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gentle, but classy perfume or lotion.
    “It’s lovely here,” she said.
    “Yes,” I answered, walking towards the brown entrance to the café. It was nearly full, but miraculously three young people got up from a window table and I led Clara Hoffmann over, guiding her lightly by the arm. The tables were white marble. As in all old Spanish cafés, the noise level was high. Serrano hams hung from the ceiling over the bar, where two bartenders were preparing coffee, tapas and drinks for the waiters in their short white jackets and black trousers, who bellowed out their orders. The walls were covered with black and white photographs of old bullfighters such as Manolete and film and stage actors from the 1940s and 50s. A huge bull’s head dominated one of the walls. The clientele was mixed, although mostly young people. The lighting was white and glaring, but the people and the smells of oil and garlic swathed the premises in a pleasantly mellow atmosphere.
    “It’s lovely here,” Clara Hoffmann said again. “Well-lit and clean.”
    I laughed.
    “That’s nearly the title of a short story written by one of its very famous patrons.”
    “Who?”
    “Hemingway. ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’,” I answered.
    “Well, where hasn’t he been?” she said, taking a cigarette from her bag, which was one of those flat practical ones, the size of a sheet of A4.
    “You’re not a fan?” I said.
    “I don’t think I’ve read anything by him. Not since my senior school days at least. He’s sort of a bit passé, isn’t he?”
    I lit her cigarette.
    “Perhaps you don’t agree?” she said. Her eyes were almost grey. They held mine, you couldn’t look away. She seemed confident, slightly cool and remote.
    “I’m a big fan,” I said, pointing down at our table and out of the window where throngs of pedestrians were on their way out for drinks and tapas before their late evening meal, which many didn’t eat until 11 p.m. “It’s even said that this was his regular table. He sat and wrote here while the fascists bombed Madrid during the Civil War. He usually stayed at your hotel when he was in town, along with the famous bullfighters of the time. Until some years ago, quite a few of the waiters here had known him and remembered him and had carried him home when he’d got too drunk to walk under his own steam.”
    She looked around.
    “It’s nice here,” she said.
    “But it’s not Hemingway you want to talk about, Ms Hoffmann,” I said.
    “Please, let’s not be formal.”
    “May I get you a drink? A glass of wine?”
    “Yes, thank you,” she said, exhaling her cigarette smoke.
    Felipe came over and we chatted about this and that. He had been a waiter at the Alemana since my young days. He had been a promising young bullfighter when he was gored and had lost his balls, as the Spanish say. The injury was superficial, but the injury to his soul was fatal. He lost his nerve and didn’t dare go in the arena again. The Alemana’s owner, who was an aficionado, gave him a job as a waiter out of respect for the great courage he had displayed before that fateful day on which a bull had taken it from him. Now he was a small, thicksetman with mournful eyes and a red nose, but he didn’t wear his bleeding heart on his sleeve. He lived alone in a little boarding house and every year he went to Ronda, where he came from, to stand all alone in the arena where he had made his debut. I have no idea what he did there. Maybe he cursed God. Maybe he just remembered his shattered dreams.
    He stood with a cloth over his arm and took my order, a glass of red wine for the Danish woman, a lemonade for me and a plate of prawns in garlic and one of serrano ham. He bellowed out the order on his way back to the bar.
    “I have a couple of questions,” Clara Hoffmann said.
    I looked straight at her.
    “Just so everything’s by the book,” I said, “could I see some identification?”
    “Of course,” she answered, and handed me