Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

6 Shadow

I didn't hurry, I lingered and delayed, and allowed a few months to pass before that 'other day' came when I finally decided to go in person to the Embassy to see how De la Garza was. Not that I wasn't concerned about his fate, I often pondered it with unease and sorrow, and in the days that followed that long unpleasant night, I kept an attentive eye on the London papers to see if they carried any report of the incident, but none of them picked it up, probably because Rafita hadn't reported the assault to the police. Tupra's intimidation, or mine when I translated Tupra's words giving those very precise instructions, had clearly had its effect. I also bought El País and Abc each day (the latter because it took more interest than most in the vicissitudes of diplomats, as well as those of bishops), but during the first few days nothing appeared in those either. Only after about ten days, in an article on the comparative dangers of European capitals, did El País's London correspondent mention in passing: 'There was some alarm among the Spanish colony in London a week or so ago when an Embassy employee was admitted to a hospital after being beaten up one night by complete strangers, for no apparent reason and in the middle of the street, according to his initial version of events. Later, he admitted that the brutal attack (which left him with many bruises and several broken ribs) had taken place in a fashionable disco and had been the result of a fight. This somewhat reassured people, since it was clearly a chance, isolated event that he possibly brought on himself and that was, at least, directed at him personally'

It would have been impossible for De la Garza to conceal his state from superiors and colleagues, and so in order to justify being away on sick leave, he would have told that story, saying, perhaps, that some brutish louts had provoked him, or that he had acted in defense of a lady (offenders of ladies like to pass themselves off as the exact opposite: I could still remember his words 'Women are all sluts, but for looks you can't beat the Spanish.'), or that someone had insulted Spain and he'd had no alternative but to get rough and come to blows, I was curious to know what fantasy he would have invented in order to emerge from the episode relatively unscathed (well, unscathed from his point of view and according to his account of things, because whoever it was had clearly thrashed him): 'Oh, they gave me a thorough pummelling, true enough, but I gave as good as I got and beat the shit out of them,' he would have crowed, still mingling coarseness with pedantry, like so many Spanish writers past and present, a veritable plague. Only the antipathy felt for him among his own circle could explain the words: 'that he possibly brought on himself it was a little uncalled-for, and the correspondent would doubtless have received a reprimand for his lack of objectivity. It amused me to imagine myself as a hard Mafia type, and at least I learned that Tupra had been spot on, he had diagnosed it right there, in the toilet, two broken ribs, maybe three, at most four, perhaps he was one of those men who could estimate the effect of each blow and each cut, depending on the part of the body and the force with which the blow was dealt, like surgeons or hitmen, perhaps he was experienced in this and had learned to gauge the intensity and depth and never went too far, but knew exactly how much damage he was inflicting and tried not to get carried away, unless, of course, he intended to. It would clearly be best not to get into a fight with him, a physical fight I mean.

And so I let time pass, telling myself that it would be better to phone De la Garza or to go and see him when he was more recovered and the anger and shock had subsided a little; and the fear, of course, which would be the feeling that had gone deepest. As far as I knew, he had obeyed us, Tupra and me, he had done as we said; he hadn't even gone telling tales to Wheeler or to his father, Don Pablo, with his now waning influence. I hadn't visited Wheeler for some time, but I still spoke to him on the phone every week or every two weeks, and while these were, as almost always, delightful stimulating conversations, they were, nonetheless, fairly routine. One day, I casually mentioned Rafita and he interrupted me at once: 'Oh, haven't you heard? It was terrible, he got beaten up good and proper and is still in the hospital, I believe. I haven't heard anything from him directly, he's not yet in a state to speak to anyone, only from people at the Embassy and from his father, who flew over to London to be with him and look after him during the first few days, and since he didn't leave Rafa's bedside for a moment, he had no time to come up to Oxford, and since I never go anywhere now, we didn't see each other.' 'Good heavens, what happened?' I asked hypocritically. 'I don't know exactly' he said. 'He must have been drunk and he has, apparently, changed his story several times, contradicting himself, he probably doesn't know what happened either or doesn't remember because he was too far gone, you've seen how fond he is of the bottle, do you remember when he was here, how he immediately bonded with Lord Rymer? He went too far with his impertinence, I imagine, with that crude and to me incomprehensible lexicon he occasionally adopts, apparently it was some compatriots of his, of yours, that is, who beat the living daylights out of him in a toilet in a disco, as if they'd been waiting there to pounce on him, it sounds like something schoolboys would do, which fits of course. But the fact is they beat him to a pulp, and there's nothing schoolboyish about that, they broke several major bones. And in a handicapped toilet of all places; that doesn't bode very well, does it?' Wheeler couldn't help seeing the comical side of almost everything and he added slightly mischievously (I could imagine the twinkle in his eyes): Apparently he's completely encased in plaster. When the other patients catch a glimpse of him from the corridor, they mistake him for The Mummy' And he immediately moved on to another subject, to do with the peculiar Spanish expression he had used-zurrarle la badana a alguien-to beat the living daylights out of someone: 'Do you still say that in Spanish or is it very old hat now? By the way, I've never known what "badana" means, do you?' I realized that I hadn't the faintest idea and felt the same embarrassment I used to feel years ago when my Oxford students would confront me with their malicious questions, and I would find myself having to lie to them in class and to improvise ridiculous, false etymologies which they diligently noted down. 'It's quite common in Spanish not to know the actual meaning of what you're saying, far more so than in English or in other languages,' Sir Peter went on, 'and yet you Spaniards come out with those phrases with such pride and aplomb: for example, what the devil does "joder la marrana" mean? Literally. Or "a pie juntillas" (I've noticed that some ignorant authors write "a pies juntillas" and I don't know about now, but that used to be considered unacceptable)? Or "a pie enjuto" or "a dos velas" or "caersele los anillos"? Why have an idiom about rings falling off when rings, if they do anything, tend, on the contrary, to get stuck. And why do you call street blocks "manzanas"? Apparently no one knows, I've even asked members of the Real Academia Espanola, but they just shrug unconcernedly and with not a flicker of embarrassment. I mean, why "apples"? It's absurd. Street blocks don't look anything like apples, even from above. And why do you make that odd gesture signifying "a dos velas" where you place the index and middle fingers of your right hand on either side of your nose and draw them down towards your upper lip, it's very strange, I can't see any connection at all with being down to your last two candles, which is presumably what it means. You use gestures a lot when you talk, but most of them make no sense at all, they're virtually opaque and often seem to have nothing to do with their meaning-like that one where you rest the fingers of one hand on the upright palm of the other, do you know the one I mean, I'd demonstrate it for you if you could see me, but I never see you, you hardly ever come now, is Tupra exploiting you or have you got a girlfriend? Anyway, I think it's used to indicate "Stop, don't go on" or perhaps "Let's go.'"

Wheeler was tireless when it came to discussing linguistic matters and idioms, he paused and lingered over them and momentarily forgot about everything else, and, as I knew, from the days when I first taught translation and Spanish at Oxford, I was profoundly ignorant of my own language, not that it mattered much, for it's an ignorance I share with almost all my compatriots and they couldn't care less. I was beginning to think that sometimes his mind wavered slightly, rather as he occasionally lost the ability to speak. Not in the same way, he didn't go blank, not at all, and he didn't talk nonsense or get confused, but he strayed from the subject more than usual and didn't listen with his usual alacrity and attention, as if he were less interested in the external, and as if the internal were gaining ground-his disquisitions, his deliberations, his insistent thoughts-and, as is often the case with the old, perhaps his memories too, although he didn't care to tell or share these, but maybe he did go over them in his mind, put them in order, unfold them to himself, and explain and weigh them up, or perhaps it was simply a matter of putting them straight and contemplating them, like someone taking a few steps back and surveying his library or his paintings or his rows of tin soldiers if he collects them, everything he has accumulated and arranged over a lifetime, probably with no other objective-this does happen-than that of stepping back and looking at them.

This form of loquacious introspection, which I noticed when we spoke on the phone, occasionally made me fear that I didn't have much time left in which to ask him all the things I'd always wanted to ask him and which I kept postponing for reasons of discretion, respect and a dislike of worming things out of people and stealing from them what they are keeping in reserve or storing away, or of seeming overly curious or even impertinent, together with a natural tendency to wait for people to tell me only what they really want to and not what they are tempted to tell me because of a particular conversational thread or the direction a conversation is taking or because they feel flattered or moved-the temptation to tell is as strong as it is transient, and it soon vanishes if you resist it or, indeed, give in to it, except that in the latter case, there's no remedy but regret or, as the Italians put it, rimpianto, a kind of sorrowful regret to be ruminated upon in private. And the truth is that I wanted to ask him those things before it became problematic or impossible, I wanted to know, however briefly and anecdotally, about his involvement in the Spanish Civil War-a war that had so marked my parents-and about which I had known nothing until recently; about his adventures with MI6, his special missions in the Caribbean, West Africa, and South East Asia between 1942 and 1946, according to Who's Who, in Havana and in Kingston and in other unknown places, although he was still not allowed to talk about them even after sixty years nor, doubtless, after however many years of life remained to him; he would take his story to the grave if I didn't get it out of him, that Acting Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Wheeler, born in the antipodes as Rylands; about his unspoken relationship with his brother Toby, whom I had known first and admired and mourned, with no idea that they were related; as well as about his activities with the group that had no name when it was created and still has none now, nor any 'interpreters of people,' 'translators of lives' or 'anticipators of stories,' indeed, he had criticized Tupra for employing such terms in private: 'Names, nicknames, sobriquets, aliases, euphemisms are quickly taken up and, before you know it, they've stuck,' he had said, 'you find yourself always referring to things or people in the same way, and that soon becomes the name they're known by. And then there's no getting rid of it, or forgetting it'; and it was true, I couldn't forget those terms now, because I was part of that group and those were the terms I'd learned from Wheeler's diminished contemporary heirs; and I wanted to know, too, about the death of his young wifeVal or Valerie, although he always preferred to leave that for another day and, besides, he believed, deep down, that one should never tell anything.

It even seemed to me-I had no proof of this, it was only a suspicion-that Wheeler might be loosening the grip of that hand that never let go of its prey, as was not yet the case with Tupra or with me or, probably, with young Pérez Nuix, all three of us were still at the restless or at least vigilant age, how long do those energetic years last, the years of anxiety and quickened pulses, the years of movement, unexpected reversals, and vertigo, the years when all of that and so much more occurs, so many doubts and torments, in which we struggle and plot and fight and try to inflict scratches on others and avoid getting scratched ourselves and to turn things to our own advantage, and when all of those activities are sometimes so very skilfully disguised as noble causes that even we, the creators of those disguises, are fooled. I mean that Wheeler was distancing himself from his machinations and his plans, at least that was the impression he gave me, as if his will and determination were finally on the wane or as if he suddenly scorned them and saw them as pointless and futile, after decades of building and cultivating and feeding them and, of course, of applying them. He was focused entirely on himself, and little else interested him. But then he was over ninety, and so this was hardly surprising or deserving of reproach, it was high time really.

And despite these warnings and my growing fear that I didn't have, as I'd always felt I had, unlimited time with him, I continued putting off my visits and my questions and still did not go and see him. I would also have liked him to tell me more about Tupra, about his antecedents, his history, his potential dangerous-ness, his character, the 'probabilities that ran in his veins'-he would know more about those, he had known him for longer- especially after that night of the sword and the videos, the memory of which had been bothering me for weeks and would do so indefinitely; but given that I'd decided not to leave or decamp, not yet to abandon my post and with it my work, salary and general state of confusion, perhaps I was avoiding the possibility of really finding out and-if Wheeler did as I asked him and deciphered Tupra fully-of having to stop what I had, for the moment, not without some violence to myself, determined to continue. I realized that I had reached a point when each passing day made it harder and harder for me to go back, let alone just to pack it all in and return to Madrid-doing what exactly, living how, just to be closer to Luisa as she moved further away from me?-a place which, nevertheless, I had still not entirely left. My mind was largely there, but not my body, and the latter was growing accustomed to strolling about London and breathing in its smells on waking and on going to sleep (always with one eye open, because of the lack of shutters, and like just one more inhabitant of that large island), to spending part of the day in the company of Tupra and Pérez Nuix and Mulryan and Rendel and, on occasions, Jane Treves or Branshaw, to the initially saving grace of certain routines in which, unexpectedly, you suddenly find yourself caught as in a spider's web, unable to imagine any other way of life, even if it isn't any great shakes and happened purely by chance and without your asking. No, it was no longer easy for me to think of myself taking another less comfortable and less well-paid job, less attractive and less varied, after all, each morning I was confronted by new faces or else went deeper into familiar ones, and it was a real challenge to decipher them. To guess at their probabilities, to predict their future behavior, it was almost like writing novels, or at least biographical sketches. And sometimes there were outings, on-the-spot translations and the occasional trip out of London.

And so I also kept delaying my return to Madrid, I mean, to see my children and my father and my siblings and my friends, too many months had passed without my setting foot in my own city and, therefore, without seeing or hearing Luisa, which was what most attracted and frightened me. I had told her, two days after that night when I'd phoned to consult her about botox and the blood stains left by women, that I would not be back for a while. 'The kids have been asking when you'll be coming to see them,' she had said, taking great care not to include herself and making it plain that she wasn't the one doing the asking. 'Not in the immediate future I shouldn't think,' I had replied and mentioned that I had a trip with my boss coming up, I didn't know exactly when yet, but it could be any time, so I was busy until then. And it was true, Tupra had told me this, although, in the end, he dragged me off, instead, on several different trips during that month, short hops lasting only a couple of days, three within the large island itself and one to Berlin, to the Continent. We went to Bath with Mulryan, to Edinburgh on our own and to York with Jane Treves, who, it seems, was from Yorkshire and knew the terrain, although it didn't seem to me that you needed to be an expert to find your way around those very human-sized cities. He didn't take Pérez Nuix with him, perhaps to punish her for trying to deceive him in the matter of Incompara and her poor beaten father, in which he must have considered me to be merely a naive and secondary accomplice, or perhaps, it occurred to me, so that she and I did not end up in the same hotel: sometimes I had the feeling that there was nothing he didn't know about, and that he was therefore sure to know what had happened in my apartment, in my bed, in silence and as if it hadn't happened, on that night of constant rain.

In each of those cities we only ever had one meeting at which I could prove useful as an interpreter, of languages or people, and if Tupra saw more people, as I imagined he did, he did so on his own and never invited me to join him. In Bath, he stayed at a very fine hotel, the Royal Crescent if I remember rightly (Mulryan and I stayed in another which was pleasant rather than fine-we, after all, occupied a different place in the hierarchy), in which there lived 'on an almost permanent basis,' according to my boss, a Mexican millionaire, 'officially retired but still very active from a distance and from the shadows,' with whom he wished to come to some agreement. This elderly man-with white hair and mustache, the vestiges of what was, by then, a very precarious elegance and a resemblance to the old actor Cesar Romero, and whose two surnames were Esperon Quigley-spoke impeccable English with a thick Spanish accent (it happens to many Latins on both sides of the Atlantic), and my help was only necessary on a few occasions, when the gentleman's diction proved so opaque to the purely English ear of Tupra and to the half-Irish ear of Mulryan that perfectly correct words became completely unrecognizable in Esperon Quigley's eccentric pronunciation. As usual, I paid no attention to what they were discussing, it was no business of mine, I was bored by it a priori and preferred not to know. The rest of the time I was free, and I spent it walking, looking at the River Avon, visiting the Roman baths and a few antique shops, and rereading Jane Austen in a place where she had spent a few years of scant literary productivity, as well as the odd page by William Beckford, who'd shut himself away there for a long time and where he reluctantly lived and died, far from his beloved Fonthill Abbey, which had led him to his ruin. On one of my strolls about the city, I was amazed to come across a shop, a rather average jeweler's, which, implausibly, bore the name of Tupra. It wasn't far from another shop with larger pretensions and which, if memory serves me right, declared itself in its window to be a supplier to the Admiralty (I imagine this referred only to watches, and not to precious stones and glass beads for the navy). When I mentioned this coincidence to Tupra, he replied tartly:

'Oh, yes, I know. Nothing to do with my family though. No relation at all. None.' This might have been true or totally false, and the watchmaker might have been his father. However, I didn't dare press the matter further.

Even so, I couldn't resist making a private joke: 'Nevertheless, it would be more appropriate for Tupra's jeweler's shop to be made supplier to the Admiralty rather than that other shop nearby which, I noticed, lays claim to just that. Even if only because of your connections, or, rather, our connections with the former OIC, don't you think?' I remembered what Wheeler had said that Sunday before lunch, in Oxford, when he spoke to me about the difficulties they'd had recruiting the first members of the group, just after it had been formed: 'It was necessary to comb the country for recruits as quickly as possible. Most came from the Secret Services, from the Army, a few from the former OIC, which you've probably never heard of, the Navy's Operational Intelligence Centre, there weren't many of them, but they were very good, possibly the best; and, of course, from our Universities.' And I saw a look of surprise and slight suspicion appear on Tupra's face (as if hearing that old acronym in my mouth-an odd thing for a twenty-first- or even late-twentieth-century Spaniard to know-made him wonder what else I knew and if he had underestimated how much I had learned).

He also allowed me some free time during the two days we spent in Edinburgh, and there, too, I walked and reread the work of two of that city's finest sons, Conan Doyle and Stevenson, just a few of their stories, and climbed up Calton Hill to see the view which so enthused the latter, and which is still astonishing even after all the time that has passed. I also took away with me a few poems by Stevenson and a little book about the city, subtitled Picturesque Notes and published in 1879 no less. In it he talks about Greyfriars, telling of how, close to this verdant cemetery, from the window of a house since demolished, but whose site was pointed out to him by a grave-digger, the body-snatcher Burke used to keep watch, for he and his mate Hare would disinter the still-fresh bodies from their graves in order to sell them to scientists and anatomists, and had eventually taken to murdering people so as to speed up the process and to prevent business from falling off: 'Burke, the resurrection man,' as Stevenson noted with irony, 'infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head, used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the green.' Now there, I thought, was a man who lacked the patience to wait for tomorrow's faces to be revealed to him, no, he preferred to sit, smoking, and watch them file past, as they had been yesterday and would be always.

And on the train journey up to Edinburgh, the two of us alone, I read out to Tupra some lines that Stevenson had written towards the end of his life in the South Seas, in Apemama, lines filled by a strange and yet very real nostalgia for 'our scowling town': 'The belching winter wind, the missile rain, the rare and welcome silence of the snows, the laggard morn, the haggard day, the night, the grimy spell of the nocturnal town, do you remember? Ah, could one forget!' he wrote, genuinely nostalgic for that desolate scene. And further on, he added: 'When the lamp from my expiring eyes shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love fall insignificant on my closing ears, what sound shall come but the old cry of the wind in our inclement city? What return but the image of the emptiness of youth, filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice of discontent and rapture and despair?' Another poem is infused with the same spirit, scorning the warm distant seas he had so diligently sought out and yearning terribly for the 'inclement city' of Edinburgh: 'A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle, environs and confines their wandering child in vain. The voice of generations dead summons me, sitting distant, to arise, my numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace, and all mutation over, stretch me down in that denoted city of the dead.' And so I read him those lines, in his language of course, in the language of Tupra and of the lines themselves: 'The belching winter wind, the missile rain, the rare and welcome silence of the snows, the laggard morn, the haggard day, the night…'

'Do you think that always happens, Bertram?' I asked; he was sitting opposite me, with him facing the engine and me with my back to it. 'You know a lot about deaths,' I added somewhat cruelly, 'do you think that, in the end, we all turn to that first place, however humble or depressing or gloomy it was, however much our life has changed and our affections have been transformed, however many unimaginable fortunes and achievements we have amassed along the way? Do you think that we always look back at our earlier poverty, at the impoverished quarter we grew up in, at the small provincial town or dying village from which we peered out at the rest of the world, and which for so many years it seemed impossible to leave, and that we miss it? They say that the very old remember their childhood most clearly of all and almost shut themselves away in it, mentally I mean, and that they have a sense that everything that happened between that distant time and their present decline, their greeds and their passions, their battles and their setbacks, was all false, an accumulation of distractions and mistakes and of tremendous efforts to achieve things that really weren't important; and they wonder then if everything hasn't been an interminable detour, a pointless voyage, all merely to return to the essence, to the origin, to the only thing that truly counts at the end of the day'-And I thought then: 'Why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, and all those doubts, all that torment?'-'You must know a lot about that, you must have seen many people die. And you can see how it was with Stevenson: he traveled halfway around the world and yet in the end, in Polynesia, there he was thinking only of the city where he was born. Look how this one begins: 'The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, from Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again…'

'Those are hills close to Edinburgh,' Tupra said, interrupting me as if he were a footnote, and then fell silent again. I waited for him to reply to my questions and for him to add something more. I hadn't read those lines to him purely for pleasure or to pass the time. I had mentioned impoverished quarters and provincial towns trusting that he might take the hint and think of Bethnal Green, if that's where he came from, or of the watchmaker of Bath, if he had spent part of his childhood with him, for example, and that he might tell me a little about them. Tupra, however, as I should have known, only answered the questions he wanted to answer. 'As I remember,' he said after a few seconds, 'Stevenson went to Samoa chiefly for his health's sake, not in search of adventures. Besides, he wasn't old. He died when he was forty-four.'

'That doesn't matter,' I said. 'When he wrote those poems, he must have known that the end was not far off, and all he could think about, with enormous nostalgia, was the inhospitable city of his childhood. Listen to what he says: "When… the voice of love fall insignificant on my closing ears…" You see, not even having his wife near will count for much, or so he imagines, in his final consciousness of the world, in his final seconds, only those momentary pictures from the past that "gleam and fade and perish." He set this out clearly in the closing lines: "These shall I remember, and then all forget," that's what he says.'

Tupra remained thoughtful for a while. I know from experience that no one can resist analyzing texts.

'How can that be? Read me the bit about insignificant love again.'

And I did:

'When… the voice of love fall insignificant on my closing ears…'

'Nonsense,' said Tupra, again cutting me off. 'Nonsense. That's not Stevenson at his best. Poetry wasn't his forte really' He fell silent again, as if to underline his verdict, and then, to my surprise, added: 'Read me a bit more, go on.'

Almost everyone likes being read to. And so I did: 'Far set in fields and woods, the town I see spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, cragg'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagg'd.' And as I read I stole occasional glances at Tupra and saw that he was enjoying it, even though he didn't like Stevenson's poetry. 'There, on the sunny frontage of a hill, hard by the house of kings, repose the dead, my dead, the ready and the strong of word. Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive; the sea bombards their founded towers; the night thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers, one after one, here in this grated cell, where the rain erases and the rust consumes, fell upon lasting silence.'

Who knows, perhaps no one had read to him since he was a child.

There in Edinburgh, by the Firth of Forth, to the south of Fife, Tupra only required my services on one night, for another supper -aim-celebrities or -aim-buffoons, which was also a supper-omt-Dick Dearlove, that is, the global singer to whom I've chosen to give that name. Fortunately, Tupra did not also oblige me to go to the concert Dearlove was giving at the Festival beforehand, although he did force me to pretend that I'd watched the concert from the first chord to the last with indescribable enthusiasm: 'Remember to mention his fantastic renditions of "Peanuts from Heaven" and the miraculous "Bouncing Bowels," he always comes up with strange new versions, and they sound different every time, even though they're two of his all-time classics,' he warned me, just in case anyone or even Dearlove himself should ask, for Tupra had engineered things so that I would be sitting near the singer. 'On the pretext of entertaining those two compatriots of yours who are often in his entourage now, try to get him talking, even at the risk of appearing nosy and boring, the worst that can happen is that he'll ignore you or change places to avoid you. Talk to him about the tremendous success he enjoys in Spain, but, whatever you do, don't say "especially in the Basque Country": even though that's true, it might offend him, as being too local, too limited. Get his attention, charm him, encourage him to confide in you, draw him out as much as you can on his supposed role as a universal sex symbol wherever he goes, or so he believes. Make him feel flattered and in the mood to boast, invent Spanish people you know who've got the hots for him, who would love to get their hands on his basket, acquaintances of yours, real people, anything to inflame his imagination, any young things you happen to know, your own children perhaps, how old are they, oh no, they're far too young, well, then, your nephews and nieces, whoever, but probe him to see what you can get out of him, he's always exhausted after a performance, but euphoric too, his guard's down, and he's eager to talk, what with all the excitement and the acclaim plus whatever he took before the concert to cope with the whole insane affair, I'm surprised he's lasted this long really, after all these years of supercharged love-fests. He knows me too well, but with a stranger he'll never see again (I don't think he remembers you from last time), with someone like you, he might reveal much more than he would to me or to some other Englishman, he'll feel less vulnerable, besides, stars love to show off to newcomers, they're always in need of a fresh influx of the easily impressed. With luck he'll describe an affair he's had, some striking sexual triumph, some exploit, anyway, that's the route you need to pursue, even if it seems impertinent-as I say, the worst that can happen is that he'll turn his back on you and refuse to take the bait. Let's see if we can get some confirmation, a clearer idea, of just how capable he is or would be of endangering the way people see him and his life, to what extent he would risk exposing himself to that narrative horror of yours and end up swelling the ranks of the Kennedy-Mansfield fraternity, from which there is no possible escape.' That's how Tupra often spoke, especially when he was giving us instructions or asking us to do something, with that mixture of colloquialisms and old-fashioned turns of phrase, some peculiar to him alone, as if he brought together in his speech his probable origins in some slum and his undoubted Oxford education as a medievalist under the tutelage of Toby Rylands, of which I frequently had to remind myself, or was it just that the figure of Toby was gradually fading from my mind, absorbed by that of his brother Peter, sometimes the living do incorporate or embrace or superimpose themselves on the dead to whom they were close, and even cancel them out.

I felt that what Tupra was asking was an impossible enterprise: to get Dick Dearlove to talk to me in those terms, and about such things, much less with other people around, at a supper for twenty or more guests, all gazing at him reverently. Nevertheless, I had a go; Tupra was determined that I should get results. He placed me almost opposite the idol, and while the people on either side tried to capture his attention through flattery, I managed to slip in a few remarks that aroused his curiosity, more because of their peculiarly Spanish nature than because of me.

'Why are the Spanish so sexually permissive?' he asked after a brief exchange of comments on customs and laws. 'For a long time we always had exactly the opposite impression.'

'And your impression was correct,' I replied, and in order to see if I could get anything more out of him, I refrained from saying that his current impression was also correct, and said instead: 'Why do you think we're so permissive now, Mr. Dearlove?'

'Oh, please, call me Dick,' he said at once. 'Everyone does, and with good reason too.' And he gave a rather weary laugh, which his neighbors echoed. I assumed this was a joke he had made thousands of times during a lifetime of being lauded and idolized (but there's always someone who hasn't heard it, and he was aware of this, that nothing has ever been entirely wrung dry, however hard you squeeze it), punning crudely on one of the meanings of the word 'dick,' which is, of course, 'polla', He was, after all, famous for his hypersexuality or pansexuality or hepta-sexuality or whatever it was, although he never acknowledged this in public, that is, in the press. 'Well, I don't know what kind of life you lead in your country,' he said paternalistically, 'but you're obviously missing out. Whenever I've been on tour there, I haven't had the energy or the time to meet the enormous demand. Everyone seems to be up for a roll in the hay, women, men, even children it seems.' And he gave a slightly less time-worn guffaw. 'With the exception of the Basque Country, where they don't seem to know about sex or else restrict themselves to performing only a pale imitation of it because they've heard about it in other places, but in the rest of Spain, I've had to hold auditions to choose who to invite into my bed, or my bathroom if it's just for a quickie, because there's so much on offer after each concert, and beforehand too: lines have formed in hotel lobbies for a chance to come up to my room for a while, and I've nearly always found it worth interrupting my well-earned rest. They're much more ardent than they are here, and much easier too; incredible though it may seem, people are more chaste in Great Britain, though the Irish are as prim as the Basques.'

Suddenly, it bothered me that he should speak of my compatriots in these terms, in that offhand manner, like sex-mad hordes. It bothered me to think that this famous fool should take young women and young men to his bed-through no merit of his own and with no effort-in Barcelona, Gijon, Madrid or Seville or wherever, each time he set foot in Spain, and he'd given quite a few concerts there over the years. I was even glad to hear that he'd had a harder time of it in San Sebastian and Bilbao, that was some consolation; and when I noticed this puerile idiotic reaction of mine, I realized that we never entirely free ourselves from patriotism, it all depends on the circumstances and where we're from and who's speaking to us, for some vestige, some remnant, to burst to the surface. I can think and say dreadful things about my country, which, personally, I consider now completely debased and coarsened in far too many respects, but if I hear those criticisms in the mouth of a despicable fatuous foreigner, I feel a strange, almost inexplicable pang, something similar to what that primitive creature De la Garza must have felt when he saw that I was not prepared to defend him from the sword-wielding Englishman who was about to decapitate him, and he perhaps considered squealing on me to the Judge later on 'when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, "We died at such a place,'" at the end of the uncountable centuries: 'This man killed me with a sword and cut me in two, and this other man was there, he saw it all and didn't lift a finger; and the man who watched and did nothing spoke my language and we were both from the same land, further south, not so very far away, albeit separated by the sea; he just stood there like a statue, his face frozen in horror, a guy from Madrid, can you believe it, a fellow Spaniard, one of us, and he didn't even try to grab the other guy's arm.' It does make it worse being from the same country, and that's how I always felt when my father told me terrible tales from our own War: they were both from the same country, the militiawoman and the child whose head she smashed against the wall of a fourth-floor apartment on the corner of Alcala and Velazquez, so were Emilio Mares and the men who baited him like a bull in Ronda, and even more so the man from Malaga in the red beret who killed him, gave him the coup de grace, and then couldn't resist castrating him too. Del Real the traitor and my father were, as was Santa Olalla, the professor who contributed his weightier and more authoritative signature to the formal complaint, and even that novelist who enjoyed a certain degree of tawdry commercial success, Dario Florez, who appeared as witness for the prosecution and delivered that sinister warning to the betrayed man via my mother, when she wasn't yet my or anyone else's mother: 'If Deza forgets that he ever had a career, he'll live; otherwise, we'll destroy him.' For me they had always been the names of treachery, which should never be protected, and they were traitors because they all came from the same country, my father and them and, in two of the cases, because they had been friends before and he had never given them any reason to withdraw or cancel their friendship, on the contrary.

I brushed aside my absurd feelings of bruised patriotism. I had to-not only to carry out my assignment from Tupra (broaching the subject had been much easier than expected; and I could see my boss's grey eyes in the distance, near the head of the table, observing me, intrigued, wondering how I was getting on), but also because there was no sense in clinging on to bruises. Dearlove's comments could have been made by a compatriot of mine, De la Garza to look no further, had he been a pop idol and able to choose on tour from among dozens of girls to sleep with, and I would have been equally put out by such arrogant and disrespectful comments. And yet, and yet… there was an added bitterness, I could not deny it, something irrational, disquieting, disagreeable, atavistic. Perhaps Tupra felt the same when, in his presence, people spoke scornfully of Great Britain or of the British, especially when those people were from the Continent or from across the Atlantic or from the green isle of Erin, where such talk is almost the norm. And perhaps for that reason, which would be logical, he had no hesitation in doing what he did, possibly with more dedication and diligence than I thought, and perhaps it was true what he had said to me shortly after we met, albeit tempered with a touch of cynicism: 'Even serving my country, one should if one can, don't you think, even if the service one does is indirect…' I understood then, rather late, that he probably served his country ceaselessly as long as it was in his own best interests, and that in time of need, in time of war, or when the moment came, I would be no more to him than another useless Spaniard whom he wouldn't hesitate to have shot, just as, during my burst of patriotic feeling, Dearlove had been for me merely a conceited English bastard I'd happily have slapped.

One of the other guests nearby, a designer of extravagant clothes who was getting on in years (she herself was wearing an incomprehensible jumble of petticoats, feathers and rags) unwittingly gave me a helping hand in keeping that conversation going along the path that most suited me:

'Really?' she said. 'And there I was thinking that it was only in Britain that everyone found you irresistible, Dickie, but it turns out that it's Spain where you've got both bed and bathroom jam-packed.' She used that expression 'jam-packed'-'de bote en bote' or 'a reventar in Spanish.

It was clear that they were friends and knew each other well, or perhaps Dick Dearlove (as also seemed to be the case) spoke openly to almost anyone about even the most intimate things, to me for example; this often happens with the very famous and the constantly praised, they end up thinking that anything they say or do will be well received because it's all part of their ongoing performance, and there comes a point when they can no longer distinguish between public and private (unless there's a photographer or a journalist around, and then they're either more discreet or more exhibitionist depending on the circumstances): if they're so warmly applauded in the first sphere, and so spoiled, why shouldn't they be equally so in the second, given that in both spheres they are the undisputed protagonists every day of their life until the end?

'As you know better than I do, Viva, even though you're a woman,' replied Dick Dearlove, in a tone that was half-ironic and half-regretful, 'at our age, however famous we might be, and I'm much more famous than you are, there are occasions when we have no option but to pay, cash or in kind. There's a certain kind of particularly tasty morsel that I almost always have to pay for here in Britain, I hardly ever get it for free now, although just a few years ago I still did, half the nation has turned into a load of tight-asses; whereas in Spain, you see, I've never had to spend a euro, it's as if the young people in Spain aren't really so interested in the act itself-at my age I'm hardly going to boast about my performance, I mean, my body can no longer keep up with my imagination-that's indefatigable, in fact I rather wish my mind would slow down a bit, oh, if only the two things were more compatible, it's all very badly thought out, at least in my view-no, people are more interested in being able to tell their friends afterwards, or spill the beans on some TV program. It's extraordinary how much people there experience things not because they really want to, it seems, but simply in order to talk about it afterwards, it's a country that really revels in gossip and boasting, isn't it, a country very given to tattle-tales-and absolutely shameless about it.'-These rhetorical questions were directed at me, as someone who knew the territory.-'Everyone tells everything and asks everything, it cracks me up at press conferences and interviews, dodging questions, they're so coarse and brazen and have no sense of shame at all, which is unheard of in a European country. I've fucked a few Spaniards who I could see were simply desperate to get it over with, not because they weren't having a reasonably good time-I haven't entirely lost my touch, you know-but because they couldn't wait to leave and spread the news, I can imagine them striding proudly into their local bar or into school the next day: "I bet you can't guess who's just had me good and hard and every which way too.'" He paused for a moment and smiled rather dreamily, as if he had found the situation so amusing that he was able to retrieve it intact years later, in the middle of a post-concert supper in Edinburgh. But also as if he were recalling something from the past, something lost that might never return. 'I don't know if their friends will believe them, they might not prove that easy to convince, and that could become a problem, because some of them come along now armed with their digital camera or their cell phone, I'm sure they want photographic evidence, although they all say it's because they don't go anywhere without them, so they have to be frisked before I let them in, it would be no joke being photographed in the act. Anyway, now I routinely check them out, I've got one of those gadgets they have at airports, you know a sort of wand-like thing-I touch them up with it in the process, which they love and which makes them laugh like crazy, and you get an idea of what to expect too, although they're all usually pretty well-endowed. And they let you do this, meek as lambs, just to get into your bedroom. In Britain, though, they're much less compliant and less fun too, they don't try to sneak in cameras or anything, but that's the downside: it's not that big a deal, going and telling someone else and boasting about it, though maybe people here have just grown tired of me. That's partly why I have to pay probably, you know how word gets around, and they know I'm a soft touch and that they'll be able to get some money out of me. But sometimes you don't get much even when you pay, we're easy prey-eh, Viva?-in our beloved England, Scotland and Wales. Now don't go depressing me by telling me that you're doing just fine.'

I was the one who was getting depressed. Dick Dearlove was over fifty now, and although he was still extremely famous, he wasn't as famous as he had been at the peak of his career. His concerts were still packed and wildly successful, but perhaps more because of his name and his history than because of his present-day powers, the common fate of most of the enduring British singers from the 1970s and 1980s who continue to perform, from Elton John to Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones. Dearlove wore his hair pathetically long for a man his age, very blonde and curly, he looked like a former member of Led Zeppelin or King Crimson or Emerson, Lake & Palmer who, thirty years on, was trying to preserve, unchanged, his perennially youthful appearance. From behind, with that almost frizzy mop of hair, he could easily be mistaken for Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease, except that if he turned around or offered his profile, his features were the very opposite of that sweet young Australian or New Zealander or whatever she was: his nose, while still aquiline, had become sharper and more prominent rather than more hooked, growing along the horizontal plane only; his eyes, which had always been small, seemed much bigger, but in a rather strange and creepy way, as if he had managed to emphasize them by resorting to the drastic method of shaving off his eyelashes or having his eyelids surgically reduced or some such barbarity; and his evident efforts not to put on weight had had the unfortunate consequence of leaving him with a scraggy neck and deep lines on cheeks, chin and forehead (perhaps his most recent dose of botox had worn off), and yet these efforts had not, on the other hand, prevented a slight paunch developing in the middle of an otherwise thin and toned body. None of this was apparent from a distance, when he was writhing around on stage, but it became so as soon as he stepped off the stage or in the close-ups on the giant screens, of which there were not that many. He had moved his chair away from the table and was now sitting sideways on so as to be face to face with the designer Genevieve Seabrook and had crossed his extremely long legs, so that I could see with surprise and dismay that he had, at some point, beslippered himself, that is, on the way to the restaurant, he had discarded his trademark musketeer boots-he wore them at every performance and had done so for three decades or more, even in hot weather-and had put on a pair of ridiculous gold and black slippers with a curved pointed toe (his bare heels, I observed queasily, were tattooed), which lent him a domestic or almost summery air that only added to my depression. He seemed as much of a buffoon as the first time I met him and even more repellent, but I also felt very slightly sorry for him because of the candor with which he acknowledged his current amatorial difficulties, having no option now but to chip in some money, at least when it came to his British encounters with those 'tasty morsels.' I hoped not to find out just how tasty they could be during what remained of that aberrant conversation, I certainly didn't intend to investigate further despite being charged by Tupra with that depressing mission. Indeed, I decided not to ask or enquire anything further of Dearlove (after all, I had little opportunity with so many other guests around, admiring, sycophantic and even extremely famous in their own right), what I had heard would be quite enough for me to write a brief report, and I could always invent the rest if Ure insisted or demanded more of me (it occurred to me that Tupra would tend to call himself Ure in Scotland, or perhaps he would prefer to be known as Dundas in Edinburgh).

'No, I won't do that, dear Dickie,' replied Viva Seabrook with a smile that was as affectionate as it was mischievous, at least insofar as I could ascertain, the layers of lurid makeup she applied must have been as thick as an Egyptian, by which I mean a Pharaoh's, death mask. 'You must bear in mind that very young boys will do almost anything as long as they get to dip their wick in some woman. So I'm lucky that way, although they do sometimes cover my face with the sheet or even with my own skirt and that does make me feel pretty bad. Well, not so much now, but the first time one of them stuck a pillow over my face, I hit the roof, and the boy fled, terrified by my insults and cursing. I consider myself rather attractive, but naturally they might associate me with their mothers or their aunts, and that could be a bit of a turn-off and, generally speaking, they're so primitive, so utterly heartless and brutal… Well, you know what I mean.'

I found it odd that she, too, should speak so bluntly in front of a complete stranger like me. Perhaps the milieu and their vanity spurred them on; perhaps they didn't notice the people around them, as if only the very famous really connected with each other, and the rest of the world was just a mist that didn't matter or counted only as an audience or a claque who might cheer and applaud, or, in the worst case, maintain a respectful or constrained silence and, as if sitting in the dark of a theater, merely listen to this celebrity dialogue. In a sense, it was as if they were there all alone, just the two of them. And what Dearlove said in reply, having first rested his curls for a few moments on Seabrook's vast decolletage, as if seeking consolation or refuge in the bosom of an old friend, confirmed me in that impression:

'Oh, Viva, how much longer have we got, how much longer have I got? A day will come when I'll be nothing but a memory for the elderly, and that memory will gradually fade as those who keep it alive all die, one after the other-with the number of those who remember me steadily decreasing, with no chance of it ever increasing-after it had been constantly growing for years and years, that's what I can't bear. It's not just that I will grow old and disappear, it's that everyone who might talk about me will gradually disappear too, those who have seen me and heard me and those who have slept with me, however youthful they were at the time, they'll become old and fat and will die too, as if they're all under some kind of curse. It's unlikely that my songs will survive and that future generations will continue to hear them-what will become of my songs when I'm no longer here to defend and repeat them, when I'm no longer up to performing concerts like tonight's? They'll never be played again. I've hardly written a thing in the last fifteen years, great tunes that others might rediscover and sing tomorrow, even if they're in ghastly new versions; I no longer have the energy to sit down and write new ones. Besides, I doubt I could come up with anything very memorable.' And he added disconcertingly. 'I mean if not even Lennon and McCartney have managed to write anything for ages and ages now, how could I? I'll be entirely forgotten, Viva. Not a trace of me will be left.'

There was something rather theatrical about his tone of voice and about the gestures that accompanied these laments, but it was clear that they contained some truth as well. He again stretched his legs, and I leaned forward a little to get a better look at those hideous ink-daubed heels of his, I felt curious to know what design or motto he'd had tattooed on his skin.

'But John Lennon has been dead for thirty years,' I couldn't help saying. 'How the hell could he compose anything?'

'That doesn't matter,' Dearlove responded sharply. 'He wasn't much good anyway. If someone hadn't shot him, his songs would probably make people nowadays throw up.'-'Another candidate for the Kennedy-Mansfield brotherhood,' I thought.-'Such a wet, pretentious git, and he couldn't sing either.'-And he shot me a fulminating glance with his once small and now unnaturally large eyes with their cropped lids, as if I were a staunch defender of Lennon, which I never have been and never will be. I rather agreed with former dentist Dearlove's diagnosis, but telling him so would have seemed like the lowest form of sycophancy.

At least my imprudent intervention had the virtue of briefly angering him, that is, of enlivening and rescuing him from the melancholy state into which he had subsided, and during the rest of supper he was once again a jolly man making rather inopportune jokes that verged on the tedious. I spent most of the time in silence, now and then attempting to lean over discreetly and crane my neck so as to read his heels, but without success.

Later on, thoroughly fed up, I gave Ure or Dundas the shortest possible report:

'I can confirm everything I told you before, but with this one amendment: he is so concerned about his posterity that, who knows, he might one day commit some atrocity in order to be remembered just for that. He doesn't believe that his music will last any longer than he will. So, in a moment of desperation, far from avoiding such a blot at all costs, he might very well blot his own life and thus deliberately enter the ranks of the Kennedy-Mansfield clan, as you call them. However, this would have to be while he was in the grip of a deep depression or else confused, or in a few years' time when he's retired and no longer gives concerts or enjoys the protective adoration of the crowd. He's so focused on himself that he sees it as some kind of unfair curse that those who admire him and have met him should die, as if this were something that didn't touch and wasn't shared by all those who have trod the earth or strode the world.' And I added at once: 'Listen, you know him better than I do, what is it he has tattooed on the heels of his feet?' I thought it best to formulate the question in this rather absurd way, because, in English, 'heel' can also mean the heel of a shoe.

Tupra, however, ignored me. He wasn't satisfied and I had to recount every last sentence exchanged over supper, by Dearlove, by Viva Seabrook, by my show-business compatriot who had been sitting near us and by anyone else who had made a contribution, however minimal, to the conversation. I loathed having scrupulously to reproduce these dialogues and being forced to relive them. I felt like those vacuous diary writers recording their mean little lives in great detail and then publishing them, to the tedium of unwary readers or perhaps readers who are equally mean and vacuous.

Why he took me with him to York, I don't know. We walked a long way around the very long wall surrounding the city, as if we were two sentinels or two princes. He wanted us to drive out to the neighboring village of Coxwold, where, two and half centuries before, the writer Laurence Sterne had his home in Shandy Hall, named in honor of his most important novel, Tristram Shandy. I attributed Tupra's interest to the influence of Toby Rylands, who, when I knew him, had already spent years working on 'the best book ever written,' as Rylands told me once- not so much immodestly as with conviction-about Sterne's other major work, A Sentimental Journey; as if Tupra wanted in this way to pay homage to his former teacher at Oxford or at MI6 or both, and I had nothing against the idea, on the contrary, and besides who was I to object? Nevertheless, as soon as we arrived, he sought out the man in charge of that house-cum-museum, a man younger than either of us, and whom he introduced to me with the unlikely name of Mr. Wildgust before shutting himself up with him in his office, having first urged me to have a look around the house and garden on my own. In each room of that pleasant, peaceful, two-storey mansion was an elderly man or woman-volunteers, doubtless retired people-who, whether you wanted them to or not, provided you, the visitor, with extensive information about the life and habits of its eighteenth-century owner and about the renovation work carried out on the mansion, both in the days of a certain Mr. Monkman, revered founder of the Laurence Sterne Trust (I gladly made a small contribution to the cause) and now. In the spacious garden I did something that is probably punishable by law: I uprooted a tiny plant, which I concealed and kept moist for the rest of the trip, and later, in London, with barely any care or effort on my part, it grew into a plant of extraordinary lushness and vigor, although I never discovered its name, in English or in Spanish (I was thrilled to have carried off and preserved some living thing from the garden of the Shandy family). Tupra didn't bother to visit the house, he had done so before, he said, and this was doubtless true. After an hour, he reappeared with Wildgust, a semi-youth of an affable, innocent, jolly appearance, with glasses and rather long fair hair, and we returned to York, where Tupra may have met up with someone else, but I did not. He didn't ask me to provide him with an interpretation of anyone or an opinion on anything, not even on Sterne or York's endless city wall or Shandy Hall.

It was hard to believe that such a practical man as Tupra would have anything but a professional relationship with Coxwold or with Mr. Wildgust, and it was equally hard to imagine why he would go and see the latter in person or of what possible use he could be to him, a mere employee leading an apparently contemplative life-he obviously didn't have much to do: when we arrived, he was immersed in reading a novel at the stall selling souvenirs and postcards, with not a customer in sight-stranded in a Yorkshire village where, in his day, the worldly, irreverent and not very vocational Reverend Sterne had been appointed curate. Nor was it easy to comprehend what business he might have with the Berlin shoemaker whom we visited in a tiny elegant shop called Von T (bespoke shoes for gentlemen), on the one occasion when we traveled to the Continent, shortly after these other trips on the large island. To be sure, Reresby did try on and buy some shoes, and it was at Tupra's urging that Herr Von Truschinsky of Bleibtreustrasse, using beautiful hand-crafted wooden tools the like of which I had never seen before, took the exact and complete measurements of my two feet-length and width, height, instep and tattooable heel-in the confident belief, he said with modesty and tact and in excellent English, that I would be pleased and inspired enough to follow my boss's example and order more pairs in future, from England or from Spain, and the truth is that, despite the high prices, I bought two pairs, with excellent results and a consequent improvement to my appearance at ground level. (And to think that I had once feared that Tupra might wear boots or clogs or worse, if there is anything worse.) The odd thing is that the shoes bought by Reresby and myself were both English brands I had never heard of before-perhaps because they were so exquisite-Edward Green of Northampton, established 1890, and Grenson, from I don't know where, established 1866. It seemed somewhat extravagant to travel to Berlin in order to get them-Tupra chose two models, one called Hythe and the other Elmsley, the first in 'Chestnut Antique' and the second in 'Burnt Pine Antique,' and I chose Windermere in 'Black' and Berkeley in 'Tobacco Suede'-instead of buying them in our own country, that is in Tupra's country in which I was living at the time. After the measuring ceremony, carried out with extreme delicacy and care by the owner and sole employee, Tupra went into the back of the shop with Von Truschinsky and they conversed behind the curtain for about fifteen minutes, while I amused myself looking through catalogues of fine shoes, which is why I know so much about the actual names of the colors and why some of the shoes I wear now were created by the superlative John Hlustik, which did not mean much to me at the time, but sounded important and Czech. The murmur that reached me was not English, but neither did I have the impression that it was German.

As in York, Tupra didn't require me to interpret anyone in Berlin or to meet anyone else. He left me free to do as I pleased and did not invite me to a supper he attended with people from the city. On the flight back, I thought he would at least ask me for my necessarily superficial opinion of the shoemaker and, perhaps belatedly, of Mr. Wildgust, even though I hadn't been present for a substantial part of either conversation. But since, after an hour of discomfort in the air, Tupra was still talking to me only about horse-racing and soccer (he was infuriated by the unnatural Russian wealth and Lusitanian antipathy of the soccer team he had supported all his life, Chelsea), I couldn't resist asking him:

'Just out of curiosity, what language were you and Mr. Von Truschinsky speaking when you and he were alone?'

He looked at me with such an accomplished show of surprise that I even thought it might be real.

'What language would we be speaking? English, of course. The same language in which I was speaking to you. Why would I change? Besides, I hardly know any German.'

It wasn't true that they had been speaking in English, but I didn't want to argue. So I changed the subject, or perhaps not that much:

'Listen, Bertram, I can understand why you asked me to accompany you to Bath and Edinburgh, and I hope I proved useful to you there. But I can't understand why you wanted me to go with you to York nor why I came to Berlin. You didn't set me any task, and I can't see what use I was. And don't tell me that it was to keep you company, that you don't like traveling alone. In York, you had the company of Jane, although in the end we hardly made use of her at all.' Jane Treves hadn't been part of the excursion to Coxwold nor had she walked for a long time around the medieval city wall. We had merely had supper with her. It could be, why not, that he had made use of her and that she had slept in his room.

'She was very busy seeing relatives. I included her in the trip more than anything so that she would have the chance to see them. She hasn't visited them for ages. I'm very pleased with her work. She's hardly stopped lately.'

'And yet, on the other hand, with all these short trips, you're forcing me to postpone my journey to Madrid. You may not realize it, but it's been ages since I saw my kids; I'll hardly recognize them. Or my father. My father's very old, you know, he's only a year younger than Peter. Sometimes I'm afraid I won't see him again.' And here I did insist. 'Why did you ask me to come with you to Berlin? To buy shoes? To renew my footwear?'

Tupra smiled with his thick lips that hardly grew any thinner when stretched.

'I wanted to introduce you to Clemens von T, he's an old friend of mine now and provides a magnificent service, you can trust him absolutely. I'm sure that, from now on, you'll be much better shod. And you'll be able to deal with him direct. Anyway, I have no trips planned for next month, so if you want to spend a few weeks in Madrid-two or three if you like-that will be fine.'

Such a generous amount of leave. I was taken aback. I thanked him. But there was no way he was going to reply to a question to which he was determined not to reply, I knew that all too well, nor would he explain something he either shouldn't or couldn't explain. I gave up. I assumed that when he mentioned my being able to deal direct with Clemens von T, he was not refering to shoes, and that in future he would ask me to consult him about something other than footwear. Nevertheless, the truth is that even now, when that time of fever and dream has long passed, I continue to order my handsome long-lasting pairs of shoes from that tiny shop in Berlin.

Tupra meant what he said on the plane, and so I arranged my trip to Madrid for the following month, a stay of two weeks, I realized this would be quite long enough, possibly even too long, I mean, once I had seen everyone, I wouldn't know what to do with my time.

Nostalgia, or missing some place or person, regardless of whether for reasons of absence or abandonment or death, is a very strange and contradictory business. At first, you think you can't live without someone or far from someone, the initial grief is so intense and so constant that you experience it as a kind of endless sinking or an interminably advancing spear, because each moment of privation counts and weighs, you feel it and it chokes you, and all you want is for the hours of the day to pass, knowing that their passing will lead to nothing new, only to more waiting for more waiting. Each morning you open your eyes-if you've had the benefit of sleep which, while it doesn't allow you to forget everything, does at least numb and confuse-thinking the same thought that oppressed you just before you closed them, for example, 'She's not here and she won't be coming back' (whether that means her coming back to you or back from death), and you prepare yourself not to trudge through the day, because you're not even capable of looking that far ahead or of differentiating one day from another, but through the next five minutes and then the next, and so you'll continue from five minutes to five minutes, if not from minute to minute, becoming entangled in them all and, at most, trying to distract yourself for just two or three minutes from your consciousness, or from your ponderous paralysis. If that happens, it has nothing to do with your will, but with some form of blessed chance: a curious item on the television news, the time it takes to complete or begin a crossword, an irritating or solicitous phone call from someone you can't stand, the bottle that falls to the floor and obliges you to gather up the fragments so that you don't cut yourself when out of laziness you wander about barefoot, or the dire TV series that nonetheless amuses you-or that you simply took to straight away-and to which you surrender yourself with inexplicable relief until the final credits roll, wishing another episode would start immediately and allow you to keep clinging on to that stupid thread of continuity. These are the found routines that sustain us, what remains of life, the foolish and the innocuous, that neither enthuses nor demands participation or effort, the padding that we despise when everything is fine and we're busy and have no time to miss anyone, not even the dead (in fact, we use those busy times to shrug them off, although this only works for a short while, because the dead insist on staying dead and always come back later on, the pin prick pressing into our chest and the lead upon our souls).

Time passes, and at some ill-defined point, we go back to being able to sleep without suddenly starting awake and without remembering what has happened in our dreams, and to shaving not at chance moments or at odd times, but each morning; no bottles are broken and we remain unirritated by any phone call, we can make do without the TV soap opera, the crossword, the random soothing routines that we look at oddly as we bid farewell to them because now we can scarcely understand why we ever needed them, and we can even make do without the patient people who entertained us and listened to us during our monotonous, obsessive period of mourning. We raise our head and once more look around us, and although we see nothing particularly promising or attractive, nothing that can replace the person we long for and have lost, we begin to find it hard to sustain that longing and wonder if it was really such a loss. We're filled by a kind of retrospective laziness regarding the time when we loved or were devoted or got over-excited or anxious, and feel incapable of ever giving so much attention to anyone again, of trying to please them, of watching over their sleep and concealing from them what can be concealed or what might hurt them, and one finds enormous relief in that deep-rooted absence of alertness. 'I was abandoned,' we think, 'by my lover, by my friend, by my dead, so what, they all left, and the result was the same, I just had to get on with my own life. They'll regret it in the end, because it's nice to know that one is loved and sad to know one's been forgotten, and now I'm forgetting them, and anyone who dies knows more or less what fate awaits him or her. I did what I could, I held firm, and still they drifted away' Then you quote these words to yourself: 'Memory is a tremulous finger.' And add in your own words: 'And it doesn't always succeed when it tries to point at us.' We discover that our finger can no longer be trusted, or less and less often, and that those who absorbed our thoughts night and day and day and night, and were fixed there like a nail hammered firmly in, gradually work loose and become of no importance to us; they grow blurred and, yes, tremulous, and one can even begin to doubt their existence as if they were a bloodstain rubbed and scrubbed and cleaned, or of which only the rim remains, which is the part that takes longest to remove, and then that rim, too, finally submits.

More time passes, and there comes a day, just before the last trace vanishes, when the mere idea of seeing the lost person suddenly seems burdensome to us. Even though we may not be happy and may still miss them, even though their remoteness and loss still occasionally wounds us-one night, lying in bed, we look at our shoes alone by the leg of a chair, and we're filled with grief when we remember that her high heels once stood right next to them, year after year, telling us that we were two even in sleep, even in absence-it turns out that the people we most loved, and still love, have become people from another era, or have been lost along the way-along our way, for we each have our own-have become almost preterite beings to whom we do not want to return because we know them too well and the thread of continuity has been broken. We always view the past with a feeling of proud superiority, both it and its contents, even if our present is worse or less fortunate or sick and the future promises no improvement of any kind. However brilliant and happy our past was, to us it seems contaminated with ingenuousness, ignorance and, in part, silliness: in the past we never knew what would come after and now we do, and in that sense the past is inferior, in objective, practical terms; that's why it always carries within it an element of hopeless foolishness and makes us feel ashamed that we lived for so long in a fantasy world, believing what we now know to be false, or perhaps it wasn't false then, but which has, anyway, ceased to be true by not resisting or persevering. The love that seemed rock solid, the friendship we never doubted, the living person whom we always relied upon to live forever because without him the world was inconceivable or it was inconceivable that the world would still be the world and not some other place. We cannot help looking down slightly at our most beloved dead, the more so as more time passes and in passing wastes them, not just with sadness but with pity too, knowing, as we do, that they know nothing-how naive they were-of what happened after their departure, whereas we do. We went to the funeral and listened to what was said there, as well as to what people muttered under their breath, as if afraid the departed might still be able to hear them, and we saw those who had harmed him boasting that they had been his closest friends and pretending to mourn him. He neither saw nor heard anything. He died deceived, like everyone else, without ever knowing enough, and that's precisely what makes us pity them and consider them all to be poor men and poor women, poor grown-up children, poor devils.

Those whom we left behind or who left our side know nothing about us either, as far as we're concerned they've become as fixed and immovable as the dead, and the mere prospect of meeting again and having to talk to them and hear them seems to us like hard work, partly because we feel that neither they nor we would want to talk about or hear anything. 'I can't be bothered,' we think, 'it's been far too long since she was a witness to my days. She used to know almost everything about me, or at least the most important things, and now a gap has opened up that could never be filled, even if I were to tell her in great detail all that has happened, everything of which she did not have immediate knowledge. I can't be bothered with having to get to know each other again and explain ourselves, how upsetting to recognize at once the old reactions and the old vices and the old anxieties and the old tones of voice in which I addressed her and she me; and even the same suppressed jealousies and the same passions, albeit unspoken now. I'll never be able to see her as someone new, nor as part of my daily existence, she'll seem simultaneously stale and alien. I'll go home to see Luisa and the children, and once I've spent a good long time with them and they're starting to get used to me, I'll sit down beside her for a rather shorter time, perhaps before going out to supper at a restaurant, while we wait for the babysitter who's late arriving, on the sofa we shared for so many years, but where I sit now like a visiting stranger, dependable or otherwise, and we won't know how to behave. There'll be pauses and clearings of the throat and, given that we're face to face, extraordinarily inane remarks such as 'So, how are things with you?' or 'You're looking really good.' And then we'll realize that we can't be together without really being together, and that we don't want that. We will be neither completely natural nor completely artificial, it's not possible to be superficial with someone we've known deeply and since forever, nor deep with someone who has lost all track of us and covered her own tracks completely, for both of us there is so much that is now unknown. And after half an hour, perhaps one, two at the most, over dessert, we'll consider that there's nothing more to be said and, even stranger, that once is quite enough, and then I'll have thirteen days' holiday left to kill. And even if the unthinkable happened and we fell into each other's arms and she said the words I've been wanting to hear for so long now: "Come, come, I was so wrong about you before. Sit down here beside me again. I haven't yet shooed away your ghost, this pillow is still yours, I just couldn't see you clearly before. Come and embrace me. Come to me. Come back. And stay here for ever"; even if that happened and I gave up my London apartment and said farewell to Tupra and Pérez Nuix, to Mulryan and Rendel and even to Wheeler, and began the swift task of transforming them into a long parenthesis-even seemingly interminable parentheses close eventually and then they can be jumped over- and returned to Madrid to be with her-and I'm not saying that I wouldn't, given the opportunity, if that happened-I would do so knowing that what has been interrupted cannot be resumed, that the gap would remain there always, hidden perhaps but constant, and knowing that a before and an after can never be knit together.'

And so, despite my genuine desire to return to my city and to see my family again, even the one person who no longer considered herself mine, to see yesterday's faces, having absented myself from today and from their today, and to find myself, without preparation or warning, confronted by tomorrow's faces, I not only planned a stay of two weeks rather than the three my boss had offered me, I also postponed my departure for a little longer on our return from Berlin, in order to find out first what had happened to De la Garza.

I thought of simply phoning him out of the blue and enquiring after his health, but it occurred to me that if I gave my name, he might not even want to speak to me, and that if I gave a false name or invented an excuse or some fabricated query, it would be difficult then to move the conversation on and ask about his physical state, suddenly and for no reason, given that I was supposedly a stranger. So I decided instead to pay him a surprise visit, that is, without making a prior appointment. However, since nowadays no official organization will allow in anyone unless they have first specified the purpose of their visit or proved that they have some legitimate business there, I phoned an ex-colleague at the BBC with whom I had worked on various tedious programs about terrorism and tourism at the start of my life in London-before I was recruited by Tupra or, rather, by Wheeler-and who, like me, had managed to escape his boring post and had doubtless improved his lot by taking on a vague although not entirely insignificant job with the Spanish Embassy at the Court of my patron saint St. James, or San Jacobo.

The name of this unctuous, treacherous individual, part-despot, part-serf (despite the apparent contradiction, the two often go together), was Garralde and when it came to ensuring his own well-being he lacked all scruples; he was always ready to be servile, not just with the powerful and the famous, but also with those he reckoned would one day enjoy a little power and fame, however minimal, enough, at any rate, to do him some future favor or for him to feel able to ask for one; in just the same way, he was scornful of those who, in his view, would never be of any use to him, although he had no qualms about suddenly and cynically turning on the charm if he discovered later on that he had been wrong. He had a broad face, like an almost full moon, small eyes, very porous skin, like pulp, and rather widely spaced teeth, the latter giving him a highly salacious appearance which, as far as I know, accorded only with his greedy mentality-he looked as if he were constantly secreting juices-but not with his activities: he was the kind of man who laughingly pays everyone amorous compliments-probably both women and men, although he would do so only implicitly and, how can I put it, interrogatively with the latter, by taking a great interest in them-but on the rare occasions when one of his flatterees responded in kind, he would, equally laughingly, make his escape, fearful that he would not be able to oblige. He had the strangest hair too, it looked just like Davy Crockett's hat (without the beaver or racoon tail or whatever it was, there were quite enough dangly bits in that Embassy with De la Garza; although the latter didn't wear his hairnet to work), and I always wondered if that hairstyle-cum-cap wasn't in fact a wig, so thick and flamboyant that no one dared suspect it was false. Whenever I saw him, I felt like giving it a good tug, under the guise of masculine affection or in manly, boorish jest, just to see if it came off in my hand and, in passing, to find out what it felt like (it bore a creepy resemblance to velvet).

He had never paid me much attention-poor radio hack that I was-when we first knew each other-he always thought he was better than that, even though he was a hack too at the time-but now he had me down as someone with influence and a touch of mystery. He didn't know exactly what I did or who I worked for, but he knew something about my occasional appearances at chic discos, expensive restaurants, racecourses, celebrity suppers, Stamford Bridge, as well as ghastly dives no Spaniard would ever venture into (Tupra's sociable spells sometimes went on for weeks), and all of this in the company of the natives, which is rare in England for almost any foreigner, even diplomats. (On this occasion, moreover, he would have noticed me wearing those extraordinary shoes made by Hlustik and Von Truschinsky, and Garralde had a keen eye for such things and an infuriating tendency to copy them.) He felt what it best behooves acquaintances to feel about oneself: confusion and curiosity. This led him to imagine that I had all kinds of contacts and powers, which meant that he would do anything I asked. And so, offering no explanation, I asked if I could come and see him at the Embassy and, once I was there at his desk, immediately clarified the situation (in a prudently low voice, for Garralde shared a room with three other functionaries; if he was thinking of staying there, he still had quite some way to go before he made it to the top).

'I haven't actually come to see you, Garralde. I made the appointment so that I wouldn't have any problems getting in. I'll just spend a couple of minutes with you, if that's all right. We can have a proper chat over lunch another day, I've just discovered this fantastic new place, you'll love it, you see lots of people there, fresh out of bed. They skip breakfast, you see.'-For him 'people' meant 'important people,' the only kind he was interested in. He spattered his Spanish with really ghastly foreign expressions like 'the cream of society' or even worse 'la crème de la crème,' 'the haut monde and 'the jet set'; he talked about 'big names' and people being 'top-notch,' and said that at weekends he was 'unplugged.' He might climb quite high with his blend of groveling and abuse, but he would never be anything more than a social yokel. He would also exclaim 'Oro!' whenever he thought something particularly wonderful or remarkable, having heard an Italian friend use the expression and finding it highly original. 'As soon as we finish here (it will only take two minutes), I want you to tell me where I can find the office of a colleague of yours, Rafael de la Garza. He's the person I really want to see, but I don't want him to know I'm coming.'

'But why didn't you ask him for an appointment?' asked the vile Garralde, more out of nosiness than to make any difficulties. 'I'm sure he'd have said "Yes."'

'I don't think so. He's upset with me over some nonsense or other. I want to make up with him, it was all a misunderstanding. But he mustn't know that I'm here. Just show me where his office is and I'll turn up there on my own.'

'But wouldn't it be best if I told him you were here? He's a higher rank than me.'

It was as if he hadn't heard what I'd said. He may have been clever when it came to manipulating friends and acquaintances, but he was basically an oaf. He irritated me, and I was on the point of hurling myself on his abundant hair, its similarity to the legendary hat of Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, was really quite incredible (although it looked more matted than on other occasions, perhaps it was beginning to bear more of a resemblance to a Russian fur hat). I once again restrained myself, after all, he was about to do me a small favor that he would soon ask me to pay back, he was not the sort to wait.

'What did I just say, Garralde? If you announce me, he'll refuse to see me, and besides, it might get you into trouble.'

Since he was a base creature, this last argument sharpened his wits a little. He would never want to make an enemy of a superior, or to annoy him, even if that person wasn't his direct superior. For a moment, I felt sorry for him: how could he possibly consider Rafita de la Garza his superior? Our world is very badly ordered and unfair and corrupt if it allows other people to be at the orders of that prize dickhead. It was just pathetic. Of course, it was equally shocking to think that someone might have Garralde as their superior and have to obey him.

'Fine, if that's what you want,' he said. 'Let me just check if he's on his own. It wouldn't do you much good to burst in on him if he's in a meeting. You wouldn't be able to undo the misunderstanding with witnesses present, now would you?'

'I'll go with you. You can show me the way and the right door. Don't worry, I'll wait outside and before I go in, I'll give you plenty of time to clear off. He'll never know you had anything to do with my visit.'

'And what about lunch?' he asked before we even set off. He had to make sure he got his reward, at least the minimum and immediate one. He would try to get something better out of me later, that was his way of charging interest. But I didn't care a fig about that or indeed about our lunch date, which I probably wouldn't keep. He'd be momentarily angry, but it would only increase his respect for me and his curiosity when he saw how little care I took over my social commitments. 'I'd love to go to that restaurant you mentioned.'

'What about Saturday? I have to fly over to Madrid for a few days after that. I'll phone you tomorrow and we'll arrange a time. I'll reserve a table.'

'Oro!'

I couldn't bear him saying that. Well, I couldn't bear anything about him. I decided there and then that I would not damn well reserve a table nor would I damn well phone him, I'd invent some convincing excuse later on.

He led me down carpeted and slightly labyrinthine corridors, we changed direction at least six times. Finally, he stopped at a prudent distance from a door that stood ajar or almost open, we could hear declamatory voices, or rather one voice, barely audible, which sounded as if it were reciting poetry in a strange, insistent rhythm, or perhaps it was a litany.

'Is he alone?' I whispered.

'I'm not sure. He might be, although, of course, he is speaking. No, wait, now I remember: Professor Rico is here today. He's giving a lecture this evening at the Cervantes Institute. They're probably rehearsing.' And then he felt it necessary to enlighten me: 'Yes, Professor Francisco Rico, no less. You may not know it, but he's a great expert, really top-notch, and very stern. Apparently he treats anyone he deems stupid or importunate like dirt. He's much feared, very disrespectful and has a caustic wit. There's absolutely no way we can interrupt them, Deza. He's a member of the Spanish Academy.'

'It would be best if the Professor didn't see you, then. I'll wait here until they've finished. You'd better go, you don't want to get a dressing down. Thanks for everything and, don't worry, I'll be all right.'

Garralde hesitated for a moment. He didn't trust me. Quite right too. However, he must have thought that whatever happened next and whatever I did, it would be best if he wasn't there. He set off back down those corridors, turning round every now and then and repeating noiselessly to me until he had disappeared from view (it was easy enough to read his lips):

'Don't go in. Don't even think of interrupting them. He's a member of the Academy'

I had learned from Tupra and Rendel how to move almost silently, and to silently open closed doors, if there were no complications, and how to jam them shut, as with the door of the handicapped toilet. And so I made my way over to De la Garza's office, keeping close to the farther side of the corridor. From there I could see practically the whole room, I could certainly see both men, the numbskull and Rico, whose face I was familiar with from television and the newspapers and which was, besides, pretty much unmistakable, he was a bald man who, curiously and audaciously, did not behave like a bald man, he had a disdainful or sometimes even weary look in his eye, he must get very tired of the ignorance surrounding him, he must constantly curse having been born into an illiterate age for which he would feel nothing but scorn; in his statements to the press and in his writings (I had read the occasional article) he gave the impression that he was addressing himself not to a few cultivated people in the future, in whose existence he doubtless did not trust, but to readers from the past, all good and dead, as if he believed that in books-on both sides of the divide: for books speak in the middle of the night just as the river speaks, quietly and reluctantly, and their murmur, too, is tranquil or patient or languid-being alive or dead was merely a secondary matter, a matter of chance. He perhaps thought, like his compatriot and mine, that 'time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common and that binds them together,' and that all time is therefore inevitably indifferent and shared (we all existed and will exist in time), and the fact that we coincide in it physically is purely incidental, like arriving late or early for an appointment. I saw his characteristically large mouth, well-formed and rather soft, slightly reminiscent of Tupra's mouth, but less moist, less cruel. His mouth was closed, his lips almost pressed together, so the primitive rhythms I could hear were emanating not from there, but from Rafita, who, it seems, not only considered himself to be a black rapper by night, in chic and idiotic clubs, but a white hip-hopper in the broad light of day and in his office at the Embassy, although he was dressed perfectly conventionally now and wasn't wearing a stiff, over-large jacket, or a gipsy earring in one ear, or some faux matador's hairnet or a hat or a bandana or a Phrygian cap, or anything else on his empty head. His recitation droned to a halt, and he said with satisfaction to Francisco Rico, that man of great learning: 'So what did you think, Professor?'

The Professor was wearing a pair of large spectacles with thick frames and lenses possibly made of anti-glare glass, but even so I could see his icy gaze, his look of sad stupefaction, as if he were not so much angry as unable to believe De la Garza's pretentiousness or presumptuousness.

'It doesn't thrill me. Ps. Tah. Not in the least.'-That's what he said, 'Ps! Not even the more traditional 'Pse' which means 'So-so' or 'No great shakes' (or 'Ni fu ni fa,' which Spaniards use all the time, even though no one really knows what it means). 'Ps,' especially when followed by 'Tah,' was far more discouraging, in fact it was deeply disheartening.

'Let me lay another one on you, Professor. This one's more elaborate, has more ass to it, it's more, like, kickin.'

There he was again with his semi-crude, semi-youth slang; no one could dishearten or discourage Rafita. I felt relieved to see that he was little changed since the last time I had seen him, beaten and lying on the floor, literally with the fear of death in his shaking, silently supplicant body, his eyes dull and his gaze averted, not even daring to look at us, at his punisher and at me, his punisher's companion by association. I saw that he had recovered, his injuries couldn't have been so very grave if he were still prepared to importune anyone anywhere with his nonsense. He must be the kind of man who never learned, a hopeless case. It was, of course, unlikely that Professor Rico would draw a sword or a dagger on him, or grab him by the neck and bang his head on the table several times. At most, he would give a loud, dismissive snort, or bluntly tell him what he thought of him, because, as the vile Garralde had said, he did have a reputation for being caustic and wounding and for not keeping to himself his harsh opinions or his insults when he considered them to be justified. He was seated indolently in an armchair, his head thrown back like a disinterested, skeptical judge, his legs elegantly crossed, his right forearm resting on the back of the chair and in his hand a cigarette whose ash he was allowing to fall onto the floor, helped by an occasional light tap on the filter with his thumbnail. It was clear that unless someone placed an ashtray immediately underneath his cigarette, he was not going to bother looking for one. He sometimes blew the smoke out through his nose, a somewhat old-fashioned thing to do nowadays, and for that reason still stylish. He probably couldn't care less about the ban on smoking in offices. He was well dressed and well shod, his shirt and suit looked to me as if they were by Zegna or Corneliani or someone similar, but his shoes were definitely not by Hlustik, that much was sure, they, too, must have come from the South. Rafita was standing in front of him, clearly rather worked up, as if he genuinely wanted to know Rico's opinion, to which, however, he paid no attention because that opinion was not, for the moment, benevolent. There are more and more such people in the world, who only hear what pleases and flatters them, as if anything else simply passes them by. It started off as a phenomenon among politicians and mediocre artists hungry for success, but now it has infected whole populations. I was watching the two of them as if from the fifth row in a theater, and if I centered myself opposite the half-open door, both appeared in my field of vision uncut.

'Look here, young De la Garza,' Rico said in an offensively paternalistic tone, 'it's as plain as day that God has not called you to follow the path of foolish nonsensical verse. You're light years away from Struwwelpeter, and Edward Lear could run rings around you.' The Professor was being deliberately pedantic, that is, he was having fun at Rafita's expense, because he probably knew that Rafita wouldn't have heard of either name, I knew of Edward Lear purely by chance, from my pedantic years in Oxford, the other name meant nothing to me, although I've found out more since. 'And I feel you should not oppose His wishes, derr, and that way you won't waste any more time. He obviously hasn't called you to the higher path either, why, you wouldn't even be capable of writing something like 'Una alta ricca rocca,' even though you have six long centuries of progress on your side.' He spoke this line in an immaculate Italian accent, and so I assumed it was not Spanish but Italian, despite the similarity of vocabulary; perhaps it was from Petrarch, on whom he was an expert, as he was on so many other world authors and doubtless on Struwwelpeter, too, his knowledge was immeasurable. 'There are some things, ets, that simply cannot be. So give up now, pf! I was struck by the fact that, despite his role as member of the Spanish Academy, he used so much onomatopoeia that was strange to our language and initially indecipherable, although, at the same time, I found it all perfectly comprehensible and clear, perhaps he had a special gift for it and was a master of onomatopoeia, an inventor, a creator even. 'Derr obviously indicated some sort of prohibition. 'Ets sounded to me like a very serious warning. 'Pf seemed to me to indicate a lost cause.

But Rafita was very much a man of his age and preferred not to hear or perhaps did not hear, and maybe the plethora of other people like him nowadays are just the same. And so he continued unabashed:

'No, you'll really like this one, Professor, it'll blow your mind. Here goes.' Then I saw him doing ridiculous things with his hands and arms just like a rapper (I'm applying the word 'ridiculous' not to him, although he was ridiculous, but to all those who devote themselves to gesticulating and mumbling that witless, worthless drivel, as if the religious doggerel we had to chorus when we were kids, God help us, was making a comeback after all these years), he flailed about, making undulating movements in an attempt to emulate the angry gestures of some low-life black man, although every now and then his Spanish roots would reveal themselves and he'd end up striking poses more like those of a flamenco dancer in full flow. It was truly pathetic, as were his awful so-called verses, a ghastly dirge accompanied by a constant bending of the knees in time to the supposed rhythm of some thin, imaginary tune: 'I'm gonna turn you baby into my ukelele,' was how it began, with that so-called rhyme, 'I'm food for the snakes, like a fine beefsteak, I'll fill you up with venom just for wearin' denim, don't go stepping on my toes if you want to keep your nose, hoo-yoo, yoo-hoo.'-And then, without even pausing to take a breath, he attacked another strophe or section or whatever it was: 'My bullets want some fun, no point in trying to run, and they're looking for your brain and are out to cause you pain, to burn up your grey matter, send it pouring down the gutter, flushing down the can, you'll be shit down the pan, hoo-yoo, yoo-hoo.'

'Enough!'-The very eminent Professor Rico had looked him straight in the eye ('de hito en hito', another phrase that everyone understands without knowing quite what it means); and I suppose he had listened to him 'de hito en hito' as well, if that's possible, which I doubt, although I really don't know He had, at any rate, turned pale on hearing those defiling dactyls, as must I, I imagine, although there were no mirrors to confirm this. Immediately afterwards, however, I felt a wave of heat to my face and I must have blushed, out of a mixture of fury and embarrassment (not for myself but for De la Garza): how did that great nincompoop dare to waste the admirable Francisco Rico's time and bother him with such out-and-out bunkum and baloney? How could he possibly think that his crude ditty had any poetic value whatsoever, not even as a kind of pseudo-limerick, and how could he expect to receive the approval of one of Spain's leading literary authorities, a great expert, on a visit to London, perhaps still tired from his journey, perhaps needing time to put the finishing touches to his magisterial lecture that evening? I felt as indignant as when I saw De la Garza on the fast dance floor at the disco, flailing the imprudent Flavia's face with his ludicrous hairnet. My one brief, simple thought then had been: 'I'd like to smash his face in,' and at the time I knew nothing of the imminent traumatic consequences of that incident. I had remembered that thought much later, with sadness, with a kind of vicarious regret (on my own behalf, but also, vaguely, on behalf of Tupra, who seemed to regret nothing, as was only natural in someone so single-minded and conscientious; he had no regrets, at least about work-related matters), both during and after the thrashing-and, of course, before-each time that Reresby's Landsknecht sword rose and fell. How could De la Garza not have learned his lesson, how could he not have grown more discreet? How could he have composed anything, however incoherent and grotesque, that contained elements of violence, when he himself, courtesy of us, had such painful first-hand experience of it? How could he even mention the words 'pan' and 'can,' when he had nearly been drowned in the blue water of a toilet? 'Perhaps that's why' I thought to myself as I stood in the corridor, still unnoticed, invisible, a voyeur and an eavesdropper. 'Perhaps he's obsessed with what happened to him, and this is his one (idiotic) way of coming to terms with it or overcoming it, by believing (in his clumsy, puerile way) that he could be Reresby and fill someone with bullets or at least with fear, or poison them, or blow their brains out, or do all those things to Tupra himself, of whom he must be scared witless and whom he doubtless prayed each day never to meet again-in this city that they shared. Fantasizing is free, we know this from childhood on; we continue to know it as we grow older, but we learn to fantasize very little, and less and less as the years pass, when we realize that there's no point.' I immediately felt rather sorry for him and that feeling tempered my indignation, although this was not the case with the illustrious Professor, of course, who shared neither my thoughts nor my outstanding debts: 'Enough!' he cried, without actually raising his voice, but the way he projected his voice it sounded like a shout, rather in the way that waiters in Madrid bars can bawl out orders to the people in the kitchen or at the bar, above or below the hubbub from the customers. 'Are you out of your tiny mind, De la Garza? Just what has got into you? Do you really think I could possibly be interested in hearing that string of inanities,' he paused, 'that tom-tom-like tosh you were spouting? What filth! Regit. What dross!'-Many of the expressions he used were old-fashioned or perhaps it was simply that the lexicon used by Spaniards nowadays has become so reduced that almost all expressions seem old-fashioned, things like '¿qué ventolera te ha dado?-'what has got into you?' or 'sarta de necedades'-'string of inanities' or 'taharra-'dross,' as well as 'no estar en sus cabales'-'to be out of your mind,' and I was pleased to see that I was not the only one to use them; for a second, I identified with Rico, a self-identification I found flattering, unexpectedly or perhaps not (he is a very eminent man). His latest onomatopoeia, 'Regh,' seemed to me as transparent and eloquent as the previous ones, conveying disgust, both moral and aesthetic.

The Professor did not move, did not get up, he was clearly capable of controlling his body, it was enough for him occasionally to unleash his tongue, however briefly. He merely deposited his cigarette end in a handy pencil-holder and touched the bridge of his glasses, first with his index finger and then with his middle finger, twice, as if he wanted to make sure they hadn't flown off his nose when he erupted. De la Garza stood paralyzed, knees momentarily bent, not the most graceful of poses, as if he were about to crouch down. Then he straightened up. And since he'd had nothing to drink, he might well have felt alarmed.

'Oh, forgive me, Professor, I'm so sorry, I don't understand, I'd read somewhere that you were interested in hip-hop, that you saw a connection with certain archaic forms of poetry, with doggerel, you know, chapbooks, songbooks, ballads, and all that…'

'You're confusing me with Villena,' Rico cut in, referring to a very well-known Spanish poet with a sharp eye (a sharp eye for all the latest trends). He didn't say this in an offended tone, but in a purely professorial and explanatory one.

'… that you'd said you found it very medieval…'

And then it happened. He stopped speaking because that was when it happened. As he was shaking his head to express his incomprehension and his contrition, shocked by Rico's blunt or rough reaction (which he'd brought on himself), he saw me and immediately recognized me, as if he had been fearing just such an encounter for some time or had often dreamed of me or as if, in his nightmares, I was a crushing weight on his chest. When he glanced to the right, he saw me there, straight ahead of him, standing on the other side of the corridor like a specter at the feast, and instantly recognized me. And I saw the effect of that surprise and that recognition. De la Garza shrank back, every bit of him, the way an insect sensing danger contracts, curls up, rolls into a ball, tries to disappear and erase itself so that death will not touch it, so as not to be picked out or seen, to cease to exist and thus deny its own existence ('No, really, I'm not what you see, I'm not here'), because the only sure way of avoiding death is no longer to be, or perhaps even better, never to have been at all. He clamped his arms to his sides, not like a boxer about to defend or cover himself, but as if he'd suddenly been seized with cold and were shivering. He drew in his head too, much as he had done in the handicapped toilet, when he turned his head and for the first time spotted the blurred gleam of metal overhead and saw, at the very periphery of his vision, the double-edged sword about to swoop down on him: he instinctively hunched up his shoulders as if in a spasm of pain, the deliberate or unwitting gesture made by all the victims of the guillotine over two hundred years or of the axe over hundreds of centuries, even chickens and turkeys must have made that gesture from the moment it occurred to the first bored or hungry man to decapitate one. As happened then, too, his top lip lifted, almost folded back on itself in a rictus, revealing dry gums on which the inner part of his lip got stuck for lack of saliva. And in his eyes I saw an irrational, overwhelming, all-excluding fear, as if my mere presence had plucked him from reality and as if, in a matter of seconds, he had forgotten where he was, in the Spanish Embassy in the Court of St. James or San Jacobo or San Jaime, where he worked or spent time every day surrounded by guards and colleagues who would protect him, they were only a step away; he had forgotten that before him sat the prestigious and very irritated Professor Rico and that, given the situation, I could do nothing to him. What I found most disquieting, what left me troubled and transfixed, was that I didn't want to do anything to him, quite the contrary, I wanted to ask if he'd recovered, inquire after his health, make sure that nothing irreparable had happened, and, if the opportunity arose, and even though I couldn't stand the man, to say how sorry I was. How sorry I was that I hadn't done more, that I hadn't stopped it, that I hadn't helped him to flee, that I hadn't defended him or made Tupra see reason (although with Tupra everything was always calculated and he never rushed into anything or lost his reason). And I would even have liked to convince the dickhead that, all in all, he'd been lucky and got off lightly, and that my colleague Reresby, despite his brutality and incredible though it might seem, had done him an enormous favor by stepping in and thus preventing the bloodthirsty Manoia (whom I had seen and not seen in action on that video, now he really was Sir Cruelty, I'd closed my eyes, I hadn't wanted to cover them, but that scene really cried out for a blindfold) from taking charge of the punishment himself. But I neither could nor should tell him any of that, still less in front of Rico, who, on seeing Rafita's transformation, glanced with disdainful curiosity in my direction (he must have despised everything about De la Garza and considered him a peabrain and a madman).

It was a very disagreeable feeling, more than that, it was incomprehensible, to discover that I could provoke such fear in someone. It was doubtless by association, by assimilation, after all, I hadn't even touched him, perhaps De la Garza assumed that we always went around together and was afraid that Tupra might suddenly hove into view behind me. I was, however, alone and had gone there without the knowledge of my boss, who would not have been in the least amused by my visit. 'Tell him not to phone you to demand an explanation, but to leave you alone, to forget he ever knew you,' Tupra had told me to tell him, to translate those words to the fallen man, before he abandoned De la Garza, brushing his face with the tail of his armed coat as he left. 'Tell him to accept that there's no reason to demand an explanation, that there are no grounds for complaints or protest. Tell him not to talk to anyone, to keep quiet, not even to recount it later as some kind of adventure. But tell him always to remember.' And Rafita had followed those instructions to the letter, he had invented some tall story to explain his battered state to friends and colleagues. And, of course, he would have remembered, indeed, he would have done little else since then, a bundle of nerves day and night, awake and asleep, night and day, even though he later had the cheek to sing a rap song to Rico and commit other unimaginable acts of nincompoopery. When he saw me there, so close, in the corridor, perhaps, from his point of view, stalking him, he might have been panicked into thinking that I was the one who would never leave him in peace or forget him. 'He could have been left with no head, he came very close,' Reresby had added. 'But since he didn't lose it, tell him there's still time, another day, any day, we know where to find him. Tell him never to forget that, tell him the sword will always be there.' I had omitted those last few words, I hadn't translated them, I had refused to endorse them, but I had translated the rest. Everything would have remained engraved on De la Garza's memory, despite his diminished consciousness after the shock of the sharp steel and being hurled against the blunt cylindrical bars: 'We know where to find you.' Nothing could be truer, and now I had found him and I was his terror, his threat.

'He's absolutely terrified of me,' I thought fleetingly. 'But how can that be, I can't recall having terrified anyone very much before, and yet here's this man, frozen to the spot and consumed with the horror he feels on seeing me, even though he's here in his inviolable office, in the Embassy, along with a member of the Spanish Academy, objectively speaking safe and sound, why, all he'd have to do is shout and fellow diplomats and the odd vigilante or guard would be here in a trice. However, his feeling is that they would arrive too late if I had a gun or a sword or a knife and used them on him right away, with no thought for my own fate and without saying a word, that is what he knows intuitively, or perhaps the memory is still all too vivid of that moment when he first glimpsed the double-edged sword and knew there was nothing he could do to save himself: death comes in a second, one moment you're alive and the next, without realizing it, you're dead, that's how it is sometimes and, of course, all the time during wars and bombardments from on high, that widespread practice, which, however customary and accepted it may have become, is always illegitimate and always dishonorable, far more so than the crossbow in the days of Richard Yea and Nay, that changeable Coeur de Lion who was slain by an arrow from a dishonorable crossbow at the end of the twelfth century: you hear the bang and see and hear nothing more, and it won't be you, but possibly someone else who's still alive, who will hear the whistle of the bullet that embeds itself in your forehead. Yes, right now, this man would do anything I ordered him to do, his dread of me-or rather of Tupra, whose representative or henchman or symbol I am-is something he not only experienced in reality for a few minutes that would have seemed to him, as they had to me, an eternity, he would also often have anticipated it, asleep and awake: perhaps he saw us striding towards him like two hired assassins come to slice him up, perhaps we had appeared in his nightmares of being chased and caught, then chased and caught again, and perhaps we have sat heavy on his soul since then.' Because 'even dreams know that your pursuer usually catches up with you, and they've known it since the Iliad,' as Tupra had said to me that night, somewhat later, the two of us sitting in his car outside the door to my apartment, where he believed someone was waiting for me, but where there was no one, only the lights still on and possibly the dancer opposite.

Then I strode quickly into the room and spoke. I walked into the office and said confidently, almost jovially:

'So, how are you doing, Rafita? I can see you've made an excellent recovery.' And I added at once, so that he would see I was keen to keep up appearances and that my intentions were not violent or aggressive. 'Forgive me bursting in like this. Won't you introduce me?' And I went straight over to Professor Rico, who made not the slightest effort to get up, but merely held out one hand to me, the way grand ladies used to do, reaching out as far as he could without actually moving, he had a most distinguished hand and a most elegant shirt-cuff, by Cupri or Sensatini at the very least, excellent brands, I shook it warmly (his hand that is). And since De la Garza still did not respond or utter a word (he just stared at me, terrified, so afraid that he didn't even stop me approaching Rico, in fact, he wouldn't have stopped me doing anything, I could, I realized, do what I liked), I introduced myself: 'Jacques Deza, Jacobo Deza. You're Don Francisco Rico, aren't you? The celebrated scholar.'

It pleased him to be recognized and he deigned to answer, doubtless for that reason alone, for his general attitude revealed no actual interest (whoever I might be, I was, after all, already stigmatized as someone he associated with that rapper-attaché).

'Deza, Deza… Aren't you a friend or acquaintance or student… or, er, whatever… of Sir Peter Wheeler? Your name rings a bell.' Both men were great scholarly figures, and I was aware that they knew and admired each other.

'Yes, I'm a very good friend of his, Professor.'

'I knew the name rang a bell. I recognized it. He must have mentioned you to me once, although I've no idea why. But it definitely rang a bell,' he said, pleased with his own retentive memory.

De la Garza wasn't listening to this superficial exchange. He had moved away from me and was now standing behind his desk as if his desk would protect him and so that he could run away if necessary.

'What the fuck do you want?' he asked suddenly, but despite the expletive, his tone was neither hostile nor ill-tempered, but imploring, as if all he wanted was for me to magically disappear (for the terrible vision, the bad dream to go away) and wishing with all his might that I would reply: 'I'm off now. I don't want anything. I was never here.'

'Nothing, Rafita, I just wanted to reassure myself that you'd recovered from your accident, that there weren't any aftereffects. I happened to be passing and it occurred to me to pop in and ask you, I've been worried. It's a purely friendly visit, I won't stay long, so don't get uptight about it. So, are you all right? Completely better? I'm really sorry about what happened, I mean it.'

'What happened? What accident?' asked Rico skeptically

'Having seen what I've seen and heard what I've heard, no accident could possibly be serious enough,' he added under his breath, but perfectly audibly.

Rafita, however, paid no attention to this harsh comment, he had relegated the Professor and his annoyance to the background, he was too preoccupied with me, alert and tense, as if he feared that at any moment, I would leap at his throat like a tiger. This was an odd sensation for me, almost amusing at first, because I knew myself to be incapable of harming him and had no wish to do so. J knew that, but he did not and contrary to what teachers believe, knowledge is not transmissible; one can only persuade. I found the gulf between his perception and my knowledge almost funny, and yet, at the same time, it was distressing to have someone see me that way, as a danger, as someone threatening and violent. De la Garza was almost beside himself, on tenterhooks.

'Believe me, I just wanted to find out how you are,' I said, trying to calm him, convince him. 'I know you made a real nuisance of yourself and really put your foot in it, but I certainly didn't expect my boss to react like that, and I'm sorry. It took me completely by surprise and was totally disproportionate. I had no idea what he was planning and could do nothing to avoid it.'

'What boss? Sir Peter, you mean? I'm completely lost, what are you talking about, élgar. If he did turn nasty, I'm not surprised, Sir Peter's far too old for such imbecilities.' Rico returned to the charge, not so much because the matter interested him, but because he was bored. He appeared to be the sort of man who cannot bear his brain to be inactive for a moment, because if you don't understand something immediately, you soon will if you wait, but such waiting is unbearable for people who are constantly thinking. That 'élgar' denoted a need to know.

'Look, go away, just go away,' said the nincompoop childishly. He took no notice of what I was saying, he wouldn't listen to reason, he probably hadn't even heard me. He'd lost his nerve completely and so very quickly that it reaffirmed me in my view that Tupra and I must often have strolled through his nightmares, in which we were probably inseparable. 'Please leave, I beg you, leave me alone, shit, what more do you want, I haven't said anything, I haven't told anyone the truth, surely that's enough.'

Rico lit another cigarette, having realized that this obscure conflict was a matter exclusively and perhaps pathologically between De la Garza and me, and that he was not going to glean anything more. He made a dismissive gesture, indicating that he was happy to abandon any further attempts at clarification, and he gave vent to one more of his varied repertoire of onomatopoeia.

'Esh,' he said. It sounded to me exactly like: 'To hell with these two idiots, I'm going to think my own thoughts and not waste any more time on them.'

I saw how shaken Rafita was-his clenched fists still held close to his body (not as a weapon, but as a shield), his eyes wild, his breathing agitated-gripped by a panic that he was now reliving and which he had perhaps been dreading for months, he had also developed an intermittent cough, which, when the fit took him, proved uncontrollable. That cloud of perpetual fear would last for some time yet, it wouldn't be quick to clear. He must have suffered greatly that night, because one is always instantly aware when there is any real danger of death, even if, in the end, it turns out to be something that merely frightened one half to death. It was pointless trying to talk to him. I wondered what state he would have been in if it had been Reresby and not me who had appeared unexpectedly at the door of his office. He would have fainted, had a seizure, a heart attack. I had gone there out of consideration for him (insofar as that was possible), and there was no sense in making him suffer further with my continued presence. On the other hand, I could leave with a clear conscience. He looked fine physically. He might still suffer some pain or other damage, but he had, on the whole, fully recovered. His present and future feelings of insecurity were, however, quite another thing, and they would stay with him for a long time. He would feel uncomfortable in the world, with the added inconvenience of fear and a permanent sense of unease. Not that this would prevent him spouting nonsense, but it would have dealt a fatal blow to his sense of pride at its deepest level.

'Anyway, I'll go now, so don't upset yourself. I can see that you're fine, although not perhaps at this precise moment. It's my fault, I suppose. You seemed in pretty good form while you were singing your rhyming couplets. I'll come and see you again some other time.' I realized that these last innocent words had terrified him still more. From his point of view it was the equivalent of a threat. I let it go, however, I didn't try to put him right, he wouldn't have listened, and I didn't really care. In a moment of weakness and guilt I had chosen to visit him and had paid the price for both weakness and guilt. 'Goodbye, Professor. It's been an honor to meet you. I'm only sorry it was so brief and so… odd.'

'Everything about young De la Garza is odd,' he said scornfully, playing down the importance of the episode, he had probably seen worse; and he stood up, not in order to shake my hand, but to leave. His anger had passed, the situation had nothing to do with him, and his mind was already wandering pastures new. 'Wait, I'm leaving too. I'll see you this evening, Rafita. I doubt I'll have the good fortune of you missing my lecture.'

And there we left De la Garza, still barricaded behind his desk, not daring even to sit down. He didn't say goodbye, he obviously still wasn't capable of articulating any civilized words. And while we, the Professor and I, walked back along those slightly labyrinthine corridors towards the exit, I couldn't help at least attempting an apology:

'You see we had a bit of a falling-out and he still hasn't got over it.'

'No,' he said. 'You should feel very pleased with yourself: you had him scared shitless. You're lucky you can keep him at arm's length like that. He's terribly clinging. I'm vaguely friendly with his father, which is why I put up with the son. Only from time to time, fortunately, and only when I come to London for one of these dull official dos.'

Once we were out in the street and we went our separate ways, I noticed (strangely enough, I hadn't noticed before) that Rafita's fear had cast me in a rather flattering light. Imposing respect, instilling fear, seeing oneself as a danger had its pleasurable side. It made one feel more confident, more optimistic, stronger. It made one feel important and-how can I put it-masterful. But before I hailed a taxi, there was time for me to find this unexpected vanity repugnant too. Not that the latter feeling drove out conceit, they lived alongside each other. The two things were mingled, until they dissipated and were forgotten.

When you haven't been back for some time to a place you know well, even if it's the city you were born in, the city to which you're most accustomed, where you've lived for the longest time and which is still home to your children and your father and your siblings and home even to the love that stood firm for many years (even if that place is as familiar to you as the air you breathe), there comes a moment when it begins to fade and your recollection of it dims, as if your memory were suddenly afflicted by myopia and-how can I put it-by cinematography: the different eras become juxtaposed and you start to feel unsure as to which of those cities you left or departed from when you last set off, the city of your childhood or your youth or the city of your manhood or maturity, when where you live dwindles in importance, and, hard though it is to admit, the truth is you'd be happy enough with your own little corner almost anywhere in the world.

That's how I'd come to see Madrid during my now prolonged absence: faded and dim, accumulative, oscillating, a stage-set that concerned me very little despite having invested so much in it-so much of my past and so much of my present, albeit at a distance-and, more to the point, one that could get along without me quite happily (it had, after all, dismissed me, expelled me from its modest production). Of course any city can do without anyone, we're not essential anywhere, not even to the few people who say they miss our presence or claim they couldn't live without us, because everyone seeks substitutes and, sooner or later, finds them, or else ends up resigned to our absence and feels so comfortable in that mood of resignation that they no longer wish to introduce any changes, not even to allow the lost or much-mourned person to return, not even to take us in again… Who knows who will replace us, we know only that we will be replaced, on all occasions and in all circumstances and in every role, and the void or gap we believed we left or really did leave is of no importance, regardless of how we disappeared or died, whether far too young or after a long life, whether violently or peacefully: it's the same with love and friendship, with work and influence, with machinations and with fear, with domination and even longing itself, with hatred, which also wearies of us in the end, and with the desire for vengeance, which darkens and changes its objective when it lingers and delays, as Tupra had urged me not to do; with the houses we inhabit, with the rooms we grew up in and the cities that accept us, with the corridors we raced madly along as children and the windows we gazed dreamily out of as adolescents, with the telephones that persuade and patiently listen to us and laugh in our ear or murmur agreement, at work and at play, in shops and in offices, at our counters and our desks, playing card games or chess, with the childhood landscape we thought was ours alone and with the streets that grow exhausted from seeing so many fade away, generation after generation, all meeting the same sad end; with restaurants and walks and pleasant parks and fields, on balconies and belvederes from which we watched the passing of so many moons they grew bored with looking at us, and with our armchairs and chairs and sheets, until not a trace, not a vestige of our smell remains and they're torn up to make rags or cloths, and even our kisses are replaced and the person left behind closes her eyes when she kisses the easier to forget us (if the pillow is still the same, or so that we don't reappear in some sudden, treacherous, irrepressible mental vision); with memories and thoughts and daydreams and with everything, and so we are all of us like snow on shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops…

It had been some time since I visited Madrid, from which I, too, had evaporated or faded, leaving not a trace behind or so it seemed, or perhaps all that remained of me was the rim, (which is the part that takes longest to remove), and also my own first name, which I had not yet left behind me, not having yet reached that state of strangeness. I hadn't ceased to exist, of course, in my father's house, not there, but I wasn't referring to his home, but to the home that was once mine. And now I would perhaps find out who had replaced me, even if he was only temporary and had no intention of staying, the permanent replacement takes his time or patiently awaits his turn, the one who will truly replace us always hangs back and lets others go ahead to be burned on the pyre that Luisa one day lit for us and which continues to burn, consuming all who come near, and which does not automatically extinguish itself once we've been burned to a cinder. I wouldn't need to worry that much about whoever happened to be by her side now, or only a little, just a touch, because of the mere fact that he was by her side and by the side of my children too.

I had decided not to give them prior warning from London, but to wait until I arrived, so that my phone call could be followed immediately by a semi-surprise visit. I wanted to make sure they were home-I knew the hours they kept, but there are always exceptions and emergencies-and then turn up a few minutes later, full of smiles and laden with presents. To see the children's excitement and, out of the corner of my eye, Luisa's amused, perhaps briefly nostalgic expression, that would allow me a simulacrum of triumph and a flicker of illusory hope, enough perhaps to sustain me during that artificial two-week sojourn, which seemed to me far too long the moment the plane touched down.

I stayed at a hotel and not at my father's house, for I had learned from my brothers and my sister-rather than from him, for he never spoke about his problems-that his health had deteriorated badly over the last two months, after the doctors discovered that he'd had three mini-strokes-as they called them-of which he had been entirely unaware, not even knowing when they'd occurred; and although my brothers, my sister, some of his grand-daughters and my sisters-in-law often dropped in to see him, there had, in the end, been no alternative but to provide him with a live-in caregiver, a rather nice Colombian lady, who slept in the bedroom I would have occupied, and who relieved his maid, who was getting on in years now, of some of her tasks. I didn't want to upset the new order with my presence. With my current salary, I could easily afford the Palace Hotel, and so I booked a suite there. It was easier for me to stay at a hotel than in someone else's house, even that of my father or of my best friends, male and female, the women being rather more hospitable: with them I would not only have felt like an intruder but also an exile from my own home, whereas in a hotel, I could pretend I was a visiting foreigner, although not a tourist, and feel less acutely that unpleasant sense of having been repudiated and then offered shelter.

I spoke to my father on the phone, as usual a brief conversation, although now he didn't have the excuse that I was calling him from England, which he assumed must be a very expensive thing to do (he belonged to a thrifty generation who only used the phone to give or receive messages, although Wheeler wasn't like that, so perhaps it was a generation that existed only in Spain), and I arranged to see him the next day. His voice sounded normal, just as it had on the last few occasions when I had called from London, I phoned him every week or even more frequently sometimes; he sounded slightly tired, but no more than that, and disliked having to hold the phone to his ear for too long. The strange thing was, though, that he made no fuss about the prospect of seeing me and expressed no excitement, as if we had seen each other only a couple of days before, if not yesterday. It was as if he suddenly had little sense of time or its passing, and kept those people closest to him, those he knew best, always in his thoughts, either so as not to miss them quite so much, their palpable presence I mean, or so as not really to notice their absence. I was simply me, one of his children, and therefore unchanging and sufficiently established in his mind for him not to feel my physical absence or my distance or the unusually long gaps between visits or, rather, the non-existence of those visits. He hardly went out now. 'I've flown over from London, Papa,' I said, 'I'll be here for a couple of weeks."Good. And how are things?' he asked, showing no particular surprise. 'Oh, not too bad. But we'll have a proper talk tomorrow when I come and see you. Today, I want to go and see the kids. I probably won't even recognize them."They were here a few days ago with their mother. She doesn't visit that often, but she comes when she can. And she phones me.' Luisa was not as fixed and stable as I was, which is why he could remember when she came to see him and when she didn't-she was, up to a point, still new to him. 'She must be incredibly busy,' I said as if she were still part of my life and I had to apologize for her. I knew there was no need, she was very fond of my father, and, besides, her own father had died a few years before, and she had, insofar as such a thing is possible, replaced that lost figure with my father. If she didn't go and see him more often, it must be because she really couldn't find the time. 'Was she looking pretty?' I asked stupidly. 'Luisa is always pretty. Why do you ask? You must see her more than I do.' He knew about our separation, I hadn't hidden it from him, as one does occasionally hide potentially upsetting news from the elderly. 'I'm living in England now, Papa,' I reminded him, 'and I haven't seen her for a while.' He said nothing for a moment, then: 'I know you're living in England. Well, if that's what you want. I hope your stay in Oxford is proving fruitful.' It wasn't that he didn't know I was living in London, but now and then he got the different times confused, which isn't that surprising really, since time is a continuum in which we are all caught up until we apparently cease to be.

I had to phone Luisa before going to her house, not only to make sure the children would be there, but out of respect for her. I still had the keys to the apartment and she wouldn't necessarily have changed the locks; I could probably just walk in, without warning, causing first shock and then surprise; but that seemed an abuse to me, she wouldn't like it at all, and besides I risked bumping into my temporary replacement, whoever he was, assuming she had granted him habitual access. It was unlikely, but when in doubt, it's best to do nothing: it would have been embarrassing and I would have liked it even less than she. It turned my stomach, the mere idea of finding a complete stranger sitting in my place on the sofa or preparing a quick supper in the kitchen or watching television with the children in order to appear all fatherly and friendly, or making out he was Guillermo's buddy. I was prepared to be told this as a fact, but not actually to see it and then, unable to forget it, have that picture in my mind once I was back in London.

I dialed her number, it was mid-afternoon, the children would be back from school. She picked up the phone, and when I told her I was in Madrid, she was really shocked and took a while to respond, as if she were rapidly taking stock of the situation in the light of this unforeseen event, and then: why didn't you warn me, how could you, it's not fair; I wanted to give you all a surprise, well, the kids mostly, and I'd still like it to be a surprise, so don't tell them I'm here, just let me walk through the door without them knowing a thing, they're not going out this evening, I assume, can I come over now?

'They're not going out, but I am,' she replied hastily and somewhat flustered, so much so that I even wondered-I couldn't help it-if it was true or if she had just made a last-minute decision to leave the house, I mean, to skedaddle, so as not to be there when I arrived, so that she wouldn't have to see me or meet me.

'You've got to go out now?' I had counted on her presence, on her benevolent gaze when the four of us met once more, it wouldn't be the same without her as witness.

'Yes, any moment actually, I'm just waiting for the babysitter,' she said. 'In fact, let me phone her right now, before she sets off, to warn her that you're coming. She doesn't know you, and she might not want to let you in unless she's forewarned, I've told her not to open the door to strangers under any circumstances, and you, I'm afraid, would be a stranger to her. Hang up now so that I can call her, and I'll call you right back. Where are you?'

I gave her the numbers of the hotel and my room. It was as if she were in the most terrific hurry, besides, nowadays you can track down a babysitter anywhere and at any time even if they're not at home, they all have cell phones. It occurred to me that she had not in fact yet spoken to the babysitter and was phoning her now so that the babysitter could race over to deal with this unexpected situation-hence the urgency-and have time to arrive, and give Luisa time to leave, before I appeared. Even if this was a genuine spur-of-the-moment decision to go out, she would never just assume that my key would still work and thus leave the children alone, not even for a minute, to wait for me there unaware they were waiting. I had the awful feeling she was trying to avoid me. But I couldn't be sure, perhaps I'd grown too used to interpreting people, those I came across at work and outside as well, to analyzing every inflection of voice and every gesture and to seeing something hidden behind any show of haste or delay This was no way to go about the world, all it did was feed my imaginings.

She took what seemed an age to call back, long enough for me to grow impatient, to rekindle my suspicions, and to hope she would dispel them by telling me she'd cancelled her date. And to think, too, that she was playing for time, I mean, allowing time for the babysitter to get there and so delay me setting off in the same direction, towards our apartment which was no longer mine. I sat motionless on the bed, which is what you do when you're expecting something to happen from one moment to the next, a wretched expression that makes every second seem an eternity and leaves us dangling. More than a quarter of an hour had passed when the phone finally rang.

'Hi, it's me,' said Luisa, as young Pérez Nuix had done when she rang my doorbell on that night of heavy, sustained rain, but with much more justification, after all, as far as I was concerned she had been an unequivocal 'me' for many years-that's usually taken for granted in marriages, that there is only one 'me'- and, by then, I had been waiting for her call for some time. She was also within her rights to assume that I would recognize her without any need for further identification-who else would it be, who else but me, but her-from the first word and the first instant, and she could be almost sure of occupying most or many of my thoughts, although that wouldn't be high on her agenda just then, her mind was elsewhere, or she was trying to combine that elsewhere with my unwanted presence, for I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was just that, a nuisance. 'Sorry, the babysitter's phone was busy, and I've only just managed to get through to her. Anyway, she knows you'll be coming and that she's not to spoil your surprise, so she won't say anything to the children. How long will it take you to get here?'

'I don't know, about twenty minutes I should think, I'll take a cab.'

'Then would you mind not leaving for another fifteen or twenty minutes, that will give her time to settle in and sort the kids out. And please try not to keep them up too long past their bedtime, otherwise they'll be worn out tomorrow and they've got school in the morning. If possible, make sure they're in bed by eleven at the latest, which is already much later than usual. You'll have other opportunities to see them. How long are you staying?'

'Two weeks,' I said, and again it seemed to me that this created another unforeseen problem for her, that it was even an annoyance, a bother, something she would have to wrestle with.

'That long?' She couldn't suppress her feelings, she sounded more alarmed than glad. 'How come?'

'As I think I told you, I had to accompany my boss on a trip. In the end, it turned out to be four trips, one after the other. Anyway, he's rewarded me, I suppose, with a longer trip just for me.' And I added: 'So I won't see you tonight, then?'

'No, I don't think so, by the time I get back the children will be in bed. The babysitter will stay as long as she needs to, so don't worry about that; as soon as they're in bed, you can leave, don't wait up for me. If you'd warned me you were coming, I'd have arranged things differently. We'll talk later, when we've got more time.'

The same city, which, just the day before, was faded and dim, becomes suddenly crystal-clear as soon as you set foot in it again; time condenses, yesterday disappears-or becomes just an interval-and it's as if you had never left. You suddenly know once more which streets to take, and in which order, to get from one place to another, wherever they may be, and how much time to allow. I had reckoned on twenty minutes by taxi to my apartment through the abominable traffic, and I was almost exactly right. And instead of thinking excitedly about my children, whom I would be seeing at last after a long absence, I couldn't help worrying about Luisa instead during the whole disenchanted journey. It wasn't that I had expected her to give me a wonderful reception, but I'd thought at least she'd show a little curiosity and sympathy, as she had on the phone whenever I'd spoken to her from London, what had changed, why had she turned against me, was it because I was now breathing the same air as her? Perhaps she had only felt that sympathy and that vague curiosity about me from a distance, as long as I was far away, as long as I was just a voice in her ear, a voice with no face, no body, no eyes, no arms; then she could allow herself those feelings, but not here, not where we had lived happily together and where, later on, we had wounded each other. This was where she had survived without me, become unaccustomed to me, and so she didn't quite know what to do with me any more: I hadn't been around for quite some time. She said not a word about her date, which had arisen, or so it seemed to me, as soon as she learned that I was there in the flesh. She was under no obligation to tell me, of course, and I hadn't asked, nor had I suggested that she cancel, which is easy enough and perfectly free and something that people do on the slightest pretext, simply because they feel like it ('Oh, please, please, today's a really special day, I would so love to see all of you together, surely you can change it, go on, why don't you try?'); and people usually do give explanations even if they're not asked, and provide needless excuses, and tell you about their inane life and speak at length and babble on, out of the sheer pleasure of using language, or so as to provide superfluous information or to avoid silences, or to provoke jealousy or envy or so as not to arouse suspicions by being enigmatic. 'The fatal word,' Wheeler had called it. 'The curse of the word. Talking and talking, without stopping, that is the one thing for which no one ever lacks ammunition. That is the wheel that moves the world, Jacobo, more than anything else; that is the engine of life, the one that never becomes exhausted and never stops, that is its life's breath.' Luisa had held in that breath and said only: 'They're not going out, but I am,' without even adding the minimal excuses usual in such cases, 'It's an appointment I can't break, I made it weeks ago,' or 'It's too late to cancel,' or 'I can't postpone it because the people I'm meeting are visiting Madrid and they're leaving tomorrow' Nor had she expressed polite regret at the clash, even if that regret was false (it still gives some small consolation to the jilted person and makes him feel better): 'Oh, how annoying, what bad luck, what a shame, I would love to have seen the children's reaction when they saw it was you. If only I'd known about it beforehand. Are you sure you can't wait until tomorrow? It's been such a long time.' She had kept her mouth shut, just as if she didn't know who her date was or where she was going, more as if she had just made it up than as if she wanted to keep it secret. That was my suspicion, an occupational hazard perhaps, acquired in England. She must have somewhere to go, somewhere to spend a few hours, the hours I would spend in her apartment. She was sure by now to have a boyfriend, a lover, however transient. It would just be a matter of finding him, or probably not even that if he'd already given her the keys to his place. 'It's as if she doesn't want to see me,' I thought in the taxi. 'But she's going to, that's for sure. I didn't come here to spend yet another day without seeing her, without once more seeing her face.'

The children were hugely surprised. At first, Marina gave me a hard, distrustful stare, then she got used to me, but more in the way that small children get used to strangers-it takes only a matter of minutes if the adult in question has a way with kids- than as if she really remembered me clearly and in detail. It also helped that her brother filled her in right from the start ('It's Papa, silly, don't you see?'). The presents helped to ease matters too, and the babysitter's approving, almost beatific smile, she was a very able young woman who came to open the door to me: I didn't dare try my key in the lock, in case it had been changed, I rang the bell like any other visitor. Marina asked me absurd questions ('Where do you live?' 'Have you got a dog?' 'Does it always rain there?' 'Are there any bears?'), while Guillermo was in charge of asking questions of a more reproachful kind ('Why don't we ever see you?' 'Do you like it better there than here?' 'Have you met any English children?') as well as of the bookish-adventure film variety, he read quite a lot and watched films all the time ('Have you visited Harry Potter's school?' 'And what about Sherlock Holmes' house?' 'Aren't you afraid to go out at night with all that fog and with Jack the Rippers about, or aren't there any Jack the Rippers in London now?' 'Is it true that if the real person stands next to his wax figure at Madame Tussaud's, you can't tell which is which?') I hadn't visited Harry Potter's school, but I had been to 221B Baker Street, because I lived nearby and often popped in; and in York, I had discovered the dark, neglected grave of Dick Turpin, the highwayman in the red jacket, mask, three-cornered hat and thigh-high boots, and next to him was buried his faithful horse, or rather mare, Black Bess, and I had seen the place where, still elegantly dressed, he had been hanged at the Tyburn, just outside York. One night, a white dog had followed me, tis tis tis, through the streets and squares and parks to my house, he was all alone in the heavy rain, for children it would be much more mysterious if I didn't mention his mistress; I let him dry himself and sleep in my apartment, and yes, I would have kept him, but he left the following morning when I took him out for a walk, and I've never seen him since, perhaps he didn't like my human food, well, I didn't have any dog food. On another night, I saw a man take out a sword in a disco, a two-edged sword, he produced it from inside his coat and threatened people, who drew back in terror; he sliced through several things with great skill and mastery, a table, a couple of chairs, some curtains, he shattered a few bottles and ripped the skirts of two women without causing them the slightest harm, he judged things perfectly, he was a real artist; then he put the sword back in the sheath inside his long coat, put the coat on-this made him walk very stiffly, like a ghost-and he left just like that, and no one dared to stop him; I didn't either, what do you mean, are you mad, he would have made mincemeat of me in seconds, he was so fast with that sword (like thunderless lightning that kills silently). I was about to tell them that I had spent a third night at the house of Wendy, Peter Pan's girlfriend, but I held back: Marina was young enough to believe it, but not Guillermo, and I didn't want to recall the videos I had been shown there, in fact, I didn't want ever to remember them and yet I thought of them constantly ('The wind moves the sea and the boats withdraw, with hurrying oars and full sails. Amongst the sound of the waves the rifle shots rang out… Cursed be the noble heart that puts its trust in evil men!… Aboard the boats, all the sailors were crying, and the most beautiful women, all in black and distraught, walk, crying, through the lemon groves.' That poem about Torrijos would always be associated in my mind with that string of evil scenes). And I realized-I had forgotten, it was such a long time since I'd spoken to Guillermo and Marina-that almost everything that happens to one, can, with very few changes, easily be converted into a story for children. Intriguing or sinister tales, the kind that protect and prepare them and make them resourceful.

Once they had gone to bed, I was sure for the first time in many months that they were safe and sound; time again condensed or concertinaed, and for a few seconds I felt as if I had never left their side and never known Tupra or Pérez Nuix, Mulryan or Rendel; when, shortly afterwards, I tiptoed into their respective rooms, to turn out the lights and to check if they were all right, the Tintin book the boy must have been reading just before he fell asleep had slipped to the floor without waking him, and the girl was embracing a little bear destined once more to be smothered by the diminutive arm of her simple dreams. Almost nothing had changed in my absence. Only Luisa, who wasn't there, and although I was, I still hadn't seen her. In her place was a discreet babysitter, and she had kept out of the way, hadn't interfered in the reunion at all, she had merely helped with the children when it was time for supper and bed. She said her name was Mercedes, even though she was Polish: perhaps it was an adopted name, to hispanicize herself more quickly. She spoke good Spanish, she had learned it during the three years she had been there, before that, she hadn't known a word, she said, but her boyfriend was from Madrid, and she was thinking of getting married and settling there (I noticed she wore a little crucifix around her neck), she told me all this while I was playing for time. 'Don't wait up for me,' Luisa had warned, well, it had sounded to me rather like a warning. She was perfectly within her rights not to want me there while she was not, I might have started snooping, looking for anything that might have changed and poking around in her mail, opening her wardrobes and sniffing her clothes, going into her bathroom and smelling her shampoo and her cologne, checking to see if she still kept a photo of me in her bedroom (unlikely), although in the living room there were still a few family snapshots in which I appeared, the four of us together, she wouldn't want the children to forget me completely, at least not my face.

'Do you often come here?' I asked Mercedes. 'The children seem to know you well and they do as they're told.' This wasn't an entirely innocent question.

'Yes, sometimes, but not that often. Luisa doesn't go out much at night. Although she has gone out more lately, usually in the evening.' And then she betrayed Luisa, although she certainly didn't intend to, but she did, without lingering or delaying- people just have to start speaking in order to tell too much, even when they don't seem to be telling anything; they supply the listener with information as soon as they open their mouth, without being asked and without realizing that it is information, and so they give someone away without intending to, or they betray themselves, and no sooner are the words out than it's too late: 'Oh, I didn't realize, how stupid of me, I didn't mean to'-'She was lucky to find me in. She doesn't normally leave it so late to call me, she always phones at least the day before. I might have been booked somewhere else, because I babysit for four different families. Four, excluding Luisa.'

'She was lucky then. How much notice did she give you?'

'None. Just enough time for me to get here. I normally have to catch a bus and a metro, but tonight she said she'd pay for my taxi. The thing is, there aren't that many taxis where I live, which is why it took me so long. "Come as soon as you can," she said, "something urgent's cropped up." She told me about your visit and that I should let you in. But I would have looked through the peephole and let you in anyway, because I know you from the photographs. 'And she gestured shyly towards them, as if she were embarrassed to have noticed.

So my suspicions had been right, perhaps all that practice in the office with no name had not been in vain. Luisa hadn't intended to go out, she'd done so in order not to see me. She hadn't dared make me postpone my meeting with the kids, she would have found it far harder to come up with a credible excuse ('That long,' she had said, aware that it really was a long time). Where would she have gone, it isn't easy to spend hours away from home if you've nothing planned, when evening starts to come on, at twilight. She could have gone to the movies, any film would do, or gone shopping downtown, although she really hated that; she could have sought refuge with her lover, or gone to see a friend or her sister. She would have to kill an awful lot of time until I left, until she reckoned that I would have left the apartment and the coast would be clear, and she would know, too, how hard I'd find it to drag myself away, I felt very comfortable there, almost nothing had changed.

It was past eleven o'clock, which was the very latest the children were allowed to stay up on special occasions, we'd had a very entertaining few hours, but I could see they were tired too, it hadn't been particularly hard to persuade them that it was high time they went to bed, and Mercedes was in equal parts persuasive and firm. It wouldn't be long before Luisa was back. If I hung on for another half an hour, we'd almost certainly meet. I could at least say hello, give her a kiss on the cheek, perhaps a hug if that seemed appropriate, hear her voice, no longer disembodied, see how she had changed, whether she had grown slightly faded or was perhaps more beautiful now that I was far away and she had someone more flattering closer to hand; I could at least see her face. I wanted no more than that, so very little, but I was filled with impatience, an unbearable impatience. Added to that were feelings of insecurity, intrigue, possibly rancor, or perhaps wounded pride: she didn't even share my elementary curiosities, but how could that be after we had been each other's main motive for so many years, it seemed positively insulting that nothing should remain, that she was quite happy to wait another whole day and not even necessarily see me tomorrow-there was no guarantee that, on various pretexts, she wouldn't also avoid me tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, and so on, during the whole of my stay; she might even suggest I pick up the kids downstairs at the entry door on my next visit and take them out somewhere or arrange it so that when I arrived, she'd always be out, or else she might drop them off at my father's apartment so that I could spend time with them there and they'd get to see their grandfather as well. Yes, it was rude of her to be in so little hurry to recognize me in the changed man, the absent man, the solitary man, the foreigner returned; not to immediately want to find out what I was like without her, or who I had become. ('What a disgrace it is to me to remember thy name, or to know thy face tomorrow,' I thought.)

'Do you mind if I stay a bit, until Luisa comes?' I asked the false Mercedes. 'I'd like to see her, just for a moment. She won't be much longer, I shouldn't think.'-'What a painful irony' I thought, 'here I am asking the permission of a young Polish babysitter whom I've never seen in my life to stay a little longer in my own apartment or what was my apartment, and which I chose and set up and furnished and decorated along with Luisa, in which we lived together for a long time, and which I still pay for, indirectly. Once you abandon a place you can never go back, not in the same way, any gap you leave is instantly filled or else your things are thrown away or dumped, and if you do reappear it's only as an incorporeal ghost, with no rights, no key, no claims and no future. With nothing but a past, which is why we can be shooed away'

'Luisa said I should stay until she got back,' she said. 'She's going to pay for my taxi home as well, if she's very late. So that I don't have to wait to catch a buho, there aren't many during the week.'-The word buho rang a bell in that context, they were, I seemed to recall, the late-night buses or metros, I'd forgotten all about them.-'There's really no point in waiting,' she added. 'She's likely to be some time yet. I'll be here if the children should wake up, if they need anything.'

She was very discreet, but her words sounded discouraging, almost like orders. As if Luisa had briefed her when she phoned and what she was really saying to me was: 'No, the best thing would be if you left, because Luisa doesn't want to see you. And she doesn't want you hanging around when she's not here, unchecked and unwatched-my presence isn't enough; I don't have any authority-she doesn't trust you any more, she stopped trusting you some time ago.' Or else: 'She's erased you, all these months she's been scrubbing away at the stain you left and now she's struggling to remove the rim, the final remnant. She doesn't want you to leave any more stains and to see all her hard work ruined. So please be so kind as to go, if not, you'll be considered an intruder.' And these last two interpretations of her words were what made me decide once and for all to stay.

'No, I think I'll wait for her anyway,' I said and sat down on the sofa, after first having taken a book from the shelves. The books hadn't changed, they were in the same arrangement and order in which I had left them, there was my entire library, I mean, our library, we hadn't divided the books up, and I had nowhere to put mine, everything in England was provisional and, besides, I had no space, and I wasn't going to start moving things if I didn't know where I was going to live, either in the short term or the long. Mercedes wouldn't dare oppose me, she wouldn't dare throw me out if I sat down and read and said nothing, if I asked her no more questions and didn't bother her or try to worm things out of her. She hadn't realized that was what I was doing, or perhaps only when it was too late. 'I'm in no hurry,' I added, 'I've just arrived from London. This way I'll be able to say hello to her-in Madrid and in person.'

I waited and waited, reading in silence, listening to the small noises that seemed either eerily familiar or instantly recognizable: the fridge with its changing moods, occasional distant footfalls in the apartment above and a sound like drawers being opened and closed-the upstairs neighbors obviously hadn't moved and kept up their nocturnal customs; there were also the faint notes of a cello coming from the boy who lived with his widowed mother across the landing and who always practiced before he went to bed, he might well be almost an adolescent by now, his playing had improved a lot, he got stuck or stopped less often from what I could hear, which wasn't much, the boy always tried not to play too loudly, he was well-brought-up and used to say 'Good afternoon' to us even when he was only small, but in a friendly not a cloying way, I tried to work out if he was playing something by Purcell or by Dowland, but I couldn't, the chords were very tenuous and my musical memory was out of training, in London I listened to music at home and rarely went to concerts, not that I spent much time at home, where I couldn't rely on the consoling daze that sustained me daily and liberated me from the curse of having to make plans. The only thing I knew for sure was that the music being played wasn't Bach.

The Polish babysitter got out her cell phone and made a call, retreating into the kitchen so that she could talk to her boyfriend where I wouldn't hear her, perhaps out of modesty, perhaps in order not to bother me with a schmaltzy or perhaps obscene conversation (however Catholic she was, you never can tell). It occurred to me that if I hadn't been there, she would have used Luisa's landline, on which she could talk at greater length because she would be saving herself the expense, for that reason alone it must have really irritated her that I hadn't left when I should have. I had taken Henry V down from the shelves, because Wheeler had quoted from it and referred to it in his house by the River Cherwell, and since then I had kept it handy and dipped into it or leafed through it now and then, even though I had long since found the fragments he'd alluded to. Or, rather, what I picked up was King Henry V, to give it its full title, a copy of the old Arden edition, bought in 1977 in Madrid according to a note I had written on the first page, and at some point I had written in it, although I couldn't remember when-but before I would have met Luisa-and my mind was in no fit state to pay due attention to the text or to trawl back through the past, I merely glanced through it, looking at the underlinings left by the young reader I had been on some distant day, so long forgotten that it no longer existed. My mind was concentrating on one noise only, which is why I heard all the other noises too, my ear cocked and waiting for the sound that mattered to me, that of the elevator coming up, followed by the key in the door. I heard the first several times, but it always stopped at other floors and only once at ours, and on that occasion it was not accompanied by the second sound and wasn't Luisa returning.

Mercedes returned to the living room, looking happier and more relaxed. She was an attractive girl, but so excessively blonde and pale and cold that she appeared not to be. She asked if I would mind if she turned on the TV, and I said I didn't, although that was a lie, because the sound of the television would wipe out all other sounds; but I was there as a mere unexpected visitor, if not an out-and-out intruder, which I was more and more becoming with each minute I lingered there. The young woman used the remote control to flip through the channels and finally opted for a film with real animals in the main roles, it was as I realized at once, Babe, I recalled taking Guillermo to see it at the movie theater a few years before, it was mystifying why the moronic programmers should put it on at that hour, when most children would be asleep. I was happy to watch it for a while, it was less demanding than Shakespeare and the little pig was a great actor, I wondered if perhaps he had been nominated for an Oscar that year, but I doubt he would have won; I would buy it on DVD for Marina, who, having been born later, might not have seen it. I was just considering the sad fate of actors-anyone can do their job, children and dogs, elephants, monkeys and pigs, but, so far, no one has found an animal capable of composing music or writing a book; although, of course, that depends on how strict you are with your definition of animal-when I saw Mercedes spring to her feet, scoop up her things in a matter of seconds and, after addressing an abrupt 'Goodbye' to me, race to the front door. Only when Mercedes was already there did I hear the key in the lock and the door opening, it was as if she was endowed with extraordinarily acute hearing and had picked up the exact moment when Luisa arrived at the street door in a car or taxi. She, the babysitter, must have been in a tremendous hurry to leave, she clearly didn't want to stay any longer than it took for her to be paid and provided with her promised expensive transportation home, for it was nearly midnight, Luisa had been out for a little over four hours. Or perhaps it wasn't just that, perhaps she wanted to warn Luisa immediately that, contrary to her expectations, she wouldn't find herself alone: that I had insisted on waiting for her, against her wishes, or perhaps in disobedience to the orders that Mercedes had received and failed to enforce.

I heard them whispering for a few moments, I got up from the sofa, but didn't dare to join them; then I heard the door close, the Polish babysitter had gone. After that came the sound of Luisa's footsteps in the corridor-she was wearing high heels, I recognized the click-clack on the wooden floor-she always wore them to go out-heading towards the bathroom and her bedroom, she didn't even look in at me, she must be desperate for a pee, I assumed, as one so often is on arriving home; that seemed quite normal really, if she'd been with other people and not wanted to get up, for example, during a meal, either at someone's table or in a restaurant. Or perhaps she wanted to tidy up before showing herself to me, assuming she had spent the evening with my ephemeral replacement and was returning as women sometimes do return from such prolonged encounters, with her skirt all wrinkled and slightly askew, her hair disheveled, her lipstick erased by kisses, a run in her stockings and the signs of all that impetuosity still in her eyes. Or perhaps she was so angry with me that she had decided to go to bed without even saying hello and to leave me in the living room until I got fed up or until I understood that when she had said she wasn't going to see me that night, she had meant it. She'd probably decided to shut herself in the bedroom and not come out, to get undressed, turn off the light and climb into bed, pretending that I wasn't there, that I was still in London and did not exist in Madrid, or that I was a mere ghost. She was perfectly capable of that and more-I knew what she was like-whenever anyone tried to impose something on her that she didn't want. But she would have to leave the bedroom before she closed her eyes, at least once, and if the worst came to the worst, I could intercept her then, for it would be quite beyond her powers not to go in and see the children and make sure they were safe and sleeping peacefully.

I continued to wait, I didn't want to rush anything, still less go and pound on her door, beg her to let me see her, bombard her with awkward questions through that barrier, and demand explanations I had no right to demand. That would have been a bad start, after such a long separation, it would be best to avoid anything that smacked of confrontation or reproach, unnecessary and absurd and not at all what I wanted. From now on, the initiative lay with her, I had already made things awkward for her by refusing to leave, once the excuse of enjoying spending time with my children had lapsed. On hearing the key in the door, I had muted the TV, but could still see the antics of that porcine emulator of De Niro and John Wayne-he was an extremely polite little pig-and his co-stars: a few dogs, some sheep, a horse, a bad-tempered duck, all of them superb actors.

After a few minutes, I heard the door of her bedroom open and a few footsteps, she was still wearing her high heels, so she obviously hadn't changed her clothes, but she walked more quietly, trying not to make noise: she peered into Marina's room and then into Guillermo's, she didn't go right in or only a little way, just far enough to see that everything was in order. I still didn't want to get up and go and find her, I preferred for her to come into the living room, if she did, and when at last she did-her footsteps firmer, normal, now that she had breathed in the sound of the children's deep sleep, which had been enough to reassure her that she ran no risk of waking them-I thought I understood, despite any efforts at concealment she may have made in the bathroom that had once been mine, why she had wanted to avoid me, and that it hadn't been because she didn't want to see me, but because she didn't want me to see her.

At first sight, she looked very good, well-dressed, well-shod, although rather less well-coiffed, and yet wearing her long locks caught back in a ponytail suited her, gave her a youthful, naive air, almost that of a young girl caught in flagrante on returning home late, but who was I to say anything, or even to feel surprised. Before I noticed anything was wrong, she had time to say a few words, with an expression on her face of mingled pleasure to see me and annoyance at finding me there, but also of fear that I had caught her out or perhaps it was embarrassment doing battle with defiance, as if I had surprised her doing something I wouldn't like or that would seem to me reprehensible, and, realizing that, she didn't know whether to strike her flag or to run it up the flagpole and stand and fight, it's odd how former couples, long after they have ceased being a couple, still feel mutually responsible, as if they owed each other a certain loyalty, even if that amounts only to knowing how they're coping on their own and what's going on in their life, especially if something strange or bad is happening. Things were happening to me about which I, being far away, had said nothing: I had clearly lost my footing or lost both grip and judgment, employed as I was in a job about whose consequences I knew nothing, not even if it had any consequences, and being paid a suspiciously large salary too; I had, by then, been injected with strange poisons and was leading an existence that grew ghostlier by the day, immersed in the dream-like state of one who lives in another country and is starting not always to think in his own language, I was very alone there in London, even though I was surrounded by people all day, they were just work colleagues and never really developed into pure friendships, even Pérez Nuix had turned out to be no different-not even my lover, which she wasn't, since there had been no repetition and no laughter-after that one night I had shared with her carnally, a fact we had kept concealed and excessively silent, from others and from ourselves, and when one pretends that something hasn't happened and it's never spoken of, it ends up not having happened, even though we know the opposite to be case; what Jorge Manrique wrote in his 'Lines on the Death of His Father' some five hundred and thirty years ago, and only two years before his own early death when he was not yet forty, wounded during an attack on a castle by a shot from a harquebus (even worse and more dishonorable than that of Richard Yea and Nay, felled by an arrow from a crossbow), 'If we judge wisely, we will count what has not happened as the past' is as true as the contrary position which allows us to count the past, along with everything else we have experienced, our entire life, as also not having happened. Then what does it matter what we do in our lives, or why it does it matter so very much to us?

You just had to stay, didn't you, Jaime?' Luisa said before I could say anything. 'You just had to wait up to see me.'

Now, though, after that initial glance, I spotted what was wrong at once, it was impossible not to, at least for me. She had tried to cover it with make-up, to conceal it, hide it, perhaps in the same way that Flavia would have tried unsuccessfully, with the unlikely help of Tupra in the ladies' restroom, to make the wound on her face invisible, the mark of the rope, the weal left by the whip, the welt caused by De la Garza's clumsy lashings during his wild gyrations on the fast dance floor. That wasn't what Luisa had on her face, it wasn't uno sfregio, not a gash or a cut or a scratch, but what has always been known in my language as 'un ojo morado'-literally 'a purple eye'-and in English as 'a black eye,' although since the impact or cause was not recent, the skin was already growing yellow, the colors that appear after such a blow are always mixed, there's never a single color, but several, which combine at every phase and keep changing, perhaps the disagreement between the two languages stems from that (although mine does lean more to English when it refers to such an eye as 'un ojo a la funerala'-more or less 'an eye in mourning'), they always take a long time to fade, it was just our bad luck that not enough time had yet passed. When I saw it, I no longer had to respond to her words, nor to apologize. Unfortunately, I couldn't greet her either or give her a kiss or embrace her, I had waited so long for this meeting and now I couldn't even manage a smile or an 'Hola, niña-'Hello, love'-as I used to when we were still together and on good terms. I immediately went over to her and the first thing I said was: 'What's that? Let me see? What happened? Who did it?'

I took her face in my hands, taking care not to touch the affected area, she had clearly just been in the bathroom applying various creams, to no avail. Her eyelid was no longer puffy or only a little, but it obviously had been. I calculated that the injury must have occurred about a week or perhaps ten days ago, and it was the result of a blow, I was sure of that, dealt by a fist or a blunt instrument like a bat or a blackjack, I had seen such bruised eyes and cheekbones and chins years before, under the Franco regime, when students who had been arrested and beaten up would emerge from the police station, from the headquarters of the security forces in Puerta del Sol or from Carabanchel prison, my fellow university students who'd had much worse luck than I did during the small semi-spontaneous street demonstrations that we called 'saltos' and at illegal rallies that were broken up with the aid of very long, flexible truncheons, which really hurt because the truncheon flexed on impact, they were used by the police or 'grises' who charged on horseback, sometimes it seems incredible to me that it was only in the mid-seventies that we used to flee their hooves every few days or weeks, as we left our classes. Although, of course, everything can come back.

She moved away, avoided me, retreating two steps in order to re-establish the distance between us, smiling as if my questions amused her, but I could see that they didn't.

'What do you mean? No one did anything to me. I collided with the garage door about a week ago. It was my wretched cell phone's fault. Someone called me, I got distracted and misjudged the distance when the door was closing. It hit me full on, it's really heavy, it must be made of solid iron. It's nearly better now, it looked worse than it was. It doesn't hurt.'

'Your cell phone? So you've got a cell phone now? Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you give me the number?' And while, in my surprise, I was asking her all this, I thought or remembered: 'Reresby made me say the same thing to De la Garza, I had to translate it for him while he was lying motionless on the floor, bruised and beaten: "Tell him that if he has to go to the hospital, then he should give them the same line drunks and debtors do-that the garage door fell on him." Luisa has become neither of those things, neither a drunk nor a debtor, as far as I know. But Tupra was obviously aware that blows from garage doors are almost always inventions.' And thanks to him I was even more convinced that she was lying to me. She lacked the kind of imagination that a habitual liar develops, and so she had resorted to cliché, like any inexperienced liar who avoids the implausible, which is precisely the thing most likely to be believed.

'It's because of the kids,' she said. 'I realized that, however much we might hate cell phones, there's no sense in a babysitter or my sister, for example, or the school, not being able to locate me immediately if anything should happen to them.'-So the Polish babysitter could have called Luisa's cell phone from the kitchen and warned her that I was refusing to shift from the apartment, and also found out with some degree of accuracy when she would arrive.-'Especially since you're not here. I bought it for my own peace of mind. Now that I'm alone with them, now that I'm the only person anyone can contact in an emergency. And anyway why would you need the number in London? It's not as if we still spoke every day…'-Unfortunately, I sensed no reproach in these last words, I wished I had. I couldn't stop looking at her purple, yellowish, bluish black eye, the white of which was still slightly red, it would have been crisscrossed with red veins during the first few days after the blow. She was pretending that she wasn't even aware of it, but she could see me staring at it and this made her slightly nervous, as became apparent when she turned to look at the television so that she was in profile, to escape my scrutiny. And she tried to change the subject too. 'What were you watching, a movie about pigs? Is this some new interest of yours?' she added with the amiable irony that was so familiar to me and so attractive. She must have seen my fleeting smile. 'I'm sure the children would enjoy it. How did you think they looked, by the way? Have they grown a lot? Do they seem very different?'

While I did want to talk to her about the children, to tell her what impression they'd made on me after such a long time, I wasn't going to let myself be diverted so easily. I was the way I was, and now I had the examples of Tupra and Wheeler, who never let go of their prey as long as there was something to be got out of him or her, after all the digressions and evasions and detours.

'Don't lie to me, Luisa, you and I haven't changed that much. That business about the garage door is so old hat, they're always rebelling and hitting people,' I said, and again I noticed that I only called her by name when we were arguing or when I was angry, rather as she only called me Deza in similar situations, as well as in other very different ones. 'Tell me who did this to you. I hope it's not the guy you're going out with, because if it is, we've got a problem on our hands.'

'Our hands? Just supposing I was going out with someone, what's that got to do with you?' she said at once, parrying my remark not sharply, but firmly; and she had enough spirit to recover her irony and immediately soften the blow: 'If you're going to continue down that road, you'd better go back to watching your little animal friends while I tidy up, but once it's over, you leave; the children have to get up early, and it's already very late. We'll talk another day when we're both a bit fresher, but not about this. I told you what happened, so don't insist on seeing phantoms. And if that was just a way of asking me if I'm going out with someone, that's none of your business, Deza. Go on, finish watching your pig, and then go back to the hotel and sleep, you must be tired from your trip and from the children. They're exhausting, and you're out of practice being with them.'

She could always make me laugh and could always win me over. I still had a soft spot for her, and that hadn't changed during my time spent in London. This was hardly news-it was something that would probably never change-but being there with her only confirmed and made still plainer to me that I should, at all times, be careful not to allow myself unwittingly to be charmed, while she bustled around and took no notice of me. Quite apart from our conjugal life and our unforgotten love, Luisa was for me one of those people whose company you seek out and are grateful for and which, almost in itself, makes up for all the heartaches, and which you look forward to all day-it's our salvation-when you know you'll be seeing her later that evening like a prize won with very little effort; one of those people you feel at ease with even when times are bad and about whom you have the sense that wherever they are, that's where the party is, which is why it's so hard to give them up or to be expelled from their society, because you feel then that you're always missing out on something or-how can I put it-living on the margins. Thinking that such people could die is unbearable to us: even if we're far from them and never see them any more, we know they're still alive and that their world exists, the world that they themselves create merely by being and breathing; that the earth still shelters them and that they therefore retain their space and their sense of time, both of which one can imagine from a distance: 'There's the house,' we think, 'there's the atmosphere filled by her steps, by the rhythm of her day, the music of her voice, the smell of the plants she tends and the pause of her night; I no longer play any part in it, but there is the laughter, the wit and charm and the dear departed friends to whom Cervantes bade farewell when he was dying, "hoping to see you soon, happily installed in the other life." And knowing that therein lies all help, that we possess a memory not shared by everyone, which, as far as I'm concerned is the past, but not truly so, not in the absolute sense-that it's only by accident, or bad luck, or my own fault that I daily perceive it as the past-a place where others come and go and enjoy themselves without ever giving it much thought, just like us when we were part of that atmosphere and that rhythm, that wit and charm, part of the music of that house and even the pause of its quiet night. Knowing that it was not just a pleasant dream or something that existed in another imagined life.' And there I was, a witness to its permanence and not wanting to leave. There stood the person who was, for me, where the party was happening, with her good humor and her steadfastness and her frequent smiles, and even her high heels. That was enough, up to a point, knowing that she had not ceased to be, that she still trod the earth and still traversed the world, that she was not safe more or less in one-eyed, uncertain oblivion or already on the side of time where the dead converse.

And yet now there was a threat, or worse still there was an already visible wound that someone had inflicted and that might be repeated, possibly something worse next time, who knew (who knows when anything will stop once it's begun). What I did know was that nagging would get me nowhere: if she had decided not to tell me something or talk about it, there was no way I could twist her arm, I would have to find out by other means, but by what means, just then I could think of none apart from the kids, but I didn't want to use them, and then I was surprised to find myself thinking: 'I could always ask Tupra for help.' If, as I assumed, he had found out about the night Pérez Nuix had spent at my apartment and about the agreement we had reached behind his back; if, therefore, my favor to her had proved useless and Incompara had gained nothing from it, and young Pérez Nuix's father had received the inevitable beating for his recurring debts, a beating that Reresby had made me watch (the billiard cues-doubtless to inform me of my failure and to teach me a lesson), he would have no difficulty in finding out the name of the man Luisa was going out with, even though it was in another country and the wench, fortunately, was not yet dead. That had been one of my fears during my time in London, since my departure, when I thought about who would, sooner or later, replace me, and of the various possibilities that had always terrified me, the figure of the despotic possessive man, who subjugates and isolates and, little by little, quietly insinuates his demands and prohibitions, disguised as infatuation and weakness and jealousy and flattery and supplication, a devious sort who declines her first invitations to share her pillow in order not to appear intrusive and who reveals not a trace of any invasive or expansionist tendencies, and who initially appears always deferential, respectful, even cautious; until one day after some time has passed-or perhaps on a rainy night, when they're stuck at home-when he has conquered the entire territory and doesn't allow Luisa a moment's peace, he closes his large hands around her throat while the children-my children-watch from a corner, pressing themselves into the wall as if wishing the wall would give way and disappear and, with it, this awful sight, and the choked-back tears that long to burst forth, but cannot, the bad dream, and the strange, long-drawn-out noise their mother makes as she dies. In the face of that nightmarish scene, I had always thought, in order to dispel it: 'But no, that won't happen, that isn't happening, I won't have that luck or that misfortune (luck as long as it remains in the imagination, misfortune were it to become reality)…' Now I was faced by a real mark left by that imagined horror, in the form of a black eye or an eye of changing colors, and by the knowledge that in this area of reality there wasn't a single drop of luck, only a vast sea of misfortune drowning everything and driving out all trace of the imaginary, such a sphere would no longer exist, or is it just that it can never coexist with real danger: there are far too many poisonous cowards in Spain who, each year, kill their wives or the women who were their wives or who they wanted to be their wives, and sometimes they kill their own children as well in order to inflict more pain on the women, it's a plague that remains unquelled by persuasions, threats, laws, or even the most severe prison sentences, because such men take no notice of the outside world and they get carried away because they love these women so much or hate them so deeply that they cannot, like me, simply live without them, content in the knowledge that cheers me in my sadness (that consoles me as regards Luisa), that they continue to exist in the world and will be or are the past only for us, but not for everyone else. 'I can't take any risks in a country like this,' I thought. 'I can't take any risks with a black eye inflicted by a punch, I can't just leave the matter entirely in her hands and to her possibly weakened will and not get involved, it's enough that I know she's put herself in danger and therefore the children too, even if only because they might lose her, and they've already suffered a semi-loss with me leaving home.'

And so I took two steps back and decided not to ask her any more questions, I would ask elsewhere, I had two weeks, that should be time enough to investigate and to convince her, and perhaps, during my stay, she would receive another blow and then she wouldn't want to keep quiet and close her mind to my words ('Keep quiet and don't say a word, not even to save yourself. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it chokes you, pretend the cat's got your tongue. Keep quiet, and save yourself But perhaps we shouldn't always do that, however much, in the gravest of situations, we are advised and urged to do precisely that).

'All right, I'll go,' I said. 'I won't take up any more of your time, you're right, it's late, I'll call you tomorrow or the day after and we can meet whenever it suits you. And don't worry about the pig, it was your Polish babysitter who started watching him, although, it has to be said, he is a wonderful actor, up there with the greats.' And at the front door, to which she accompanied me, smiling ever more brightly, as if the imminent absence of my gaze were already a source of relief, I added: 'But te conosco, mascherina,'-This was an expression I had learned a long time before from my distant Italian girlfriend, who had taught me her language, more or less; and that carnivalesque expression, known to Luisa as well, was tantamount to saying: 'You don't fool me.'

I wasted no time. The following day, I went to see my father, as I'd said I would; I had lunch with him and, while we were eating dessert, my sister arrived, she dropped in on him most days and since she knew nothing of my visit (my father had forgotten to mention it, 'Oh, I thought you all knew.'), finding me there was a cause of great surprise and pleasure. And when my father went to lie down for a while, at the request of his caregiver, and left us alone, Cecilia brought me up to date on the medical situation, providing me with more details (the outlook wasn't good, either in the medium or more likely short term), and once she, in turn, had told me about her and her husband and I'd done my best not to tell her anything about myself beyond the innocuously vague, I finally got up the nerve to ask if she knew anything about Luisa: what kind of life she was leading, if they ever got together socially, if she knew whether or not she was going out with anyone yet. She knew almost nothing, she told me: they talked on the phone now and then, especially about practical matters involving their respective children, and they occasionally met up there, at my father's apartment, but generally only for a matter of minutes because Luisa was usually in a hurry, they would exchange a few friendly words and then Luisa would leave the children to spend some time with their grandfather or with their cousins, my sister's children or my brothers,' one or another of whom would usually be there on a Saturday or a Sunday; then, after a couple of hours, Luisa would return to pick up Guillermo and Marina, but, again, she was always in a rush. My sister understood, though, that Luisa sometimes visited my father on her own, on a weekday, to chat and keep him company, they had always got on well together. So it might be that she talked more with him, or about more personal matters, than with any other member of the family, even if only once in a blue moon. No, she had no idea what kind of life Luisa was leading in her spare time, not that she would have a great deal of that. There was no reason why Luisa would keep her up to date on her comings and goings, least of all the romantic kind. Her husband had bumped into Luisa one evening, about two or three months ago, coming out of an art gallery or an exhibition, she couldn't quite remember which, accompanied by a man he didn't know, which was hardly surprising really, it would have been far stranger if he had known him; they had seemed to him like friends or colleagues, by which he meant that they hadn't been walking along arm in arm or anything. The only thing he did say was that the man looked to him like an arty type. At that point, I interrupted her (my reflexes in my own language were beginning to go).

'You mean he's an artist? Why? Did Federico say what he looked like?'

'No, by "arty" he meant one of those people who like to look the part of the artist, the eccentric. They may or may not be artists, it doesn't matter. They dress in a way that gives that impression, it's a deliberate ploy, to fool people into thinking that they're very intense and, well, arty, it could be a black polo neck or a fancy walking stick with a ghastly greyhound head on the handle, or an anachronistic hat they never take off, or long wavy musician's hair, you know the sort I mean.'-And she made a corresponding gesture with her hands around her head, rather as if she were washing her hair without touching her scalp.-'Or a ridiculous Goyaesque hairnet,' I had time to think fleetingly. 'Or tattoos anywhere, especially on their heels'-'Or' she went on, 'women who wear caps, or those baggy stockings that reach just above the knee, or a sailor's hat or the kind of hat some smug sassy black woman would wear or else some ghastly rasta braids.'

It amused me to know that she hated that particular kind of stockings. I had no idea, on the other hand, what she meant by 'the kind of hat some smug sassy black woman would wear' and I was curious enough to be tempted to ask. However, I couldn't afford to waste any time, my other curiosity was more urgent. 'I see. So what was the guy wearing? Or did he have the whole caboodle, polo neck, walking stick and hat?'

'He had a ponytail. Federico noticed this because he wasn't a particularly young man, your age or thereabouts. Our age.'

'Yes, in certain places, it's quite a common sight now. You get grown men wearing a ponytail, in the belief that it makes them look like a pirate or a bandit; or else it's a goatee, and then they think they're Cardinal Richelieu or a psychiatrist or someone's clichéd idea of a sage-there's a positive epidemic of them among professors; or they grow a mustache and an imperial and think they're musketeers. They're complete frauds, the lot of them.' With my sister I could allow myself to be as arbitrary and cranky and over-the-top as she herself tended to be, it was a comical family trait, shared by all of us except my father, whom we did not greatly resemble in terms of equanimity or good temper. I, for example, never trust men who wear those rather monk-like sandals, I figure they're all impostors and traitors; or anyone in bermuda shorts or clamdiggers (men, I mean), which nowadays means that in summer I trust almost no one, especially in Spain, that paradise of shameless ignominious get-ups. It may be that those intuitions-made-rules, those radical prejudices or defining superficialities, which are based solely on limited personal experience (as are all such intuitions), had helped me with Tupra in my now not-so-new job, even if only in the categorical way I sometimes pronounced on the individuals presented to me for interpretation and conjecture, once, that is, I'd acquired both the confidence to issue judgments out loud and the irresponsibility one always needs when handing down any verdict. Nevertheless, those generalizations are based on something, even if that something belongs only to the realm of perceptions: each person carries echoes of other people within them and we cannot ignore them, there are what I call 'affinities' between individuals who may be utterly different or even polar opposites, but which, on occasion, lead us to see or intuit the shadows of physical resemblances which seem, at first, quite crazy. 'Objectively speaking, this beautiful woman and my grandfather have absolutely nothing in common,' we think, 'and yet something about her makes me think of him and reminds me of him,' and then we tend to attribute to her the character and reactions, the irrascibility and opportunism of that despotic ancestor of ours. And the surprising thing is, we're often right-if enough time passes for us to find that out-as if life were full of inexplicable non-blood relationships, or as if each being that exists and treads the earth and traverses the world left hanging in the air invisible intangible particles of their personality, loose threads from their actions and tenuous resonances from their words, which later alight by chance on others like snow on shoulders, and thus are perpetuated from generation to generation, like a curse or a legend, or like a painful memory belonging to someone else, thus creating the infinite, exhausting and eternal combination of those same elements. 'What else did he tell you? What was the guy like, apart from the ponytail? How was he dressed? Didn't Luisa introduce him? What was his name? What does he do?'

'How should I know? I've no idea. Federico didn't notice and anyway he only saw him for a moment. They just walked past each other and said "Hello," that's all, but they didn't stop. Besides, Federico and Luisa don't really know each other that well.'

'So the lovely couple were in a hurry, were they?'

'They all were, Jacobo, Federico didn't stop and neither did they. Now don't start going around giving funny looks to every guy with a ponytail you happen to meet. Besides, whoever he was, they've probably split up since then. And don't go calling them "the lovely couple" either, because there's no basis for that, not the slightest indication, I've told you what happened, but I obviously can't tell you anything much at all. You're just getting yourself all worked up about nothing.'

I preferred not to tell her about the punch, the unbearable blow, about the shiner, the black eye, it was best if I continued investigating on my own without alarming her, if Cecilia knew no more than she had told me, she wasn't going to be able to provide me with any further information, I didn't mind if she attributed my disquiet exclusively to feelings of jealousy, those were enough to justify my insistent curiosity and, after all, they did exist, perhaps as much as my concern that some poseur, some wretch, with ponytail or without, it didn't matter, was abusing Luisa: someone who was trying to take my place but who would have difficulty keeping it, because it wasn't his turn. Even so he must be gotten rid of. If he was violent, if he was dangerous, if he raised his hand to her, he must be ejected without delay, before he had a chance to settle in, because life is full of surprises and there's always the risk that something that seems to have no future at all could go on forever. And if she lacked the will, the strength, the resolve or the courage, I was the only one capable of attempting it, or so, at least, I told myself.

And so I waited for my father to get up (or for him to be helped out of bed and brought to the living room, to the armchair where he had always done his reading, beneath the pleasant light of the lampstand) and for my sister to leave, and then I could continue my investigations, or my soundings. I didn't really expect that he would know very much, possibly nothing, but if, of all the people I had to hand, he was, according to what Cecilia had said, the one who perhaps talked most to Luisa about her personal life-even if only now and then and given the natural constraints felt by a daughter-in-law and a father-in-law, or rather by two people with such a great age difference between them-I might be able to find out, if not about the man who aspired to my position-she wouldn't tell him anything about that; and there might well be several aspirants-at least about what most concerned me: how she saw me, now that I had abandoned the field and gently removed myself from her existence;-and even from her practical life-and detached myself, unprotesting, from her time and from that of our children. I asked my father about her and again he said that she didn't often come to see him, although I was gradually discovering or realizing that he had grown rather bad at gauging the presences or absences of certain people, as if it seemed to him that his most pleasant or enjoyable visitors always visited him far too infrequently, although I knew that some of those people visited almost every day, as was the case with my sister and my older nieces; he had always enjoyed the company of women and now that he was so weak and in need of gentleness, this liking had become even more marked. I guessed that something similar was happening with Luisa, who would certainly not have been able to visit him quite that often, but who, given the familiarity with which he referred to her and the odd telling comment, clearly did so more often than he imagined or felt that she did. I pressed him ('What does she say, what does she talk about when she comes? Does she talk about me or does she try not to mention me? Do you think she has doubts, might she have regrets, or does my name on her lips sound always as if she had found a place for me from which I don't and won't move, a place that is far too calm and stable?'), and suddenly he looked at me with his pale eyes, without answering, resting his forehead on one hand, his elbow on the arm of the chair, his usual pose when he was thinking and preparing to say something, I had the impression sometimes that he mentally constructed his sentences before uttering them, the first few at least (but not the subsequent ones). He sat looking at me with a mixture of interest, slight impatience and slight pity, as if I were not his son exactly, but a troubled young friend, of whom he was very fond and in whom he found two things strange or perhaps disappointing: one, that I should take such pains over a matter involving the extent of someone else's feelings or, indeed, self-interest, neither of which one can do anything about; and the other, that, despite being a grown man, a father, and despite my years and experience, I had still failed to grasp the insuperable nature of such griefs, or are they perhaps merely disquiets, and their laments.

'You don't seem at all resigned to the situation, Jacobo,' he said at last, after studying me for a while, 'and you have to resign yourself. If someone no longer wants to be with you, then you have to accept it. On your own, and without always watching to see how that person is changing or always looking out for signs and hoping for some drastic change. If such a change occurs, it won't be because you're watching or asking me questions or sounding out someone else. You can't keep on at someone all the time, you can't apply a magnifying glass or a telescope or resort to spies, nor, of course, must you pester them or impose yourself on them. Pretending doesn't help either, there's no point in feigning indifference or politeness when you feel neither polite nor indifferent, and I don't think you feel either of those things-yet. She'll know that you're pretending. Remember, transparency is one of the characteristics of being in love and other related states, in all their many guises (love can often be confused with stubbornness in its first stages and its last, when one thinks that the love of the other person has not yet put down deep roots or is slipping away). It's very difficult to deceive the person you love, or who feels or has felt loved (who has known love), unless, of course, that person prefers to be deceived, which, I must admit, is not uncommon. But you always know when you're no longer loved, if you're open to finding that out: when everything has become mere habit or a lack of courage to bring things to a close, or a desire not to make a fuss and not to hurt anyone, or a fear for your life or your purse, or a mere lack of imagination, most people are incapable of imagining a different life from the one they're living and they won't change it for that reason alone, they won't move, won't even consider it; they patch things up, postpone, seek distractions, take a lover, go gambling, convince themselves that what they have is bearable, allow time to do its work; but it won't occur to them to try something else. Only self-interest can defeat feelings, and then only sometimes. And in the same way, you always know when you're still loved, especially when you would like that love to abate or to stop altogether, which is usually the case with a couple in the process of splitting up. The one who made the decision, if he or she isn't an egotist or a sadist, longs for the other person to leave, to disentangle themselves from the web, to stop loving them and oppressing them with that love. To move on to someone else or, indeed, to no one, but to wash their hands of the whole business once and for all.'-My father paused for a moment and again looked at me hard, the way one sometimes looks before saying goodbye. He seemed to be scrutinizing me, which was unlikely because his sight had deteriorated greatly and he found it hard to read or even to watch television, I think he listened to it rather than watched. And yet that look had exactly the opposite effect, those ever paler blue eyes fixed on my face seemed to see right through me and to know more about me than I did myself.-'I think you need to let Luisa go Jacobo. You haven't done so, even though you've respectfully and courteously taken yourself off to another country and so on. But you still haven't let her go. And now you have no option, you have to do it whether you like it or not. Let her breathe freely, give her some air, don't stand in her way. Let her take the initiative. It's not in your hands to do anything. If, one day, she discovers she's unhappy without you, if she realizes that she misses you so much that it's making her miserable, I don't think she would hesitate to tell you so and to ask you to come back, if I know her as I think I do. She's capable of admitting she was wrong, she's not proud. If she doesn't do so, it's because she doesn't want to, and she won't change whatever you do or say or however you behave, here or at a distance; as far as she's concerned, you're transparent, as she will be for you if you're prepared really to see her and to recognize what you see. If you're not, then that's another matter, and I understand that. Just don't ask me something I don't know, but you do; she isn't transparent to me.' And he added at once: 'Do you have a girlfriend at all in London?'

Now it was my turn to sit thinking for a moment, but not because I wasn't sure. No, I didn't have anything remotely like a girlfriend; I'd merely had a few fleeting encounters, especially in the first few months of settling in and reconnoitering and weighing things up, but they had all lacked either continuity or enthusiasm: of the three women who had slept at my apartment during that period, only one had returned with my consent (another had tried but without success), and that relationship had soon foundered, after our third or fourth date. Subsequently, another woman had passed through, but without any consequences. Then there was young Pérez Nuix who, I could not deny it, had meandered through my imagination, and after the one night we spent together, she still did occasionally, but that strange encounter had become tinged with vague ideas of favors and payments, and such things quickly douse the imagination; and although ideas of secrecy and silence ignite it, they are perhaps not enough to counteract the former, which have more weight and force.

'No,' I replied. 'Just the odd fling, but at my age such things are no longer stimulating or particularly diverting. Or only to those who are easily flattered. Which is not my case.'

My father smiled, he was sometimes amused by the things I said.

'No, maybe not now. It was in the past though, when you were younger, so don't be so superior. It's not the case with Luisa either, of that I'm sure. I have no idea whether she's seeing anyone else. Needless to say, she doesn't talk to me about such things, although she will one day, if I live that long. She trusts me, and I think she would tell me about any serious relationship. What I do see is that she doesn't discount the possibility and might even be in a hurry for such a relationship to appear. She's in a hurry to get back on her feet or to remake her life, or however people put it nowadays, you'll know, I'm sure. I mean that I don't think she yet has doubts about her attractiveness, that's not the problem, although neither of you is as young as you were. It's more that she's afraid of starting "the definitive relationship" too late. For many years, she clearly thought you were that-"definitive" I mean-but realizing that you weren't hasn't made her think that such a thing doesn't exist, rather that you both made a mistake and that she has wasted a great deal of precious time. So much so that she must now make haste to find that definitive relationship, which she hasn't given up on, she hasn't yet had time to adapt her expectations, or her illusions, she must still feel quite bewildered.'-Now the look of pity on his face grew more marked, similar to the look one sees on the face of many a mother as she watches her small children and sees how ignorant they still are and how slow they are to learn (and therefore how vulnerable). Naivete does, more often than not, provoke pity. My father seemed to see that quality in Luisa, of whom he was speaking, but he may have seen it in me too, for asking him about her when he couldn't help me. All he could do was distract me and listen to me, that, after all, is what it means to take on another person's anxieties.-'It's rather childish, I suppose. As if she'd always had a particular model of life in her head and as if the enormous upset with you hasn't made her abandon that, not yet at least, and as if she were thinking: "If he wasn't the person I thought he was, there must be another one. But where is he, I must find him, I must see him." That's all I can tell you. She's not in need of flattery, nor, of course, of ephemeral conquests in order to bolster her confidence. Whenever she goes out with someone, if she does, she'll be looking at him as if he might be the definitive one, as a future husband, and she'll make every effort to make things turn out right, she'll treat him with infinite good will and patience, wanting to love him, determinedly desiring him.'-He paused and looked up at the ceiling, the better perhaps to imagine her at the side of some permanent imbecile, practicing her patience upon him. Then he added sadly: 'It doesn't look good for her. I'd say that such an attitude tends to frighten men off or else attract the pusillanimous. It would certainly scare you off, Jacobo. You're not the marrying kind, even though you were married for several years and miss being married now. What you really miss is Luisa, not matrimony. I was always surprised that it suited you so well. I was surprised, too, that it lasted so long, I never thought it would.'

I didn't want to go down that road, I certainly didn't feel any curiosity about myself or, as that anonymous report in the files at the office had put it, I just took myself for granted, or assumed I knew myself, or considered myself a lost cause upon whom it would be pointless to squander thought. And so I insisted on talking about someone I knew much better or, who knows, perhaps not that well:

'Do you think that in her haste she might end up with the wrong kind of man, with someone dangerous?'

'No, I wouldn't go that far,' he said. 'Luisa's an intelligent woman, and when faced with disappointment, she'll accept it, however reluctantly, however much she resists and however hard it is to do so… She might end up with someone merely average or with whom she feels only partially satisfied, or even someone who has qualities she dislikes, that's possible. What I do think is that whatever he's like, she'll give innumerable opportunities to that potential husband, to that project, to the person upon whom she's fixed her gaze, she'll do more than her share, she'll try to be as understanding as she can, as she no doubt tried to be with you until, I suppose, you overstepped the mark, although I've never asked you what exactly happened… She won't hand this man any blank checks, but rather than get rid of him, she'll use up almost the whole checkbook, little by little. Nevertheless, as far as I know, no such person exists as yet, or he's still not important enough for her to talk to me about him or to consult me. Bear in mind that I am now the closest thing Luisa has to a father, and that she still preserves a childlike attitude that makes her such a delightful person and leads her to ask the advice of her elders. Well, in some respects, but not, of course, in others. When did you say you were going back to Oxford?'

I could see that he was tired. He had made an effort, yes, an effort of translation or interpretation, as if he were me and I were Tupra in our office, and Tupra was putting pressure on him to talk about Luisa, I just hoped they never put her under scrutiny, there was no reason why they should, but the mere thought made me shudder. My poor father had done as I asked, he had tried to help me, as a favor to his son, he had told me what he thought, how he saw Luisa, what, it seemed to him, could be expected from her immediate future. Perhaps he was right in his estimations, and if Luisa was going out with someone who, at one fateful moment, on one fateful day, had gone too far, it might be that she was trying to excuse him or change him or understand him instead of distancing herself or running away, which is what you have to do while there's still time, that is, when you're not tied to someone, but only involved. It might be that she wanted to ignore or erase that moment, that she was seeking to relegate the fact to the sphere of bad dreams or to toss it into the bag of imaginings, as most of us do when we don't want that other face to fail us so soon, not today, without them even being considerate enough to wait until tomorrow to disappoint us. Many women have almost infinite powers of endurance, especially when they feel themselves to be saviours or healers or redeemers, when they believe that they will be able to rescue the man they love, or whom they have decided to love at all costs, from apathy or disease or vice. They think he'll be different with them, that he'll mend his ways or improve or change and that they will, therefore, become indispensable to him, sometimes it seems to me that for such women redeeming someone is a form-foolish and naive-of ensuring the unconditional love of that person: 'He can't live without me,' they think without entirely thinking that or without quite formulating the thought. 'He knows that without me he would revert to his former self, disastrous, incompetent, sick, depressed, an addict, a drunk, a failure, a mere shadow, a condemned man, a loser. He'll never leave me, nor will he endanger our relationship, he won't play dirty tricks on me, he won't run the risk that I might leave him. Not only will he be forever grateful to me, he'll realize that with me he can stay afloat and even swim on ahead, whereas without me he would sink and drown.' Yes, that is what many women seem to think when some difficult or calamitous or hopeless or violent man crosses their path, they see a challenge, a problem, a task, someone they can put right or rescue from a little hell. And it's quite incomprehensible that after centuries of hearing about other women's experiences and of reading stories, they still don't know that as soon as such men feel sober and optimistic and healthy again-as soon as they feel real rather than mere specters-they will believe that they got back on their feet all by themselves and will very likely see the women as mere obstacles who keep them from running freely or from continuing their upward climb. It seems equally incomprehensible that the women don't realize that it is they who will be the most entangled or the most tightly bound and who will never be prepared to abandon those dependent, disoriented, irascible, defective men, because they will have made them neither more nor less than their mission, and if you have or believe you have a mission, you never give up on it, if you have finally found a mission and believe it to be an endless lifelong commitment and the daily justification for your gratuitous existence or for the countless steps taken upon the earth and for your slow, slow journey through the shrunken world…

I got up and placed my hand on his shoulder, it was a gesture that, in recent years, had always calmed my father, whenever he felt frightened or weak or confused, when he opened his eyes very wide as if seeing the world for the first time, with a gaze as inscrutable as that of a child born only weeks or days before, and who, I imagine, observes this new place into which he has been hurled and tries perhaps to decipher our customs and to discover which of those customs will be his. My father's sight must have been as limited as the sight of such newborn babies is sometimes said to be, he may have been able to make out only shadows, blotches, the familiar light and the blur of colors, it was impossible to know, he always claimed to see much more than we thought he could, possibly out of a kind of pride that prevented him from recognizing how physically diminished he had become. He knew who I was, and his hearing was as acute as ever, and so perhaps, more than anything, he saw with his memory. And that is why, in part, he accordingly located me in Oxford, where I had in fact lived, albeit many years before and from where I had, moreover, returned. As regards London, on the other hand, he didn't yet know for sure that I would return from there (I had returned now, but not for good). During my two-week stay I would, at some point during my visits to him, place my hand on his shoulder: I would leave it there for a while, exerting enough pressure for him to be able to feel it and know that I was near and in touch, to make him feel safe and to soothe him. I could feel his slightly prominent bones, his collarbone too, he had grown thinner since I left, and when I touched them they gave an impression of fragility, not as if they might break, but as if they might easily become dislocated, by a clumsy gesture or excessive effort; when his caregiver helped him up, she did so with great delicacy. On one occasion, however, he turned to look curiously at my hand on his shoulder, although in no way rejecting my touch. It occurred to me that he perhaps found it odd to be the object of a gesture that he had possibly often made when I was a child, when he was tall and I was growing only very slowly, the father bending down and placing his hand on his son's shoulder in order to tell him off or to instill him with confidence or to offer him some symbolic protection, or to pacify him. He looked at my hand as if at an innocuous fly that had alighted there, or perhaps something larger, a lizard momentarily pausing in its scurryings, as if hearing approaching footsteps. 'Why do you put your hand on my shoulder like that?' he asked, half-smiling, as if amused. 'Don't you like me to?' I asked in turn, and he replied: 'Well, if you want to, it certainly doesn't bother me.' However, on that first visit, he didn't really notice, as was usually the case, but was merely silently aware of that gentle, guiding, soothing pressure. I said:

'I don't live in Oxford any more, Papa. I only go there occasionally to visit Wheeler, I've mentioned him to you before, do you remember? Sir Peter Wheeler, the Hispanist. He's about your age, well, a year older. I live in London now. I'll be going back in a couple of weeks.'

Perhaps his wise interpretation of Luisa had taken its toll, he had made a great effort for me and now he was paying the price. It was as if he had grown suddenly tired of his own perspicacity and had again become confused about time, as he had the previous day on the phone. Perhaps he could no longer stand being himself for very long, I mean being his old self, his alert intellectually demanding self, the one who urged his children always to go on, to go on thinking, the one who used to say 'And what else?' just when we felt that an exposition or argument was over, the one who made us keep on looking at things and at people, beyond what seemed necessary, at the point when we had the feeling that there was no more to see and that continuing would be a waste of time. At the point,' in his words, 'where you might say to yourself there can't be anything else.' Yes, as I get older, I know how that wearies and wears one out, and sometimes I wonder why I should and why, to a greater or lesser degree, we do pay so much attention to our fellow men and women or to the world, and why we don't just ignore them, I'm not even sure that it isn't yet one more source of conflict, even if what we see meets with our approval. He was ninety years old. It was hardly to be wondered at that he should want to take a rest from himself. And from everything else too.

'Oh, honestly,' he said somewhat irritably, as if I had deceived him on purpose and for my own pleasure. 'You've always told me you were in Oxford. That you'd been offered a job there, teaching. And there was a man called Kavanagh, who writes horror novels and is a medievalist, isn't that right? And of course I know who your friend Wheeler is, I've even read a couple of his books. But didn't he used to be called Rylands? You always used to call him Rylands.' I didn't tell him they were brothers, that would have led to still more confusion. 'So which university are you teaching at in London?'

That is how the memory of the old works. He remembered Aidan Kavanagh or his name, and even the successful novels he used to publish under a pseudonym, a pleasant and deliberately frivolous man, the head of the Spanish department during my time in Oxford, but long since retired; he remembered Rylands too, although he confused him with Wheeler; and yet he didn't remember that I had gone to work for the BBC during my second English sojourn, so recent that it was still going on. There was no reason why he should remember what had happened subsequently: as with Luisa, I had told him very little-only a few vague, possibly evasive remarks-about my new job. It's strange how one instinctively hides, or, which is somewhat different, keeps quiet about anything that immediately strikes one as murky: just as I would say nothing to Luisa about meeting a woman with whom I had barely exchanged a word at a meeting or a party and with whom nothing could or indeed would happen, but to whom I had felt instantly attracted. I had possibly never even mentioned Tupra to my father or to Luisa, or only in passing, and yet he was, without a doubt, the dominant figure in my life in London (and after a few days I realized just how dominant a figure he was). It didn't seem to me, at that moment, worth disillusioning my father and telling him that I no longer did any teaching anywhere.

'I've got to go now, Papa,' I said. 'I'll pop in now and then, when I've got time. Do you want me to warn you? Shall I call before I drop by?'

My prolonged absence made me feel rather like an intruder and as if I needed to ask such a question, which was perhaps inappropriate in a son with respect to his father's home, a home that had for many years been mine too. I was still standing, still with my hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me, whether seeing me or guessing at my face or remembering me, I don't know. His gaze was, at any rate, very clear, surprised and slightly helpless, as if he had not quite grasped that I was leaving. His eyes were now very blue, bluer than they had ever been, perhaps because he no longer wore glasses.

'No, there's no need. As far as I'm concerned, you all still live here, even if you left a long time ago.' He fell silent, then added: 'Your mother too.'

I wasn't sure whether he meant that she still lived there as well or if he was reproaching her as well for having left, when she died, longer ago than anyone else. He probably meant both.

And I continued to waste no time. I didn't linger or delay or loiter or dally. I was longing to see my children again, not to mention Luisa and my sister, and, for the first time since my return, my brothers and a few friends, and to stroll around the city like a foreigner, but I felt I had something concrete and urgent to do, something to investigate and resolve and remedy. That was something I had learned from Tupra, at least in theory: Luisa was clearly in danger, and now I understood that sometimes one has no option but to do what has to be done and at once, without waiting or hesitating or delaying: I had to do this unthinkingly, like some very distracted, busy person, as if it were merely my job. Yes, there are occasions when one knows precisely what would happen in the world if no pressure or brake was imposed on what one perceives to be people's certain capabilities, and that if those capabilities were to remain undeployed, it was necessary for someone-me, for example, who else in this case?-to dissuade or impede them. In order for Tupra to adopt the punitive measures which he deemed necessary and appropriate, he simply had to convince himself of what would happen in each case if he or another sentinel-the authorities or the law, instinct, the moon, the storm, fear, the hovering sword, the invisible watchers-did not put a stop to it. 'It's the way of the world,' he would say, and he would say this about so many things and situations; he applied those words to betrayals and acts of loyalty, to anxieties and quickened pulses, to unexpected reversals and vertigo, to vacillations and torments and to the involuntary harm we cause, to the scratch and the pain and the fever and the festering wound, to griefs and the infinite steps we all take in the belief that we are being guided by our will, or that our will does at least play a part in them. To him all this seemed perfectly normal and even, sometimes, routine-prevention or punishment and never running too grave a risk-he knew too well that the Earth is full of passions and affections and of ill will and malice, and that sometimes individuals can avoid neither and, indeed, choose not to, because they are the fuse and the fuel for their own combustion, as well as their reason and their igniting spark. And they don't even require a motive or a goal for any of this, neither aim nor cause, gratitude nor insult, or at least not always, or as Wheeler said: 'they carry their probabilities in their veins, and so time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment.' And for Tupra this very radical and sometimes ruthless attitude-or perhaps it was simply a very practical one-was just another characteristic of the way of the world to which he conformed or adhered; and that unreflecting, inclement, resolute stance (or one based perhaps on a single thought, the first), also formed part of that way of the world which remained unchanged throughout time and regardless of space, and so there was, therefore, no reason to question it, just as there's no need to question wakefulness and sleep, or hearing and sight, or breathing and walking and speech, or any of the other things about which one knows 'that's how it is and always will be.'

I was feeling now as he did, that is, like someone who didn't bother to issue any prior warning, at least not always, someone who makes decisions at a distance and for barely identifiable reasons, or without the actions appearing to have any connection of cause and effect with those reasons, still less with the proof that such acts have been committed. Nor did I need proof of that arbitrary or justifiable occasion-who could tell which it was and what did it matter?-nor did I intend sending any warning or notice before unleashing my saber blow, I didn't even require any evidence of actions committed or proven, of events or deeds, or even certainty in order to set to and remove from Luisa's existence the man marring and threatening her life and, therefore, the lives of my children. First, I had to find out more about the man and then track him down. She wouldn't say a word to me about him, especially now that I had voiced my immediate suspicion that this as yet nameless, faceless man was the person responsible for her multicolored black eye. After my father's conjectures and his belief that my wife would be inclined to humor or encourage whoever she was attracted to or whoever she was focused on now ('Yes,' I thought, 'strictly speaking, she is still my wife. We're not divorced and neither of us seems in a hurry to get a divorce or has even suggested it,' and this confirmed me in my determination or in my first thought that admitted of no second thought), my next step was to go and see her sister or talk to her on the phone; and even though she and I had never got on particularly well or had much to do with each other and even though she led a very independent life with few family ties and saw myself and the children only infrequently, as mere extensions of Luisa, she did meet up with Luisa once or twice a month; Luisa would either go to her place without the kids and without me, her husband, or they would lunch together in a restaurant and tell each other about their respective lives, just how much I didn't know, but probably almost everything. If anyone knew what was going on, if anyone knew the identity of that man with violent tendencies, his face and name, that person was Cristina, Luisa's somewhat surly younger sister. And although her first loyalty was to Luisa and even though she considered me to be a mere dispensable appendage, I was sure that if something was worrying her-and if my deductions were correct, and even if they weren't, this guy was very worrying indeed-she would tell me and welcome hearing the views of someone who felt the same way about the matter.

I phoned her that evening, much to her surprise, for she didn't even know I was in Madrid, but then how could she unless she had spoken to Luisa during the day and Luisa had told her, she asked me how things were going in London, and I was amazed that she actually knew where I was currently living, 'Fine,' I said, without going into detail, after all, it was just a reflex question, and then I asked if we could meet up as soon as possible, 'No,' she said, 'impossible, I'm off on a trip tomorrow and I've got loads of things to do before I go,' 'How long are you away for?' 'A week,' 'It will be too late when you get back, I need to see you before you leave, I'm only here for two weeks, well, less than that now, what time are you leaving?' I asked, 'At lunchtime, but I'm really tied up until then, can't you tell me over the phone? Is it about Luisa?' Yes, it's about Luisa.' Then she fell silent for a few seconds and it seemed to me that she had sat herself down on a chair in readiness. 'What have you got to say, then? Come on, tell me,' 'What? Now?' 'Yes, now. If it's what I think it is, it won't take much time and I imagine we'll be pretty much in agreement on the subject. It's about Custardoy, isn't it?'

'Who?'

'Custardoy, the guy she's going out with. Or didn't you know? Oh, Jaime, don't tell me you didn't know.' She said this not as if she were afraid she had put her foot in it, but as if she couldn't believe I wouldn't know. Perhaps she had always thought of me as rather absentminded, or worse, a fool.

'I've only just got back. I didn't know his name.' Now, however, I did and knew of his existence in Luisa's life, so it wasn't all conjecture on my part. All I needed now was to know what he looked like and find out where he lived. Custardoy. It was an unusual surname, odd, there wouldn't be many in Madrid. 'I've been away for ages, and when you only talk on the phone, it's hard to know what's really going on. Who is he? What does he do?'

'He's a painter, a copyist, or both of those things. Some people say he's a forger too, but at any rate, he's in the art world. I'm glad you phoned actually, I've been really worried-although I'm not sure anything can be done, in this kind of situation there's rarely much you can do.'

Worried? Why? What situation?'

'Tell me first why you phoned. Has Luisa told you anything?'

I wondered if I should pretend to know more than I did, but that seemed unwise, Cristina could be very touchy and, if she caught on to what I was doing, she might refuse to say another word. And that was the last thing I wanted, I was entirely dependent on her for help, and she had, inadvertently, already told me a lot, with no need for me to worm it out of her.

'No, not really,' I said at last. 'According to Luisa, what she does is no longer any of my business, and she's right of course. The thing is, I saw her briefly last night, I'd gone over there to see the kids, and she avoided me and left before I arrived, but I waited until she got back, she was away for several hours, I've no idea where she went, she left me with the babysitter, and I think the reason she was avoiding me was because when I did see her, her face was a real mess, and that was obviously the reason she hadn't wanted to be there. She claims she collided with the garage door, but she's got a black eye and it looks to me as if someone punched her, and I don't just find that worrying, I find it downright alarming, and it is my business, how could it not be? It would be the same if someone had hit you or any female friend. Do you know anything about it?'

'It wouldn't be the same if someone had hit me, Jaime, because you don't give a damn about me.' My sister-in-law's sharp tongue could not resist getting this comment in first. Then her tone changed and she said almost as if to herself: 'Not again. That's dreadful.'

'Again? You mean it's happened before?'

Cristina didn't respond at first. She paused as if she were biting her lip and weighing something up, but her hesitation lasted only a moment.

'According to her, no, nothing has ever happened, not what you suspect now nor what I've suspected in the past. Look, I'm telling you this because I'm worried, and even more so after what you've just told me, I didn't know anything about that, I haven't seen her for a couple of weeks, and she hasn't put any pressure on me to meet up before this trip of mine, presumably because she thinks the mark will have faded by the time I get back and then I won't ask any awkward questions. But I don't think she would be at all pleased if she knew I was talking about this to you. The only reason she hasn't told me not to talk to you is because it would never occur to her that you and I would be in touch. It wouldn't have occurred to me either, to be honest. Did she know you were coming to Madrid?'

'No, I phoned her when I arrived yesterday. I wanted it to be a surprise for the children.'

'She won't have had time to prepare herself,' she said, 'nor to worry about you finding out. She probably doesn't even want you to know she's going out with the guy'

'What is it that you suspected?'

'Well, according to her, a couple of months ago or so she fell over in the street and hit her face on one of those metal posts the council have put up everywhere, which is perfectly possible, because the city's full of the things, bollards I think they call them, you have to make a real point of avoiding them if you don't want to fracture your kneecap. Did she mention anything to you about falling over?'

'No, nothing. And we talk at least once a week.'

'Well, I'm surprised she didn't. It was a really nasty cut, a superficial one, but it went from one side of her nose to halfway across her cheek, you couldn't miss it.'-'Uno sfregio,' I thought, that recently learned word sprang immediately into my mind, 'a gash.'-'And she had a graze on her chin. From the way she talked about it, I just didn't believe her, and it looked more like a scratch or a welt or as if someone had slapped her, I know a bit about these things because a woman I was vaguely friendly with some years ago used to get beaten up by her husband; in fact, he killed her in the end, after I'd stopped seeing her luckily, which is something.' I instinctively knocked on wood. 'So I asked her straight out if Custardoy had hit her, if he'd beaten her up. She denied it, of course, and said I must be mad, how could I even think such a thing. But she blushed when she said it, and I can tell when my sister is lying from years of watching her face whenever she lied as a child. And I've heard other things since.'

What things? Do you know the guy?'

I realized that I preferred not to mention his name, although I had it stored away in my memory, as if it were a find, a treasure. It was a valuable piece of information.

'Yes, by sight. And by hearsay too. A few years ago, he was often to be seen drinking in smart bars like the Chicote, the Cock, or the Del Diego, or in others, he's an arty type, a nocturnal womanizer, although apparently he didn't restrict his activities to the nighttime only, he's the kind of man who can tell at once who wants to be chatted up and for what purpose, the kind who's capable of creating the necessary willingness and purpose in someone else, that is, in women. At least so I've heard. I don't know if he still goes to those places, because I don't go any more myself. You probably saw him once or twice there yourself, in the eighties or nineties.'

'What does he look like? Has he got a ponytail?' I asked, I couldn't help myself. I was burning to know this.

'Yes, how did you guess?'

'Oh, it was just something someone said. But in that case, no, I've never seen him. I mean, I can't remember anyone in particular with a ponytail. Then again, I pretty much stopped going out at night when Guillermo was born, and the guy probably didn't have a ponytail before that. And of course the surname doesn't mean anything to me either. What things have you heard?'

'Well, after seeing that cut on Luisa's face-which left me with a really bad feeling-I asked an acquaintance of mine, Juan Ranz, about Custardoy, who he's known since they were children. They never got on well and have had hardly any contact for years, but their parents were friends and used to leave them together to play and entertain each other, so he had to put up with his company quite often. He says Custardoy was one of those very grown-up kids, impatient to enter the adult world, as if he wanted to climb out of his as yet unformed body. Then, when he was older, Custardoy used to make copies of paintings for Ranz's father, who's an art expert (apparently, Custardoy's a brilliant copyist and can make a perfect copy of anything from any period, in fact, it's hard to tell them from the originals, which, of course, is where his reputation as a forger comes in), and so he still used to see him from time to time, through his father. Juan is an interpreter at the United Nations, and, as a matter of fact, his wife's name is Luisa too.'

'What else did he tell you?'

'The most notable or perhaps the most troubling fact, and the one that most concerns us, is that, although he's a great success with the ladies, there's obviously something slightly sinister about the way he treats them because Ranz knows of some women who've emerged from a night with Custardoy feeling really scared, after having sex I mean (some of them were prostitutes, and so it was purely sexual). And afterwards, they didn't even want to talk about it, as if they needed to forget it as quickly as possible and shake off the whole experience. As if the experience, or even the mere memory of it, had burned itself into them and didn't lend itself to being turned into a story. And even when there were two prostitutes involved at the same time (apparently he's into threesomes, although always with women), both had emerged feeling equally scared and refusing to say anything about it. And inevitably, there are lots of other women, prostitutes or not, who feel an irresistible desire to know just what it is he does or doesn't do. There's no shortage of stupid women out there as you know.'

This was the worst possible news. A ladies' man who was also into whores, and who left his mark on women, even if that mark was only a mark of terror. A man like that won't even have to bury me or dig my grave still deeper, the grave in which I'm already buried,' I thought, 'because he will have erased my memory at a stroke, with the first terror and the first entreaty and the first fascination and the first command, and Luisa could already be under his thumb.'

'But Luisa isn't stupid, at least she didn't used to be, no, she's never been stupid,' I said. 'Perhaps he's different with women who aren't whores. Perhaps when he has more than one night at his disposal his behavior changes to the exact opposite, purely in order to ensure that there will be more nights to come. Or do you think that's precisely what is so sinister about him, that he beats up all the women he goes out with? I can't believe that. Someone would have said something, someone would have found out, the women he'd been with would have warned each other. You women talk about such things, don't you, I mean details? Spanish women do. In what sort of terms has she spoken to you about him? Is she in love or infatuated? Desperate, mad, distracted, flattered? Just how serious is she? She can't be in love. And how did she meet him? Where did he spring from?' The information provided by this Ranz fellow had perhaps made me even more uneasy than Luisa's now yellowing black eye. 'What else did this friend of yours say?'

'Nothing very good, except that he's brilliant at his job. According to Ranz, though, he's a slippery customer, not to be trusted under any circumstances. And he's not the sort to fall in love, or didn't use to be, he said. But who knows, love is an area in which people can change at any moment. When I told him that my sister was going out with him, he said: "Oh God" like someone heralding a disaster. That's why I was trying to find out more, well, because of that and her supposed collision with a bollard and that worrying cut. In fact, I asked him outright if he thought Custardoy would be capable of hitting a woman.' And Cristina paused, as if she'd completed that particular sequence of sentences.

'And what did he say? Tell me.'

'He wasn't categorical about it, but nevertheless…He thought about it for a moment and then said: "I suppose so. I don't know that he has, no one's ever told me he has and he wouldn't tell me so himself. It's not the kind of thing you boast about. But I suppose that, yes, he would be perfectly capable of doing so." You see what I mean. (Of course, Ranz doesn't like the man and so can't be taken as the oracle.) That was when he told me about the prostitutes and, well, I assumed it wasn't only prostitutes. Now you tell me that Luisa has another injury, one she hasn't even mentioned to me. If she'd bumped into a door and given herself a black eye, the normal thing would be for her to tell me about it, we may not have seen each other lately, but we've spoken on the phone. And she didn't tell you about the incident with the bollard. Yes, now I really am very worried. And Jaime, Luisa may not be stupid, but you've only known her in a stable situation, when she was with you. Apart from the last few months before you left, of course, but there was still a remnant of stability while you were at home, a kind of postponement, an inertia. But how long have you been away now? Nine months, twelve, fifteen?

That's a long time for the person left behind, longer than for the one who leaves. Neither you nor I know what she's like in that situation, and she was still very young when she met you. People are unpredictable when they've just split up with someone. Some might closet themselves at home and not want to see anyone, others might hit the streets and climb into the first bed that's offered. Some might do first one thing and then the other, or the other way round, I mean, who knows what foolishness you've been getting up to in London, fancy-free and with no family obligations. There are half-measures too, of course. Luisa won't have hit the streets because, to start with, there are the children to consider. But she won't simply have wept into her pillow. She must feel slightly impatient, excited, curious to meet another man and see how it works out, and curiosity leads to all kinds of silliness and to persisting in that silliness until the curiosity wears off. She hasn't told me a great deal, about her feelings, I mean, or her expectations; she probably doesn't have any great expectations and is simply letting time pass until she can see more clearly what she wants or, indeed, if she wants anything. From what Ranz told me, and given Custardoy's reputation, it's highly unlikely that he'll put any pressure on her to move in with him or to get divorced or whatever, if he isn't the sort to fall in love. Not that I've asked her much about it either, I suppose: you know what I'm like, I'll listen to what others tell me, but I'm not that interested really, unless things get serious. All I know is that she's going out with this guy, has a good time with him and obviously likes him. How much she likes him I don't know, possibly a lot, she might be crazy about him, which is why she's being discreet and keeping quiet about it. She doesn't try and hide their relationship, but she's not shouting it from the rooftops either. Not with me, I mean, and I would think with other people she says even less. She didn't announce it to me with a great fanfare, as if it were headline news. And I've only seen them together once, very briefly and from the car, so I haven't spent time with them or anything. I get a sense of reserve, modesty almost, as if after all those years as a married woman, she was embarrassed to have a boyfriend.'

'How did you happen to see them?' Even if it was as brief as she said, that would provide me with the only image I had of the two of them together, apart from the indirect and imprecise one provided by my brother-in-law via my sister. And I needed to be able to imagine them. It was odd to imagine Luisa being with anyone other than me. It seemed not so much repugnant or offensive as unreal, like a performance, a farce. Yes, it was more unreal than painful. Separations like ours make no sense, however commonplace they have become in the world and have been for a long time now. You spend years orbiting round a particular person, depending on her at every turn, seeing her every day as if she were a natural prolongation of yourself, including her in all your comings and goings, in your aimless thoughts and even in your dreams. Thinking of telling her the slightest thing seen or experienced, for example, a Romanian mother asking for a packet of baby wipes for her children. You are with that person, just as the Hungarian gypsy was with her children or Alan Marriott's dog was without a leg. You have a detailed, constant and permanently refreshed knowledge of her thoughts and preoccupations and activities; you know her timetable and her habits, who she sees and how often; and when you join her each evening you tell each other what has happened and what you've been up to during the day, during which neither of you has ever entirely left the consciousness of the other for a single moment, and sometimes those reports are quite elaborate; then you go to bed with her and she's the last thing you see that day and-even more extraordinary-you get up with her too, for she's there in the morning, after those hours of absence, as if she were you, someone who never goes away or disappears and of whom we never lose sight; and so on, day after day over many years. Then suddenly-although it isn't sudden, it just seems like that once the process is over and distance has been established: in fact it happens very gradually and both parties know when it began, even though they prefer not to-you cease to have any notion of what that person's daily thoughts, feelings or actions are; whole days and weeks go by with almost no news of her, and you have to resort to third parties-who used to know much less than you, well, nothing really, in comparison-to find out the most basic things: what kind of life she's leading, who she sees, how the kids are taking it, who she's going out with, if she's in pain or ill, if she's in good or low spirits, if she's still looking after her diabetes and taking her long prescribed walks, if anyone has upset or hurt her, if she's finding work exhausting, if it's getting her down or is a real source of satisfaction, if she's afraid of growing old, how she sees her future and how she views the past, how she thinks of me now; and who she loves. It makes no sense that it should go from all to almost nothing, even though we never cease to remember and are basically the same person. It's all so unbearably ridiculous and subjective, because everything contains its opposite: the same people in the same place love each other and cannot stand each other; what was once long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissible-whether slowly or suddenly it doesn't matter, that's the least of it, someone who helped set up a home finds he's forbidden from entering it, the merest contact, a touch, once so taken for granted that it was barely conscious becomes an affront or an insult, it's almost as if you were having to ask permission to touch yourself, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed for would now poison the air or provoke nausea and must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before seem unimportant. Erase, suppress, take back, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition, that way nothing exists, nothing is anything, the same things and the same facts and the same beings are both themselves and their reverse, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards and in the long-distant past. And in between there is only time that does its best to dazzle us, the only thing with purpose and aims, which means that those of us who are still traveling through time are not to be trusted, for we are all foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, with no idea of what we might be capable nor of what end awaits us, foolish, insubstantial, unfinished me, no, no one should trust me either…

'We'd arranged to have lunch one day,' Cristina said. 'This was a few months ago now, before the business with the bollard and that ugly cut, I had no anxieties or concerns at the time, in fact, I really didn't care what she did or who with as long as it cheered her up a bit, she is the older sister, don't forget, and I've never tended to be very protective of her, although she is of me, which is only normal. Luisa had arranged to meet him afterwards, at his apartment or studio, I don't remember which now. Anyway, lunch went on longer than expected, and it got a bit late and she was really alarmed when she saw the time, because they hadn't arranged to meet actually in his apartment or studio or whatever, but outside in the street and they would then go up together or perhaps go on somewhere else, I don't know, but she was horrified at the thought of keeping him waiting. So I gave her a lift in my car, because she hadn't brought hers; she'd planned to take the metro, she said, which, normally, would have been quicker, but it was quite a way from the nearest station to his place and so would have taken too long, anyway, I dropped her off at the door. It's impossible to park in that part of town, I could barely stop, just long enough to let her out, I dropped her almost on the corner. She didn't introduce him or anything, although, as I say, I knew him by sight already from seeing him out and about in bars at night. I only saw them together from the car, for a matter of seconds, while I waited for the lights to change, from the corner.'

'What part of town was it? What corner?'

'At the end of Calle Mayor, just past Bailen, next to the viaduct. Just before you reach Cuesta de la Vega.'

'Can you remember which number?'

'No, I didn't notice. Why do you want to know?'

'Which side of the road?'

'The only one with houses. The eyesore's on the other side, if you remember, But why do you want to know?'

The 'eyesore' was the Almudena or museum of ecumenical horrors, the ghastly modern cathedral, largely the work of Opus Dei or so it seems, with a statue of the Polish Pope outside, totus tuus, with a bulging forehead, worthy almost of Frankenstein's monster, and arms flung wide as if he were about to dance a jota; and this, though hideous, is perhaps the least of the uglinesses, because there are, among other monstrosities, some monstrous stained-glass windows made by an unimaginable artist called Kiko (Kiko something-or-other), well, nothing good can come from a man with a name like that.

'Oh, no reason. Just so that I can imagine them there. What did you see?'

'Well, not much really Nothing. She leaped out of the car with the lights on red at the junction with Calle Mayor, she was in such a hurry, about ten minutes late. The one thing I did notice was that it had started to rain, and he, instead of taking shelter in the doorway (he only needed to step back two paces), was waiting for her on the sidewalk, getting drenched. Perhaps he was there so that he would be sure to see her arrive, out of impatience.'

'Or perhaps to have one more reason to reproach her for being late,' I said, wilfully misinterpreting the facts. 'That way he could make her feel even guiltier, by saying it was her fault he had got soaked or even caught a cold. How did he greet her? Did they embrace, did he kiss her, put his arm about her waist?'

'I don't think so, I don't think they actually touched. From her attitude and certain gestures, it seemed to me that she was apologizing profusely, she pointed to my car, to explain why she was late. What does it matter?'

'Did you see them go in?'

'Yes, just before the lights changed. Now that you ask, he might have been a bit annoyed, because he went in ahead of her rather than giving way to her, and Luisa followed behind, placing one hand on his shoulder, as if to soothe or placate him, as if she were still apologizing.'

'Ah, I see. A quick-tempered, artsy-fartsy, hysterical type. Well, certainly not a gentleman anyway'

'I wouldn't go that far, I only saw them together for a moment, but he's definitely not the gentlemanly sort. He's well-dressed, mind, always wears a tie, very traditional. But his success, I suppose, comes from the roguish air he has about him and which lots of women find attractive. I don't myself, not at all, but maybe I'm odd or maybe I've met a few rogues already and know they're not worth the bother. That day, with his hair scraped back and all wet, he did look slightly menacing. He gives the impression of being a tense, self-contained, nervy sort, I mean, someone under constant tension. He's always seemed to me a rather somber figure. Friendly and seductive, but somehow somber too.'

'How old is he?'

'I don't know, he must be around fifty now, I should think. Although he looks younger.'

'Ten or twelve years older than Luisa. That's not good; he'll have authority over her, influence. Do you know his first name?'

'Esteban, I think. Wait. Yes, Esteban. Luisa has called him that occasionally, although she tends to refer to him more by his surname, as if she wanted to distance herself from him and make it seem as if they weren't that close.'-'I call young Pérez Nuix by her surname too,' I thought, 'but that's not the same thing at all.'-'As I said, sometimes it's as if she were embarrassed to have a boyfriend. Because of the kids and you and all that.'

'Esteban Custardoy. Are you sure? He's not known as a painter, then? I mean, his name doesn't appear in the papers, he doesn't hold exhibitions and so on?'

'Not that I know of, no; but I don't take much notice, to be honest; the last thing I would be interested in is modern art. I think he's more of a copyist. Luisa mentioned that sometimes he's commissioned to copy paintings from the Prado and that he spends hours there studying and copying. Or he gets commissions to copy paintings in museums abroad, in Europe, and then he goes away for a few days to study those paintings. Ranz told me that he learned the trade from his father, Custardoy the Elder as he used to be called, who made copies for his father, Ranz's father that is. And at first the son was known as Custardoy the Younger, but I don't know if he still is.'

I fell silent for a moment. I lit a Karelias cigarette, of which I had brought ten packs with me, knowing that I wouldn't be able to find them in Madrid.

'There's something that doesn't quite make sense, Cristina. I just can't believe that Luisa would put up with someone mistreating her, still less if she's only known him for a short time, a matter of months. If our suspicions are right, he hasn't hit her once, but twice. I don't understand why she would go on seeing him and going to bed with him as if nothing had happened, why she didn't break it off the first time, let alone the second. Only yesterday she denied anything was wrong; in a way she was protecting him or protecting herself, I mean her relationship with him, to make sure no one meddles or gets involved or sticks their nose in where it isn't wanted. It's understandable that I'd be the last person she'd want to talk to about her boyfriend, especially if relations with him are problematic, and even if he represents a danger to her. But she doesn't even talk to you! How would you explain such forbearance? And she's hardly the submissive type.' I suddenly realized that this was the first time I had spoken about or thought about or really imagined their relationship as something real and regular and ongoing; the words that came out of my mouth were: '… and going to bed with him as if nothing had happened.' Of course they went to bed together, that's one of the benefits of going out with someone, it's the norm. 'But that doesn't necessarily mean very much,' I thought at once in order to mitigate that fleeting image and those words. 'I've slept with Pérez-Nuix and with others too and it's almost as if it never happened. They don't occupy my thoughts, I don't remember them, or only very occasionally and without any feeling. Well, it's a bit different with Pérez-Nuix because I see her every day and each time I see her, I do remember or, rather, know, even though screwing her was an extraordinarily impersonal experience, performed, how can I put it, almost with eyes closed, almost anonymously, in silence. I've slept with other women in the past on a regular or continuous basis, Clare Bayes in England was a case in point, or my girlfriend in Tuscany to whom I owe my Italian. But so what, they're just data in an archive, recorded facts that have long since ceased to affect or influence me. No, those things don't really mean very much once they're over. The problem is that Luisa's affair is happening now and isn't yet over, and it's harming her and threatens us all, all four of us.'

Now it was Cristina's turn to pause and think for a few seconds. I heard her sigh at the other end of the line, perhaps she was weary of our conversation or felt she should be getting on with preparations for her trip.

'I don't know, Jaime. Perhaps we're wrong, and he hasn't done anything to her, maybe she did collide with a bollard and with the garage door, and is just having a run of bad luck. The trouble is that neither of us believes that. My feeling is that she's determined to stick to him, however much she may pretend not to know or care, and in that case anything is possible-when a person's set on loving someone then nothing circumstantial or external will dissuade them. People are much more long-suffering than we think. Once involved, they'll tolerate almost anything, at least for a time. I should know. They believe they can change the bad things or that the bad things won't last. And Luisa is patient, she'll put up with a lot, after ah, look how long it took her to break up with you. I don't really know why we're talking about it. For the moment, as we've seen, she's not going to tell us anything, and even if she did, we wouldn't be able to persuade her. I don't see what we can do. Anyway, Jaime, I have things to do, I'm leaving tomorrow and this conversation is getting us nowhere, apart from feeding our mutual anxieties.' I said nothing, I was pondering what she had said: 'Once involved, they'll tolerate almost anything, at least for a time.' 'It's all a matter of involving the other person, of intervening, making a request, a demand, asking a question. Of speaking to him and interfering,' I was thinking, still saying nothing.

'Jaime, are you there?'

'We could try persuading him,' I said at last.

'Him? We don't know him, least of all you. What an idea! You can count me out. Besides, I'm off tomorrow. Anyway, if you did go and talk to him, he'd probably laugh in your face or punch you, don't you see, if he really is a violent man. Or were you thinking of offering him money to go away, like an old-fashioned father? Huh. For all I know, he may not even need the money, the art collectors he works for must be rolling in it. Then he'd go straight to Luisa and tell her, and exactly how would you justify such interference in her life? You are, after all, separated. She would never speak to you again, you know that, don't you? You're aware of that?'

But perhaps none of those things would happen after my attempt to persuade him. And so I ignored her objections and merely asked, as if I hadn't heard what she had said:

'Apart from the ponytail, what does he look like?'

I had learned a few things from Reresby and Ure and Dundas and even from Tupra, but I still wasn't like him, nor did I wish to be, except on the odd occasion, and this was just such an odd occasion. Perhaps it's not possible to imitate someone else only now and then and when you choose, and perhaps in order to act like your chosen model-even just once-you have to resemble him all the time and in all circumstances, that is, when you're alone and when there's no need, and for that to happen you must have more than just accidental reasons, reasons that come upon you suddenly and from without. You have to have a deep need, a profound desire to change, which was not my case. Initially, I behaved as I thought he would have behaved, but there came a point when I wasn't sure, or couldn't imagine exactly, how he would have behaved, or perhaps I preferred not to, or else couldn't imagine myself behaving like that, and I was filled with doubt, which he never would be; and so I went back to the idea that he might be able to help me, or at least give me advice and reassure me, or at least not dissuade me. I didn't phone Tupra until a few days into my stay and after my first visit to the children, my stolen glimpse of Luisa, my meeting with my sister and my father, my phone conversation with my sister-in-law Cristina Juarez, and after I had already taken a few steps in his imaginary wake.

I began by consulting the phone book and looking for that unusual surname, Custardoy. I discovered that I had been way off in my calculations, because there weren't a few Custardoys in Madrid, there was only one, who lived in Calle de Embajadores and whose initial, alas, wasn't E for Esteban, but a wretched R for Roberto, Ricardo, Raul, Ramon or Ramiro and what use were they? His number must be under another name, possibly his landlord's if he was renting, although it seemed to me likely that he would own his apartment or studio or whatever it was, if those art collectors really did pay him well, doubtless for forgeries that could later be switched for the real thing in some ill-supervised church or sold as authentic to naive, provincial museums, for I had already decided to myself that the man was a fraud, a con man. It might also be that he was listed under his second surname, some people do that to avoid being pestered, the ringing of the phone would disturb him when he was working, he would lose precision, concentration, he would jump and make the wrong brushstroke or put a hole through the canvas, the paint would run, he was, after all, an 'arty type,' but I couldn't think who would be likely to know that second surname, probably not even Luisa. I called directory assistance just in case, and asked for the number of someone called Custardoy living in Calle Mayor, but they had no one of that name, only the Custardoy in Calle de Embajadores. So I set off to the short stretch of Calle Mayor beyond Bailen and just before Cuesta de la Vega and the nearby park called Atenas, which I knew only from having driven through it once a long time ago, and I was in luck, because there were just two doors, and since one belonged to the offices of the nearby town hall, I deduced that it must be the other door, number 81. There were no names on the intercom-or portero automáttico as we call it in Spanish-only the numbers of the apartments, of which there were four and one on the ground floor. It was almost lunchtime-bad planning on my part-and the vast ornate carved door was closed, so there was no way of knowing if there was an actual flesh-and-blood doorman whom I could approach on another occasion. I thought of ringing a couple of the bells and inquiring after Custardoy, but if, by chance, I pressed the right bell and he answered in person, furious at this unexpected interruption to his fraudulent activities, I would have to invent some pretext, saying, perhaps, that I had a telegram for him and then not going up when he opened the street door for me, well, post office workers are so often unreliable and incomprehensible, he would wait for a while, mutter a few curses and then forget all about it, summoned back to work by his false art. I pressed a bell at random and no one answered. I tried a second one and, after a while, I heard a woman's voice.

'Is Don Esteban Custardoy there, please?' I asked.

'Who?' The woman was doubtless elderly.

'Cus-tar-doy' I said slowly and clearly. 'Don Esteban.'

'No, he doesn't live here.'

'I must have the wrong apartment. Would you be so kind as to tell me which apartment he lives in? I have a telegram for him.'

'A telegram for me? Who from? We never get telegrams.'

'No, not for you, madam.' I realized that I would get nowhere with her. 'It's for your neighbor, Señor Custardoy. Would you mind telling me which floor he's on?'

'Which floor? This is the second floor,' she said. 'But there's no Bujaraloz living here. You've got the wrong address.'

The sound on those tinny intercoms is always dreadful, but the lady in question must, like Goya, have been both Aragonese and deaf for her to be able to trot out so blithely and so fluently the name of that rather obscure town in the province of Zaragoza. I apologized and thanked her, then left her in peace.

I decided to press a third bell, but there was no response, so many people have lunch out in Madrid. I tried a fourth bell and immediately heard another female voice, younger and more encouraging.

'Esteban Buscato?' the voice asked. That was the surname of a former basketball player, she must be a fan, I thought. 'No, I don't know the name. I don't think he lives here.' There was some creaking and the sound of the sea in the background, it was like having a seashell pressed to my ear and as if a ship somewhere out there was about to be wrecked.

'The name's Custardoy' I said again. 'Cus-tar-doy. He's a painter. Perhaps you could tell me which floor he lives on or where he has his studio. He's a painter, Custardoy the painter.'

'We're not expecting any painter here.'

'No, I'm not a painter, Madam,' I said, fast losing hope. 'I have a telegram for Señor Custardoy. He's the painter. Don't you know of a painter living in this building? A painter, not a house painter, but a painter like Goya, do you know him?'

'Of course I know Goya. He's the one who painted La Maja! And she sounded rather offended. 'But as I'm sure you can imagine, he doesn't live here, or anywhere else for that matter. You may not know this, but he's dead.'

I silently cursed the forger's outlandish surname and gave up. I couldn't stay there much longer, ringing every bell, or I could do so on another occasion (ringing two was enough at any one time, I shouldn't overstep the mark), or return at a different hour when the real-life doorman would be in, if there was one. Besides, it occurred to me that Custardoy might have rented or bought his apartment or studio under a false name, as befitted a criminal, or maybe under his own name, Custardoy being a pseudonym. In either case, no one in that building would be able to tell me where to find him.

I was almost certain I had the right place, which was promising, but I had to make sure and find out what floor he lived on and in which apartment; Tupra, I knew, would have had no qualms about stationing himself outside my house from early on-that is, outside Luisa's house-waiting for her to come out and following her as often as proved necessary, knowing that on one such sortie she was sure to head for that area near the Royal Palace and the cathedral-cum-eyesore, near Cuesta de la Vega and Atenas Park and the various other local parks and gardens, Sabatini, Campo del Moro, Viaducto and Vistillas or what remained of them (I had read that the Council and the Church were plotting to do away with them and use the land to build diocesan offices or semi-clerical housing or a parking lot or something), where the Madrid of the Habsburgs mingled with that of Carlos III, until she arrived at that or another door. I, however, did have qualms. It wasn't just that it seemed wrong and contemptible of me to shadow her like that, I feared, above all, that she might spot me and then all my plans would be ruined: she'd be on the alert, she'd be sure to get angry and forbid me from interfering in any aspect or area of her life, and then I would be unable to talk to Custardoy or influence him without her attributing to me any resulting change, and blaming me for any rupture with the con man or, indeed, his withdrawal, the thing I so desired, and then, as her sister had predicted, she would never speak to me again; well, perhaps not never, but certainly not for a long time. I had to save Luisa without her suspecting my intervention, or as little as possible. She would always have an inkling that there was some connection, because of my presence in Madrid: her boyfriend vanishing just when I appeared or shortly afterwards would be too much of a coincidence, and she'd be left with the conviction that I'd had something to do with it. However, if I performed my task well and kept out of the way as much as possible, that conviction would have no grounds, no proof, and, as such, would soon fade and end up tossed into the bag of suspicions and imaginings.

During the days that followed, I visited my children and took them out as often as I could, occasionally meeting Luisa when I picked them up or dropped them off, but usually encountering only the Polish babysitter. I avoided hanging around, as I had on the first night; I avoided asking Luisa anything more about her black eye, or, at most, ventured some neutral, indirect comment: 'I see it's getting better-but try to be more careful in future.' Nor did I insist we meet on our own one day, to go out to supper and talk in peace, it was best to see very little of her during that stay and concentrate on trying to extricate her from the unhealthy relationship she had got herself into, even if she didn't see the relationship like that or, worse, was drawn to it. And if she was bemused by my lack of insistence, I could always say chivalrously: 'You've got too much to do. I'm just passing through, almost like a tourist really. And it seems more appropriate to let you take the initiative. Besides, I need to spend time with my father, who's not at all well. He sends his love by the way, and always asks after you.' And so I tried to remove myself and not to coincide with her except where the coincidence was genuine, not to make myself too visible or to be always bumping into her, as would have been tempting, and as I might have tended to do had I not immediately taken on that unexpected, specific, urgent, vital task as soon as I arrived in Madrid. Not that I found it easy to maintain a discreet pose, especially when the first week had passed and Luisa showed no sign of regret at not being able to spend time with me nor-most woundingly of all-did she show any curiosity about my life in London, about the kind of person I was when I was there, about who I hung around with, nor if I had become someone else, even if only superficially, nor about my current job of which I had spoken so little over the phone, almost avoiding her occasional questions, perhaps asked only perfunctorily and out of politeness, but at least they were questions. Now there were no questions of any kind, nor did she seek the opportunity to ask them: during that first week she never made a single proposal to meet or get together, to go out to lunch, to linger a while in the apartment or have supper or a drink with her when I returned with Guillermo and Marina in the evening, having taken them to the movies or the Retire or wherever. It was as if she had no mental space to think of anything apart from her relationship with Custardoy, or at least that was what I assumed must be filling it entirely, for what else could it have been? She seemed to me absorbed, preoccupied. It wasn't the absorption of mere excitement or of plenitude. Nor that of anxiety or torment or unease, but that of someone struggling to understand or to decipher something.

And I did, in fact, spend time with my father and see my siblings and a few friends; I also visited Madrid's secondhand bookshops and generally mooched around. In one of those bookshops I bought a present for Sir Peter, a large book of propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War, some of which, I noticed, bore the same 'careless talk' slogan as had appeared in his own country, with very similar warnings-I'd had a vague recollection of seeing something similar in Spain, although he never had-and he would be intrigued to see these Spanish precursors, as would Mrs. Berry. I would go and see him as soon as I got back, without fail. And one morning, I returned to the area where Custardoy lived and, standing on the sidewalk opposite, looked at the street door leading to his apartment or studio in Calle Mayor. The door was still closed, so it may be that there was no doorman or only one who kept a very brief or idle or erratic timetable. In the end, however, I had decided that if I were ever to find him in, I would not approach the doorman; it was best that no one should see or identify me, still less associate me with Custardoy. If I were to go there in person to enquire after that copyist and forger, I might, depending on what happened later on between him and me, be putting myself in a vulnerable position, for you never know what might occur when two men come face to face and argue, or if one of them tries to get or demand something from the other, to force or convince or dissuade or repel. Standing on the same side of the street as the abominable cathedral, I looked up at the balconies, in the bizarre hope that I might have the great good luck that while I was there, Custardoy would appear on his-I would recognize him by his ponytail and from Cristina's grudging description-and I would know then, with no need for further effort or investigation, just where he worked or lived. There were balconies on all the floors until the fifth, where there were only the windows of what looked like an attic apartment. The balconies of the apartment immediately above the enormous door were made of stone and had little columns, while above that they were all fancy wrought iron, and every one had slatted shutters that stood open, an indication that each apartment was occupied and no one was away or traveling, and that Custardoy was in town. I studied each balcony and each window, trying to take in the fact-rather than imagine, which would have been a disagreeable and superfluous exercise-that behind one of them Luisa and Custardoy met and went to bed together, laughed and talked, discussed their day, that there they had perhaps argued and he had slapped her round the face with his open hand or punched her in the eye with his closed fist. He must be a very irascible fellow or perhaps not, perhaps he was utterly cold and had delivered both blows as a calculated warning, to remind her just what and how much he was capable of. And it might be that one night my wife would emerge from that ornate door opposite me, trembling with fear and excitement, simultaneously horrified and captivated. No, I didn't like that man or anything I knew or could imagine about him.

I also took to going to the Prado each morning, before I did anything else and as soon as I'd had breakfast, it was right across the street from my hotel. This wasn't just for my enjoyment and because I hadn't visited the place for ages. I also had in mind something my sister-in-law Cristina had said to me about Custardoy: '… sometimes he's commissioned to copy paintings from the Prado and he spends hours there studying and copying.' And so the first thing I did on the first day I went into the museum, and before looking at any pictures at all, was to search the place from top to bottom and from end to end, scrutinizing the copyists who were working in the various rooms, in case one of them was a fifty-something man with his hair scraped back in a ponytail, a man prepared to spend hours and hours before some painting not of his choice, whether good, bad or indifferent. Needless to say I spotted none of these characteristics, indeed, most of the copyists were youngish women, although not all of them young enough to be art students. Perhaps it's another of those professions, like art restoration, that the female population has appropriated and which they do very well. I saw no one answering that description on the second day either. I carried out that same preliminary patrol, although I was filled this time with less hope or was it mere superstition: copying is such a slow task that it was likely that only those from the day before would be there again, or so it seemed; it would have been an extraordinary coincidence if Custardoy had started work on one of his copies or forgeries on the very day I happened to be there, on the alert. This, however, did not prevent me from repeating what I had done the previous morning and striding round all the galleries, studying the few people who were sitting or, in some cases, standing at their easels, intent on reproducing what was there before their eyes, something that already existed and which had, usually, been painted better several centuries before.

On the fifth day, I got up late, after a relatively wild night with some old friends, and only arrived at the Prado around one o'clock, about two hours later than usual. I wanted to visit some of the rooms containing works by Italian artists that I hadn't seen for years, and since those in charge of the museum have the ridiculous habit of moving everything around every so often-as if they were running a supermarket-and I suspected that it would take me a while to find the current location of those paintings, I dispensed with my preliminary patrol and inspection of the copyists. And it was there and then that I noticed in passing, in one of the long galleries on the ground floor, a man with a short piratical or matadorish pigtail who wasn't copying anything, but taking notes or doing pencil sketches of a painting in a fairly sizeable sketch pad, although not so large that he couldn't hold it in one hand. He was standing quite close to the picture in question and therefore with his back to me or to anyone else who was not right next to him or who had decided to block his view. I was perfectly within my rights to do either or both of those things, it is, after all, quite common nowadays for rude tourists-almost a tautology really-or indeed the rude natives of any city to impatiently, inconsiderately interpose themselves between painting and viewer and even elbow the latter none too subtly out of the way in order to occupy his or her more central position, the way of the world of which Tupra spoke has become ill-mannered, especially in Spain, although it's now a near-universal phenomenon. I kept a safe distance from him and not only so as not to appear rude. Initially, I observed him from behind, but just as there was no space to his right, only a rope barrier and the side wall, to the left of the painting there was a high door and to the left of that another painting (there were only two on that end wall), and so I moved cautiously in that direction to get as clear a view as possible of his profile, at the same time doing my best not to enter, or only minimally, his field of vision. I realized at once that I needn't worry about him seeing me, for he was totally absorbed in the painting and in his sketchbook, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth between the two, with no interest in anything else, he wasn't even distracted by the continuous ebb and flow of tourists, mostly Italians (come to admire their ancient compatriots), who, curiously enough, did not insist on crowding round him and bothering him by looking at what he was looking at, rather, on seeing him so absorbed in his work, they walked past without stopping, as if intimidated by that tense motionless figure and as if prepared, for the moment, to allow him exclusive usufruct and enjoyment of it. I noticed that he had a mustache and sideburns, which, although not long, were somewhat longer than is perhaps considered the norm nowadays, or perhaps they were merely striking because, while his hair was straight and rather fair and with no visible grey in it, his sideburns were curly and much darker, almost black, but streaked with white and grey, as if old age had decided to begin its work from the sides, leaving the pale dome for later. He was quite tall and thin, with perhaps some evidence around his belly of having drunk too much beer, but the general impression was of someone gaunt and bony, and what I could see of his cheekbones and his broad forehead confirmed that impression, as did his swift active right hand, which had the long strong fingers of a professional pianist; alarming fingers, like piano keys.

Since I was unable to view him from the front, and so couldn't see his eyes or lips or teeth or facial expression (although I could see his nose in profile), it was impossible for me to interpret him, I mean, in the way I used to do at the building with no name when confronted by all those famous and unknown faces, whose voices I almost always heard as well, either in person or on video. From what I was able to make out (which was only his left side, whenever, that is, I pretended to be looking at the other painting separated from his by the high door and placed myself level with him, protected by the distance between us), everything seemed to agree with, or at least not contradict, Cristina's grudging but, as it turned out, accurate description of Custardoy. I had only asked her what he looked like at the end of our conversation, when she was already tired and eager to bring things to a close. 'Oh, I don't know,' she said, 'he's bony, sinewy, with a long nose like a flamenco singer, like the singer in Ketama, for example, you know the one I mean?' (I had an idea Ketama were some kind of semi-flamenco group.) 'And very strange dark eyes, I can't really describe them, but there's something strange, something peculiar about them that I don't like. Sometimes, he has a mustache and sometimes not, as if he kept shaving it off and then letting it grow again I suppose, because I've seen him with one and without.' 'What else? Tell me more,' I had urged her, just as Tupra or Mulryan or Rendel or Pérez Nuix used to urge me on, one more insistently than the others. 'That's all really. I can't think what else to say. Bear in mind that I only know him by sight. I've come across him over the years here and there, I know who he is and I've heard things about him as I have about a lot of other people (well, up until this business with Luisa, of course, since when I've heard rather more about him). But as far as I can remember, we've never been introduced, I've never been that close to him or exchanged a single word.' 'You must have noticed something more,' I had urged her again, knowing that if you press someone, there is always something more. 'Well, as I've said, he wears a tie on all occasions, as if he were trying to compensate for the slightly bohemian impression he makes with that ponytail and the half-grown mustache he sometimes sports: a contrast, a touch of originality. He dresses very correctly, very traditionally, he aspires to elegance I suppose, but doesn't quite make it. Perhaps because elegance is simply not compatible with the salacious look on his face, I don't quite know how to explain it, but he has one of those faces that oozes sexuality, absurd really, but maybe that in part explains his success with women, you can smell it on him. Even from a distance, you can tell what he's about. At least you can if you're a woman. He looks at you so brazenly, he sizes you up. He gives you the once-over, from head to toe, lingering shamelessly on your breasts and your ass, and, if you're sitting down, on your thighs. I used to see him do this, years ago, with loads of women at the Chicote and at the Cock, as soon as they walked in; and he's done it to me too, from a distance, because he doesn't care whether you're with someone or not. But he obviously didn't fancy me much or else could sense that he wasn't my type, because he never approached me. According to Ranz, he can tell immediately who is a willing prey, and he knows even more quickly whether he wants to sink his teeth in or leave well enough alone.' Given their present relationship, it had troubled me to think that he had spotted Luisa as a victim right from the start, as soon as he saw her. And I couldn't help but then go on to wonder if he would have seen the same thing in her had they met when she and I were together. The thought that followed was even worse: it wasn't impossible that they had met before I went off to London and before our official separation. That idea didn't bear thinking about, and so I did not pursue it.

In the man in the Prado I could see nothing of this, by which I mean his sexual voracity, although his gaze was intently fixed on a painting depicting a woman, a mother. Perhaps he had given her the once-over too, prior to any artistic, pictorial or even technical appraisal. Perhaps he had been put off by the fact that the woman appeared in the painting with her three small children; although not necessarily, if he was Custardoy, given that he was clearly attracted to Luisa and she, after all, was a mother of two. (True, the woman in the painting was a rather unattractive, matronly type, whereas Luisa kept herself very slim and, to my eyes, pretty and youthful, but I don't know how she appears to other eyes.) What I had noticed right from the very first instant was that he was wearing a jacket and tie and black lace-up shoes. They wouldn't have been made by Grenson or Edward Green, but they were plain and in good taste, with soles that were neither thick nor made of rubber, I couldn't object to his choice of clothes, except to say that they were too conventional. Not the ponytail, of course, although in recent years, that's become fairly common among men of any age (age no longer acts as a brake on anything and has lost the battle against fashion and vanity). It gave him a roguish look, which was the adjective Cristina had so aptly used to describe him, if indeed it was him.

Once when I walked past, always keeping a prudent distance so that he wouldn't notice me, I managed to confirm my first impression: he was making sketches of the four heads in the painting and, at the same time, taking notes, both at great speed. If he was Custardoy, he might have been commissioned to make a copy and was carrying out a preliminary study. Or, if he really was as good as they said, perhaps he didn't need to stand in front of the picture itself with easel and brushes for long hours and even longer days, and it was enough for him to capture and memorize it (maybe he had a photographic memory) and then work from a good reproduction in his studio, the fact is I know nothing about the techniques used by copyists, let alone forgers (he wouldn't be creating a forgery on this occasion, no one would believe that the work in the Prado wasn't authentic, wasn't the original).

However, I didn't want to spend too much time in his vicinity: the longer I stayed there like his shadow, the greater the risk that he would turn around or glance to his left and see me there, although it was highly unlikely that he would know me or recognize me from photos Luisa might have shown him, though I doubted that she had, and the probability was that he had never seen me. Anyway, I moved away a little and looked briefly at another painting, "Messer Marsilio Cassoti and His Wife" by Lorenzo Lotto, and then shifted closer again, I didn't want him to escape me now, to lose track of him; I ventured slightly further off and had a quick look at a "Portrait of a Gentleman" by Volterra, but was drawn back at once to the man with the pony-tail, I didn't dare take my eyes off him for more than a few seconds; I wandered away again and studied Yahez de la Almedina's "St. Catherine"-all in reds and blues, resting a long sword on the wheel of her martyrdom-and that figure distracted me, so much so that after only half a minute's contemplation, I started in alarm and almost ran back to the painting of the mother and her children. In between all these comings and goings and periods of waiting, I managed to get a good look at that painting: it was average size, about three feet something long by three feet wide I reckoned; and the painting was a family portrait, according to the label, "Camilla Gonzaga, Countess of San Secondo, and her Sons" by Parmigianino, whose real name, I noticed, was Mazzola, like a famous soccer star from my early childhood who played against the Real Madrid of Di Stefano and Gento, I seemed to recall he was a forward with Inter Milan. Against a dark almost black background stood the sturdy Countess, well dressed, discreetly bejewelled, holding in her right hand a golden, gem-incrusted goblet which looked slightly out of place

with so many children around her; or perhaps it wasn't a goblet, but the large tassel from her belt. She bordered on the plump, or maybe not (but she was certainly wide), her expression was rather absent and certainly not lively, although there was perhaps a remnant there of calm almost indifferent determination. She had slightly bovine, almost prominent eyes, very fine eyebrows, which looked as if they had been penciled in, and rather thin and unalluring lips; her best feature was possibly her lustrous un-lined rosy skin, so smooth and taut on her cheeks that it looked as if it might burst. More surprising was her lack of interest in her children, Troilo, Ippolito and Federico according to the label; she showed no signs at all that she was devoted to them, she wasn't looking at them or touching them, not even holding the hand of the child to her left, which was very close to her own inert left hand. The Countess was like an astonished statue surrounded by other smaller but similarly self-absorbed statues, because the odd thing was that the children weren't paying her any attention either, although two of them were distractedly clasping the braided belt of her dress. Each figure was gazing out of the picture in a different direction as if each and every one of them was far more interested in people or elements beyond the frame than in each other in the case of the boys, or in her sons, in the case of the mother, who was the central figure. The oldest child on the right was the least attractive and resembled a foundling or an orphan, partly because of his ugly and excessively severe haircut, and partly because of the sad expression on his face; the youngest didn't seem very happy or very affectionate either, just vulnerable, and about to tug at his mother's belt like someone performing a purely reflex or habitual action; the boy on her left, the prettiest of the children and the one with the most alert eyes, seemed completely oblivious to the rest of the group, as if he were anxious to escape both the others and the enforced patience of his extreme youth.

The only gaze that one could follow or imagine was that of the Countess, given that, to her right, beyond the high door, which kept them still further apart (a whim of that month's reorganization), hung the portrait of her husband, at whom she was directing that distinctly chilly and possibly disappointed look, or perhaps it was a look that was wounded by the mere thought of him. 'They were painted separately,' I thought, 'husband and father on one side, wife and mother with the children on the other, two different portraits, in two distinct, isolated spaces rather than in one space common to them both: a bit like my now living alone in London, while Luisa stays here in Madrid with Guillermo and Marina, except that she's devoted to our children and they to her, at least that's how it has been up until now, it would be terrible if that Custardoy fellow were beginning to distance her from them, it happens with women sometimes, they suddenly have eyes and thoughts only for the new man they're chasing or for the old love they're losing-that's the only thing that can, very occasionally, create a rift and cause them temporarily to relegate their children to second place, just as the Countess perhaps has her gaze fixed on the distant soldier who is out of the picture and perhaps out of time, thus neglecting Troilo, Ippolito and Federico, who are accustomed now to the fact that their mother barely pays them any attention and lives obsessed with thoughts of her absent husband and perhaps sees them as a tie and an impediment and a hindrance, I don't think such a thing would ever happen with Luisa, although she does seem to have made frequent use of the Polish babysitter while I've been here, and there must be or could be a reason for that. And Luisa is clearly not obsessed with thoughts of me, however absent I might be. She, after all, was the one to expel me from her time and from the children's time, although I doubtless gave her some cause to do so.'

'Pedro Maria Rossi, Count of San Secondo. 1533-35,' said the label and then went on to describe him: "Pedro Maria Rossi (1504-1547) was a brilliant soldier who served under Francis I of France, Cosimo I de' Medici and Charles V ('So he was a mercenary in other words,' I thought, 'as I am, too, in my own way'). 'The portrait was painted when he was fighting under the imperial flag, which explains the inclusion of the word "imperio" and the many classical quotations.' The Count's blue-grey gaze was even colder than that of his wife, almost scornful, almost steely

and almost cruel, although it was harder to imagine that he was directing it at her than that she was directing hers at him. ('He could be Sir Cruelty,' I thought.) The long beard and mustache made him seem older (he would only have been about thirty when he posed for the portrait) and made it hard to know at first glance whether he was good-looking or merely elegant and severe, a second glance revealed that he certainly was (all three things, I mean). His noble nose was quite large, larger than mine but not as large as Custardoy's, which was, moreover, slightly hooked. Like St. Catharine and Reresby, he wore a sword, on his left side (which meant that he must be right-handed), but his sword was sheathed and you could only see the hilt and the guard, not the blade. He was wearing a fine costume trimmed with fur, and to his right was a statue of a helmeted youth also carrying a sword, presumably the god Mars. The Count had distinguished hands, with fingers that seemed too slender to be those of a warrior. But pretty much the most striking thing about him was the aggressive codpiece, seamed or stitched or whatever you call it (it must have been made of hard leather, not of reeds or wicker as they appear in most paintings), visibly and obscenely pointing upwards-a permanent reminder of his erection-far less discreet and modest, for example, than those worn by Emperor CharlesV and Philip II in the full-length portraits, both by Titian, in the same museum. 'Perhaps this Count, this soldier, this husband, isn't like me at all,' I thought, 'the one who's leaving or has left, but like the one who is about to arrive or has arrived already and is a violent man who carries a sword, like that bastard Custardoy. Perhaps his wife's gaze then is one of devotion and fear, which is why she seems paralyzed and will-less, for devotion and fear are such powerful dominant feelings, whether felt simultaneously or separately it doesn't matter, that they can momentarily cancel out all other feelings, even love for one's children. I hope Luisa doesn't look at Custardoy like that, I hope she isn't afraid of him, still less devoted. But precisely how she looks at him is something I will never know'

I again looked away from the portrait and glanced over at Custardoy or at the man who might be Custardoy and I saw that he was also looking in my direction; I was convinced that, for a couple of seconds, our eyes met, but so briefly that it was likely that we had, in fact, each merely glanced simultaneously at the painting that more or less matched the picture we each had before us, I that of Pedro Maria Rossi and he that of Camilla Gonzaga with Troilo, Ippolito and Federico, their children; since I first spotted him, he must have spent at least seven minutes there jotting down words and scribbling lines but he'd doubtless been there longer than that too, and that's a long time to look at a single painting. In that couple of seconds, however, I was able to see his face full on for the first time, and it immediately impressed me as being crude, rough and cold, with its broad forehead or receding hairline, its sparse mustache (dark like his sideburns) and its nose which appeared, as is only logical, less hooked than it had in profile (yes, he did suddenly remind me of a long-haired singer I had seen on television, probably the singer with that group Ketama), and two enormous very dark eyes, rather wide-set and almost lashless, and both those factors, the lack of lashes and the wide-apartness, must have made his obscene gaze unbearable or possibly irresistible when turned on the women he seduced or bought and possibly also when turned on the men with whom he might be competing. They were eyes that grabbed, like hands, and one night or one day, they had alighted on the face and body of Luisa and made her his prey. ('And very strange dark eyes, I can't really describe them, but there's something strange, something peculiar about them that I don't like,' according to the description I had coaxed out of a reluctant Cristina). And so, to give those eyes no time to fix on or grab me, I walked away from my portrait of the Count, retreated a few steps and went into the room next door, to the left and on a slightly higher level (a matter of going up three or four steps). From there I could peer in every thirty seconds or so to make sure Custardoy had not escaped without my realizing, and, at the same time, I was much less likely to re-enter his field of vision. In that first lightning glimpse of his face full on he had reminded me of someone else, not the singer, but someone I knew personally, but it was too brief a glimpse for me to be able to remember who, or if my memory was right.

The next room was dominated largely by German art. It contained Dürer's famous self-portrait, as well as his 'Adam' and his 'Eve.' However, my eye was caught at once by a long narrow painting I had been familiar with since childhood, when, as was only normal, it had shocked and filled me with a degree of fear tinged with curiosity, 'The Three Ages and Death' by Hans Baldung Grien, which, like the two portraits, has its counterpart in another painting of the same format and dimensions next to it, 'Harmony, or The Three Graces.' In the former, Death, on the right, is grasping the arm of an old woman or has his arm linked through hers and is tugging at her gently, unhurriedly, and the old woman, in turn, has one arm round the shoulder of a young woman while with her left hand she's plucking at the younger woman's skimpy raiments, as if she, too, were drawing her softly away. Death is carrying an hourglass in his right hand ('An hourglass figure,' I thought) and in his left hand keeps a loose hold on a spear twice broken (it almost resembles a thun-derless flash of lightning) on whose point falls or rests the hand of a sleeping child who is lying at the feet of that group of three, though it may be a long time until he joins them, and he is quite oblivious to their dealings. To his right, an owl; in the background, a solar landscape that looks instead lunar, grim and desolate, with a ruined tower in flames; the inevitable cross hangs in the sky. I had always wondered, ever since I was a child,

if the young woman and the old were the same person at very different ages or if they were two separate women, I mean, if the older woman had always been tugging at herself from youth onwards and into old age, when she finally allows herself to be carried off by Death, for if that were not the case, the subject would be graver and more troubling. However, the two women looked very alike to me: the blue eyes, the nose, the rather thin lips, the somewhat sharp chin, the long wavy hair, the stature, the smallish widely-spaced breasts, the feet, the whole figure, there were even similarities in their facial expressions, or at least they were not entirely opposed. The young woman is frowning, either worried or annoyed, but not alarmed or frightened, as she probably would have been had the person drawing her away been a stranger, or just another person, or even her mother. She doesn't struggle or put up a fight or try to shrug off the hand on her shoulder, and at most, she tries to prevent her from removing all her garments. The old woman, for her part, focuses all her attention on the young woman and not on Death, and in her look there is a mixture of gravity, understanding, resolve and pity, but no ill will, as if she were saying to the young woman (or to herself when she was her age): 'I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do' (or 'Come along, we have to go on; I know because I've already arrived'). As for Death, who has his arm linked through hers, she takes no notice of him, but neither does she resist or oppose him, she looks more towards the past than her future, perhaps because-despite the promises of the cross hanging in the air and the infernal tower in flames, with a large hole in the side as if made by a cannon ball-she knows that there is little or no future left.

'There's Sir Death,' I thought,' as in the English and, generally speaking, the Germanic tradition: he's clearly male, el Muerte not la Muerte, because although he is cadaverous, a semi-skeleton with the skin clinging to bones it barely covers-like a disguise he's adopted to tread the earth, all the more so when you notice his eyes are more deeply sunken than the rest-you can see a few wisps of beard growing out of his chin, and other wisps, resembling tiny tentacles, more like the tentacles of a cuttlefish or a squid than an octopus, peeping out where his penis and his vanished testicles would have been, now there's only a hole where once a codpiece doubtless stood erect. He's certainly not like Sergeant Death in the Armagh ballad ("And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me"), who is a man in his prime, a strong energetic warrior prepared to snatch lives away nonstop, an experienced professional with his cold disciplined arms always busy; this Death is the feeblest and most worn of the three figures, or of the four, with his meek broken spear, so meek that an unwary child can almost touch it. And yet there is determination and energy in the scrawny arm that grips, and he is, above all, the master of time, he holds the clock and knows the time and can see when it's running out, the sand or water, whichever it is that his hourglass contains and on which his red-veined eyes are firmly fixed, rather than on the old or the young woman, for time is his only guide, the only thing that counts for this Sir Death, as naked and decrepit as our Latin hag with her scythe, this Sir Death with neither helmet nor sword.' And I suddenly remembered 'the loud tick-tock' in that small sepulchral living room in the Lisbon cemetery of Os Prazeres, which, according to the traveler who 'with a degree of indiscretion' discovered and observed it, 'was to a normal tick-tock what a shout is to the spoken voice'; and I recalled the enigmatic words suggested by the sight of the alarm clock making the noise ('of the kind we used to see in our parents' kitchens, round in shape, with a bell like a spherical skullcap and with two small balls for feet'): 'It seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common.' Perhaps when all the sand or all the water had trickled through, thus signaling the death of the old woman painted by Baldung Grien, and who was perhaps also the young woman, when he had finally sent them to join 'the more influential and more animated majority,' he would still have to turn over the hourglass or clepsydra in order to begin the countdown again, about which my compatriot the traveler wondered: Was it the amount of time they had been dead or the time yet to elapse before the final judgment? If it was measuring out the hours of solitude, was it counting those that had passed or those still to come?

I kept peering in at the larger Italian gallery, then turning back to spend a little more time with the German painting, which while it no longer frightened me, still intrigued me. From the threshold I saw, too, 'The Annunciation' by Fra Angelico, an excellent full-size copy of which had presided over my father's living room for as long as I could remember, he and my mother had commissioned it from a friend who was a copyist, a Custardoy of the 1930s and '40s, Daniel Canellada was his name I recall; seeing that painting was, for me, like being at home. On one of my brief forays into the German gallery, I lingered too long in front of the Baldung Grien and, when I returned to the Italian gallery, the man was no longer standing before the Parmigianino, I mean, before the Countess and her children. I bounded down the intervening steps, looking anxiously to right and left, but, fortunately, I spotted him at once, his now closed sketchbook under his arm, on his way to the stairs that led up to the first floor and then to the exit. That's when I started to follow him, or where I became more like his shadow, not in quite the same way as I had been with Tupra on the journeys we made together, but in both cases I relegated myself to the background. Once upstairs, he went to the coat check, and I waited with my back turned until he reappeared, looking round every three seconds so as not to lose him again, and when he emerged, I discovered with horror that what he had left there and retrieved was a hat, possibly a fedora ('A man wearing a ponytail and a hat,' I thought, 'possibly a fedora. Good lord!'). He had the good manners not to put it on while he was indoors, but only when he went out into the street, and then I saw-although it brought me little relief-that it was broader brimmed than the aforementioned fedora, more the kind of hat a painter or a conductor or an artist would wear, and black, of course. Duly behatted, he set off down the steps outside the museum, opposite the Hotel Ritz, and I followed after, always at a safe distance. He strode along the Paseo del Prado at a good pace, then stopped outside a brasserie, studied the menu, peered in through the window, shielding his eyes with his hand against the reflections on the glass (wasn't the brim of his presumptuous hat enough?), as if he were considering having lunch there-although it was early for Madrid unless you happened to be a foreigner; perhaps I was wrong, and he was a foreigner; but he didn't look like one to me, I could sense something unequivocally Spanish about his whole appearance, especially the way he walked, or perhaps it was the trousers-and so I took advantage of that pause to look in the window of a nearby shop selling artifacts from Toledo, including swords-obviously aimed at tourists, but nowadays they wouldn't be allowed to take such swords with them on a plane, they'd have to check them, and even then a sword wouldn't easily fit in a suitcase; it wouldn't be permitted on trains either, and I wondered who the devil would buy such swords now if they couldn't be transported anywhere, a collector of decorative knives and swords like Dick Dearlove would presumably have them sent to him some way or other. Most would be made of our famous Toledo steel, very Spanish and very medieval, but I noticed that among those on display there were also a few that were apparently Scottish and even bore the name 'McLeod' engraved on the guard, an ignoble concession to the movie-mad Anglo-Saxon masses. It occurred to me that I might buy one, not right then, of course, but later, for I had learned from Tupra a little of the effect that such an archaic weapon could produce. Almost all of them, however, were much longer and larger, doubtless far more difficult and far heavier to wield than the 'catgutter' or Landsknecht or Katzbalger, they had really huge blades. They would cut off a hand at a blow. They would slice through and dismember. 'No,' I thought, 'it would be best if it were a sword I didn't have to get rid of, one that I could return to its place, used or not, it wouldn't matter, one that I wouldn't have to throw away or deliberately abandon for someone else to find later.'

The man who was now very probably Custardoy continued on along Carrera de San Jeronimo, past my hotel, where he peered in at the entrance and read the plaque there which states, incredibly, that the Palace Hotel was conceived, designed and built in the brief space of fifteen months spanning 1911 and 1912, by the Leon Monnoyer construction company, who were, I suppose, French or Belgian, I don't know how the builders of today-that plague, that horde-can hold up their heads for shame or indeed shamelessness; a little further on, more or less opposite the Parliament building, he paused momentarily by the statue of Cervantes-who also had his sword unsheathed-there were some police vans parked there, with five or six policemen armed with machine guns standing outside to protect the honorable members, even though there were none to be seen, they must all have been inside or off on a trip somewhere or in one of the bars. The man with the ponytail and mustache had clearly retrieved something else from the museum coatcheck, a briefcase with no handles, into which he must have put his sketchbook, and he was carrying said briefcase under his arm and walking quickly, confidently, head up, eyes front, looking frankly about him and at the people he passed, and I had quite a fright when, as he was passing Lhardy, he slowed his pace and turned his head to observe the legs of a girl with whom he had almost collided, possibly deliberately I thought. I was afraid he might see me and recognize me, I mean from before, from the Prado. His response to the young woman was very Spanish, one I often have myself, although whenever I turned round like that in London, I had the sense that I was the only man who did, less so in Madrid, although there are fewer and fewer men who dare to look at whatever we want to, especially when the person we're looking at can't see us and has her back to us, which means that we're not bothering or embarrassing anyone-in these increasingly repressive times the puritans are even trying to control what our eyes do, often quite involuntarily. His was a quick, appreciative, brazen glance, with those large dark marble-like eyes of his, intense and troubling, wide-set and lashless, which more or less coincided with what Cristina had told me about the way he visually grabbed at women; but perhaps that was an exaggeration, I myself sometimes look in a similar way at a passing derriere or a pair of legs as they move off, perhaps with less penetrating appraising eyes, more ironic or more amused. His eyes looked as if they were salivating.

If when he arrived at the ruined Puerta del Sol, he continued straight on, if he didn't go down into the metro and didn't catch a bus or a taxi, we would be on the right track, that is, heading for Custardoy's house or workshop or studio, and then there'd be no further room for doubt that he was he. I feared for a moment that he was about to deviate from that route when, at the beginning of Calle Mayor, he crossed the street, but I was reassured at once to see that he was merely going into a rather fine-looking bookshop, Mendez by name. From the other side of the street, through the shopwindow, I saw him greet the owners or employees affectionately (patting them on the arm; and he was again polite enough to take off his hat, which was something), and he must have made some funny comment because they both laughed, a burst of generous spontaneous laughter. He left after a few minutes, carrying a bag from the bookshop, so he must have bought something, and I wondered what sort of thing he would read, then he crossed back onto my side of the road, and I retreated a few steps, until there was the same distance between us as there had been since we left the museum. However, I had to stop again almost at once and make a slow withdrawal from an ATM, in order to gain time and not overtake him, because he met a female acquaintance or friend-I caught a glimpse of blue eyes-a young woman in trousers, with short hair and a fringed suede jacket, a la Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett or General Custer when they skewered him. She smiled warmly at him and planted a kiss on each cheek, he must live in the area; they chatted animatedly for a few minutes, she obviously liked him (he didn't take off his hat this time, but at least he touched the brim with his fingers when he saw the young woman, the classic gesture of respect in the street), and she laughed loudly at something he said ('He's the sort of man who makes people laugh, like me when I want to,' I thought. 'That could explain why Luisa likes him. Bad luck. Bad news'). No one would ever suspect that he hit women, or one particular woman, the woman who still mattered most to me.

He said goodbye and continued on his way; he walked with great resolve, almost fiercely sometimes when he increased the pace, he would never be bothered by any of the pickpockets or muggers who abound in that touristy area and who, for preference, fleece the Japanese; perhaps beggars would leave him alone too, his walk was that of someone who, however pleasant, is not open to overtures of that kind; and the duty of beggars and thieves is to recognize this at once and to sense who they're dealing with. He proceeded on past the San Miguel market on his left, where the road went slightly downhill. On the wall of a building I noticed a carved inscription which said soberly, gravely: 'Here lived and died Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca,' the dramatist on whom Nietzsche, in his day, was so keen, as indeed was the whole of Germany; and a little further along, on the other side, a more modern plaque indicated: 'In this place stood the Church of San Salvador, in whose tower LuisVelez de Guevara set the action of his novel El diablo cojuelo-The Devil Upon Two Sticks-1641,' a book it had never occurred to me to read, not even when I was at Oxford, but Wheeler, Cromer-Blake and Kavanagh would surely have known it. Custardoy went over for a moment to a statue immediately opposite, in Plaza de la Villa, how odd that a painter should be so attracted to the three-dimensional. 'To Don Alvaro de Bazan' was all it said underneath, the Admiral in command of the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto, where Cervantes was wounded in 1571, losing the use of his left hand when he was only twenty-four, which meant that he could justifiably refer to himself as 'a complete man albeit missing a hand' in the same lines of farewell that I had quoted to Wheeler, even though he didn't want to hear them: farewell wit, farewell charm, farewell dear, delightful friends. There, too, was the Torre de los Luxanes, where it is said Francis I of France was held prisoner after being captured by the Spanish during the battle of Pavia in 1525; but since various other places in Spain also claim that he was held captive there, either a lot of people are lying or the Emperor Charles V trailed the French king round the country, exhibiting him like a monkey or a trophy.

Custardoy was still on the right track, the one that should lead him to his house, straight down Calle Mayor, and with me right behind, his rather distant or detached shadow. 'I've spent some time now being a shadow,' I thought, 'I have been and am a shadow at Tupra's side, accompanying him on his journeys and talking to him almost every day, always by his side like a subaltern, an interpreter, a support, an apprentice, an ally, occasionally a henchman ("No doubt, an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use"). Now I'm playing shadow to this man whom I'm not even sure is the man I'm looking for, but as regards him, I'm none of those other things; I'm a sinister, punitive, threatening shadow of which he as yet knows nothing, as is usually the case with those walking behind, who cannot be seen; it would be better for him if he did not continue along this route, or if his route turned out not to be the one I hope for and desire.' Just after thinking this, I thought he might escape me, because when he reached the Capitania General or Consejo de Estado (where soldiers bearing machine guns stood outside the first door), he again crossed the street as if he were about to go into the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, which is immediately opposite. Except that he didn't, he went down a narrow street just beyond that, and I felt really alarmed: surely, at this late stage, he wasn't going to turn out not to be he and not approach that ornate door before which I had stood on two occasions now. At the end of that street, very short and for pedestrians only, I saw him disappear to the left and I quickened my pace slightly to not lose track of him, and to find out where he was going, and when I reached that same point, he very nearly did see me: there, in the corner, was an old bar, El Anciano Rey de losVinos, where he took a seat outside, looking obliquely across towards the Palacio Real; in Madrid, what with global warming, it's almost like summer for nearly six months of the year, and so there are tables and chairs set outside cafes and bars long after and long before the appropriate seasons. I immediately turned round to hide my face from him and pretended to read, like a tourist, another metal plaque just above me (and, of course, I did read it): 'Near this place stood the houses of Ana de Mendoza y la Cerda, Princess of Eboli, and in one of them she was arrested by order of Philip II in 1579.' She was the one-eyed woman, an intriguer and possibly a spy, who had doubtless in her day spread outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague, as Wheeler had done, or so he said, and doubtless Tupra too, or perhaps the latter had merely lit the fuses that provoked great fires. (No age is free of such contagions; in every age there are people bearing flaming torches and people who talk.) The lady was always shown wearing an eye-patch, over her right eye I seemed to recall from seeing some portrait of her, and I thought, too, that I had watched a movie about her, starring Olivia de Havilland.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Custardoy placing his order with the waiter, and I walked back down the street as far as Calle Mayor, pondering what to do next, apart, that is, from keeping well out of the way. There was a ridiculous statue there, which Custardoy, showing excellent taste, had not stopped to look at; it was one of the many 'anonymous' pieces that fill our cities (in the name of 'democratizing' monuments, a contradiction in itself), but the fellow looked suspiciously like Hemingway, patron saint of tourists. And there was another plaque high up on the wall, that said: in this street, Juan Escobedo, secretary to John of Austria, was killed on March 31, 1578, on the night of Easter Monday.' Again this rang a bell with me, that murky murder; perhaps the Princess of Eboli had been involved, although it would have been very stupid of her to order an enemy to be killed right next to her house. (Later, I checked, and apparently it's still not known if the murder was carried out on orders from the Princess, from Philip II himself or from Antonio Pérez, his scheming secretary, who ended up being sent into exile; an as yet unsolved crime four and a bit centuries later, there in that narrow street which, at the time, was called Camarin de Nuestra Senora de Almudena. But why do I say 'still' or 'as yet,' in some cases the passing of time serves no purpose, so much remains unknown, denied, hidden, even as regards ourselves and our own actions.) 'What a lot of one-eyed, one-handed, hobbling people there have been in these old streets,' I found myself thinking, 'what a lot of deaths. They won't notice one more, should it come to that.'

I decided to take a few short turns about the surrounding area, so that I could return every so often to a point from which I could keep an eye on Custardoy and his movements from afar, I couldn't risk missing the moment when he paid his bill, got up and set off again, from El Anciano Rey de los Vinos to what I presumed was his house, just steps away; he would only have to cross two streets. And so I moved a little way off and stopped before another statue in Calle Bailen, this time a rather rough bust of the admirable madrileño writer Larra, who committed suicide in 1837 by shooting himself in the head while standing in front of the mirror, before he was even twenty-eight (another member of the Kennedy-Mansfield fraternity, of which there are so many), perhaps over some unhappy love affair, but who knows; and then I stopped by yet another sculpture, slightly grotesque this time, of a certain Captain Melgar, all medals and curled mustaches-he reminded me somewhat of Tupra's improbable ancestor in the portrait by Kennington I had seen at his house- and who, according to the inscription, had died in the battle of Barranco del Lobo, in Melilla, during the African War, in 1909; it wasn't so much the actual bust of the Captain that was grotesque as a second disproportionately small figure-not so small as to be a Lilliputian or Tom Thumb, but certainly a midget-of a soldier dressed like Beau Geste and who was trying to climb up the pedestal or column with his rifle in his hand, whether to worship his Captain or to attack him and finish him off wasn't clear. And then I walked back the way I had come-although on the other side of the street this time, the same side as the Catholic monstrosity-and studied Custardoy where he sat outside the cafe. He had been served a beer, some anchovies and some patatas bravas ('So he treats himself to a proper aperitif, does he?' I thought. 'He obviously feels he's worked hard enough and he's in no hurry, he'll certainly be there for a while'), and had unfolded a newspaper, which he was sitting reading, legs crossed, now and then looking around with his huge eyes, which meant I had to be prudent, and so I again moved off, this time going as far as the Palacio Real, only to discover more hideous statues, a constant feature in Madrid: a whole line of Visigothic kings dressed like pseudo-Romans and each bearing a barely comprehensible inscription, especially for a foreigner, and I was feeling rather like a foreigner: 'Ataúlfo, Mu. A° de 415,' said the first one, and the same enigmatic inscription (meaning presumably Murió Año de… He died in the year…) accompanied Eurico, 'de 484,' Leovigildo, 'de 585,' Suintala, 'de 633,' Wamba, 'de 680'… Further on, stood a large monument, 'erected at the instigation of Spanish women to the glory of the soldier Luis Noval,' who must have been a heroic soldier and obviously the darling of the ladies, for he, too, was dressed like Beau Geste or Beau Saberur or Beau Ideal or all of them put together: 'Patria, no olvides nunca a los que por ti mueren, MCMXII; My country, never forget those who died for you, MCMXII' (that word 'patria' would have to be translated as 'country,' the word used by Tupra on the night we first met and which had made me wonder if he might, in spirit, be a fascist in the analogical sense). But my country forgets everyone, both those who die for it and those who don't, including that fellow Noval-why, no one in Madrid will have the faintest idea who he was or how he distinguished himself or what he did. Every time I retraced my steps, and the cafe terrace once more came within my field of vision, the more settled the man with the ponytail seemed to be, and so I decided to set off in another direction and walk down Cuesta de la Vega, 'Near here stood the site of Puerta de la Vega, the main entrance into Muslim Madrid, from the ninth century onwards' and 'Image of Maria Santisima de la Almudena, hidden in this place in the year 712 and miraculously rediscovered in the year 1085' ('They hid it in the year following the Moorish invasion,' I thought, 'presumably so that it wouldn't be destroyed.' But that very white effigy of the Virgin and Child, placed in a niche, didn't look remotely like something made in the eighth century or even a replica of one, but was a shameless fake; Custardoy would have known), and even got as far as Parque de Atenas, where the inevitable bust, almost hidden this time because of the isolated position in which it had been placed, was of no less a person than the jubilant Boccherini, who lived for twenty or more years in Madrid and died here in penury, never having been honored by this ungrateful city (it's not even known where his bones lie or if there was a grave to give them shelter); behind him was a stone plaque bearing the words of someone called Cartier which said: if God wanted to talk to mankind through music, He would use the works of Haydn; but if He Himself wanted to listen to music, he would choose Boccherini.' Yes, his music, like Mancini's, accompanied me wherever I went.

I had gone too far and hurried back up Cuesta de la Vega, fearing that I might be left not knowing what I needed to know, by a miscalculation or through carelessness. When I once again reached the point where Calle Mayor and Calle de Bailen meet- I glanced at the door to my right, but there was no sign of Custardoy going in-it occurred to me that the best place to keep watch over the cafe terrace, or part of it, without being seen, was from the top of the short double flight of steps that led directly to the statue of the Polish, jota-dancing Pope, and so up I went and stood leaning on the balcony, with my back turned on Totus tuus, yes, his really was the ugliest of the statues, but not through incompetence on the part of the sculptor; people would assume I was another devotee, a few of whom were taking photographs of the figure and imitating his invitation-to-the-dance posture. I could see my man from there, he wouldn't escape me when he got up. I waited. And waited. He was still reading the newspaper, still wearing his hat (he was, after all, in the open air); he had placed his handleless briefcase on the chair beside him, and he seemed to possess special antennae for detecting any good-looking women, because whenever one passed or sat down, he would look up and check her out, perhaps he just had a very good nose. 'Luisa hasn't shown much judgment in that respect either,' I thought. 'He's probably the kind of man for whom one woman is never enough.' I wished I had some binoculars with me so that I could observe him more closely. Even at that distance, there was something about him that reminded me of someone else, an affinity or a resemblance, just as Incompara had immediately brought to mind my old classmate Comendador, now a respectable building contractor in New York or Miami or wherever it was he had gone. But I couldn't put my finger on it, I couldn't identify the model, I mean, the first individual of that sort whom I had, at some point, met.

Finally, I saw him hold up his arm and click his fingers twice, a disdainful and now antiquated way of summoning waiters. 'He can't be about to order another beer,' I thought, 'there are two empty glasses on the table already' Fortunately, he was asking for the bill; he took some notes out of his trouser pocket (I carry them like that too, loose, rather than in a wallet) and put one down on the table, as we madrileños always used to do: money should never pass from hand to hand, but via a neutral place. He obviously knew the waiter, which made his previous very classist finger-clicks even ruder; as the waiter put the change down, likewise on the table, Custardoy patted him lightly on the arm, as he had with the booksellers, perhaps he took his pre-lunch drink in El Anciano Rey de los Vinos every day. He made some comment to the waiter as he left and the latter laughed out loud, as had the people in the bookshop and the young General Custer or Davy Crockett with her fringed jacket; he clearly had a sense of humor. Soon I would know whether he was he or someone else. He didn't leave that corner cafe by walking back down the narrow street of the unsolved murder, but via Calle de Bailen, which was a good sign. As he walked along, he looked into the windows of the shop selling musical instruments which occupies that whole corner, strode quickly across Calle Mayor and paused by the traffic lights in Bailen, which were red. At that point, I lost sight of him and hurriedly retreated until I found a position from which I could see him again, to the left of the shop belonging to that ghastly temple, which was to the left of Totus (who on earth would want to buy anything there?). I could see the whole corner from there, from behind some railings, I was right in front of the door to his house-if it was his house-only on higher ground, where he wouldn't see me, because he was unlikely to look up, I felt like the Düsseldorf vampire lying in wait. Custardoy now only had to cross the street when the light turned green and go through the door towards which I was pushing him and which was, once again, closed. I could see him clearly now, he was unmistakable in his hat, I would see his footsteps too once he started walking. 'One, two, three, four, five…' I started counting in my head when the lights changed, he had small feet for a man his height, he followed the correct path, he wouldn't stop now,'…forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, and forty-nine.' And he stopped outside the right door, his key ready in his hand. And then I thought with an ephemeral feeling of triumph: 'Got you, just where I want you.'

I waited for a few minutes more to see if a window opened, telling me what floor he lived on and confirming that he was home. There, however, I was out of luck. I walked down the steps, crossed the two streets that Luisa perhaps also often crossed, if, that is, she visited him much-she couldn't ever spend the night there-wondered briefly whether I should get a taxi back up to the Palace Hotel, but seeing none free, started to walk. When I reached Plaza de la Villa, I stopped to have a better look at the statue he had looked at, Don Alvaro de Bazan or Marques de Santa Cruz, possibly the least ugly of the statues I had encountered. I walked round it and found an inscription at the back of the pedestal: 'I was the scourge of the Turk at Lepanto, the Frenchman at Terceira, the Englishman o'er all the seas. The King I served and the country I honored know best who I am by the Cross in my name and the cross-hilt of my sword.' 'We Spaniards are always such braggarts,' I thought, still feeling distinctly foreign, 'I should learn from them and convince myself that my enemies will all flee before me, saying: "I go, victorious Spaniard of lightning and fire, I leave you. I leave you too, sweet lands, I leave Spain and tremble as I go…" Spaniards are always boasting like that, even when confronted by a compatriot who will not be so easily frightened off. And Custardoy and I are compatriots.' The Admiral had one arm raised and was holding something in his hand. I couldn't quite see what it was, it could have been a rolled up map or, more likely, a General's baton. His other hand, the left one, was gripping the hilt of his sheathed sword, rather as the lone Count was in his portrait. 'What a lot of swords there are in these old streets too,' I thought.