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feel about a few weeks in San Sebastián this summer?”
     
    “I suppose.” María was dubious. “If you’re given permission to travel.”
     
    The professor nodded. “It would be simple to pick up Meyer there, if he can slip across the border.”
     
    “I love the seashore.” Elena smiled, pleased above all that her father was once again planning things.
     
    The professor shook his head. “I meant your mother and I. There’s no need for you to get involved, Elenita.”
     
    Elena was annoyed. I’m already involved, she thought, and then reproached herself for being ungrateful for her father’s intermittent efforts to protect her.
     
    The professor continued reading, unaware of her mutinous thoughts. “Well,” he asked, as he reached the end of the much worked-over letter, “what do you think?”
     
    “It’s wonderful, Guillermo,” his wife said sincerely. “No one who wasn’t as obsessed with Homer as you are could understand it.”
     
    “I wonder.” Elena was hesitant, but the old urge to critique the professor’s work was strong.
     
    “Yes?” Her father looked at her anxiously, but it was with his old anxiety about his writing, and she was not upset by it.
     
    “Is it too obscure?” the young woman said slowly. “You don’t want something that shouts it’s a code. Because a coded message is sure to attract attention. Because it’s coded, you know.”
     
    The professor nodded. “I know. That’s why I didn’t write in Greek. It would have been simpler, really.”
     
    “Censors aren’t known for their subtlety.” María spoke comfortingly. “I think it’s fine, Guillermo. They’ll probably just make some comment about absent-minded professors, and pass it along.”
     
    The professor looked relieved. “Maybe. What do you think I should change, Elena?”
     
    His daughter shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not one censor in a hundred has studied the classics. So I’m sure it’s fine.”
     
    “Probably not one in a thousand.” The professor spoke with a trace of bitterness. “I’ll go and make a clean copy then.”
     
    Elena nodded, trying not to wince at this break in the routine. In the old days, her father had always rushed out of the house without the time to make fair copies. His speeches tended to be crosshatched and doodled-over affairs, with arrows leading from paragraph to paragraph. But at least her father was moving with some purpose, even if it was only to recopy a letter.
     
    Elena had come to dread the end of breakfast since her return to Salamanca. During her childhood, breakfast had been a hurried affair; her father had been perpetually late for his lectures, and she and her brother had been rushing to school. In Madrid, before the incident that had cost her her job as a teacher and forced her to return home, she had stopped eating breakfast entirely, and had simply prepared for work first thing in the morning. But now breakfast had no natural end. It was usually Señora de Fernández who finally stood, after it was no longer possible to pretend to linger over coffee, and cleared the cups away with a final air. Then Elena would cast an apologetic look at her father, and follow her mother out of the room, to help her with the housework that both of them hated. Guillermo Fernández would stare at his hands, or else stand and mumble something about going to his study. He seldom left the house in the mornings anymore. He had few errands to run, and aimless walks tended to attract unwanted shadows with three-cornered hats and rifles. On good days the professor had private tutoring to look forward to in the afternoons, and he would spend hours carefully planning how to pound basic Latin into the head of a wealthy and unwilling adolescent. On days when there was no tutoring he did not leave the house at all.
     
    Elena hated the drudgery of cleaning and mending. But she hated watching her father’s idleness even more. She knew that her mother sympathized