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flute. He was attracted to her for the same reason that he’d been attracted to Maddy: the beauty, the glamour, the sexiness and the complete mystery. But what was he to her? What had he been to Maddy Krugman? That was something that occupied his spare thinking time. Especially those hours of the early morning, when hewoke up next to Inés and thought that he might be dead.
    ‘I don’t really give a fuck why you married her,’ said Marisa, trying a well-tested trick.
    ‘Well, that’s not what’s interesting.’
    ‘I’m not sure I need to know what is interesting,’ said Marisa. ‘Most men who think they’re fascinating only ever talk about themselves…their successes.’
    ‘This wasn’t one of my successes,’ said Calderón. ‘It was one of my greatest failures.’
    He’d made a snap decision to tell her. Candour was not one of his strongest suits; in his society it had a way of coming back on you, but Marisa was an outsider. He also wanted to fascinate her. Having always been the object of fascination to women he’d understood completely, he had the uncomfortable feeling of being ordinary with exotic creatures like Maddy Krugman and Marisa Moreno. Here, he thought, was an opportunity to intrigue the intriguers.
    ‘It was about four years ago and I’d just announced my engagement to Inés,’ he said. ‘I was called to a situation, which looked like a murder-suicide. There were some anomalies, which meant that the detective, who, by a coincidence, happened to be the ex-husband of Inés, wanted to treat it as a double murder investigation. The victim’s neighbours were American. The woman was an artist and stunningly beautiful. She was a photographer with a taste for the weird. Her name was Maddy Krugman and I fell in love with her. We had a brief but intense affair until her insane husband found out and cornered us in an apartment one night. To cut a long and painful story short, he shot her and then himself. I was lucky not to get a bullet in the head as well.’
    They lay in silence. Voices came up over the balcony rail from the street. A warm breeze blew at the voile curtains, which billowed into the room, bringing the smell of rain and the promise of hot weather in the morning.
    ‘And that’s why you married Inés.’
    ‘Maddy was dead. I was very badly shaken. Inés represented stability.’
    ‘Did you tell her you’d fallen in love with this woman?’
    ‘We never talked about it.’
    ‘And what now…four years later?’
    ‘I feel nothing for Inés,’ said Calderón, which was not quite the whole truth. He did feel something for her. He hated her. He could hardly bear to share her bed, had to steel himself to her touch, and he couldn’t understand why. He had no idea where it came from. She hadn’t changed. She had been both good to him and for him after the Maddy incident. This feeling of dying he had when he was with her in bed was a symptom. Of what, he could not say.
    ‘Well, Esteban, you’re a member of a very large club.’
    ‘Have you ever been married?’
    ‘You are joking,’ said Marisa. ‘I watched the soap opera of my parents’ marriage for fifteen years. That was enough to warn me off that particular bourgeois institution.’
    ‘And what are you doing with me?’ asked Calderón, fishing for something, but not sure what. ‘It doesn’t get more bourgeois than having an affair with a state judge.’
    ‘Being bourgeois is a state of mind,’ she said. ‘What you do means nothing to me. It has no bearing on us. We’re having an affair and it will carry on until it burnsout. But I’m not going to get married and you already are.’
    ‘You said I was the last person in the world who should be married,’ said Calderón.
    ‘People get married if they want to have kids and fit into society, or, if they’re suckers, they marry their dream.’
    ‘I didn’t marry my dream,’ said Calderón. ‘I married everybody else’s dream. I was the brilliant young judge, Inés