Or perhaps it’s just that they spend so much time together (however little time that is amongst modern couples, it still amounts to a lot of time) that the two partners (but in particular the man, who feels guilty if he remains silent) have to make use of whatever they think and whatever occurs to them or happens to them in order to amuse the other person; thus, in the end, there’s not a single tiny corner of all the events and thoughts in an individual’s life that remains untransmitted, or rather translated matrimonially. The events and thoughts of others are transmitted too, those they’ve confided to us in private, that’s where the expression “pillow talk” comes from, there are no secrets between people who share a bed, the bed is like a confessional. For the sake of love or its essence – telling, informing, announcing, commenting, opining, distracting, listening and laughing, and vainly making plans – one betrays everyone else, friends, parents, brothers and sisters, blood relations and non-blood relations, former lovers and beliefs, former mistresses, your own past and childhood, your own language when you stop speaking it and doubtless your country, everything that anyone holds to be secret or perhaps merely belongs to the past. In order to flatter the person you love you denigrate everything else in existence, you deny and abominate everything in order to content and reassure the one person who could leave you; so great is the power of the territory delineated by the pillow that it excludes from its bosom everything outside it, and it’s a territory which, by its very nature, doesn’t allow for anything else to be on it except the two partners, or lovers, who in a sense are alone and for that very reason talk and hide nothing – involuntarily. The pillow is round and soft and often white and after a while that roundness and whiteness become a replacement for the world and its weak wheel.

I talked to Luisa in bed about my conversation and my suspicions, about the violent death (according to Custardoy) of my Aunt Teresa and about the possibility that my father had been married before, a third time that would have been the first, before he married the two sisters, and about which I would otherwise have known nothing. Luisa couldn’t understand why I hadn’t wanted to ask more questions, women feel an unalloyed curiosity about things, their minds are investigative, gossipy and fickle, they never imagine or anticipate the nature of the thing about which they know nothing, or what might come to light and what might happen, they don’t know that actions happen singly or that they can be set in train by a single word, they need to try things out, they don’t look ahead, perhaps they really are always ready to know; in principle they’re neither afraid nor distrustful of what might be told to them, they forget that having found something out, everything changes, the skin opens, something tears.

“Why didn’t you ask him to tell you more?” she asked me. She was in bed again, as she had been that evening in Havana, only a few days before, but now it was or was going to be the usual night-time routine, like every night, I was under the sheets too, the sheets were still very new (part of our trousseau, I imagined), she wasn’t ill now nor was her bra cutting into her, she was wearing a nightshirt that I’d seen her put on only a few minutes before, in our own bedroom, and when she put it on she turned her back to me, still unused to having someone there before her, in a few years’ time, perhaps months, she won’t even notice that I’m there or, rather, I will be no one.

“I don’t know that I want to know more,” I replied.

“What do you mean? After what you’ve told me, I can’t wait to find out more.”

“Why?”

The television was on with the sound down. An old Jerry Lewis film, dating perhaps from my childhood, but you couldn’t hear anything except our voices.

“What do you mean, why? If there’s something I don’t know about someone in my life, I want to know what it is. Besides, he’s year father. And now he’s my father-in-law, I’m bound to be interested in what happened to him. All the more if it’s something he’s been hiding. Are you going to ask him?”

I hesitated for a second. I felt that I did want to know, not so much what had happened as whether what Custardoy had said was the truth or just fantasy, rumour. But if it was the truth I wanted, I’d have to go on asking questions.

“I don’t think so. If he’s never wanted to talk to me about any of this up until now, I’m not going to make him do so at this late stage. Once, not many years ago, I asked him about my aunt and he told me that he didn’t want to go back forty years. He almost threw me out of the restaurant we were lunching in.”

Luisa laughed. Almost everything made her laugh, she tended to see the funny side of things, even the most tragic or terrible things. Living with her is like living immersed in comedy, that is, in a state of perpetual youth, as it is living with Ranz, perhaps that’s why two, or possibly three, women chose to live with him Although Luisa really is young and might change over time. She liked my father too, he amused her. Luisa would want to hear what he had to say.

“I’ll ask him,” she said.

“Don’t you dare.”

“He’d tell me. Who knows, maybe he’s been waiting all these years for someone like me to appear in your life, someone who could act as an intermediary between you. Fathers and sons are so awkward with each other. Perhaps he’s never told you his story because he didn’t know how to or because you’ve never asked him the right questions. I’d know how to get the story out of him.”

On TV Jerry Lewis was busy hoovering. The hoover was like a puppy that kept jumping up at him.

“And what if it’s something that can’t be told?”

“What do you mean? Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting, one word follows another.”

“Something that shouldn’t be told. Something whose moment has passed. Every time has its own stories and if you let the moment pass, then sometimes it’s best to keep silent forever. All things have their time, when that’s passed, they lose their timeliness.”

“I don’t believe in things whose time has passed, it’s all there waiting for us to call it back. Besides, everyone likes to tell their story, even people who haven’t got one. Even though the stories may differ, the meaning’s the same.”

I turned round slightly to look her in the face. She was going to be there forever, at my side, at least that’s the idea, forming part of my story, in my bed which is not my bed but ours, or perhaps hers and, if she were ever to go away one day, I’d be prepared to await her return patiently. When I moved, I brushed her breast with my arm, her breast was bare beneath the light fabric, almost visible through it. I left my arm where it was, so that she’d have to move to break the contact.

“Look,” I said, “people who keep secrets for a long time don’t always do so out of shame or in order to protect themselves, sometimes it’s to protect others, or to preserve a friendship, or a love affair, or a marriage, to make life more tolerable for their children or to shield them from some fear, of which they usually have many. Maybe they simply don’t want to add to the world a story they wished had never happened. Not talking about it is like erasing it, forgetting it a little, denying it, not telling a story can be a small favour one does to the world. You have to respect that. You might not want to know everything about me, later on, as time goes by, you might not want to, and I won’t want to know everything about you either. You wouldn’t want a son of ours to know everything about us. About us when we were separate, for example, before we met. Not even we know everything about each other, neither before, when we were apart nor now, when we’re together.”

With a perfectly natural gesture, Luisa moved away a little, that is, she removed her breast from where my arm had been, there was no contact now. She picked up a cigarette from her bedside table, lit it, took two rapid puffs and tried to remove the ash that had not yet formed, suddenly she seemed a bit upset, rather serious, which was unlike her. It was the first time there’d been any mention of a child, neither of us had ever talked about this plan until then, it was too soon, and now this first mention hadn’t been part of a plan, but hypothetical, in order to illustrate something else. Without looking at me, she said:

“I’d certainly want to know if one day you considered killing me, like Guillermo, that man in the hotel in Havana.” She said this without looking at me and she said it quickly.

“So you heard that?”

“Of course I did, I was there just like you, how could I help but hear it?”

“I wasn’t sure, you were half-asleep and feverish, that’s why I never said anything to you.”

“But if you thought I hadn’t heard, why didn’t you tell me the next day either? You could have told me then, since you tell me everything else. Or perhaps you don’t, in fact, tell me everything.”

Luisa had suddenly become angry, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I hadn’t told her what I acknowledged I’d heard or if her anger was aimed at Guillermo, or perhaps at Miriam, or even at men in general, women have more of a community feeling than we do and often get angry with all men at the same time. She might also have been angry because that first mention of a child had been only hypothetical and made merely in passing and hadn’t been expressed as a proposition or a desire.

She picked up the remote control and flicked through the other channels only to return to the original programme. Jerry Lewis was attempting to eat some spaghetti. He started turning the fork round and round and now his whole arm was swathed in pasta. He was looking at it in amazement and biting at it. I laughed like a child, I had, in fact, seen that film as a child.

“What did you think of Guillermo?” I asked. “What do you think he’ll do?” Now we could have the conversation that neither Luisa nor I had wanted to have at the time, because of her feverish state. Maybe everything does await its moment of restitution, but nothing comes back in quite the same way in which it would have happened but didn’t. It didn’t matter now, she’d put it in brutal, frivolous terms, she’d said: “I’d certainly want to know if one day you considered killing me.” I still hadn’t answered that, between people who talk about everything and talk nonstop, it’s so easy not to reply to things you don’t want to reply to, the words become superimposed, the ideas don’t last, they disappear, although sometimes they come back, if one of you insists.

“The worst thing is that he won’t do anything,” Luisa said. “It’ll all go on as it has up until now, with Miriam waiting and his wife dying, if she really is ill or if she really does exist, as Miriam was quite right to doubt.”

“I don’t know that she’s ill, but I’m sure she exists,” I said. “That man is definitely married,” I declared.

Luisa wasn’t looking at me now, she was looking at Jerry Lewis and was still annoyed. She’s younger than me, she may not have seen the film when she was a child. I felt like turning the sound up but I didn’t, that would have put an end to the conversation. Besides, she had the remote control in one hand and in the other her half-smoked cigarette. It was quite hot, but not that hot: I noticed that the skin between her breasts was damp, slightly shiny with sweat.

“It makes no difference, even if she died he wouldn’t do anything, he still wouldn’t bring that woman from Havana over here.”

“Why not? You didn’t see her. I did. She was pretty.”

“I’m sure she is, but she’s also a woman who gives him a lot of trouble, he’s well aware of that. Here or there, as lover or wife, she always would give him trouble. All her interests lie outside herself, she’s totally dependent on the other person, there are still plenty of women around like that, no one’s yet taught them to do anything other than to think about themselves in relation to another.” Luisa paused for a moment, but then went on, as if she regretted using the verb “teach”. “It may be that it isn’t a question of teaching, simply of heredity, they’re born bored with themselves, I’ve known lots of women like that. They spend half their lives waiting, then nothing happens or they treat what does happen with utter indifference, then they spend the other half of their lives remembering and brooding over what seemed so little to them or which was, in fact, nothing. That’s the way our grandmothers were and the way our mothers still are. With Miriam there’s no future gain, only what there is now, which will gradually diminish anyway, so why change anything? Less pretty, less desire, more repetition. That woman’s played all her cards, she didn’t even start with a very good hand, she holds no surprises, she’s given all she’s got to give. You only get married if you expect there to be a few surprises, some gain, some improvement. Well, not always.” She remained silent for a second and then added: “I really pity her.”

“She may not have any more to give, but, on the other hand, she could cease to be a burden, that’s the future gain there might be with her. She’d cease to be a burden if Guillermo were to marry her one day. Some men are like that too, you know.”

“Like what?”

“Bored with themselves, only able to think about themselves in relation to another, to a woman. That kind of man likes women who give him trouble, it helps to pass the time, it amuses him, justifies his existence, just as it does for the women who cause all the trouble.”

“Guillermo isn’t like that,” Luisa asserted (both of us are much given to making such assertions).

This time she did look at me, albeit out of the corner of her eye, a distrustful look – an inherited distrust – or so it seemed to me. A question hung in the air, possible, even probable or obligatory, a question that either she could ask or I could: “Why did you marry me?” Or rather “Why do you think I married you?”

“Custardoy asked me this afternoon why I married you.” That was my way of both asking and not asking the question.

Luisa realized that she was expected to say: “And what did you tell him?” She could also remain silent, she’s as sensitive to words as I am, we share the same profession, although she works less now. She remained silent for the moment and again flicked through the channels with the remote control, this took a matter of seconds, then stopped again, returning to Jerry Lewis, who was dancing now with an elegantly suited man in an enormous empty room. I recognized and remembered the man at once, it was George Raft, who over many years specialized in gangster roles and was a brilliant dancer of boleros and rumbas, and had appeared in the famous film Scarface. Jerry Lewis had cast doubt on his true identity (“Come on now, you’re not George Raft, you may look like him, but you’re not him really, though I bet you’d love to be”) and had made him dance a bolero to prove that he could dance like George Raft and therefore was George Raft. Their arms about each other, the two men danced in the dark, in the middle of the empty room, their two figures lit by a spotlight. It was a scene that was both comic and strange. To dance like someone in order to prove to a doubting partner that one is that someone. That scene was in colour and the others had been in black and white, perhaps this wasn’t a film at all but a retrospective of the comic’s work. When they stopped dancing and shyly separated, I remember that Lewis said to Raft, as if he were doing him a big favour: “All right, I believe you, you are the real Raft” (but we still had the sound down and I couldn’t hear it now, the words were a memory from my inexact childhood). Luisa didn’t say: “And what did you tell him?” but:

“And did you answer him?”

“No. He only wanted to know about what we got up to in bed, that’s what he was really asking me.”

“And you didn’t answer him.”

“No.”

Luisa burst out laughing, her good humour suddenly restored.

“But that’s the sort of conversation schoolboys have,” she said, still laughing.

I think I blushed a little, in fact, I blushed for Custardoy, not for myself, they hardly knew each other then and that’s why, in her presence, I felt responsible for Custardoy, who was my friend, an old friend, well, not exactly, but you feel responsible for everything that might embarrass you and almost anything can embarrass you before the object of your love (when you first begin to love them), which is also why we’re capable of betraying anyone, because, above all, you betray your own past, or whatever one hates or denies in that past (she was not in that past, the person who saves us and improves us, the person who ennobles us, or at least so we believe while we love her).

“That’s why I didn’t want to get involved,” I said.

“What a pity,” she said. “If you had, you could now be telling me what you’d told him.”

Now I was the one who didn’t feel like laughing, people are so often out of step with each other by a matter of seconds. But laughter can usually wait.

I felt uncomfortable, ashamed. I remained silent. Why tell her? Then I said:

“So you don’t think Guillermo will ever kill his sick wife.” I returned to Havana and to the topic that had made Luisa so serious. I wanted her to go back to being serious.

“Of course he won’t kill her, of course he won’t,” she replied with confidence. “No one kills anyone because someone else asks them to, someone who might then leave them. Otherwise he’d have done it already, difficult things always seem possible if you think about them a little, but they become impossible if you think about them too much. Do you know what’ll happen? The man will stop going to Cuba one day and they’ll forget about each other. He’ll stay married to his wife for the rest of his life, whether she’s ill or not, and if she is ill, he’ll do whatever he can to make her better. She’s his guarantee. He’ll go on having mistresses, doing his best to find ones who don’t give him any trouble. Married women, for example.”

“Is that what you’d like?”

“No, that’s what I think will happen.”

“And what about her?”

“She’s less easy to predict. She might meet another man soon afterwards and the time she spends with him will seem little or nothing. She might well kill herself as she said she would, when she sees that he isn’t coming back. She might just wait and remember. Whatever happens, she’s done for. Things will never work out the way she wants them to.”

“They say that people who talk about killing themselves never do.”

“That’s stupid. It takes all sorts.”

I took the remote control from her. I put down on the bedside table the book I’d been holding in my hands, without reading a line. The book was Pnin by Nabokov. I never did finish it, although I was really enjoying it.

“And what about my father and my aunt? Now, according to Custardoy, it turns out that she killed herself.”

“If you want to know if she gave any prior warning, you’re going to have to ask him. Are you sure you don’t want me to?”

I hesitated a little before replying, then said:

“No.” I thought for a while longer and said: “I don’t think so. I’ll have to think about it.”

I turned the sound up on the Jerry Lewis retrospective. Luisa turned out the light on her side and turned over as if she was going to sleep.

“I’ll switch off in a minute,” I said to her.

“The light doesn’t bother me. But can you turn the sound down on the television?”

Jerry Lewis was now sitting in a cinema before the film began, holding a bag of popcorn in one hand. When he applauded all the popcorn fell on the head of a staid, white-haired lady sitting in front of him. “Oh, madam,” he was saying, “my popcorn’s fallen in your hair, allow me to remove it,” and in fifteen seconds he destroyed the woman’s carefully coiffed hair. “Just sit still a moment,” he said to her whilst he rumpled and manhandled her hair, turning it into the hair of a bacchante. “Well,” he said reproachfully, “just look at the state of your hair.” I laughed out loud, I’d never seen that sketch when I was a child, I was sure of it, it was the first time that I’d seen or heard it.

I turned the sound down again, as Luisa had asked me to. I wasn’t sleepy, but when two people share the same bed there has to be a minimum of agreement as regards when to go to sleep and when to get up, when to have lunch and supper, though breakfast is another matter, I thought. I remembered that I hadn’t bought any milk and I’d said I would, Luisa would be annoyed in the morning. Though on the whole, she’s very easygoing.

“I forgot to buy any milk,” I said to her.

“Don’t worry, I’ll pop down and get some tomorrow,” she replied.

I turned the television off and darkness filled the room. My light wasn’t on because I hadn’t got round to reading. For a few seconds I could see nothing, then my eyes grew somewhat accustomed to the darkness, although they never do entirely, Luisa likes to sleep with the shutters closed, I don’t. I turned over and lay with my back to her, we hadn’t said goodnight, but perhaps we wouldn’t always have to say goodnight, every night, in the years to come. But perhaps that night we should.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Goodnight,” she replied.

When we said goodnight, we hadn’t said one another’s names, neither did we use any of our usual terms of endearment, all couples have them, often several, or at least one, just to make it seem as if they were different and not always the same and to avoid calling each other by their real names, which they keep for when they insult each other or are angry or have to give some piece of bad news, for example, that one of them is about to be left alone. My father had been called various names by at least three women, it would all have come to sound the same to him, similar, repetitive, it must have been confusing, or perhaps not, it would be different with each wife, when he’d had to give them some bad news he’d have called them Juana or Teresa or another name which I don’t know, but which he won’t have forgotten. With my mother he would have had many years, with my Aunt Teresa almost no time at all, perhaps only the brief time that Luisa and I have been married, there were no future years for them, or even months, she’d killed herself, according to Custardoy. And the third wife, who was the first, how long had that lasted? What did they call each other when they said goodnight and turned their backs on one another? Or would only she address him or he her and then lie separately, embracing the shared pillow (that’s just a manner of speaking, because there are always two pillows)?

“I wouldn’t want to know if you were ever to consider killing me one day,” I said to Luisa in the dark.

I must have sounded as if I meant it, because then she turned to me and I felt the contact that had been lost some time before, her familiar chest against my back, and I immediately felt supported. I turned round and then I noticed her hands on my forehead, caressing me or scolding me, and I felt her kisses on my nose, eyes and mouth, on my chin, forehead and cheeks (on my whole face). My face allowed every bit of it that was kissable to be kissed, because at that moment, after those words – after turning to face her – I was the one who was protecting and supporting her.

AS I MENTIONED, not long afterwards, once the honeymoon and the summer were over, I had to absent myself again because of my work as translator and interpreter (now more as an interpreter) for various international organizations. I’d agreed with Luisa that, for a while, she would work less and dedicate herself to the (unnatural) business of preparing our new home, until we could, as far as possible, make our presences and absences coincide or until we changed careers completely. The sessions at the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York begin again in the autumn, halfway through September, and continue for three months, and that was where I was to work as a freelance interpreter (they always need a few on hand during the Assembly), as I had in other years before I met Luisa, eight weeks of interpreting before going back to Madrid from where I wouldn’t stir or do any interpreting for at least a further eight weeks.

It’s no fun being in big cities, not even in New York, because you work flat out for five days a week and the two remaining days seem unreal somehow (like a parenthesis) and you’re so exhausted that all you can do is gather strength for the next week, go for a walk, gaze from afar at the drug addicts and the future delinquents, go shopping (almost everything is open on a Sunday), spend all day reading the mammoth New York Times, drink high-energy fruit juices or tutti-fruttis and watch the ninety TV channels (Jerry Lewis is bound to be appearing on one of them). All you want is to rest your ears and your tongue, but it’s not possible, you always end up either listening or speaking, even if you’re alone. I’m not, as it happens. The majority of the so-called freelances rent some squalid apartment for their stay there, which always works out cheaper than a hotel, a furnished apartment with a fitted kitchen, and no one can ever decide whether it’s best to cook there and put up with the smell of what they’re going to eat or have eaten, or else have lunch and supper out, which is both tiring and expensive in a city in which nothing costs what they say it costs, in restaurants you have to add an extra fifteen per cent for the obligatory tip and then an extra eight per cent for the local New York tax, which applies to everything (and which is extortionate, in Boston it’s only five). I’m lucky, I have a Spanish friend in New York, who’s kind enough to take me in as a lodger during my eight weeks at the Assembly. She’s settled there and has a permanent post as a United Nations interpreter. She’s been in New York for twelve years now, she has a nice apartment, not in the least squalid, in which one can cook from time to time without the smell of the food invading the sitting room and the bedrooms (in small apartments, as you know, it’s open-plan). I’ve known her even longer than the time she’s spent away from Spain, I knew her at university, we were both students, although she’s four years older than me, which means that now she’s thirty-nine and was one year less than that when I was in New York after my marriage, on the occasion I’m writing about or about which I’m going to write. Then, when we were students that is, fifteen years ago in Madrid, we went to bed together on two isolated occasions, or perhaps it was three or maybe four (but no more than that), though I’m sure that neither of us remembers those occasions with any clarity, but we do nonetheless know about them and our knowledge of that fact, much more than our knowledge of the event itself, means that we treat each other with great delicacy but at the same time with great trust, I mean that we tell each other everything. And we offer each other words of consolation or distraction or encouragement when we see that one or the other of us is in need of such words. We also miss each other (vaguely) when we’re not together, she’s one of those people (in everyone’s life there are four or five such people whose loss one truly feels) to whom you’re used to telling everything that happens to you, that is, one of those people you think about when something happens to you, be it funny or dramatic, and for whom you store up events and anecdotes. You accept misfortunes gladly because you know you can tell those five people about them afterwards. “I must tell Berta that,” you think (or I often think).

Berta had a car accident six years ago. One of her legs was crushed and she suffered multiple open fractures, then osteomyelitis set in and they thought they’d have to amputate, but they managed to save her leg, although she lost part of the femur, which they had to shorten, and ever since then she’s had a slight limp. It’s not so pronounced that she can’t wear shoes with heels (which she does with great panache), but the heel of one always has to be a little longer and thicker than that of the other shoe, she has them specially made. You don’t notice those unequal heels unless you’ve been told about them, but you do notice that she has a limp, particularly when she’s overtired or at home, where she makes no attempt to amend the way she walks: she relaxes once she’s shut the door behind her and put the key away in her handbag, she doesn’t pretend any more, her limp becomes exaggerated. She was also left with a scar on her face, it’s very faint, so faint that she’s never considered having plastic surgery, it’s like a half moon on her right cheek which sometimes grows darker and more visible when she hasn’t slept well or feels upset about something or is very tired. Then, for a few moments, I think she’s got a smudge on her cheek, that she’s dirtied her face, and I point it out to her. “It’s my scar,” she reminds me, which has grown blue or purple.

She was married when she was younger and that, in part, was the reason she went to America and looked for work there. She got divorced after three years, married again two years later and a year after that again got divorced. Since then, nothing has lasted very long. For six years now, since the accident, she’s felt unjustifiably old and has lost faith in her abilities to seduce anyone (in the long term, that is). She’s a pretty woman whose looks were never that youthful and so she seems barely to have changed since we were at university. She’ll age well, her face won’t undergo those transformations that make some faces from our past unrecognizable, or our own face for that matter, for we never really look at our own face. But, however unjustified her feelings seem to me, that’s how she feels, and although she hasn’t given up on herself or written herself off entirely, her relationship with men has become tainted by those obsessive, involuntary feelings, a tense relationship that has not as yet become indifference, as it doubtless will do in the not too distant future. Over the years, whenever I’ve done my stint as a temporary interpreter in New York, various men have entered and left her apartment (the majority of them Americans, plus a few Spaniards, even the odd Argentinian; the majority would arrive with her, others phoned and arranged to meet her elsewhere, a few came by to pick her up, one or two even had a key), none of whom has shown the slightest interest in meeting me and therefore couldn’t have any genuine interest in her (long-term interest, I mean, because you want to know and even be nice to the friends of someone who might be with you for some time). Every one of those men has let her down or abandoned her, often after spending only one night together. She’s placed her hopes in each and every one of them, she’s imagined she had some future with them, even on that first night which so often seemed likely to be the last and which so often was. It’s becoming more and more difficult for her to hold on to someone and yet she tries harder every time (as I said, she’s not yet reached the time of indifference or cynicism).

When I was there after my wedding, from mid-September to mid-November, she’d been experimenting for two years with dates arranged through an agency and, for a year, had been replying to adverts in the personal columns (or “the personals” as they’re called) in magazines and newspapers. She’d made a video of herself for the agency who then, for a fee, would send her video to anyone interested in someone like her. It’s an absurd expression, but it’s the one they use and which Berta herself uses, “people interested in someone like me”, that is, Berta measures herself against some previous but non-existent model instead of creating her own. In the video, she was sitting on her sofa talking (she showed it to me, she’d kept the original, the people at the agency made copies and sent them out), she looked very pretty, very smart, very composed, younger than her years, and was speaking in English to the camera, at the end she said a few conventional phrases in Spanish to attract any other solitary Spaniards, resident or just passing through, or people who liked the exotic touch or what Americans call Hispanics. She talked about her likes and dislikes, about her interests, her ideas (though not too many), but not about her work, she mentioned the accident and, with an apologetic smile, her slight lameness, you had to admit to any physical defects so that no one could claim they’d been cheated; then she was shown walking round the apartment, watering her plants, reading a book (by Kundera, a mistake), with background music (something by Bach for the cello, a cliché), in the kitchen wearing an apron, writing letters on a table by the light of a lamp. The videos were very short, only three to five minutes long, all very innocuous. After payment of a modest fee, she (and this is why I speak of them in the plural) also received copies of such tapes, videos of men who had or hadn’t seen hers and wanted to meet her or be introduced to new women. She received two or three a week, during my stay there we used to watch them together and laugh, I’d give her advice, not that I felt able to give her any very serious advice, it all seemed like a game to me, it was hard for me to believe that she could pin her hopes on any of those men. I felt that the people who got involved in that kind of thing must, by definition, be weird, anomalous types and far from trustworthy. But when I thought that, I was forgetting that Berta was one of those people and she was my friend and worthy of anyone’s trust. The agency was quite a respectable one, or at least that’s how they presented themselves, it was all controlled up until the first meeting, everything was in the best possible taste, they even censored the videos if necessary. Things were different in the personal contacts she made by letter. There was no control at all, no intermediary, and talk turned at once to things carnal, the correspondents immediately wanted videos that were, first, suggestive and, later, lewd, they made bold remarks, cracked repellent jokes, which Berta didn’t seem to see as such, nothing we’re part of, nothing to which we’ve become accustomed, strikes us as repugnant. After a while the agency was no longer enough, although she went on asking for tapes in order to feel that she was still part of that innocuous world, but she also exchanged letters and videos with weird, anomalous men, people with faces and bodies but no names, people with initials or nicknames, I still remember some she mentioned to me, they gave themselves names like: “Taurus”, “VMF”, “De Kova”, “The Graduate”, “Weapons”, “MC”, “Humbert”, “Sperm Whale” or “Gaucho”. They all smiled nonchalantly at the camera, home videos, doubtless filmed by themselves when they were alone, talking to no one, to someone they’d never met or had yet to meet, or perhaps to the world that ignored them. Some spoke to her from their pillow, reclining on the bed, wearing underpants or minuscule bathing trunks, revealing incipient beer-bellies, chests smeared with oil as if they were athletes. Which they weren’t. The more daring ones (the older they were the more daring) appeared naked and with an erection, chatting away as if it were the most natural thing in the world, making no mention of what was all too often far from noteworthy. Berta would laugh when she saw them and I would laugh too, but uneasily, because I knew that, after the laughter, Berta would reply to one of these, send them her video and arrange to meet and perhaps come back with them to the apartment. And on those occasions, after shutting the door and putting her key away in her handbag, she’d make a special effort to walk without a limp, and even though she was at home, she wouldn’t relax her efforts to hide her lameness, at least until they reached the bedroom, because nobody walks in bed.

Two weeks after I’d arrived in New York in the year of my marriage (it was a weekend, the second weekend and I was already beginning to feel the build-up of exhaustion), Berta showed me a letter that had arrived at the box number she’d rented to receive the replies to her personal ads. She used to let me read them when I was there in order to share the fun (she was less inclined to share the subsequent grief), but in this case she wanted to know if I saw the same things as she did in the letter.

“See what you think,” she said as she handed it to me.

The letter was typewritten in English and didn’t say very much, the tone was relaxed but polite, even a little conservative for that kind of correspondence. The man had seen Berta’s advertisement in the personal ads in a monthly magazine and seemed interested in making contact. He mentioned he was going to be in the city for a couple of months (which, he realized, could be both an attraction and a disadvantage) and added that, nevertheless, he visited Manhattan quite often, several times a year (which was, he said, both encouraging and convenient since it would guarantee that he wouldn’t become a burden). As if he were unused to writing that kind of letter and didn’t know that it was normal to begin by using a pseudonym or a nickname or just one’s initials, he signed off with the name “Nick” (the signature was in his own hand) and justified this by adding that, as he worked “in a very visible arena” (those were his exact words), he had to be very discreet for the moment, not to say reticent or even secretive. That’s what he said, “not to say reticent or even secretive”.

After reading the letter I said to Berta what she’d hoped I would say:

“This letter was written by a Spaniard.”

The English was very correct, but there were a few hesitations, one obvious error and several expressions, which were not only unEnglish, but which seemed to have been too literally translated from the Spanish: all three of us, Berta, Luisa and I, are very good at picking up the errors our fellow countrymen make when they speak or write other languages. If the man was Spanish, however, it seemed perverse, if not absurd, for him to address Berta in English, since the first thing she mentioned in the advertisement she placed in that magazine every month were her origins: “Young woman from Spain …”, that was how it began, although when it came to meeting the men, she was a bit embarrassed at having described herself as still young; before going out she always thought she looked hideous and could see all her wrinkles, even after the collagen treatment, even the wrinkles that didn’t exist. What intrigued her most about the letter from Nick was the “very visible arena”. The truth is that, since she’d first begun her dealings or pre-dealings with strange men, I’d never seen her so excited after an initial contact. “A very visible arena!” she exclaimed and repeated it laughing a little, half at the pretentious, comical nature of the phrase, half out of enthusiasm and hope. “What do you think he does? A very visible arena, that sounds like cinema or television to me. Do you think he’s a presenter? There are several of them I like, but of course, if he’s Spanish, then I won’t know him, I don’t know who they are, but you might.” She paused to think for a moment and, after a while, added: “Maybe he’s a sportsman or a politician, although I don’t think a politician would risk it. Although in Spain people are pretty brazen about things. Saying he works in a very visible arena is like saying he’s famous. That’s why he wants to pass himself off as an American. Who do you think it can be?”

“The ‘arena’ business may be a lie, a trick to give himself airs and get you interested. And it’s worked.”

“Possibly, but the expression does have a certain charm. ‘Arena’. It’s a very American expression, but if he’s Spanish, where did he pick it up from?”

“From TV where everyone learns everything. It may well be that he’s not famous at all, but that he imagines he is. Maybe he’s a stockbroker or a doctor or a businessman, and he just thinks he’s important and therefore vulneable to exposure, when, in fact, no one knows who such people are, especially not here in America.

I encouraged her discoveries and her hopes, it was the least I could do. That is, the least I could do was to listen to her, take an interest in her world, cheer her on, give importance to the things to which she gave importance and be optimistic, which is, in my opinion, the prime function of friendship.

“Maybe he’s a singer,” she said.

“No, a writer,” I replied.

Berta wrote back to the box number that Nick had given her, “PO Box” that’s what they call it in English, everyone uses it, there are millions of them scattered about the country. But although during my stay Berta was always happy to show me any letters or videos sent by her correspondents, she didn’t feel the same about her written replies, which she despatched without keeping a copy and without showing me, and I understood that, because one could accept an outsider passing judgement on actions that are never seen in their entirety and are transient, but not on words, which are both legible and permanent (even if the person passing judgement does so without meaning to and from the best of motives, even if that person doesn’t give expression to that judgement).

A few days later she got a reply to her reply, another letter she was quite happy to show to me. It was written in that same decorous and dubious English, the language in which Berta had replied to him, or so she told me, so as not to disappoint him or wound his linguistic sensibilities, and the letter this time was shorter and more salacious, as if my friend had encouraged this change in him, or perhaps not, perhaps at this second stage the minimum of formality essential in all initial contacts tended to disappear. This time he didn’t sign himself “Nick”, but “Jack”, the name he preferred “this week” he said, and again the name was written in his hand, the “c” and the “k” identical in both signatures. He asked her to send him a video so that he could see her face and hear her voice, and he apologized for not yet sending her one of himself (so it must have been Berta who’d asked him to do so in the first place): since he was still settling in for his two-month stay in the city and hadn’t had time to buy a camera or find out where he could have such a video made, but he’d send it next time. On this occasion he made no reference to his “arena” and said nothing more about himself, instead he wrote a little about Berta, whom he briefly (in three lines) allowed himself to imagine in the privacy of her room. He was still using clichéd rather than crude phrases, the kind you get in love songs: “I already long for the moment when I can undress you and caress your soft skin”, things like that. Then at the end, just before the signature, Jack signed off with a kind of brutal mischievousness, as if unable to contain himself any longer: “I want to fuck you”, it said in English. But those words seemed to me to have been written in cold blood and by way of being a harsh reminder, just in case Berta should imagine that fucking didn’t figure in the plan he was concocting. Or perhaps it was a way of eliminating his earlier melodic affectations or of gauging the forbearance and the vocabulary (the lexical tolerance) of his correspondent. Berta had more than enough forbearance and humour: she was still laughing, her eyes were shining, her limp was less pronounced, she felt flattered, forgetting for a moment that for this man who desired her and wanted to fuck her she was still no more than a few letters, a few initials, the mere promise of someone, “BSA”, a few words written in a language that was neither hers nor his, and that once he’d seen her or seen her video and she was something more than that, she might no longer be desired or even fuckable, as had happened on other occasions, and that after gratifying his desire – if it was gratified – she might be rejected, as had happened on almost every occasion for some time now, though why she didn’t know or want to know.

She was aware of all this (once that first moment was over), but she replied to “Jack” as she’d replied to “Nick” and she sent him a copy of her agency video and waited. During those days of waiting she was nervous but also cheerful and affectionate towards me in the way women are when they’re nursing some illusion, although with me she’s never anything other than affectionate. One afternoon, when I got back from work before Berta and I picked up the mail from her mailbox, she made her feelings even clearer. No sooner had she opened the door and put the key away in her handbag (and without slipping into her homely ways, her mind was on other things), she came over to me and asked urgently, not even bothering to say hello first:

“Did you pick up the mail or didn’t we get any today?”

“Yes, I did. Yours is on the table. I had a letter from Luisa.”

She hurried over to the table and looked at the envelopes (one, two, three) but opened none of them until she’d taken off her raincoat, gone to the bathroom and to the fridge and put on a pair of moccasins that made her appear even lamer than usual. Neither she nor I were going out that night and while I was watching Family Feud on the TV and she was reading (not, I’m glad to say, Kundera), she said to me:

“I’m such an idiot, I’m all twitchy, I keep forgetting things. Earlier on I thought there might be something in the mail from ‘Visible Arena’. But if he does write to me, he’ll write to my box number not here, he doesn’t know my address or my name, what could I have been thinking of?” She paused for a second and then added: “Do you think he’ll reply?”

“Of course he will. How could he not reply after seeing your video?” I said.

She fell silent and joined me in watching one of the games on Family Feud. Then she said:

“Every time I wait for a reply to one of my letters, I’m as terrified by the idea that there won’t be one as by the idea that there will. It’s always a complete disaster anyway, but while it’s still all yet to come I have a feeling of absolute cleanness and infinite possibility. I feel the way I used to when I was fifteen years old, not in the least sceptical, it’s odd. I can’t help hoping. Most of the guys I go on to meet are vile, repellent, sometimes I end up going out and having supper with them or whatever just because they were preceded by the waiting and the letters, otherwise I wouldn’t even cross the road in their company. Maybe they feel the same about me.” She paused again or perhaps she was listening to another of the questions on Family Feud. Then she went on: “That’s why the perfect state is one of waiting and ignorance but, of course, if I knew that state was going to last for ever then I wouldn’t enjoy it. For example, a guy turns up who, for some reason or other, I’m really interested in, without knowing anything about him, like this Nick or Jack. Why do you think he changed his name? They don’t usually. Before I meet him, and before I see the video or the photograph he sends, I feel almost happy. For some time now those have been the only days when I do feel happy and in a good mood. Then they send me those ridiculous videos that they think are so daring, the video’s a real curse, and even then I often arrange to meet them, as if nothing that happens before the actual meeting counts. It’s too artificial, I think, people behave differently when they’re face to face. It’s as if I was giving them another chance, forgetting what they made of their first chance or what I made of mine. It’s an odd thing but, regardless of the falseness of the situation in which they’re made, the videos never lie. You see, you watch a video the way you watch television, with impunity. We never look so closely or brazenly at anyone in the flesh, because in any other circumstance we know that the other person will also be watching us, or that they might see us watching them on the sly. It’s an infernal invention, it’s put an end to transience, to the possibility of deceiving oneself and describing the way things happened differently from how they actually did happen. They’ve put an end to memory, which was imperfect and open to manipulation, selective and variable. Now that you can’t remember something at your leisure once it’s been recorded, how can you remember something that you know you can see again, exactly as it happened, in slow motion if you like? How can you possibly alter it?” Berta sounded weary, she had her damaged leg curled up beneath her in the armchair and she was holding the book in her hand, as if she’d not quite decided whether to stop reading or to stop watching the contest: she was speaking, therefore, as if in parenthesis, that is, without wanting to say too much. “It’s just as well that we only film occasional moments from a whole life, but those moments, you see, never lie, more because of the way the person watching them looks at them than because there’s any real authenticity in what was filmed. When I see the videos of those men my heart sinks, even though at the time I laugh and sometimes even end up going out with some of them. My heart sinks and it sinks even further when I see them arrive in the ugly suits they’ve chosen with such care and with their condoms in their pocket, not one of them ever forgets to bring them, they’ve all thought: ‘Well, just in case.’ It would be even worse if one of them did forget to bring them on the first date, I’d probably fall in love with him. Now I’m all excited about this Nick or Jack, a perverse Spaniard who wants to pass himself off as an American. He might be fun, with his visible arena, what a way to introduce yourself! I’ve felt much more resigned, even contented, these last few days, because I’m waiting for a reply from him and for him to send me his video, well, and because you’re here too. And what will happen? His video will be vile, but I’ll watch it several times anyway, just to get myself used to him, until he doesn’t seem quite so awful and even his defects begin to seem attractive, that’s the one advantage of repetition, it distorts everything and makes it familiar, what repels you in real life you end up finding attractive if you see it often enough on the TV screen. But I know, deep down, that all that guy wants is to screw me, for one night only, as he’s taken it upon himself to warn me, and then he’ll disappear, whether I like him or nor, whether I want him to disappear or not. I want to see him and I don’t want to see him, I want to meet him and I want him to go on being a stranger, I want him to reply and I don’t want to receive that reply. But if it doesn’t arrive I’ll feel desperate, I’ll get depressed, I’ll think that when he saw me, he didn’t like me and that’s always hurtful. I never know what to want.”

Berta covered her face with the open book without realizing what she was doing; when she felt the contact of the pages on her face she dropped it and then covered her face with her hands, as she’d meant to do in the first place. She wasn’t crying, just hiding for a moment, for an instant. I stopped watching Family Feud, got up and went over to her. I picked up the book from the floor and put my hand on her shoulder. She took my hand and stroked it (just for a second), then slowly removed it, a gesture of gentle rejection.

There was no face in the video sent by “Nick” or “Jack”, who on this third occasion had chosen to call himself “Bill”, “which might be my definitive name and then again it might not”, he said, still in English, on the card that accompanied the recording, and the “i” was identical to the “i” in “Nick”. It may have arrived on the day that it couldn’t have arrived at the house and didn’t, but Berta picked it up two days later, when she went to look at her box number at the local post office, where she received her more personal, or rather impersonal, correspondence. She was still wearing her raincoat when I got in that evening, she’d arrived only a few minutes before me, although she would have arrived a good deal earlier than me if she hadn’t stopped by the post office or been delayed or got nervous when she was trying to open the silver mailbox. She was holding the package in her hand (a package in the shape of a video tape), she held it up and waved it at me with a smile, to show me, to let me know it had come. She was standing still and so wasn’t limping.

“Shall we watch it together tonight after supper?” she asked me, trustingly.

“I’m having supper out tonight. I don’t know what time I’ll be back.”

“OK, if I can, I’ll wait until you get back. If I can’t, I’ll leave it on top of the television so that you can watch it before you go to bed, then we can discuss it tomorrow.”

“Why don’t we watch it now?”

“No, I’m not ready yet. I want to wait a few hours, just to know that I’ve got it but without watching it. I’ll wait up for you as long as I can.”

I was on the point of cancelling my date. Berta would rather watch the video with me, in order to be protected while she was watching it or in order to give it the visual importance that she’d been giving it verbally for days now. It was an event, even a solemn event, and you have to give importance to what is important to your friends. But my date was in part work-related, with a senior Spanish civil servant, a friend of my father’s who was visiting the city and who had a reasonable but uncertain grasp of English and had asked me if I could accompany him and his (much younger) wife to supper with another couple, an American senator and his (much younger) American wife, in order to chat to the women while the men discussed dirty tricks and also to lend him a hand with his English if, as was quite probable, he needed it. Not only were the two ladies younger, they were also a pair of frivolous birdbrains who, after supper, insisted on going out dancing and so we did: they danced for hours with me and with various other men (never once with their husbands, who were up to their eyes in dirty tricks) and they danced very close, especially the Spanish woman, whose breasts to me felt like silicon implants, like wood soaked in water, not that I submitted them to any hands-on analysis. The two couples were both rich and sophisticated, they did deals, they injected themselves with silicon, they spoke of Cuba like people in the know, they went to places where you dance very close.

By the time I got home it was after two o’clock in the morning, but luckily it was Saturday the next day (indeed, I’d only agreed to the evening out because it was a Friday). The light was on, the one Berta read by and had been reading by, the one she left on when she went to bed before I got home, or that I left on if she hadn’t got home. I wasn’t tired, my ears were still filled with the music I’d danced to with the two birdbrains and the sound of the manly voices drawing up plans for the new Cuba (I had to help the civil servant out several times by translating for him). I looked at my watch even though I knew what time it was and I remembered what Berta had said: “I’ll wait up for you as long as I can.” She hadn’t been able to wait for me until the end of the dance. On top of the television, as she’d promised, was a video tape with a card, the card from Bill (“which might be my definitive name”) that I’ve already mentioned. The tape was very brief as these personal videos usually are, it was at the end and hadn’t been rewound. I put the cassette in to wind it back, I still had my raincoat on. I sat down, creasing it, something you should never do, because then you walk around for weeks looking like an illegal immigrant. I started playing the video and watched, sitting in my raincoat. During the three or four minutes of recorded tape the scene didn’t change, it was always the same, the camera remained resolutely still, and what you saw was a headless torso, the frame cut off the man’s head (you could just see his throat, his pronounced Adam’s apple) and below, you saw only as far as his waist, he was sitting upright. The man was wearing a bathrobe, a pale blue bathrobe, newly bought or just washed, perhaps the sort that expensive hotels lend their guests. Or perhaps not, since on his left breast you could see two discreet initials, “PH”, his name was perhaps Pedro Hernández. You could also see his forearms, his arms were folded, hiding his hands, but the sleeves to the bathrobe were not that long, it was a kind of kimono style that left his strong, hairy, possibly even long arms uncovered, folded and immobile, dry, not wet, not just out from the shower or the bath, the bathrobe was perhaps only a way of avoiding wearing any clothing that might be recognizable or identifiable, a kind of sartorial anonymity: the only object that was clearly his was a large, black watch on his right wrist (his hands were concealed by his folded arms), perhaps he was lefthanded or merely perverse. He spoke in English, but his accent betrayed his Spanish origins even more clearly than his letters had. Talking like that, he couldn’t possibly believe that he could pass himself off as an American to a Spanish woman who lived in New York, who worked as an interpreter (only he didn’t know that); and yet he continued to speak in English, using language as a disguise, as a false trail, voices change slightly when they speak a language not their own, as I’m all too well aware, even when the person speaks it imperfectly and without making much of an effort (his English wasn’t bad, it was just that he had an accent). The open neck of his bathrobe revealed a triangle of chest, which was again very hairy and with a few grey hairs, though the hair was otherwise dark. In that bathrobe and with all that hair he reminded me of that great actor, Sean Connery, a childhood hero of mine: as I remember it, when he played the part of the spy licensed to kill, he was often dressed in a towel or a bathrobe or a kimono. I immediately gave the faceless man Connery’s face, it’s difficult to listen to someone on television without imagining their features. At one point in the recording his chin appeared in the picture when he lowered it, just for a few seconds, it seemed to be cleft although not quite, the shadow of a dimple, a groove, a hollow in the bone but not in the skin, but which nevertheless showed through (I can’t remember if Sean Connery has a cleft chin or not). For more than a minute I watched the almost motionless image of this torso with its arms folded (motionless apart from his breathing) and heard nothing, as if the man had set the camera running before he was ready to say his words, or as if he were thinking about them or memorizing them. In fact, far off in the background you could hear music playing, as if there was a radio or a television on in the distance. I was just about to fast-forward the tape to see if it changed at all and whether there was in fact any message when “Bill” finally started speaking. His voice shook. It was almost a whisper only rather sharp, shrill even, it didn’t seem the right voice for such a hairy man and certainly not for Sean Connery. His Adam’s apple moved up and down. He made strange pauses when he spoke, as if before sitting down in front of the video he’d broken his text down into short, simple phrases and was reciting them. Sometimes he repeated himself. It was difficult to know if this was for stylistic effect or involuntary, in order to correct his pronunciation. The result was very sombre. The phrases were not just short, they were cutting. His voice was like a saw. His voice was like the voice I’d heard in Havana on the balcony and through the wall, the voice of Guillermo, which in English translates as William, the diminutive of which is Bill and not Nick or Jack. “I received your video, thank you,” said the voice in its intelligible but Hispanicized English which he’d translated and which I now re-translate, long after the event. “The fact is that it all looks very promising. You’re very attractive. But that’s the unfortunate thing, that it’s only promising. It’s not enough. It’s not enough. That’s why I’m only sending you something partial too. Incomplete. You seeing my face would be equivalent to me seeing your body. Your body. You women care about faces. Eyes. That’s what you say. Men care about the face and the body. Or the body and the face. That’s how it is. As I said before, I work in a very visible arena.” (“A very visible arena,” he said again and the last word he pronounced as if it were Spanish, he couldn’t help himself, given the Spanish origin of the word. I leaned back. My raincoat grew even more creased.) “Very visible. I can’t meet a complete stranger just like that. Unless I’m convinced that it’s worth it. To know that, I have to see all of you. Everything. I have to see you naked. In as much detail as possible. You say you had an accident. You say you limp a little. A little. But you don’t let me see how little that little is. I’d like to see your injured leg. How it looks. To see your tits. Your cunt. If possible, wide open. To see your tits. Your cunt. I’m sure they’re lovely. Only once I’ve seen them can we arrange to meet. That’s how it is. If your breasts and your cunt and your leg persuade me that it’s worth running the risk. If you’re still interested in me. Perhaps you don’t want to go on with this. You probably think I’m being too direct. Brutal. Cruel. I’m not cruel. I just can’t afford to waste any time. I can’t waste any time. I can’t run unnecessary risks. I like you. You’re very pretty. I mean it. You’re very pretty. I like you a lot. But from what you’ve sent me I know as little of you as you now know of me. I’ve seen very little of you. I’m not cruel. I just want to see more. Send it to me. Send it. Then I’ll show myself. If it’s worth it. I think it will be. I still want to fuck you. Even more now. Even more now. That’s how it is.” The recording continued for a few seconds longer, with no voice now, the same scene as before, the hairy triangle and the folded arms, the black watch on the right wrist, the Adam’s apple not moving as it had when he was speaking, his hands hidden, I couldn’t see if he was wearing a wedding ring, as Guillermo had, and as I’d seen from my balcony. Then the torso got up and walked off to the left (still wearing the long dressing gown), and for a few seconds I could see what until then had remained hidden, a pillow, a large, unmade double bed, at the foot of which he’d sat to film himself. Immediately afterwards the screen went blank and the clock stopped, it was a new tape, one of those lasting fifteen or twenty minutes, which are beginning to replace letters or perhaps photographs, since letters have already been replaced, long ago. When I switched off the television and its light, much brighter than that of the reading lamp, had gone, I saw Berta behind me, reflected in the now dark screen, and I turned round. She was standing there in her dressing gown, looking sleepy or rather sleepless, she must have watched and listened to the video dozens of times before I arrived and now she’d left her bedroom in order to see it again, with me or rather while I watched it for the first time. She had her hands in her dressing-gown pockets, she had no shoes on, her hair was all dishevelled from her tossing and turning, she looked pretty, with no makeup on. Nor shoes, if she’d been walking she would have limped. She didn’t move. The music from the dancing had left my head, but not the Cuba of the conversation. She took her hands out of her pockets and folded her arms as “Bill” had done to speak to her but not to reveal himself; she leaned back against the wall and said:

“So now you see.”

My raincoat was seriously creased by now. I got up.

“Yes,” I said, “I see.”

OVER THE NEXT few days I waited for Berta to mention him again, “Nick” or “Jack” or “Bill” or “Visible Arena” or maybe Pedro Hernández, or perhaps Miriam’s Guillermo, although I almost immediately dismissed this possibility, because we always distrust our first impression of something or someone when a second, third or even fourth impression becomes superimposed on it, someone whose words or image remain for too long in our memory, like a dance tune that dances on in our thoughts. But during that time, during the weekend immediately following (the whole of Saturday and Sunday), Berta said nothing or perhaps preferred not to talk about it, she wandered round the apartment and came in and out as if distracted, not in a bad mood but not in a good mood either, without the cheery nervousness of the days of waiting, perhaps asking me more questions than she usually did about my plans, about my still recent marriage and apartment, about my father and about Luisa, whom she knew only from her photo and from talking to her on the phone. If I often thought about “Bill”, I thought, she couldn’t but do otherwise, after all she was the person he’d been speaking to in his bathrobe, she was the one he wanted to see more of before agreeing to meet her, this man who needed so many certainties. Neither of us used the video that weekend, as if it were jinxed or contaminated, and “Bill’s” video remained inside, at the end of the tape just as I’d first found it and then left it, without either of us rewinding it or taking it out.

On Monday, however, when we both went back to work, I got home in the evening to find Berta, who’d also only just got back (her handbag was still open and in it her key, she’d taken off her raincoat, but it was lying on the sofa), playing the video. She was looking at it again and stopping now and then, stopping it here and there, all in vain, since, as I’ve explained, the image remained the same throughout its three or four minutes’ duration. The days were already quite short, it was getting dark, it was Monday, my work at the Assembly had been exhausting, as I imagined it had been for her as well, after that you need some distraction, you need not to listen. But Berta was still listening. I said nothing, just waved to her, went to my room, then to the bathroom to freshen up, and when I returned to the living room she was still studying the tape, stopping it and winding it on a little only to stop again.

“Did you notice that at one point you can see his chin?” she said to me. “Here.” She froze the image of “Bill” lowering his chin a fraction so that for an instant it appeared on the screen.

“Yes, I noticed it the other night,” I replied. “It’s almost like a cleft chin.”

She held back the question for a second (but only a second).

“You couldn’t recognize him from that alone, could you? If you saw him I mean. If you saw that face somewhere else.”

“Of course not, how could you possibly recognize him?” I said. “Why?”

“Not even if you knew it was him? If you knew beforehand, I mean, that it must be him.”

I looked at the chin frozen on the screen.

“Perhaps if you knew, yes, perhaps then you’d be able to. Why do you ask?”

Berta switched off the video with the remote control and the image disappeared (the image that she could flick back on at will). Her eyes were bright and lively again.

“Look, he really intrigues me this guy. He’s a real son-of-a-bitch, but I might just send him what he wants. I’ve never done it for anyone, no one’s ever dared ask straight out like that, in that way, and, as you can imagine, I’ve never responded with one of my own to any of the filthy videos I’ve received before. But it could be fun, just to do it once.” Berta didn’t want to dredge up any more justifications, instead she broke off and changed her tone of voice; she smiled. “My body would be recorded for posterity, even if only for a very brief posterity, everyone always ends up wiping tapes and using them again. But I’ll take a copy for my old age.”

“You’re including your leg in this film for posterity, are you?”

“I’m not sure about the leg. The bastard!” Her face hardened for a moment when she swore (but only for a moment). “But before deciding, I need to see him, to know something more about him, it’s really creepy that faceless bathrobe. I need to know what he looks like.”

“But he says you can’t see him until you send him your video and, even then, you can’t be sure. He’ll have to give you the OK, the swine.” My face, I imagine, had been set hard from the beginning of the conversation and not only when I swore. And had been for three nights perhaps.

“I can’t do anything because he’s seen my video and knows my face. But he hasn’t seen you, he doesn’t even know you exist. We know the number of his mailbox, which he must visit every now and then. I’ve already found out where it is, it’s at Kenmore Station, it’s not that far. You could go there, identify the mailbox and keep a watch on it, wait there and see his face when he goes to pick up his mail.”

Berta had said, “We know”, she was including me in her curiosity and her interest, or perhaps there was more to it than that. She was assimilating me into herself.

“Are you mad? Who knows when he’ll go there next, days might go by without him turning up. Are you expecting me to spend the whole day at the post office?”

Berta looked irritated. This didn’t often happen. She’d decided what she had to do and would brook no opposition, not even an objection.

“No, that isn’t what I meant. I just want you to go there a couple of times over the next few days, when you’ve nothing else to do, when you leave work, just for half an hour, and just see if you have any luck, that’s all. At least give it a try. If you don’t have any luck, fine, we’ll forget it. But it’s no big deal to try. He’ll be waiting for my reply at the moment, the video that I’m not yet going to send him, he might drop by every day just to see if it’s arrived. If he’s here on business, he probably works nine to five, so he might well drop by the post office when he leaves work, after five o’clock, that’s what I do. We might strike lucky.” She’d gone back to using the plural, she’d said “we’ll forget it”. The look I gave her was doubtless more thoughtful than angry, because she smiled and added in a calmer voice: “Please.” The half moon, the scar, however, had become very blue; I was almost tempted to try and wipe it from her cheek.

I went to the post office at Kenmore Station three times, the first occasion was on the following evening, after work, the second two days later, on the Thursday of that week, again after an exhausting day of interpreting. I didn’t stay for half an hour, as Berta had recommended, but for nearly an hour on both occasions, victim to the fear that always grips people who wait in vain, the fear that at the very moment we leave, the person who’s taken so long to arrive, will arrive, as doubtless happened with Miriam on that hot evening in Havana, when she was pacing up and down on the other side of the esplanade and Guillermo didn’t appear and she didn’t leave. Guillermo didn’t appear on Tuesday or on Thursday, nor did “Bill” or “Jack” or “Nick” or Pedro Hernández. In New York, however, at any time or place, there are enough suspicious-looking people or even people of criminal appearance for no one to take any notice of a man in a raincoat, carrying a newspaper and a book, standing in a post office where other people were busy picking up or delivering parcels and where, from time to time, someone would rush in, key in hand, to open his or her silver mailbox, thrust in an arm and scrabble about and sometimes bring out a booty of envelopes, at others only an empty hand. But none of those men in a hurry went to PO Box 524, which I’d located when I arrived.

“Just once more,” Berta pleaded on the Friday night, a week after receiving the video; sometimes what threatened to drown us a week ago might just refloat us now, it can happen. “Tomorrow morning, at the weekend. He might be so busy he can only go there on Saturdays.”

“Or perhaps he has so much free time that he’s been there every day at any one of the many times I wasn’t. It makes no sense, I’ve waited an hour each time.”

“I know you have and I can’t tell you how grateful I am. But do it just once more, please, try it once more at the weekend. If he doesn’t turn up, we’ll forget it.”

“But even if he does turn up, what good is it going to do you for me to see him? Do you want me to describe him to you? I’m no writer. And how am I supposed to know if you’d like him or not. Besides, I could lie to you and tell you that he was handsome when he’s ugly or ugly when he’s handsome, what difference does it make? You’re not going to send him or not send him what he asks you because of that, because of my description of what he looks like. What will you do if I tell you he’s a monster or looks weird? It’ll make no difference. I might say that anyway, so that you don’t send him anything and have nothing more to do with him.”

Berta didn’t respond to my last words, I assume because she didn’t want to know why I’d rather she had nothing more to do with him, or rather because she knew and couldn’t be bothered to hear why.

“I don’t know, I don’t know yet how I’ll react to what you tell me. But I need to know more, I can’t bear the idea that this guy has seen my face, in my apartment, and I haven’t seen his, and that no one else has either, you, I mean. This Visible Arena guy is really smart. Once you’ve seen him I’ll decide. I don’t know what yet, but I’ll decide then. I’d go myself, but he’d recognize me and then he wouldn’t want to have anything more to do with me.”

At that point, I would have paid good money to have nothing more to do with the whole affair.

The following morning, the Saturday of my fifth week there (it was October), I took a copy of the mammoth New York Times with me to Kenmore Station prepared to wait for another hour, or perhaps longer: people who wait, even if they do so unwillingly, always want to exhaust all possibilities, in other words, waiting is addictive. I placed myself, as I had done on Tuesday and Thursday, next to a column that served both as a support and as something to hide behind or to rest my foot against every now and then (bending my leg as though I was about to kick something), and I began to read the newspaper, but not so closely as not to notice the presence of each individual as he or she approached the mailbox, opened it slowly or impatiently and shut it again with satisfaction or repressed rage. Since it was Saturday there were fewer people and the footsteps sounded less timorous or more individual as they crossed the marble floor, so all I had to do was to look up every time some user of the mailboxes appeared. After some forty minutes (by then I was on the sports pages) I heard some footsteps that were more strident and individual than the others, like someone with metal tips on the soles of their shoes or like a woman in high heels. I looked up and saw a man approaching, the minute I saw him I knew he was Spanish, more than anything because of his trousers, Spanish trousers are unmistakable and have a very particular cut, I don’t know exactly what it is about them, but they tend to make most of my compatriots look as if they have very straight legs and a very high bum (I’m not entirely sure that the cut flatters them). (But I thought all this later on.) Without even needing to look he went straight to my mailbox, no. 524, and got his key out from the pocket of his patriotic trousers. He might have been going to open no. 523 or no. 525, or so I thought while he was searching for his key (he tried first his lighter pocket, then the pocket in his waistband, but it took only a matter of seconds). He had a moustache, he was well-dressed overall but unmistakably European (although he could also have been a New Yorker or from New England), he was about fifty (but a young or, rather, a well-preserved fifty), he was quite tall and he passed by me so quickly that when I tried to catch a glimpse of his face he already had his back to me, looking for his key and turned towards his mailbox. I folded up my newspaper (a mistake) and stood there watching him (another mistake). I saw him open Box 524 and put his arm inside as far as he could. He took out various envelopes, three or four, none of which could have been from Berta, so he presumably exchanged letters with a lot of people, perhaps they were all curious women, people who write to the personals don’t limit themselves to just one attempt, although at a given moment, as Berta was doing now (but as “Bill” perhaps was not), they might concentrate on one particular individual and forget about the rest, strangers all of them. He closed the mailbox and turned round looking at the envelopes with neither satisfaction nor rage (one of them looked to me like a package, possibly a video, given its shape and size). He stopped after taking a couple of steps forward, then walked on again as rapidly as he had before and when he passed me, his eyes met mine, for my eyes were no longer on the newspaper. Maybe he recognized me as being a fellow Spaniard, perhaps because of my trousers. He took a good look at me, I mean, he fixed me with his gaze for a moment and would, I thought, recognize me if he saw me again (as I would him). Any likeness to the actor, Sean Connery, apart from the hairy chest which he wasn’t displaying at the time (he was wearing a jacket and tie and was carrying a raincoat over one arm, like someone who’s left a car that they themselves aren’t driving), was limited to the receding hair which he made no attempt to disguise and the eyebrows, which arched steeply and reached down as far as his temples, giving him, as it does to Connery, a piercing look. I was unable to see his chin or to compare it, but I did notice that he had deep lines on his forehead, although they didn’t make him look old, he was doubtless an expressive man. He wasn’t ugly, on the contrary, of his type he was doubtless attractive or even handsome, the kind of man who’s busy, mature, determined, a rich man with a certain degree of sophistication (perhaps recently acquired): he’d make deals, perhaps go to places where you dance very close, he’d doubtless speak of Cuba like someone in the know, if he was Guillermo, Miriam’s Guillermo. But he’d draw the line at injecting himself with silicon, his piercing gaze would never condone that.

I thought that I could perhaps follow him for a while, it was a way of prolonging the waiting which was, in fact, over. When I saw him leave the post office, when I reckoned that the closing of the swing doors would disguise the sound of my shoes on the indiscreet marble floor, I set off, keeping the same swift pace in order not to lose him. From the street door I saw him go over to a waiting taxi, which he paid off and sent away, he must have decided to walk a little, it was a nice day (he didn’t put his raincoat on, he had it draped over his shoulder now, I could see that it was a posh shade of pale blue, mine, which I was wearing, is the traditional raincoat colour of beige). He was walking along looking at the envelopes from time to time then, without slowing his pace, he opened one, read its contents, ripped up the two things, contents and envelope, and tossed them into a litter bin he was passing. I didn’t dare stop to rummage around in it, the idea filled me with shame and I was afraid of losing him. He continued walking. He was looking straight ahead, one of those men who always walk with their head held high, in order to seem taller than they are and to appear more dominant. In his hand he was carrying the other envelope and the package containing the video (I was sure it was a video). Then, when I looked at that right hand, I noticed the wedding ring, he wore it on the opposite hand to me, for I’d been wearing my wedding ring on my left hand for some months now, I was beginning to get used to it. Then, again without slowing down, he opened another envelope and did the same as he had with the first one, but this time he put the torn pieces in one of his jacket pockets, perhaps because there was no litter bin to hand (a civic-minded gentleman). He stopped to look in the window of a bookshop on Fifth Avenue, Scribner’s, if I remember rightly, but presumably nothing interested him or he was just attracted by the shop, because he continued on his way. When he stopped, he put his raincoat on, or rather he threw it over his shoulders without putting his arms into the sleeves, as Ranz, my father, has done all his life and still does, but as many Americans would not (only gangsters, like George Raft). I was following him, doubtless more closely than was prudent in such cases, but then I’d never followed anyone before. He had no reason to suspect anything, although he wasn’t exactly strolling along, he was keeping up a good pace, stopping only for traffic lights, and not always for them, there’s not so much traffic on Saturdays. He seemed to be in a hurry, although not in enough of a hurry to have kept the taxi. He was on his way back somewhere, but it was obvious that he knew where he was going, perhaps both his haste and the need to wait were linked to the package he was carrying in his hand, the video probably had no return address of any kind on it, just a card inside, perhaps “Bill” thought it might be from my friend Berta, whom he knew as “BSA”, perhaps he believed he was carrying her naked in his hand at that very moment. He paused again outside a superperfumery, perhaps intoxicated by the multitudinous smell created by the mingling of all the different brands as they wafted out on to the street. He went in and I followed (I felt that waiting outside would make me more conspicuous). There were no shop assistants, the customers wandered about as they pleased, chose their bottles of cologne and paid on the way out. I saw him stop by the Nina Ricci stand and there, leaning for a moment on the glass counter, he opened the third envelope and read the letter it contained: this time he didn’t tear it up but placed it instead in the pocket of that pretentious raincoat (the tom-up letter had been consigned to his jacket pocket, he was a very orderly man). He picked up a small tester of Nina Ricci and sprayed his left wrist, bare of any watch or any other adornment. He waited the required few seconds, sniffed it but was not apparently impressed, since he moved on to another less prestigious counter, on which various brands of perfume were displayed. He sprayed his other wrist with Eau de Guerlain – his large black watch must have got wet too. He sniffed it (the watch strap), after the requisite few seconds allowed for by those who know about such things, and he must have liked it, because he decided to buy the bottle. He lingered a while longer in the men’s section, trying two scents on the back of each hand, soon he’d have no uncontaminated areas left. He picked up a bottle of an American make bearing some Biblical name, Jericho or Jordan or Jordache, I can’t remember now, he obviously wanted to try the local products. I picked up some Trussardi for women, now that I was married it would never go amiss I thought (I often thought of Luisa), I could even give some to Berta (and, when I thought that, I picked up a second bottle). It was then, standing in the queue to pay (each of us in a separate queue with another between us, though he was nearer than I was to his corresponding checkout), that he turned his head and looked at me and recognized me. He had piercing eyes, just as they’d seemed when I first looked into them in the post office, but though penetrating they revealed nothing, neither curiosity nor unease nor fear (neither terror nor threat), they were piercing but opaque as if their penetrative qualities were blind, as if he were one of those television personalities who think of themselves as very intense, forgetting that they can’t be, given that they spend all their time looking at a camera and never at a person. He left the shop and continued walking and, despite everything, I followed, despite the fact that I knew he’d seen me. He stopped more frequently now, pretending to be looking into shop windows or checking his watch against the clocks in the street, and when he turned round to look back at me, I had to act normal, buying magazines and hot dogs I didn’t want from street vendors. But his walk lasted only a little while longer, for when he reached 59th Street, “Bill” turned sharp left and I lost sight of him for several seconds and, when I reached the corner and he might again have entered my field of vision, by a miracle I glimpsed him running up the canopied steps of the luxurious Plaza Hotel and disappearing, at the same swift pace, through its doors, greeted by uniformed, behatted porters whom he ignored. In one hand he was carrying his video and a bag containing the perfume he’d bought, I was carrying my magazines and the gigantic New York Times, the bag containing my bottles of perfume and a hot dog. He must have run the distance from the corner, hoping to reach the hotel in time to prevent me from seeing where he’d gone, the famous Plaza Hotel, the discreet initials “PH”, the bathrobe was borrowed and his name wasn’t Pedro Hernández.

I recounted all this to Berta, although without mentioning my idea that he might be the same man who’d made Miriam wait and incurred her wrath one evening in Havana, Miriam with her strong legs and her big bag and that grasping gesture, a married man with a sick or perhaps a healthy wife. Berta listened to all this with evident fascination and a look of modest triumph (the triumph was due more than anything to the fact that her idea that I should visit Kenmore Station had proved successful). I was incapable of lying to her and telling her that “Nick”, “Jack” or “Bill” was a monster, he wasn’t and I told her so. Nor could I tell her that he was weird, he wasn’t and I told her that too, although I hadn’t liked his ostentatious raincoat and his piercing, indecipherable eyes and his sharp up-and-down eyebrows like Sean Connery’s and his neat moustache and his cleft chin and his voice like a saw. With that voice he would make deals and talk about Cuba like someone in the know. With that voice he’d seduced Berta. I didn’t like him. I gave Berta the first bottle of Trussardi.

A few days went by without either Berta or myself mentioning him again (I said nothing, hoping to dissuade her, she was doubtless thinking things over), they were days of intense work at the United Nations: one morning I had to translate a speech by the same high-ranking politician from my own country whose words I’d altered the first time I met Luisa. I abstained from doing so on this occasion, we were, after all, at the Assembly, but whilst I translated his pompous Spanish and his rambling, ill-judged ideas into English and into the earpieces of the world, I recalled that first time and I remembered vividly what had been said on that occasion, through my mediation, while Luisa was breathing at my back (she was breathing near my ear like a whisper almost brushing me, almost brushing against me, her breast against my back). “People love one in large measure because they’re obliged to,” the Englishwoman had said. And then she’d added: “Any relationship between two people always brings with it a multitude of problems and coercions, as well as insults and humiliations.” And a little later: “Everyone obliges everyone else, not so much to do something they don’t want to do, but rather to do something they’re not sure they want to do, because hardly anyone knows what they don’t want, still less what they do want, there’s no way of knowing that.” And she’d continued, whilst our high-ranking politician kept silent, perhaps already weary of that speech or as if he were actually learning something: “Sometimes they’re obliged by some external factor or by someone who’s no longer in their lives, the past obliges them, their own discontent, their own history, their own wretched biography. Or even things they know nothing about or which are beyond their comprehension, the part of our inheritance we all carry within us and of which we’re all ignorant, who knows when that whole process actually began.” Lastly, she’d said: “Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if we all just stayed very still, if we were dead, after all it’s the only thing that, deep down, we all want, the one future idea we’re gradually accustoming ourselves to, and about which there can be no doubts, no anticipated regrets.” Our leader had remained silent and the Englishwoman who, by this time – it was autumn – had already lost her post and no longer attended the Assembly in New York, had blushed after her pseudo-soliloquy, when she heard the long silence that ensued, shaking her out of her emotional trance. I had again helped her out and put a suggestion of my own in her mouth: “Why don’t we go and have a stroll in the gardens? It’s a glorious day.” (I’d invented this Anglicism – “un día glorioso” – in order to lend verisimilitude to the phrase.) The four of us had gone out to walk in the gardens, on that most glorious of mornings when Luisa and I had first met.

Our high-ranking politician was still in his post, perhaps thanks to his pomposity and to his ideas which were as rambling and ill-judged as those of the British leader, but in her case they’d not been enough to keep her in her post (she was probably a depressive and, doubtless, thoughtful too and in politics that in itself is enough to dig one’s own grave). After his speech I passed him in the corridor, surrounded by his entourage (my shift was over and he was busy receiving insincere congratulations on his peroration from various people) and, since I’d met him, I decided to greet him, holding out my hand and addressing him by the title of his post preceded by the word “Señor”. It was ingenuous of me. He didn’t recognize me, despite the fact that I’d once twisted his words and made him say things he hadn’t said and which it would never have occurred to him to say, and two bodyguards immediately grasped my extended hand and the hand I hadn’t extended and pulled them behind my back, holding me with such violence (crushing my arms, bearing down on me) that for a moment I thought they’d handcuffed, or rather, manacled me. Fortunately, a top-flight United Nations civil servant, who’d noticed me and happened to be passing, immediately identified me as the interpreter and thus managed to free me from those protecting our high-ranking politician. The latter was already on his way down the corridor, borne along on a wave of false flattery and a jangling of keys (he had a mania about his keyring, which he jiggled about in his pocket). Watching him depart, I noticed that he too was wearing the national trousers which shared that famous and unmistakable Spanish cut. Anything else would have been wrong in a representative so thoroughly representative of our far-off country.

Later that night, back at home, I recounted this anecdote to Berta, but she didn’t listen, as she usually did, with amusement or even amazement, still less with any show of vehemence, her mind fixed on what had been going round and round in it all day, or perhaps longer, a plan, doubtless to do with “Bill”.

“Will you help me make the video?” she asked me the moment I’d finished telling her about my adventure.

“Help you? What video?”

“Come on, don’t act the innocent. The video. I’m going to send it to him. I’ve decided to send it to him. But I can’t film a video like that by myself, it wouldn’t come out right. Centring the shots, things like that, the camera can’t be static, it has to move. Will you help me?” Her tone of voice was light, almost amused. I must have looked at her with an imbecilic expression on my face because she added (and her tone was no longer light): “Don’t just look at me with that imbecilic expression on your face, answer me. Will you help me? It’s obvious that if we don’t send it to him, he won’t give any further signs of life.”

I said (without thinking what I was saying): “What if he doesn’t? Would that be so very bad? Who is he, after all? Think about it. Who is he? What possible importance can it have if we don’t give him the video? We don’t have to give it to him, he’s still nobody, you haven’t even seen his face.”

She’d reverted to using the plural: “If we don’t send it to him”, she’d said, taking my participation for granted. Perhaps now she was more justified in using the plural, after my vigils at Kenmore Station and in other places, even by the canopied steps of the Plaza Hotel. I’d used it too, by assimilation, by contagion, “If we don’t give it to him.” “We don’t have to give it to him.” I’d done so without realizing.

“It’s important to me, I’m serious about this.”

I switched on the television, it was time for Family Feud, which was on every day, and I felt that the images might help to mitigate the growing atmosphere of irritation, might perhaps silence the words. It’s impossible to resist looking at a television screen now and then, once it’s on.

“Why don’t you try to negotiate a meeting? Write to him again, he’ll reply, even if you don’t send him what he wants.”

“I don’t want to waste any more time. Are you going to help me or not?”

There was nothing light about her tone of voice now, it sounded almost commanding. I looked at the screen. I said:

“I’d rather not have to.”

She was looking at the screen too. She said:

“There’s no one else I can ask.”

Then she remained silent for the rest of the evening, but she didn’t spend it with me, she just passed me now and then on her way from the kitchen to her bedroom. When she passed I could smell the Trussardi cologne she was wearing.

Over the weekend we spent more time together at home, as we usually did. (It was the sixth weekend of my stay there, the time was coming for me to return to Madrid, to Luisa and our new home, I used to talk to her a couple of times a week, never about anything much, as tends to be the case with hurried, vaguely amorous conversations, especially long-distance ones), and on Saturday, Berta again asked me. “I have to make that video,” she said, “you must help me.” Her limp had seemed more pronounced over the last few days as if, unconsciously, she wanted to arouse my pity. It was absurd. I didn’t answer and she went on: “There’s no one else I can ask. I’ve been thinking about it and the only person I’d trust is Julia, but she knows nothing about the whole affair, she knows about the agency and that I write to the personals and that from time to time I go out with someone and that it never works out, but she’s no idea that I send and receive videos or that I end up in bed with some of these men. She knows nothing about ‘Visible Arena’; you, on the other hand, have been in on it from the start, you’ve even seen his face, don’t force me to tell it all to someone else, people always talk. I’d be so ashamed if my colleagues found out. You must help me.” She paused and hesitated before speaking and then said (the will is always slower than the tongue): “After all, you have seen me naked before, that’s another advantage.”

“Any relationship between two people always brings with it a multitude of problems and coercions, as well as insults and humiliations,” I thought. “Everyone obliges everyone else,” I thought. “That’s what this guy Bill has done to Berta and now Berta’s trying to do the same thing to me, Bill has tried coercion, he’s also insulted and humiliated her even before meeting her, perhaps she doesn’t realize that or perhaps she doesn’t really care, she’s too caught up in it all, Berta is trying to use coercion to persuade me, just as Miriam did with Guillermo to get him to marry her and just as Guillermo tried perhaps to coerce his Spanish wife into dying, into death. I coerced and obliged Luisa, or perhaps Luisa was the one who did it to me, it’s not quite clear; who must my father have tried to coerce, who had he offended, who had he obliged, how was it that there’d been two deaths in his life, perhaps he’d coerced someone into dying, I don’t want to know, the world seems so innocuous when you don’t, wouldn’t it be better if we all just stayed very still. But even if we were to do that, the problems and coercions and humiliations and insults continue, as do the obligations, sometimes we oblige ourselves, a sense of duty it’s called, perhaps my duty is to help Berta do what she’s asking me to do, you should give importance to the things that are important to your friends; if I refuse to help her I’ll offend her, humiliate her, any refusal is also an offence, an act of coercion, and it’s true that I have already seen her naked, but that was a long time ago, I know it happened, but I can’t remember, fifteen years have passed since then and she’s older now and lame, she was young then and hadn’t had any accidents, didn’t have one leg shorter than the other, why had she brought that up now, we never talked about our slender past together, which was both slender in itself and in comparison to the broad present, I was young then too, what happened between us both happened and didn’t happen, it’s the same with everything, why do or not do something, why say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, why worry yourself with a ‘perhaps’ or a ‘maybe’, why speak, why remain silent, why refuse, why know anything if nothing of what happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try; we pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. Or perhaps there never was anything.”

“All right, but let’s do it fast, right now,” I said to Berta. “Let’s get it over with.” I used the plural, this time with some justification.

“You’ll do it?” she said with sudden undisguised gratitude and relief.

“Tell me what I have to do and I’ll do it. But be quick, come on, get ready, the sooner we start the sooner we finish.”

Berta came over to me and gave me a peck on the cheek. She left the living room to get her camera, but we went back into the room she’d brought it from, because she chose her bedroom and her unmade bed as the backdrop. We were in the middle of breakfast, it was still morning.

That body bore no resemblance to the one I remembered, or no longer remembered, although the truth is I only looked at it through the camera, to provide the framings and the closeups she suggested to me, as if seeing her in that indirect way was like not seeing her, every time we stopped filming for a few seconds to think up a new pose or to vary the shot (I did the varying, she did the thinking) I would stare at the floor or into the distance, at the wall or the pillow, at some point just beyond her, keeping my gaze opaque. To start with, Berta had sat at the foot of the bed, as “Bill” had done in his pale blue bathrobe and Berta had imitated him in that as well, she’d put on her own bathrobe (which was white), having first asked me to wait while she showered, then she emerged with her hair still damp and the bathrobe wrapped about her, she opened it a little afterwards, let it fall open a little to reveal her front, keeping the belt still knotted, I didn’t remember those full breasts, perfected by the passing of time or perhaps by touch, I couldn’t believe she’d had silicon implants, it was as if they’d been transformed or become more maternal since I’d last seen them, and for that reason I felt not only indiscreet, but also troubled (perhaps like a father who stopped seeing his daughter naked when that daughter stopped being a child and then sees her again as an adult, by accident or because of some misfortune). Her whole body, the body I saw through the lens, was more solid than the one I’d embraced in Madrid fifteen years ago, perhaps she’d taken up swimming or gymnastics during the twelve years she’d been in America, a country where they cosset and mould their bodies, but only their bodies. But as well as being more vigorous, it was older too, her skin had grown darker the way the skin on fruit grows dark when it begins to rot, there were creases at her armpits, around her waist, some areas were striated by that shadowy hatching you can only see from very close to (those almost-white lines that look as if they’d been painted on wood with a very fine brush), even those strong breasts were wider set than was ideal, the channel between them broadened, they wouldn’t suit certain low-cut dresses. Berta had abandoned modesty, or so it seemed, I, on the other hand, had not and I tried to force myself to remember that I was filming it all for other eyes, the eyes of “Bill” or “Guillermo”, for the piercing, indecipherable eyes of the man in the Plaza Hotel, his penetrating, opaque gaze would see what I was seeing, that was who it was intended for, not for my opaque but unpenetrating gaze, I wasn’t seeing it, even though the angle I chose would be the one he would see, what he would see later on his screen depended on me (but also on Berta), nothing more, nothing less, only what we decided, what we chose to film for that briefest of posterities. Berta had let the bathrobe slide down to her waist, the belt still knotted, her legs covered by the rest of it, only her torso uncovered (but entirely uncovered now). I only filmed her face in passing, when the movement made by the camera required it, perhaps wanting to disassociate the familiar face (nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks, the whole face) from the unfamiliar body, that body which was older, stronger or perhaps just forgotten. It wasn’t like Luisa’s body, which is the body I’m most used to, then and now, although I realized at that moment that I’d never observed Luisa’s body in such detail, through a camera lens, Berta’s body was like a piece of wet wood at which knives are thrown, Luisa’s was like indiscreet marble on which every footstep echoes, younger and less worn-out, less expressive and more intact. We didn’t talk while I was filming, the video picks up voices – Berta perhaps felt no sense of fun or relief now, I never had – voices debase what happens, any commentary clouds the facts, even recounting them does; we paused, I stopped filming, it all took very little time, I only had to record a few minutes, but we’d still not finished. I was looking more and more as if through “Bill’s” eyes, the eyes that I had seen but Berta had not, they were not my eyes but his, no one could accuse me of having looked with that look, of having really looked, as I said before, because it wasn’t me but him looking through my eyes, his eyes and my own opaque eyes, my eyes growing ever more penetrating. But she didn’t know those eyes, we still hadn’t quite finished. “Your cunt,” I said to Berta, and I don’t know how I managed to say it, how I dared to say it, but I did. “We haven’t filmed your cunt yet,” I said, and I used the plural in order to include myself or perhaps to soften what I was saying, just two words, then six, the two words repeated in the second phrase (perhaps I was speaking through “Bill’s” mouth too). Berta didn’t answer, she didn’t say anything, I don’t even know if she was looking at me, I wasn’t looking at her (I wasn’t filming at that point), but into the distance, at the wall and the pillow from which those who are ill and those who are married end up seeing the world, as lovers do too. She undid her bathrobe and opened it up to reveal her stomach, still keeping her legs covered, that is, you could see her inner thighs but not the front or lower down, the rest, the lower part of the bathrobe fell like a pale blue cascade (or, in this case, white) hiding her extremities, one longer and the other shorter, one shorter and the other longer, and I filmed her, going in closer, just a few video seconds, for that ephemeral posterity, Berta would take a copy, that’s what she’d said. She wrapped her bathrobe around her as soon as I’d filmed what I needed of her crotch and I withdrew a little with the camera. I thought that her scar must be very purple now, I still wasn’t looking at her, I still had something to say to her, we still hadn’t finished, there was still something that “Bill”, “Jack” or “Nick” had demanded of us, we still hadn’t filmed her leg. I lit a cigarette and as I did so the spark fell on to the unmade bed, but it burned out on contact without singeing the sheet. Then I or “Bill” or Guillermo said to her in our saw-like voice: “Your leg,” we said, I said. “We still haven’t filmed your leg,” we said, “remember, Bill said he wanted to see it.”

THE REASON I’m remembering all this now is because what happened afterwards, very shortly afterwards and whilst I was still in New York, resembled, in one aspect at least (but I think only in one, although it may have been more), what happened later on (but not much later on), when I’d returned to Madrid to rejoin Luisa and I again began experiencing those presentiments of disaster – only more strongly and perhaps with more reason this time – which had dogged me ever since the wedding ceremony and which have still not dissipated (at least not entirely, and maybe they never will). Or perhaps it was a third feeling of unease, different from the two I’d experienced during the honeymoon (particularly in Havana) and even before that, a new feeling, just as unpleasant, which, nevertheless, like the second, may well have been invented, imagined or discovered by chance, a necessary but unsatisfactory answer to the terrifying question asked by that initial unease: “Now what?” A question that one answers again and again and yet which is always resurfacing or reformulating itself or is simply always there, emerging unscathed after every reply, like the story of the good pipe, guaranteed to drive children to distraction and which was told to me by my Cuban grandmother on the afternoons when my mother left me with her, afternoons spent singing songs and playing games and telling stories and sneaking involuntary glances at the portraits of those who had died, or during which she would watch past time passing by. “Do you want me to tell you the story of the good pipe?” my grandmother would say with gentle mischievousness. “Yes,” I would say, as all children do. “I didn’t ask for a yes or a no, all I asked was if you wanted me to tell you the story of the good pipe,” my grandmother would continue, laughing. “No,” I would say, changing my reply as all children do. “I didn’t ask for a no or a yes, all I asked was if you wanted me to tell you the story of the good pipe.” By then my grandmother would be laughing louder than ever and so it would go on until desperation and weariness set in, capitalizing on the fact that the desperate child never thinks to give the reply that would undo the spell: “I want you to tell me the story of the good pipe,” repetition as salvation, or the formulation that never occurs to the child because he still lives in the yes and the no, and has no time for perhaps or maybe. But this other question about then and now is worse and repeating it serves no purpose, just as it served no purpose, or remained unanswered or undispelled, when I turned it back on my father in the Casino de Madrid when he asked me the question out loud, when the two of us were alone in a room after my wedding. “That’s what I want to know,” I said. “Now what?” The only way of escaping from that question is not by repeating it but by not allowing it to exist, by not asking it or allowing anyone else to ask it of you. But that’s impossible and perhaps because of that, in order to answer it, you have to invent problems and feel fears and entertain suspicions and think about the abstract future, and think “so brainsickly of things” as Macbeth was told not to do, to see what is not there in order for something to be there, to fear illness or death, abandonment or betrayal, and to dream up threats, if necessary from a third party, even if only by analogy or symbolically and perhaps that is what drives us to read novels and news reports and to go and see films, the search for analogy, for symbolism, the need for recognition rather than cognition. Recounting an event distorts it, recounting facts distorts and twists and almost negates them, everything that one recounts, however true, becomes unreal and approximate, the truth doesn’t depend on things actually existing or happening, but on their remaining hidden or unknown or untold, as soon as they’re related or shown or made manifest, even in a medium that seems real, on television or in the newspapers, in what is called reality or life or even real life, they become part of some analogy or symbolism, and are no longer facts, instead they become mere recognition. The truth never shines forth, as the saying goes, because the only truth is that which is known to no one and which remains untransmitted, that which is not translated into words or images, that which remains concealed and unverified, which is perhaps why we do recount so much or even everything, to make sure that nothing has ever really happened, not once it’s been told.

I don’t know quite what it was that occurred on my return, or rather, I’m not sure that I’ll know what occurred in my absence until many more years have passed. I only know that one rainy night, at home with Luisa, when I’d been back from New York for a week, after eight weeks of work and keeping Berta company, I got out of bed and left our shared pillow and went to the fridge. It was cold or the fridge made me feel cold and I went to the bathroom and put on a dressing gown (I was tempted to use my bathrobe as a dressing gown, but I didn’t), and afterwards, whilst Luisa in turn visited the bathroom for a wash, I paused for a moment in the room where I work and looked at a few texts, standing up, a Coca-Cola in my hand, already feeling sleepy. As is so often the way in clear-skied Madrid, a weary, uniform rain was falling, untroubled by any wind, as if it knew it was going to last for days and there was no need for fury or haste. I looked out at the trees and at the beams of light from the curved streetlamps that illuminate the falling rain and turn it to silver and then, on the same corner at which, later, the old organ-grinder and the gypsy woman with her saucer and her plait would stand, the same corner you can see only partially from my window, I saw the figure of a man who, unlike them, I could see because he was leaning against a wall, away from the road, sheltering unsuccessfully from the rain beneath the eaves of the building opposite, the building that doesn’t block my light; there was little chance of him being knocked down by a car and, besides, there was little traffic. He was sheltering beneath a hat as well, a rare sight in Madrid, although less so on rainy days, a few older people, like Ranz, my father, wear them. That figure (you could tell at once) was not that of an older man, but of a still-young man, tall and erect. Beneath the brim of his hat, and given the darkness and the distance, I couldn’t make out his face or rather his features (I could see the anonymous white smudge of a face in the dark, his face was far from the nearest beam of light), because what made me stop and look at him was the fact that he had his head raised and was looking upwards, he was looking, or so I believed, directly at our windows, or rather at the window that was now to my left, our bedroom window. From where he was standing, the man wouldn’t be able to see into the room, all he would be able to see, and this was perhaps what he was after, was whether or not the light was still on, or perhaps, I thought, the shadows cast by our figures, by Luisa and me, though whether we were close enough or had moved close enough, I couldn’t remember. He might have been waiting for a signal, from time immemorial people have used the lighting and extinguishing of fires to send signals, just as they have used their eyes, opening and closing them, or the brandishing of torches in the distance. The fact is that I recognized him at once despite not being able to see his face; figures from one’s childhood are unmistakable in any place or at any time, one glance is enough, even though they might have changed or grown taller or older since then. But it took me only seconds to recognize him, to recognize that beneath the eaves and the rain the figure I recognized was Custardoy the Younger looking up at our most private window, waiting, watching, just like a lover, a little like Miriam and like myself a few days before, Miriam and I in different cities on the other side of the ocean, Custardoy here, on the corner opposite my house. I hadn’t waited like a lover, but I had perhaps waited for the same thing as Custardoy, for Luisa and I to turn out the light so that he could imagine us asleep, with our backs to each other, not facing, or perhaps lying awake in one another’s arms. “What’s Custardoy doing there?” I thought. “It must be a coincidence, he must have got caught in the rain when he was walking up our street and decided to shelter under the eaves of the building opposite, he doesn’t dare ring or come up, it’s late, but that can’t be, he’s waiting there, he must have been there for some time, that’s what it looks like and that’s why he’s got his coat collar turned up, gripped by his bony hands whilst he gazes up with his huge, dark, wide-set, almost lashless eyes, gazing up at our bedroom, what’s he looking at? what’s he looking for? what does he want? why is he looking? I know he’s been here with Ranz sometimes to visit Luisa during my absence, my father brought him, what people call “dropping by”, a visit from the father-in-law and a friend of his and, in theory, a friend of mine, he must be in love with Luisa, but he never falls in love, I don’t know if she knows anything about this, how odd, on a rainy night like this, now that I’m back, standing there in the street getting drenched, like a dog.” Those were my immediate thoughts, rapid and disorderly. I heard Luisa coming out of the bathroom and going back to our bedroom. From there she called out my name and said to me (there was a wall between us but both doors were open on to the corridor): “Aren’t you coming to bed? Come on, it’s late.” Her voice sounded as natural and cheery as it had every day since my return, a week ago, as it had a few minutes before while she was murmuring vaguely amorous things to me on our shared and mutual pillow. And instead of telling her what was happening, what I was seeing, what I was thinking, I stopped, just as I didn’t go out on to the balcony and call Custardoy by name and ask him straight out: “Hey, what are you doing down there?” Almost the same question which, not knowing who I was, Miriam had asked from the esplanade, as naturally as you would address someone you know and trust. And I gave a furtive reply (the furtiveness of suspicion, although I didn’t yet know it): “You can turn out the light if you like, I’m not sleepy yet, I think I’ll just check over a bit of work.” “OK, but don’t take too long,” she said and I saw that she’d turned out the light, I saw it in the corridor. I closed my door and turned out my light, the small lamp that had lit the room in which I work, where I go over texts to be translated, and then I knew that all our windows were in darkness. I again looked out of my study window, Custardoy the Younger was still looking upwards, his face lifted, the white smudge turned towards the dark sky, despite the sheltering eaves the rain was beating down on it, there were drops on his chin perhaps mingled with sweat, but not with tears, the drop of rain that falls from the eaves always on to the same spot, so that the earth becomes softer and softer until the drop penetrates and makes a hole, perhaps a channel, a hole and a channel, like Berta’s, which I’d seen and filmed and Luisa’s in which I’d lain only minutes before. “Now he’ll leave,” I thought, “when he sees that the lights have gone out he’ll leave, just as I gave up waiting when I saw the lights in Berta’s house go out not so many days ago. Then it was a prearranged signal, I too waited for a while out in the street, as Custardoy is doing now, as Miriam did some time before, except that in Miriam’s case she didn’t know that she was being watched from up above by two faces or two white smudges and two pairs of eyes, Guillermo’s and mine, and in this case Luisa doesn’t know that two eyes are spying on her from the street without actually seeing her, and Custardoy doesn’t know that mine are watching him from the dark sky, from above, while the rain falls, looking like mercury or silver beneath the streetlamps. On the other hand, in New York, Berta and I both knew where each of us was, or we could imagine it. “Now he’ll go,” I thought, “he has to go so that I can return to my bedroom with Luisa and forget about his presence there, I won’t be able to get to sleep or protect Luisa as she sleeps knowing that Custardoy is downstairs. During my childhood, I’d so often seen him looking out of my bedroom window, as I am now, longing for the outside world and desiring the world to which he now belongs and from which he was then separated by a balcony and by glass doors, turning his back on me, his shaven neck, intimidating me in my own bedroom, he was as terrifying a child as he is a man, he’s a man who knows instantly who wants to be approached and why, in a bar or at a party or even in the street and doubtless even in a house he’s visiting, but he’s the one who creates both disposition and intention, they didn’t exist in Luisa before I left, unlike in Berta’s case, where disposition and intention existed before I arrived and during my stay and will, I’m sure, remain now that I’m gone. Will she still be seeing Bill, whose real name is Guillermo, will she have seen him again? Or will Guillermo have returned to Spain like me after his planned two months’ stay? Berta was the only one of the three to stay behind, I should call her, even though I left I’m still both involved and assimilated, the use of the plural becomes inevitable and ends up appearing everywhere, what does Custardoy want of us now, what’s he up to?”

I hadn’t wanted or been up to anything while I waited outside Berta’s house, it had been unexpected, something we hadn’t counted on, it was the seventh weekend of my projected eight-week stay, the weekend after the one I’ve already described and during which I made the video lasting only minutes and, in the days prior to that penultimate weekend, the post had positively flowed, we sent our video on the Monday (Berta didn’t bother getting a copy made) and it had had the desired effect, or at least it had proved attractive enough for “Bill” to consider taking a few risks. He’d written a brief note in reply, without a word of apology for not responding in kind and still without showing his face even in a miserable photo, but proposing that they meet next Saturday. His note didn’t reach us until the Friday, I knew this for sure because Berta had visited her mailbox at Old Chelsea Station every afternoon that week, after work. Bill’s note was, as usual, in English, but it was a very Spanish thing to do, to make an appointment like that for the following evening. “I’ll recognize you,” it said, in the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel, a place where people meet before the theatre or supper or even the opera, unaware that she knew that was also the place he was staying, that is, where he had his pillow. Berta had arranged some weeks ago to have supper that night with her colleague, Julia, and a few other people, I was supposed to go too and she decided that it would be best not to tell them in advance that she wouldn’t be there, in case they insisted on dropping by to see her if she said she was ill, and so it fell to me, once I’d reached the harbourside restaurant, to make her excuses, saying she had a terrible migraine and feeling something of an intruder when I appeared there alone, they were people I hardly knew.

Before going out, as I was shaving and getting ready, Berta was also getting dressed up (perhaps by a process of assimilation) for her long-awaited meeting with “Bill” and “Jack” and “Nick”, and we vied for position in front of the bathroom mirror, for the use of the bathroom itself. She was impatient and smelling already of Trussardi cologne. “Haven’t you finished yet?” she said, when she saw that I still hadn’t finished shaving. “I didn’t know you were going out now,” I said, “I could have got shaved in my room.” “No, I won’t be going out for another hour,” she replied and yet she was very smartly dressed and needed only to put her make-up on, which, as I knew, she did very quickly (she put her shoes on even more quickly, her feet were doubtless very clean). I still hadn’t put my tie on when she came back into the bathroom this time in a quite different but equally smart outfit. “You look lovely.” “I look hideous,” she replied. “I don’t know what to wear. What do you think?” “Perhaps what you had on before was better, although you look lovely as you are.” “What do you mean ‘before’? I haven’t even begun getting dressed yet,” she said, “that was just something I’d put on to wear around the house, not to go out in tonight.” “But it suited you,” I replied while I rinsed one of my contact lenses, my tie hanging loose about my neck. She left the bathroom again and, after a few moments, reappeared in a different, more provocative outfit, if the word “provocative” means anything any more, I assume it does since it’s often used to describe women’s clothing and is the same in all the languages I know and languages are rarely all wrong about the same thing at once. She looked at herself in the mirror from a distance to get the most complete view possible (there was no full-length mirror in the house; I stood to one side and stopped tying my tie); she bent one leg and with one hand smoothed her rather short, tight skirt, as if she feared that some imaginary crease might be spoiling the line of her skirt at the rear, or perhaps she was just adjusting the elastic of a recalcitrant pair of knickers through the fabric covering them. She was concerned about the way she looked when dressed, Bill having already seen her naked, albeit only on screen.

“Don’t you feel a bit frightened?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Meeting a total stranger, after all, you never know. I don’t want to put a jinx on things, but as you yourself said, the world is full of men you wouldn’t even feel safe crossing the street with.”

“And most of them work in very visible arenas: you see them every day at the United Nations and everyone crosses the street with them. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m used to it. If I gave in to fear I’d never meet anyone. You can always change your mind, it’s just tough luck if it doesn’t work out. Well, in fact, you can’t always change your mind. Sometimes it’s too late.”

She kept looking at herself, from the front, from the side, from the other side and from behind, but she didn’t ask me if she looked better now or before and I didn’t want to say anything unless she asked me to. Finally she did.

“I look awful, perhaps I’ve put on weight,” she said.

“Don’t worry, you look great, only a few days ago you were fretting that you were too thin,” I said, adding, in an attempt to distract her from gazing into the mirror and from her unnecessary concerns about herself: “Where do you think he’ll take you?”

She moistened a tiny brush under the tap and applied it to her eyebrows, brushing them upwards to lend them emphasis.

“Bearing in mind that he’s wasting no time and has arranged to meet me at his hotel, I imagine he’ll want to take me straight up to his room. But I have no intention of going without supper tonight.”

“He might have arranged for you to have supper upstairs, like one of those Don Juan types in the movies.”

“Well, he’s got another think coming then. Don’t forget, I haven’t even seen him yet. I may not even bother to stay for a drink once I have.” Berta was putting a brave face on things, she was feeling unsure of herself, wanting to think just for a moment that things wouldn’t turn out the way they inevitably would, that she’d need to be persuaded, or rather, seduced. She knew how things were going to turn out because that depended in large measure on her, she’d been seduced long before “Nick” wrote to her, by her own disposition and intention, which are the most important elements in matters of persuasion and seduction. Which was why she added, as if unwilling in my presence to nurture any illusions: “Oh and don’t worry if I don’t come home tonight, I might not be back to sleep.”

I left the bathroom and finished tying my tie in my room, with the aid of a hand mirror. I was almost ready to go out, my date, which had been hers, was due to begin earlier than her actual date which wasn’t mine. I put on my jacket and, with my raincoat over my arm, stood at the bathroom door to say goodbye, not daring this time to cross the threshold, as if, once I was dressed and ready, I no longer had the right to do so, despite the lack of social niceties between us, between two friends who, fifteen years before, had lain awake in one another’s arms.

“Will you do me a favour?” I asked her, poking my head round the door (I was still not sure whether to ask her, I was still considering whether I should or shouldn’t do so when I spoke).

She continued looking at herself (standing at the mirror, now hers entirely, searching out or inventing imperfections with the aid of a pair of tweezers). She said: “Of course, what is it?”

I considered again and again spoke before I’d decided to do so (the way I do sometimes when I’m interpreting and anticipate the words to be translated because I can guess what follows), while I was still thinking: “If I ask her, she’ll want to know why.”

“During the course of the conversation could you just mention the name ‘Miriam’ and let me know how he reacts?”

Berta tugged hard at the one eyebrow hair she’d condemned and which she now held in the grip of her tweezers. She looked at me then.

“Why Miriam? Do you know something I don’t? Is she his wife?”

“No, I don’t know anything, it’s just a kind of experiment, an idea I have.”

“Come on,” she said, wiggling the forefinger of her left hand as if drawing me towards her, or as if to say: “Come on, out with it,” or “Explain yourself,” or “Tell me everything.” She was all agog.

“I don’t know anything, it’s nothing, just a suspicion, a theory of mine, anyway, I haven’t got time to explain now, I’d better be punctual if I’m to warn your friends you won’t be coming, I’ll tell you tomorrow. But if you wouldn’t mind and the opportunity arises, just drop that name into the conversation somehow or other, say you had to cancel supper with a friend of that name, anything, it’s just a name. But don’t make a big thing of it.”

Berta was fascinated by the unknown, nobody can resist participating in an experiment and returning with news, even when they don’t know what the experiment’s about.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll try. Can you do me a favour in return?”

“Of course, what is it?” I said.

She spoke without thinking, or rather she’d considered the question and had already decided to ask it.

“Have you got any condoms you can let me have?” she said not looking at me, her mouth tight (she was painting her lips with a tiny brush and with inordinate care).

“I should have some in my sponge bag,” I replied, as casually as if she’d asked me for a pair of tweezers, hers were still by the washbasin; but my nonchalance was so obviously artificial that I couldn’t help adding: “I thought you always lived in hope that one day one of your dates wouldn’t bring any.”

Berta burst out laughing and said:

“I know, but I don’t want to run the risk of Visible Arena being that date.”

There was genuine happiness in her laughter, as there was in the soft singing that reached my ears (she’d be brushing her hair in front of the mirror, alone now, without me there leaning at a door other than my own bedroom door), whilst I was leaving the apartment, the laughter and the soft singing of the more fortunate women, who are not yet grandmothers or widows or old maids, the insignificant song intended for no one particular person’s ears and judged by no one, and which was not now the prelude to sleep or an expression of weariness, but the foolish smile or the expression and prelude to something desired or guessed at or known already.

But something unexpected happened which, when I thought about it later, wasn’t unexpected at all. I returned from my supper around midnight, and, as I always do before I go to bed when I’m alone, I switched on the television and flicked through the channels to find out what had been happening in the world during my absence. I was still engaged in that when the front door opened again, the door I’d closed but not bolted only minutes before, and Berta appeared. She didn’t put her key away in her handbag, she kept it in her hand. She was limping less than ever, or perhaps concealing it so well that she wasn’t in fact limping at all. Her raincoat was unbuttoned and I noticed that she wasn’t wearing the outfit I’d last seen her wearing in the bathroom, she’d probably changed dozens of times after I left her. It was another pretty and provocative outfit and she wore a look of urgency etched on her face (or was it fear or distress or was it just the night, her night face).

“I’m glad you haven’t gone to bed yet,” she said.

“I just got in. What’s up?”

“Bill’s downstairs. He doesn’t want us to go to his hotel, well, he hasn’t even told me that he’s staying at a hotel. Anyway, he doesn’t want us to go to his place, he wants to come here. I told him I had a friend staying for a few days and he said he doesn’t want any witnesses, which is reasonable enough, isn’t it? So what do you think we should do?”

She had the delicacy to use the plural now, although it was possible that this time the plural did not include me, but Bill, who was waiting downstairs, or perhaps it applied to all three of us.

“We can do what we used to do as students, I suppose,” I said, getting up and recalling another plural that applied only to us and which had been ours in the past. “I’ll go for a walk.”

She knew that’s what I would say, she was expecting it. She didn’t protest, that was what she’d wanted me to say.

“It won’t be for long,” she said. “An hour, maybe, or an hour and a half, I don’t know. A little further down, on Fourth Avenue, there’s a fast-food place that’s open twenty-four hours a day, you can’t miss it, it’s huge. Anyway, it’s not that late, there’ll still be plenty of places open. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, of course I don’t. Take all the time you want, shall we make it three hours, to be on the safe side?”

“No, we won’t be that long. I’ll tell you what, I’ll leave the light on in this room, you can see it from the street. When he’s gone, I’ll switch it off. You’ll be able to see from downstairs if the house is in darkness and then you can come up. Is that all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “And what if he wants to stay the night?”

“I’m sure he won’t. Take something with you to read,” she added in a more motherly tone.

“I’ll buy tomorrow’s paper. Where is he, by the way?” I asked. “Don’t forget he’s seen me before. If he sees me leaving here now and he recognizes me, it could look bad.”

Berta went over to the window and I followed her. She looked to left and right and finally spotted Bill, to the right. “There he is,” she said, pointing. My chest brushed against her back, she was breathing fast, with haste or distress or fear or perhaps it was just the night. The night sky was overcast and reddish in colour, but it didn’t look like rain. I saw “Bill”, standing with his back to us, waiting quite some way from the street door and out of reach of the one beam of light in our field of vision (Berta lives in a street of brownstones, on the third floor, not in an avenue of skyscrapers).

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll go down with you to warn him. He’s the one who doesn’t want to be seen by anyone. All you have to do is head off to the left when you leave, he won’t turn round until I tell him to. Are you sure you don’t mind?” And Berta stroked my cheek with the affection women always show towards you when they’re nursing some illusion, even if that illusion is only going to last an instant or might even be ending at that very moment.

I left and wandered around for a bit. I went into various shops, which were still open, there are always shops open in New York, Berta had thought for a moment like a true Spaniard, perhaps because one Spaniard was waiting for her and she was speaking to another. In a Korean shop that never closed I bought the New York Times, in its mammoth Sunday edition, and some more milk because we’d run out. I went into a record shop and bought a record, the original soundtrack of an old film, not available on compact disc, only on uncatalogued vinyl. It was Saturday night and the streets were full of people, in the distance I could see the drug addicts and the future delinquents. I went into an all-night bookshop and bought a Japanese book purely for its title: House of the Sleeping Beauties it was called in English, I didn’t like the title but that, nevertheless, was the reason I bought it. I was accumulating a lot of small packages so I put it all in a plastic carrier bag, the largest one containing the record, and discarded the rest, the handle-less brown paper bags you get in shops are awkward and require both hands to hold them, they fill them, the way a man’s hands – and a woman’s – are filled on the wedding night, which in today’s terms is equivalent to the first time they have sex, so forgettable if there’s no second time, indeed if there’s no third or fourth or fifth time, even if you know that’s how it will be. This was “Bill” and Berta’s wedding night and it was taking place while I was wandering about in the city, passing the time, killing time as they say. I saw the fast-food place that Berta had mentioned, in fact because she’d mentioned it, I’d been making my way there without even realizing it. I decided not to go in just yet, I’d keep it for later on because, unlike the other shops, it stayed open twenty-four hours and I might need it, instead I read the menu. The sky above the avenues was invisible now, there was too much light and too many angles, I knew though that it was overcast and reddish in colour and that it wouldn’t rain. I walked on without going very far and the time passed, the time that is always all so noticeable when you’re killing it, every second seems to take on its own individuality and weight, as if the seconds were pebbles you let fall one by one, like grains of sand in an hourglass, time becomes rough and rugged, as if it were already past or had passed, you watch past time passing, it would be different for Berta and for Guillermo, that had been agreed and settled from the very first letter and the final stages of the negotiations would have taken place over supper; I wondered where they would have gone, to talk a little, impatiently and without really listening, pretending to enjoy the conversation, an anecdote, watching the other person’s mouth, pouring the wine, being polite, lighting cigarettes, laughing, sometimes laughter is the prelude to a kiss and the expression of desire, its mode of transmission, without one quite knowing why, laughter disappears afterwards during the kiss and the fulfilment of the desire, there’s rarely any laughter when two people lie awake in one another’s arms, their heads on the pillow, no longer watching the other person’s mouth (the mouth is always full, abundance itself), there’s a tendency to seriousness, however full of laughter the prologues and interruptions might have been, or the delay, the waiting, the prolongation and the pauses, a breathing space, laughter stops, sometimes voices do too, the articulated voice falls silent or speaks only in vocatives or interjections, there’s nothing to translate.

Around half past two I began to feel a bit peckish, my supper seemed hours ago, so I went back to the twenty-four hour place, ordered a sandwich and a beer and opened my mammoth New York Times, I read the international news and the sports pages, killing all that time was beginning to prove difficult, but I didn’t want to go back before the three hours I’d offered Berta were up. Although, who knows, “Bill” might have left and both the seriousness and the laughter would be over, once everything’s been agreed, the actual execution is often brief and soon completed, men become impatient and anxious to leave, they’re irritated by the unmade bed and the sight of the sheets and the stains, the remains, the traces, the imperfect body which they only notice now and would prefer not to notice (before, they embraced it, now they find it strange), the figure of a woman abandoned on the bed is such a commonplace in both painting and the cinema, but never the figure of a man, unless he’s dead like Holofernes, the woman as reject, perhaps Berta was already alone and waiting or even longing for my return, for my friendly hand on her shoulder, longing not to feel strange or rejected. I paid and left, walking back to my street, to the apartment, there were fewer people now, people don’t stay out so late as they do in Madrid, where Friday and Saturday nights are crazy, but in New York by that time taxis were beginning to be the only presence in the streets. It was three twenty when I reached the spot where Bill had waited for me to leave the apartment, some distance from the door, some distance from the one beam of light, although now, from the pavement, I could see others a little way off, along the smaller streets where the city council economizes on all the electricity it splurges in the avenues. From there I couldn’t see the living-room light, I was at the wrong angle, I took a few steps, looking for the third floor, I went nearer to take up a more frontal position and I saw that the light was on, “Bill” hadn’t yet left, he was still there, he hadn’t yet reached the point of considering Berta a stranger. I didn’t move after that, I decided to wait in the street, it was too late to go looking for a hotel, I should have thought of that before, I didn’t feel like going back to the fast-food place, there weren’t that many others open, besides I wasn’t hungry now, just a bit thirsty, I didn’t want to wander about any more, I was tired of walking and looking at my watch all the time. I remembered Jack Lemmon in that film from the Sixties, where he could never get into his own apartment, I stood beneath the streetlamp, leaning against it like some stage drunk, on the ground was my bulging plastic bag containing the carton of milk and in my hand the newspaper so that I could read it by the light of the streetlamp. But I didn’t read it, I waited as Miriam had done, except that I wasn’t worried about any deterioration in my appearance during the wait and I knew exactly what the situation was, I mean, I knew why I was being made to wait, I wasn’t angry with anyone, I was just waiting for a signal. I kept looking up at the window, just as Custardoy was now looking up at my bedroom window, I was keeping watch over “Bill” and Berta’s false wedding night, just as the Cuban mother-in-law in the song and the story had watched over that of her daughter and the foreigner who changed into a snake the following morning (it happened during the night, during the wedding night, the daughter’s pleas for help went unheeded, the son-in-law deceived and persuaded his mother-in-law that all was well by addressing her as “mother-in-law”) and left the sheets stained with blood, though it might have been the blood of the newly-wed bride, the flesh changes or the skin opens or something tears, Berta wouldn’t shed any blood that night. Ranz had had three wedding nights, three genuine wedding nights, there was sometimes something to be torn then, in the old days. The light was still on, for too long perhaps, it was a quarter to four, talking, repeating, going on, no more laughter, “Bill” must have decided to stay the night, no, that was unlikely, now you couldn’t even hear the murmur of traffic along the avenue, I suddenly felt frightened for Berta, doesn’t it make you feel a bit frightened?, I’d said to her, it’s just tough luck if it doesn’t work out, she’d replied, but people do die, it seems impossible but they do, like my Aunt Teresa, for example, and my father’s first wife, whoever she was, I still didn’t know anything about her, maybe I didn’t want to; Luisa did though, Luisa was intrigued, who knows, perhaps Luisa was in danger far away on the other side of the ocean, like Guillermo’s sick wife unaware of the danger she was in; meanwhile I felt afraid for Berta who was so very near, on the other side of the window in her brightly lit living room, a signal, my bedroom was still in darkness just as I’d left it, I couldn’t see hers, it didn’t face on to the street, and that was where she’d be with “Bill” and his saw-like voice, his voice inarticulate now, as mine had been with Luisa only a few minutes before going to the fridge (uttering only interjections) and looking out afterwards through the window of the room in which I work, outside, down at the corner opposite my new home, the corner at which so many people stop, an organ-grinder and a woman with a plait, a streetcrier selling roses, as well as Custardoy with his obscene, rain-drenched face turned upwards, I didn’t go down that night to offer him money to make him go away, he wasn’t bothering me or making a noise, I couldn’t buy him off, I couldn’t do anything, he was simply standing in the rain with his hat on looking up at our bedroom window, not that he could possibly see in, given how high up we were, he could probably just see the light that was now no longer on, Luisa had switched it off while I was lying to her and watching the outside world without wanting it; since I married and perhaps before that too, my world has been my shared pillow, could there have been someone in that world or on that pillow during my absence, someone who would know how to furnish both disposition and intention?

The thought terrified me and I didn’t want to think it, the secret that remains unspoken harms no one, if you ever have any secrets or if you already have, don’t tell her, my father had said to me shortly after asking me: “Now what?”, her secrets would no longer be secrets if you knew them, he said, but I’d noticed no change in Luisa’s attitude towards me, or if there were some change, there was no need to be afraid any more, she was no longer on the other side of the ocean but close by, in the next room, I’d soon be by her side, backing her up, and Custardoy would leave. I’d told Luisa almost nothing, nothing about “Bill” or Guillermo, nothing about the bathrobe or the triangle of hairy chest, nothing about the video or the saw-like voice, nothing about Berta’s leg or about my wait outside her apartment on that Saturday night, none of that was in itself a secret and there was no reason for it to be a secret, but perhaps it was now a secret because I’d said nothing about it during the week since my return, a secret isn’t characterized by any one thing, it’s shaped out of concealment and silence or out of caution or forgetting, out of not saying anything or not telling, because listening is the most dangerous of acts and cannot be avoided, and it’s only then that things really happen, when we don’t talk about them, because if you talk about them you scare them off, you frighten away the facts; couples tell each other everything about other people, but not about themselves, unless they think that information belongs to both of them, and then you say, with your tongue at their ear: “I have done the deed,” and that bare statement immediately changes or negates that fact or action. Macbeth dared to say: “I have done the deed,” he said it the moment he’d done it, who would dare to do as much, not so much do it but say it, life and the years to come depend not on what you do, but on what people know about you, what people know you’ve done and what they don’t know because there were no witnesses and no one has said anything. Perhaps deceit is inevitable, part of the truth, just as truth is part of deceit, our mind is all vacillations and ambiguities and always prey to suspicions, for our mind there will always be areas of shadow and it will always think in that brainsickly way.

I was afraid for Berta, it was four o’clock by then, I was afraid that she might have been murdered, people do die, even people we know die, however impossible that may seem, she was the only one who knew that switching off the light was a prearranged signal, there was no reason why the murderer would do so when he left, the light should have been switched off after his departure, to tell me he’d gone and to say “Come up”, the darkness meant “Come up”; perhaps our darkness meant something to Custardoy, he’d see it, my message to him would be “Clear off.” I picked up my bag and made my way across the road, intending to go upstairs without further delay, it was only a few steps to the other side and no car had passed for some time now, it was twenty past four, too long a time for two people who didn’t know each other to be together. I was in the middle of the road when a taxi appeared, driving along very slowly as if he were getting close to the number house he was looking for. I retreated to the pavement, the taxi driver drew up alongside me and eyed me with distrust (beggars and drug addicts often carry plastic bags, drunks, on the other hand, favour the handle-less brown paper variety); when he could get a clear view of me and could see that I was perfectly composed, he made an interrogative gesture with his head and asked me for the number of Berta’s building, I could barely make out what he was saying, he was probably Greek or Lebanese or Russian, like most New York taxi drivers, everyone knows how to drive. “That’s it there,” I said pointing to the door whose number was lost in the cloudy night beyond the reach of the one solitary streetlamp, and I drew back, withdrew from the beam of light as if I were in a hurry to be on my way, that was the taxi “Bill” must have ordered to take him back to the Plaza, perhaps he was leaving now and the light would finally be switched off, assuming Berta was still alive, or rejected or not rejected, too many hours. I remained standing some way off, even further away from the spot on which “Visible Arena” had waited in order to proceed upstairs unwitnessed, the taxi driver gave a short, sharp blast on the horn, meaning “Hey”, or “Here I am”, or “Come on down”. The street door opened and the patriotic trousers reappeared, along with the raincoat which, in the night, looked almost peacock blue, the sky was still red, perhaps rainclouds were gathering. I heard the taxi door slam and the engine start up, it accelerated past me, I had my back to it. I retraced my steps as far as the streetlamp and saw that the light in the living room had now been switched off, Berta had remembered me and was alive, our lights had all been switched off too now, I’d just plunged my study into darkness, Luisa had turned the bedroom light off shortly before, only a few seconds had passed. Beneath the beams of light it was still raining mercury or silver, our night was vaguely orange and greenish in colour, as rainy nights so often are in Madrid. Custardoy still had his obscene, white smudge of a face turned upwards. “Clear off,” I said with my brainsickly brain. Then he raised one hand to his hat and, clutching the raised collar of his jacket with the other, he left the shelter of the eaves, turned the corner and disappeared from view, getting drenched to the skin like a lover or a dog.

WHO HAS NEVER harboured suspicions, who has never doubted his best friend, who, at some time in his childhood, has never been betrayed or let down – at school you encounter everything that will await you later on in the longed-for outside world, the obstacles and the disloyalties, the silences and the traps, the ambushes; there’s also always some classmate who says: “It was me”, the first expression of some recognition of one’s responsibilities, the first time in your life when you feel obliged to say or to hear: “I have done the deed”, and then, as you grow up and the world seems less worldly because it’s no longer beyond your grasp, you say and hear it less and less, childhood language disappears, is rejected as being too schematic, too simple, but those stark, absurd phrases that we used to think so heroic never leave us, they live on in certain glances, attitudes, in signs, in gestures and in sounds (in interjections, inarticulate utterances) which can and should be translated too because their meaning is often so clear, they actually say something and are rooted in the facts (unalloyed hatred and unconditional love), without any unnecessary perhaps or maybe, without the outer wrapping of words which serve less to inform or relate or communicate than to confuse and conceal and avoid responsibilities; words level out things which, as actions, are distinct and not to be confused. Kissing or killing someone may seem opposed as actions, but talking about the kiss and talking about the death of someone assimilates and associates the two things, sets up an analogy, constructs a symbol. In adult life, which is dominated by words, you never hear a yes or a no, no one says “It was me” or “It wasn’t me”, but you still see them (more often “It wasn’t me” than “It was me”), acts of heroism soon join the list of mistakes.

Who has not had their suspicions? and there are only two things you can do with suspicion, both equally useless, you can either ask or remain silent. If you ask and force the person to respond, you might perhaps be rewarded with an “It wasn’t me”, but you’ll have to listen to what isn’t said, to the tone, to the shifty look in the eyes, the tremor in the voice, the possibly feigned expression of surprise and indignation; and you’ll never be able to ask the question again. If you remain silent, that question will remain forever virgin and available, although on occasions time itself renders such questions incongruous, almost ineffable, extemporary, as if in the end everything reaches its expiry date or merely makes us smile once it’s been relegated to time past, the whole of the past appears venial and ingenuous. If you remain silent you have to dispel the suspicion and cancel the question, or rather feed the first and prepare the second with extreme care, but what you can’t do is confirm your suspicions, nobody knows anything about an event at which they weren’t present, even confessions can’t be believed; at school people say “It was me” when it wasn’t, people will lie as surely as they will die, incredible though it may seem, you can never know anything ever. Or at least that’s what I believe. That’s why sometimes it’s better not to know even the beginning of something nor to hear the voices telling the story, the voices against which one is so defenceless, those narrative voices that we all know and which go back to the remote or the recent past and uncover secrets that are no longer important but nevertheless influence one’s life or one’s future years, our knowledge of the world and of people; you can trust no one once you’ve heard them, anything is possible, the people we know are as capable as we are of the worst horrors and the greatest atrocities. And everyone is absorbed in this ceaseless talking and ceaseless concealment, only what is unsaid remains untold or unconcealed. But what remains silent becomes a secret and, sometimes, the day arrives when that secret will be told.

I said nothing, I didn’t ask and I still haven’t asked, the more time passes the more unlikely and difficult it will become for me to do so. You let one day go by without saying anything, and then two days and then a week, and the months pile up without your even noticing, and any manifestation of the suspicion is deferred if the latter hasn’t grown meanwhile, perhaps you’re just waiting for that too to become part of the past, to become something venial or ingenuous, something that will perhaps make us smile. For some days afterwards, before going to bed, I used to look out of my study window down at the corner below; but Custardoy wasn’t there on any subsequent night and the next time I saw him was upstairs in my own apartment, just for a moment. My father had arrived around half past eight to have a drink with Luisa and myself before going to some supper or other to which Custardoy had invited him, and that’s why Custardoy the Younger came to pick him up around ten o’clock. He sat down for a few moments, had a quick beer, and I didn’t notice anything, no new familiarity, however minimal, between Custardoy and Luisa; apart from through my father, they’d met each other through him during my absence and my father had always been present on those few occasions, that was all, or so it seemed to me. There was much more familiarity between Ranz and Luisa, they’d often met each other alone, my father had accompanied her on shopping expeditions to buy things for our new home, he’d taken her out to lunch and supper, he’d given her advice (he was a man of taste, an art expert), they clearly liked each other, amused each other. My father talked about Cuba during that visit, but there was nothing unusual in that, indeed, it was a country about which he often spoke, he’d had a lot of contact with it, from his marriage to the two daughters of a Cuban mother to a few unusual transactions which I already knew about. He’d gone there in the December of 1958, just weeks before the fall of Batista: foreseeing what was about to happen (as did the land-owning classes), he’d acquired a lot of jewellery and valuable pictures – at bargain prices – from families who were preparing to flee. Some (a few) he’d kept, others had been sold to Baltimore, Boston or Malibu, or had been auctioned in Europe (the jewels had perhaps been removed from their settings by jewellers in Madrid and some given away as presents). It was something he was proud of and his one regret was that he hadn’t had such foresight again when it came to revolutions and their subsequent crop of wealthy exiles. “When rich people leave the field of battle, they don’t want to leave anything behind for their enemies,” he used to say, that mocking smile playing on his feminine lips. “They’d rather burn or destroy their possessions than leave anything in the hands of their enemies, but the rich know that selling is always a better option.” If he’d gone to Cuba then, you’d imagine that he had contacts and even friends there and that he’d been there before, but his visits to that continent were all jumbled up, the different visits became confused when he talked about them (he himself confused them) – he’d made so many trips there to act as a valuer for one of his respectable North American museums or to one of his fraudulent South American banks – and of all the possible trips he’d made to Cuba, the only one that remained clear to me was the one he made just before the revolution. (On the other hand, you do tend to tell your children things in a disorderly fashion, little by little and not in any particular sequence, according to how old or how interested they are, and for children the past life of their progenitors is, at best, chaotic.) Whatever the truth of the matter, he would have lost touch with any friends in Cuba after 1959 and the much-vaunted end to all privilege, although, oddly enough, I can’t remember him ever having had any dealings with Cuban exiles in Spain. Or perhaps he just hadn’t brought them home with him and so I would never have been introduced to them. He hadn’t been back since and so when Ranz spoke of Cuba now, he didn’t do so as a person in the know.

But on that occasion the way he spoke was out of the ordinary, different, as if Luisa’s presence had already acquired such weight that the tone he used and the solicitude he doubtless displayed when they were alone together prevailed over the usual, more ironic tone, which he’d always used with me both in childhood and in adulthood. And when Luisa left the room for a moment to answer the phone, my father’s way of commenting and talking changed or, rather, was interrupted. As if realizing for the first time that I was there, he began asking me questions about New York, questions he’d asked me upon my return (we’d had lunch together at La Ancha three days after I got back), questions he knew the answers to and was no longer interested in. I was there in front of him, but it was Luisa he was talking to, and the moment she returned, his remarks regained that unusual liveliness, although Ranz has always been a very lively person. Maybe Luisa’s laughter was somehow opportune, maybe she laughed in all the right places (that is, when he intended her to), maybe she listened to him the way he wanted to be listened to or made appropriate comments and asked suitable questions, or maybe she was someone to whom he wanted to tell everything, someone new to whom he could tell his story in sequence and in the proper order, because she was interested from the outset and there was no need to wait for her to grow up. My father told us several anecdotes I’d never heard before, like the one about the Venetian forger of Romanesque virgins carved in ivory which, once he’d added the final skilful touches, he would place in his wife’s capacious bra; the (abundant) secretions from her breasts and the (pungent) sweat from her armpits lent the statuettes a perfect patina. Or the one about the director of a bank in Buenos Aires, who was very keen on art and who refused to believe Ranz was telling the truth and bought a work by Custardoy the Elder from him, a work Ranz had taken there on the orders of a miserly but immensely rich family who’d wanted a good copy of a much-admired Ingres; before Ranz delivered it, the director of the bank saw it in its unframed state in his hotel room (the Plaza in Buenos Aires), he was so taken with it that he wouldn’t even hear of its being a copy; my father explained its origin and its intended owners time and again, he also explained that the original was in Montauban, but the banker was convinced that he was trying to deceive him and that he had, rather disloyally, acquired the masterpiece for other clients and that the painting in Montauban was false. “In that case,” my father had said, still unable to convince him, “if you buy it from me as authentic then you’ll have to pay me the authentic price.” Those words, intended to dissuade, were proof to the banker that he was right. “It was the most money Custardoy ever earned from a single painting,” said my father. “It was a shame for us that there weren’t more obsessive directors of banks and museums like him. It was a shame that, in general, people always trusted me and that we therefore couldn’t use it as a method.” And he added, delighted, laughing along with Luisa: “I never heard from him again, I felt it was better that way. I just hope no one ever accused him of misappropriation of funds.” My father was enjoying himself, as was Luisa, although not as much as he was, the thought occurred to me that she’d be able to get him to tell her anything she wanted and that thought didn’t occur to me by chance, I was thinking too about what she wanted to find out from him and what I, or so I believe, did not, which is not to say that I’d stopped thinking about it, that is to say, that what might be termed a suspicion had been dispelled, I shouldn’t think you could live with several at the same time, which is why you sometimes dismiss a few of them – the most improbable or perhaps the most probable ones; those which haven’t yet been relegated to the past, those on which we might still be obliged to act and which might yet make us afraid and cause us trouble and might change the concrete future – and they feed other suspicions, those which, were the facts to be confirmed, would seem irremediable, and would change only the past and the abstract future. I think I dismissed any suspicions I had about Luisa, but had to feed some as yet unformulated ones about my father, or else it was Luisa who, that same evening, just before Custardoy rang the doorbell, took it upon herself to remind me of them by mentioning them out loud, for in the midst of all the smiles and laughter and the anecdotes that were new to me, she said to Ranz in an admiring tone, addressing him formally as “Usted” as she’s always preferred to do:

“It doesn’t surprise me in the least that you’ve been married so often, simply because you’re such an inexhaustible source of barely credible stories and, therefore, an inexhaustible source of entertainment.” And she added at once, as if to give him the chance to reply to the second part of her statement and not, if he preferred, to make any reference at all to the first part, to what she’d said up until then (it was a sign of respect). “A lot of men think that women just need to feel loved and flattered, even spoilt, when what we want most is to be entertained, that is, we want you to stop us thinking about ourselves too much. It’s one of the reasons we tend to want children. But I’m sure you know that, why else would they have loved you so much?”

I didn’t assume she was referring to me, on the contrary. I told Luisa a lot of barely credible stories, although up until then I’d said nothing to her about “Bill” and Berta, which she would have found most entertaining; but that story was mine as well, which was perhaps why I didn’t say anything. I’d said nothing about Guillermo and Miriam either until Luisa mentioned it and I realized that the story belonged to her too, and the day we met, in interpreting the words of the two leaders, I’d omitted or changed some of the things they said (in particular the things said by the Spanish leader) and which had seemed to me misguided or unsuitable or reprehensible. On that occasion, however, my censorship hadn’t affected Luisa, who understood as much if not more than I did in both languages; she was the “net”. Keeping silent and speaking are ways of intervening in the future. It seemed to me that the virtue Luisa was attributing to my father was shared by Custardoy the Younger: when he was in the right mood, he’d amuse my father by telling him incredible stories, during my childhood and adolescence he’d told me innumerable stories, more recently one about Ranz and my Aunt Teresa and another woman to whom I’m not related, a story, in a way, about myself (perhaps that story was mine too; perhaps Luisa would like to hear Custardoy the Younger tell it).

Ranz’s laughter didn’t freeze on his lips, he merely laughed for rather longer than was necessary or natural, as if to gain time and to decide which part of Luisa’s words he would reply to and how (or whether he would reply to it all or to none of it). He laughed when there was no longer any reason to, even the untranslatable and the uncensorable have their limits, indeed perhaps their meaning lies somewhere between those limits.

“They didn’t love me that much,” he said at last, in a very different tone to his usual one, as if he were still uncertain. If it had been my words he was replying to, he wouldn’t have hesitated or prolonged his laughter for a second (both things were a sign of respect, respect for Luisa). “When they did, I didn’t deserve it,” he added and the phrase wasn’t said in the least coquettishly: I knew him too well not to be able to tell the difference.

Luisa was brave enough to insist, a little less respectfully (or perhaps it was her way of warning me that her investigation was now underway and that nothing would stop it now, whatever my thoughts on the subject: if I didn’t take charge, the story could become hers, as Ranz had already begun to be. Perhaps it was another sign of respect, respect for me, to have waited for me to be present in order to begin her enquiries, as if she were warning me: “From now on I’ll take no notice of your views on this particular subject”).

“But according to what I’ve heard, apart from the woman who would have been my mother-in-law, you were married to her sister too. That can’t be easy, to be loved by two sisters. And how many other women loved you before that I wonder.”

Luisa’s tone was light, jokey and mocking, the tone you often use with old people when you want to cheer them up and raise their spirits, a teasing, affectionate tone, which Ranz himself used, with others and about himself, perhaps in order to raise his own spirits. However, for a moment the tone of his reply wasn’t like that. He shot me a fervent glance, as if to confirm that the information received by Luisa had come from me and must therefore be the same information. There was nothing strange about that, it was only natural: on the shared pillow you tell everything about everyone else. But I didn’t react. Then he said:

“Don’t you believe it, little sisters often take a fancy to whatever their older sister has. I’m not saying that was how it was in my case, but there’s nothing very unusual about it, on the contrary.”

“And before?” Luisa asked again, and it was clear that she wasn’t expecting him to tell her anything just then, at least nothing substantial, Ranz was about to go out to supper, it was more as if she were preparing the ground and forewarning him of something that would take place in the concrete or indeed the immediate future. I was surprised as much by her own insistence as by my father’s reaction. I could remember the day when he almost threw me out of a restaurant for asking him about the past (“I want to eat in peace and today, not on a day that took place forty years ago”), a less distant past than the one Luisa was asking him about. Ranz looked at me again, as if doubting that I was the source of that information, not even sure that there was one. Again I gave no sign. He recovered his usual tone of voice and replied, making an exaggerated gesture with the hand holding his cigarette:

“Before? ‘Before’ happened so very long ago, I can’t even remember it.”

That was when the doorbell rang and while Luisa was getting up to go and answer it, while she was walking to the door to greet Custardoy the Younger (“It’ll be Custardoy,” my father said while she walked down the corridor, out of sight), she still had the time or presence of mind to say: “Well, think back, because I’ll ask you about it again some other day and then you can tell me, one day when we’re on our own.”

Custardoy simply drank his beer and seemed unusually laconic during the short time he was in our apartment, like me perhaps or perhaps like someone in love. His metal-tipped shoes made hardly any noise, doubtless like the shoes “Bill” wore, whose feminine sound I’d heard on the marble floor at the post office but not on the asphalt outside in Berta’s street when he came out and got into his taxi, as if his shoes had also agreed to keep his secrets.

How many things are left unsaid in the course of a lifetime or a story, sometimes without our meaning or choosing to do so? I’d kept silent not only about all the things I’ve mentioned above, but about the feelings of unease and the presentiments of disaster that have afflicted me ever since I got married, over a year ago. They’re not so strong now and perhaps, one day, they’ll disappear altogether, for a time. I hadn’t mentioned those feelings to Luisa, to Berta or to my father, and certainly not at work or, needless to say, to Custardoy. People in love often choose to keep silent, even people who are infatuated. The people who keep silent are those who’ve found something that they might lose, not those who’ve lost something or are about to get it. Berta had talked endlessly about “Bill”, for example, and about “Jack” and “Nick”, whilst they had no physical reality, no face, and while she still hadn’t got them (we talk about promises, not about the present but about the future, both concrete and abstract; also about losses, as long as they’re not too recent). But then she fell silent. After my four long hours of wandering about, of shopping and anxiety and waiting, I found her in her dressing gown, still up and not in her room. She was alone again, but I noticed that she was still disguising her limp, that is, she hadn’t yet settled back into her customary solitude, nor into the trust she felt towards me, not so easily, not so soon. I didn’t switch on the light that she’d switched off only minutes before as a signal to me to say “Come up” because it wasn’t necessary: she was lying on the sofa in front of the television, the light from which was bright enough, she was replaying “Bill’s” brief video, now that she could complete the image with her newborn memory of him, now that she at last knew what went with the triangle of pale blue bathrobe, above and below. When I came into the room without switching on the light, the voice that resembled that of a preacher or a crooner, that saw-like voice, was saying again in English from the screen: “You women care about faces. Eyes. That’s what you say. Men care about the face and the body. Or the body and the face. That’s how it is.” Berta stopped the video when she saw me. She got up and kissed me. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you’ve had to wait ages.” “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I bought some milk, we’d run out, I’ll put it straight in the fridge.” I went to the fridge and took the milk out of the bag as well as all the other things I’d bought, the Japanese book, the newspaper, the soundtrack from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, I always do that, just as, when I get back from a trip, the first thing I do is unpack my suitcase and put everything away in its proper place and the suitcase away in its cupboard, in order to forget that I’ve been away, to forget everything about the trip, as quickly as possible, so that peace appears to be restored. I threw the bag in the rubbish bin, in order to forget about my purchases and my wanderings. I went back into the living room with my booty in my hand, Berta wasn’t there, but the television was still on, a programme full of canned laughter that had replaced the video once it had finished. I heard her moving about in her bedroom, she’d be airing it, making the bed or changing the sheets, given my prompt return, she wouldn’t have had time to do so. But that wasn’t what she was doing, not changing the sheets anyway, because when she came out she wasn’t carrying a pile of bed-linen in her arms, instead she had her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown, a salmon-pink silk dressing gown, with nothing on underneath I think, perhaps she preferred to sleep with the smell of “Bill” still on the sheets; when you want to hold on to certain smells they always seem to evaporate too quickly. She no longer smelled of Trussardi, when she walked past me, she smelled of Guerlain, I saw the bottle (the opened box) on the table where we usually left the mail and on which I had left my newspaper, my book and my record: the bottle whose purchase I had witnessed. It was the only physical trace of “Bill” in the apartment. “How did it go?” I asked, I couldn’t not ask, everything was more or less in order, although there are always things that need tidying up. “Fine. How about you? What have you been doing all this time? You must be exhausted, you poor thing.” I gave her a quick rundown of my wanderings, but said nothing of my fears, I showed her my purchases, but didn’t talk to her about my long wait. I didn’t know whether I should ask her any more questions, she seemed to have acquired a modesty she hadn’t had in the previous weeks or that same evening when she’d asked if I had any condoms (I’d seen them amongst the rubbish, two of them, when I threw away the plastic bag, which had covered them up, they’d no longer be visible on my next visit, the speed with which forgetting takes place, sometimes you don’t have to do anything to speed it up, the new covers the old in exactly the same way as happens in a rubbish bin, each new minute not only substitutes those that have passed, it negates them). My supper with her friends, with Julia, seemed so long ago, and Berta seemed to have forgotten all about it, she didn’t even ask me about them and I didn’t feel inclined to mention them in the brief chat that we could and usually did have before going to bed, however late it was. It was very late and even though it was a Saturday, it was time we went to bed, to sleep, to forget everything in dreams, or, in Berta’s case, to cling on to her memory. But I wanted to know at least something, this was both my story and not my story (I had the right to know and I risked nothing). I’d spent hours wandering about beneath the invisible sky above the avenues and the reddish sky above the streets, on three occasions I’d waited on the marble floor of Kenmore Station, I’d followed his metallic footsteps as far as the Plaza, I’d let him see me, I’d made a video, I did perhaps deserve to know something without having to wait for time to pass. “Come on then, tell me about it,” I said. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. She was barefoot and yet she wasn’t limping, her eyes looked dreamy or perhaps just sleepy. She seemed calm, like someone engaged in an unhurried meditation and upon whom that meditation weighs but lightly. Her smile was hesitant, foolish, the smile of someone remembering things in a vague, indulgent way. “But he is Spanish, isn’t he?” I said. “Yes, he is Spanish,” she replied, “we knew that.” “What’s his name? What does he do?” “His name’s Bill, which suits him, and he hasn’t told me what he does. We didn’t talk about that.” “Tell me a bit more about him, what he’s like? Did you like him? Were you disappointed? Were you afraid? He was horrible in that video,” and I indicated the programme with the canned laughter, which I could still hear even with the sound down. “I’m not sure yet,” Berta replied, “that will depend on what happens next.” “Have you arranged to see each other again?” “Yes, I suppose so. We know each other’s mailbox numbers and he can call me, I’ve given him my phone number.” Berta was being laconic, like a person in love who doesn’t want to share, who hides things, stores them away; she couldn’t be in love, it was ridiculous, perhaps she was infatuated or perhaps she didn’t want to talk about it just then, when he’d just left after more than four hours in his company, or rather, four plus four, since they’d arranged to meet at half past eight. Perhaps she wanted to think about it on her own, about what had happened, to reinforce the memory which, now that Bill had left, would already have begun the slow process of disappearing, and which must have been why she’d put on the video which I had interrupted. “Tomorrow perhaps,” I thought, “perhaps she’ll feel more like talking about it tomorrow, the truth is that it’s not that important to me, in fact my mission is over, I had to take seriously what she took seriously, to help her reach the person she wanted to reach and perhaps to win him. That’s all. Besides, my stay here’s almost over, I’ll be gone in a week and I may not be back for another year, and that will be when she tells me everything as if it were something that belonged to the past, something venial and ingenuous that we’ll laugh about and which we’ll experience rather as if we weren’t the people who’d participated in it or made it happen, something that can perhaps be told in its entirety, from beginning to end, not like now, when it’s still happening, and we don’t know how it will turn out.” But I knew I couldn’t go to bed without asking her two things, at least two. “Did he have condoms with him?” I asked. In the shadows it seemed to me that Berta blushed, she was looking at me with a flushed face she definitely hadn’t worn when she asked me for them, nor – or, at least, so I believe, for I only saw her through the camera lens – when I was filming her. “I don’t know,” she said, “I didn’t give him the chance to offer, I got mine out first, the ones you gave me. Thanks, by the way.” And that “Thanks” was spoken with a distinct blush. “And what about Miriam? Did you get a chance to ask him about her?” Berta was no longer interested in that, she’d forgotten all about it, she made a face as if to say: “Why bring that up after all this time?” The name “Miriam” must have got lost at some point near the beginning of their date and had thrown up no new information. “Yes, I did,” she said, “I mentioned the name, as being that of a friend in Spain. But it didn’t seem to mean anything to him, so I didn’t insist. You did say that I shouldn’t make a big thing of it.” Now she didn’t ask me what that was all about or what I suspected or knew (she didn’t say to me “Come on, out with it” or “Explain yourself” or “Tell me everything”), too much time had passed, erasing my imaginings, my idea. She was lying down on the sofa again, she must be tired after that long night of getting to know him and of disguising her lameness. I looked at her long-toed feet on the sofa, they were pretty feet, very clean, for “Bill’s” benefit – they hadn’t stood on the asphalt – I felt like touching them. I’d touched them before, a long time ago (had I reminded her of that, she would have pulled that face that meant: “Why bring that up after all this time?”), they were still the same feet, even after the accident, how many steps must they have taken, how often would they have been touched in the past fifteen years? Perhaps, only a short time before, “Bill” had touched them, perhaps while they were talking, having first driven me out into the street, but what had they talked about, they hadn’t discussed his visible arena, what then, maybe they’d talked about me, maybe Berta had told him my whole story just to talk about something, on the pillow we betray and denigrate others, we reveal their greatest secrets and offer the only opinion that flatters the listener, which is the disparagement of everyone else: everything outside that territory becomes unnecessary and secondary if not despicable, it’s there that one so often abjures friendships, past as well as present loves, as Luisa would have denied and decried me had she shared a pillow with Custardoy, I was far away in another country on the other side of the ocean, my memory vague, my head absent, leaving no trace on the pillow for eight weeks, she would have got used to sleeping across the bed, there was no one there for some time, and it’s easy to deny the importance of someone who isn’t there, with a remark, just as it was easy for Guillermo to speak with such indifference of his sick wife on another continent, when he thought no one else was listening, in a hotel room in Havana beneath the mellow moon and with the balcony doors ajar, to speak of killing her or at least of letting her die: “I’m letting her die,” he’d said. “I’m doing nothing to help her. I’m pushing her towards death.” And later on: “I take away from her the little will to live that she has. Don’t you think that’s enough?” But Miriam didn’t think it was enough, she’d spent too long waiting, and waiting is the one thing guaranteed to bring on despair and wild talk, it corrodes and makes one say things like: “I’ll get you” or “You’re mine” or “I’ll see you in hell” or “I kill you”. It’s like a vast piece of cloth with no stitching, no ornament, no folds, like an invisible, reddish sky with no angles to limit it, an undifferentiated, immobile whole in which one cannot see the weave and there is only repetition, but not the repetition that occurs after some time has passed, which is not only tolerable but pleasant, not only tolerable but necessary (you can’t accept that certain things are not going to be repeated), but a continuous, uninterrupted repetition, an unending whistle or a constant levelling out of what is happening. Nothing is ever enough when you’re waiting, something needs to be ripped asunder with a sharpened blade or burned with a lighted cigarette or a flame, nothing is ever enough after the disparagement and the abjuration and the disdain, afterwards you can only allow yourself the next inevitable step, the suppression, cancellation or death of the person expelled from the territory delineated by the pillow. The mellow moon, the balcony doors ajar, the bra cutting into the flesh, the damp towel, the concealed tears in the bathroom, the hair or the lines across the forehead, the sleeping woman and the woman about to go to sleep, the soft singing of someone still hoping: “You must kill her,” Miriam had said. And Guillermo had replied, forswearing his sick wife on the other side of the ocean and like a weary mother who’ll say the first thing that comes into her head, it’s easy to condemn someone verbally, nothing happens, everyone knows that you’re not responsible for what you say, even though at times the law punishes people for it, the tongue in the ear, the tongue doesn’t kill, it commits no act, it can’t: “All right, all right, I will, but for the moment just keep doing that with your hand.” And later on, she’d insisted, in a neutral, but not a faint tone: “If you don’t kill her, I kill myself. Then you get one woman’s death on your hands, either her or me.”

“You didn’t tell him I followed him, did you?” I asked Berta. “No, I didn’t, but I might tell him later on, if you don’t mind. But I did talk to him about you, about our conjectures and suppositions.” “And what did he say?” “Nothing, he just laughed.” “So you talked about me, then?” “Well, I told him a bit, after all we had thrown you out on to the street in order that he could come up, it’s only logical he should feel some curiosity about the person he was inconveniencing.” Berta’s reply seemed exculpatory when there was no need to be. Unless my question had sounded somewhat accusing because of the “then” with which I’d closed it, converting it into a statement of fact. Berta didn’t want to talk, she kept replying to my questions, but without any enthusiasm, just so as not to be rude or to make it up to me a little for my nocturnal wanderings. Her dressing gown had fallen open slightly, I could see part of her breasts through the opening, and the shape of them through the silk, just then I would like to have seen those breasts I hadn’t wanted to film, an extemporary desire. She was dressed provocatively. She was a friend. I didn’t insist.

“Right, I’m going to go to bed, it’s late,” I said.

“Yes, I’ll be going to bed in a minute,” she replied. “I just want to tidy up a bit.”

She lied to me just as, later, on the other side of the ocean, I would lie to Luisa, when I didn’t want to go to bed so that I could watch Custardoy from the window. There was nothing to tidy up, apart from a bottle of Eau de Guerlain on the table and the opened box. I picked up my book, my record and the newspaper in order to take them to my room. I still had my raincoat on.

“Goodnight,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow,” Berta said.

She stayed where she was, lying on the sofa in front of the canned laughter on television, tired, with her feet up and her dressing gown half open, perhaps with her thoughts on a new concrete future which the night could not yet take away from her. Or perhaps she wasn’t thinking at all: I went to the bathroom for a moment and while I was cleaning my teeth and the water from the tap blotted out all other sounds, I thought I could hear her singing abstractedly to herself, with the pauses you’d expect a person to make who is in fact singing without realizing it, while they’re having a wash or caressing someone by their side, even though Berta wasn’t having a wash (she perhaps wanted to hold on to the smell of “Bill”) and there was no one by her side. And what she was singing was in English, it was this: “In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk to you,” the beginning of a well-known song from perhaps fifteen years ago. I didn’t go into the living room again that night. I went straight from the bathroom to my bedroom. I got undressed and got into the bed that had no particular smell, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep for ages, so I prepared myself for insomnia. I’d left the door ajar as usual, so that the air could come in (in New York, on the lower floors of buildings, you always keep windows that open on to streets closed). And then, when I was more awake than at any other moment in the whole night and there was no sound at all, I heard again, very low, as if through a wall, the voice of “Bill” or the voice of Guillermo, the vibrato voice of a gondolier, the saw-like voice that repeated its cutting phrases in English from the screen. The result was very sombre.

“That’s how it is. If your breasts and your cunt and your leg persuade me that it’s worth running the risk. If you’re still interested in me. Perhaps you don’t want to go on with this. You probably think I’m being too direct. Brutal. Cruel. I’m not cruel. I just can’t afford to waste any time. I can’t waste any time.”

EIGHT WEEKS ISN’T a very long time, but it’s longer than it seems if you add to that another period of eight weeks which is separated from that initial eight weeks by another eleven or twelve. My next eight-week stint was a trip to Geneva in February, it was also my last. I’d like it to stay that way for a while, there’s no sense in Luisa and I being married if we’re going to spend so much time apart, so that I’m not there to witness the changes wrought by marriage or grow accustomed to them, and to harbour suspicions that I must later dismiss. I wonder if I’m changing too, I can’t say I’ve noticed, I suppose I must be, since Luisa changes in superficial ways (shoulder pads, hairstyle, gloves, lipstick), the apartment changes, the apartment whose unnatural inauguration now seems ages ago, work changes, my workload has increased whilst hers has diminished, indeed almost dried up completely (she’s looking for a permanent post in Madrid): since my stay in New York until my return from Geneva, that is, from mid-September to almost the end of March, she’s made only one work-related trip, and it didn’t last weeks but days, a trip to London, to stand in for our celebrated high-ranking politician’s official translator, who’d been careless enough to catch chicken pox off his children (the leading politician now has his own exclusive interpreter, a post snapped up by an intriguer – though an interpreter of real genius, let it be said – of uncertain nomenclature, for, having obtained the post, he is now known by his two surnames, De la Cuesta y de la Casa), who (the leading politician not the interpreter with chicken pox, who’d been denied entry because of the risk of infection) was making a lightning visit to convey his regrets to his recently deposed colleague and to talk to her successors about what our representatives say they always talk to the British about: Gibraltar, the IRA and ETA. Luisa doesn’t go in for telling incredible stories, nor do I require her to do so, and she said little about the interview, to me that is, since one assumes that interpreters, official or not (but it’s more common amongst consecutive than amongst simultaneous translators, I do both types of work, but I’m very much the exception, not that I often work as a consecutive translator, for consecutive translators hate simultaneous translators and simultaneous translators hate consecutive translators), never breathe a word about what was said inside a room, they’re all principled people who would never betray a secret. But she could have told me. “It was extremely dull,” she said, referring to the conversation that had taken place in the official residence which the British leader was about to abandon in a few days’ time: she was surrounded by half-full packing cases. “It was as if he saw her now as an old friend stripped of all responsibilities and power and she was feeling much too sad to attend to his pressing problems, it must have filled her with a kind of advance nostalgia.” There was only one moment reminiscent of the personal conversation into which I’d guided them the day I met Luisa. It seems that the British politician had quoted from Shakespeare again, again from Macbeth, which must have been her constant reading matter, either that or she saw it performed repeatedly. She said: “Do you remember what Macbeth says that he heard when he murdered Duncan? It’s very famous.” “I can’t say that I do, perhaps you could refresh my memory …” our representative had said by way of an excuse. “Macbeth thinks he heard a voice crying out: ‘Macbeth does murder Sleep, the innocent Sleep’. Well,” she added, “that’s how I felt about my sudden removal from power, murdered while I slept, I was innocent sleep, content to rest surrounded by my friends, by people watching over me, but it was those same friends who, like Macbeth, Glamis and Cawdor, stabbed me while I slept. One’s friends are one’s worst enemies, my friend,” she warned our leader, rather unnecessarily, since he’s left behind him a path strewn with ex-friends. “Never trust the people closest to you, those whom you always thought never needed to be obliged to love you. And never go to sleep, years of security seduce one into it, one gets used to feeling safe. I fell asleep for an instant feeling perfectly safe and you see what happened.” And with an expressive gesture, the ex-leading politician indicated the open boxes round about her, as if they were a manifestation of opprobrium or were the drops of blood spilled in her murder. Shortly afterwards, her ex-colleague from Spain left her to go and speak to her successor, that is, with her Macbeth, Glamis and Cawdor.

That was the only job Luisa had during all that time, not that she was idle: the apartment looked more and more like a home and she was becoming more and more like a real daughter-in-law, not that I required her to be that either.

I had no friend living in Geneva and so I spent my weeks as an interpreter at the ECOSOC Commission of Human Rights living in a tiny rented furnished apartment, my only distractions being long walks through the empty city in the evenings, going to films subtitled in three languages or out to the occasional supper with colleagues or old friends of my father’s (who had obviously struck up new friendships on all his trips abroad) and watching television, there’s always television, it’s the one thing you can rely on. The eight weeks I’d spent in New York had been bearable, even pleasant and intense, because Berta was there with her stories to tell (as I said, she’s someone I always vaguely miss and someone for whom I store up news for months at a time), the weeks I spent in Geneva, however, were depressing in the extreme. It’s not just that I’ve never found the work interesting, but in that particular city, in winter, I found it unbearable, since it isn’t the work itself that’s such a torment, but what you know awaits or doesn’t await you when you leave it, even if all that awaits you is being able to plunge your hand into a mailbox. There, nothing and no one awaited me, a brief chat on the phone with Luisa (whose vaguely amorous words meant that I only lay awake at night for a couple of hours, rather than for hours on end), followed by an improvised supper more often than not cooked in my own apartment, which ended up stinking of whatever I’d eaten, never anything complicated, nothing too pungent, but it would still smell, the kitchen occupying the same living space as my bed. After twenty days of being there and again after thirty-five days, Luisa came to spend two long weekends with me (four nights each time); in fact there was no reason for her to wait until then or for her to stay so short a time, since she wasn’t tied to any task that couldn’t be postponed, nor to any timetable. But it was as if she foresaw that I too would soon give up the kind of casual work that forces us to travel and spend far too much time away from home, and it seemed more important to her – more important than keeping me company doing something that was certain to end, something that was, by definition, ephemeral – to prepare and nurture what was permanent and to which I would eventually return for good. It was as if she’d stepped fully into her new role, burying all that had gone before, whilst I was still bound to my single life by a prolongation of that life which was anomalous, inopportune and unwanted; as if she’d got married and I hadn’t, as if she were waiting for the return of her errant husband whilst I still awaited the date of my wedding, Luisa was installed in marriage and her life had changed, whilst mine – when I was away – was the same as it had been in previous years.

On one of her visits we went out to supper with a friend of my father’s – younger than him and older than me by some fifteen years – who was in Geneva for one night, on his way to Lausanne or Lucerne or Lugano, and who, I imagined, had murky or dirty dealings in all four cities; he was an influential man, a shadowy figure as my father had been when he worked at the Prado, since Professor Villalobos (for that’s his name) is best known (though only to a literate public) for his studies of eighteenth-century Spanish painting and architecture and for his childish behaviour. He’s known to an even smaller but less literate public as one of the chief academic and political intriguers in the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Rome, Milan, Strasbourg and even Brussels (and Geneva; much to his annoyance he still has no power in Germany or England). As one would expect in such an exalted and busy personage, he has, over the years, touched on a wide variety of fields of study and Ranz has always claimed to feel great respect for his brief but illuminating study of the Casa del Príncipe at El Escorial, which, I’m afraid, I’ve never read and never will. This professor lives in Catalonia, which is enough of an excuse for him not to visit my father whenever he comes to Madrid, having so many other things to do in the kingdom’s capital city. But the two of them often exchange brief letters, those from Professor Villalobos (which Ranz, amused, has sometimes allowed me to read) being written in a deliberately antiquated, ornate prose style which, on occasions, also infects his diction or rather his loquacity: he’s the sort of man who, confronted by some obstacle or snag, would never say, for example, “We’re in a mess”, rather “This is a fine pickle we’re in.” I’d seen him only rarely, but one Monday afternoon (intriguers never travel at weekends) he phoned me, at the suggestion of my father (as the high-ranking Spanish official with the dancing, silicon-enhanced wife had done in New York), hoping not to have to languish alone in his hotel room that night (when evening falls, local intriguers return to their homes to rest after the intrigues of the day, leaving the foreign intriguer to his own devices). Although I wasn’t too pleased at the idea of sacrificing one of my nights with Luisa, we didn’t, in fact, have anything planned for that night beyond a tacit agreement to spend it together, and within marriage such agreements can be broken without serious consequences.

Villalobos didn’t just want to invite us to supper, he wanted to impress us too, Luisa more than me perhaps, or perhaps just in a different way. He was impertinent, as was apparently his habit, criticizing the profession I’d chosen or, rather, drifted into. “Where are you going with this job?” he said, a superior sneer on his moist, fleshy lips (they were naturally moist, but he’d also drunk a lot of wine), as if he were my father (one’s father’s friends seem to think that they inherit from the former their way of treating their children). He did not, on the other hand, reproach Luisa with having chosen the wrong path, perhaps because she was no longer working as a translator or perhaps because, deep down, he saw no reason why she should choose any path at all. He was pleasant, smug, nominally wise, coquettish, pedantic and affable, he took pride in being shocked at nothing, in knowing untransmittable secrets and knowing all there was to know about everything that goes on in the world, be it yesterday or four centuries ago. Over dessert he fell silent for several minutes, as if overcome by weariness after all the frenzy and excitement or as if he’d plunged into dark thoughts, perhaps he was unhappy and was suddenly reminded of this. It was clear that he was a man of talent, being able to move so swiftly from smugness to depression without appearing false or insincere. It was as if he’d said: “What does it all matter anyway?” The conversation faltered (he’d taken it upon himself to do most of the talking) while his gaze grew absent and the hand holding the spoon with which he was eating his raspberry tart remained poised in mid-air.

“Is anything wrong?” Luisa asked him, touching his arm.

Professor Villalobos dropped his hand and spooned up another piece of tart before replying, as if some physical movement was necessary before he could emerge from his state of inner stupor.

“No, nothing, nothing. What could possibly be wrong, my dear?” And he pretended that his reverie had been a pretence. Then he recovered his composure and added, with a rhetorical gesture of his spoon: “Your father-in-law wasn’t exaggerating when he told me about you. Your merest wish is my command.”

He’d had a lot to drink. Luisa gave a short, mechanical laugh and said:

“How long have you known him?”

“Ranz? Since before his son, your new husband, was born.” This wasn’t something I knew about with any exactitude, we tend not to be interested in anything that happened before we were born, in how the friendships that preceded our existence were formed. Addressing me, the professor, who always presumed to be better informed than anyone else about everything, added: “Do you know, I even knew your mother and your Aunt Teresa before he did. My father, who was a doctor, used to visit your grandfather when he came to Madrid. I sometimes went with him and I knew them all slightly, although, to be honest, I only knew your father by sight then. I bet you don’t know what your grandfather died of.”

“From a heart attack, I think,” I replied. “I don’t know exactly, he died a short while before I was born, it’s one of those things one tends not to take an interest in.”

“A great mistake,” said the professor, “You should take an interest in everything, you won’t get anywhere with that apathetic attitude. In medical terms, yes, he did die of a heart attack, but in artistic terms, which is how one really dies and what really counts, he died of worry, anxiety and fear, and all because of your father. Every illness is caused by something which is not an illness.” As well as his untransmittable secrets, Professor Villalobos enjoyed these little theatrical effects when recounting something, whether secret or not.

“Because of my father? Why because of my father?”

“From the moment your Aunt Teresa died shortly after marrying him, your grandfather conceived an utter dread of him. He was as frightened of him as he was of the Devil himself, a superstitious fear. I take it you know what happened.”

The professor didn’t beat about the bush the way Custardoy had done. He came straight to the point, he had no doubts whatsoever about the value of knowing about everything, or that knowledge could ever harm anyone, and that if it did then you just had to lump it. I thought then – in an intuitive flash – that it was, in fact, time for me to know, as if stories, which have lain for years in a state of repose, each had their moment to awake, an awakening no one could do anything to prevent, at best you could delay it slightly, but only slightly and to no real effect. “I don’t believe in things whose time has passed,” Luisa had said to me in bed just before my arm brushed her breast, “it’s all there, waiting for us to call it back.” She put it well, I think. Perhaps there is a time when the things themselves want to be told, in order, perhaps, to rest or in order finally to become fiction.

“Yes, I do, I know that she shot herself.” I realized then that I knew something about which I, in fact, had neither proof nor assurance, it was just a recent rumour, passed on from Custardoy to me and from me to Luisa.

Professor Villalobos was still drinking and demolishing the tart at enormous speed now, wielding his spoon as if it were one of his father’s scalpels. After each mouthful or each sip of wine, he would dab with his napkin at his moist mouth, which remained moist even after he’d dried it. He knew more than I did about this matter too.

“Something you might not know is that my parents were there when it happened, they were guests at lunch.” He used the plural form of “you” as one does with married couples. “They returned to Barcelona in a state of shock and I often heard them talk about it. Your aunt got up from the table, picked up your grandfather’s pistol, loaded it, went into the bathroom and shot herself through the heart. My parents saw her dead, as did all of your family apart from your grandmother, who was spending a few days outside Madrid, in the house of a sister of hers who used to live in Segovia or was it El Escorial?”

“It was Segovia,” I said. That I did know.

“It was lucky for her really, or perhaps, though it seems improbable, your aunt had thought of that. Your grandfather, on the other hand, never recovered from having seen his daughter, all bloody, lying on the floor of the bathroom, with one breast destroyed. She’d been more or less normal during lunch, well, she’d been very quiet, barely eating or saying anything, as if she were unhappy when she had no reason to be, she’d only got back from her honeymoon a week or so before. But it was later on that my parents recalled all that, while they were eating no one could have suspected what was going to happen.” And then Villalobos went on to recount what I didn’t want to know, but which I do now know. He talked for some minutes, he described it all in detail. He talked. And talked. The only way I could have avoided hearing what he was saying would have been to leave. Finally, he remarked: “Everyone said how unlucky for Ranz, being widowed for a second time.” Then he paused and finished his raspberry tart, the ingestion of which he’d delayed (his spoon again poised in mid-air in that rhetorical gesture) while he recounted every detail and mentioned another tart, an ice-cream cake that had melted. Neither Luisa nor I said anything, so he replaced the implement on his plate and went back to the beginning, like the teacher he was. “You can imagine why it was that later, when Ranz married your mother, your grandfather lived in a permanent state of panic. They say he grew pale and clutched his head in his hands every time he saw your father. Your grandmother was made of sterner stuff and, besides, she hadn’t seen her daughter dead, only buried. After that your grandfather lived, although not, it’s true, for very long, like a man who, though sentenced to death, doesn’t know the date of his execution and rises each morning wondering if today will be the day. That’s not a very apt comparison, for he feared for the death of his one remaining daughter. He barely slept, he jumped every time the phone or the door bell went or whenever a letter or a telegram arrived, even though your parents didn’t go away on honeymoon, such frivolity would have seemed out of place; in fact, they didn’t leave Madrid once while he was alive. According to my father, he’d never seen a clearer case than that of your grandfather of somebody dying from fear, the heart attack was just the form it took, the medium, it could have been anything, he said. When your grandfather died our two families saw much less of each other. It wasn’t until years later that I got to know Ranz again, through quite different channels. So there you have it!” There was a certain self-satisfaction in those last words, everyone enjoys experiments, being the bringer of news. The professor summoned the waiter and, despite having devoured the tart, he asked for the cheeseboard and for more wine to accompany it. “I’m ravenous,” he said, “I didn’t eat any lunch today.”

Luisa and I were drinking our coffee. There were two questions to be asked, two main questions it would have been difficult not to ask, especially since there were two of us there to ask them. In fact, both were questions we needed to ask my father, but he was far away and you couldn’t talk about the distant past with him, or perhaps you could, the unlikely possibility occurred to me that it had been Ranz who’d sent Custardoy to me some months back and that now he’d sent Villalobos, to warn me, to prepare me for a story that he now wanted to tell me himself, perhaps because I’d just got married for the first time, he’d been married three times and two out of those three times things had turned out badly for him, or, as everyone said at the time and as the professor himself had just said, he’d had very bad luck. But then he’d also sent me the high-ranking civil servant from Spain with the frivolous, pneumatic wife and he had told me nothing. Luisa and I spoke almost at the same time: “But why did she kill herself?” she said, getting in before me by half a second.

“Who was the first wife?” I said.

Professor Villalobos cut himself some Brie and some Camembert, both very ripe. He spread a little of the first on some toast that crumbled when he put it in his mouth. One piece remained on it, too large to be consumed in one bite, and he contrived to stain both his lapel and the tablecloth.

“No one knows why she killed herself,” he replied, his mouth still full, but quite unruffled, as if he were confronting a battery of questions in class. He gulped some wine to help him wash the cheese down. “Even your father doesn’t know, or so he said. When he got to his father-in-law’s house, he was as shocked as any of the other people present or as any of those who arrived later, his pain even greater. He said everything was going fine, that there’d been no disagreement between them, that they were very happy. It was inexplicable and he could offer no explanation. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual when they parted that morning, they’d said goodbye with a few vaguely amorous words, as on any other day, the kind of conventional words you two might well say to each other tonight or tomorrow. If that’s true, he must have been in a state of constant torment all these years. Obviously your mother was an enormous help. Perhaps Ranz also had to ascertain if your Aunt Teresa had led some kind of double life and had a suicidal side to her he knew nothing about, such things do happen. If he did find out anything, I imagine he kept quiet about it. Though I can’t really say.” The professor dabbed at his lips, this time with more reason, to wipe the crisp crumbs of toast and the soft remains of the Brie from the corners of his mouth.

“You’ve got some on your lapel too,” Luisa pointed out.

The professor looked down with displeasure and surprise. It was a very expensive Gigli lapel. He dabbed at it clumsily, Luisa moistened one corner of her napkin with water and went to his aid, she moistened the napkin just as I had moistened the corner of a towel in the bathroom of the hotel in Havana in order to cool her face, her throat, the back of her neck (her long, dishevelled hair had clung to her skin and a few stray hairs lay across her forehead like fine lines sent by the future to cast a momentary shadow over her).

“Do you think it will leave a mark?” the professor asked. He was a vain man, distinguished-looking despite his broad face.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll find out soon enough,” said the professor and with his middle finger he gave the expensive, besmirched lapel of his Romeo Gigli suit a disdainful flick. He spread some more Camembert (not on his lapel but on another piece of toast, he was mixing up a lot of different flavours), drank some more wine and went on, without losing his thread: “As for the first wife, I don’t know much about her, except that she was Cuban, like your grandmother. As you know, Ranz lived in Havana for a while. For a year or two, around 1950, he had a minor post in the Embassy there. Was it cultural attaché perhaps? Do you happen to know? Anyway, knowing him as I do, I’ve always thought he must have been something like artistic advisor to Batista. Has he never told you anything about all this?”

The professor was expecting some firm statement from me, such as I’d provided about Segovia. But I had no idea that my father had once lived in Cuba. For a year or two.

“Who’s Batista?” asked Luisa. She’s young and forgetful and doesn’t have a very good memory for things, except when it comes to translating.

“I don’t know,” I said answering Villalobos, not her. “I had no idea he’d lived in Cuba.”

“I suppose that’s another of those things you weren’t ever interested in,” said the professor. “Oh well. That was where he married his first wife and I think he met your mother and your aunt there too, they were spending a few months in Havana with your grandmother on a trip she made to sort out something to do with a legacy or perhaps because she wanted to revisit her childhood haunts before she got too old, I can’t say, bearing in mind that this was all gleaned from scraps of conversation I overheard from my parents years back, conversations not intended for my ears.” Professor Villalobos was making excuses. He was no longer telling the story with his previous gusto, it irritated him to be unsure about his facts, he hated incompleteness and inexactitude, he could never have written anything but monographs, never anything biographical, biographies never end. He popped a truffle in his mouth, they’d brought them with our coffee. At least I think he did, the movement was so abrupt (he popped it into his mouth as if it were a pill) and he hadn’t finished with the cheese yet, it all seemed too much of a mixture to me. I only know that the plate now had one truffle missing. “Whatever the reason, she took the girls with her, to keep her company, for three months or so. Your father only met her briefly there, his courtship of your aunt began some time later, of course, and by then he was a widower and had returned to Madrid. It seems he was a good-looking chap, well, he still is, the sad but merry widower, irresistible, he had a small moustache at the time, it seems he didn’t shave it off until his third wedding and then he never let it grow again, out of superstition perhaps. But I know almost nothing about his first wife.” The professor seemed troubled by the fact that he’d failed to foresee this topic of conversation and make sure he was better informed. Perhaps he couldn’t have been any better informed. “You know how it is, you tend to say little or nothing about the dead to the people who’ve replaced them, you couldn’t keep on talking to your family or to acquaintances about someone who was a stranger to them, who, when viewed in retrospect, had occupied the place of your Aunt Teresa. There are two ways of looking at things, don’t you think? From the perspective of the future and from the perspective of the past and things can look very different depending on which view you choose. Anyway, as I was saying: I imagine that everyone knew about her, but no one bothered to mention her, with some people it would have been better if they’d never existed; although there was no alternative when your aunt killed herself, for a short time it was inevitable that people would remember her, he becoming a widower for the second time. She wouldn’t have shared the same fate when your mother took her place, you don’t forget a sister, however inconvenient a role she played, but you do forget a foreigner and a stranger. They were different times then.” The professor almost sighed.

“There’s always been a portrait of my aunt in my parents’ house,” I pointed out, in large part I think to console Villalobos; if he didn’t have all the facts to hand, it might at least please him to be found right in his conjectures.

“Of course,” he said, as if giving no importance to having guessed correctly (though it was evident he was delighted). He pushed away his cheese plate with his forearm, he must have been full to bursting by then. But no, he reached for another truffle and ordered a coffee for himself. When he pushed away the plate he wiped the sleeve of his suit on the greasy edge of the plate. He was sitting with his arms folded on the table now, but still managed to look elegant.

“And what did she die of?” asked Luisa.

“Who?” replied the professor.

“His first wife,” I said, and when I said that, I think Luisa realized that I was saying something else too, something like “OK” or “Go ahead” or “You win” or “Go on, then.” But if I was saying that, I was saying it to her, not to Villalobos.

“You must forgive me, chaps, but I don’t know much about that either.” He was suffering agonies now and still knocking back the wine. I thought he was about to change the subject, unaccustomed as he was to having to say “I don’t know” so many times in succession. He apologized again: “My friendship with your father is, let us say, more academic than personal, although we have great personal respect for each other as well. I learned all these things from my father, who died years ago now, but I’ve never talked to Ranz about it.”

“You mean you weren’t interested?” I said. I couldn’t resist repaying his impertinence. It was unfair but, after all, he’d addressed no fewer than three such remarks to me.

The professor peered at me through his glasses with a mixture of distaste and pity, but, like all his other reactions, it was a paternalistic distaste. The look of pity, though, was professorial.

“I was a good deal more interested than you were, you ninny.” The insult was so antiquated, venial and didactic, it almost made me laugh, and I noticed that it had the same effect on Luisa. “But I know where the boundaries are in any relationships. With your father I talk about Villanueva and Villalpando,” said Villalobos, “but I don’t suppose you even know who they are.”

“I don’t,” said Luisa.

“You will,” said the professor, as if she were some impatient student he would deal with after the class. “As I was saying: I don’t really know how his first wife died. I don’t even know her name. It happened in Cuba, that I do know. And then, but don’t quote me on this, because I’m not even sure that I did hear this, I have an idea that she died in a fire. It’s a very vague idea that I could just have picked up from some film that was showing at the time, when I was a boy and people were still talking about your father and his double widowhood. You’re a lot younger than me, so it won’t have happened to you yet, but there comes a time when one confuses what one has seen with what people have told you, what one has witnessed with what one knows, what happened to one with what one has read; in fact, it’s a miracle that, normally speaking, we can distinguish between them, and it’s odd, because all the stories that you hear and see throughout your lifetime, what with the cinema, television, the theatre, newspapers, novels, they all accumulate and could easily become confused. It’s astonishing that most people do know what happened to them. What is impossible to distinguish is what happened to others and the things they tell us about themselves as if they were fictitious or real but remote, the reality of people we don’t know or the reality of the past. Let’s just say that, except in certain extreme cases, one’s own memory still remains quite safe, untouched, you remember what you yourself have seen and heard in a different way to how you remember books or films, but the difference is less marked when it comes to what others have seen and heard and witnessed and known and then told us about. And then, of course, there are the things you invent.”

Professor Villalobos was no longer making excuses, he was speechifying. He was changing the subject, he’d grown tired of the earlier topic of conversation. He was stirring his coffee with a new spoon. After eating all that food, he’d added saccharin. He was not a fat man but he wasn’t thin either. He asked a passing waiter for a cigar. “A cigar,” he said, although he said it in French.

“I get all the speeches I’ve ever translated muddled up. I can’t remember a thing about them,” I said to flatter him and to try and make up a little for my earlier unjustifiable cheek.

“What sort of fire?” Luisa wasn’t going to let him change the subject just yet.

“I don’t know,” said the professor, “I don’t even know if there was one. Around the time that your aunt died and people used to talk about her more, I developed a fear that our house would burn down during the night and I used to have difficulty sleeping, it’s quite a normal childhood fear, at least it was in my time, but I associate it with having seen or heard of someone being burned in their bed while they were asleep. I associate that image in turn with the death of your father’s first wife, but I don’t know why, I don’t remember anyone saying anything, at least nothing concrete, about that death, which, unlike your aunt’s death, happened a long way away. It may have been some scene I saw in a film that was set in the tropics, it made an impression on me and I just associated the two ideas, Cuba and fire, fire and the Cuban wife. A lot of films were set in the tropics in my day, it was fashionable, I suppose after the Second World War people liked to see and think about places that had been far from the battlefields, places like the Caribbean, the Amazon.”

Professor Villalobos was now definitively changing the subject, not without difficulty, doubtless he was bored with our company. It seemed that he had lost his fear of fire, for the waiter brought him a box of cigars. He chose one without hesitation (he knew the different brands), he didn’t bother to smell it (he was an educated man, he wasn’t wearing any rings), he put it in his mouth – the moist mouth which is always full and is abundance itself – and allowed the waiter to hold an immense flame much too near his face. The cigar smelled bad, but then I don’t smoke cigars. The professor took a few puffs and, while he did so, his eyes grew absent again, his mind plunged in dark thoughts. He didn’t seem insincere then either, when he grew depressed and silent he looked a little like that English actor, who committed suicide some years ago in Barcelona, where Villalobos lived, his name was George Sanders, a great actor. Perhaps he’d again recalled that he was unhappy and that his unhappiness wasn’t just something someone had told him about, something he’d read, something he’d invented, nor anything to do with any intrigue.

“Yes, the Amazon,” he said, cigar in hand. The end of the cigar glowed red.

THAT NIGHT Luisa and I talked when we got back to the apartment, albeit only briefly and only once we were in bed, after two silent taxi rides. But there’s no point in saying anything further about that night, I should speak instead about another night not long after that, or, which comes to the same thing, a night not long ago, on the day of my return from the city of Geneva, having (almost) completed my eight weeks of work, three weeks after the night about which there’s no point in saying anything further. Or perhaps there is, since it was then that we reached an agreement. Or then again, perhaps there isn’t, since what happened three weeks later was a mixture of agreement and chance, of chance and agreement, of a perhaps and a maybe.

I brought forward my return by twenty-four hours. I had, in fact, miscalculated at the start, forgetting to include a public holiday in Switzerland, thanks to which my work finished on the Thursday and not the Friday of the eighth week. But I only realized this on the Monday and, that same day, I changed my ticket from Saturday to Friday. I spoke to Luisa on the phone that night and on Tuesday night and on Wednesday night, but not on Thursday night, and I said nothing on any of those nights about my change of plans, I suppose I wanted to give her a little surprise, I suppose I wanted to see what the apartment would look like when she wasn’t expecting me, to see what she was doing, what she was like without me there, where she was, what time she got back home, who, if anyone, she was with or who she was entertaining, who was standing on the corner outside. I wanted to dispel the suspicion once and for all. However much you dislike having suspicions, they sometimes come back even when you dismiss them, they do so with less and less force when you live with someone, but they do so whether you’ve asked the question and received the reply, “It wasn’t me”, or whether you’ve kept silence, what you want is for them to diminish in strength. That was the chance element.

The agreement came about because it seemed that the moment had come for me to know what all the insinuations of the previous nine months had meant, ever since our wedding though not before, not since our first meeting. To sum up, my own father had started it all on the wedding day itself, in the old Casino de Madrid, a few hours after the ceremony, when he drew me aside and asked me the question I’d been asking myself the whole of the previous night, during which I’d barely slept, the question I had perhaps begun to dismiss during the ceremony. But I hadn’t succeeded, then or subsequently, and my unease continued to grow throughout the honeymoon, in Miami and New Orleans and Mexico, and in particular in Havana. Perhaps if Luisa hadn’t fallen ill that day my presentiments of disaster would have disappeared along with my sense of the unnaturalness of our setting up a new home, which seems more natural to me with every day that passes, I’m even beginning to forget about the apartment which I once had all to myself. Not even a year ago now. The agreement came about on that night about which I should say nothing further, but about which I will just say one thing more. When we got back to the apartment after leaving Professor Villalobos at the door of his overnight hotel (he wasn’t rich or expert enough to go on to a night club where people dance very close, or perhaps, by then, he was too immersed in his own unhappiness), Luisa said to me in the dark (she said it to me with her head on the pillow, it was a single bed with a duvet, but wide enough to hold two people who don’t mind being close): “Do you still not want to know? Do you still not want me to ask your father?” I’m afraid I answered her with another suspicion: “You mean you haven’t asked him already? You see enough of each other.” Luisa didn’t get angry, we all understand that such suspicions exist. “No, of course not,” she said, with no offence in her voice. “And I won’t, not if you don’t want me to. He’s my father-in-law and I’m very fond of him, but he’s your father. Just tell me what you want me to do.” There was a silence. She didn’t press me. She waited. She was waiting. We couldn’t see each other. There were no sheets. Our bodies were just touching. What she was clear about was that it had to be her, not me, who asked Ranz, not so much because she was so sure that he’d confide in her, but because she was sure he wouldn’t confide in me at all. “He’d tell me,” she’d said once, when the light was on and we were in our own bed. “Who knows, maybe he’s been waiting all these years for someone like me to appear in your life, someone who could act as an intermediary between you, fathers and sons are so awkward with each other.” And then she’d added, quite rightly and proudly: “Perhaps he’s never told you his story because he didn’t know how to or because you’ve never asked him the right questions. I’d know how to get the story out of him.” And she’d gone further, she’d said with ingenuous optimism: “Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting, one word follows another.”

Everything can be told, even what you don’t want to know about and don’t ask about and yet listen to when it is told.

To her still invisible face I said: “Yes, perhaps you should ask him.” I noticed that she noticed a touch of hesitancy in my voice and, doubtless because of that, she said: “Do you want to be there, or shall I just tell you about it later?” “I don’t know,” I said, “perhaps he wouldn’t want to talk if I was there.” Luisa touched me on the shoulder as if she could see me (she knows my shoulders, she knows my body). She replied: “If he wants to tell me I don’t think he’d hold back because of that. I’ll do it the way you want, Juan.” She called me by my name, even though she wasn’t insulting me, or angry with me, nor did it seem that she was about to leave me. Perhaps she anticipated that if she was going to have to tell me what Ranz told her, then she might have to give me some bad news. No unequivocal words left my mouth, words like “OK” or “Go ahead” or “You win” or “Go on then”, instead I said: “I don’t know, there’s no hurry, I’ll have to think about it.” “Well, let me know,” she said and withdrew her hand from my shoulder in order to go to sleep. We were literally sharing one pillow between us and that night we said nothing more.

There are two pillows on our bed, as is usual on double beds, and when I got back from Geneva, a day before Luisa was expecting me, in the middle of the afternoon, the bed was made. I arrived home tired, the way you do from airports, I opened the door and, without checking to see if there was anyone at home, I put the keys in my jacket pocket, the way Berta used to put them in her bag so as not to forget them when she went out again. When I went in, I called Luisa’s name, but no one was there. I put my suitcase and bag down for a moment and went into the bedroom, where I saw that the bed was made, then I went into the bathroom, the door was open and everything was in order, except that the shower hose hadn’t been put back and only Luisa’s dark blue towels and bathrobe were there; mine, which are pale blue like “Bill’s” bathrobe or, rather, the Plaza’s bathrobe, were still in the wardrobe, where they’d remained since I’d been away. I realized that I didn’t know exactly which wardrobe they were in, I’m still not entirely familiar with my own apartment, which has undergone various changes during my absences, although I hope there’ll be no more absences for a long time now. I went into the kitchen and saw that it was clean, Luisa is both clean and tidy, the fridge was half-full, but there was no milk, I’d have to go out later and buy some. In the sitting room there was an unfamiliar bit of furniture, a pleasant grey armchair that had meant a repositioning of the ottoman and the rocking chair that had once been my grandmother’s and, much later, the backdrop to Ranz’s original poses when he received visitors. The armchair was comfortable, I sat down in it to try it out. In the room where Luisa works when she has something to work on there was nothing to indicate that she’d been working on anything lately. (Perhaps one day it will be a child’s room.) There were no changes in the room where I work, I saw a pile of post awaiting me on my U-shaped desk, too much for me to bother looking at just then. I was about to go back into the hall when I noticed something new: on one of the walls there was a drawing I’d seen before and whose title, if it had one, would be Head of a Woman with Her Eyes Closed. I thought, “My father’s made us another gift, or else he gave it to Luisa and she’s put it in my room.” I went back to the front door and, as I always do when I get home or reach my destination, I started unpacking and putting everything away in its place, diligently, urgently, as if that operation were still part of the journey and the journey had to be concluded. I put my dirty washing in the washing machine, where I noticed there were a couple of things of Luisa’s, I presumed they were Luisa’s, I didn’t check, I just opened the door and threw mine in, without switching the machine on, there was no hurry and she might want to programme it. After a few moments, my suitcases were empty and stored away in the cupboard reserved for them, which I did know about (it’s above the closet for overcoats in the hallway) because ever since we were married I’ve always taken them out of there when I set off on my trips. I was very tired, I looked at my watch, Luisa might arrive at any moment or she might not be back for hours, it was mid-afternoon, the time in Madrid when no one is at home, no one can bear that time of day, people are seized by something close to hysteria or desperation, though they’d never admit it, people would rather do anything than stay in, they go shopping in the crowded stores, go to the chemist’s, they run unnecessary errands, window-shop, buy cigarettes, pick up the children on their way out of school, eat or drink something (even though they’re neither hungry nor thirsty) in one of the million different bars and cafés, the whole city is either out in the street or at work, everyone’s on walkabout, no one’s at home, it’s so unlike New York, where almost everyone goes home at half past five or six, or half past six, if they’ve had to check their mailbox at Kenmore or Old Chelsea Station. I went out on to the balcony, but I saw no one standing on the corner, although there were hundreds of cars about and masses of people on the move, walking back and forth, getting in one another’s way. I went into the bathroom, had a pee and cleaned my teeth. I returned to the bedroom, opened our wardrobe, hung up the jacket I was wearing, saw Luisa’s dresses hanging up on her side, immediately noticed two or three or five new dresses, instinctively kissed or brushed them with my feminine lips, rubbed my face against the scented, inert fabrics and felt the stubble on my chin rough against the smooth cloth (if I’m going out at night, I always have to shave again). I noticed that evening was coming on (it was Friday, it was March). I lay down on the bed, not intending to sleep, just to rest, so I didn’t pull the covers back (the sheets might not be new, Luisa would have planned to change them tomorrow, just before my arrival). Nor did I take off my shoes. I lay across the bed, so that my shoes hung over the edge, presenting no danger to the bedcover.

When I woke up, no light entered from outside, I mean that what light did enter was a nocturnal light, the light of neon and streetlamps, not an afternoon light. I looked at my watch but I couldn’t see it without turning on the lamp. I was about to switch on the lamp on the bedside table when I heard voices. They were coming from inside the apartment, from the living room, I thought. I was still feeling confused but not for long, my eyes soon grew accustomed to the darkness, the bedroom door was closed, I must have left it like that, a night-time habit in that room, even though it was a habit I’d been out of for eight weeks now. One of the voices was Luisa’s, she was speaking at that point, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Her tone was leisurely, confiding, even persuasive. She’d come back. I felt for my lighter in my trouser pocket and lit it in order to look at my watch, twenty past eight, almost three hours had passed since I arrived. “Luisa must have seen me sleeping and decided not to wake me up,” I thought, “she left me to wake up of my own accord.” But it was also possible that she hadn’t realized I was back. She didn’t normally come into the bedroom the minute she got home, not unless she needed to change her clothes. If she’d come in with someone else she would have gone straight to the living room, perhaps a brief visit to the bathroom, perhaps to the kitchen to pour some drinks or get some olives (I’d noticed some olives in the fridge). Although I don’t believe I had done this on purpose (I didn’t, after all, know that I’d fall asleep), I realized that there would be no sign in the house of my arrival, I’d put everything away, as I always do, including my suitcase and my bag; I’d put my overcoat underneath, in the closet intended for overcoats, a light goes on when you open the door; I hadn’t got my dressing gown out or my towels, they’d still not been put out in the bathroom, I’d dried my hands on one of Luisa’s towels; all the presents I’d brought from Switzerland were with me in the bedroom; there was only one thing, my sponge bag, which I’d taken out of my hand luggage and left on a stool in the bathroom, its contents were the only things I hadn’t returned to their respective places; I’d opened it, that’s true, but only to take out my toothbrush, not even the toothpaste, I’d used the toothpaste that was on the shelf, Luisa’s toothpaste, half used up. It might be that neither she nor her companion knew that I was there. An involuntary spy in my own house (involuntary until then that is). Now the other voice was speaking, but very low, lower than Luisa’s voice, I couldn’t even make out the tone of the voice and that unsettled me, as it had in the hotel room in Havana – which, it seems, was once the Sevilla-Biltmore, though I’m not sure – on an island. I was gripped by impatience. I knew that I’d eventually find out who was in the living room with Luisa, even if he were to leave at that very moment, I would only have to open the door, go out and see, before he was out of the door and was still waiting for the lift. But that feeling of impatience arose because I was aware that what I didn’t hear now, I never would hear, there’d be no instant replay, as there can be when you listen to a tape or watch a video and can press the rewind button, rather, any whisper not apprehended or understood there and then would be lost for ever. That’s the unfortunate thing about what happens to us and remains unrecorded, or worse still, unknown or unseen or unheard, for later, there’s no way it can be recovered. Cautiously, without making a sound, I opened the bedroom door, a strip of distant light entered through the still minimal crack and I lay down on the bed again and then I could identify the voice that was speaking, thanks to that crack, I identified the voice with a mixture of fear and relief, it was Ranz’s voice, my father’s voice, which I identified more with relief than with fear.

I have a tendency to want to understand everything, everything that people say and everything I hear, even at a distance, even if it’s in one of the innumerable languages I don’t know, even if it’s in an indistinguishable murmur or an imperceptible whisper, even if it would be better that I didn’t understand and what’s said is not intended for my ears, or is said precisely so that I won’t hear it. Once the door of my bedroom was half-open, the murmur was distinguishable, the whisper perceptible and both were in a language that I know perfectly, my own, the one in which I write and think, although I co-habit with other languages in which I also sometimes think, though never as often as I think in my own; and it was perhaps best that I should understand what the voice was saying, it was perhaps being said so that I could hear it, so that I would understand. Well, not quite; I didn’t think Luisa could have failed to notice my presence in the house (she’d have spotted something: my sponge bag, my toothbrush in its usual place, my overcoat hanging in the closet), but Ranz, Ranz might not know (if he’d gone into the bathroom the sponge bag and the toothbrush would have meant nothing to him). Perhaps Luisa had finally decided to have that talk with my father and ask him about his dead wives, about Bluebeard, Bluebeard, and leave it to chance that I should wake up and hear what he said directly or go on sleeping off my exhaustion after my trip back from Geneva and find out only indirectly and later on, through her and in other words (translated and possibly censored), or perhaps, if she so decided, I would never find out. Perhaps she’d had no intention of having that talk, not that night or rather evening, until she got home and saw my sponge bag, my toothbrush, my overcoat and then, perhaps, my sleeping figure on our bed. Perhaps she’d looked into the room and it was she, not I, who’d closed the door. It was then, when I thought about it, that I understood that that was what must have happened, because it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that the bed was not as neat as I’d found it. Someone had pulled back the sheets, blanket and bedcover on one side and had tried to pull them clumsily over me, from its outer limit as far as the weight and outline of my body permitted. It was possible I could have done this in my sleep, I thought, but it was unlikely, I dismissed the idea at once and fell to wondering when that could have happened, my being covered up, when Luisa could have opened the door and seen me lying there asleep, perhaps with my hair dishevelled, a few stray hairs lying across my forehead like fine lines sent by the future to cast a momentary shadow over me. (She hadn’t taken my shoes off, I still had them on and now they were dirtying the bedcover.) And I wondered too how long Luisa and Ranz had been there and how she’d managed to orchestrate the conversation they were having so that at the precise moment I half-opened the door and went back to lie on the bed and could hear Ranz’s words (albeit at a distance), those first words were:

“She killed herself because of something I told her. Something I told her on our honeymoon.”

My father’s voice sounded weak, but not because he was old, there was never anything of the old man about him. His voice was hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to say what he was saying, as if he were aware how easy it is to say things (it’s just a matter of starting, one word follows another), but that once words have been heard, there’s no forgetting them, you know what’s been said, as if he were remembering that.

“And you don’t want to tell me what it was,” I heard Luisa say. Her voice was cautious but natural, she didn’t overplay her persuasiveness or her delicacy or affection. She was tentative, that was all.

“Now, it isn’t a question of my not wanting to, not if you want to know,” replied Ranz, “although the truth is I’ve never told anyone, I’ve kept it to myself It all happened forty years ago, it’s almost as if it had never happened, or had happened to other people, not to me, not to Teresa, not to the other woman, as you call her. Neither they nor what happened to them has existed for a long time now, only I know what happened, I’m the only one left who remembers, and what happened seems very blurred to me now, as if one’s memory, like one’s eyes, grew tired as one got older and no longer had the strength to see clearly. There are no glasses that can compensate for a tired memory, my dear.”

I went and sat down at the foot of the bed, from which position I could, just by reaching out a hand, open the door a little more or close it. Without thinking, I remade the bed, that is I put sheets, blanket and bed covers back in their original position, I even tucked in the sheets and blanket. Everything was in order, a faint light, the door opened just a crack, the light of the night outside.

“Why did you tell her, then?” said Luisa. “You must have imagined how she might react.”

“Hardly anyone imagines anything, not when you’re young, and you’re young for much longer than you think. The whole of life seems a sham when you’re young, what happens to other people, unhappiness, calamity, crimes, it all seems utterly alien, as if it didn’t exist. Even what happens to us seems alien once it’s over. Some people are like that all their lives, eternally young, a great misfortune. We all tell stories, we talk, speak, words are cheap, and sometimes they pour out of us unrestrained. They go on pouring out of us whatever the occasion, when we’re drunk, when we’re angry, when we’re exhausted, when we’re fed up, when we’re cheerful, when we think we’re in love, when it’s not at all the right time to say them or when we’re in no position to ponder them. And we hurt people. It would be impossible not to make a mistake. It’s strange that words don’t have worse consequences than they do. Or perhaps we just don’t see it, we just think they don’t have any consequences and, in fact, the world’s in a permanent state of disaster because of what we’ve said. The whole world talks endlessly, at any given moment there are millions of conversations going on, stories, statements, remarks, gossip, confessions, they’re spoken and heard and no one can control them. No one can foresee the explosive effect they can have, or even perceive that it happens. Because, however many words there are, however cheap and insignificant they arc, very few of us are capable of ignoring them. We invest them with importance. Even if you don’t, you’ve still heard them. You can’t imagine how often I’ve thought about those words over the years, the words I said to Teresa in an uncontrollable moment of passion, I suppose, we were on our honeymoon, it was almost at an end. I could have kept silent for ever, but we believe that the more we love someone, the more secrets we should tell them, telling often seems like a gift, the greatest gift one can give, the greatest loyalty, the greatest proof of love and commitment. You’re rewarded for telling secrets. It isn’t enough just to speak, to utter fiery words that are soon extinguished or even become repetitive. Nor are they enough for the person listening. The person speaking is as insatiable as the person who listens, the person speaking wants to hold the attention of the other for ever, wants to penetrate as deeply with his tongue as he can (“the tongue as raindrop, the tongue in the ear,” I thought) and the person listening wants to be kept entertained, wants to hear and know more and more, even things that are invented or false. Perhaps Teresa didn’t or rather would have preferred not to know. But I blurted something out to her, I didn’t control myself, not enough, and then she couldn’t go on not wanting to know, she wanted to know, she had to listen.” Ranz paused for a second, he was speaking now without hesitation and his voice was louder, almost declamatory, not a murmur or a whisper, I’d have heard it even with the door closed but I kept it half-open. “She couldn’t take it. There was no divorce in those days and she would never have been prepared to ask for an annulment, she lacked all cynicism, and besides our marriage had been consummated, very much so, and long before we were married. But even if divorce or annulment had been possible, it wouldn’t have been enough either. It wasn’t just that once she knew, she couldn’t stand me, couldn’t bear to be with me for a day or a minute longer, as she said, although she did in fact stay with me for a few days longer, unable to decide what to do. It was because she’d once said something herself, a long time ago, and what she’d said then had had consequences. She could bear neither me nor herself all because of a frivolous remark she once made, not understanding that she wasn’t in the least to blame, how could she possibly be, for what I might have heard, just as I wasn’t to blame for having heard it (“An instigation is nothing but words,” I thought, “translatable, ownerless words”). After I told her, she spent a few days in a state of extreme and ever-mounting anxiety, I’ve never seen anyone in a state like that. She barely slept, she didn’t eat and she kept retching, trying to vomit, but she couldn’t, she didn’t talk to me or look at me, she barely spoke to anyone, she buried her head in the pillow, she put on a brave face in front of other people. She cried, she cried all the time during those few days. She even cried while she slept, when she managed to sleep, just for a few moments, she cried in her dreams, and would wake up at once, sweating and startled, and look at me lying next to her strangely at first and then with horror (“With her eyes fixed on me but without as yet recognizing me or knowing where she was,” I thought, “the feverish eyes of the sick person who wakes up frightened, having received no warning while they slept that they were about to waken”), she used to cover her face with the pillow, as if she didn’t want to see or hear. I tried to calm her, but she was afraid of me, she regarded me with fear or horror. Someone who doesn’t want to see or hear can’t go on living, her only escape would have been to tell someone else the story, in fact, I’m not surprised she killed herself, I didn’t foresee it, but I should have. You can’t go on living in that state, not if you’re impatient, not if you can’t wait for time to pass (“It was as if she’d lost herself and there was no abstract future at all,” I thought, “which is the only future that matters, because the present can neither taint it nor assimilate it”). Everything just evaporates in the end, but you young people don’t know that. She was very young.”

My father stopped speaking, perhaps to catch his breath or to weigh up what he’d said up until then, perhaps he realized that he’d said too much to stop now. I couldn’t tell from the voices where each of them was sitting, perhaps my father was reclining on the ottoman and Luisa on the sofa, or Luisa on the ottoman and Ranz in the new comfortable armchair that I’d tried out. Perhaps one of them was sitting in the rocking chair, I didn’t think so, at least I was sure Ranz wouldn’t be, the only reason he liked that particular piece of furniture was so that he could sit in it and strike original poses when guests were around. Since his tone was not in the least festive, I couldn’t imagine him in one of those poses now, besides he wasn’t with guests, I could imagine him, though, sitting on the edge of whatever he was sitting on, leaning forward, his feet planted on the floor, not even daring to cross his legs. He’d be looking at Luisa with those devoted eyes that flattered what they looked upon. He’d smell of a mixture of cologne, tobacco and mint, with a suggestion of alcohol and leather, like someone from the colonies. He might well be smoking.

“But what did you tell her?” said Luisa.

“If I tell you, dear child,” said Ranz, “for all I know I might be doing the same thing I did before.”

“Don’t worry,” said Luisa with courage and humour (enough courage to say it and enough humour to have thought it), “I’m not going to kill myself over something that happened forty years ago, whatever it is.”

Ranz also had enough courage and humour to laugh a little. Then he said:

“I know, I know, no one kills themselves because of the past. Besides, I don’t think you’d kill yourself over anything, even if you found out today that Juan had done something similar, the thing I told Teresa about. You’re different. The times are different, more frivolous, or perhaps harder, they can absorb anything. But maybe telling you all this is, on my part, a deliberate proof of my affection, further proof, a way of getting you to go on listening to me and enjoying my company. It may well have the opposite effect. I’m sure you won’t kill yourself, but you might not want to see me again. I’m more afraid for myself than I am for you.”

Luisa perhaps placed a hand on his arm if he was near enough or, if she stood up for a moment, on his shoulder (“The hand on the shoulder,” I thought, “and the incomprehensible whisper that persuades us”) or that’s what I would have imagined happening in a play, I had no option but to imagine since I couldn’t see, I was just listening through a crack in the door, not through a wall or across an open balcony.

“Whatever you did or said forty years ago doesn’t matter much to me and won’t make me any the less fond of you. I know you as you are now and nothing can change that. I don’t know the person you were then.”

“The person I was then,” said Ranz. “The person I was then,” he repeated, doubtless smoothing his white hair as he did so, just brushing it with his fingertips without meaning to or realizing he was doing it. “I still am the person I was then or, if not, then I’m his prolongation, his shadow, his heir, or his usurper. There’s no one else more like him than me. If I were not myself, something which I almost believe sometimes, he’d be no one and what happened wouldn’t have happened. In any case, I’m the person who most closely resembles him and all these memories must belong to someone. Those of us who don’t kill ourselves have no alternative but to carry on, although some do choose to remain where they are and stay behind with the others, looking back at the past, making a fictitious present out of what the world calls the past. And so what happened becomes instead a product of the imagination. Not for that person, but for the world. For the world, which abandons him. I’ve thought about this a lot. Do you understand what I mean?”

“You don’t strike me as being the sort of person who would have chosen to remain where they were,” Luisa said to him.

“In one way I suppose I didn’t, but in another way I did,” replied Ranz. His voice had grown quiet again. It was almost as if he were talking to himself now, not hesitantly but meditatively, the words emerged one by one, each word weighed and pondered, the way politicians speak when they make a statement that they hope to see translated and to the letter. It was almost as if he were dictating. (Only now I’m reconstructing what he said from memory, that is, in my own words, though they were first his.) “I carried on, I went on living my life as blithely as possible, and I even got married again for a third time, to Juan’s mother, Juana, who never knew anything about all this and was generous enough not to pester me with questions about her sister’s death which she witnessed, which was so inexplicable to everyone and which I couldn’t explain to her. Perhaps she sensed that if there was anything to know and I hadn’t told her, it would be better not to. I loved Juana very much but not the way I loved Teresa. I loved Juana more cautiously, more considerately, less insistently, more thoughtfully, if you can say that, more passively. But even though I did carry on, I know that at the same time I also stopped still on the day Teresa killed herself. On that day, and not on another day that took place before that, it’s odd how the things that happen to other people without our direct intervention seem more important, seem so much more important than the things we do or commit ourselves. Well, that’s not always the case, only sometimes. It depends, I suppose.”

I lit a cigarette and felt for the ashtray on the bedside table. There it was, on Luisa’s side, luckily she still smoked, we both smoked in bed while we talked or read or after making love, before going to sleep. Before going to sleep we always used to open the window even if it was cold, just to air the room for a few moments. We were in agreement on that, in our shared home in which I was now a spy, no doubt with her consent. Perhaps when we opened the window we could be seen from the corner by someone looking up from below.

“What other day?” asked Luisa.

Ranz fell silent, for too long for the pause to be natural. I imagined his hands holding a cigarette, the smoke from which he wouldn’t inhale, or else folded and in repose, those large hands which, though lined, were still unmarked by age spots, I imagined him looking at Luisa opposite him, with those eyes that were like large drops of whisky or vinegar, regarding her with grief and with fear, those two very similar emotions according to Clerk or Lewis, or perhaps with the foolish smile and the fixed gaze of someone looking up, raising his head like an animal, on hearing the sound of a barrel organ or the swooping whistle of the knife-grinder, and wondering for a moment if the knives in the house are as sharp as they should be or if he should run down to the street with them, making a pause in his labours or his indolence to remember and to think about knife-blades, or perhaps become suddenly absorbed in his own secrets, the secrets he has kept and the secrets he suspects, those he knows about and those he doesn’t. And then, when he looks up to listen to the mechanical music or to a repeated whistle that comes advancing down the street, his gaze grows melancholy as it falls upon the portraits of those who are absent.

“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” I heard Luisa say.

“The other day,” said Ranz, “the other day was the day on which I killed my first wife in order to be with Teresa.”

“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” I heard Luisa repeating and repeating, and that repetition, when she’d heard what there was to be told, was her civilized way of expressing her shock, mine too, perhaps her regret at having asked in the first place. I wondered if I should shut my door, close the crack so that everything would again become an indistinguishable murmur, an imperceptible whisper, but it was too late, for me too, I’d heard it, we’d heard what Teresa Aguilera had heard on her honeymoon, at the end of her honeymoon, forty years ago, perhaps less. Now Luisa was saying: “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” perhaps for my sake, too late, women feel an unalloyed curiosity about things and never imagine or anticipate the nature of the thing about which they know nothing, of what might come to light, of what might happen, they don’t know that actions happen singly or that they can be set in train by a single word. The act of telling had already been set in train, it was just a matter of starting, of one word following the other. “Ranz referred to ‘my first wife’,” I thought, “rather than saying her name, and he said it out of consideration for Luisa, because if she’d heard that name (Gloria or perhaps Miriam or Nieves or even Berta), she wouldn’t have known who he was talking about, not with any certainty at least, nor would I, although I imagine we would have guessed. That means that Ranz is engaged in telling the story, not just talking to himself, as might happen in a while, if he goes on remembering and telling. But what he’s said up until now has been said with the consciousness that he’s saying it to someone else, to a particular audience, that he’s telling a story and being listened to.”

“No, you have to let me tell you now,” I heard my father say, “just as I had to tell Teresa. It wasn’t like now, but it wasn’t that different either, I uttered a few words and with those words I told her all there was to know, but then I had to tell her the rest, I had to tell her more in order to make up for that initial sentence, absurd I know, but don’t worry, I won’t go into too much detail. I’ve told you now, told you all there is to know, I’ve told you in cold blood, then it was in the heat of the moment, you know how it is, you say passionate things and grow still more passionate, you love someone so much and feel so loved that sometimes you don’t know what else to do. In certain circumstances, on certain nights, you become a visionary, a savage, you say the most extravagant things to the person you love. Then it’s forgotten, it’s just a game, but, of course, an actual event can’t be forgotten. We were in Toulouse, we went to Paris for our honeymoon then went south. We were in a hotel, on the penultimate night of our trip, we were in bed, and I’d said a lot of things to Teresa, you say all kinds of things on such occasions precisely because you do feel so unthreatened and I’d run out of things to say, yet I still needed to say more, I told her what so many other lovers have said without suffering any very dire consequences, I said: ‘I love you so much I would even kill for you.’ She laughed and said: ‘Don’t be silly.’ But at that moment I couldn’t laugh, it was one of those moments when you love the other person with such utter seriousness, there can be no joking. I didn’t hesitate then and I said the words: ‘I already have,’ I said. ‘I already have’.” (“I have done the deed,” I thought in English, or perhaps I thought, “It was me” or else I thought it in my own language, “I have done the deed and I have committed the act, the act is both deed and exploit, which is why, sooner or later, it has to be told, I have killed for you and that is my exploit and telling you now is my gift to you, and you will love me even more knowing what I have done, even though knowing it stains your heart so white.”)

Ranz fell silent again, and this time the pause seemed to me a rhetorical one, as if once he’d begun to tell the untellable he wanted to control how his tale was told.

“Seriousness has a lot to answer for,” he added after a few seconds, in a very serious voice. “I’ve avoided it ever since, or at least I’ve tried to.”

I put out my cigarette and lit another, I looked at my watch without taking in what time it was. I’d travelled and I’d slept and now I was listening as I’d listened to Guillermo and Miriam, I’d been sitting at the foot of the bed then too, or rather as Luisa had listened to them, lying down, pretending to be asleep, without my being sure that she could hear them. Now she was the one who didn’t know whether or not I was listening, whether or not I was lying down and asleep.

“Who was she?” she asked my father. Once she’d got over her shock and any instinctive feeling of regret, she too was prepared to know everything, more or less, once she knew and could not unhear the words (“Listening is the most dangerous thing of all,” I thought, “listening means knowing, finding out, knowing everything there is to know, ears don’t have lids that can close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late. Now we know and it may well stain our hearts so white, or are our hearts merely pale or fearful or cowardly?”)

“She was a Cuban girl from Havana,” said Ranz, “where I’d been posted and where I spent two idle years, Villalobos has a better memory than he thinks (“They’ve been talking about the professor,” I thought, “so my father knows that I already know what Villalobos knows”). But I’d rather not say too much about her, if you don’t mind, I’ve more or less managed to forget what she was like, she’s just a shadowy figure now, that whole period is, we weren’t married very long, only a year, and I have a tired and weary memory. I married her when I no longer loved her, if I ever did. You do these things out of a sense of responsibility or duty, out of momentary weakness, some marriages are the objects of pacts, agreements, a formal announcement is made, and they thus become logical and irrevocable, and that’s why they take place. It was she who obliged me to love her at first, then she wanted to get married and I didn’t put up any opposition, her mother, well mothers always want their daughters to marry, or they did then (“Everyone obliges everyone else,” I thought “and if they didn’t the world would grind to a halt, we’d all just float around in a state of global vacillation and carry on like that indefinitely. All people want to do is to sleep, the thought of future regrets would simply paralyse us”). The wedding took place in the chapel at the embassy where I worked, a Spanish ceremony not a Cuban one, a bad move on my part, but it was what she and her mother wanted, on purpose perhaps, if we’d got married under Cuban law we could have got divorced when I met Teresa, they had divorce there, although I don’t think Teresa would have agreed, and I’m sure her mother wouldn’t have, she was very religious.” Ranz paused to catch his breath and added in his usual mocking voice, the one I was most familiar with: “The religious mothers and mothers-in-law of the middle classes are the real ties that bind. I suppose I got married in order not to be alone, I don’t exempt myself from blame, I didn’t know how much longer I was going to stay in Havana, I was wondering whether I should do something in diplomacy, I hadn’t even finished my degree then. I abandoned the idea though and never pursued it and instead went back to my art studies, I’d got the job in the embassy through family connections and string-pulling, just to see if I liked it, I was a bit of a n’er-do-well until I met Teresa, or rather until I married Juana.” He used the expression “n’er-do-well” and I felt sure that, despite the serious nature of what he was talking about, it would have amused him to use that old-fashioned term, just as it had amused him to call me a “Lothario” on the day of my wedding, during the reception, while Luisa was talking to an old boyfriend whom I dislike and to others – possibly to Custardoy, yes, Custardoy, I hardly saw him at the reception, only from a distance, watching with avid eyes – and I found myself separated from her for a few moments by my father, who led me into a room in order to ask me: “Now what?” And after a while, to say to me what he really wanted to say: “If you ever do have any secrets or if you already have, don’t tell her.” Now he was telling his and telling Luisa, perhaps to prevent me from telling her mine (what secrets do I have? perhaps the one about Berta which isn’t mine, perhaps about my suspicions, perhaps about Nieves, the former object of my love in the stationer’s shop) or so that she would be the one to tell me her secrets (what secrets does she have? I don’t know, if I did, they wouldn’t be secrets). “Perhaps Ranz is telling us the secret he’s kept for all these years, so that we don’t tell each other ours,” I thought, “past, present and future secrets, or so that we do our best not to have any. Nevertheless, today I have, in fact, returned home in secret, without warning, or rather letting her think that I’d be back tomorrow and now Luisa is keeping her secret from Ranz, the secret that I’m here, lying down or sitting at the foot of the bed, perhaps listening, she must have seen me, if she didn’t, how else explain the bedcovers and the blanket and the sheets pulled up to cover me?”

“Could I have a drop more whisky, do you think?” I heard my father say. So Ranz was drinking whisky, which is the colour of his eyes when the light shines on them, except now they’ll be in shadow. I heard the sound of ice falling into one glass and then another and then the sound of the whisky and then the water. When it’s mixed with water, the colour isn’t quite so similar. Perhaps the olives from the fridge were on the low table in our living room, it was one of the first pieces of furniture we bought together, and one of the few that hadn’t changed position in all that time, not since our wedding, barely a year ago now. I suddenly felt hungry, I would have been glad of those olives, especially if they were stuffed olives. My father added: “Then we’ll go out to supper, eh? Regardless of what I tell you, just as we planned. Besides, there isn’t much more to tell.”

“Of course we’ll go out to supper,” Luisa said. “I always honour my engagements.” That was true, she always has and she still does. She might take a while to say yes, but once she’s decided she doesn’t go back on her word. She’s very good like that. “What happened next?” she said, which is the question children always ask, even when the story’s over.

I could hear the click of Ranz’s lighter (the ear becomes accustomed to hearing everything from wherever it happens to be), so before, he probably had his hands folded and in repose.

“I happened to meet Teresa and Juana with their Cuban mother, who’d spent almost her whole life in Spain. They were visiting Havana to sort out something to do with legacies and sales, one of their mother’s aunts had died, I’m amazed that Villalobos should have remembered so much, I’d never have thought it (I thought: “Luisa must have said to him ‘Villalobos has told us this and this, is there any truth in it?’”). We loved each other almost from the start, I was married, we saw each other a few times in secret, but it was all very sad, it made her sad, she couldn’t see any possible solution, and the fact that she couldn’t made me sad too, sadder than the certain fact that there was no solution. We didn’t see each other often, but often enough, in the afternoons when the two sisters used to go out for a walk together and then go their separate ways, I don’t know what Juana got up to and Juana didn’t know what Teresa got up to, Teresa and I spent the afternoons in a hotel room and when darkness fell (the night told us what time it was), she’d meet up with Juana again and the two of them would go back and have supper with their mother. The last time we met, we were like two people saying goodbye for ever, it was absurd, we were young, we weren’t ill, there was no war. She was going back to Spain the next day, after a stay of three months in the house in Havana belonging to the great-aunt who’d died. I told her that I wasn’t going to stay there for ever, that I’d return to Madrid at once, that we had to go on seeing each other. She didn’t want that, she preferred to use that enforced separation in order to forget about it all, about me, about my first wife, whom she did, in fact, know slightly. She liked her, I remember that. I insisted I talked of separating from my wife. ‘We still wouldn’t be able to marry,’ she said, ‘it’s just not possible.’ She was as conventional as the times she lived in, even though it was only forty years ago, there were thousands of stories like ours, except that most people are all talk and no action. Well, some aren’t (“The worst thing is that he won’t do anything,” I thought, that’s what Luisa had said about Guillermo one night, in a rather peevish voice, her chest damp with sweat, her skin slightly shiny, the two of us in bed). And then she said the words which I heard and which later meant she couldn’t live with herself (“Translatable, ownerless words that are passed from voice to voice, from language to language and from century to century,” I thought, “always the same, always provoking people to the same act for as long as there have been people and languages and ears in the world to hear them. But the person who says them cannot live with themselves if they see those words acted upon”). I remember that we were both fully clothed, lying on the rented bed with our shoes on (“Perhaps her feet were dirty,” I thought, “since nobody was going to see them”), we didn’t get undressed that afternoon, neither of us felt like it. ‘Our one possibility is if she should die,’ she said to me, ‘and we can’t rely on that.’ I remember that when she said it, she placed her hand on my shoulder and her mouth close to my ear. She didn’t whisper it to me, she didn’t mean to make it sound like an insinuation, placing her hand on my shoulder and her lips close to my ear was a way of consoling or calming me, I’m sure of that, I’ve often thought about the way she spoke those words, although there was a time when I took them to mean something quite different. It was an expression of renunciation, not of inducement, they were the words of someone withdrawing, giving up. Afterwards she kissed me, very gently. She was withdrawing from the field.” (“The tongue in the ear is always the most persuasive of kisses,” I thought, “the tongue that probes and disarms, whispers and kisses, that almost obliges”). Ranz broke off again, his voice had lost all trace of irony or mockery now, it was almost unrecognizable, but there was nothing saw-like about it. “Then, when I told her what I’d done and I repeated those words to her, she didn’t even remember saying them at first, then when she did remember and understand, she claimed she’d said them lightly, without thinking, giving expression to a thought that was in both our minds, it was obvious, a bald statement of fact with no hidden meaning, just as if you were to say to me now: ‘It’s time we were thinking about supper.’ I didn’t pay much attention to her words at the time either, it wasn’t until much later that I went over them in my mind, when Teresa had left and I missed her so much I could hardly bear it, our one possibility is if she should die, and we can’t rely on that. It was my wretched brain that insisted on reading more into it. (“Don’t think too much about things, father,” I thought, “don’t think about things with so brainsickly a brain. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures, father. These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so, it will make us mad”). She only remembered what she’d said when I reminded her of it, and that caused her even more torment. If only I’d said nothing to her (“She hears his confession of that act or deed or exploit and what makes her an accomplice is not that she instigated it, but that she knew about the deed and its accomplishment. She knows, she knows what happened and therein lies her guilt, but she was still not the person who committed the crime, however much she may regret it or claim to regret it, staining her hands with the blood of the dead is a game, a pretence, a false alliance she makes with the person who did the killing, because you cannot kill someone twice, and the deed is done; ‘I have done the deed’ and there is never any doubt about who that ‘I’ is. She is guilty only of having heard the words, which is unavoidable, and although the law doesn’t exonerate the person who spoke, the person who speaks, that person knows that, in fact, she’s done nothing, even if she did oblige the other person with her tongue at their ear, her chest pressed against their back, her troubled breathing, her hand on their shoulder, with her incomprehensible but persuasive whisper”). Nothing.”

“What did you do? Did you tell her everything?” Luisa asked. Luisa was only asking what had to be asked.

“Yes, I told her everything,” said Ranz “but I’m not going to tell you, not what I did exactly, not the details, how I killed her, you can’t forget that kind of thing and I’d rather you didn’t have to remember it, nor would I want you to remind me of it in the future, which is what would happen if I told you.”

“But what explanation was given for her death? No one knew the true one, surely you can tell me that,” said Luisa. I felt afraid, she was only asking what had to be asked, as she would do with me if ever she had to ask me.

I heard the clink of ice, this time against the side of a glass. Ranz would be thinking with his brainsickly brain, or perhaps his brain hadn’t been brainsickly for decades now. Perhaps he would be smoothing, just touching, his talcum-white hair. Perhaps he would be wearing that look of momentary defencelessness I’d once seen on his face. That day was beginning to seem very far off.

“Yes, I can tell you, and Villalobos was right about that too,” he said at last. “He must be one of the few people alive who still remembers anything about it. Apart, of course, from Teresa and Juana’s brothers, they’ll remember it if they’re still alive, as did Juana herself and her mother. But it’s been years since I had anything to do with my two brothers-in-law, my brothers-in-law twice over, after Teresa died they didn’t want to have anything more to do with me or with Juana, not that they ever said that in so many words: Juan, for example, barely knew them at all. Only her mother, Juan’s grandmother, continued to treat me as one of the family, more in order to protect her daughter than for any other reason, to watch over Juana and not to abandon her to her marriage, to what I imagine she considered to be her dangerous marriage to me. I don’t blame her, when Teresa died they all suspected that I was in part to blame, that I was hiding something and yet, on the other hand, no one suspected anything about the other death. You see life doesn’t depend on events, on what you do, but on what people know about you, what people know you’ve done. I’ve led a normal, even a pleasant life since then, those of us who can, can survive almost anything: I’ve made quite a bit of money, I have a son I’m very proud of, I loved Juana and I never made her unhappy, I’ve worked in the field that most attracted me, I’ve made friends and owned some good paintings. I’ve had fun. All of that was possible because, apart from Teresa, no one knew anything. What I did was done, but the big difference about what happened afterwards is not whether I did or didn’t do it, but the fact that no one knew about it. That it was a secret. What kind of life would I have had if people had known? I might not have had a life at all.”

“So how was her death explained? Was there a fire?” insisted Luisa, who refused to let my father stray too far from the subject. I lit another cigarette from the cigarette I was still smoking, I was thirsty, it would have been nice to be able to clean my teeth, I couldn’t get to the bathroom despite being in my own home, I was there secretly, my mouth felt as if it had been anaesthetized, perhaps by sleep, perhaps by the tension of the journey, perhaps because for some time my jaws had been clenched tight. When I realized what I was doing, I unclenched them for a moment.

“Yes, there was a fire,” he said. “We were living in a small two-storey chalet, in a residential area some way from the centre, she was in the habit of smoking in bed before going to sleep, I was, too, to tell the truth. I went out to supper with some Spanish businessmen I had to entertain, i.e., take them out drinking. She’d probably been smoking in bed and she fell asleep, perhaps she’d had a bit to drink in order to get to sleep, she used to do that towards the end, perhaps that night she drank too much. The cigarette set light to the sheet, it was perhaps slow to take at first, but she didn’t wake up or only when it was too late, we never asked whether or not she’d died of asphyxiation before being burned, people in Havana often sleep with the windows closed. What did it matter? The fire didn’t destroy the whole house, the neighbours intervened in time, I didn’t get back until they found me and told me, much later on. I’d got drunk with the businessmen. But there was time enough for the fire to consume our bedroom, all her clothes, all mine, the clothes I’d given her. There was no investigation, no autopsy, it was an accident. She was burned to ashes. Nobody bothered to investigate further and I didn’t pursue the matter. Her mother, my mother-in-law, was too devastated to think about other possibilities.” He was speaking rapidly now, as if he were in a hurry to finish the story, or that part of the story. “Anyway, they weren’t influential people,” he added, “middle-class, with not much money, a widow and her daughter. I, on the other hand, had good connections and, if I’d had to, I could have put a stop to any investigation or dispelled any suspicions. But there was no need for that. I took a calculated risk and it worked. That was the explanation, bad luck,” said Ranz. “Bad luck,” he repeated, “we’d been married for a year.”

“And what was the truth?” said Luisa.

“The truth was that she was dead when I left to go drinking,” my father replied. His voice again dropped when he said that, so much so that I had to strain to hear him as if the door was closed when it was, in fact, half-open, I pressed my ear to the crack in order not to miss what he said. “Towards evening we had an argument,” he said, “when I got back home after various dealings in the city that had taken up the whole day, those businessmen again. I came back in a bad mood and she was in an even worse one, she’d been drinking, we’d barely touched each other for two months, or rather I hadn’t touched her. I was withdrawn and distant since I’d met Teresa, and more so since her departure, any sense of pity I might have felt was fast being replaced by resentment (“He avoids saying her name,” I thought, “because he has no reason to insult her now, nor can he get angry with or abandon a dead woman who has no reality for anyone else, apart from her mother, mamita, mamita, who didn’t know how to keep guard or watch over her, she lyin’, mother-in-law”). I felt that uncontrollable irritation you feel when you stop loving someone who continues to love you despite everything and won’t give up, we always want everything to end when we choose to end it. The more distant I became, the more clinging she was, the more she hassled me, the more she bothered me (“You won’t get away from me,” I thought, “come here, you’re mine, you owe me, I’ll see you in hell, perhaps accompanied by that same grasping gesture, a lion’s claw, a claw”). I felt fed up and impatient, I wanted to break that link and go back to Spain, to go back on my own (“I don’t trust you no more,” I thought, “you got to get me out of here, I never been to Spain, you one real bastard, I’m gonna get you, I kill you”). We argued for a bit. It wasn’t a proper argument, just the exchange of a few harsh words, insult and riposte, insult and riposte, and she went into the bedroom, threw herself down on the bed with the lights out and cried, leaving the door open so that I’d be able to see or hear her, she was crying for my benefit. I listened to her sobbing from the living room while I killed time before going out again to meet the businessmen, I’d promised them I’d take them out drinking. Then she stopped and I heard her singing to herself abstractedly (“The prelude to sleep and the expression of weariness,” I thought, “the song, more intermittent, more disparate, which you can still hear at night in the bedrooms of those more fortunate women, who are not yet grandmothers or widows or spinsters, a quieter, sweeter, more resigned song”), then she fell silent and when it was time I went into our bedroom to get changed and I saw that she was asleep, she’d fallen asleep after our quarrel and her crying because, whether feigned or not, nothing is as exhausting as grief. The balcony door was open, I could hear the voices of the neighbours and their children in the distance before supper, as evening was falling. I opened the wardrobe and I changed my shirt, I threw the dirty one over the chair and I was still buttoning up the clean one when the idea came to me. I’d thought about it before, but then I thought about it as something that could happen, do you know what I mean, something that could happen at that precise moment. It’s odd the way sometimes a thought comes to us with such force and clarity that nothing can stand between it and its execution. You think of a possibility and it ceases to be just a possibility, you act on what you think and it becomes a thing accomplished, there’s no transitional stage, no mediation, no negotiation, no thinking it over, you may not even be quite sure you want to do it, such actions are committed singly.” (“The same actions that no one is ever sure they want to see carried out,” I thought, “actions are always involuntary, no longer dependent on words once they’ve been carried out, rather they sweep them away and remain cut off from any before or after, isolated and irreversible, whilst words can be reiterated and retracted, repeated and rectified, words can be denied and we can deny we said them, words can be twisted and forgotten”). Ranz was doubtless looking at Luisa with his fervent, liquid eyes, or perhaps he was looking down. “There she was in her underwear, in her bra and pants, she’d taken off her dress and got into bed as if she were ill, the sheets were pulled up as far as her waist, she’d been drinking alone and had shouted at me, then cried and sung herself to sleep. There wasn’t much difference between her and a dead person, or between her and a painting, except that the next morning she would wake up and would turn her head, which was now resting on the pillow (“She’d turn her head and no longer show the pretty back of her neck,” I thought, “perhaps, like Nieves’, it was the only thing that had remained unchanged about her with the passing of time; she’d turn her head, unlike the young serving girl offering poison to Sophonisba or ashes to Artemisa, and because that serving girl would never turn her head and her mistress would never pick up the goblet and never raise it to her lips, the museum guard Mateu would have burned them both with his lighter, along with the blurred head of the old woman in the background, a flame, a mother, a mother-in-law, a fire”). If she turned her face towards me she would never let me leave her or go in search of Teresa, whom she never found out about, she didn’t know why she died, she didn’t know she was going to die. I remember noticing that her bra was cutting into her because of the position she was lying in and for a moment I thought of loosening it so that it wouldn’t leave a mark. And I was just about to do that when the idea came to me and so I didn’t. It came to me with no time for me to imagine its consequences, which is why I could do it (“Using one’s imagination avoids many misfortunes,” I thought, “the person who anticipates his own death rarely kills himself, the person who anticipates that of others rarely murders, it’s better just to think about murdering someone or killing yourself, there are no consequences, it leaves no traces, even the distant gesture made with a grasping arm, it’s all a question of distance and time, if it’s a little too far away, the knife stabs the air instead of someone’s chest, it doesn’t plunge into dark or pale flesh but through empty air and nothing happens, its passage isn’t recorded or registered and so remains unknown, you can’t be punished for intentions, failed attacks are often not even spoken of, they’re even denied by the intended victims, because everything goes on as before, the air is the same, there’s no wound to the skin, there’s no change in the flesh, no tear, the pillow pressed down on no one’s face is inoffensive and afterwards everything is the same as before because the mere accumulation of events and the blow that strikes no one and the attempt at suffocation that suffocates no one are not enough in themselves to change things or relationships, neither is repetition or insistence or a frustrated attack or a threat”). I killed her while she was asleep, while she had her back to me (“Ranz has murdered Sleep,” I thought, “the innocent Sleep, and yet it’s always the chest of the other person we lean back against for support, we only feel truly supported or backed up when there’s someone behind us, someone we perhaps cannot even see and who covers our back with their chest, so close it almost brushes our back and in the end always does; and in the middle of the night when we wake up startled from a nightmare or are unable to get to sleep, when we have a fever or feel we are alone and abandoned in the darkness, we have only to turn round and see before us the face of the person protecting us, the person who will let themselves be kissed on any part of the face that is kissable (nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks; and ears, the whole face) or perhaps, half-asleep, will place a hand on our shoulder to calm us, or to hold us, or even to cling to us”). I won’t tell you how, don’t make me tell you that.” (“Clear off,” I thought, “I’ll get you, I kill you, my father thinks for a moment and acts, but perhaps he has to stop for a moment to consider if the knives are as sharp as they should be, he looks at the bra cutting into her flesh and looks up then to remember and think about knife-blades which, this time, will not strike the air or a breast, but someone’s back, it’s all a question of distance and time, or perhaps it’s his large hand that grips her pretty neck and squeezes and crushes it, and it’s true that there’s no face beneath the pillow, for the face that will never turn again is lying on the pillow; her feet kick on the bed, her bare feet, doubtless very clean because she’s at home or because you never know when the person you’ve been waiting for might arrive or, if you’re married, the person who might see them and caress them, the person she’s been waiting for, for so long; maybe she flails her arms about and, when she raises them, reveals her armpits shaved for the returning husband who no longer touches her, ever, but she won’t be worried that some crease might be spoiling the line of her skirt at the rear, because she’s dying and she’s taken off her skirt and it’s draped over the chair where my father left his dirty shirt, he’s got a clean shirt on now, not yet buttoned up, they’ll burn together, the dirty shirt and the ironed skirt, and perhaps Gloria or Miriam or Nieves, or perhaps Berta or Luisa, does manage to turn over and turn her face in one last effort, just for an instant, and with her myopic, inoffensive eyes she sees the hairy triangle of chest belonging to Ranz, my father, hairy like “Bill’s” chest and like mine, the triangle of chest that protects and supports us, perhaps Gloria’s long hair, dishevelled by sleep or fear or grief, would have clung to her forehead and some stray hairs would lie across her forehead like fine lines sent by the future to cast a momentary shadow over her, over her last moments, because that future, be it concrete or abstract, will never come about, not for her. And yet, in that final moment, the flesh changes or the skin opens or something tears”). “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” Luisa said. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” she repeated and it seemed to me then that she was almost imploring him not to tell her.

“No, I won’t tell you, I don’t want to tell you. Then I buttoned up my shirt and I went out on to the balcony, no one was there. I closed the balcony doors, went to the wardrobe, where her inert, scented clothes were hanging, and put on my jacket and tie, I was very late by then. I lit a cigarette, I didn’t understand what I’d done although I knew that I’d done it, sometimes those are two different things. Even now, I don’t understand it even though I know I did it, just as I did then. If it wasn’t me then it wasn’t anyone and she could never have existed, it was a long time ago and one’s memory grows as weary as one’s eyes do. I sat down at the foot of the bed, I was drenched in sweat and exhausted, my eyes ached as if I hadn’t slept for several nights, I remember that, the pain in my eyes, then I thought and I acted, I thought again and at the same time I acted. I left the lit cigarette on the sheet, I watched it, saw how it burned, I flicked the burning ash off the end, though without putting it out. I lit another one, took three or four puffs at it and left that on the sheet too. I did the same with the third, knocking the ash off all of them, so that the cigarettes were burning and the scattered embers were burning too, three plus three equals six, all burning on the sheet. I watched as holes fringed with red began to open up (“And I watched for a few seconds,” I thought, “watched how the circle grew and widened, a stain that was at once black and fiery, consuming the sheet”), I think.” My father stopped, as if he hadn’t quite finished his last sentence. You could hear nothing, only, for a moment, his harsh, troubled breathing, that of an old man. Then he went on: “I closed the bedroom door and I went out into the street and before getting into the car, I turned and looked back at the house from the corner, everything was normal, it was night, night had fallen and there was no smoke as yet (“Nor would anyone notice anything up there,” I thought, “at the balcony or the window, even if you stood opposite them like Miriam when she was waiting, or like a gypsy woman with a plait and an old organ-grinder on their pitch, or like “Bill” first and then myself later outside Berta’s house, both of us waiting for the other one to leave or like Custardoy beneath my own window one night of silvery rain”). But that was a long time ago,” said Ranz, his voice a shadow of his normal voice, of his more usual voice. I thought I heard the click of a lighter and a tinkling sound, perhaps he’d picked up an olive and Luisa had lit a cigarette. “And besides these are not things one talks about.”

For a while there was silence, Luisa wasn’t saying anything now and I could imagine that Ranz would be waiting tensely, his hands folded and in repose, perhaps sitting on the sofa or reclining on the ottoman or in the nice, new grey armchair which he may have helped her to choose. But not, I thought, in the rocking chair, not in the rocking chair in which my Cuban grandmother used to sit and think about her own daughters, one living, one dead, both married, and perhaps about the dead, married daughter of another Cuban mother, when I was a child and she used to sing “Mamita mamita, yen yen yen” in order to fill me with a fear that was both transitory and tinged with humour, a very female fear, the fear of daughters and mothers and wives and mothers-in-law and grandmothers and nannies. Perhaps Ranz was afraid that Luisa, his daughter-in-law, might make some gesture to him that meant “Go away” or, rather, “Clear off”. But what Luisa said in the end was this:

“It’s time we were thinking about supper, if you’re hungry that is.”

Ranz’s heavy, troubled breathing ceased and I heard him respond with what I thought to be relief:

“I’m not sure I’m that hungry. If you like, we can walk as far as Alkalde and if we feel hungry when we get there we’ll go in, if not, I’ll walk you back and we can go to our separate apartments. I hope we sleep all right tonight.”

I heard them stand up and heard Luisa tidying up some of the things she’d placed on the coffee table, one of the few pieces of furniture that we’d bought together. I heard her walk to the kitchen and back and I thought: “Now she’ll have to come in here to change her clothes or to pick up something. I’d love to see her. When they’ve gone I can clean my teeth and have a drink of water and there might still be some olives left.”

My father, who probably had his raincoat on already or, rather, draped over his shoulders, had reached the front door and was opening it.

“Are you ready?” he asked Luisa.

“I won’t be a second,” she replied. “I’m just going to get a scarf.”

I heard her high heels approaching, I knew her steps well, they echoed on the wooden floor much more discreetly than “Bill’s” metal-tipped shoes on the marble floor or Custardoy’s anywhere, any time. They didn’t limp, even when she was barefoot. They wouldn’t clamber wearily up a ladder in search of some unknown make of ink cartridges, nor would they dig into the pavement like knives, they wouldn’t swiftly, angrily drag their sharp heels, they’d never be like spurs, like axe blows. Not if I had anything to do with it, or so I hoped, hers were fortunate footsteps. Through the crack I saw her hand on the doorhandle. She was about to come in, I would see her. I hadn’t seen her for about three weeks, and I hadn’t seen her there in our home, in our bedroom, on our pillow, for almost eight. But before pushing the door open she called to Ranz down the corridor, he’d still be in the hallway, waiting for the lift, his raincoat over his shoulders:

“Juan arrives tomorrow. Do you want me to tell him or would you rather I didn’t?”

Ranz’s reply was quick in coming, but the words emerged slowly, wearily, his voice sounding rusty and hoarse as if he were speaking through a helmet.

“I’d be very grateful,” he said, “I’d be very grateful if you saved me the trouble of thinking about that, I don’t know what’s for the best. Would you mind very much deciding for me?”

“No problem,” said Luisa and pushed open the door. She didn’t put on the light until she’d closed it again. She must have noticed at once the smell of the smoke from my cigarettes. I didn’t stand up, we didn’t kiss, it was still as if we hadn’t seen each other, as if I hadn’t yet arrived. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, smiling, she opened our wardrobe and took out the Hermes scarf I’d bought her on a previous trip, before we were married. She smelled good, a new perfume, not the Trussardi I’d given her. She looked tired, as if her eyes hurt, Ranz’s eyes, she looked pretty. She put the scarf round her neck and said to me:

“So now you see.”

And I realized at once that those were the very words Berta had said to me when she came into the room in her dressing gown and I saw her reflected behind me in the dark glass of the TV screen after I’d finished watching the video that she’d already watched several times and would go on watching and is perhaps still watching today. That’s why, I suppose, I replied as I had then. I got up. I placed a hand on Luisa’s shoulder.

“Yes,” I said, “I see.”

MY UNEASE has dissipated somewhat and my presentiments of disaster have grown less disastrous and, although I’m still not capable of imagining, as I once was, an abstract future, I can once again allow myself to think vague thoughts, to let my thoughts drift over what will or might happen, to wonder without too much exactitude or intensity what will happen to us tomorrow or in five or forty years’ time, to wonder about things we cannot foresee. I know, or rather believe, that I won’t understand for a long time what may have taken place or may take place between Luisa and myself, or perhaps I never will know, but my descendants will, assuming we have any, or someone unknown to us will, someone who doesn’t even know us, someone who perhaps hasn’t yet entered this longed-for world, being born depends on a movement, a gesture, a phrase spoken at the other end of the world. To ask or to remain silent, either is possible, remaining silent like Juana Aguilera or asking and demanding like her sister Teresa, or doing neither one thing nor the other, like the first wife whom I’ve christened Gloria, who might almost never have existed or who existed only minimally, for her match-making mother, the mother-in-law, who by now will have died of heartbreak in Cuba, a widow with no daughter, the serpent swallowed her, I know of no parental equivalent for “orphan” in any of the languages I speak. Besides, very soon she will cease to exist at all, when Ranz’s time comes and Luisa and I can remember only what has happened to us and what we’ve done and not what others have told us or what has happened to other people or what others have done (when our hearts are no longer quite so white). Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, that everything happened and at the same time didn’t, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences gradually cancels itself out, negates itself in its apparent repetitiveness until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable. Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. There’s no such thing as a whole or perhaps there never was anything. But it’s also true that there is a time for everything and that it’s all there, waiting for us to call it back, as Luisa said.

Now, like her, I’m considering new jobs, it seems that we’ve both grown tired of making those trips of eight weeks or sometimes less, which are exhausting and which alienate us a little from each other. I’ll have no problem finding work, with my four languages and a smattering of Catalan, which I’m learning in order to ingratiate myself, since one of my employment possibilities would involve frequent phone calls to Barcelona. And a lot of people are under the impression that I have important contacts in international organizations and that I have dealings with leading politicians. I’m not going to disabuse them, even though they’re quite mistaken. Nevertheless, I don’t much like the idea of staying in Madrid all the time either, coming in and going out with Luisa instead of going to see her or receiving her, with a few rooms and a lift and a front door that now belong to both of us, with one pillow (that’s just a manner of speaking, there are always two) for which we sometimes find ourselves obliged to battle in our sleep and from which we are becoming accustomed, like invalids, to seeing the world; our feet no longer hesitate outside on the damp pavement, they don’t deliberate or change their minds, there’s no room for regret or even choice: there’s no doubt now when we leave the cinema or a restaurant that we’re both heading towards the same place, in the same direction down the half-empty, hosed-down streets, whether we want to or not that particular night, or perhaps it was only last night that she didn’t want to. At least that’s how it seemed to me for a moment, but we nevertheless walked on. I suppose, though, that when our steps head off together towards that same place (the echoes out of time with each other, because now there are four feet walking), we’re both principally thinking about one another, at least I am. I think, though, that we wouldn’t exchange each other for anything in this longed-for world, we’ve still not demanded any act of mutual suppression or obliteration of the person each of us was and with whom we fell in love, we’ve merely changed status, and that no longer seems so serious or incalculable: I can now say we went or we’re going to buy a piano or we’re going to have a baby or we’ve got a cat.

Some days ago I talked to Berta, she phoned, and when she phones it’s usually because she’s feeling a bit sad or lonely. If I give up my job as an interpreter altogether, it won’t be easy for me to spend a few weeks at her apartment every so often, I’ll have to store up for much longer all the events and anecdotes – dramatic and amusing – which I habitually keep for her or else I’ll have to write to her, which is something we don’t often do. I asked her about “Bill” and she took some seconds to identify him or to remember who he was, he was already ancient history, she thought that he’d probably left New York and hadn’t yet returned. “Now that I think about it,” she said, “he might be back any day now.” I realized that she’d heard nothing more from him since we watched him get into the taxi, I from the street, she from her window. But she’s quite right, it’s possible that he might reappear, assuming he was Guillermo. Berta continues to advertise in the personals. She hasn’t lost her nerve or given up, she told me that she’s currently interested in two men she hasn’t yet met, “J de H” and ‘Truman” to give them their respective aliases. She cheered up when she talked about them, she sounded affectionate the way women do when they’re nursing some illusion and that illusion doesn’t involve or affect us, they’re merely transmitting it to us; but while we were talking, I imagined her during one of those moments when the half moon on her right cheek, her scar, would darken until it was blue or purple and make me think it was a stain. Perhaps the day would come, I thought (and I did so in order to prevent it happening), when she would lose her nerve and give up and the half moon would remain one of those two colours. Berta was her name, her initials “BSA”, marked for life.

I haven’t seen Custardoy for a while now, though I know that I’ll still meet him from time to time, through my father, and I imagine I’ll go on doing so even when my father’s no longer alive, there are certain figures who accompany us intermittently from childhood onwards and never leave us. He’ll go on coveting the world, he’ll continue in his bid to be more than one person and telling barely credible tales about things that have happened to him. But I prefer not to think about him, although sometimes, without wanting to, I still do.

I still haven’t talked to Ranz about what I heard that night, which was in fact only a short time ago, although it’s fast receding into the distance in these precipitate times, which, nevertheless, like all times, contain the same thing, a single, incomplete or half-lived life, that of each of us, my own life, or Luisa’s. We probably never will talk about it. Ranz won’t even know that I know, he won’t even ask Luisa if she told me in the end, there’s always someone who doesn’t know something or doesn’t want to, and thus we linger on for ever. As far as I can see, their relationship remains the same, or very similar to what it was before, as if that night had never existed or didn’t count. It’s better that way, they have a great deal of respect for each other and she enjoys listening to him. The only thing that’s new is that now he seems older, not so ironic, almost an old man, which he never was before. He’s a little unsteady on his feet now, his eyes have lost some of their life and sparkle, they seem less fervent when they look at me or at others, they gaze less flatteringly upon the person before them; his feminine mouth, so like mine, is becoming blurred by lines; his eyebrows no longer have the same vigorous arch; sometimes he puts his arms into the sleeves of his raincoat, I’m sure that next winter he’ll do so all the time. We see each other often, now that I know I’m going to be in Madrid for a while and now that I’m taking some holiday. We often go out to lunch, with or without Luisa, to La Trainera, La Ancha, La Dorada, to Alkalde as well as Nicolás, Rugantino, Fortuny and El Café and La Fonda, he likes to vary the restaurants. He still tells me stories, familiar and unfamiliar, about his working life, about his years of travelling and his time at the Prado, about his contacts with millionaires and directors of banks, who have long since forgotten him, he’s too old now to be of any use to them, to amuse them or be able to fly over to visit them, the very rich like to receive people and won’t move an inch in order to see a friend. I thought about what Ranz told Luisa and which I overheard, sitting smoking a cigarette at the foot of my bed. Although I will in time forget it, I haven’t done so yet, and now when I look at the small portrait of my Aunt Teresa (who could never have been my aunt), which Ranz keeps in his house, I look at it with more attention than I did before, during my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps I look at it the way one looks at the photographs of people who can no longer see us and whom we no longer see, out of anger or absence or attrition, the photographs that end up usurping their vanishing features, the photographs fixed for ever on a particular day that no one can remember, the day that they were taken; the way my grandmother and my mother sometimes looked, transfixed or wearing a foolish smile, after their laughter had died, staring into space, their eyes dry and unblinking, like someone who’s just woken up and still doesn’t quite know where they are, that was how Gloria must have looked at the last (there’s no portrait of her) had she managed to turn her head; unreflecting, not even remembering, feeling grief or retrospective fear, grief and fear are not fleeting emotions, looking at faces that one watched grow up but not grow old, three-dimensional faces that have now grown flat, mobile faces that we become used to seeing in repose, not them but their image which has replaced them, as I prepare myself to do with my father, as one day Luisa will become accustomed to doing with my photograph when she no longer has before her even half her life and mine is over. Not that anyone knows the order of the dead or the living, whose turn it will be to experience grief or fear first. It doesn’t matter, everything is past and nothing ever happened and, besides, you just don’t know. What I heard that night from Ranz’s lips seemed to me neither venial nor ingenuous nor did it make me smile, but it did seem to me to belong to the past. Everything does, even what is happening now.

I doubt that I’ll ever hear anything of Miriam again, unless she manages to get out of Cuba or the new Cuba, for which there are so many plans (may that island soon prosper and may fortune aid her). I think I’d recognize Miriam anywhere, even if she wasn’t wearing her yellow blouse with the scoop neck or her tight skirt or her high heels stabbing the pavement, nor carrying her huge bag on her arm not on her shoulder, as women do today, her indispensable bag that almost overbalanced her. I’d recognize her even if she walked more elegantly now and her heels didn’t keep slipping out of her shoes and she didn’t make gestures that meant “Come here” or “You’re mine” or “I kill you”. There is, alas, a good chance that I might meet Guillermo one day in Madrid, where sooner or later everyone meets everyone else, even those who come from elsewhere and stay. But I wouldn’t recognize him. I never saw his face and you can’t recognize someone by their voice and their arms. Some nights, before I go to sleep, I think about the three of them, about Miriam, him and his sick wife, Miriam far away and the other two possibly in the same city as me, or in the same street, or in the same apartment block. It’s almost impossible to resist putting a face to someone whose voice one has heard, and that’s why sometimes I give him “Bill’s” moustachioed face, the most likely face, too, since it might well be his, I could meet him in this restless city; on other occasions, I imagine him looking like that fine actor, Sean Connery, a childhood hero of mine, who in his films often sported a moustache; but mixed in with it is the obscene, gaunt face of Custardoy, who’s constantly growing and then shaving off his moustache, or that of Ranz himself, who had a moustache in his youth, when he lived in Havana and later too, when he married Teresa Aguilera and left with her on their honeymoon; or mine, my face which has no moustache and never has, but one day I might grow a moustache, when I’m older, as a way of avoiding looking like my father as he looks now, as he looks now and as I will remember him.

On many nights I’m aware of Luisa’s breast brushing against my back in bed, either when we’re awake or asleep, she likes to lie close up. She’ll always be there, at least that’s what I intend, that’s the idea, although there are still many years to run before that “always” comes to pass, but sometimes I think perhaps everything will change over time and in the abstract future, which is what matters because the present can neither taint nor assimilate it, and that strikes me now as a great misfortune. At such moments I’d like nothing to change, ever, and I can’t discount the possibility that at some point, someone, a woman I haven’t even met yet, will arrive, absolutely furious with me or perhaps relieved to find me at last, but she’ll say nothing to me and we’ll just look at each other or stand locked in a silent embrace or go over to the bed and get undressed or perhaps she’ll simply take off her shoes, showing me the feet she’d so carefully washed before leaving home simply because I might see them or caress them and by then they’ll be tired and aching having waited for me for so long (the sole of one of them dirty from contact with the pavement). It might be that this woman will go to the bathroom and shut herself in for a few moments, without saying a word, in order to regain her composure and do her best to erase from her face the accumulated expressions of anger and tiredness and disappointment and relief, wondering which would be the most appropriate, most advantageous face to wear to confront the man who’s kept her waiting all this time and who’s now waiting for her to emerge from the bathroom, to face me. Perhaps that’s why she’d make me wait much longer than necessary, with the bathroom door closed, or perhaps that wouldn’t be the reason, perhaps she’d just want to sit on the lid of the toilet or on the edge of the bath weeping secret tears, having first taken out her lenses if she wore them, drying her eyes and burying her face in a towel until she managed to calm down, wash her face, put on her make-up and be in a fit state to come out again and pretend that everything is all right. Neither can I discount the idea that Luisa might one day be that woman and that it won’t be me there that day but another man demanding a death of her and saying to her, “It’s him or me” and that the “him” will be me. But were that the case, I’d be happy simply for her to come out of the bathroom and not lie there on the cold floor with her breast and her heart so white and her skirt all creased and her cheeks wet from a mixture of tears and sweat and water, because the jet of water from the tap had been splashing against the basin perhaps and drops would have fallen on her fallen body, drops like the drop of rain that falls from the eaves after the storm, always on to the same spot where the earth or skin or flesh grows softer and softer until the drop penetrates and makes a hole, perhaps a channel, not like the drip from a tap that disappears down the plughole leaving no trace in the sink, or like a drop of blood that can be soaked up with whatever is to hand, a cloth or a bandage or a towel or sometimes water, or when only the hand itself is to hand, the hand of the person losing the blood, assuming they’re still conscious and the wound wasn’t self-inflicted, the hand that goes to the stomach or the breast or the back to stop up the hole. Someone who’s wounded himself, however, has no hand, and needs someone else’s hand to support them. I would support her.

Sometimes Luisa sings when she’s in the bathroom, while I watch her getting dressed, leaning against the door which is not our bedroom door, like a lazy or sick child seeing the world from his pillow or without crossing the threshold and from there I listen to that murmured feminine song, which isn’t sung in order to be heard, still less interpreted or translated, that insignificant song, with neither aim nor audience, which one hears and learns and never forgets. A song that is sung despite everything, but that is neither silenced nor diluted once it’s sung, when it’s followed by the silence of adult, or perhaps I should say masculine life.

He just wanted a decent book to read ...

Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.

We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books

The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.

Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy. We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.

So wherever you see the little bird – whether it’s on a piece of prize-winning literary fiction or a celebrity autobiography, political tour de force or historical masterpiece, a serial-killer thriller, reference book, world classic or a piece of pure escapism – you can bet that it represents the very best that the genre has to offer.

Whatever you like to read – trust Penguin.

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The translator would like to thank Javier Marías, Annella McDermott and Loreto Todd for all their help and advice. M.J.C.

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Spanish as Corazón tan blanco by Editorial Anagrama S.A., Barcelona, 1992
First published in this translation in Great Britain by The Harvill Press 1995
Published in Penguin Classics 2012

Copyright © Javier Marías, 1992
English translation copyright © The Harvill Press, 1995
Introduction copyright © Jonathan Coe, 2012

Cover © Oberto Gili/i2i photography.

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author, translator and introducer has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-19996-2