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I don't really know, I hardly know anything about the history of Cuba, despite being a quarter Cuban), I felt inclined neither to rest nor to ignore the murmur coming from the room next door, as I had before, for example, when I heard the more general murmur of people walking the city streets outside below my balcony, on the contrary, I realized that, without meaning to be, I was in fact extremely alert and, as they say, with my ears pricked, and that if I was to hear anything I required absolute silence, with no clinking of glasses or rustling of sheets or the sound of my own footsteps coming and going between the room and the bathroom, nor the sound of running water from the tap. Nor, of course, Luisa's enfeebled voice, even though she wasn't saying very much or attempting to hold a proper conversation with me. There's nothing worse than trying to listen to two things at once, two voices; there's nothing worse than trying to understand when two or more people all talk at once, without waiting their turn. That's why I wanted Luisa to go back to sleep, not only for her own good and so that she would get better, but above all so that I could apply all my interpretative faculties and experience to listening to what Miriam and the left-handed man would be saying to each other in that low murmur.
    The first words I could make out clearly were spoken in a tone of exasperation, like someone repeating for the nth time something that the person who's heard it all before neither believes nor understands nor accepts. It was a mitigated exasperation, habitual, and that was why the voice, the man's voice, wasn't a shout but a whisper.
    "I tell you my wife is dying."
    Miriam responded at once, infected by the exasperation in which both, I suddenly realized, must be permanently immersed, at least when they were together: her words and the man's first sentence formed a group, which I suddenly heard with scarcely any effort at all.
    "But she never die. She been dyin' for a year now and still she never die. Why you don't just kill her? You got to get me out of here."
    There was a silence and I didn't know whether it was because he was saying nothing or because he'd dropped his voice still further in order to reply to Miriam's plea, which was, perhaps, not her habitual one.
    "What do you want me to do, smother her with a pillow? I can't do any more than I'm already doing, which is quite enough. I'm letting her die. I'm doing nothing to help her. I'm pushing her towards death. I don't always give her the drugs the doctor prescribes for her, I ignore her, I don't treat her with any affection, I make her suffer, I feed her suspicions, I take away from her the little will to live that remains to her. Isn't that enough? There's no point in making a wrong move now. Even if I divorced her, things would drag on for at least a year and, on the other hand, she could die at any moment. She might be dead now. Do you realize that the phone could ring this very minute to give me the news?" The man paused and added in a different tone of voice, as if he were saying it incredulously, half smiling despite himself: "She's probably dead already. Don't be a fool. Don't be so impatient."
    The woman had a Caribbean accent, presumably Cuban, although my grandmother remains my only real reference point (the Cubans are not assiduous visitors to international congresses) and she'd left Cuba in 1898 at a very early age along with the rest of her family and, according to what she said when she spoke of her childhood, there was a tremendous variety of accents on the island; she, for example, could distinguish someone from the province of Oriente, someone from Havana and someone from Matanzas. The man, on the other hand, had the same accent as me, a Spaniard from Spain or rather from Madrid, neutral, correct, like the accent they used to use for dubbing films, the accent I still have. Their conversation was almost routine, it probably only varied in the details, Miriam and