The Infatuations

That was the only advantage, which was, of course, worth nothing. The waiters were wrong, and when they found out they were wrong they didn’t bother telling me. Desvern would never come back, nor, therefore, would the cheerful couple, who had, as such, also been erased from the world. My colleague Beatriz – who also occasionally breakfasted at the café and with whom I had discussed that extraordinary pair – was the first to mention the incident to me, doubtless assuming that I would know, that I would have found out on my own account, either from the newspapers or from the waiters, and assuming, too, that we would have already talked about it, completely forgetting that I had been away during the days immediately after the murder. We were having a quick cup of coffee outside the café, when she suddenly paused, aimlessly stirring her coffee with her spoon, and said softly, looking over at the other tables, all of which were full:

‘How dreadful to have such a thing happen to you, I mean what happened to your favourite couple. To begin a day like any other with not the faintest idea that someone is going to take your life, and in the most brutal manner. Because, in a way, her life has been taken from her too. At least that’s how it will be for a long time, years probably, if you ever do recover from something like that, which I doubt. Such a stupid death, so unlucky, one of those deaths where you could spend your whole life thinking: “Why did it have to happen to him, why me, when there are millions of other people in the city?” I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really love Saverio any more, but if something like that happened to him, I’m not sure I could go on. It wouldn’t be the sense of loss so much as the feeling that I had somehow been marked out, as if someone had set my course for me and that there was no way of changing it, do you know what I mean?’ Beatriz was married to a cocky, parasitical Italian guy she could barely stand, but whom she put up with because of the kids, and also because she had a lover who filled her days with his salacious phone calls and the prospect of the occasional sporadic encounter, not that there were many of those, since both of them were married with children. And one of our authors filled her nocturnal imaginings, although not, it should be said, stout Cortezo or Garay Fontina, who was repulsive both physically and personally.

‘What are you talking about?’

And then she told me or, rather, started to tell me, astonished by my evident confusion and exclamations of ignorance, because it was getting late and her position at the publishing house was even more precarious than mine and she didn’t want to run any risks, as it was, Garay Fontina had taken against her and frequently complained about her to Eugeni.

‘Didn’t you read about it in the newspapers? There was even a photo of the poor man, all bloody and lying on the ground. I can’t remember the exact date, but if you look on the Internet, you’re sure to find it. His name was Deverne, apparently he was a member of the film distribution family, you know, “Deverne Films presents”, you’ll have seen it thousands of times at the cinema. You’ll find everything you need to know there. It was just horrible. Such terrible bad luck. Enough to make you despair. I don’t think I’d ever get over it if I was his wife. She must be out of her mind with grief.’ That was when I found out his name or, if you like, his stage name.

That night, I typed in ‘Deverne Murder’ on my computer and the item came up at once, drawn from the local news sections of two or three Madrid papers. His real surname was Desvern, and it occurred to me that perhaps his family had changed it at some point for business purposes, to make it easier to pronounce for speakers of Castilian and possibly so that Catalan speakers would not immediately associate them with the town of Sant Just Desvern, a place I happened to know because several Barcelona publishing houses have their warehouses there. And perhaps also to give the appearance of being a French film distributor, because when the company was founded – in the 1960s or even earlier – everyone would still have been familiar with Jules Verne, and everything French was considered chic, not like now with that President who looks like Louis de Funès with hair. I learned, too, that the Deverne family used to own several large cinemas in the centre of Madrid and that, perhaps because such cinemas have been gradually disappearing, to be replaced by shopping malls, the company had diversified and now specialized in property development, not just in Madrid, but elsewhere too. So Miguel Desvern must have been even richer than I thought. I found it even more incomprehensible that he should have breakfasted nearly every morning in a café that was well within my more modest means. The incident had occurred on the last day that I saw him there, which is how I knew that his wife and I had said goodbye to him at the same time, she with her lips and I with my eyes only. In a further cruelly ironic touch, it was his birthday; he had thus died a year older than he had been the day before, at fifty.

The versions in the press differed in some details (it doubtless depended on which neighbours or passers-by the reporters had spoken to), but they all agreed on the main facts. Deverne had parked his car, as, it seems, he always did, in a side street off Paseo de la Castellana at around two in the afternoon – he was probably going to meet Luisa for lunch at the restaurant – quite close to their house and even closer to a small car park belonging to the Technical College for Industrial Engineers. When he got out, he was accosted by a homeless guy who used to park cars in the area in exchange for tips from drivers – what we call a gorrilla – and who had then started berating Desvern, making incoherent, outrageous accusations. According to one witness – although none of them really understood what the man was talking about – he accused Deverne of having got his daughters involved in some international prostitution ring. According to others, he gave vent to a stream of unintelligible invective, of which they could make out only two phrases: ‘You’re trying to take my inheritance away from me!’ and ‘You’re stealing the bread from my children’s mouths!’ Desvern tried to shake the man off and reason with him for a few seconds, telling him that he had nothing to do with his daughters, whom he didn’t even know, and that he had clearly mistaken him for someone else. However, the gorrilla, Luis Felipe Vázquez Canella according to the reports, thirty-nine years old, very tall and heavily bearded, had grown even angrier and continued to hurl abuse at Desvern and heap him with incomprehensible curses. The porter of one house had heard him screaming hysterically: ‘You’re going to die today and, by tomorrow, your wife will have forgotten you!’ Another newspaper reported a still more wounding version: ‘You’re going to die today and, by tomorrow, your wife will have found another man!’ Deverne had made a dismissive gesture as if giving up on the fellow, and was about to set off towards Paseo de la Castellana, abandoning any further attempt to calm the man down, but then the gorrilla, as if he had decided to wait no longer for his curse to take effect, but to become, instead, its artificer, had produced a butterfly knife with a seven-centimetre blade and launched himself on Deverne from behind, stabbing him repeatedly, in the chest and side according to one newspaper, in the back and abdomen according to another, in the back, the chest and the side of the chest according to a third. The reports also disagreed on the number of stab wounds: nine, ten and sixteen, but the reporter who gave that last figure – and who was possibly the most reliable because he mentioned ‘autopsy results’ – added that ‘every blow struck a vital organ’ and that ‘according to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, five proved fatal’.

Desvern had initially tried to get away from the man and escape, but the blows had been so fast and furious and brutal – and, apparently, so accurate – that there had been no way he could evade them and he soon collapsed and fell to the ground. Only then did the murderer stop. A security guard at a nearby company ‘saw what was happening and managed to detain the man until the police arrived, saying: “You’re not leaving here until the police arrive!”’ There was no explanation as to how, with mere words, he had managed to immobilize an armed man, who was completely out of control and who had just spilled a great deal of blood – perhaps he did so at gunpoint, but none of the articles mentioned a gun or that he had got a gun out and pointed it at the assailant – because various sources stated that the gorrilla was still holding the knife when the police arrived, and that they had been the ones who ordered him to drop it. The man then threw it down on the ground, was handcuffed and taken to the local police station. ‘According to Madrid’s chief of police’ – these or similar words appeared in all the newspapers – ‘the alleged murderer was brought before a court, but refused to make a statement.’

Luis Felipe Vázquez Canella had been living for some time in the area in an abandoned car, and here again the testimony of neighbours differed, as always happens when one asks or tells a story to more than one person. For some, he was a very calm, polite individual who never caused any trouble: he spent his time earning a little money by looking for parking spaces and guiding drivers to them with the usual imperious, obliging gestures that go with the job – his services were sometimes unnecessary or unwanted, but that is how all gorrillas work. He would arrive at about midday, leave his two blue rucksacks at the foot of a tree, and set about his intermittent task. Other residents, however, said that they had become fed up with ‘his violent outbursts and evident insanity’, and had often tried to get him thrown out of his static mobile home and have him removed from the neighbourhood, but without success. Although Vázquez Canella had no previous police record, Deverne’s chauffeur had been the victim of one of his outbursts only a month before. The beggar had addressed him very rudely and, taking advantage of the fact that the chauffeur had his window wound down, had punched him in the face. The police were duly informed and arrested him briefly for assault, but, in the end, the chauffeur, although ‘injured’, had taken pity on the man and decided not to make a formal complaint. And on the eve of Desvern’s death, victim and executioner had had their first argument. The gorrilla had made his usual wild allegations. According to one of the more talkative concierges in the street where the stabbing took place, ‘He talked about his daughters and about his money, saying that “they” wanted to take his money away from him.’ Another version described how: ‘The victim explained to him that he had got the wrong person and that he had nothing to do with his affairs. The bewildered beggar then wandered off, muttering to himself.’ Somewhat embellishing the narrative and taking a few liberties with the people actually involved, it added: ‘Miguel could never have imagined that, twenty-four hours later, Luis Felipe’s delusions would cost him his life. The script written for him had begun to take shape a month earlier’ – this was a reference to the incident with the chauffeur, who some neighbours saw as the real object of the beggar’s rage: ‘Who knows, perhaps he had it in for the chauffeur,’ one of them was reported to have said, ‘and got him mixed up with his boss.’ It was suggested that the gorrilla had been in a foul mood for a month or more, because, with the installation of parking meters in the area, he could no longer earn any money with his already sporadic work. One of the newspapers mentioned in passing a disconcerting fact that none of the others had picked up: ‘The alleged murderer refused to make a statement, and so we have been unable to confirm whether or not he and his victim were related by marriage, as some people in the neighbourhood believed.’

An ambulance had sped to the scene of the crime. The ambulance men had given Desvern first aid, but because he was so gravely injured, all they could do was ‘stabilize’ him and drive him immediately to the Hospital de La Luz – or, according to a couple of newspapers, to the Hospital de La Princesa; they couldn’t even agree on that – where he was rushed into the operating room with cardiac arrest and in a critical condition. He hovered on the brink of life and death for five hours, during which time he never recovered consciousness; he finally ‘succumbed late that evening, with the doctors unable to do anything more to save him’.

All this information was published over a period of two days, the two days following the murder. Then the item vanished from the press completely, as tends to happen with all news nowadays: people don’t want to know why something happened, only what happened, and to know that the world is full of reckless acts, of dangers, threats and bad luck that only brush past us, but touch and kill our careless fellow human beings, or perhaps they were simply not among the chosen. We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don’t want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people’s misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: ‘How dreadful. But what’s next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we’ve worn out yesterday’s already.’

Oddly enough, during those two days, little was said about the man who had died, only that he was the son of one of the founders of the well-known film distributors and that he worked for the family firm, which was now almost an empire that had been growing for decades and constantly adding to its many ramifications, currently even including low-cost airlines. In the days that followed, there was no sign of any obituary for Deverne anywhere, no memoir or evocation written by a friend or colleague or comrade, no biographical sketch that spoke of his character and his personal achievements, and that was strange. Any wealthy businessman, especially if he has links with the cinema, and even if he isn’t famous, has contacts in the press or friends with contacts, and it wouldn’t be difficult to persuade one of those contacts to place a heartfelt note of homage and praise in some newspaper, as if that might compensate the dead person in some way for being dead or as if the lack of an obituary were an added insult (so often we only find out that someone has existed once they have ceased to do so, in fact, because they have ceased to exist).

And so the only available photo was the one snapped by some quick-witted reporter while Deverne was lying on the ground, before he was taken away, when he was still receiving treatment there in the street. Fortunately, it was hard to see the image on the Internet – a very small, rather bad reproduction – because that seemed to me a truly vile thing to do to a man like him, who, in life, had always been so cheerful, so impeccable. I barely looked at it, I didn’t want to, and I had already thrown away the newspaper where I had first glimpsed the photo in its larger version without realizing who it was and not wishing to spend time over it. Had I known then that he was not a complete stranger, but a person I used to see every day with a sense of pleasure and almost gratitude, the temptation to look would have been too hard to resist, but then I would have averted my gaze, feeling even more indignant and horrified than I had when I failed to recognize him. Not only do you get killed in the street in the cruellest way possible and completely out of the blue, without so much as an inkling that such a thing could happen, but also, precisely because it did happen in the street – ‘in a public place’ as people reverentially and stupidly say – it is deemed permissible to exhibit to the world the humiliating havoc wrought on you. In the smaller photo on the Internet, I would barely have recognized him, and then only because the text assured me that the dead or soon-to-be-dead man was Desvern. He, at any rate, would have been horrified to see or know himself to have been thus exposed, without a jacket or tie or even a shirt, or with his shirt open – you couldn’t quite tell, and where would his cufflinks have gone if his shirt had been removed? – full of tubes and surrounded by ambulance staff manhandling him, with his wounds on display, unconscious and lying sprawled in the middle of the street in a pool of blood, watched by passers-by and drivers alike. His wife would have been equally horrified by this image, if she had seen it, although she would probably have had neither the time nor the desire to read the newspapers the following day. While you weep for and watch over and bury the dead, all uncomprehending, and when you have children to tell as well, you’re in no fit state for anything else, the rest does not exist. But she might have seen it afterwards, perhaps prompted by the same curiosity I felt a week later, and have gone on to the Internet to find out what other people had known at the time, not just close friends and family, but strangers like me. What effect would that have had on her? Her more distant friends would have found out via the press, from that local Madrid newspaper or from a death notice, one or even several must have appeared in various papers, as usually happens when someone wealthy dies. That photo, above all else that photo – as well as the manner of his death, foul and absurd and, how can I put it, tinged with misfortune – was what allowed Beatriz to refer to him as ‘the poor man’. No one would ever have called him that while he was alive, not even one minute before he got out of his car in that charming, peaceful part of town, next to the small garden surrounding the college, where there are trees and a drinks kiosk with a few tables and chairs, and where I’ve often sat with my young nephews. No, not even a second before Vázquez Canella opened his butterfly knife; apparently, you have to be quite skilled to open one of those double-handled things, which are, I believe, not available to buy and may even be banned. And now, there were no two ways about it, he would be that for ever: poor, unfortunate Miguel Deverne. Poor man.





‘Yes, it was his birthday, can you believe that? The world normally allows its characters to enter and leave the stage in too disorderly a fashion for someone actually to be born and to die on the same date, with a gap of fifty years, exactly fifty years, in between. It doesn’t make any sense, precisely because it seems to. It could so easily not have happened like that. It could have been any other day or no day. Better if it had never happened at all.’

Several months passed before I saw Luisa Alday again, and a few more before I knew her name, that name, and before she spoke those words and many more. I didn’t know then if she talked continually about what had happened to her, with anyone prepared to listen, or if she had found in me a person with whom she felt comfortable opening up her heart, a stranger who would not report what she heard to any of her close friends or family and whose incipient friendship could be interrupted at any moment without explanation or consequences, and who was also compassionate, loyal and curious and whose face was both new to her and vaguely familiar and associated with happier times unclouded by sorrow, although I had always thought that she had barely noticed my presence, even less so than her husband.

Luisa reappeared towards the tail-end of summer, late into September, and she arrived at the usual time, accompanied by two women friends or work colleagues; the tables were still set out on the pavement and I watched her arrive and sit or, rather, drop on to a chair; I saw how one of her friends grabbed her forearm with mechanical solicitude, as if fearing that Luisa might lose her balance and taking her friend’s fragility for granted. Luisa looked terribly thin and not at all well, and had the kind of profound pallor that blurs all the features, as though not only her skin had lost its lustre and its colour, but also her hair, brows, lashes, eyes, teeth and lips, all dull and diffuse. She seemed to be there on temporary loan, I mean on loan to life. She no longer talked vivaciously as she used to with her husband, but with a false naturalness that betrayed a sense of obligation and indifference. It occurred to me that she might be on medication. They had sat down quite close to me, with only an empty table between us, which meant that I could hear scraps of their conversation, mostly what her friends said, rather than her, for she spoke only in muted tones. They were consulting or questioning her about the details of a memorial service, doubtless Desvern’s, although I couldn’t tell whether this would be a service held to commemorate the three-month anniversary of his death (which would, I calculated, be around that time) or if it was the first such service, which had not been held after the usual one- or two-week interval, as is still sometimes the custom, at least in Madrid. Perhaps she hadn’t felt strong enough so soon after the incident, or the gruesome circumstances had made such a service inadvisable – people can never resist poking their nose into such public ceremonies, or spreading rumours – and so, assuming the family liked to keep to the traditional way of doing things, it was still pending. Or perhaps some protective figure – a brother, for example, or her parents or a woman friend – had whisked her away from Madrid after the funeral, so that she could become accustomed to her husband’s absence from a distance, without the usual familiar, domestic scenes that only underlined his absence or made it all the more poignant: a pointless postponement of the horror awaiting her. The most I heard her say was: ‘Yes, that’s fine’ or ‘If you say so, you’re thinking more clearly than me’ or ‘Make sure the priest keeps it short, Miguel wasn’t too keen on priests, they made him a bit nervous’ or ‘No, not Schubert, he’s too obsessed with death, and we’ve had quite enough of that.’

I noticed that the two waiters at the café, after a moment’s discussion behind the bar, went over to her table together, stiffly rather than solemnly, and although they spoke shyly and very quietly, I heard them offer their brief condolences: ‘We just wanted to say how very sad we were to hear about your husband, he was always very kind to us,’ said one. And the other contributed the usual old, vacuous phrase: ‘Please accept our deepest sympathy. A real tragedy.’ She thanked them with her lacklustre smile and that was all, and it seemed perfectly understandable to me that she should prefer not to go into detail or to comment or to prolong the conversation. When I got up, I felt an impulse to follow their example, but did not dare to further interrupt her desultory conversation with her friends. Besides, time was getting on, and I didn’t want to arrive late at work, now that I had mended my ways and arrived punctually at my post every day.

Another month passed before I saw her again, and although the leaves were falling and the days were growing cooler, there were still those who preferred to breakfast al fresco – speedy breakfasts eaten by people in a hurry, people who would subsequently spend many hours shut up in an office and who didn’t linger long enough at the café to get cold; most, like me, ate in sleepy silence – and so the tables were still outside on the pavement. This time, Luisa Alday arrived with her two children and ordered them each an ice cream. I imagined – basing myself on a remote childhood memory – that she had taken them to the doctors for a blood test without letting them have any breakfast beforehand and was giving them a treat to make up for both the jab and for having had to go hungry, a treat that included allowing them to miss the first hour of school. The little girl was very attentive to her brother, who was about four years younger than her, and I got the impression that she was also, in her fashion, looking after her mother, as if they occasionally swapped roles, or, if they didn’t perhaps go quite that far, as if they both occasionally competed for the role of mother, in the few areas where such competition was possible. I mean that, while the little girl was eating her ice cream from a glass, wielding her spoon with childlike meticulousness, she was also making sure that Luisa did not let her coffee go cold and urging her to drink it. She kept one eye on her mother all the time, watching her every gesture and expression, and if she noticed that her mother was becoming too abstracted and sunk in her own thoughts, she would immediately speak to her, make some remark or ask a question or perhaps tell her something, as if to prevent her mother from becoming entirely lost, as if it made her sad to see her mother plunging back into memory. When a car drew up and double-parked outside the café, very faintly sounding its horn, and the children sprang to their feet, grabbed their satchels, quickly kissed their mother and walked, hand in hand, towards the car, knowing that it had come to pick them up, I had the feeling then that the daughter was more concerned about leaving Luisa than the other way around (she it was who fleetingly stroked her mother’s cheek as if counselling her to be good and not to get into any trouble, or wishing to leave her some small tactile consolation until they saw each other again). The car had probably come to pick them up and take them to school. I looked to see who was driving, and could not help a sudden quickening of the pulse, because although I know nothing about cars, which all look the same to me, this one I recognized instantly: it was the same car Deverne used to drive when he went off to work, leaving his wife to stay on for a while in the café either alone or with a friend. It was doubtless the same car he had driven and parked next to the college, the car he should never have got out of on that day, his birthday. There was a man at the wheel, and at first I thought it must be the chauffeur with whom Deverne occasionally alternated as driver and who could have replaced him on that fateful day, could have died instead of him, and who was perhaps the person the gorrilla actually wanted to kill, the intended murder victim, and who had, therefore, narrowly escaped death – by pure chance, who knows, perhaps he had a doctor’s appointment that day. If he was the chauffeur, he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I couldn’t quite see him, half-concealed as he was by the other cars parked alongside the pavement; nevertheless, I thought he looked rather attractive. He didn’t resemble Miguel Desvern, but they had certain characteristics in common or were at least not complete opposites; it was easy to see how a mistake could be made, especially by someone mentally disturbed. From her table, Luisa waved goodbye, or waved hello and goodbye, from the moment he arrived until he left. Yes, she waved three or four times, slightly absurdly, while the car was parked. She repeated the gesture with an absorbed look in her eyes, eyes that saw perhaps only a ghost. Or was she only waving goodbye to her children? I didn’t see if the driver waved back or not.





That was when I decided to go over to her. The children had left in what had been their father’s car, and she was alone, with no one for company, no work colleague or fellow mother from school or friend. She was using the long, sticky spoon that her son had left in his glass to absent-mindedly stir what remained of his ice cream, as if she were intent on instantly reducing it to liquid, thus accelerating its inevitable fate. ‘How many small eternities will she experience in which she will struggle to make time move on,’ I thought, ‘if such a thing is possible, which I doubt. You wait for time to pass during the temporary or indefinite absence of the other – of husband, of lover – as well as during an absence which is not yet definitive, but that bears all the marks of being so, as our instinct keeps whispering to us, and to whose voice we say: “Be quiet, be quiet, keep silent, I don’t yet want to hear you, I’m still not strong enough, I’m not ready.” When you have been abandoned, you can fantasize about a return, you can imagine that the abandoner will suddenly see the light and come back to share your pillow, even if you know he has already replaced you and is involved with another woman, with another story, and that he will only remember you if that new relationship suddenly turns sour, or if you insist and make your presence felt against his will and try to pester him or win him round or force him to feel sorry for you or take your revenge by giving him a sense that he’ll never be entirely free of you and that you don’t intend to be a slowly fading memory but an immovable shadow that will stalk and haunt him for ever; making his life impossible and, ultimately, making him hate you. On the other hand, you cannot fantasize about a dead man, unless you have lost your mind, and there are those who choose to do that, even if only temporarily, those who consent to do so while they manage to convince themselves that what happened really happened, the improbable and the impossible, the thing that did not even have a place in the calculation of probabilities by which we live in order to get up each morning without a sinister, leaden cloud urging us to close our eyes again, thinking: “What’s the point if we’re all doomed anyway? It’s all pointless. Whatever we do, we’ll only be waiting, like dead men on leave, as someone once said.” I don’t believe, though, that Luisa has lost her mind, but that’s just a feeling, I don’t know her. And if she hasn’t, then what is she waiting for, how does she spend the hours, the days, the weeks and now months, to what purpose does she drive time forwards or flee from it and withdraw, and how, at this very moment, is she managing to push it away from her? She doesn’t know that I am about to come over and speak to her, as the waiters did the last time I saw her here, not that I’ve ever seen her anywhere else. She doesn’t know that I’m going to lend her a hand and erase a couple of minutes for her with my conventional words of commiseration, perhaps three or four minutes at most if she says anything beyond “Thank you”. She’ll still be left with hundreds more until sleep comes to her aid and clouds her ever-counting consciousness, because it’s her consciousness that is always counting: one, two, three and four; five, six and seven and eight and so on ceaselessly and indefinitely until she falls asleep.’

‘Forgive the intrusion,’ I said, standing by her table; she did not get up at once. ‘You don’t know me, but my name’s María Dolz. I’ve been having breakfast here at the same time as you and your husband for years now. And I just wanted to say how terribly sad I am about what happened, what he went through and what you must have been going through ever since. I read about it in the newspaper, somewhat belatedly, after not seeing you for several mornings. I only ever knew you by sight, but you obviously got on so well and I always thought you made such a lovely couple. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

I realized that with my penultimate sentence, I had killed her off as well, by using the past tense to refer to them both and not just to her late husband. I tried to think of some way to remedy this, but couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t either clumsy or unnecessarily complicated. I imagined, though, that she would have understood what I meant, that I had enjoyed seeing the two of them as a couple, and as such they no longer existed. Then I thought that perhaps I had highlighted something she was trying to hold in suspense or confine to some kind of limbo, because it would be impossible for her to forget or deny it to herself: that they were not two people any more and that she was no longer part of a couple. I was about to add: ‘That’s all I wanted to say, I won’t delay you any further,’ then turn and leave, when Luisa Alday stood up, smiling – it was a broad smile that she made no attempt to repress, she was incapable of deceit or malice, she could even be ingenuous – and placed one hand affectionately on my shoulder and said:

‘Yes, of course, we know you by sight as well.’ She unhesitatingly addressed me as tú despite my more formal approach, well, we were the same age more or less, or she was possibly just a couple of years older; she spoke in the plural and in the present tense, as if she had not yet become used to being singular or perhaps considered herself to have already crossed over to the other side, to be as dead as her husband and therefore an inhabitant of the same dimension or territory: as if she hadn’t yet separated from him and saw no reason to give up that ‘we’ to which she had been accustomed for nearly a decade and which she wasn’t going to abandon after a mere three months. However, she did then go on to use the imperfect tense, perhaps because the verb demanded it: ‘We used to call you the Prudent Young Woman. You see, we even gave you a name. Thank you so much for your kind words. Won’t you sit down?’ And she indicated one of the chairs that had been occupied by her children, still keeping her hand on my shoulder, and now I had a sense that I was a support for her or a handle to hold on to. I was sure that, had I moved even slightly closer, she would, quite naturally, have embraced me. She looked fragile, like a hesitant novice ghost, who is not yet fully convinced that she is one.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was late. I wanted to ask her about that nickname, I felt surprised and slightly flattered. They had noticed me, had spoken about me and given me a name. I smiled unwittingly, we both smiled with a kind of tentative happiness, that of two people recognizing each other in the very saddest of circumstances.

‘The Prudent Young Woman,’ I repeated.

‘Yes, that’s how we see you.’ She returned again to the present tense, as if Deverne were at home and still alive or as if she could separate herself from him only in some respects. ‘You don’t mind, I hope. Please, sit down.’

‘Why should I mind? I had my own private name for you too.’ I was still using the formal usted, not because I didn’t want to address her as tú, but because, having included him in that plural ‘you’, I didn’t dare address her husband in such familiar terms, just as one cannot refer to a stranger who has died by his first name. At least one shouldn’t, but nowadays no one worries about such niceties, everyone is overfamiliar. ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t stop now, I have to go to work.’ I glanced at my watch again, either mechanically or simply to corroborate that I was in a hurry, because I knew perfectly well what time it was.

‘Of course. If you like, we can meet later on. Come to our house. What time do you leave work? What do you do, by the way? And what was the name that you gave us?’ She still had her hand on my shoulder, she wasn’t demanding, but rather pleading. A superficial plea, born of the moment. If I declined, come the evening, she would probably have forgotten all about our encounter.

I didn’t answer her penultimate question – there wasn’t time – still less her last one, because telling her that I had thought of them as the Perfect Couple could only have added to her pain and sorrow, after all, she was about to be left alone again, as soon as I left. But I said, yes, I would drop by on my way home from work, if that suited her, at around half past six or seven. I asked for her address and she told me, it was quite near by. I said goodbye and briefly placed my hand on hers, the hand resting on my shoulder, and I took the opportunity to squeeze that hand gently before removing it, again very gently, and she seemed grateful for that contact. I was just about to cross the road, when I realized I had forgotten something and had to go back.

‘How silly of me to forget,’ I said. ‘I don’t know your name.’

And it was only then that I found out, for her name had not appeared in any newspaper, and I hadn’t seen any of the death notices.

‘Luisa Alday,’ she answered. ‘Luisa Desvern,’ she added, correcting herself. In Spain, a woman doesn’t lose her maiden name when she gets married, and I wondered if she had decided to call herself that now as an act of loyalty or homage. ‘No, Luisa Alday,’ she said, correcting herself again. That’s probably how she had always thought of herself. ‘It’s a good job you remembered, because Miguel’s name doesn’t appear on the door, only mine.’ She paused for a moment, then added: ‘He did that as a precautionary measure, because his name has so many links with business. Much good it did him.’





‘The strangest thing is that it’s changed the way I think,’ she said to me that same evening or, rather, when night had already fallen in her living room. Luisa was on the sofa and I was seated in a nearby armchair, I had accepted her offer of a glass of port, which had been her choice of drink; she took frequent small sips and kept pouring herself a little more and was, if I’m not mistaken, already on her third glass; she had a naturally elegant way of crossing her legs, right leg over left, then left over right, she was wearing a skirt that day, and shiny, black, low-vamp shoes with small but very dainty heels, which made her look rather like an American college girl; in contrast, the soles of her shoes were almost white, as if she hadn’t yet worn them out in the street; her children or one of them would occasionally come in to tell her something or to ask a question or settle an argument, they were watching television in the next room, which was like an extension of the living room, with no separating door; Luisa had explained to me that there was another TV in the little girl’s bedroom, but that she preferred to have the children close by, where she could hear them, in case anything happened or they quarrelled, as well as for the company, and so she obliged them to stay near her, if not in sight at least within earshot; they didn’t disturb her concentration because she couldn’t concentrate on anything anyway, and had given up hope of ever doing so again, whether reading a book or watching a film all the way through or preparing a class in anything more than a haphazard fashion or in the taxi on her way to the university, and she could listen to music only now and again, short pieces or songs or a single movement from a sonata, anything longer simply wearied and irritated her; she also followed the occasional TV series, because the episodes were usually short, and she bought them on DVD now so that she could rewind if she lost track of the plot, she found it so hard to pay attention, her mind wandering off to other places, or, rather, always to the same one, to Miguel, to the last time she had seen him alive, which was also the last time I had seen him, to the peaceful little garden next to the college off Paseo de la Castellana, along with the man who had stabbed and stabbed and stabbed him with one of those apparently illegal butterfly knives. ‘I don’t know, it’s as though I had a different mind entirely, I’m continually thinking things that would never have occurred to me before,’ she said with genuine bewilderment, her eyes very wide, as she scratched one knee with the tips of her fingers as if she had an itch, although it was probably just her general state of unease. ‘It’s as though I’ve become a different person since then, or a different sort of person, with an unfamiliar, alien mentality, someone given to making strange connections and being frightened by them. I hear a siren from an ambulance or a police car or a fire engine, and I wonder who’s dying or being burned or perhaps choking to death, and then I’m assailed by the dreadful idea of all the people who would have heard the siren on the police car that arrived to arrest the gorrilla or of the ambulance that went to help Miguel in the street and take him to hospital, they would have listened to it distractedly or even irritably, thinking, “Why do they have to make such a racket?” – you know the kind of thing, it’s what we all say – “Why so loud, it can’t be that urgent.” We almost never ask ourselves what very real misfortune they’re rushing to, it’s just another familiar city sound, a sound with no specific content, a mere nuisance, empty of meaning. Before, when there weren’t so many of them and they didn’t make so much noise, we never suspected the drivers of turning on their sirens for no reason, just so that they could drive faster and make the other cars get out of the way, people used to stand on their balcony to see what was going on and even assumed that there would be a report in the next day’s newspaper. No one rushes out on to their balcony now, we all just wait for the siren to go away and remove from our auditory field the ill or injured or wounded or perhaps dying person, so that they’ll stop bothering us and stop setting our nerves on edge. I don’t actually stand on the balcony either, but during the weeks immediately following Miguel’s death, I couldn’t resist rushing over there or going to the window and trying to spot the police car or ambulance and follow it with my eyes for as long as I could, but you can’t usually see them from the house, only hear them, and so, after a while, I gave up, and yet still, every time I hear a siren, I stop what I’m doing and look up and listen until it’s gone; I listen to it as if it were someone moaning or pleading with me, as if each siren were saying: “Please, I’m a gravely wounded man, fighting for my life, and it’s not my fault, I haven’t done anything to make someone stab me like this, I just got out of my car as I have on many other days and suddenly felt a sharp pain in my back, then another and another and another in other parts of my body, I don’t even know how many, and then I realized that I was bleeding profusely and was going to die even though I wasn’t ready to and even though I’d done nothing to deserve it. Let me through, I beg you, you can’t be in anywhere near as much of a hurry as me, and if there is a chance I can be saved, I have to get to the hospital quickly. Today’s my birthday, and my wife has no idea what’s happened, she’s sitting in a restaurant waiting to celebrate, she’s probably bought me a gift, a surprise, don’t let her find me dead.”’

Luisa stopped and took another sip of port, it was a mechanical gesture really, because there was only a tiny drop left in her glass. Her eyes no longer had an absent look, rather, they were very bright and alert, as if her imaginings, far from distracting her, had given her a momentary burst of energy, made her feel more part of the real world, even if that real world existed only in the past. I hardly knew her, but my feeling was that she found her present life so bewildering that she felt much more vulnerable and powerless now than when she placed herself back in the past, as she had done just now, even in that most painful and final of moments. Her brown, almond-shaped eyes looked lovely lit up like that; she had one eye visibly larger than the other, but that didn’t spoil her looks in the least, her eyes were filled with a new intensity and vitality when she put herself in the shoes of the dying Desvern. Even in the midst of her suffering, she was still almost pretty, especially when she was happy, as she had been on the mornings when I used to see her at the café.

‘But he couldn’t possibly have thought any of that, if what they said in the newspapers was right,’ I pointed out. I didn’t know what else to say or perhaps there was no need to say anything, but it seemed wrong to stay silent.

‘No, of course he couldn’t,’ she said quickly and slightly defiantly. ‘He couldn’t have thought it while they were taking him to the hospital, because he was unconscious by then and never regained consciousness. Perhaps he thought something like that before, though, while he was being stabbed. I can’t stop imagining that moment, those seconds, from the time the attack began until he stopped trying to defend himself and became unaware of anything, until he lost consciousness and felt nothing, neither despair nor pain nor …’ She fumbled briefly for what else he might have felt before he collapsed, half-dead. ‘Or farewell. I had never thought anyone else’s thoughts before, never wondered what another person might be thinking, not even him, it’s not my style, I lack imagination, I don’t have that kind of mind. And yet now I do it almost all the time. Like I say, it’s changed my way of thinking, and it’s as if I don’t recognize myself any more; or, rather, it seems to me sometimes that I never knew myself in my previous life, and that Miguel didn’t know me either: he couldn’t have, it would have been beyond him, isn’t that strange? If the real me is this woman constantly making all these connections and associations, things that a few months ago would have seemed to me completely disparate and unrelated; if I am the person I’ve been since his death, that means that for him I was always someone else, and had he lived, I would have continued to be the person I’m not, indefinitely. Do you understand what I mean?’ she added, realizing that what she was saying was pretty abstruse.

It was almost like a mental tongue-twister to me, but I did more or less understand. I thought: ‘This woman is in a very bad way indeed, and who can blame her? Her grief must be immense, and she must spend all day and all night going over and over what happened, imagining her husband’s final conscious moments, wondering what he could have been thinking, when he would probably have had quite enough to do trying to avoid the first knife-thrusts and get away, get free, he probably never gave her so much as a thought, he would have been focused entirely on what he foresaw might be his death and on doing all he could to avoid it, and if anything else crossed his mind it would have been merely his sense of infinite astonishment, incredulity and incomprehension, what’s going on here, how is this possible, what is this man doing and why is he stabbing me, why has he chosen me out of millions and who has he mistaken me for, doesn’t he realize that I am not the cause of his ills, and how ridiculous, how awful, how stupid to die like this, because of someone else’s mistake or obsession, to die violently and at the hands of a stranger or of someone so secondary in my life that I had barely noticed him until forced to by his intemperance and his disruptive behaviour, by the fact that he increasingly made himself a nuisance and one day even attacked Pablo, to die at the hands of a man who is of even less importance to me than the pharmacist on the corner or the waiter at the café where I have breakfast, someone purely anecdotal, insignificant, as if I suddenly found myself being attacked by the Prudent Young Woman who is also there at the café every morning and with whom I have never exchanged a word, people who are merely vague extras or marginal presences, who inhabit a corner or lurk in the obscure background of the painting and whom we don’t even miss if they disappear, or whose absence we don’t notice, this can’t be happening because it’s just too absurd, a stroke of inconceivably bad luck, I won’t even have a chance to tell someone about it, which is the one thing that very slightly makes up for the worst misfortunes, you never know what or who will don the disguise or shape of your unique and individual death, which is always unique even if you depart this world at the same time as many others in some massive catastrophe, but there are usually some warning signs, an inherited disease, an epidemic, a car accident, a plane crash, some bodily organ wearing out, a terrorist attack, a landslide, a derailment, a heart attack, a fire, a violent raid on your house at night, or straying into a dangerous area as soon as you’ve arrived in an, as yet, unexplored city, I’ve found myself in just such places on my travels, especially when I was younger and travelled a lot and took more risks, something could easily have happened to me through my own imprudence or ignorance in Caracas and Buenos Aires, and in Mexico, in New York and in Moscow and in Hamburg and even in Madrid itself, but not right here, yes, perhaps in one of Madrid’s more troubled, downtrodden, darker streets, but not in this bright, quiet, well-heeled area which is more or less my home patch, and which I know like the back of my hand, not while getting out of my car as I have on so many other occasions, why today and not yesterday or tomorrow, why today and why me, it could easily have happened to someone else, even to Pablo, who had already had a far more serious altercation with this man, if only he had made a formal complaint to the police when the brute punched him, I was the one who advised him to drop the matter, what a fool, I felt sorry for this man whose name I don’t even know, but that would have got rid of him, and now that I think of it, I had my warning yesterday, when he shouted at me, and I just shrugged it off and put it out of my mind, I should have been afraid and have acted more cautiously and not entered his territory again for several days or at least until I had ceased to be a target, I shouldn’t have put myself within range of this furious madman who has got it into his head to stick his knife into me again and again, and the knife is sure to be filthy, although that’s hardly important now, it won’t be an infection that carries me off, the point plunging into my body and the blade turning inside are killing me far more quickly, he’s so close to me and he stinks, he can’t have washed in ages, he doesn’t have anywhere to wash, always stuck in his abandoned car, I don’t want to die with that stench in my nostrils, but we don’t get a choice, why does that have to be the last thing to surround me before I say goodbye, that and the now overwhelming smell of the blood, a metallic smell from childhood, which is when one tends to bleed most, it’s my blood, it can’t be anyone else’s, not this madman’s blood, I haven’t wounded him, he’s very strong and very overwrought and there’s no way I could have fought him off, I have no knife to stick in him, whereas he has opened and pierced my skin, my flesh, and my life is flowing out through those wounds, I’m slowly bleeding to death, so many wounds, there’s nothing I can do, so many, he’s done for me.’ And then I, too, thought: ‘But he couldn’t have thought any of that. Or perhaps he could, in very concentrated form.’





‘I’m in no position to give advice to anyone,’ I said to Luisa, ending my prolonged silence, ‘but it seems to me that you really shouldn’t think so much about what went through his head during those moments. After all, they were very brief moments and, in the context of his whole life, almost non-existent; perhaps he didn’t have time to think anything. It doesn’t make sense that, for you, on the other hand, they should have lasted all these months and will perhaps last still longer, what do you gain from that? What does he gain? Nothing. However often you go over and over it in your head, there’s no way you could have accompanied him during those moments or died with him or taken his place or saved him. You weren’t there, you knew nothing about it, and however hard you try, you can’t change that.’ – I realized that I was the one who had spent most time over those borrowed thoughts, albeit incited or infected by her; it’s very risky imagining yourself into someone else’s mind, it’s sometimes hard to leave, I suppose that’s why so few people do it and why almost everyone avoids it, preferring to say: ‘That’s not happening to me, I’m not having to live through what he’s living through, and why on earth should I take on his sufferings? He’s the one having a rough time of it, so to each his own.’ – ‘Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s over, it no longer is and no longer counts. He’s no longer thinking those thoughts and it’s no longer happening.’

Luisa refilled her glass – they were very small glasses – and put her hands to her cheeks, a gesture that was part thoughtful, part pained. She had long, strong hands, adorned only by her wedding ring. With her elbows resting on her thighs, she seemed to shrink or diminish. She spoke as if to herself, as though thinking out loud.

‘Yes, that’s what most people believe. That what has ceased to happen is not as bad as what is happening, and that we should find relief in that cessation. That what has happened should hurt us less than what is happening, or that things are somehow more bearable when they’re over, however horrible they might have been. But that’s like believing that it’s less serious for someone to be dead than dying, which doesn’t really make much sense, does it? The most painful and irremediable thing is that the person has died; and the fact that the death is over and done with doesn’t mean that the person didn’t experience it. How can one possibly not think about it, if that was the last thing the dead person shared with us, with those of us who are still alive? What came after that moment is beyond our grasp, but, on the other hand, when it took place, we were all still here, in the same dimension, him and us, breathing the same air. We shared the same time and the same world. Am I making any sense?’ She paused and lit a cigarette, her first; the pack of cigarettes had been beside her since the start of our conversation, but she hadn’t lit one until then, as though she had lost the habit of smoking, perhaps she had given up for a while and had now gone back to it or maybe only half-heartedly: she bought them, but tried to avoid them. ‘Besides, nothing ends entirely, I mean, think of dreams; the dead appear in them alive and sometimes the living die in them. I often dream about that final moment, and then I really am present, I really am there, I really do know what he’s feeling, I’m in the car with him and we both get out, and I warn him because I know what’s going to happen and even then he can’t escape. Well, that’s what dreams are like, simultaneously confusing and precise. I shake them off as soon as I wake up, and in a matter of minutes they’re gone, I forget the details; but I immediately realize that the fact remains, the fact that it’s true, that it happened, that Miguel is dead and was killed in a very similar way to what happened in my dream, however quickly the dream vanished.’ She stopped and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette, as if she found it odd to be holding it between her fingers. ‘Do you know what one of the worst things is? Not being able to get angry or to blame anyone. Not being able to hate anyone even though Miguel suffered a violent death, even though he was murdered in the street. It’s not as if he’d been murdered for a reason, because someone was after him and knew who he was, because someone saw him as an obstacle and wanted revenge or whatever, or at least intended to rob him. If he’d been a victim of ETA, I could join with the families of other victims and together we could hate the terrorists or even hate all Basques, and the more you can share hatred, share it out, the better, don’t you agree? The more the merrier. I remember that when I was very young, a boyfriend of mine left me for a girl from the Canary Islands. I not only hated her, I hated all Canary Islanders. Ridiculous, I know, an obsession, if you like. If they showed a match on TV in which Tenerife or Las Palmas were playing, I would hope they would lose regardless of who their opponents were, not that I particularly care about football and even if I wasn’t the one watching it, but my father and my brother. If there was one of those idiotic beauty contests on, I would always hope that the girls from the Canaries didn’t win, and would throw a tantrum if they did, which was often the case, because they tend to be very pretty.’ And she laughed gaily at herself, she couldn’t help it. If something amused her, it amused her, even in the midst of her grief. ‘I even vowed never to read Galdós again; however much of a denizen of Madrid he became, he was still born in the Canaries, and so I imposed a complete ban on him, which lasted for ages.’ And she laughed again, and her laughter was so contagious that I laughed too at such an inquisitorial idea. ‘Such reactions are childish and irrational, I know, but they help momentarily by varying your mood. Anyway, I’m not young any more and I don’t even have the option of spending part of the day feeling furious, instead of feeling sad all the time.’

‘What about the man who killed Miguel?’ I asked. ‘Can’t you hate him or hate all down-and-outs?’

‘No,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation, as if she had already considered the question. ‘I don’t want to know anything more about the man, I understand he refused to make a statement, and that, from the start, he opted to remain silent, but it’s obvious that he made a mistake and is not right in the head. Apparently, two of his daughters are prostitutes, and he decided that Miguel and Pablo, the chauffeur, were in some way responsible for that. How stupid. He killed Miguel just as he might have killed Pablo or anyone else from the area whom he happened to have a grudge against. I suppose he needed enemies too, someone to blame for his misfortune. It’s what everyone does: the working classes, the middle and upper classes and the socially mobile: we just can’t accept that sometimes things happen for which no one is to blame, or that there is such a thing as bad luck, or that people go off the rails, lose their way, and bring unhappiness and ruin upon themselves.’ – ‘You yourself have shaped your own fate,’ I thought, quoting Cervantes, whose words, it’s true, are no longer heeded. – ‘No, I can’t get angry with the person who killed him like that for no reason, with the person who, if you like, chose him entirely by chance; that’s the worst thing; with someone who’s mad, mentally unhinged, someone who felt no animus against him personally and didn’t even know his name, who simply saw him as the embodiment of his misfortune or the cause of his own painful situation. Well, I’ve no idea what he saw, of course, I’m not inside his head and I don’t want to be. Sometimes my brother tries to talk to me about it, as does the lawyer, or Javier, one of Miguel’s best friends, but I stop them and tell them that I don’t want to hear their more or less hypothetical explanations or their half-baked theories, because what happened was so serious that the reason why it happened really doesn’t matter to me, especially when the reason is utterly incomprehensible and exists only inside that sick, crazed mind into which I prefer not to venture.’ Luisa spoke well, using a wide vocabulary, words like ‘animus’ and ‘venture’ that crop up rarely in general conversation; after all, she was, as she had told me, a university lecturer in English, and, as a language teacher, she would, inevitably, have to read and translate a lot. ‘To exaggerate slightly, that man has the same value to me as a bit of plaster cornice that breaks off and falls on your head just as you’re walking by underneath; you could so easily not have passed by at that particular moment; a minute earlier and you would have known nothing about it. Or like a stray bullet from a hunting party, fired by some inexperienced hunter or by a fool; you could so easily not have gone into the countryside that day. Or like an earthquake you get caught up in while on a trip abroad; you could so easily not have gone to that place. No, hating him serves no purpose, it doesn’t console or give me strength, I take no comfort from waiting for him to be sentenced or hoping that he rots in prison. Not that I feel sorry for him either, of course; I can’t. He’s a matter of complete indifference to me, because nothing and no one will bring Miguel back. I imagine he’ll be sent to some psychiatric hospital, if such things still exist, I don’t know what they do now with the mentally ill who commit violent crimes. I suppose they put them out of circulation because they constitute a danger to society and so as to prevent them committing a similar crime again. But I don’t seek his punishment, that would be as stupid as the kind of thing armies used to do – in more naive times – arresting and even executing a horse that had thrown an officer and brought about his death. Nor can I take it out on beggars and homeless people in general, although I do feel afraid of them now. When I see one, I tend to move away or cross the road, a perfectly justifiable reflex action that will stay with me for ever. But that’s different. What I can’t do is actively devote myself to hating them, as I could hate a group of rival businessmen, say, who had hired a hit man to kill him, apparently that’s becoming increasingly common, even in Spain, flying in a murderer from another country, a Colombian, a Serbian, a Mexican, to get rid of an overly successful competitor who’s cramping their style, in other words, a simple business arrangement. They bring in a hit man, he does his job, they pay him and he leaves, all in the space of one or two days, and the police never find these killers, they’re discreet and professional, entirely neutral, leaving no trace, and by the time the body is found, they’re already at the airport or on the return flight home. There’s rarely any way of proving anything, still less who hired the killer, who instigated the murder or gave the order. If something like that had happened, I couldn’t even hate that abstract hit man very much, he just drew the short straw, and it could have been someone else, whoever happened to be free at the time; he wouldn’t have known Miguel or had anything against him personally. But I could hate the instigators, that would give me the chance to suspect people right, left and centre, a competitor or someone who felt resentful or hard done by, because every businessman creates victims either accidentally or deliberately, even among close colleagues, as I read again the other day in Covarrubias.’ Luisa saw my look of vague incomprehension. ‘Don’t you know it? Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. It was the first Spanish dictionary, written in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias.’ She got to her feet, picked up a fat green book from a nearby table, and began leafing through it. ‘I had to look up the word “envidia” to compare it with the English definition of “envy”, and this is how the entry ends.’ And she read out loud to me. ‘“Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.” And that’s obviously a very old idea, because look what it goes on to say: “This is a commonplace, written about by many; but since it is not my intention to dig over ground others have already dug, I have nothing to add.”’ And then she closed the book and sat down again, with the book on her lap; I noticed that various pages were marked by bits of paper. ‘My mind would have something else to occupy it then, rather than just grief and longing. Because I miss him all the time, you see. I miss him when I wake up and when I go to bed and when I dream and throughout the whole of the intervening day, it’s as if I carried him with me all the time, as if he were part of my body.’ She looked at her arms, as though her husband’s head were resting on them. ‘People say: “Concentrate on the good memories and not on the final one, think about how much you loved each other, think about all the wonderful times you enjoyed that others never have.” They mean well, but they don’t understand that all my memories are now soiled by that sad and bloody ending. Each time I recall something good, that final image rises up before me, the image of his cruel, stupid, gratuitous death, which could so easily have been avoided. Yes, that’s what I find hardest to bear, the sheer stupidity of it and the lack of someone to blame. And so every good memory grows murky and turns bad. I don’t really have any good memories left. They all seem false to me. They’ve all been contaminated.’