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he was watching me. He stood there silently for a few seconds, time enough for me to react and take a step toward him. In an instant the figure withdrew into the shadows, and by the time I reached the sitting room there was nobody there. A breath of light from a sign on the other side of the street flooded the room for a second, revealing a small pile of rubble heaped against the wall. I went over and knelt down by the remnants that had been devoured by fire. Something protruded from the pile. Fingers. I brushed away the ashes that covered them and slowly the shape of a hand emerged. I grasped it and when I tried to pull it out, I realized that it had been severed at the wrist. I recognized it instantly and saw that the girl’s hand, which I had thought was wooden, was in fact made of porcelain. I let it fall back on the pile of debris and left.
    I wondered whether I had imagined that stranger, because there were no other footprints in the dust. I went downstairs and stood at the foot of the building, inspecting the first-floor windows from the pavement, utterly confused. People passed by laughing, unaware of my presence. I tried to spot the outline of the stranger among the crowd. I knew he was there, maybe a few meters away, watching me. After a while I crossed the street and went into a narrow café packed with people. I managed to elbow out a space at the bar and signaled to the waiter.
    “What would you like?”
    My mouth was as dry as sandpaper.
    “A beer,” I said, improvising.
    While the waiter poured me my drink, I leaned forward.
    “Excuse me, do you know whether the place opposite, El Ensueño, has closed down?”
    The waiter left the glass on the bar and looked at me as if I were stupid.
    “It closed fifteen years ago,” he said.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Of course I’m sure. After the fire it never reopened. Anything else?”
    I shook my head.
    “That will be four céntimos.”
    I paid for my drink and left without touching the glass.
    The following day I arrived at the newspaper offices before my usual time and went straight to the archives in the basement. With the help of Matías, the person in charge, and going on what the waiter had told me, I began to check through the front pages of
The Voice of Industry
from fifteen years back. It took me about forty minutes to find the story, just a short item. The fire had started in the early hours of Corpus Christi Day 1903. Six people had died, trapped in the flames: a client, four of the girls on the payroll, and a small child who worked there. The police and firemen believed that the cause of the tragedy was a faulty oil lamp, although the council of a nearby church alluded to divine retribution and the intervention of the Holy Spirit.
    When I returned to the pension I lay on my bed and tried in vain to fall asleep. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the business card from my strange benefactor—the card I was holding when I awoke in Chloé’s bed—and in the dark I reread the words written on the back.
“Great expectations.”

5
    I n my world, expectations—great or small—were rarely fulfilled. Until a few months previously, the only thing I longed for when I went to bed every night was to be able to muster enough courage to speak to Cristina, the daughter of my mentor’s chauffeur, and for the hours that separated me from dawn to pass so that I could return to the newspaper offices. Now, even that refuge had begun to slip away from me. Perhaps if one of my literary efforts was a resounding failure I might be able to recover my colleagues’ affection, I told myself. Perhaps if I wrote something so mediocre and despicable that no reader could get beyond the first paragraph, my youthful sins would be forgiven. Perhaps that was not too high a price to pay to feel at home again. Perhaps.
    …
    I had arrived at
The Voice of Industry
many years before, with my father, a tormented, penniless man who, on his return from the war in the Philippines,