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eyes.
    Carlo, she learned, was a painter from a wealthy Tuscan family; after finishing his studies, he had moved to Rome to begin his career. Laura found he had a way of making her feel comfortable talking about her life, her family in Barcelona, her studies, her job in the workshop, her memories of childhood … But what most enchanted her was how he looked at her, and how he treated her with a certain vulnerability, with deference and with attentiveness; that was something completely new to her.
    For Laura, whose behavior with men was normally characterized by a paternalistic overprotection coming from her father or from Zunico—who talked about her at times as if she were just a girl—or by the chaste familiarity that prevailed among her classmates, the metalworkers and the jewelers from the workshop, or by the slightly condescending self-assurance of her siblings, who were bold and daring people with no doubts as to their value or their positions, Carlo’s vulnerability was something completely new. He looked at her with admiration, as though there were no other women in the world, as though she were the most beautiful and, more important, most intelligent girl he had seen in his life and he were holding himself back to keep from standing up right there and shouting it to the four winds. And he managed to convey all that with those black, intense eyes, which observed her from a deep, burning intimate world and said to her wordlessly: Come, Laura, don’t resist, let yourself be dragged along. …

CHAPTER 4
    â€œAre you sure it’s around here?” A cloud of vapor emerged from Arnau’s mouth and Dimas nodded his head. “These alleys in the Barrio Chino are like a maze …”
    Dimas motioned for him to lower his voice. It was already nighttime and the cold, unusual for mid-March, kept the Barcelonans off the street. The two workers needed to find the former headquarters of the banned National Confederation of Labor, the CNT. The anarchist union was helping them to organize the strike and had a good number of affiliates among the workers in the tram bays. The instructions were precise: Go one by one, or maximum two by two, to keep from attracting attention; if they met with a police patrol, they were to pretend they were drunk and had just stumbled out of some tavern. Normally the police would let them go, though they might be arrested and have to spend the night at the station. As Daniel Montero reminded them, it was much better to be arrested for that reason than for being at a clandestine syndicalist meeting; in the latter case, the risk of torture was very high.
    Arnau had taken the instructions seriously and would not let go of his jug of wine. “At home you can spill a little wine on your shirt and it adds to your cover story,” he explained to Dimas. He smiled and they went on walking through the narrow streets.
    They arrived at a place with the door sealed shut and broken windows—it looked completely abandoned. They would have to jump through one of the windows, five feet off the ground, and sneak inside. Cold and afraid, they managed to get in and looked for the trapdoor that would give access to the basement where the meeting would take place. In that broad subterranean space, the air smelled of damp, of tobacco, of sweat. Oil lamps cast a bit of light and gave a spectral aspect to the faces of the attendees. Daniel Montero passed in front of a makeshift stage formed by some piled-up crates and looked impatiently at his pocket watch.
    â€œWe’ll wait another fifteen minutes for the assembly to begin,” he announced. “Then we’ll assume that those who haven’t shown up couldn’t make it.”
    The conversations took place in hushed tones, those who spoke swathed in a fragile but protective blanket of silence. They knew that only a thin membrane protected them from danger, and it could be torn by the slightest noise out of the